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notalwaysworking_feedRead When You Lose Access But Gain A Training Program
One obnoxious colleague had a habit: instead of walking through the main office entrance, he’d cut through the meeting room, out the other side, and straight to his desk. The problem? He’d leave the meeting room door propped open, which triggered an alarm every single time. Guess who had to get up and close it? Me.
notalwaysworking_feedRead Outrunning The Echo Chamber
Me: "They help immigrant youths, especially kids separated from their families."
Coworker: "You know that’s a scam, right? Those charities just undermine America. Half of them are funneling money to domestic terrorists."
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brithistorianI was trying to type the information for an art exhibition into the to-do app on my phone. I had typed "University of," and the three options that autocorrect offered me were "Nature," "Art," and "Style."
Obviously none of these were correct, but they're all universities I would have considered attending if I had known about them earlier in my life. ;)
notalwaysrelated_feedRead That Phone Is Indestructible, And So Is Your Reasoning
I'm a mom to a twelve-year-old son who has been arguing with us for his "need" to get a smartphone for a while now.
Son: "Everyone else at school has one!"
Me: "You don’t need one."
Son: "Yes, I do. It’s a safety thing! You need to be able to contact me if there’s an emergency, and same if I need to contact you!"
notalwaysfriendly_feed
Mother: "Oh, that's not good! You don't need to put him on that artificial stuff! Insulin is just doctors shilling for Big Pharma. You should just rub lemon balm essential oils into his daughter's heels every night."
lydamorehousenaomikritzer invited me as her "comealong" friend. As it happens, Minnesotan author (and friend to both of us,) Marissa Lingen will also be there because she's up for the WSFA Small Press Award for her short story "A Pilgrimage to the God of High Places" which appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue 406 (May 2024). So that will be nice. notalwayslearning_feedRead Ignorance Of Explosive Proportions
Student #1: "USA should be the only country that's allowed to have nukes! That way all the other countries will have to stay in line."
Student #2: "And why would any other country agree to that? And how would it be enforced?"
Student #1: "It'd be enforced WITH the nukes, idiot!"
james_davis_nicoll
in_the_pipeline_feedI wrote here a few years ago about the idea of completely enantiomeric “mirror proteins”, in the context of how they could benefit crystallography. These of course are made up of mirror-image enantiomers of the individual amino acids, but are otherwise the same (and cannot be differentiated by “non-chiral” means - they have the same molecular weights and other large-scale properties).
There’s been more talk (and worry) in the last few years about the possibility of extending this idea to mirror nucleic acids, mirror carbohydrates, on and on to the idea of making an enantiomeric living cell: “mirror life”. That would be a mighty ambitious thing to try, but it also could carry some risks that are unlike anything we’ve had to think about before. Here’s an article from 2024 on this, and there’s a detailed accompanying report on the idea of making mirror-bacteria. Just recently, Nature has highlighted a conference in Manchester on this same topic, and published this editorial from one of the researchers in the field.
As those stories indicate, no one is even close to making such things. But there are plenty of model systems along the way, and the question is where the potential dangers of this sort of work start to outweigh the scientific benefits. So let’s talk about both of those briefly. One outstanding question (for well over a century now) is why all life on Earth uses the same “handedness” of the chiral biomolecules (carbohydrates, amino acids and their associated proteins, etc.) One immediate answer is because all life on Earth stems from a common ancestor that used these, and that is almost certainly correct (albeit extremely hard to prove!) But that just leads to another question: why these ones and not the mirror images?
There seems to be no a priori reason, and indeed, in abiotic samples like carbonaceous meteorites we find both enantiomers of such compounds. There have been many rather esoteric physics-based proposals on how one enantiomeric series might be slightly more stable than another (and thus increasing its chemical odds) but none of these are even close to definitive. So was this an accident? If so, if there are living creatures using vaguely similar biochemistry on other worlds, are they broadly distributed half-and-half, or what? You open up a lot of tricky origin-of-life questions with these lines of inquiry, and mirror-image cells (or simply mirror-image models of them) could be a way to answer them.
On the downside, we don’t really know how our immune systems might respond to complex mirror-image biomolecules. They might just slide by invisibly, but they might well not - after all, there are a lot of ways to do molecular recognition. Moving past that, could a mirror-image cell survive in the wild? No one’s sure: if it has enough intracellular machinery to make its own key constituents, it could probably use the achiral building blocks that are lying around everywhere and keep going with them. And a big problem with that is that something like an enantio-bacterium would presumably have no natural enemies, and would presumably be nonresponsive to antibiotics and other defenses that bacteria use to keep each other in line. So the possible downsides are rather large - but no one knows how possible they are.
I doubt if anyone is interested in my own take, but for what it’s worth I think that we are sufficiently far from producing any actual organisms that I am not worried about this research. But I think it is prudent to think about what could eventually happen, and perhaps set some tripwires for the future. For now, though, I think that this is interesting and challenging research, and I think it should go on.
mpr_daily_download_feedGustav Mahler - Symphony No. 9: 2nd movement
Polish National Radio Orchestra
Michael Halasz, conductor
More info about today’s track: Naxos 8.550535-36
Courtesy of Naxos of America Inc.
You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, or by using the Daily Download podcast RSS feed.
textsfromsuperheroes_feedlois_mcmaster_bujold_feedseaofstarsrpg_feed
You feel something in the air, something wrong. There on the group, blackish liquid both like and unlike blood is flowing uphill and congealing into a mass. Flying through the air to join the terrible mass are the dessicated bodies of thousands of dead insects. It all combines into a foul, viscid mass that rises up as though looking for prey. Looking for you.
Befouled Earth Elemental
Large elemental (blight), unaligned (blight)
Armor Class 16 (natural armor)
Hit Points 22 (12d10 + 60)
Speed Walk 30 ft., Burrow 10ft., swim 20 ft
STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA
18 (+2) 12 (+1) 20 (+5) 5 (-3) 11 (+0) 5 (-3)
Skills Perception +3, Stealth +4
Damage Resistances bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing. acid, cold, lightning, necrotic, psychic
Damage Immunities poison
Condition Immunities exhaustion, grappled, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned, prone, restrained, unconscious
Senses darkvision 30 ft, tremorsense 30 ft., passive Perception 13
Languages understands most, does not communicate except through violence
Challenge 5 (1,800 XP)
Chilling Congeal. Intense cold causes the elemental to clump and stick to other objects, slowing it. When a befouled earth elemental suffers cold damage, its speed is reduced by 10 feet until the end of its next round (it speed can only be reduced once at any one time by this effect).
Befouling Death. When a befouled elemental dies, it explodes in a horrid burst of blighted earth and foul liquid. All within 15′ must make a Dexterity save (DC 15) or takes 2d6 each of necrotic and poison damage, half damage on a successful save, and they suffer a level of exhaustion if they fail the save by 10 or more.
Boneless Form. The elemental can enter a hostile creature’s space and stop there. It can move through a space as narrow as 1 inch wide without squeezing.
Consume the Dead. The befouled earth elemental can, as a bonus action, absorb the useful life energies and nutrients from a grappled creature that has dropped to zero hit points. This kills the creature and heals the befouled earth element of 1d10 hit points per hit dice the creature had.
Weak to Light and Thunder. The befouled earth elemental has disadvantage on saves against fire, radiant, and thunder attacks and if it fails the save by ten or more (or if the effect does not have a save), damage rolls of 1s are treated as 2s.
Actions
Multiattack. The befouled earth elemental can make two attacks, be they befouling blows, thrown globs, or one of each.
Befouling Blow. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 13 (2d8+4) bludgeoning damage plus 1d6 poison damage and if the target is a creature, it is grappled (escape DC 15). While grappled this way the creature is restrained and cannot breathe; additionally, the grappled creature takes 2d4 points of poison damage on the end of each of its turns. The elemental can grapple one Large, or two Medium or smaller creatures at one time.
Thrown Glob. Ranged Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 30/120 ft., one target. Hit: 13 (2d8 + 4) bludgeoning damage plus 1d6 poison and if the target is a creature it is restrained by the horrible sticky gunk. The target can escape the mud and end the restrained condition by using its action to make a DC 14 Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) check, if it does not escape, it takes 1d4 points of poison damage at the end of its turn.
It is rare for the blight to manifest so directly; it usually prefers to spread more like an infection but circumstances occasionally create an eruption of the Blight in almost its primordial form, using the materials available to create a dangerous form with which to attack those that threaten its continued existence.
TACTICS
Before Combat: If it can, it will find an isolated member of the group it is going to attack and consume them first. But it is at best cunning and not a careful planner.
During Combat: The befouled earth elemental will strike out at those it perceives as being the greatest danger to it, those who use fire, light, and thunder to attack. It will try to disable such threats before moving on to the next one.
Morale: Unless commanded by a stronger representation of the Blight, once it starts combat, it fights until it is destroyed or its opponents are.
Notes: The final fight for the Blight arc! While it has been fun, I will be glad to turn the page and move onto new exploration when we get back to the campaign.
Image by ARLIS Reference, from Flicker and used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic deed
billropernaomikritzer_feedThere are fifteen people running for Minneapolis mayor. You only have to worry about four of them, and this post will talk about those four. If you want to know more about all the others, that is in a separate post.
The four candidates who might actually win in November:
Jacob Frey (incumbent)
Omar Fateh
Jazz Hampton
DeWayne Davis
The tl;dr is that my current ranking is (1) DeWayne Davis; (2) Omar Fateh; (3) Jazz Hampton. What I would really strongly encourage people to do if they don’t want Jacob but aren’t sure how they feel about the precise order of the challengers is to pick a favorite as soon as possible and donate and doorknock. Four years ago, I got my post up really late, and I was indecisive, and I think I was probably not the only person who got caught up in analysis paralysis. Analysis paralysis that keeps you from donating and volunteering will get you four more years of Jacob Frey! I am here RIGHT NOW, TODAY with information to help you make a decision (which can totally be different from the one I’m making! Get out there and doorknock for Omar Fateh or Jazz Hampton if one of them is your first choice!) Frey is extremely unpopular; the biggest hill to climb for his opponents is name recognition.
I made an effort this month to meet DeWayne Davis, Omar Fateh, and Jazz Hampton in person. I went to a DeWayne Davis meet-and-greet at a park, an Omar Fateh fundraiser, and a Jazz Hampton meet-and-greet at a playground. I asked each of them if they could identify a problem that they thought they could solve as mayor — Minneapolis is facing plenty of problems, some very complicated and some more straightforward, was there any particular problem that they looked at and thought, “make me mayor, and I could fix this one.” I didn’t try to find Jacob to ask this question because he’s been mayor for eight years; he’s had his chance.
Something I found worthwhile was the Mayoral Candidate Q&A from the city DFL convention. There are some challenging and interesting questions. (You can skip 5 seconds at a time with arrow keys if there are candidates you don’t want to hear from.) One caveat is that the video was taken from over to the side and you can’t always tell who’s talking; you have to be able to recognize the candidate’s voices (which mostly I can, but mileage may vary here.)
Cut because the analysis is going to get long!
Jacob Frey (incumbent)
Jacob Frey is a deeply performative empty suit who literally runs away from hard questions. He’s also genuinely terrible at working with the City Council, terrible at collective problem solving, and terrible at overseeing the Minneapolis police.
To give him the credit I think is due: back in 2017 I remember someone who was ranking him second because they thought he’d build a lot of housing, and Minneapolis has added a lot of housing in the last eight years, both affordable and market rate, and the result is that while no one here feels like housing is particularly affordable, we’re doing better than most blue-state cities. I don’t know that Frey deserves a ton of credit for this but he has at least avoided screwing it up.
Two of the biggest ongoing issues in the city are homelessness and policing, and on both he has been consistently performative, ineffective, and cowardly in the sense of being unwilling to tackle hard questions.
He’s been bad at supporting transit, he’s been bad at keeping property taxes in check, he’s just bad at his job. Don’t rank Frey.
DeWayne Davis spent several years as the Lead Minister at Plymouth Congregational Church, but prior to going to divinity school he worked in Washington, DC as a congressional aide. When I went to his event he talked some about this: he arrived in Washington just as the Democrats lost their congressional majority, and he thought he wouldn’t have a lot to do, but he turned out to be completely incorrect. The Republicans of that era, he noted, did still at least believe in governance, and they were able to come up with a lot of useful bills he was able to get them to cooperate on.
More recently, he co-chaired the Minneapolis Community Safety Working Group, and he talked some about that, too, how it was a large, diverse group that needed to reach consensus on the recommendations, and did, only to have the mayor ignore most of what they came up with. He clearly believes in the value of working groups like the one he served on and talked about an approach to problems that involved gathering stakeholders and getting them invested in solutions they now see as their idea. He’s extremely clear-eyed about his goals, extremely flexible in what path he’d take to get there — he clearly has plenty of ideas about good paths, but one of his biggest frustrations with Frey is his my-way-or-the-highway thinking.
The thing that particularly struck me when I met him in person: he is an extremely good listener. There are a lot of people (me included) who spend a lot of time waiting for their turn to talk; he is someone who listens, and listens with deep empathy.
I asked him if he could identify a problem in Minneapolis that he thought he could solve as mayor. He said he thought he could maybe not solve but make a significant impact on homelessness and encampments; he wants to “depopulate” the encampments rather than clearing them, by giving the service organizations enough resources to give the people in encampments better options of places to go. (Here’s his response at the DFL City Convention Q&A to a question about encampments.)
I really liked him. I think he’d be extremely effective as mayor, and would do really good stuff. He’d be my #1 pick.
Omar Fateh was elected to the State Legislature (SD 62) in 2020, defeating incumbent Jeff Hayden. Link is to my post from that year; one of the things that struck me was the comment from someone who was a delegate that year who said, “Omar Fateh must have called me personally at least a half a dozen times prior to the voting. I think I got one phone call from Jeff Hayden.” Omar Fateh’s organizing ability is honestly kind of unparalleled, at least locally, and he’s the one who probably has the best chance of defeating Frey.
He was born in the DC area to parents who had immigrated from Somalia, grew up in Virginia, and moved to Minnesota in 2015. He has worked in voter services and for MNDOT. As a legislator, his major accomplishments include the statewide minimum wage for rideshare drivers, and the North Star Promise scholarships.
I’ve seen a lot of scaremongering about him, so let me go through the stuff I’ve heard and whether I think it has any basis in reality.
He is the left-most of the serious candidates and his list of goals includes rent control, along with a lot of urbanist stuff like 24/7 bus lanes. If you are looking for the most left-wing candidate in the race, he’s probably already your first choice, but if you’re a centrist whose first choice is Jazz Hampton, let me make a case for Omar Fateh as your third choice over Jacob Frey.
When I met him in person (at a Jews for Fateh fundraiser) I asked him the same question I asked DeWayne: is there a problem in Minneapolis that you look at and think, I can solve this. He asked if I wanted to hear about governance solution or a policy solution, and then said he’d give me one of each. For governance, he talked about his years in the legislature working mostly within divided governance to get things done. (And I will note that when the Minneapolis City Council passed the rideshare ordinance, and Lyft and Uber announced they were going to simply pull out, it was Fateh who came up with a compromise that softened the rules in the metro but applied statewide. He’s someone who will stake out a left wing position as a starting place so that when he meets people halfway, they’re meeting somewhere in the actual middle, and not way over on the right.)
The policy thing he said he thinks he could fix is an ambitious youth agenda — job programs, arts programs, a bunch of things that will get teenagers off the streets. He talked about a summer jobs program he was involved with, how he realized that it was being “promoted” only in the sense that there were flyers on a desk at the park building, and arranged for people to go door to door with information. (That’s another thing I really like about him: his skill at organizing isn’t just for getting him elected, he uses it in other ways.) At the end of the summer he talked to some of the teenagers and asked how they spent the money, expecting to hear about new gaming systems, and instead heard from multiple kids that they gave it to their mom to buy groceries and pay rent.
In order to pass rent control, he’ll need support from the City Council. This year’s City Council was progressive enough to pass a bunch of things that Frey vetoed: however, Katie Cashman is on the record as opposed to rent control, and Aurin Chowdhury is open to it but only with an exemption for new construction. Most of the leftyist leftist things that the city centrists are pearl-clutching over Omar Fateh potentially doing are things he would have to temper significantly to get through the City Council (and others are things he would have to first get through the State Legislature, he’s not even saying “we’re going to do this!” but “we’re going to advocate that the State Legislature pass a bill to let us consider doing this at some point in the future!”)
The thing that struck me the most about Omar Fateh was his ability to bring people together to work. I mean, when people say someone is an “amazing organizer” that’s kind of what they mean, and it was cool to see it in action. I will also note that when he delivered his speech at the gathering, he explicitly asked everyone to rank Jazz and DeWayne as well. I think he would be an excellent mayor and I would rank him #2.
Jazz Hampton is a lawyer and an entrepreneur; in 2020 he created an app (TurnSignl) that lets users get an instant video-chat lawyer on their phone if they’re pulled over while driving. (You can see a recorded call demonstrating it in use here.)
I went to a Jazz meet-and-greet called “Politics at the Playground.” He noted that it’s hard for parents to participate in politics (he is himself the father of two pretty young kids) and by setting up events at parks adjacent to play areas he hoped to make it a little easier for parents to show up and learn more about his campaign. Small children who wanted to ask questions were also encouraged to do so.
The thing that struck me the most about Jazz was his positive outlook. He’s friendly in a way that says he genuinely likes people. I asked him my question about what problem he thinks he could solve, and he said “economic revitalization” and talked about improving the climate for small businesses, calling out a restaurant that had opened nearby only to almost get killed off by road construction that was supposed to take six weeks, and instead took six months. He wants to streamline regulations and inspections (I was looking through stuff about 2013 yesterday and that was a big issue in 2013 and is still an issue).
(I will note that Omar Fateh and DeWayne Davis also want to make it a better city for small businesses. In terms of problems and solutions in general the policies all three of them want have a lot in common. They all want more community mental health workers for 911 calls where they’re more appropriate than police, they all want more interventions programs to prevent crime in the first place, they all want to do something about vacant buildings owned by land speculators, etc. But as the conversation rolled along at the meet-and-greet, Jazz came back to the problems of business owners more often than the other two did.)
I think he’d be a significant improvement over Jacob Frey, and I would rank him #3.
This has been a long post, but let me sum up with another pep talk.
Jacob Frey can be beaten! Another Frey term is not inevitable. However, you (we) need to not succumb to analysis paralysis, where fail to donate to or doorknock for anyone because we are undecided between DeWayne and Omar, or between DeWayne and Jazz. We need to pick a favorite and get out there. The strength of Instant Runoff is that people who like DeWayne the most but think Omar has a better shot at winning can list them 1/2. The weakness of Instant Runoff is that it gives us the opportunity to dither over that 1/2 ranking when considering who to donate to / doorknock for. And dithering when we should be doorknocking is a free donation to Jacob Frey.
Put up a sign for your favorite. Or your top two favorites. Or make a sign with your ranking. Talk to your neighbors about how you’re voting and why you’re not ranking Frey. Volunteer — if you can’t stand doorknocking, you can go table for people at Open Streets or go chat with people who come to the next meet-and-greet or help with a fundraiser.
Jazz Hampton events
DeWayne Davis events
Omar Fateh events
(All of those links lead to Mobilize and include doorknocking, fundraisers, house parties, meet-and-greets, and opportunities like “Table for [Team] at Open Streets!”)
I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.
I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)
I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)
elisemelisemsharonlee_feedThe new writing digs are open for business, and I’m all set up to get started tomorrow, and to work uninterrupted. Pursuant to that point, I’ll need to go out in a couple minutes and put gas in the car so that I may drive to and from Bath with dignity on Friday morning.
Likewise pursuant, I may not be around much tomorrow, or Friday, either, ref Bath, above. I’m not avoiding you, I’m just … busy.
Hopefully.
Everybody stay safe. I’ll pop in as can.
rolanniThe new writing digs are open for business, and I'm all set up to get started tomorrow, and to work uninterrupted. Pursuant to that point, I'll need to go out in a couple minutes and put gas in the car so that I may drive to and from Bath with dignity on Friday morning.
Likewise pursuant, I may not be around much tomorrow, or Friday, either, ref Bath, above. I'm not avoiding you, I'm just ... busy.
Hopefully.
Everybody stay safe. I'll pop in as can.
notalwaysworking_feed - When You Lose Access But Gain A Training Programnotalwaysworking_feed - Outrunning The Echo Chamberbrithistorian - Fun with autocorrectnotalwaysrelated_feed - That Phone Is Indestructible, And So Is Your Reasoningnotalwaysfriendly_feed - Lemon Balm And Snake Oillydamorehouse - Busy Weeknotalwayslearning_feed - Ignorance Of Explosive Proportionsjames_davis_nicoll - Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois by Gardner Dozoisin_the_pipeline_feed - Mirror Life Worriesmpr_daily_download_feed - Gustav Mahler - Symphony No. 9: 2nd movementrmjwell - Burlesque Picture of the Day, 2025-09-17: Mellionaire!textsfromsuperheroes_feed - Texts From Superheroeslois_mcmaster_bujold_feed - unexpected citeseaofstarsrpg_feed - Befouled Earth Elemental for D&D 5Ebillroper - Treading Waternaomikritzer_feed - Election 2025: Minneapolis Mayoral Race (the four contenders)elisem - silly body continues to be silly, yet I trudge forward, for I am frikkin' stubbornelisem - Om nom: food combinations, or, playing with what's heresharonlee_feed - Wednesday night reportrolanni - Wednesday night reportbranchandroot