round #23 - voting.
Apr. 22nd, 2026 09:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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lgbtrainbow
Voting will be open for 5 days.
( round #23 - voting )
Kash Patel Is A Sober, Cool Dude Who Files Reasonable Lawsuits And Has Sex
Apr. 22nd, 2026 06:39 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
wonkette_feed
Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump’s most enthusastic leg-humper and “former” personal lawyer at the DOJ, Todd Blanche, and his most enthusiastic leg-humper at the FBI, Kash Patel, held a joint press conference where they humped Trump’s legs together. And they both jizzed in record time!
They were there to announce that they had conjured up a completely bullshit way to indict the Southern Poverty Law Center, and an indictment that assumes that judges and courts are as stupid as the average Trump administration official. In essence, the indictment alleges that the SPLC is guilty of doing … exactly what the SPLC is supposed to be doing, and what its donors expect it to do, investigating and rooting out and exposing right-wing extremists. You can imagine why that makes the Nazis, incels, and other hate groups who make up the Trump Regime and its extended fluffer support system very mad!
But instead of the very dumb charges for the SPLC, those mean reporters wanted to talk about Kash Patel’s very dumb lawsuit against The Atlantic, which stands accused of committing the equally egregious crime of doing heavily sourced reporting about Kash Patel’s alleged status as the most paranoid, drunk basic bitch in the entire administration.
Watch this video and see what absolute raging weenuses Blanche and Patel are, queening out at reporters for daring to ask why KA$HLOL’s stupid lawsuit, filed by that squeaky little boy wonder lawyer Jesse Binnall, doesn’t even match his public contradictions of the story in The Atlantic regarding that time he reportedly got locked out of FBI systems and immediately had a paranoid freakout that he had been fired.
“I was never locked out of any systems!” KA$HLOL protested.
“Anyone who says the opposite is lying!” KA$HLOL whined, which was a really mean thing to say about his own lawsuit.
“You are off topic!” he bitched at the reporters, like anybody believes their indictment of the SPLC has merit. (We will lawsplain at you about it in the morning, these things take time.) C’mon, dudes, everybody knows neither Todd Blanche nor Kash Patel is a serious or real man.
And then Todd Blanche trying to come in and save Little Kash at the end there. LMAO.
Big men. BIG MEN!
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Here was another funny part. A reporter asked if FBI Director “I’m Not As Think As You KA$H I Am” Patel could say “unequivocally” that he’s never been “intoxicated or absent during your tenure as the FBI director”? Kash thought he sounded cool and normal and impressive when he responded by saying that “I can say unequivocally that I never listen to the fake news mafia.” He added, “When they get louder, it just means I’m doing my job.”
Then he started bragging about himself and his accomplishments, as if serious people don’t automatically laugh at him when they see him. At the end, he finally denied he had ever been “intoxicated on the job.” We’ll see how that all plays out in court, we guess, but The Atlantic seems pretty confident in its reporting, and Kash Patel is a human joke, so we know which way we’d Kalshi our Polymarkets, if we were a betting man!
Not that we’re saying Patel’s denials are meaningless or that he’s not a person of integrity — ha ha — but mean old House Democrats are nonetheless launching an investigation into Kash Patel’s drinking, or alleged drinking, or, you know, whatever this is:
Probably O’Doul’s, you guys.
Anyway, here’s Rep. Jamie Raskin:
“There are numerous accounts that you consume alcohol to the point of illness, direct profanity-laced outbursts at support staff, and pass out drunk behind locked doors in episodes making you so unreachable that agents have had to fetch SWAT-level breaching equipment to awaken you,” Raskin wrote to Patel.
Raskin called for Patel to complete the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT), which is a ten-question screening test to assess harmful alcohol consumption.
Do they have a second one of those tests to send over to the Pentagon? We are just asking.
“For the sake of our own security, we need to know, for example, ‘how many drinks containing alcohol do you have on a typical day when you are drinking,’ ‘how often during the last year have you failed to do what was normally expected from you because of drinking,’ ‘how often during the last year have you needed a first drink in the morning to get yourself going after a heavy drinking session,’ and ‘how often during the last year have you been unable to remember what happened the night before because you had been drinking?’” the Maryland Democrat wrote.
And then there’s mean old Rep. Ted Lieu, who said this week that Kash “appears to be a raging alcoholic” and that he “should go to rehab.”
But Kash is saying no, no, no.
In other news about Kash Patel’s very successful life, yesterday, the very same day as that press conference, a judge threw out Kash’s other defamation lawsuit, brought by the exact same superlawyers, where he was trying to sue former FBI guy Frank Figliuzzi for saying on MS NOW of Kash that “reportedly, he's been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building."
The judge, US District Court Judge George Hanks Jr. — a mean judge appointed by mean Barack Obama — said Figliuzzi’s statement was “rhetorical hyperbole that cannot constitute defamation,” and that “The Court finds that Figliuzzi's statement, when taken in context, cannot have been perceived by a person of ordinary intelligence as stating actual facts about Patel.”
Also that Kash failed to show, you know, defamation.
Keep walking that straight line, KA$HLOL.
You’re nailin’ it, buddy.
[Daily Beast / Newsweek]
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Ma twll yn y pridd yn Alltwalis lle taflaf fy mhryderon
Apr. 22nd, 2026 02:01 pmsovayselkie linked me to In geveb's "Undzer Mishpokhe: A Queer Yiddish Curriculum Supplement" and a_reasonable_man let me know about the Catalogue of Ships incorporated into a Roman-era mummy. The latter makes sense as a magical text to me. Who wouldn't want so many heroes and ships on their side with all that underworld to cross?
🔊 Daily music
Apr. 22nd, 2026 11:57 ambluapapilioWhat is it that stays my hand now?
With so much misery that I could mercifully put end to
For that animal I let slink off into the undergrowth, unscathed
Do I not fear death, but just pretend to?🎤
Paris Paloma - hunter
Reading, Listening, Watching
Apr. 22nd, 2026 04:36 pmpurplecatListening: Just finished an episode of the Machine Ethics Podcast with which I have a somewhat frustrated relationship. It's proved very useful for keeping tabs on the AI Ethics landscape, but there are definitely times I want to shake the interviewer or interviewees, and a couple of times I've just had to nope out entirely because SO MUCH NONSENSE. This was a slightly odd episode, the interviewee had clearly reached out, requesting an interview in order to talk about/promote her biocomputing company. Clearly outside of the interviewer's comfort zone, and hard to know to what extent this was crossing the line from science communication into advertising.
Watching: Three weeks late we realise Have I Got News for You has started up again. It does what it does and we're the target demographic. I laughed a lot at Armando Iannuci's exasperation at people claiming that Winston Churchill was being replaced by a badger.
You All Started It And Virginia F*cking Finished It
Apr. 22nd, 2026 03:31 pmwonkette_feed
Well here we go again! Another day of Americans going to the polls, another night of sexy results that demonstrate just how much people understand the assignment right now, and how ready they are to do whatever it takes to beat Donald Trump and these motherfucking fascists and Nazis.
Last night, it was Virginia, which was voting on its constitutional amendment to redraw its congressional maps heavily in favor of Democrats, in response to the Republican attempt at vote-rigging the midterms that started with Trump hereby demanding Texas redraw its maps and Texas saying SIR YES SIR! They had tears in their eyes, but they were not actually big, beautiful, strong men. (Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton we’re talking about here.)
If you see the New York Times while you’re out walking your dog today, be sure to let them know it started with Texas, since apparently they’re under the impression that no act committed by a Democrat could ever be a valid response to any bad behavior by a Republican.
In the end the amendment won by over three points. Because when Northern Virginia comes out to vote — and increasingly Eastern Virginia too, especially if you look at their results last night — it doesn’t matter what the pig turd Republicans in the rest of the state do.
Let’s see how Jeff Bezos’s LiveJournal The Washington Post Editorial Board reacted to that, vs. how it reacted to Texas.
Eat shit, you fucking fascists.
Anyway, what Virginia voters did last night was huge and hilarious, and they know exactly what they did. Its delegation, assuming the state supreme court approves it — the state supreme court still has to approve it — will be 10-to-1 in favor of Democrat-leaning districts, compared to where it currently sits, at around 6-to-5. (Which is approximately where it ought to be, in a country where all the states drew their districts fairly, instead of Republicans drawing theirs to steal elections and representation from We The People.)
How hilarious? Let us ask a numbers nerd, since their Twitter accounts are the funniest and best on election nights. Tell us what Democrats nationwide have won in exchange for fighting back like actual motherfuckers!
Hahahahahahahahahaha.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, Republicans.
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Wonder if Republicans would support a bill to ban partisan redistricting nationally once Democrats take the House by (potentially) huge margins in November, or if they’re just mad Democrats are for real fighting back and winning.
Haha, probably a dumb question!
Hey, remember when Democratic Virginia state Senator L. Louise Lucas saw Ted Cruz whining like a little bitch about Virginia’s redistricting plan back in February, and responded, “You all started it and we fucking finished it”? Oh, MAGA screamed and wailed! A Black lady they think they’re better than was talking back to them!
Yeah well, here’s Lucas last night. She tweeted “THANK YOU VIRGINIA!” with this video:
Amazing.
People are also retweeting this thing Lucas said back in November:
Have fun, Republicans!
Back to numbers-nerding with Carlson, he explained who was responsible for this victory, with the helpful use of charts:
He noted in the comments the massive overperformance of Hispanic voters in that chart, but simply noted there were far fewer of them in Virginia. But we should note that in the context of nationwide trends, shouldn’t we! It’s becoming clearer and clearer that Trump’s 2024 numbers with Hispanic voters didn’t represent some kind of permanent shift. More like a blip, if you will, a thing that happened.
Are the MAGA losers wailing? Well of course. They’re shouting about fraud because they don’t understand how counting works, and they really are mentally incapable of conceptualizing how many more people live in Northern Virginia than live in Southwest Pigfuck. If Momma can count all the cows in the barn before dinnertime why can’t the Dummycrats in Fairfax count their votes? TELL ME THAT, LIBS.
There’s human dead weight like John Fetterman, poor thing is just dismayed by all this.
And of course, there are the usual MAGA suspects doing their screaming, acting like we haven’t been living in a world for decades now where states like North Carolina and Wisconsin — the swingiest of swingies — have been gerrymandered to fuck in favor of Republicans, to the point of idiocy.
Even before North Carolina’s fuckery this year, its congressional delegation sits at a 10-4 Republican majority, which means places like the Research Triangle, Charlotte and Asheville — you know, where the quality North Carolinians live — have disproportionately low or, in the case of Asheville, no congressional representation. Wisconsin is 6-2, Republicans. The state of Tennessee, where Donald Trump won 64 percent of the vote, which means the other 36 percent went to somebody, nonetheless only has one blue district out of nine, and the burgeoning metropolis of Nashville, which is every bit as blue as majority-Black Memphis, has zero congressional representation.
So spare us, fucking MAGA creeps. You started this, as Senator Lucas said. And we are indeed going to fucking finish it.
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Colorado Catholic Preschools Hate The Gays But Love State Funding. What's A Supreme Court To Do?
Apr. 22nd, 2026 02:08 pmwonkette_feed
It’s a tale as old as Bob Jones University. Well, as old as Bob Jones University trying to convince the IRS to let them keep their tax exempt status while they banned interracial dating and marriage for their students, anyway.
On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to take up a case from the Archdiocese of Denver and two Colorado Catholic preschools that want to be able to participate in UPK Colorado, the state’s Universal Pre-K program, but also refuse to admit kids who have LGBTQ+ parents. As anyone with sense might imagine, since the schools are funded by Colorado taxpayers of every religion, race, and sexual orientation, schools that participate in the program are not allowed to exclude enrollees on the basis of religion, race, or sexual orientation. It’s not that hard!
The schools and the Archdiocese claim that this amounts to discrimination against them for being Catholic. It’s not. What would be discrimination would be a school refusing to admit children from Catholic families — which, to be clear, it would very much not be allowed to do. Even if they think the Pope has been real mean to Donald Trump these past few weeks.
There have been three recent cases from virulent homophobes against the state’s various civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ individuals. It hasn’t been great. SCOTUS ruled against their ban on conversion therapy and in favor of a web designer and a cake designer who wished to only create wedding websites and wedding cakes for heterosexual couples. The plaintiff’s attorney brought these up as prime examples of why he thought the state would lose.
“After three losses in religious freedom cases at the Supreme Court, Colorado should know better,” Nick Reaves, an attorney with Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that states cannot exclude families from government benefits because of their faith. We’re confident the Court will say the same thing here and put a stop to Colorado’s no-Catholics-need-apply rules.”
No one is excluding families from government benefits because of their faith. No one has barred Catholic families from getting food stamps or unemployment. Rather, they are telling preschools that they can’t get taxpayer money if they want to discriminate against taxpayer children. There are many Catholic organizations these days that do not discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals and their children, and frankly it would be very hard to make any kind of case that barring these children from preschool is, in any sense, consistent with Catholic doctrine.
Pope Leo XIV, while still unfortunately holding to the doctrine that homosexuality is a sin and saying that it is unlikely that the church will change their position on this in the near future, has welcomed LGBTQ+ Catholics (including several married couples) to the Vatican and has said that everyone should be welcome in the church and no one should be excluded. Additionally, a 2023-24 Pew Research poll found that 70 percent of Catholics believe gay people should be allowed to marry, which was not only a lot higher than the 49 percent of Protestants who share that belief, but also higher than the 68 percent of Americans as a whole who did.
It is absurd to expect Colorado families to pay taxes in order to fund schools that discriminate against their children. These schools are free to exist as private, parochial bigot schools. They are free, as repugnant as it is, to insist that the toddler children of gay parents are evil sinners who might somehow taint their sacred Fisher Price See ‘n’ Says and bar them from their classrooms. What they’re not free to do is to use everyone else’s money to do so. This isn’t hard!
“We value the role of all preschool providers in our state, including religious providers, and have consistently welcomed all providers into the UPK program, so long as all families — no matter who you love, who you are or how you worship — may also participate in any preschool receiving state taxpayer dollars,” Eric Maruyama, spokesperson for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, said in a statement.
There has, unfortunately, been a recent and fairly hysterical backlash on the Right to same-sex marriage, adoption, surrogacy, IVF and, quite frankly, any kind of families and family planning beyond teenage virgin girls marrying older men and having as many babies as it is possible for them to have, regardless of their ability to care for them. They spent a few years pretending that they had overcome the whole “hating gay people” thing, then pretended that they didn’t hate gay people, only trans people, and now — I believe as a result of being cordoned off on Xitter, with almost zero exposure to normal people — they have fully returned to their roots.
Of course, it’s now a slightly awkward situation, what with all of the gay Republicans they invited into their tent, many of whom are either married with children or hope to be in the near future — Dave Rubin, George Santos, Ric Grenell, Jillian Michaels, Tim Miller, etc. etc.
Not to mention Brandon Straka, the #WalkAway guy who went around assuring LGBTQ+ people that it was safe to dive into the GOP pool for the last decade, who is currently spiraling into full-on denial.
Just this past weekend, conservatives were howling over a video of right-wing “influencer” Ryley Niemi walking up to a random gay couple while they were holding their baby and asking them to comment on what appears to be his personal theory that gay people are more likely to molest their children than are straight couples and subsequently getting hit in the head by said couple. There is, to be clear, literally zero evidence of this whatsoever.
They were also extremely upset about another video of two men joking about their baby saying “Mama,” because the straw-grasping must continue.
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I don’t think it’s likely that the Supreme Court will rule against Colorado in this case, as that would open the floodgates to any entity receiving taxpayer money to discriminate against protected classes. That could end poorly, and not just for LGBTQ+ people on the Left. If there’s no problem with these schools receiving taxpayer funds while discriminating against toddlers from LGTBQ+ families, then it would be hard to make a case that preschools can’t exclude people based on the color of their skin or their religious beliefs. Surely, as mentioned, these groups would not like it very much if toddlers from Catholic families were excluded from another school (and we wouldn’t like it either!).
The real threat, unfortunately, is this surge in anti-gay extremism on the Right, because we’ve got some truly poisoned minds out there right now, desperate for a thing to grab onto while the Trump ship is sinking. If anything is going to end poorly, that will.
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April Manga TBR 7
Apr. 22nd, 2026 09:57 ambluapapilioI read 17/18 on my last board, overall had a good time. :D
Avatar:
Conan
Skill: Beat the trap tile once, roll a prompt
Roll #1:
A 4, prompt: enemies to lovers - BASARA .
Roll #2:
A 2, prompt: sword & sorcery. I'll go ahead and read my new volume of Crimson Spell.
Roll #3:
A 3, prompt: based on a webnovel - Men of the Harem.
Roll #4:
A 5, prompt: crossdressing - Ai ga Aru Kara Osu!.
Roll #5:
A 2, prompt: published between 10'-'15 - Jackass!.
Roll #6:
I swear I have some kind of superpower? curse? because when I think 'I just know it's going to be a one' right before the trap tile...I get a 1. I'll go ahead and use my skill because why not. Prompt is read a manhwa - Chess Isle.
Roll #7:
A 6, vers/switching - Love Love Reversible Couple Heart Beat Anthology.
Roll #8:
A 2, generate from CR list - #51, I guess it's about time I read more Meitantei Conan: Zero no Tea Time...
Roll #9:
A 1, prompt: opposites attract - BoiGyaru.
Roll #10:
A 6, prompt: weapon on the cover - Kimetsu no Yaiba.
Roll #11:
A 2, prompt: longest titled - Touken Ranbu Anthology - SquEni no Jin .
Roll #12:
A 6 and the end. Shortest board in a while! Reward is Wind Breaker.
~Manga TBR List~
[Adventure/Fantasy] BASARA
[BL/Fantasy] Crimson Spell
[Reverse Harem/Politics] Men of the Harem
[BL/Romance] Ai ga Aru Kara Osu!
[BL/Romance] Jackass!
[Action/Mystery] Chess Isle
[BL] Love Love Reversible Couple Heart Beat Anthology ✔️
[Slice of Life/Detective] Meitantei Conan: Zero no Tea Time
[GL/Romance] BoiGyaru
[Action/Supernatural] Kimetsu no Yaiba
[Slice of Life/Fantasy] Touken Ranbu Anthology - SquEni no Jin
[Action/Slice of Life] Wind Breaker
x2 shoujoi/josei, x3 shounen/seinen, x4 BL, x1 GL, x1 other
Pokémon Go
Apr. 22nd, 2026 10:50 amsettiaiIt's mostly been because I've never had any PokéStops or gyms that I could access from home/work. On the days when I'm out and about, I could walk around and visit them, but that's definitely not something I could do every day. Especially now that my job is hybrid. I only have so much capability to deal with people in a given week, so on days when I'm working remotely it's not unusual for me to avoid all human contact whatsoever.
And, well, the game intentionally punishes you for that. Outside of a brief period during the height of the pandemic where they extended the range of PokéStops and gyms, you miss out on things if you don't actually go outside and spin those regularly as that's where you get a lot of items that can be used in the game to do things like catch new Pokémon.
Anyway, I do have a point! There's a PokéStop that I can access from anywhere in my new apartment. I've been playing the game significantly more the past month or so because it's so much more rewarding when I can easily access new items (including Poké Balls).
what i'm reading wednesday 22/4/2026
Apr. 22nd, 2026 10:00 amlirazel+ Listened to More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker.
WHAT A BANGER! I anticipated that this would be about how fucked up our tech overlords' worldviews are from a moral and public policy perspective, and that certainly played a large part in it. But it ended up being more about why they're wrong about the very tech they're hyping--why the claims they make are not actually possible given, like, physics and the nature of the universe. Which is not an angle I'd seen explored before, and I would have expected it to all be over my head. But Becker is absolutely fantastic at explaining complicated tech and science-y things in a way that I could understand--at least enough to know that these Silicon Valley guys are full of shit.
The moral arguments are woven into all of this; Becker has a lovely humanist approach to the world and a deep appreciation for the humanities. He's clearly repulsed by the perspectives and priorities of the people who are running our digital world (and, increasingly, our physical one as well), so I felt safe in his hands. I often feel alienated from STEM subjects both because math doesn't come easily to me and because the current discourse around it seems so anti-human to me. But Becker reminded me that there's really no boundary between the humanities and STEM and that if you appreciate both, you better serve whichever one you're focused on. Life, nature, the universe is one interwoven textile and needs to be understood as such.
The more I learn about the decision-making class in Silicon Valley, the more I believe that they hate all the things that make us human--art, care, struggle, nature, bodies, again, death, humility, the mutuality of relationships. All of these people are absolutely terrified of death and yet, if they did succeed in their (futile) endeavors to live forever, what would they do with all that time? They're certainly not investing in learning about the world as it is or getting to know other people or creating beautiful things or just enjoying nature. So what would be the point of living forever? They have no answer to this and if they weren't doing such terrible, terrible things to our society and nature, I would feel profound pity for them. As it is, I'm just angry. It's baffling to me that we allow the most morally vacuous people in the world to make consequential decisions about the fate of humanity.
My one complaint is that I wish Becker had read the book himself. Judging by his new podcast Dreaming Against the Machine, he's got the voice for it, and I always, always prefer to have the writer read the book if it's possible. The guy who read it did fine, but there's just no replacing the personality of a writer.
+ Read The House of the Patriarch, the 18th Benjamin January series. You may ask yourself, "Is 18 simply too many books in this series?" And the answer is "NO!!!!" There can never be too many books in this series!
For those of you who are new to my favorite currently-being-written series of books: these historical mysteries follow Benjamin January, a free man of color, in 1830s-40s New Orleans and beyond. The mysteries are good, but they're really an excuse to explore Ben's world: the complicated and colorful people he knows and loves and fears and hates, the vivid and singular and meticulously-researched world of antebellum New Orleans. These are books about power and oppression, about resisting it and not being able to resist it, about building relationships with people who are very different than you are, about how those relationships are really the only thing worth anything in a world of darkness and cruelty. I love them with all my heart.
This is one of the not-in-New Orleans books; Ben is searching for a young white woman who disappeared in upstate New York's "burnt over district" in a time of weird religious groups. A favorite topic of mine! My first thought was, "We're going to get a Joseph Smith cameo!" but no, we're a few years after he left for Illinois, so while he's mentioned a time or two he does not show up. The historical cameo we do get is much more unexpected and made me laugh. The cameos are always such a fun part of the not-in-New-Orleans books, and Hambly's writing is grounded enough that Ben never quite turns into the Forrest Gump of the antebellum US (and Mexico and Cuba and France and wherever else he goes!).
The mystery itself is engaging--I was very invested in Eve Russell, who became one of my favorite one-off characters--and, as usual, Hambly makes fantastic use of a period of American history that doesn't get a lot of fictional attention. I especially appreciated that palpable danger that the non-white characters were in even in ostensibly "free" New York--there are traffickers everywhere just waiting to capture free black people and sell them into slavery down south. No one can breathe easy because everyone is in danger all the time. Of all the fictional media I've encountered, this series as a body of work is one of the best at communicating the totality of the chattel slavery system--how it affected every single thing about life for black people, every moment of every day. How no one was ever, ever safe and how hard people had to fight for even the relative safety that a few were able to find. How it tainted the whole society, how it curdled souls. I always come away with an understanding of just why the Civil War had to happen, why the abolitionist movement probably never would have succeeded without violence. Slavery had to be ripped out at the roots.
Anyway, since we weren't in New Orleans, I missed Rose and Hannibal and Livia and Dominique and Shaw and Olympe and everybody back home, but we did get some excellent Chloe scenes, which are always a bonus! (Chloe!!!) As usual, I spent the whole book going, "When will Ben get to go home? When will he get to have a bath and a good meal and a full night's sleep and see his wife and children???" because nobody whumps their main character the way Hambly does.
But somehow no matter how dark the subject matter of these books are, they never make me feel hopeless. Heavy with the reminder of all the things that people do to each other, yes, but also fiercely grateful for all the ways we find to take care of each other. Gah, I love these books!
+ Listened to Culture Creep by Alice Bolin, a collection of essays at the intersection of feminism and pop culture. Your degree of enjoyment will depend largely on how willing you are to read personal essays that dive deep into things that most people would say "it's not that deep" about (Animal Crossing, wellness tracking, teen magazines, the Playboy Mansion). Most people's eyes would probably glaze over, and honestly I'm not sure if I would have kept up with this if I was reading it, but listening to it while working was enjoyable enough. I don't care for memoir as a genre unless the writer is really freaking fantastic, so when things are too person, I tend to check out, but this managed to be rooted enough in the texts themselves for me to never do that, and Bolin has some really sharp insights throughout. All in all a fine audiobook experience.
What I'm currently reading:
+ Listening to God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn. Well this is a unique book! It's philosophy and technology all tangled up together, at once personal and universal, about the past and the future, meaning and consciousness and nature. O'Gieblyn is incredibly smart and the book is very challenging in a way I appreciate. I also appreciate that she grew up fundamentalist and went to a Bible college before becoming an atheist; there's this one moment where she talks about how a process that took society centuries of bloody struggle (moving from Christian to secular societies) is something that those of us who were raised in rightwing Christianity have to do on our own in the course of a few years, and I have never heard anyone talk about it that way. But yeah, it's really hard to go from "the world is 6,000 years old" to "the universe is billions of years old" and all that those things imply in a short period of time! It's a lot for an individual human being, and she does an incredible job of evoking the disruption of that and also how things linger even when you don't want them to.
+ Reading Hunting Shadows by Charles Todd, 16th in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series of historical mysteries. This series is set in the UK just after WWI and has a shell-shocked Scotland Yard inspector as its protagonist. These are suitably engaging and twisty mysteries for when that's what I want. They kind of all blur together in my head, but that's fine--I don't need everything to be Benjamin January. I don't like cozy mysteries, and these are not, but they also don't lean too far into the gritty darkness either. It's a good balance, well written, and I continue to enjoy this series as I dip in and out of it.
Things
Apr. 23rd, 2026 12:37 amvassBooks
Read T. Kingfisher's Paladin's Grace for the first time, and found it soothingly undemanding.
Listened to the audiobook of Rick Morton's Mean Streak, about Robotdebt, on the strength of how excellent Morton's livetweeting was during the Royal Commission.
I found Mean Streak initially a bit hard going not just because of the awfulness of the subject matter (which I'd factored in) but because of Morton's extended literary riffs (in the first seven chapters, he draws detailed analogies with Heller's Catch-22, Kafka's The Trial, Borges' entire body of work, and Piranesi's Carceri.
Reading this as I was over Easter, I began to anticipate that any moment now he'd go "According to the Christian gospels, Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by an uncaring bureaucracy. Do you know who else was crucified by an uncaring bureaucracy? Welfare recipients under Robodebt!" like a reverse youth pastor, but he never did, and eventually I came to understand the analogies as not an excessive and unnecessary stylistic choice but rather the last defences of a mind besieged by Lovecraftian horrors.
There was some levity, though: Morton and his publisher were obliged to allow some of their subjects to exercise their right of reply. He provided space for this as an appendix at the end of the book. There were no real surprises in the politicians' responses, just some unpleasant reminders for readers, e.g. Stuart Robert exists and is presumably the same species as us.
Kathryn Campbell's reply, however, was the funniest part of the whole (admittedly deadly serious) book. It was amazing.
Just knowing she paid her lawyers, plural, to draft and send this document to Morton's publishers for inclusion in his book, is such a wonderful reminder of the wide variety of people in this world.
Morton could not possibly have condemned her as harshly as her own self-defence did.
One of the allegations Campbell disputes, in this rebuttal which took 57 minutes 56 seconds for Rick Morton to read (the whole audiobook being 15 hours 32 minutes) is that she is a micromanager.
Another is that (as Morton stated) the commissioner said she "failed to address in any manner concerns about the illegality of income averaging, despite being aware of concerns about the illegality of the scheme".
Having already argued that Commissioner Holmes was wrong; and then that Commissioner Holmes' above finding was only the commissioner's opinion, not a finding of fact; she then felt the need to stipulate that Commissioner Holmes' wording was not "failed to address in any manner," it was "did nothing of substance".
She didn't say I didn't do anything at all, she said I did fuck all. Unless you correct the record to reflect that the Royal Commissioner's report into the worst public service fuckup of the century (so far) said that I did fuck all, not nothing at all, I'll sue you.
Ms Campbell either has never read Much Ado About Nothing (act IV, scene 2), or she did, and she took it as personal advice and unlike Dogberry had the power to ensure she was writ down an ass.
Currently reading: Sax Brightwell's Low Dawn and the audiobook of Rachel Neumeier's Tuyo.
Fandom
Posted a thing.
Crafts
Got around to packing up and sending another Sekrit Project.
Tech
Started watching a five hour YouTube video about data structures and algorithms, then (half an hour in) spent the evening making a number guessing game in Twine Harlowe, using binary search.
Next time I'll use Python or Javascript or something. I don't care that I don't know Javascript.
The problem is, I keep telling myself I'll just do a quick snack-sized learning activity on my phone, and Twine (or another thing I've tried recently, jsdares.com) will seem so convenient and then I'll be in a self-made hell of how unsuited their web-based interpreters are for mobile, ugh.
Garden
Bought some calendula seeds to sow.
Cats
Their previous favourite toy, the Mousie, is on stress leave: after some gastric issues it was eventually diagnosed with disembowelment.
I'm happy to say that Ash and Dory are welcoming the Mousie's substitute, the Birdie, with full lethal force.
How are you all?
April Manga Wrap-Up 6
Apr. 22nd, 2026 09:15 ambluapapilio
Read On Doorstep and rated it 7.5/10. 
Read ch. 19-24 of Men of the Harem! Dropped Kashikomarimashita, Destiny, I was not feeling it by chapter 3 and it probably would've only got like a 6 out of me if I'd continued. Read Fuck Buddy and rated it 8/10! Read ch. 5 of Chess Isle. Read ch. 77 of Blue Exorcist! Read Brand-new ♡ Start, rated it 6.5/10. Read Mine and rated it 3.5/5. Read 2 ch. of Junjou Romantica. Read A Room with No Windows, rated it 9/10!! Read ch. 8 of Shugo Chara! Read Kimetsu no Yaiba ch. 182-183. Read ch. 7 of Witch Hat Atelier! Finished volume 2 of BASARA. Read ch. 7 of Touken Ranbu Anthology: SquEni Formation! Read volume 1 of Otoko ga Otoko wo Aisuru Toki, rated it 6.3/10. Read ch. 11-13 of Wizardly Tower. Read chapter 175-176 of Wind Breaker!Our Old Friend Hairball Joe DiGenova Is Back, Y'All
Apr. 22nd, 2026 12:55 pmwonkette_feedSo, U GUYS, remember the pair of married lawyers once known around here as The Hairballs? A couple of very-pro-Russian-position-shall-we-say lawyers, Joe DiGenova and his flame-haired wife Victoria Toensing, whose Trump involvement goes at least all the way back to owning the law firm that employed Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, Rudy Giuliani’s close pals who in 2019 got arrested on campaign finance charges en route to Vienna, Austria, to help set up an interview between Sean Hannity and Viktor Shokin, the corrupt former Ukrainian prosecutor at the heart of the HUNTER BIDEN BURISMA DONG campaign?
Hang on to your tinfoil beanies, because those two are BACK! The mister, anyway, who was sworn in on Monday as a counselor to the attorney general. His official role shall be as the voice of reason for Trump’s 2020 RIGGED STOLEN ELECTION space laser 2026 Revenge Tour, soon to be featuring Burisma and who knows what all else, lumped together and now and from henceforth to be known to all as “The Grand Conspiracy.”
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DiGenova made this announcement to Greg Kelly on Newsmax, for whom he is a frequent contributor, and the fart-sniffing was peak.
HOST GREG KELLY: We have congratulations to share with Joe diGenova. Good luck, Joe. Did you hear? He’s got a big gig at the Department of Justice. One of our favorite guests on this show will be counselor to the attorney general. That is a big-deal role.
No lies detected so far.
Now, formally, what does it actually entail? He’ll advise on legal policy and enforcement. He’s going to work out of Florida. The US attorney is down there. Fort Pierce, Florida, courthouse.
Sounds like good place for a guy to be so he and Judge Aileen Cannon can work to protect the minions of a certain resident there from any consequences of their actions!
He was a US attorney himself in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.
He is 81, older than even Trump! But 80 is the new 60 when you LONGEVITYMAXX, we hear. And whatever he’s been taking, he can push George Soros-y Deep State stolen-election conspiracy theories with the strength of a man half his age, with such virility that even Fox News got freaked out about liability after more than 90 of his appearances. Not Newsmax, though.
KELLY: He is a superstar, and he knows about the corruption. He knows about the swamp. He knows what they did to President Trump.
DiGenova sure knows even more than most anybody else about what kind of quid pro quo Trump tried to cook up in Ukraine, because his own filthy fingers were all up in it! Trump was even going to hire Joe and his missus to be lawyers for his first impeachment over that PITCH PERFECT PHONE CALL, until it became clear that Joe’s involvement in the whole affair created a conflict.
KELLY: You know what I love about Joe? He thinks creatively, ethically, honestly, but creatively. And he’s aggressive. Too many people here — oh, no, Trump is crazy. They don’t want to touch him with a 10-foot-pole. However you feel about President Trump, he was a victim. And Joe is so fired up for this role. All right. He’s going to be in the middle of it all. And he was very frustrated with Pam Bondi, who’s no longer going to be his boss.
It sounds more like Bondi didn’t care to have him, but whatever.
Other Joe DiGenova hits include apologizing after telling former Homeland Security Department cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs that he should be “taken out at dawn and shot”; for ranting nonstop in 2024 and appearing to threaten the jurors in Trump’s criminal fraud trial; and in 2019, he urged Fox viewers to go buy guns because there was going to be civil war. Newsmax never stopped lovin’ it.
And so, just as trendspotter Evan McGillicuddy Hurst foretold back in January was to be, so it shall: The media, the world, your ass, none of them are ready for whatever Obama Switzerland John Brennan CIA FBI cash pallet stollen Dominion voting machine toad-licking African-shrub-chomping WIRETAPPPP madness is about to emerge next, now that Trump is getting increasingly desperate to steal the midterms by any means necessary so Congress doesn’t come along with clippers to neuter his Democracy-fucking agenda.
1-900-TOLD-YOU
Gerrymandering, trying to poke into state voter databases to hand-pick their voters, trying to bully the Senate into passing the SAVE Act, Tulsi Gabbard’s toenails stomping around Fulton County Georgia and demanding 2024 election records from Wayne County Michigan … whatever it is, Trump will have one of each! And Joe diGenova is fixing to be the babysitter for whatever collective trip we’re all about to embark on.
Man, we thought shit was crazy enough back then, but Trump 1.0 was just a few roaches working their mandibles on the toothpaste and lolling in the sink compared to what was behind the walls. First term, Trump had to keep a certain cadre of legitimate-seeming people around him to maintain the reluctant support of establishment Republicans, who had been at the cusp of dumping him as their candidate a mere month before the 2016 election after his leaked locker room talk with George and Jeb’s cousin Billy. The freaknut nominees Trump surely would have preferred would never have gotten confirmed by Congress, and stymied if he back-footed them in. Now the idea of Rudy Giuliani as head of the DOJ (if he had a law license, that is), given the clown show that is today, we would almost cradle that freak to our bosom. Well, no, but point is, different times, and back then Trump had to make do with the relatively more uncreative, unaggressive likes of Attorney General Bill Barr.
So many greasy little skittering feet! When we saw Michael Cohen frantically arranging a legal squaredance wherein Daryl Dongerson and Peggy Peterpumper and David Pecker and Karen McDougal all do-se-doed with some money in exchange for the life rights to a certain secret that they all had shared, then allemanded away to go be a two-time president, a magazine lifestyle columnist, and a stripper/brave witness, all respectively, and said to ourselves, that was some of the craziest shit we ever saw.
Oh, how we had no idea. And with lawyers Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova saddling up their hairballs to ride down for a final shootout, the yugest batch of crazy of all time is headed to town.
