I have been offline more than usual lately because the internet is off at my house and I've been unable to reach anyone who is not an AI, which went about as well and efficiently as you can imagine. The AI has decided that I need a new router and is mailing it to me with instructions for how to install it myself, because God forbid a human be involved. If that doesn't work, who knows what the next step is. I am beginning to suspect the only humans at the company are the CEOs and shareholders.

Meanwhile, I decided that I am spending way too much time doomscrolling, both intentionally and non-consensually. Not only is everything horrible right now, but the minute you get online you're personally informed of every horrible thing that happened anywhere, big or small or in between. Did some random dude murder his entire family anywhere in the world? You'll be informed of it, complete with heartbreaking photos of the dead kids. Did a child commit suicide anywhere in the world? You'll hear about that too, also complete with the awful story and heartbreaking photos! And that's not even getting into politics and the upcoming end of the world. I don't think humans are mentally equipped to live like that.

So I installed ScreenZen on my phone. It's one of many apps that will block both apps and entire websites. (Sadly it does not have the ability to block words.) I blocked everything I doomscroll on. I highly recommend this! I still get the news, as 1) I get a news digest emailed to me daily, 2) people will tell me the news in person whether I consent or not, but at least I'm not constantly marinating in global misery that I can't do anything about. Also, I now have more time to be useful in ways that are actually possible.

The result is that I have read so many more books than usual. I am completely behind on reviewing, also as usual, but with more books involved now. Perhaps I will post a poll.
Tags:
([syndicated profile] atrios_feed May. 12th, 2026 07:30 pm)
When someone - the president, other politicians, people in The Discourse generally - showes themselves to be a bad faith and dishonest actor, you are allowed to remember that. If you are a journalist, it should impact how you cover those people going forward. As an editor or producer, whether you go to them for quotes or appearances.

This should not be controversial.

I've written before that one problem with DC (government and government-adjacent DC, including journalism) is that almost everybody is paid to lie. Some of those lies are mostly harmless - puffing up your boss a bit, spinning something - and many of them are less harmless. If there were social and professional sanctions for people who bullshit in their bullshitting jobs, then the entire social system would collapse.

Go to a random dinner party and you're going to find people who work as lobbyists for Evil Corp, or people whose spouses and friends do.

That's the glorious "bipartisan" Washington.

If you are a journalist, you should be allowed to remember things. You certainly shouldn't be encouraged to pretend you don't.

Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), previously named polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), affects one in eight women. However, the term PCOS is inaccurate, implying pathological ovarian cysts, obscuring diverse endocrine and metabolic features, and contributing to delayed diagnosis, fragmented care, and stigma, while curtailing research and policy framing. Building on an international mandate for change, we outline an unprecedented, rigorous, multistep global consensus process for the name change. Funding and governance were established with engagement of 56 leading academic, clinical, and patient organisations. Using iterative global surveys (with responses from 14 360 people with PCOS and multidisciplinary health professionals from all world regions), modified Delphi methods, nominal group technique workshops, and marketing and implementation analyses, we identified principles prioritising scientific accuracy, clarity, stigma avoidance, cultural appropriateness, and implementation feasibility. An accurate new name was prioritised over retaining the PCOS acronym or a generic name. Implementation approaches prioritised evolution rather than transformation. Preferred terms were polyendocrine, metabolic, and ovarian, reflecting the condition's multisystem pathophysiology, and polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome was the consensus new name. Accuracy was improved by omitting cysts and by capturing endocrine, metabolic, and ovarian dysfunction. A co-designed global implementation strategy, including a transition period, education, and alignment with health systems and disease classification, is under way.

Teede, H. J., Khomami, M. B., Morman, R., Laven, J. S. E., Joham, A. E., Costello, M. F., … Piltonen, T. (n.d.). Polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, the new name for polycystic ovary syndrome: a multistep global consensus process. The Lancet. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(26)00717-8

([syndicated profile] atrios_feed May. 12th, 2026 06:30 pm)
It's always on the table when gas prices rise, which I suspect leads to people thinking that it's a significant amount when it's only 18.5 cents/gallon.

It's an action which will make people more mad, because it's inevitably swamped by the actual price increase. You promised help! You said you'd cut the tax but gas is still 5 bucks a gallon!
([syndicated profile] atrios_feed May. 12th, 2026 05:30 pm)
The below is a joke, but so often that is the level of The Discourse. Anyway, fun things happen when the supply curve goes vertical, especially for a good which tends to have pretty close to just-in-time delivery AND which is an input in, well, everything through its role in transportation (including transporting itself!).

Even if there aren't lines at the gas station, $100 gas would reflect, by any colloquial understanding, a "shortage."

But of course in practice, those pumps would go dry, in places, in such a scenario.

I'm not predicting gas shortages, I'm just saying that people will have ridiculous things to say about them if ever they are looming.

Posted by adamg

Thomas Rosa of Chelsea, who was only officially absolved in March of the 1985 murder of Gwendolyn Taylor of Dorchester yesterday sued the state for the 34 years he spent in prison for her murder.

In his suit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court, Rosa is seeking the maximum $1 million fee state law allows for wrongful imprisonment, along with expungement of his conviction from state records, state-funded medical and mental-health care, at least 50% off any classes at state colleges, housing assistance and attorney's fees.

Rosa was charged with the  murder, rape and kidnapping of Taylor, an 18-year-old Talbot Avenue resident, whose body was found in a car parked at a repair garage on Norfolk Street in December, 1985.

His first trial, in 1986, ended in a mistrial. The next month, a Suffolk Superior Court jury convicted him, but the Supreme Judicial Court overturned the verdict and ordered a new trial, which resulted in a guilty verdict in 1993 - for first-degree murder and kidnapping, with an acquittal on the rape charge.

In 2020, a single justice of the Supreme Judicial Court ordered him freed as he pursued a new trial, based on new evidence, such as the fact that the man's DNA found on the victim's body was not his - and that DNA found on a coat at his home was not the victim's.

In 2023, a Suffolk Superior Court judge vacated his conviction and ordered a new trial. At the time, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office said it planned to retry him, but this past March filed a nolle prosequi form formally and finally dropping his case.

In his complaint, Rosa's attorneys say that in addition to physical evidence, eyewitness accounts were faulty - they said the man last seen with Taylor had fine, straight hair and a missing or gap tooth, while Rosa had thick curly hair and no gap between his front teeth.

But the complaint also blasts Boston Police detectives for allegedly getting witnesses to change their stories when their accounts did not match Rosa's description.

When police focused on Mr. Rosa as the suspect, they convinced the roommate to alter her physical description of the man she saw to avoid the obvious mismatch with Mr. Rosa. ...

Police also convinced the roommate, and the roommate's siter who was in the apartment the night of Taylor's killing, to change their description of the coast they saw on the unfamiliar man after learning that Mr. Rosa had a different coat. ...

The Commonwealth argued to the jury that biologic evidence on Mr. Rosa's coat connected the victim to the coat, but DNA evidence refutes that claim.

In contrast, the complaint continues, Rosa immediately cooperated with detectives once they began to go after him as the suspect - he willingly gave police hair, blood and saliva samples.

And, the complaint alleges, the detectives made up statements by Rosa's wife, who did not speak English, but who was not provided a translator, to rebut his alibi.

Topics: 
Neighborhoods: 
Free tagging: 

Posted by adamg

Staco City reports (with video and audio from the scene) that somebody was shot in the back on Dacia Street in Dorchester around 1:15 a.m.

At least 17 bullets were fired, hitting not only the victim, but two houses and a parked car.

Neighborhoods: 
Topics: 
Free tagging: 
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
([personal profile] rachelmanija May. 12th, 2026 11:08 am)


This novel has one of the most off-the-wall premises I've come across. In a near-future world much like our own, women who get pregnant also conceive a "fetal mother." When they give birth to their baby, they also deliver the fetal mother, then fall into a coma-like sleep. The fetal mother rapidly grows into an identical clone of the original mother, then EATS HER. This process is called rebirth. The new mother has the original mother's memories and personality, but is also endowed with superpowers for the first five years of her child's life: she needs almost no sleep, has super strength and fast reflexes, is filled with energy, and finds all child care and domestic tasks endlessly fascinating and enjoyable. In short, the new mother is the woman that mothers are supposed to be.

The main character, Vivi, is terrified of rebirth, and sees it as death. This view is very stigmatized, but might be more widespread than society lets on. She's reluctant to get pregnant because of it. When she finally does, something goes wrong with her rebirth. She didn't get new mother powers. Instead she slogs along, depressed and alienated, trying to care for her infant while she's still physically impaired from the pregnancy and actually needs sleep. She and her husband end up breaking up over this, and Vivi moves to Australia to live with her uncle, who runs a hobbling business.

Remember I mentioned this is near-future? The world has actually decided to do something about climate change, and so drastically regulated energy consumption. Hobbling is altering old machines to make them low emitters. The low-emissions world is less lavish: planes are rarely used, long-distance calls are brief, and only the very rich have unlimited internet. It's an interesting take on a world whose future seems much brighter than ours, but whose present is more similar to our recent past.

Vivi and her family are Indonesian-Chinese, and their cultures (including Australian) play into the book much as the near-future setting does: it's pervasive and interesting and very specific, which makes a nice grounded base for the incredibly weird rebirth stuff.

But Won't I Miss Me is a weird, fascinating, ambitious book with a weird, fascinating, ambitious premise. Great social commentary and issues of identity. I didn't quite love the ending - it felt like it needed either more setup or more payoff - but the book is still excellent and very original.

Posted by adamg

Two managers at the Fourth Wall, 228 Tremont St. near Stuart Street, told the Boston Licensing Board today they're trying to buy the place from an owner who already has no fans on the board and that their priority is stopping a seeming flood of under-21 drinkers who have been flocking there with fake out-of-state IDs.

"We apologize for being here this morning," Fourth Wall attorney Curt Bletzer told the board at a hearing on on incident on Feb. 13 during which two BPD licensing detectives found a table with seven women, all 19 or 20, with alcoholic beverages - and possibly could have IDed more tykes, only the tables around them quickly emptied out as they were busy examining fake licenses around the table from states west of Williamstown. The bar faces a second hearing for a similar seven-people underage violation in April.

Bletzer said managers Dave Ferrando and Brett Walshaw have already taken steps to beat back the youthful tide, including buying a new license scanner recommended by BPD, hiring more doorpeople and training or retraining all the staff in recognizing fake IDs. The pair also fired the manager on duty on the night of the April incident for not properly checking IDs -  even as they continue to negotiate to buy the bar from serial bar owner Derek Brady, who did not attend the hearing.

Board Chairwoman Kathleen Joyce asked Walshaw if he had himself been trained by Brady on combatting under-age drinking and running a bar according to the law.

When he said he had, she told him she "I highly recommend" that he get re-training from somebody else.  "Mr. Brady has a history of not managing his licensed premises properly in the city of Boston," she said.

In January, the board voted unanimously to shut the Draft, Brady's Harvard Avenue bar, not just because BPD detectives had also found underage drinkers there, but because Brady had hired a friend to manage the place after earlier telling the board he was firing him and vowed to never rehire him after a 2024 incident at his Loyal Nine on Union Street in which the manager was charged with trying to strangle his girlfriend in a basement office. In 2022, the board rejected Brady's bid to buy a defunct bar and restaurant on Brighton Avenue in Allston.

Although still the Fourth Wall's listed owner, Brady did not attend today's hearing. And nobody from the Fourth Wall attended a recent mandatory meeting the licensing board held to discuss keeping the Theater District safe during what could be an unusually busy upcoming summer. Walshaw and Ferrando said they never saw any notices about the required meeting.

"And that's the reason we're trying to fix that," by consummating the sale - which will require licensing-board approval - Bletzer said.

"You should get your act together quickly," Joyce advised.

Neighborhoods: 
([syndicated profile] atrios_feed May. 12th, 2026 03:30 pm)
Me, dumb: We could have shortages soon.

You, smart, after two Econ 101 classes: Prices adjust to equate supply and demand so shortages are impossible.
([syndicated profile] atrios_feed May. 12th, 2026 02:30 pm)
I'd still bet on Trump ramping up the violence soon and if he does there will be more long term impacts.
UAE won’t resume full gas production until 2027 after Iranian attacks

The United Arab Emirates’s main gas-processing complex, which was hit in Iranian attacks during the war, will not reach its full production capacity again until next year.

ADNOC Gas said the Habshan site, which is one of the world’s largest gas production facilities and supplies gas across the UAE, is now operating at 60 percent capacity and “the company is currently working towards achieving 80 percent restoration by the end of 2026 with full capacity restored in 2027”.

In a statement sharing its first-quarter results, the company reported $1.1bn in net income, a 15 percent decrease compared with the same quarter last year.
katiedid717: (Default)
([personal profile] katiedid717 posting in [community profile] agonyaunt May. 12th, 2026 11:38 am)
I am a social person. But increasingly, I have little time to socialize. I have two young children and a demanding job. Still, some friends text me frequently, even though I reply concisely and keep refusing their kind invitations. Should I be firmer — maybe start ignoring texts?
BUSY MOM


I once had a boss who, like you, was a busy working mother. She taught me a valuable lesson for managing social interactions on text and email: Do not become hostage to your phone or feel compelled to respond to every message as it arrives. Once or twice a day, spend 15 or 20 minutes responding to all of them — and don’t worry about them again until the next time. It beats telling friends to stop texting.

EDIT: LW provided more info in the comments

I am Busy Mom, LW #4. I just want to clarify something.

In my email to Philip, I used the word "acquaintances," not "friend." The texts I am referring to are from former coworkers, parents of my kids' old friends who now attend different schools, etc. - people I really don't know very well.

I know I should count my blessings, and I do appreciate that people are reaching out, but I truly feel overwhelmed by the number of texts I get from these acquaintances. There are a few former co-workers who text me all the time just to chat and "stay in touch," and I truly do not have as much time for them as they have for me. I'm genuinely wondering if it's better to "ghost" them and stop replying, or to say I don't have the capacity right now.

I'm not sure if other young(ish) parents can relate, but parenting right now feels like a constant barrage of communications - medical appointment reminders, school and after-school emails, parent chat groups, parent-teacher meeting updates, mom WhatsApp groups, neighborhood Signal chats, school log-in systems with updates from teachers, I am completely and utterly overwhelmed with information overload. I get so much textual messaging across so many different platforms, it honestly stresses me out, and I can't keep track of everything.
Tags:
seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
([personal profile] seekingferret May. 12th, 2026 11:48 am)
I've been a Knicks fan for 35 years and this past two weeks has been the best I have ever seen the Knicks play. They are better by far than '94 and '99. They're also astoundingly more likeable than the '94 or '99 Knicks. It's so much nicer to cheer for Jalen Brunson than it was to cheer for Latrell Sprewell.

The Hart-Bridges-Brunson Nova Knicks thing is adorable, the sheer joy of them getting to hang out again with their college buddies is one of the fun dynamics of this team and certainly contributes to team chemistry.

And KAT, especially Point God KAT that we are seeing in the playoffs, is so much fun. The problem with KAT has always been that he's so talented that sometimes he loses interest and coasts, but he is so fun to watch when he tries his hardest and I have never seen him trying harder than he is trying right now. He fights for every rebound, he's blocking shots like he was Willie Cauley-Stein, and when he drives from the three point line it's like a freight train. And yet even better than any of that is when he stands at the middle of the arc and orchestrates the offense like an air traffic controller. And he's doing it with all of his goofy KAT energy intact. What a delightfully silly man.

I haven't even said anything about OG, who a surprising amount of the time is the best Knick in the floor, a defensive wizard who has discovered how to score at will.

And OG's injury aside, the greatest delight of this postseason is how well rested everyone is. It was so miserable last season watching Thibs grind his starters into powder. Were there triumphs, yes, but the human cost was too high. With help from Mitchell Robinson, Deuce McBride, Landry Shamet, Jordan Clarkson, and even a bit of Tyler Kolek and Jeremy Sochan, the starters are getting to take a break, and the result is obvious, what everyone was screaming about last year. If you're well rested, you don't get hurt as much and you can play with more energy and have more fun. DUH, Thibs And now the Knicks get a full week off before the Eastern Conference Finals while Detroit and Cleveland slug it out.

I'm very nervous nonetheless about Detroit, who has dominated us in the regular season even though they look like they're running out of gas now. But maybe we don't need to face them at all, if they can't get passed the Cavs. And right now the Knicks look like they can beat anybody, and I cannot remember ever having that feeling. It feels so good.
Tags:
annabeth_roses: (DW: 11 pleading (Eleventh Hour))
([personal profile] annabeth_roses posting in [community profile] fandom_icons May. 12th, 2026 11:39 am)
245 Doctor Who icons from Bells of St. John, Rings of Akhaten, Cold War, Hide, Journey to the Center of the TARDIS, The Crimson Horror, The Name of the Doctor, and some more The Snowmen icons.
All Eleventh Doctor with several of him & Clara in the same icon. Also Eleven and River. This was literally the "Eleventh Doctor batch."
Very image heavy.

Teasers:



here @ my journal
The fare is $3. If you commute, you take the bus or train twice a day, five days a week. Every week you spend $30*. You'd have to be caught and ticketed more often than once every five weeks in order to make this math not work out in your favor. And that is never going to happen, because there aren't nearly enough enforcement agents. As it is, the ones we have cost more than they make back. It's all a racket, but you'll notice the buses still aren't free because Albany is still in control of the MTA.

* I'm making a few assumptions here, first, that you're not sharing the same card among several family members with staggered schedules; once you spend $35 in a week on the same card, subsequent trips are free. Also, this is the full fare for most buses and trains, but not for the express bus.
([syndicated profile] atrios_feed May. 12th, 2026 01:00 pm)
Impressed by Trump's ability to make messes.
US prices rose in April at their fastest rate since May 2023 as the impact of the war in Iran was increasingly felt by consumers.

A jump in the cost of gasoline and groceries pushed the consumer price index (CPI), the amount prices jumped by in the past 12 months, to 3.8%.

It is the highest level since inflation hit 4% three years ago.
([syndicated profile] cakewrecks_feed May. 12th, 2026 01:00 pm)

Posted by Jen

Ever seen Cornelli lace? It's this pretty icing technique Jennifer wanted on her wedding cake:

 

But instead, her baker got a little really drunk and had a silly string party:

Bottom Tier: "Hey, I think I'm actually better after a few drinks!"

Middle Tier: "MOAR BEER MOAR STRINGY THINGS WHEEEE"

Top Tier: [face down on the counter, blindly spraying icing all over the room]

 

Meanwhile...

Kimberly decided on something a little more rustic for her wedding:

 

...but this really goes against the grain:

 

And Brittany T. ordered this loveliness for her wedding cake:

 

You must admit, her baker did a crackin' job:

o.0

Also, if you watch those embedded BBs long enough, I'm pretty sure they'll slowly sink into the cake and disappear, ala the La Brea Tar Pits.

Who's hungry?

 

Thanks to Jennifer H., Kimberly W., & Brittany T. for fueling bride-to-be nightmares everywhere.

*****

P.S. In case this post wasn't painful enough:

Exceptionally Bad Dad Jokes

There are a lot of "dad joke" books out there, but this one has awesome ratings AND the word "spiffing" on the cover, so it's a clear winner.

Good news, there's a Volume 2!

Exceptionally Bad Dad Jokes, Vol II


This one has the word "spiffing" in the title AND comes with a lovely green-and-gold cover, so folks will recognize your sophisticated taste while begging you to stop telling these terrible, TERRIBLE jokes.

*****

And from my other blog, Epbot:

.