fandomonymous

siderea

Overheard on Reddit, u/Itsyademonboi:

Sorry, Nazis are from Germany under Adolf Hitler, what we have here is Sparkling Fascists.

flexagon

Things progress:

The cat is eating, the metamour is healing.

I do have a tenant! He starts March 1 and has signed an 18-month lease, though the deposit money hasn't shown up yet. Something to poke at.

I finished all my sewing/alteration projects and immediately got itchy for more. I've been intending January as a low-buy month, so there's stuff piling up in online baskets at blankshirts.com and moodfabrics.com. In the meantime I'm realizing that some of my athletic wear is still produced by black magic. I have flat seams that look like the wrong side of coverstitch machine stitches, but on both sides.

Made progress on several of my handstand exercises, and also more hand-to-hand. We're getting more used to working on it with no extra mats and no coaches.

The Montana trip is shaping up. The squirrel is going to come along(!), and we barely kept Birdie's dad from also showing up (!), and we found a surprisingly nice AirBnB very near my dad because I guess search results for groups of four are just better around there. Yesterday I told my dad the schedule and the guest list, and he took it pretty well, if with some confusion.

Things don't progress:

The NYT rejected my third crossword puzzle, which I'd had really high hopes for, with a very nice personalized letter from one of the head editors saying she was sad about them not taking it. But a rejection nonetheless. We are planning to rework it to address the feedback... but I'm feeling pretty down about it anyway. Maybe my taste in themes just isn't aligned enough with the cruciverbalist masses.

I was going to go to the Fetish Fair Fleamarket with the squirrel this year, but eventually learned that NELA itself has ceased operation and the FFF is no more. Looks like the pandemic killed it. More lost chances, another thing I attended for the last time without realizing it might be the last time. :( My gripe about this on a forum led to a discussion about Arisia also being much smaller than it used to be, about #metoo and Dobbs and covid collectively being extra hard on communities that require the genders to get along en masse.

Thanks to a giant snowstorm, there was no circus open studio today and no show to attend this evening. Only shoveling, and some stretching at home, although Birdie came over and stretched with me and cooked (we're attempting rosemary-salt bagels). A lot of things will still be closed on Monday too.

I'm having just a few feelings about being unemployed, or I guess about not being considered valuable by large powerful (rich) organizations. Some of this is about an unexpected eldercare expense, some of it is hearing about various perks provided by other people's jobs (subsidized concierge healthcare) and remembering the ones provided by my old job. Somehow the ICE stuff in Minneapolis, which oh yeah I've got to call my congress critters about, is not helping. It's a "what if nobody powerful cares about me" feeling. Of course I have some power of my own.

hafnia

"So did you see the news today?" I asked Maximo, as we were out and running errands.

He gave me a grim look, like, yes.

We talked about it, briefly, just like — this is what's happening, truly, and I said out loud the thing I have been thinking for a long time but haven't wanted to give voice to, because giving voice to it makes it somehow real:

"I'm glad I'm not working outside the house right now. I'm glad we're in [OUR COUNTY] and that it's rural enough and white enough that raids have been limited to specific employers. If we were elsewhere..."

"If we were elsewhere you'd want to carry your passport, and even that might not be enough."

"Yeah." A pause, then: "If we were elsewhere, we'd be getting grocery delivery and I wouldn't be leaving the house. I have my fucking Real ID, but —"

"Yeah, they've arrested people even with Real ID."

Just exchanged a bleak look, like.

Cool.

Whenever I mention anxiety to him, it is with the hope that he will tell me that what-I-fear will not come to pass. Being able to basically feelings-barf on him and go, "I know this probably isn't real, but..." helps a great deal.

I don't get that this time.

I have never been ashamed of not being white. The way that I was brought up, I was supposed to denounce that part of myself, to pretend that I was something other than what I was, because we only look like those people, we are not Those People, as though the ones that divide everyone into Us and Them on the basis of skin color care about whether or not you are, in fact, One Of The Good Ones.

I have never been ashamed. I have tried to reclaim heritage, to reclaim pride, to feel proud of who I am and where my family comes from, what ties we have to what parts of land. I learned Spanish despite my dad telling me I didn't have to; I have tried to research tribal affiliation and piece together where my family is from, because none of them will talk about it. Arizona, but what part. Montana, but what part. California, but what part. Mexico, but where and when?

I remember being told that my English was "very good, considering".

I remember well-meaning people asking if I was sure I wasn't "something else". Indigenous, Chicana, okay, but what if you're actually southern European? Are you sure your mom's family isn't from, oh, Italy? Spain?

I always said, no.

Up until recently, I also would have said that I wasn't afraid.

Now, I'm trying not to be.

siderea

For those of you in the parts of the US for whom an ice storm is predicted and who have no idea of what that is except that it means it will be cold:

1) If you have an ice scraper to clean the ice off your car, have it inside with you, not in the car. Because at a sufficient level of ice coating, leaving your ice scraper in the car is like leaving your car keys in the car.

1a) Honestly, at a certain level of ice coating, it's more like having one's car coated in concrete, and you shouldn't waste your energy and body warmth whaling futilely at it. One of the failure modes is you succeed in getting the ice off but take the windshield with it.

2) You probably associate winter storms and coldness with grey-overcast skies and darkness. But once it is done coming down, often the arctic winds that drove the storm will blow the clouds away, the skies clear and the sun will come up. I cannot begin to describe how bright it gets when the sun is shining and the whole world is made of glass. If you packed your sunglasses away for the winter, go get them out. If you store them in your glove compartment of your car, again, maybe go get them and have them inside with you so you can see what you're doing when you are trying to get the ice off the car.

3) All that said, maybe just don't be worrying about leaving home. A fundamental clue is that an ice storm is not done when the storm is done raging. For as long as there's a thick glaze of ice on everything, the crisis is not over. Your life experience has given you an intuition of physics that says ice forms where water pools and is therefore mostly something flat. But in an ice storm, you get ice coating absolutely everything including sloped and vertical surfaces. YouTube is willing to show you endless videos of people attempting and failing to walk up quite gentle slopes covered with ice and cars slowly and majestically sliding down hills. Driving and walking can be unbelievably dangerous after an ice storm. Try to ride it out by sheltering in place and don't try to go out in it if you can at all avoid it. Remember, it's not about how good a driver you are, it's about how good a driver everybody else on the road isn't.

4) Snow and ice falling off buildings can kill you. Yes, I know snow looks fluffy, but it is made of water and can compact to be quite solid and if it attains free fall it can build up quite a bit of momentum. Icicles are basically spears. If you endeavor to try to knock snow or ice off from a roof or other high structure, be real careful how you position yourself relative to it.

5) Now and until this is over is absolutely not the time to do anything that entails any unnecessary risk. Any activity that is at all discretionary that has even a remote likelihood of occasioning an ER trip is to be avoided. Boredom, I know, makes people find their own fun. Resist the urge.

hafnia

Stealing an idea from a couple of other people, since February is the shortest month, let's do it. Talking meme! Prompt me on p much anything and I will write a post about it.

Topics that are fair game: books, writing (feel free to ask about specific projects), cooking and baking (specific recipes, favorite things to make, bucket list things to cook), tabletop RPGs (both GMing/DMing as well as designing, D&D as well as GMless or other systems), video games, fiber arts, tarot...

I mean honestly pretty much anything is fair game — if there's something you want my opinion on, I will probably give it! If it's private I may Politely Decline, but outside of stuff I really don't expect people to ask about, I think it unlikely? So.

Dates beneath the jump; I'll fill them in as people ask. I don't expect that I'll fill all 28 days, but how cool if we did? :P

Go ahead, ask me anything!

( Dates! )

In other news: tonight was trivia! Our team came in second, so that was fun. Knowing how to calculate the volume of a sphere came in clutch. Max helped us clinch 2nd with his love of dumb word games, and my friend's knowledge of manga helped us too. Very good overall; got a $10 gift certificate to a local coffee place, which we all magnanimously agreed could go to Maximo, because none of the rest of us really do coffee.

(Like — I do sometimes, but am becoming increasingly aware just what caffeine does to my anxiety levels, so I have mostly switched to tea, and everyone is happier. :P )

Other-other news would be, I made the puff pastry pizza and it was REALLY GOOD. Definitely doing it again! Maximo requested pepperoni with pepperoncini next go-round; might do that for him and do mushroom and onion for me. Very good stuff overall, though, 10/10, love King Arthur's recipes. :D

hafnia

Bad migraine Thursday. Like, "I am not a functional human being" most of the day lasting into Friday.

Friday at least was better? but yeah. Most of the weekend was off-and-on "pain and anxiety", because that's also one of the weird migraine symptoms. Somewhere in there my major joints also decided that since it's cold as hell (in the 20s, in town, which is unusual for us), they were going to seize up, so. You know.

The upshot of it is that I was running on too little sleep this weekend, including Holiday Monday, and so I slept eleven hours today.

Which. Okay.

I'm glad I had the ability to do it, I guess?

One of the things that was contributing to "blergh" mood (besides, you know, pain) was that everything I tried to cook this weekend turned out awfully, mostly for reasons that weren't my fault. Like — mmm. Last night I made a dish I have made many, many times. Everything went more or less smoothly, except when Max took his first bite he gagged and had to go spit it into the trash, because the frozen vegetable mix I use as a mix-in apparently had a moldy bell pepper stem in it.

...yup. Also found a bit in mine. Thank God neither of us is allergic to mold?

(It was the "pepper stir-fry mix" from WinCo, on the off-chance that anyone else lives somewhere with a WinCo and uses it. Never had that issue before; had unfortunately already thrown out the packaging and taken the trash out as part of making dinner, so, you know. I'm out $3.)

Aside from that: tried to make bread Sunday and it was awful (new bag of flour; must have more water than the last bag I bought from the same brand, because I followed the usual hydration ratio and it was too wet — just did not have a good structure and didn't end up with a good rise, was more like flat bread); overcooked the protein for Saturday's dinner...

The moldy pepper was the real low point and that was the point at which I ended up crying, ha. Too little sleep, fucking up the dinner that spouse had specifically ASKED FOR...yeah.

Anyway! I redeemed myself tonight.

When we went to wine tasting weekend before last, we were given shooters of "Hungarian Mushroom Soup" to accompany their pinot noir.

Both of us tried it and were pleasantly surprised at how good it was. Max in particular was like, "That's really good!", so.

I looked it up and laughed, because it was a recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook!

I told Max I could make it, so. Picked up oyster mushrooms at the store. Had everything else on hand.

Made a new loaf of bread tonight, reducing the amount of water, and it was fine.

Cooked the soup. Omitted the sour cream and the salt (I was using salted butter for the onion step, and like — tamari is pretty salty on its on, too, didn't want to overdo it). The sour cream omission was something I'd seen recommended online to drop the richness of it. Cheated, and instead of making a roux (because I can ALWAYS TASTE THE FLOUR, ugh, I would rather eat wallpaper paste than something made with a traditional French roux — yes, I am weird, and yes, that includes bechamel sauce), I whisked about a tablespoon of corn starch into the milk and added that for the final step with the stock.

Yeah, it was a good dupe of the soup we had at the wine tasting, so. Heh.

It was excellent. The bread was also very good, I put together a green salad to go with it, and on the whole was like, right, yeah, I do know how to cook, so. A much-needed win, I have redeemed myself.

Tomorrow is going to be an attempt at this, I think, so.

Quiet day, otherwise. I started reading Blood on Her Tongue, because my hold came in at the library after having waited for...long enough that I forget when I'd placed it (July, according to the library app). It's...mm. I like parts of it? I suppose I'll post an in-depth review when I'm finished with it. Right now I'm about a third of the way through and it's...something.

Before Blood on Her Tongue was — some dumb memoir by a trauma surgeon from the Rockies that was probably not worth the hour it took to read (dude is massively burnt out and I hope he's since gotten to take a proper vacation, but that doesn't make for good reading). Before that, dumb romance novels. I still have a bunch of stuff on my TBR, but the migraines have been frequent of late, and it's very difficult to want to focus on anything when you're dealing with that level of pain. It's part of why I haven't been posting much, here — when it's like, "well, today was another day, and all that happened was I had a migraine and so slept most of the day and I'm still in pain", why bother? so.

Other stuff:

-I'm doing

getyourwordsout and I'm on track to meet my goal for the year! Which feels very nice, ha.

-If you're at all interested in participating in the tropes-based remix event I'm co-running with

shadaras, entries are due on the 24th! Details at

seasonalremix! Right now it's, uh...just me, I think? so as excited as I am to remix my own story, if you've been thinking about it, now's the time. :D

-I wasn't planning on being an official DEI committee member this year (because I forgot the fucking deadline, whoops), but apparently the city recorder has Thoughts On That, because I got an email today telling me nicely that there were still vacancies and would I be willing to fill one? She asked Manda, too, at some event or another, if I was going to be signing up again, as "the city would find it valuable", so. I filled it out. I was planning to volunteer in an unofficial capacity anyway; this is just — yeah. I think it's mostly that I'm used to running meetings in a very different context and have no compunction about telling someone, like, "that's great, thank you, we are not doing that" and getting stuff back on track.

-After a conversation with Ed (therapist) I am thinking about career stuff in a sort of different light. More on that to come, maybe, when I am up for talking about it — his perspective on things was difficult mostly because, like — I pay my therapist to be the voice of reason, right (among, you know, other things), and so hearing him be like, "I am wondering why you haven't thought about doing [thing I have secretly thought about doing like every day for the last four years] for work?"

I laughed when he asked, then got flustered and was like, well, because — and couldn't come up with a good answer. So.

(It is very boring, fear not, I am just sort of — mm. Fragile enough about it at the moment that anyone going, "Oh, really, are you sure that's a good idea?" will probably make me cry. Ha. :P )

Talked to Max about it and he was like, "huh."

So.

God, that's a really cryptic way to end an entry — I promise, I am not going to run away to join the circus, suddenly start training to be an Olympic gymnast (HA), or anything else that is wildly unattainable. It is very boring and staid! It's just...not something I had let myself think about, for reasons that are difficult to get into. So.

Off to go write, again. It dawns on me that part 3 of this project (which is, to be fair, an unedited nightmare) is at 75k words long. Good lord.

Current Music: Aesc (First Branch) - Richard Skelton (An Ash-Tree Which the Ignorant Call Holy)

siderea

Hey, Americans! Do you live around or south of the Mason-Dixon line? If so, your weather report for later this week is shaping up to be a bit exciting. Looks like Actual Winter will be visiting places that historically have been poorly prepared for this sort of thing, i.e. TX, the South, and the mid-Atlantic.

(Also eventually the NE, but a forecast of a few feet of snow is threatening us with a good time.)

H/t to the RyanHallYall YT channel. He's a well-reputed amateur, but his report is congruent with what I'm seeing in conventional weather reports:

Watch on YouTube

https://youtube.com/shorts/nh4JEVGWfFU

Good luck and remember running a charcoal grill in your living room is a dumb way to die.

siderea

I found this intriguing. YouTuber KnittingCultLady, who is an Air Force veteran and author about two books on military culture from the standpoint of cults(!), put out this rather frustrated video clarifying how members of the military respond to illegal orders. The tl;dr is they will follow orders of ambiguous legality, and refuse to follow orders of obvious illegality, and what is obviously illegal may not be what civilians think.

2026 Jan 18: KnittingCultLady on YT: Some Examples of Recent Malicious Compliance from the Military, ALSO Listen Carefully To My Words:

Watch on YouTube

She doesn't put it this way, but it sounds from what she says that what makes something obviously illegal is that it resulted in a courtmartial or other nigh-universal condemnation when tried previously. Orders that are for doing things that are war crimes by the letter of the law but which did not result in prosecution or other negative consequences for the perpetrators when done in the past do not trigger the sense that they are illegal, e.g. if it was okay for Bush to seize Noriega, then clearly it must be legal for Trump to seize Maduro.

hafnia

TOO MANY FEELINGS (and nowhere to put them), so I've been participating in

threesentenceficathon and writing fanfic for the first time in, oh, 20 years?

Fills (in no particular order):

Secret Garden, Dickon/Mary, "April is the cruelest month/breeding lilacs out of the dead land"

Star Trek, Any F/F, otherworldly

Narnia, any, assign a dnd class to a character

Sinners, Stack/Mary, survivors

Any, any, He died alone. The neighbors buried him.

The Darkangel, Aeriel/Erin, star (or planet) gazing

Narnia, any, My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun

Grey's Anatomy, George, his last thoughts before he died

Narnia, Susan arrives in the true Narnia

The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai/Estraven, nightfall

Alien/Aliens, Ellen Ripley, haunted by everyone she couldn't save

Silmarillion/LOTR, any, came back wrong

Knives Out & any fandom, any, can Benoit Blanc solve the case in this canon?

Any, any, Cowboy AU (I went with Macbeth)

Am genuinely sort of impressed with myself that most of 'em are only 3 sentences (however tortured those sentences are).

Will update as I fill more, probably. Have left exactly two (2) prompts, have fun finding them (if that's your thing), they're for Weird Shit.

flexagon

This week was so much, I really wish I'd written separate posts about some of these things. It is troublesome how much good stuff and bad stuff happens at the same time -- and usually far too quickly for me to absorb, metabolize and think over the last experience before there's another.

I said last time that I hoped to have a couple of days in which to get more creative. So let's start there -- I got them! I finished my exercise video, and also got on with various sewing repair/alteration projects. That's been amazing because having a serger is amazing. The way it cuts as well as making a seam means I don't have to be very precise at all about cutting out pieces, as long as I'm precise when feeding fabric into the machine. So among other things, I 100% finished the project I thought would be the most daunting: adding size to a T-shirt by opening the side seams and adding racing stripes. And I got a little artsy with another one, where I was trimming down a loose dress and decided to try out some reverse applique with the leftover pieces of fabric. That was surprisingly fun, and came out very cool too. I asked Perse to draw on the dress, and went home and stitched around the drawing before snipping it out with scissors, and none of it required measurements or much planning. (Am I getting more punk, here in my middle years? Yes.) I enlarged the arm holes of a tunic, and am turning another tunic into a T-shirt, and am generally having a great time. Once the repairs are done, I'm going to maybe get into reverse applique in earnest. Blank T-shirts are cheap.

Circus continues to be good or great. We got our first standing hand-to-hand completely away from the safety mats, on Monday, and quite a few more on Friday.

The new condo: I got overconfident, and maybe a little bit antsy, and decided to get an official lead inspection. I thought the odds of finding lead were approximately zero, given the recent gut renovations to that house, but I didn't realize that the inspector would also look at the exterior of the building; yup, we've got some lead on exterior basement window sills, and now we have to disclose that to tenants and I'll have to find a deleading place. And I will get on that tomorrow, because for the rest of the week I was busy with the next things. It should all come out okay in the end, since there's a $3000 tax credit for bringing a unit into lead compliance, but in the meantime what a pain.

Pasta?? Yes pasta, I attended a fresh pasta cooking class at Dave's Fresh Pasta with the squirrel and it was a good time. We actually made pasta from eggs and durum flour, rolled it, and cut it into spaghetti and fettuccini. They fed us a lot of snacks plus salad, sandwiches, and our own newly made spaghetti, and the squirrel had a marvelous time. I forgot all about the idea of Dry January, and had a couple tiny glasses of the nice white wine they were serving; so much for my dedication to sobriety.

Cat. This was the worst. Early in the week Caltrop, the impetuous 3-year-old cat, simply and abruptly stopped eating. This took a while to notice and be sure of, especially since I usually feed the cats their wet food while

heisenbug usually feeds them dry food. So on Monday she got her annual checkup and I said everything was great, but she'd actually already stopped eating, and on Thursday I was back for an urgent set of X-rays and fluids and anti-nausea and appetite stimulant. Ugh. Which barely worked, and also she freaked out and decided her brother was a stranger and we had to separate the cats and it was all a giant pain, so on Friday we went back for bloodwork too, but after that she started eating a bit. Dry food only so far. But it's been more every day, and today I found a couple of "moist" meaty options she will also eat. A vast improvement. I'm not sure if I just spent $1000 for nothing, or if we just saved her life, or something in between; or if she had acute-onset pancreatitis (which the blood test might still tell us) or a Mysterious Cat Thing. She still won't eat her normal wet food.

Metamour. Overlapping this, on Friday, Perse had her third abdominal surgery in four years. So Friday was just the squirrel and me sending worried text messages back and forth about our creatures. We gave up on saying "Everything is okay" and settled on the more plaintive, but more accurate, "Some things are okay... so far." But her surgery went well. We were planning to visit her in the hospital on Saturday, but as we drove there we found out they were discharging her early (!), so the "visit" turned into picking her up and taking her home! Discombobulating, given that they said 2-4 days initially, but positive.

Tenant? For the third time, I have someone halfway through signing an 18-month lease on my new condo. Hopefully this one will finish signing.

In the meantime I'm just tired. And glad that my cat is eating. And also tired.

siderea

(h/t

hudebnik)

Two things: this is a thing that has happened, I have a read on what it is that nobody else seems to have come up with.

1) The thing that happened:

2026 Jan 16: NYTimes: "Thousands of Chinese Fishing Boats Quietly Form Vast Sea Barriers" by Chris Buckley, Agnes Chang and Amy Chang Chien

The most interesting thing here is the visualization animations, so if that link doesn't work for you:

2026 Jan 17: TaiwanPlus News [TaiwanPlusNews on YT]: "NYT: China Tests Civilian Fishing Boats in Maritime Military Operations"

Watch on YouTube

2) Take:

“The sight of that many vessels operating in concert is staggering,” said Mark Douglas, an analyst at Starboard, a company with offices in New Zealand and the United States. Mr. Douglas said that he and his colleagues had “never seen a formation of this size and discipline before.”

“The level of coordination to get that many vessels into a formation like this is significant,” he said.

Yeah, so, about that:

Watch on YouTube

It turns out that the world leader in developing systems for coordinating large numbers of semi-autonomous vehicles is China.

The way a drone show works is that the design of the show and the intended positions and trajectories of all the individual drones is calculated and stored on the coordinating computer, from which they are transmitted to the drones during the show. However, drones in the air can be knocked off course by turbulence, so they also have onboard collision avoidance and position resumption algorithms.

The drone show company in question, Shenzhen DAMODA Intelligent Control Technology Co., Ltd. brags they can control 10,000 drones from a single laptop.

There were only 2,000 ships. Well within what their system could handle.

So what this could be is a test of such a coordination technology deployed to civilian boats.

Perhaps on each of those ships was either a sail-by-wire system that puts them under remote/autonomous control, or a receiver/interface that relayed instructions to the human pilots from a drone-controller that both received orders from command-and-control and managed the specifics of positioning through the same sort of collision-avoidance and repositioning algorithm as light-show drones.

Also, I suspect the way DAMODA manages to control so many devices from a single laptop – I was not able to quickly get a bead on this, and it would be unsurprising if they were less than forthcoming about their secret sauce – is that they have been figuring out ways to offload more and more of the steering logic onto the drones themselves. There comes a point, I suppose, where the logic for collision avoidance and repositioning crosses over into what used to be called (back in the 1980s and 1990s) flocking algorithms. Perhaps this was a test of a flocking algorithm based system for boats.

In any event, this might not be an example of a lot of people doing a thing. This might be an example of a thing being done to a lot of people. I mean, it almost certainly is the latter in that the government of China's modus operandi is to "voluntell" its citizens, and one of the concerning things here is the apparent use of civilians for military maneuvers. I'm saying this might be a test of a system that doesn't rely on acquiescence to government authority.

siderea

This was it. This was the week that America admitted America is going fascist – which is to say has gone fascist, i.e. has had its government seized by fascists with broad fascist support for imposing fascism which it is now doing with zeal, i.e. has an acute case of fulminant fascism.

I've been watching this bear down on us for a half a century, so it's slightly dizzying to finally have everybody else come into alignment. One of the basic exigencies of my life has been moving through the world being reasonably certain of a bunch of things that I knew the vast majority of my fellows thought were insane to believe. Over the last ten years, more and more people have been noticing, "what are we doing in this handbasket and where is it going?" but – as evidenced by the behavior of the DNC over the last year – it's taken the secret police gunning Americans down in the streets (since I started writing this: and throwing flashbang grenades at or into (reports vary) passing cars carrying little kids) for the greater liberal mass to come around.

Obviously, it would have been nicer for the realization It Could Happen Here to have not required It Happening Here to be the conclusive rebuttal of their pathological skepticism. But one of my favorite sayings is, "There's three kinds. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves," (Will Rogers) and this is why. Clearly America needed to piss on the electric fence for itself. I try to be philosophical about it.

I just felt, if only for myself and posterity, I should note this long-in-coming nation-wide realization has finally been attained.

I'm not getting too carried away, though. It's hard to be too jubilant when the problem that brought us here is still very much with us, by which I don't mean the fascism itself, I mean the terrible mentality on "my" "side" that causes that pathological skepticism and other catastrophic thinking faults that brought us to this pass and lead to the fascists getting away, quite literally, with murder.

siderea

This is blackly hilarious and absolutely worth a read.

Leftist journalist Laura Jedeed showed up at an ICE recruiting events to do scope it out and write about what she found. What happened next is... eye widening.

2026 Jan 13: Slate: "You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof." [Paywall defeater] by Laura Jedeed:

At first glance, my résumé has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America’s Gestapo-in-waiting: I enlisted in the Army straight out of high school and deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 82nd Airborne Division. After I got out, I spent a few years doing civilian analyst work. With a carefully arranged, skills-based résumé—one which omitted my current occupation—I figured I could maybe get through an initial interview.

The catch, however, is that there’s only one “Laura Jedeed” with an internet presence, and it takes about five seconds of Googling to figure out how I feel about ICE, the Trump administration, and the country’s general right-wing project. My social media pops up immediately, usually with a preview of my latest posts condemning Trump’s unconstitutional, authoritarian power grab. Scroll down and you’ll find articles with titles like “What I Saw in LA Wasn’t an Insurrection; It Was a Police Riot” and “Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution.” Keep going for long enough and you might even find my dossier on AntifaWatch, a right-wing website that lists alleged members of the supposed domestic terror organization. I am, to put it mildly, a less-than-ideal recruit.

In short, I figured—at least back then—that my military background would be enough to get me in the door for a good look around ICE’s application process, and then even the most cursory background check would get me shown that same door with great haste.

[...]

I completely missed the email when it came. I’d kept an eye on my inbox for the next few days, but I’d grown lax when nothing came through. But then, on Sept. 3, it popped up.

“Please note that this is a TENTATIVE offer only, therefore do not end your current employment,” the email instructed me. It then listed a series of steps I’d need to quickly take. I had 48 hours to log onto USAJobs and fill out my Declaration for Federal Employment, then five additional days to return the forms attached to the email. Among these forms: driver’s license information, an affidavit that I’ve never received a domestic violence conviction, and consent for a background check. And it said: “If you are declining the position, it is not necessary to complete the action items listed below.”

As I mentioned, I’d missed the email, so I did exactly none of these things.

And that might have been where this all ended—an unread message sinking to the bottom of my inbox—if not for an email LabCorp sent three weeks later. “Thank you for confirming that you wish to continue with the hiring process,” it read. (To be clear, I had confirmed no such thing.) “Please complete your required pre-employment drug test.”

The timing was unfortunate. Cannabis is legal in the state of New York, and I had partaken six days before my scheduled test. Then again, I hadn’t smoked much; perhaps with hydration I could get to the next stage. Worst-case scenario, I’d waste a small piece of ICE’s gargantuan budget. I traveled to my local LabCorp, peed in a cup, and waited for a call telling me I’d failed.

Nine days later, impatience got the best of me. For the first time, I logged into USAJobs and checked my application to see if my drug test had come through. What I actually saw was so implausible, so impossible, that at first I did not understand what I was looking at.

Somehow, despite never submitting any of the paperwork they sent me—not the background check or identification info, not the domestic violence affidavit, none of it—ICE had apparently offered me a job.

According to the application portal, my pre-employment activities remained pending. And yet, it also showed that I had accepted a final job offer and that my onboarding status was “EOD”—Entered On Duty, the start of an enlistment period. I moused over the exclamation mark next to “Onboarding” and a helpful pop-up appeared. “Your EOD has occurred. Welcome to ICE!”

I clicked through to my application tracking page. They’d sent my final offer on Sept. 30, it said, and I had allegedly accepted. “Welcome to Ice. … Your duty location is New York, New York. Your EOD was on Tuesday, September 30th, 2025.”

By all appearances, I was a deportation officer. Without a single signature on agency paperwork, ICE had officially hired me.

Click through to read the whole thing.

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Page generated Jan. 30th, 2026 03:10 am

Reading

Terminology [curr ev]

Written Sunday, posted Monday

(no subject)

Ice storm advice [meteo]

talking meme month? talking meme month! (and trivia)

(no subject)

PSA: US, pay attention to weather [US, meteo]

An explanation of US military perspective and behavior re illegal orders [mil/US, Ω]

(no subject)

Mostly okay, but what a week.

The Chinese fishing boats maneuvers [war, curr ev]

Well, we're finally here [me, pols]

Slipping on into ICE [curr ev, pols]

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