This Week In, Well Everything:
I have been horrified by the news coming out of Texas and Alabama, and strongly encourage you to donate to organizations that help trans youth and combat the hate in those places. But as always, vet charities before you donate to them, and consider donating through mutual aid whenever possible.
I’m equally horrified by the situation in Ukraine, and the combined news makes me want to curl up in a dark room and hide.
I read Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw. It’s a nasty little haunted house story with bite. It didn’t quite nail the ending for me, but Khaw is excellent at building dread, and it was a joy to read. The characters are polarizing to some readers, but I found them fascinating. A group of people who by any metric should no longer be friends with each other, but still gather based on a shared history, with all the strange resentment and dark undercurrents that you would expect.
Nothing But Blackened Teeth I released another ridiculous Explorers Wanted adjacent bot. This time on Twitter, where if you mention @ExpWantedBot with either the word “quote” or “markov” in your tweet, it will serve you up a random quote or generated sentence from the podcast as an image with alt text.
Sample bot output Speaking of Explorers Wanted, we released episode 111 of the show, “Pretty Dresses.”
I learned a pro-tip for household owners. We had a mouse get into our walls somehow and it got stuck and died. Unfortunately, without tearing out your walls there’s not much you can do besides wait out the smell. The most effective thing I’ve found to reduce the odor is to grind some fresh coffee beans and put the grounds in a bowl near the wall. The coffee smells good and the grounds help absorb the odor.
I discovered recently that there is now a Korean fried chicken restaurant near us that delivers. This is incredibly dangerous.
And that’s it for this week. Remember to tell your friends and family that you love them, and try to make the world better today than it was yesterday. In times like these, that can be incredibly hard, but even the smallest kindnesses can add up to a huge difference for someone, so you are morally obligated to try.