Lately my inner dialog has been: *grumble grumble* Paper books! *grumble grumble* News was more honest when I was a kid! *grumble grumble* Thank goodness I'm friends with people who can make some of their own art!

I can admit it's a BIT fuddy duddyish, even if I think I'm right.

You know, that's a good point. I see ring finger ones all the time, but not really many others. Perhaps they've faded so much they're barely noticeable?

Almost all of them, but the Temu goat pillow is apparently printed rather than woven, which I suspect would ruin the effect!

But people are genuinely, truly welcome to make a donation to any zoo and pair me with any animal they'd wish, and I'd like quite a few of those craft kits!

That doesn't seem like it's going to happen? Wouldn't whatever this is take some time to implement?

Oddly, my Jasper isn't much of a bonker. His strategy is to pin me down, locate the nearest hand, and then grind.

That's hilarious, and now that I think of how hard their little skull bones* are, I'm guessing those jaws can apply a pretty significant clap!

*nothing nefarious going on, I just have a cat who gets really enthusiastic about scent marking my hands

Anyway, these thoughts are kind of disconnected, and I'm probably just an old fuddy duddy. But maybe some of the big names in media and culture should fall so there's some room for them to be replaced by something else.

(I haven't seen every movie on the lists, but Sinners was a more cogent, thoughtful, and relevant piece than One Battle After another. I enjoyed Frankenstein, but come on. And my reaction to The Phoenician Scheme is that it's lesser Wes Anderson, which is still pretty entertaining.)

But I also rolled my eyes at Sinners being excluded from the Best Of lists, even though that's a media bias that's far from new. That's the only movie I've seen this year that really had something new to say and was artistically successful in saying it.

There's been a lot of shit lately, right? The Time Warner sale where there are only bad options, the Nuzzi thing where political media is even more useless than we suspected (and where some supposedly independent voices on substack are also bad actors), the Disney AI story...

When she curls up, her orange spots pop.

I'm also guessing that, "What's a good bedtime for an 8-year-old?" could lead to unhappy conversations in families where the school bus comes at 6:30.

Not that kids won't run into this kind of stuff by...flipping channels isn't something they really do anymore, is it? On YouTube ads, or whatever.

But it seems like the effects of this stuff are stronger when they come from something anthropomorphized that appears to be talking specifically to you.

Or what about something like, "What should I get Daddy for Christmas?" I'm guessing the response might not be something the average child interested in that sort of toy could easily obtain.

Oof. Yeah.