Yvonne Lam
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yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Yvonne Lam
@yvonnezlam.bsky.social
6.6K followers 660 following 21K posts
I play with books, cats, food, yarn, and dirt, not all at the same time. Software engineer. Society of People Interested in Boring Things. She/her, cis.
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yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Like me, Marianne loves early Lauren Bacall films.
a black and brown bullseye tabby kitty sprawled on a brown Oriental rug gazes over her shoulder with half closed eyes
December 16, 2025 at 9:24 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
I hate the whole software supply chain conversation for precisely this reason:

blog.yossarian.net/2025/11/21/W...
“Supply chain security” is a serious problem. It’s also seriously overhyped, in part because dozens of vendors have a vested financial interest in convincing your that their framing of the underlying problem1 is (1) correct, and (2) worth your money.
December 15, 2025 at 8:37 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Posting the sign so I can tap it when necessary.
@naomikritzer.bsky.social There's a pretty great Tumblr post about this: nitewrighter Mar 26 me: I don't get it. I thought I was doing a lot better than I was a few years ago. I'm like 10 times more on top of things than I used to be. How does everything feel terrible now? The Tiny Me in OSHA-approved Hi-Vis Gear Who lives in my brain and pulls all the levers: Boss, it's the fascism. You're completely gunked up with cortisol due to the fact that your entire daily life is now underscored with a haunting awareness of the rapid erosion of your rights, dignity, and any and all social safety nets, and you're also bearing witness to the most vulnerable people immediately being persecuted. This creates a natural stress response that basically means you're going to continue having memory and organizational problems, as well as emotional imbalances. Me: BUT I HAVE A BULLET JOURNAL AND I MEDIATE NOW. Tiny OSHA Me: BOSS, THE FASCISM.
December 15, 2025 at 4:04 AM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Read what @leahreich.com wrote about AI.
To the people who build GenAI, intelligence is about solving big problems through skills and languages the rest of us don't know. This is so central to the entire system, in fact, that to really maximize a generative AI tool, you need to learn the machine's language. You need to ask the right questions and use the right prompts. You need to conform to tool in order for the tool to effectively work for you.
December 11, 2025 at 3:00 AM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
I am not in the UK, but nonetheless here is my reaction to Labour's "obesity tsar"
December 8, 2025 at 4:52 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
@jenbyers.com One thing I learned in sociology class :: "when smeone tells you they're talking 'common sense,' prepare yourself for a deeply ideologically charged statement to come next." 'neutral' and 'objective' can sometimes serve the same role -- concealing ideology under an assumed (but not shared) norm.
December 7, 2025 at 10:12 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Elinor likes to help (*) my partner work at his desk.

(*) prevent him from typing
An open laptop on a desk. A brown and black bullseye tabby cat with white socks and mittens sprawls over the laptop keyboard, gazing smugly back at the viewer and preventing typing.
December 7, 2025 at 9:39 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
I see US Rowing is following the path set by the Olympic Committee :

usrowing-craft-storage-production.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/staging/File...
Policy and Competition Categories USRowing has the following competition categories for USRowing-sanctioned events (“USRowing Events”): • Women - Pursuant to the requirements in the Rationale, above, this category is limited to athletes who were assigned a sex at birth of female. This requirement is administratively applied under the “Administrative Application” section, below. • Men – USRowing’s policy is that the Men’s competition category is for rowers of any sex and gender. • Open Gender – USRowing’s policy is that the Open Gender competition category is for rowers of any sex and gender. Rowers who participate in this category may compete in either the Women’s or Men’s competition category if they qualify for such category. • Mixed - A crew that contains 50% rowers who are qualified to compete in the Women’s competition category and 50% rowers of any sex. Coxswains can participate in any competition category.
December 5, 2025 at 9:12 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Yes! This!
The closest I get to Transcendentalism as an historical period or literary movement is Louisa May Alcott and her exasperation with the ramshackle New England utopias that in her view did little else but extort the labor of those unlucky women whose husbands or fathers were much preoccupied with oversouls and the unity of all things and whatever else. Women, Alcott demonstrates in "Transcendental Wild Oats," had all the work of creating utopia's infrastructure and carrying [End Page 47] out the daily jobs that made their male relatives' half-baked plans actually work.
December 5, 2025 at 8:26 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
December 3, 2025 at 10:33 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Marianne was not committing a crime. Absolutely not.
A blurry black and brown bullseye tabby kitten with one claw stuck in the corner of an ottoman.
December 3, 2025 at 2:59 AM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Everyone is coming for me today.
from iamgokcekutsl on instagram: a photograph of a white woman with dark hair flipping through a musical score. She has a text bubble that says: it's always "you're too much of a perfectionist" and never "sorry we told you for years that anything less than perfect meant you didn't belong here" the caption underneath the photo says: You're a "perfectionist" because your training created an enivronment where "good enough" wasn't safe.
November 28, 2025 at 11:56 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
I'm going in. What's everyone else reading today?
A hardcover library copy of Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.
November 27, 2025 at 5:02 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
O this is lovely:

www.themarginalian.org/2025/07/25/u...
Ceramics came into my life the way the bird divinations had a year earlier — suddenly, mysteriously, as a coping mechanism for the confusions and cataclysms of living. I was reeling from a shattering collision with one of life’s most banal and brutal truths — that broken people break people — and I needed to make, to do the work of unbreaking, in order to feel whole again; I needed something to anchor me to the ongoingness of being alive, to the plasticity of being necessary for turning trauma into self-transcendence.
November 27, 2025 at 3:00 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
a cat in a pink peignoir with curlers pinned around its head. The caption, added by Eva Burke, is "No, I thought he was away on business. I'm terribly worried, detectives."
November 26, 2025 at 8:31 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
I don't know why this strikes me as bluesky serendipity but it does @ncdominie.bsky.social @fionatribe.bsky.social
ncdominie: "I'm gonna hold a protected conversation with him under the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013" - Don Vito Corleone fionatribe: "I find myself in the business of optics rather than substance." After the Hunt
November 26, 2025 at 1:24 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Marianne on the left, Elinor on the right.
Two brown tabby bullseye kittens sprawled over a patterned rug. The kitten on the right has white shirtfront, socks, and mitts.
November 24, 2025 at 11:18 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
panel 1: a cartoon goose asks, "Who is given the assumption of rigor?" panel 2: a cartoon goose chases a person wearing a puffy jacket. The goose is yelling, "Who is given the assumption of rigor, motherfucker?"
November 22, 2025 at 6:04 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
I hope I get a chance to read Harmony Holiday on Joni Mitchell and blackface.

thecreativeindependent.com/people/write...
When I talk about the language being traded on the internet and trafficked through memes and stuff, it’s pretty much all a function of black beauty or black aesthetics being universalized and codified into something that everyone can access and use as a life force. It’s a thing that the American personality runs on without really acknowledging it. I firmly believe that is the case, from the music to the dominant social and spiritual attitudes, to the way people stand, everything that people aspire to look and act like has some root in black aesthetics. I want to write about Joni Mitchell, in part because of her comments where she says, “I’m the only black Man in the room.” This is Joni Mitchell, white from Canada. She starts her autobiography saying that. So there’s a black muse, whether it’s for white folk music or weird pockets of the internet where people are talking about dating, using black slang. It’s the last bastion of Americanism before we run out of all native capital, and it’s not even native to here, but that’s another story.
November 21, 2025 at 8:50 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Elinor wanted to help.
Elinor, a black and brown bullseye tabby with white socks and bib, stands on her hind legs to peer into a very full spice drawer labeled "Coffee".
November 19, 2025 at 10:05 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
A very good piece on how we all act like pundits now, but we don't have to! (h/t @ninametz.bsky.social )
But there’s a trap. And it’s tautological. The problem with thinking like a pundit is that you end up thinking like a pundit. You end up caring more about having opinions about politics rather than actively engaging in politics, which is to say, actively engaging with other people, trying to build the world that you think we deserve. Or put differently, if you consider yourself a Democrat, why are you spending your wild and precious political life shouting and gesticulating about what “Democrats” should do? Just do that thing! And invite others to do it with you!
November 18, 2025 at 11:35 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
An excellent piece by @marisakabas.bsky.social (h/t @karenho.bsky.social)
“It suggests that there’s an obvious shortcut through the hard work that goes into reporting fairly and accurately, which is to just create a spectacle,” Miles Klee, culture writer at Rolling Stone, said of the ethically-dubious work that’s been presented as journalism. “It’s not a coincidence that Wolff and Nuzzi both made their names by printing what is essentially gossip. Sure, a lot of it may be true, but what you’re really selling there is the concept of yourself with total and intimate access to everyone who matters, which makes you just as important, a byline that magazines can always bank on.”
November 18, 2025 at 11:08 PM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Photograph of my kitchen after I put the keema cottage pie in the oven. You can see why this is a recipe started with an empty dishwasher. Not shown: the giant frying pan I used to cook the keema and the pan for boiling potatoes.
A messy kitchen counter with a white plastic cutting board with cilantro choppings, a used tasting spoon, and a dirty measuring spoon on it. there is a metal bowl that used to contain turmeric mashed potatoes by the sink. the sink contains a colander filled with dirty utensils including a potato ricer and a dry measuring cup. A glass measuring cup that used to contain cream is on the counter too.
November 15, 2025 at 2:05 AM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Given the scene in my living room just now, I might be willing to lend you at least one:
Oscar, an orange tabby cat, swats at Marianne, a small black and brown bullseye tabby, who becomes a whirlwind of stripes and paws in response. Felix, a gray and white piebald tabby, looks on.
November 10, 2025 at 1:44 AM
yvonnezlam.bsky.social
Preventing my large orange son from eating the kittens' food.
A large orange cat gazing balefully at an unseen light-skinned person whose hand is skritching him under the chin.
November 7, 2025 at 10:15 PM