serakit

House is being sold. Have to be out of house by December 31st.

We are looking for a three-bedroom apartment in the greater Camberivlle that's no more expensive than $900 a person and preferably a bit less, or alternatively a four-bedroom apartment and an additional person.

I am also looking for help with the physical elements of moving, given that what COVID did to my heart is going to interfere somewhat with the moving-furniture stuff.

Also possibly a backup place to stay for a bit if I can't find an apartment in that timeframe.

siderea posted this essay about Vance and now I have Thoughts, because I too have been wondering whether Trump dying and Vance in charge would be better, but apparently from an entirely different angle than most people. Because while I didn't know Vance was mentored by Peter Thiel, I did read his book back when it was first published. He did not, from his memoir, strike me as crazy, but I do remember a lot of people calling him a poser Appalachian who was appropriating their culture while not really belonging to it. I was unclear on what percentage of that was to do with the not-one-of-us from his changing of social class (thinking very much of this essay from siderea, and in particular the part where she mentions her grad school obliquely warning people about how getting the degree might lead to people thinking of them as class traitors, paired with the passage in Hillbilly Elegy where Vance makes a frantic phone call from the bathroom at a fancy law dinner to get someone more used to such situations to tell him what fork to use) versus him genuinely talking about aspects of the culture he hadn't experienced, but I remember the book being both lauded and backlashed at the time. I was also a bit startled by the appearance of Amy Chua as Vance's mentor-- not that I know that much about her, but I was like "Wait, from the tiger mother thing?"

(I startled my coworkers during the couchfucking thing, because I was like "Okay, it's been a while since I read it but I am certain I would have remembered that if it was in there" and they were like "You've read it?")

Again, Vance didn't seem crazy, and he certainly didn't seem like someone who would fall in with Trumpism. One of the things I have been trying and failing to do is reconcile the ideas espoused in the book with committing to being Trump's lackey, because the one really does not obviously follow to the other. Knowing he was subsequently mentored by Peter Thiel makes him make so much more sense.

But even without "how did we get from there to here" making sense, I was not wondering whether Vance becoming president would be a return to sanity in the executive. Vance has hitched his star to Trumpism at this point. Making an about-face return to sanity and respect for rule of law and the courts would guarantee Vance falls into irrelevance. One thing everyone agrees on is that they don't like signs of ideological corruption in their leaders--even people who shrug at actual corruption will get upset if it becomes too obvious that a politician doesn't actually believe the things they're espousing, or won't act on beliefs they claim to hold. (See also why Collins and Murkowski get so much attention. They keep gesturing at sanity but not actually following through on it. If they just voted for things without turning it into a production about how "This is amoral but I'm voting for it anyway for ~reasons~" they wouldn't get nearly so much heat for it from either side.) Vance cannot make any kind of return to sanity and rule of law without it being an outright admission of cold-bloodedly going along with Trump solely for power, at which point the naked power grab is too obvious and uncloaked in ideology for anyone to be willing to play along with it.

No, what I was wondering is whether Vance, lacking Trump's cult of personality, might have less of a stranglehold on Congress than Trump does. Because while Vance is committed, there are plenty of Republicans in Congress who could still gracefully back away, and Republicans are increasingly aware that people hate what they're actually doing to such a degree that they can't hold town halls--and no one likes Vance. They can't take action against Trump without putting themselves at electoral risk--but I wondered if they might be able to rein in Vance, since he isn't exactly popular. If they might be willing, were Vance the one in charge, to do things like revoke the tariffs or hold legitimate threat of impeachment over Vance if he goes too far, since it really wouldn't take that many Republicans backing away gracefully for the Democrats to force the proceedings.

Of course, that would imply that we're not yet at the point where Vance could respond to that by straight-up conducting a military coup, which is unfortunately not a given. Vance, unlike Trump, is competent. Vance, unlike Trump, would probably succeed if he tried a military coup.

This seems to be an unusual angle to come at it from, though, and I'm curious why that is. Possibly some of this is that I've been getting most of my news from The Bulwark, and I really do recommend adding it to your news diet--it was founded by the sane Republicans who stuck to their Not Trump principles, so it is being run by a bunch of people who genuinely adore John McCain. If you are looking for where the "party I disagree with, not the party that scares me" people went, well, several of them went and founded a Substack news site. And they don't talk about Vance much and on the rare occasion they do it's not terribly complimentary, so I already had some signal that he's not a return to Republican sanity. They're all about country over party there but they were Republicans once upon a time and some of them risked a lot, professionally speaking, in the course of founding the site. If they saw signs of rationality in the Republican upper leadership they would be all over it. (My primary news diet, for the curious: the free version of The Bulwark, Heather Cox Richardson's letters, and Josh Barro and Ken White's podcast Serious Trouble. Occasionally I will also watch a TL;DR News video on Nebula, and sometimes the videoessayists and craft newsletterists I follow will take a dip into politics like Lindsay Ellis's Palestine video or Scalzi's intermittent politics blog posts on Whatever.)

Incidentally, this can also be held up as an example of your framing making a big difference in whether people believe you--you've seen me make the occasional annoyed link to someone wandering down the leftist conspiracy rabbit hole. "A subset of the wealthy is deliberately accelerating our progression into complete societal collapse so they can make money off it and there is a man behind the man dictating Trump's behavior" sounds ridiculous when you phrase it like that and you aren't going to actually convince anyone who wasn't already inclined to listen to you. "Vance was mentored by Peter Thiel and has a deep ideological belief that democracy is bad and here are all these examples of these people talking about their plans" is saying a very similar thing--there is a cult of rich guys trying to destroy democracy for Reasons--but it sounds a lot more believable, enough so that I'm like "okay, this makes things I was already observing make sense in a way that comes with receipts and doesn't sound like you're trying to get me to join a cult." (I mean, cults as a general rule also don't sound like they're trying to get you to join cults, but there are no specific actions being prescribed here beyond "don't trust this guy who you already didn't trust," so.)

Smart Bitches Trashy Books has a timeline (sexual assault; NSFW) of what happened at Sinners & Stardust, which is a convention I was not familiar with until this news hit FFA.

This is, incidentally, where radical-feminism-type thinking leads us: when you believe that all sexual harm comes from The Penis, you wind up in a position where you don't believe it's assault when women do it to men, and... it absolutely can be, and from the descriptions this isn't even questionable. It is absolutely assault. And given that bit with the AirTag, some techno-stalking as well. (Imagine if he didn't have an iPhone; he might never have known about that part, and that part could have been incredibly dangerous.)

Just curious, has anyone here heard about the Stanley Cup Trend? Apparently this is a Thing.

So this year I have two songs to plug for these times.  The first is my annual suggestion of Lucy Wainright Roche's "Fifth of July" which has been getting ever more relevant in these times. It's a commentary on the duality of America, and a patriotism that's about worrying about the direction of the country. ("And I'd like to just run but when all's said and done, I'm still in the business of trying.")

The other one, new for this year, is Sassafrass's "Somebody Will," which I would not normally consider a Fourth of July song. It's about the quest to form a Mars colony, after all. But what it's also about is striving for a future you are never going to live to see, and staying on track with not giving up on that future just because you won't live to see it. And the reality is that bringing the country back from this experience is going to be a generations-long project, something most of us won't live to see. I might, if I'm not killed outright by whatever comes, but I might not, and most of my friends are older than me and probably never will. But you do it anyway so other people might live to see it.

I set DOM popups allowed to a null value. I essentially did what I did with NoScript: forced it to make me whitelist individual sites. Because I am the sort of person who prefers to brute force my internet blocking. (Doing scriptblocking this way is extremely customizable, subverts some types of paywall, and blocks a whole host of annoying things--yes, you have to spend time whitelisting multiple bits of every site you go to because it requires whitelisting scripts at the individual level, but every time I use someone else's computer I marvel at how annoying the internet is because I have rid myself of so much of it.)

Except that while this worked for a while, it abruptly stopped working, and I cannot figure out why, because the field is still set to a null value, but it doesn't block pop-ups anymore.

My zucchini are coming up! As are one of my other things-- either the basil or the parsley. Whichever of those two didn't say it takes a very long time to germinate.

The problem is that I now have eight peat pots with active plants and two large clay pots. And pots are expensive. Anyone have a local idea for sourcing pots? Ideally cheaper than Home Depot.

So I finally tried the Aldi, because people get really enthusiastic about Aldi, and it's... fine?

It seems like the kind of grocery store where you go to see what they have, not to get things off a list. (Like, I do not think the fact that it's in the same plaza as an Ocean State Job Lot is a coincidence.) It would not work as my sole grocery store in quite the same way as any of the others I visit-- while I would not like being limited to one grocery store, it would be possible for any of the ones in my regular rotation. With Aldi it would not.

It is possible I would be more enthusiastic about it if I had fewer food restrictions, or if I had not decided to cut way down on my snack purchasing as a cost-saving measure. (Although it is possible that buying snacks at the Aldi might have a similar effect, from a cost-saving standpoint.) But there are certain essentials it's definitely lacking. (Though some of the things often described as "quirks" don't really register to me as odd; "you have to unlock the cart with a quarter which you get back when you return it" was a standard element of childhood trips to BJs.)

That being said, it does have some strong points, namely less than half of what I would normally pay for a bag of mandarins with no hesitation about quality-- they passed my "I am going to squeeze the entire bag to make sure they're of the desired firmness" test with flying colors and I didn't even have to try multiple bags to get there; it was the first one I picked up. (This is incredibly unusual.) There was lox that was sufficiently inexpensive that I could not resist buying it. It is wildly less overstimulating than most grocery stores-- one of the things they eliminate as a "frill" is having a background music playlist, and another is Bright! Eye-catching! Displays!

And if any of you not-allergic people are having trouble sourcing eggs, they're currently ~$4.50 a dozen at the Aldi.

So while it's not going into the regular rotation, I will probably drop in there occasionally just to see what's on offer.

So apparently there's a local Tesla protest: https://www.boston.com/news/business/2025/03/18/the-back-bay-tesla-location-is-becoming-a-perennial-protest-site/

Every Saturday from 12-2; I might have to look into turning out for one.

I attended a portion of (meeting started at a bit past six and I left a bit before eight) the public comment meeting regarding the proposed Davis Square redevelopment. It was massively crowded, standing room only (I was glad I arrived early enough for a chair), and criticized by several people for not having microphones. Which, really, there were flyers floating around that meant people actually knew about the meeting; the meeting being large enough to require microphones should have been anticipated. (Someone suggested also including hybrid capacity, which I would 100% get behind.) There was also a lot of snottiness from the people who have been attending all along towards the large crowd of people who only showed up to their first meeting tonight, which... these meetings have not been well-advertised. It is possible that was on purpose, so as to avoid the huge crowd of people many of whom were united in the belief that this is a bad idea. (Also I now need to find out when and where zoning committee meetings are. I presume these are open to the public?) Flyers went around alerting people to the existence of these meetings and being aware that the meetings existed, people went. I even got on a couple of email lists, so perhaps I will know about these meetings in the future.

I had been able to access notes from previous meetings prior to this but I honestly couldn't tell if they were official or not; they were just a random google doc, and I didn't find them; they were pointed out to me. I'm not sure it would be possible to find them without being given a direct link. (I'm not sure I could find them again.) The developer repeatedly referred to "according to our information" without being able to point to anywhere that information was easily accessible-- he said he'd send it to the person who pressed him on that point, but I have to wonder why they don't just have all of that data up on a website somewhere if they're going to be using it to justify things.

Primary impression is that they're using "iterative development process" as a way of avoiding committing to anything-- the reason this feels poorly thought out is that they are trying to keep everything in a state of flux so they can be responsive to community feedback! Which conveniently also means they don't have actual answers to most questions; they want to have "thought partners" on those things. Questions were asked about the parking thing and mostly got the "we are looking for thought partners" line. Other actual questions that were dodged included what kind of price point they're doing with affordable housing. Housing can be classed as affordable if it's 30% of 80% of the area median income for a family of one more people than bedrooms. (Yes, I looked this up.) There are then some income restrictions on who can move in, but what percentage of the area median income you're basing that on is important to how genuinely affordable your "affordable" housing is and when the question was asked it was pretty much brushed aside. (There was also someone in the audience who was like "well maybe if you didn't put in the affordable housing you wouldn't have to build something so big," but the majority of the audience and the developer were kind of like "WTF?" at that comment.)

Since that question had been asked already when I was called on and jducoeur had mentioned completion bonds as an area of concern while we were talking about this, I asked about completion bonds and was told "we're not at that stage yet." They are also not at the stage for a parking study or a shade study. For all they're going on about iterative process, there really is not much of substance to comment on at these public comment meetings. They're doing an excellent job at being evasive while talking a good game about working with the community and making minor changes like moving which side of the development the residential entry is on. (This gets touted as an example of them Listening! To! The! Community! They were also willing to perhaps commit to banning AirBnbs. I feel like that's usually covered in the standard "no subletting" lease clause?)

One interesting thing that did get definitively stated: if they don't get permission from the city to do this they are going to decommission those buildings "as leases expire" which heavily implies that if they don't get their way they're going to kick everyone out and close up a large chunk of Davis Square altogether. I attempted to call them on this a bit-- "Saying that if you don't get your way you're going to close it all up really makes me feel like you're interested in working with the community"-- but while that line got some amusement from the audience it got entirely brushed aside by the developer at the same time he brushed away the completion bond question.

There was much representation from the musician community who pointed out that it's not just the management of The Burren that's a problem with closing it; there is a huge community of working artists that relies on playing shows there to make money. The management may be able to open another restaurant and then expand back in, but the artists are just stuck. That was another "it's a good question" with only vague answers-- maybe these other places will take the overflow (the artist asking the question had specifically said that won't work when asking her question). I'm not sure whether the "maybe sponsoring some outdoor concerts or something" idea came from the developer or the audience but I'm skeptical that would be enough as a substitute. Pretty much any time someone brought up a way this was going to cause problems the developer said "I understand your perspective" without actually commenting on it.

So yeah, I came away from this with the idea that I need to both find out where and when the zoning meetings are and figure out who my ward councilor is. I imagine the very local politicians are even more strongly influenced by phone calls than the state or national ones.

(I can't do anything about the fascism. But I can go to a public comment meeting and report back about the developers.)