I find myself once more preparing briefings for the various niches of my life (parents, work, readership)...

So, I’ve been selected for jury duty in a civil case that they expect to run through next Friday the 9th. Every day I have to put on real trousers and a clean shirt and go to the courthouse at 9am.

Devices are allowed in the building but the judge really, really hates cellphones and he’s also extremely mean, so my phone has to be completely off from 9:30 onwards (until sometime between 4:30 and 6 depending on when we finish for the day) except for “comfort” breaks every two hours and the hour we get for lunch. We are also obviously not allowed to talk about the case, and since about 80% of my content at this point comes from me writing about what I do day-to-day, I’m going to be pretty deprived for stuff to talk about.

This means I am going to be extremely quiet, likely even more quiet than I was when I was in Europe, because I not only can’t post, I can’t even read or interact for the vast majority of every day or talk about what I’m doing even when I can post. And, as discussed, a room devoid of decoration where one person talks and I’m not allowed to look at my phone or move from my seat more than once every two hours is going to be a challenge, so I expect to be pretty tired most of the time I’m not completely locked away from external stimulus of any kind. 

So if you see my queue go quiet it’s because I’m doing my civic duty, and if you see me reblogging a lot of old posts it’s because I’m trying to keep the queue from going quiet. Your patience is appreciated! I’ll go ahead and pin this post until I’m no longer earning $35 and one sandwich per day sitting in judgement on people I suspect are about to waste my time.

It is KILLING ME that I can’t talk about what I spent all day doing. I was clearly not made to shut up about anything, ever (the haters are like “yes we know”). 

I will say having gauged the quality of the food on offer for us (iffy pastries and coffee in the morning, mediocre sandwiches and chips for lunch) I can recalculate when and what to eat; I wasn’t planning on depending on them for breakfast in any case, and while I’ll still order a sandwich daily, as we don’t have a guarantee of being let out of the building for lunch, I’ll also bring snacks and, if I CAN escape, I know a couple of places to get decent hot chow. 

I don’t think it’s a violation of any legal mandate to tell you guys that there is one real dickhead serving with me (I mean, maybe more than one, but only one has shown his hand). He does, however, seem to be intimidated by me -- or perhaps he’s just one of those guys who backs down the second anyone calls him on his behavior -- so I’m on a mission to spend our entire time together always being casually but pointedly on the edge of his vision. Not like I’m trying, just like for some reason wherever he goes, there I am. I feel this will be tremendously character-building for him and will undoubtedly keep me entertained. 

I’m home for the day, anyway, and after a few more minutes of quality couch time with the cats I’m going to reheat one of my millions of tamales and then probably collapse in a masa-inspired coma. 

Spring garlic two ways! I got a bunch of spring or "green" garlic in the farmshare this week, so this morning I trimmed the greens (those are being dried in the dehydrator), sauteed the stems in olive oil, and roasted the bulbs. My place smells amazing.

[ID: a small glass bowl full of bright green sauteed stems, chopped fine and shiny with olive oil; on top of them are two halved bulbs, one of which is translucent, the other of which is golden brown in numerous caramelized layers.]

Well, I'm in superhell and Roma lost the cup match in penalty shots, but I walked past the Printer's Row fountain and the fence was down. My cryptid daughters are now preserved in stone!

[ID: A photograph of a brick laid in the foundation of the Printer's Row Fountain; it has been engraved "Sam, Deebs, & Dot". I can't believe someone else submitted a brick "In memory of Eliot Ness" but they wouldn't let me put "For the love of god, Montresor!"]

I HAVE BEEN IN JURY SELECTION ALL GODDAMN DAY AND THE CUP GAME IS TIED IN OVERTIME.

It turns out while I will accept jury duty if that is my fate, sitting in a small bare room listening to one person talk for days at a time with my phone turned off and then having to sit with eleven strangers to make a decision about it is in fact what happens to people with ADHD who go to super hell.

Three Jokes From Rome

The AS Roma football fandom is a little wild, and there are some real weird corners of it, but one of my favorite things is the sense of humor they have on social media. In the lead up to today’s Europa Cup there are three jokes that never fail to make me laugh: 

1. The Fragility of Paulo Dybala: Dybala is one of Roma’s top scorers even despite being out for much of the season with injuries; he’s known to be “injury prone” which is why it was a little bit of a risk to sign him. That said, he’s spectacular in play and Rome loves him, so every time a photograph of him is posted, the commentary fills with people acting overly concerned for his well-being. “Dybala, don’t walk on that grass, you’ll slip! Think of your ankles!”  “Please carry Paulo to the airplane, don’t make him walk, what if he trips?” “SOMEONE PUT THE BOY IN A GLASS CASE UNTIL THE GAME PLEASE.”  “There’s too much ice in your glass, Paulo, don’t drink it so quickly!” 

2. The Sturdiness of Nemanja Matic: Conversely, Nemanja Matic is a much less flashy player and has scored fewer goals (expected, given he’s a midfielder) but is incredibly hard-working and always seems to be where he’s needed. He has become the local equivalent of a Chuck Norris meme. After a game where he did a lot of running, the next morning people were posting stuff like “Matic hasn’t stopped running, he ran through my yard this morning” and “Matic has run to the sea and that’s the last we saw of him”. The best of these was on a recent post that showed the team on the plane to Budapest for the Europa Cup. Someone posted “How are they sending internet posts on a plane in flight?” and someone else replied, “Matic is such a powerful wifi conductor they’re just using him.” 

3. The Vitality of Europa Cup: The cup is a big deal for Rome for reasons we don’t really need to get into on this, a nerdy tumblr, but the importance of the match has caused discussion of everything from a girl’s father missing her graduation to attend it (Marta, the graduating daughter, is a bit of a meme at this point) to a joke that I’ve seen a million times even in America and still laugh at: 

“I have tickets to the cup match, but it’s the same day as my wedding. So if anyone wishes to attend in my place....the wedding is at the Church of the Sacred Heart at 11am.”

Makin’ tamales....at five thirty in the morning....

I had a bunch of “ends” left over from making italian beef, and for basically all winter I’ve been throwing those in a bag in the freezer. Every so often I’d take out a few chunks and dice them up for enchiladas or curry or whatnot, but I still ended up with about a pound of randomly-sized beef, and I had masa harina in the fridge, so I figured I’d make tamales. I made the filling but I’ve been procrastinating on actually assembling and cooking it all because they’re a labor-intensive process, but I looked at the clock as I was making breakfast and thought, well, I have the time right now...

The tamale dough itself is vegetarian. I’m making three types of beef tamale (teriyaki, sloppy joe, pulled-beef bbq) but also a “mushroom pizza” tamale and it’d be nice, I thought, if those were vegetarian completely.

So the pizza tamales (shredded cheese, pizza sauce, sauteed diced mushroom) and the teriyaki beef tamales (cooked beef, chopped coarsely to shreds, and mixed with teriyaki sauce) are currently pressure-steaming. I ran out of room to do any more in this steam batch, but I wanted to test how the tamale dough would be after refrigeration, so I’ve got the other two beef mixtures and the tamale dough in the fridge, and I’ll make those either this evening or tomorrow. And if they don’t come out, eh, they were made from leftovers of leftovers, the waste is negligible. 

It’s a bit counter-productive in the end, because I definitely will need to freeze these and while I got rid of a pound of beef in the freezer, I do not have space for like five pounds of tamale. Still, I’ll peel that husk when I get there. Might be time to repack the freezer, there’s usually space I can free up in one way or another.  

Also tamales are small and microwave decently, so I figure I’ll pack a few for lunch, since I’m reporting for jury duty today and there aren’t a lot of places around the courthouse to eat. The good places are too slow, the fast places are no good, and EVERYWHERE will be crowded. I’m given to understand there are some microwaves in the jury holding pen, so it’s going to be me, a tamale, and the Europa Cup on my phone, unless I get called to interview for a jury. 

btw, for those who gave to the Fountain fundraiser in spring of 2021, the fountain has been restored and reinstalled! It's not up and running yet but it's looking fine. There's a rededication ceremony in late June when it'll be activated.

(I'm not sure when they're putting in the "sponsorship" bricks but as soon as my brick gets installed I'll definitely share that!)

[ID: A photograph visibly taken through chain construction fencing of the Printer's Row Park fountain, a vaguely art-deco style two-basin fountain, about the height of a person, in shades of gold, blue, and red. Its cement base is drained of water and surrounded with soil, which is usually planted with flowers in summer.]

I’ve messed around with AI a little, because I like to understand a thing when I’m formulating opinions on it and I’ve found the best way to do that is to climb into the thing and start pushing buttons. I’ve been unimpressed with ChatGPT; its fiction chops are oddly saccharine, and of course you can’t trust the nonfiction it spits out because everything it says needs to be fact checked. It claims it can’t “lie”, only misinterpret data from the sets it was trained on; devs call the misinterpreted data “hallucination”.

Part of what I was testing was whether it could competently do my job, so that if my boss starts asking about it, I can give him a decent report. I asked it for biographies of a few wealthy people I’ve researched in the past, and it spat out some respectably generic information that was mostly correct. However, most of the people I research now are not like “so rich I’m famous for it” levels of wealthy, and harder generally for me to find information on, as I assumed it would be for ChatGPT. 

So I thought I’d see what it could do with someone more middle class, and asked it for a biography of Sam Starbuck. 

What it returned was like what you would get if you told me “Write a flattering biography of yourself and don’t worry that I’ll be fact-checking anything you say.” It was mostly true, but it hyped up my achievements as an author in ways that I would consider not entirely honest, and said I was also a professional editor and that I had led prestigious writing workshops in the past. That’s plain untrue, but I can see where it would be making that assumption, because my author bio sounds like a lot of other, more famous peoples’ author bios, and I would guess it just pulled in some of their verbiage for color. 

But the wildest part of the bio was that it named three of the novels I’ve written. Or rather, it named two novels I’ve written and one novel that I definitely have not. It said I was the author of a novel called “Like Clockwork”. Just in case I had written a fanfic titled “Like Clockwork” and forgotten about it, I checked AO3 and also asked ChatGPT for a plot summary of Sam Starbuck’s “Like Clockwork”. And sure enough it hallucinated a multi-paragraph summary of an entire novel I’ve never written, on AO3 or anywhere else. (It was not a good summary. Very Generic YA SF Thriller.) 

ChatGPT is very good at one thing: apologizing. When I pressed it about where it found the data it couldn’t say, when I asked why it had made up the plot summary it couldn’t tell me, when I asked if it could show me source links or data it drew on to create “Like Clockwork” it of course would not. But it always said it was sorry...

Anyway, my best theory from googling is that every year there are roughly nine million news stories about how Starbucks Coffee’s holiday cups are back “like clockwork”. 

I suppose I should be glad the novel’s title isn’t Unicorn Frappucino.

Aw, that's a nice way to procrastinate! I hope you've been enjoying them :) Interested to know how they sound with the google play books reader, I'll have to check that out. For a while I was trying to set up so that I could listen to articles as well as podcasts on my phone but the tech is uh, still evolving.

As for the chaperoning issue, being fair, if your kid attends Maritime then likely you live in Fons-Askaz and if that's the case you have probably bumped into the King Emeritus like....grocery shopping or eating a doughnut or something. :D "Of course he can run a country, but will he make sure my kid wears sunscreen? I've seen him at the beach, he doesn't even wear a hat."

On the other hand there's ample evidence of him being an invested and mindful father. Almost certainly someone has by now put up a youtube video that's just a compilation of every interview, speech, and public appearance he made, 1990-1996, while holding a squirming child in his arms. And the kid's got his job now so he turned out ok....

I do think it must have been a little intimidating when Amani's parents realized that their kid was having afterschool snack-and-study at the home of the King Emeritus. Meanwhile Amani is much more impressed by the super cool and famous Jes Deimos, and thinks of Michaelis as the guy who makes dumb nautical puns and brings cookies home if he knows Noah has friends over.

[ID: Two extremely fluffy and adorable kittens, with long shaggy orange striped fur, are lying together in a cat hammock, cuddled up and sleepy.]

Aw, babies! Great names btw :D I hated leaving my cryptids that first day I had to go back to work.

I've gone through a couple of iterations of the home webcams; the first ones I bought were some company that I think has since gone out of business, and they were a bit of a struggle anyway since it was an Italian company selling mostly to Japan, and nothing was in English :D Their app was...subpar.

Currently I have three Kasa brand webcams and I really like them. They can be slightly temperamental to set up, especially if you don't have really strong internet; it used to be I could basically only have two of them operational at any given time because my internet was too weak to sustain the third, but we got new internet in the building a few months ago and suddenly the problems went away :D I wish that it was possible to access them from a webpage as well as the app, but I can't complain too much -- otherwise I've been very pleased with them.

Mine (similar to this, I think a slightly earlier model) can turn almost completely around; they have night-vision too, which I like. I started out just having one in the living room, but when I'm not there the cats often stay in other areas of the house, so I put one in the hallway and eventually the bedroom -- the goal was to put cameras where I knew my cats would be, so I could look in on them and actually see them. You'll get a sense, using the cameras or even just living with your kits for a while, of where they like to be when you aren't there.

Dearborn will often come when called to a camera, but Polk completely ignores them. If you want to interact with your cats you may want to buy one of the special petcam versions that have controllable laser pointers and treat dispensers, but mine don't like treats so I went with pure camera ability.

There's no real security on them other than whatever's on them natively, but I really only have them on when I'm traveling. They have a "privacy" mode where you can physically see that they've been switched off, there's a little light that is always on when they're on. But also like. If some hacker really wants so badly to see a fortysomething man talking to his cats, whatever, I hope they have fun. :D I assume there are extra security measures that can be put into place, but they'd probably involve the wifi rather than the cameras.

But yeah -- the Kasa cams are reasonably high-def, have sound and a speaker, have night-vision and are pretty maneuverable; can recommend.

Ah, never if I can help it! It fell victim to the Monday Off Struggle, where I often forget to check my to-do list on Mondays I have off -- RFM's reminder is automated, so it pops on my to-do list every Monday morning, but if I don't check the list....

It hasn't happened very often, probably less than a dozen times in the nearly twenty years I've been doing it (oh god) but when I actually legit forget, it's almost always either Memorial Day or Labor Day. This time around wasn't helped by a headache and some other minor struggles.

But it's been posted now! Apologies to the fundraisers for being a day late.

Radio Free Monday

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Radio Free Monday! Ways to Give: Ember is raising funds to help prevent homelessness for her and her senior dog; she's been struggling to find remote work she can do and needs to raise back rent funds. You can read more and support the fundraiser here. Anon linked to a fundraiser for breakingjen, who is currently on sick leave but whose sick pay is unable to cover some of her bills this month; she needs to pay a debt collector to avoid the enforcement authority and further serious debt. You can read more and support the fundraiser here. cinder-ember is raising funds for his top surgery; his insurance doesn't cover gender-affirming care 100% and he will be out of work from two jobs for three to four weeks in recovery. You can read more and support the fundraiser here. ysse_writes linked to a fundraiser for thanatos_kalos, who needs help getting home from Ethiopia for her mother's surgery, and then to her next job; you can read more and find giving information here. maximum_mom is a single parent on medical leave who will have surgery in June, after which she'll have six weeks of recovery; she's currently fundraising for rent, as she is the sole financial support for her children. You can read more, reblog, and find giving information here, give via paypal here, or subscribe via patreon here. altamira16 linked to a fundraiser for threemeninaboat, who is raising funds to restock Little Free Libraries at several RTD bus stops in Colorado; it costs $8 to donate a bag of books to keep them stocked. You can read more and find giving information at twitter here. Recurring Needs: punyhoomans is raising funds for expenses related to an urgent prostate surgery their father needs; he is currently in Guatemala and needs funding to get to and from the US for care. You can read more, retweet, and find giving information here. gwydion linked to a fundraiser for Veronica and Kurtis, friends who have secured housing but are low on cash they've been using to survive to this point; they need to raise $4000 before move-in to help cover deposit and living expenses in the meantime. You can read more and support the fundraiser here. rilee16 is raising funds to cover bills that their roommate is unable to cover after giving them no notice he would not have the funds; one of rilee16's jobs also just cut their hours in half, and the roommate's partner recently threatened them. They are currently late on rent, facing a late fee, and used cash earmarked for medication to keep the electricity on; you can read more, reblog, and find giving information here. gwydion's friend Karrin is running a fundraiser for a cat rescue; it's a no-kill shelter and most cats are fostered until adopted. Karrin would like to host a "game day" fundraiser, but needs funds to purchase the board/card/etc games for people to play. You can read more and support the fundraiser here. And this has been Radio Free Monday! Thank you for your time. You can post items for my attention at the Radio Free Monday submissions form. If you're new to fundraising, you may want to check out my guide to fundraising here.