little surfer

Today

• so much grading
• am head empty from the weekend

Reading

I have been reading Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement by by Jane McAlevey and Bob Ostertag and it is fascinating! It fits then that “Nearly 15K NYC nurses begin strike at hospitals in Manhattan, the Bronx”. The whole union thing is so wild. Great and wild. I am struggling to compare it to the teachers union here in Germany and we come off as wimps compared to these amazing people. Great book!

I finished Enshittification by Cory Doctorow. Am well written and low to the ground explainer on how/why things are how they are. Terrifying and oh my goodness people can be such shites.

There’s a name for this strategy, coined by the librarian-theorist Fobazi Ettarh: vocational awe. Ettarh uses this term to describe the weaponization of workers’ sense of duty, especially to the public those workers serve. For Ettarh, vocational awe is why teachers, nurses, hospice care workers, and, of course, librarians accept poor pay and conditions without rebelling. They feel a sense of duty to their students, patients, and patrons, and their bosses don’t, and everyone knows it. So long as workers believe that their boss would rather harm the people they love and care for rather than increase their pay, they are held hostage by their own sense of duty.

Also read Accidental Shepherd: How a California Girl Rescued an Ancient Mountain Farm in Norway by Liese Greensfelder. Very good. Almost like a diary, well written, beautiful places and harrowing experiences.

But you know what? The mountains aren’t going away. They’ll be here if we ever need to use them again.

To-Do

• grading all over everything – deciding on how and why and then no one will explain anything to the kids, because that conversation happened a few months ago and was not about those particular grades
• add a one-page Dungeon to the Tock Tock Press site on this site. -prep classes for the week

Status

The TL;DR on functioning in a capitalist world is to move a little slower, with a little more intention. Your dollar helps people stay in business. Be careful where you put it. I’m not saying it’s easy. As I told at the top of the story, I shamefully let frustration get to me and I took the easy way out. This’ll happen. But every time we keep doing it, we get closer and closer to having no other options than having to shop at a company store run by white supremacists. (via Mike Monteiro)

Burnout shifted its meaning: from a symptom experienced by people struggling to change society to one experienced by people trying too hard to succeed within it. (via A Working Library)

Today: – Are We Participating in a Thing That Is Not Even Working?’ Chris Gethard on the end of the middle-class comedy job. / Podcast Version – Coffee or not

To Do: – finish building the math exam for Friday. Still need to write the last tasks and do points – work on my entry for the TWG Game Jam

STATUS: Should I not have coffee in the morning? Music is on. Freedom is active. Now to open word and the Worksheet Crafter and get going.

Our embassies should be closed and our diplomats expelled, our games and tournaments boycotted, including the upcoming World Cup and Summer Olympics. And everybody else should be issuing travel advisories to the US in an attempt to crash our tourism industry. Everything the international community did to Russia after it invaded Ukraine should be done to us now that we’ve invaded Venezuela and are trying to install a sham government there.

Elie Mystal in the Nation

On January 1, 2026, books published in 1930 enter the U.S. public domain.

This includes legendary books by William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, Agatha Christie, and Langston Hughes. In addition, The Maltese Falcon, perhaps the best-known noir book—and film—of all time, and books by Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and more, enter the U.S. public domain, becoming free for anyone in the U.S. to read, use, and re-use.

Standard Ebooks make nice versions of public domain works. And here are 20 that entered the public domain this year.

My first recommendation would be Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers.

Mystery writer Harriet Vane is on trial for the murder of her lover, a man with unconventional opinions on anarchy and free love. The result is a hung jury, so the judge orders a retrial—the perfect opportunity for Lord Peter Wimsey to unravel the case.

I have only read one Sayers book and it was a nice, slow and cozy crime outing.

A plea for the new year, drawing More/Less, a whole lot of really good music.

I have never before missed as many shows because I was sick as in this year. It sucked so much. But I got to listen to a bunch of amazing records and interview a bunch of rad bands.

Every year I make a playlist with all the albums that ended up in my library and that came out that year. MusicBee says there are 40 albums in that list. Wild. I went through and picked some that I really like and remember fondly. It is always a struggle for a record to break into the timeless rotation and not many manage.

I did an album whale for it. Which means no listening on this website. Such is life. That said, I need to buy some tickets for shows in 2026!

In relation to the last post. This is about where the data gets stored and what people are doing about it.

TW for death, surveillance and a shit future.

Once upon a time I read a book about Tear Gas. It featured a discussion of states testing the tear gas for other states. So the IDF would Tear Gas protestors and then police in the USA would know what worked and what didn't.

Recently Mohammed R. Mhawish, a journalist, escaped from Gaza and wrote this about surveillance by the Israeli state.

It operated, too, through a system of watching, knowing, and collecting us: drones that hovered endlessly overhead, quadcopters that dipped near windows and entered houses, facial-recognition scans at checkpoints, movements followed through phone tracking, calls that broke with static before an air strike. The Israeli army was using artificial intelligence to generate kill lists, monitoring our social-media accounts, and storing in bulk the audio of our phone calls. Journalists, human-rights researchers, and legal scholars have mapped pieces of the surveillance apparatus in Gaza. What has largely been missing is how this technology landed on bodies, homes, and neighborhoods; how it reshaped daily life for people forced to live inside the matrix; how it reordered our minds.

Emphasis mine because Quadcopters that entered houses? And what does this do for people and how they behave?

“Nobody doesn’t have political leanings,” one man named Mohammed told me. “But I’ve killed it. I’ve prohibited myself from speaking on this. I’ve locked it with a key.”

And then.

Khaled, who worked for nearly three decades as an ambulance driver for Al-Awda Hospital, said that during an interrogation, an officer showed him a private text message he’d sent his family. “Everything we say, they can see,” Khaled said.

“Everything we say, they can see.”

By this summer, the bombardment had cracked part of the roof open. At around 4:30 a.m. on July 27, while she slept in one of the remaining rooms, Mary woke to a faint buzz that seemed to come from just beside her. “I froze,” she told me. “I could not move. I could not scream.” A dark square hovered near the ceiling. She stared at it, motionless, until it drifted out of the room and exited through a window. If they could fly a drone to her bedside, they could see everything, she told me. Weeks later, her 35-year-old neighbor was shot dead by an armed drone while drying laundry on her balcony, standing beside her 4-year-old son, Mary said. “It is not death that we fear,” she told me. “It is the terror that comes before it.”

You really should read the whole thing.

This here is a video about the social media ban in Australia. Campbell Walker aka struthless goes into the why and hows of the ban and does so in a very compelling matter. One part of the ban that is absolutely critical is verification of age. A topic as old as time and always hotly contested, because it leads/can lead/must lead towards more surveillance. And I guess that is where those two lines meet. In Gaza we see a possible future for everyone else. Being tested and perfected. And well, I am not sure we are actually doing anything about that.

A really good video about our times. Very much USA centric, but I think the main idea of tax the rich already you cowards can be applied universally.

Said the Gramophone is an old school mp3 blog. They don't post much, but they have a singular way to wrap the year. Their selection is always amazing and diverse. Highly recommended to go through it at least once and find something that you missed this year.