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Reading about Andor

Filed under: Media, Politics and Government, Resistance, Star Wars — Leave a comment
29 August 2025

I finished the second season of Andor: A Star Wars Story (or whatever they’re terming it now), turned around and rewatched both seasons, and started looking at articles and podcasts about the show. In particular I started looking at Tony Gilroy’s interest in bringing in real world historical examples of authoritarian governments, and the resistance movements against them, and how he worked them into the Star Wars universe. Star Wars has always been about resistance against tyranical regimes; Andor just tells the story from a different angle.

In the course of searching for politically themed material, I also came across so much more. The art of the set and costume design, the art of structuring the story in three episode arcs, the way leaving so much unsaid, or happening off camera, helps shape the story and focus it.

This post is just a place for me to collect links to things I’ve read, listened to. and watched. I’m likely to add to it as I find other pieces I want to remember and perhaps go back to. It doesn’t necessarily mean I agree with everything the people in the collection say. However, I’d recommend the two podcasts with Wajahat Ali and Danielle Moody very highly, as well as Thomas Coombes’ piece, “Star Wars show Andor is the story about resistance we need right now: Why science fiction matters for social change“

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Grim + Dread = Just trying to get through it

Filed under: Uncategorized — Leave a comment
20 November 2024

[cross posted on Substack]

I wrote a while back about my constant state of “grim,” a throughline for me for since Trump won the 2016 election.

Now we add dread.

Because as much as I worried about the awfulness Trump would surely bring in his first administration, it ended up being So Much Worse than I could have imagined. And now, going into another Trump regime, I know how bad it can be and expect worse.

I can barely watch the news. Reading is better for in terms of absorbing what is happening, and still, I start articles, and end up skimming them because it’s just fucking depressing. I, the Pollyanna of most of my circles online and off, am feeling more grim, more resigned to awfulness, more defeated than I’ve ever been.

This is not good.

I told my dearest love last night (who is fighting depression and dread more than I am), while we are not at the bottom of the power structure, but we’re pretty close. There’s not a ton we can do. So we have to focus on taking care of ourselves, and supporting the most vulnerable around us as best we can. That’s all we can really do, and it’s important.

But I’m fucking worn out.

First there was the devastation of Trump’s muslim ban, and kids in cages, and all the other insanity of 2017 and on. And then COVID, and the loss of friends and family and tons of people we didn’t know. And George Floyd and all the other murders. And then the brief joy of Dems winning in 2020, and then the insurrection. And then launch into MAGA folks in Congress and in our communities being insane and cruel and meanspirited and utterly unapproachable. And Ukraine. And Gaza. And then the fucking mess of the Democratic party, and the joy of Kamala, and then again, the fucking mess of the 2024 election.

And I know I’m missing things. I don’t even want to try to flush that list out.

And in the midst of all of that national and international misery, my partner of 30+ years faced major depression, an emotionally devastating month-long road trip with an abusive (now former) friend, and a year plus of healing after a critical back injury that could have easily paralized or killed her.

So, that’s been fun.

I know I’ll make it. Probably. But this is an awful time, trying to find stability ahead of what will surely be a country and communities in upheaval. Not everyone will make it, and that’s a horrible thing to know. I hang on to hope, but it’s a grim hope, and it’s been like this for far too long.

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Just for the record: Trump in prison

Filed under: January 6th, Politics and Government — Leave a comment
5 September 2023

I just don’t care as much as I think I’m supposed to

Just for the record – my own personal record – I’m kind of apathetic on the whole Trump in Prison deal.

I mean, sure, it would be great to see him held accountable for his crimes, and not skate yet again from any legal responsibility. It’s been his modus operandi for so long, and it’s worked, and how nice would it be to see THAT turn around?

And yes, the visuals of him in an orange jumpsuit (or stripey ones, or bland scrubs) are rather enticing. The idea of him sitting in a gray cell, no gold toilet, no one serving his every need – yeah, that’s rather satisfying. My most fervent wish for his punishment has always been for him to be sitting in a boring cell, no one in attendance, no one listening, no luxury, no attention. It’s actually a pretty cruel dream, because he craves attention so badly; it’s his whole trauma/drama since childhood.

Vendettas and trauma aside, the one useful part of Trump in prison is the idea that he’d be cut off from influencing other people with his poison words. And of course, he’d be a prime example of fuck around, find out. That’s certainly a social positive!

But…. would he learn his lesson? ever? I think not. He’s unredeemable at this point. I hate to consign him, or anyone, to no possibility of change or insight, but I have approximately .0000142% faith that this could ever happen.

And, then there’s the whole thing where prisons are AWFUL and so often inhumane, and however much I want certain people help accountable, I can’t want us, the People, the whole of our nation, to keep putting people in inhumane situations.

But still: other than the “get him out of the public eye” part, it’s just not that satisfying to think of him in prison. He’s just going to keep playing the same old “they’re victimizing me! I’ve been wronged!” schtick he’s always done. He’ll be a pain in the ass inmate, and god only knows what it means for his Secret Service detail. It will not be possible to completely cut him off from public awareness, in part because his devotees will keep their MAGA Dream alive using his visage. Trump will continue to be a martyr for the MAGA folk, and he’ll continue to grift.

So.

I do have some enthusiasm — disgusting state of the prison system aside — for taking the accountability game right to the feet of those who supported Trump and the Insurrection (new band, coming to a prison cafetaria near you). Gulianni? Eastman? Powell? all those other fuckers at the state elections and the federal level? Yes, please, hold them accountable, because they will feel the pain. They will understand what they are being held accountable for, even as they protest the supposed injustice. They know. They knew at the time they were skating the edge of democratic institutions, and probably when they stepped over the line. If they couldn’t figure it out when they did it, they most certainly are aware of it now.

And without them to shore up Trump’s grift (because they won’t have the same pull from within prison that I think Trump would), chalk up another failure for Trump.

Which is all to say that I’m sorta meh about Trump in prison – house arrest with some limitation on use of media, while unsatisfying, would probably be about the same for him, and cheaper for us.

But goddammit, let the hammer fall on those who enabled him, because without their allegiance and acceptance of his bullshit “vision,” we would be where we are right now. The dude did not accomplish this mess on his own. He both used, and was used by, a right wing movement already in motion.

So yes, I won’t complain too much if Trump is thrown in prison. But it’s not at the top of my list. Bringing down the circle of power around him? Yeah, that will hit the sweet spot for me.

[cross posted on Substack]

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Grimly Hoping

Filed under: 2016 Election, January 6th, Politics and Government, Resistance, Trump Administration — Leave a comment
3 August 2023

When Trump won in 2016, I went into grim mode.

I didn’teven realize it at the time; it started as a stoic “I will survive” attitude. Or rather, MOST of us would survive; I realized even back then that people would suffer, and some wouldn’t make it. I had a vague sense of what was coming, but it was worse than I expected. It was worse than a lot of us expected.

It wasn’t long before I recognized this core, the feeling of “grim.” Every successive Trump bullshit episode added another layer. Every ridiculous but entrenched defense of his cruelty solidified my bleak expectations of that corrupt administration and its adherents.

The outright racism of his early attacks on Muslims deepened it.

Family separation at the border deepened it.

COVID deepened it.

The increasing cult-like behavior of the MAGA folk deepened it.

The familiarity of the racism, the sexism, the frenetic right-wing christianity, the bigotry, the fear — all of that aspect of MAGA extremism cemented the core of grim, increased my resolute commitment to just fucking getting through this mess.

It was a big relief when Biden won, but I knew it wasn’t over yet. I knew Trump’s MAGA base would not give up. I didn’t expect Jan. 6th, but I knew they were deep into their delusion, and the rest of us would pay for it. Are still paying for it. Will continue to pay for it.

It’s going to take at least a generation; probably a few generations to get through this.

Grim.

But what else am I to do but walk through this mess? I don’t know any other way to be. So. To the present. Or sort of.

Anyway, Trump loses the 2020 election, refuses to admit it, Impeachment Two Insurrection Boogaloo happens, the GOP waffles on their initial outrage, and we’re treated to the high likelyhood that, as with the very revealing Mueller Investigation that was not quite able to hold Trump accountable, maybe he’s gonna skate on all this too! All around me, my friends are outraged that no one will throw this fool in jail. Merrick Garland receives a lot of their wrath; they’re tearing tehir hair out, shaking their fists, protesting the unfairness of it all.

But I’ve just been grim. I don’t expect things to move fast; I don’t expect things to work out perfectly. I’m crossing my fingers, but (grimly) not counting on much of anything.

And now we arrive at Arraignment Day – on his THIRD set of indictments. Am I happy? There’s a certain exhilaration to seeing Jack Smith and team work diligently to hold Trump accountable. There’s a certain satisfaction to watching team Trump freaking out. And I’ve done my share of laughing my ass off at the ridiculousness of Trump and Company’s response to all this.

But I’m not happy about it. That our nation should sink to this point, that a president would sink this low, that such a large contingent of willing idiots ignore law and logic to support their authoritarian vision — it all just makes me heartsick. Depressed. Grim. But not despondent; somehow that core of somber realism keeps me centered, moving forward. I don’t understand it, but I’m willing to roll with it.

Grim has kept me strong. Grim has kept me from melting. And Grim will get me through this too.

Coffee at the edge of the ocean, Nov 11th, 2016. Mood.

[Crossposted on my Substack blog]

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Change is hard, but you knew that

Filed under: Media, Routines, writing — Leave a comment
16 July 2023

Reflections on Wonkette moving to a new platform, and our curmudgeonly fellow commenters

[cross posted from my Substack]

A big portion of my online life for the last two days has been grappling with new ways of interacting with fellow readers of the finest snark emporium on the interwebs, Wonkette.com. They moved from whatever place was hosting the website over to Substack, dumped the long-despised but heavily used commenting platform Disqus, and then all hell broke loose.

Which, when you’re dealing with a few hundred eccentric opinionated loyalists to the Wonkette Cause, is to be expected. Metaphors popped into my mind, primarily learning to ride a bike the first time ever, or learning to use my first average-intelligence flip phone, or later, my first smart-phone. In all those situations, I had to translate ways I had been doing things to some new fangled procedures, and it was Never Nice. I simultaneously would feel like a stupid dork and be furious that the device wasn’t doing what I thought it should.

And then it gets better.

As I told Rebecca Schoenkopf, we’re a curmudgeonly species. As the complaints and whiny posts and frustrations played out on Substack’s various user-contribution modes (Comments, Notes and Chats), some were ready to dump the whole affair, others could only focus on how it was different from Disqus, the system we constantly complained about, and crashed under the onslought of our cat GIFs and youtube embeds. A few of us talked about what we did like about the platform, as we poked around trying to figure out what does what, and got some pushback.

I felt bad for Rebecca, and not a little pissy with some of my fellow commenters. Come on, you guys, I’d think, you haven’t even been doing this for a whole damn day yet! We’ll figure it out! Not for the first time, I wished some of the talented programmers who frequent the discussions would band together to write a good, stable commenting system. But since I can’t raise the funds, I don’t have much faith that pipe dream.

But we’ll be ok. Like two-wheeled vehicles and computer-ified phones, we’ll learn the ropes. A few people won’t follow along, a lot of new people will join in. Like we always do, we’ll help each other figure out how to make it work; we won’t be able to satisfy every plea for help but while get most of it sorted out.

And, in this partiular case, I’m hoping it save Wonkette a lot of money, and provides a better platform for getting their articles out.

Learn something new every day!

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Sourdough

Filed under: Home Life — Leave a comment
10 February 2023

I must be getting old. I keep telling my sourdough story, and I get tired of typing out the whole thing again. This is surely the sign of my elder years.

But, here it is:

I was about 17 or 18 years old, and had just finished a house-sitting stint a few blocks from home. My neighbor paid me, but also passed a treasure from her family on to me: a portion of the sourdough starter that had been passed on for generations in her mother’s family.

I was a whole-foods 1970s vegetarian at the time, so real, aged sourdough starter was quite the gift. And it came with a story: the starter passed to me had come from a batch made by an Alaskan miner great-something-granduncle, who’d mixed up his sourdough starter in the late 1890s, nurtured through his adventures in Alaska, and brought it home to share with his relatives. As many of us know, leavened bread was hard to find in those days, and miners carefully guarded theirs. When I was gifted my batch, it was 80 some years old, strong in flavor, and magic in the breads and pancakes I made with it.

Fast forward 20 or so years, and my carefully cultured starter might have a bit higher proportion of whole wheat and natural sugars in the mix, but it was still strong and vibrant and gave off that sharp odor of straight alcohol when you uncapped the jar. Mine was stored in a beautiful aqua glass jar with a clamp-top lid, always living in the back of my fridge.

Until my roommate threw it out.

She was a very nice woman, but kind of a terrible roommate. I could go on and on, but in THIS particular story, this woman who rarely cleans the kitchen after messing it up takes it upon herself to clean out the fridge. She sees the sourdough starter jar, pops the lid, thinks it’s something gone bad, and NOT ONLY THROWS OUT THE STARTER but the goddam beautiful jar to boot.

I was furious. Thirty years later, I’m still mad. But there was nothing I could do. And out of some kind of misguided petulance, I haven’t been able to bring myself to start a new batch from scratch. Someday maybe, but not today.

Anyway, that’s my sourdough starter story.

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The Snarkiest Live Blog of Easter Parade You’ll Ever Read

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4 October 2022

Whenever the subject of Easter Parade comes up (which is more often than I’d ever have suspected), I send people to an old link that I fear will some day disappear entirely. Thus, I’ll produce here the excerpt from Jason Linkin’s excellent and long-gone live blog of the Sunday news shows, a joyous if often troubling snarkfest analysis and head-slapping of the finest degree. At the original post, you have to scroll through the reviews of FOX News Sunday, Jake Tapper’s This Week, to get there, along with a hefty peppering of ads. Plus, the nice screenshots from the movie are no longer part of the the post.

HOWEVER, for posterity and the ability to link to just the liveblog of this most excellent, silly, and memorable movie, I’ve excerpted just the movie part, complete with references to 2010-era political news.

Jason Linkins

TV SoundOff: Sunday Talking Heads

By Jason Linkins

Jun 4, 2010, 05:12 AM EDT|Updated Dec 6, 2017

TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES presents EASTER PARADE

And now, in the spirit of recent holidays, I think that I shall focus this week’s contemporary politics through the prism of the Fred Astaire/Judy Garland classic, Easter Parade. This is because this liveblog is essentially a lawless, rogue state, and I am feeling oddly frisky and because I promised my wife I’d TiVo it for her, because she loves it, and that means my TiVo cannot get MEET THE PRESS today, too bad for America!

EASTER PARADE, which documents some weird bygone traditions like bursting into spontaeous songs and walking around in public wearing stupid looking hats, for Jesus. Fred Astaire opens the movie shopping for hats, and you watch a bunch of ladies stroll out from a back room wearing them, which indicates that customer service used to actually MEAN SOMETHING. My wife confesses that it always upsets her when he chooses the boring white hat over the obviously superior yellow one.

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Divided sentiments: Thoughts for a 2022 Independence Day

Filed under: Abortion, Art, Politics and Government, Resistance — Leave a comment
4 July 2022

Over on Wonkette, folks are talking about their plans for the day, and how after the Dobbs decision on Roe v Wade, they aren’t celebrating, or are celebrating differently. One said:

I ain’t feeling it today. Ask the uterus-havers in your vicinity how free they’re feeling these days.

I thought about it for a bit before choosing to reply. In about an hour, I’m heading out to socialize with some new acquaintances and watch a small parade from their front yard. And I won’t be the debbie-downer at their gathering. But still it’s mixed. So I replied:

Speaking as a uterus haver, though not a particularly productive one anymore, I’m split on all this. On the one hand, a pit of red-hot fury is rumbling at my core 24/7. On the other hand, the ideals of liberty still move me, like they’ve moved people for hundreds of years now.

So, today I stand with a foot in each camp, resolute in my fury, and committed to moving forward as much as I am able, and as much as I’m able to help others, attain their independence and self-determination.

It’s a big day in one of the little towns I live between, probably our biggest tourism day of the entire year. I’m going to focus on what I want for myself and my fellow citizens, watch our itsy bitsy parade (which is very queer-positive, so that helps), eat some hotdogs, hang with friends, and stand strong for the fight we are all facing. It’s the only way I know how to do this without melting into that pit of fury.

I feel so grim. I’ve felt this way since Trump won, but even then, it wasn’t a new feeling. Awful, awful things happen in our world all the goddam time, and I’m powerless to stop almost all of it. What I can do is keep the faith, tell the truth, stand by those near me. So that’s what I do, and I’ll keep doing it as long as I can.

And at least there’s this, the whacky, wonderful Yachats La De Da parade (2014)

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Choice

Filed under: Abortion, Culture, Health Reform and Health Care, Politics and Government, Resistance, Women — Leave a comment
24 June 2022

I chose abortion. In 1978, I was pregnant, didn’t want to be, and chose abortion.

Group Health Cooperative was my insurer, and they covered much of the procedure. I was 19 years old. And there weren’t many obstacles. My abortion-adverse boyfriend wouldn’t help pay my share of the cost, but he promised to be there for me when it was done, and he kept that promise – tea, pampering, warmth, kindness. It was odd, but a mostly-tolerable anti-abortion attitude, and he certainly didn’t try to keep me from going through with the abortion.

Having health insurance most definitely helped; I was part of a network of services. Admittedly, I had to go to Seattle twice, once for a pre-procedure appointment, and then again for the a abortion itself. And I had to go to the local GHC clinic to have a laminaria inserted. The older man who inserted the laminaria was friendly and kind, and gentle, and perfectly comfortable telling me why they wanted me to have the thin, dried up, sterile piece of seaweed inserted in my cervix, to soak up the natural liquids in my vagina, swell the thing, and help open my cervix for the next day’s procedure. He told me how old the use of laminaria was (old, though I don’t remember how old anymore), how trusted it was.

My mother drove me to Seattle the next day – an hour’s drive, and my mother was nervous but supportive, and the clinic workers were practical, kind, efficient. I didn’t see the doctor until just before the abortion, but I’d met with her the week before. They did some physical testing at that first appointment – heart rate, weight, general health screening – but the bulk of that appointment was spent in talking: how an abortion works, what to expect, gentle questioning about who’s choice this abortion was (mine? another person?). They were careful, respectful, informative.

The abortion appointment next week took longer, but was also respectful, easy, supportive of what I was choosing. The procedure itself was quick, the nurse and doctor happy to tell me what they were doing and why, and it didn’t hurt much. I waited afterwards in a semi-dark room with other women, all of us quiet, none of us seemingly in deep trauma or regret.

My mother waited patiently in the room by the front desk, took me to lunch afterwards, asked careful and non-invasive questions just in case I wanted to talk about it. I did want to talk about it. She listened patiently and attentively to everything I had to say.

As promised, my boyfriend was waiting when I got home, ready to take care of me, fetch me comfort food, and blankets, and kittens, and smoke. No guilt, no drama. I felt empowered by the abortion: I had made a decision about the trajectory I wanted my life to take, and acted on that decision.

This is how abortion access should be.

And now, as of today, this is how it can not be, for far too many women, in far too many states.

It will take a long time, but we must, MUST change this.

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COVID look back

Filed under: Pandemic — Leave a comment
28 February 2021

A year ago I had a weird cold, and in March decided to write about the symptoms as a marker, just in case it overlapped other non-typical COVID symptoms, We were still learning the basics back then – we weren’t masking yet, though caution was high. Cloth masks had barely been tried and paper ones were in short supply; most of the focus was on social distancing, wearing gloves, and not touching our faces.

I suspect I did not have COVID (it was the thick mucus that made me wonder, but I haven’t seen other report of people having that issue with their eyes). But at the time… yeah, I was worried.

The first known US death from COVID happened a year ago tomorrow, and even back then I knew we could be facing months of the disease. Had Trump et al actually faced the crisis with any kind of aggressive response, it might have only been that long.

But here we are.

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