bombs in bottles
It's spring break at my day job, so I'm in the uncomfortable position of (1) being off my routine, (2) having a long to-do list of things "I'll deal with at spring break," (3) being car-less due to addressing one of those things on the list (a very necessary brake repair), and (4) "spring" being a loaded season for me, generally.
All this results in me very much needing to write and also very much not being able to concentrate on any one thought for very long. I'm getting client work done, but not my own stuff.
Some disjointed stuff from my brain meats:
On my Web site homepage, which also has a new domain name. Also on Playce, the little site I made to store links to games and retro movies and similar stereophonic multimedia events:
samiz.dad, aka "drmollytov.neocities.org"
Playce: weird fun internet stuff
Playce's sub-pages will likely get shmashed into the new CSS this week. Samiz.dad's probably won't. There's a reason the creator of that CSS calls it "a mess" - it's really not designed for more than a single front page. I'll probably tweak the rest to align the colors, etc., but leave them more readable.
Ironically, Samiz.dad's content is all mobile-friendly, but its homepage isn't. Playce's content is mostly not mobile-friendly, but its homepage is. Go figure.
This site is not only mobile-friendly, it's also Gemini and Gopher-friendly. I figured that if I had one site that did that, I didn't need all of them to do it.
I grew up with parents who deeply researched their purchases. "Buying it for life" and "getting the most value for our money" were their actual hobbies. I learned to do it, but I always regarded it as a slightly obsessive, kooky thing to do.
These days, I feel like researching my purchases is a hazard of buying literally anything. I'm tired of typing "who owns $COMPANY" or "who owns $BRAND" into my search engines, yet I don't know another way to avoid buying cheap dropshipped crap anymore.
Tl;dr Kaito Electronics, once a California company, is now owned by a Chinese holding company. However, I can't find obvious evidence that Midland Radios is not US-owned and -operated.
< old man voice > Back in my day, we could just walk down to the hardware store and buy a weather radio. None of this "where was it made" or "who owns the brand" or "who owns the company that owns the brand" crap. We just bought a radio and it worked. End of story. </ old man voice >
...Seriously, though: I do not remember having this much trouble buying household goods 30 or 40 years ago. I remember the trouble my parents took being exceptional - not a minimium hazard requirement. But then, I can say the same thing about the Internet. If you're not constantly battling for your privacy these days, you don't have any.
Yes, I changed my Web site's domain name to a play on "samizdat." Yes, my screen name is a play on "molotov" (as in "cocktail"). Yes, I've literally written a Web site on how to become ungovernable. I'm reading and writing and sharing more opinionated stuff than ever.
One might think, from all this, that I don't fear the current US federal administration. One would be wrong. I absolutely do. The only thing standing between me being disappeared into an El Salvador hell prison like that literal father and US resident last week is my US birth certificate, and that won't be worth the paper it's printed on if the regime takes umbrage with any of my current or past work.
But that's the thing: I was already a target. My legal name is a byline on several major-outlet pieces critical of points the current administration embraces. If they can ship a graduate student to a Louisiana detention facility for a byline on an op-ed she wrote years ago, they can do it to me too.
I'm not writing more than ever because I'm not afraid. I'm writing more than ever because I know there is nothing between me and the power of the federal government anymore - and the federal government cannot be trusted to hold itself to any law or standard. I'm writing WHILE I STILL CAN.
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