What's Up?

So what's up here in our lives?

I haven't been writing about Trump lately, because -- as my kid puts it -- everything just gets worse and worse. Honestly, this is making his first regime look almost harmless. Frazer Sherman has a list of what's been happening lately. My kid is most concerned about the turnips who are working to make p*rn illegal, and then defining anything about trans people as p*rn. They're also defining anything about sexual abuse or women or non-white people as p*rn, so you see where this is headed. Right now the turnips have convinced Mastercard not to allow payments for anything they define as p*rn. This includes, for example, some of my kid's comics which are about trauma related to abuse.

(You can donate to my kid's Patreon here or become a member or buy his art: https://www.patreon.com/c/deercliff/posts)

See also this: 

Everyone: Please please please don't write  

your books in Google Docs. Frankly don't use Google Drive for personal stuff.

Their terms of service say they take down stuff like content related to terrorism and trafficking, but this Google Sheet was literally a list of movies I'd watched this year and books I'd read.

#i have no idea why this would happen#and my only guess is that the sheet contained a lot of different languages

They also deleted this person's fiction writing, for reasons they don't and don't have to explain. 

Block everything related to "terrorism" or "trafficking," and then define things in other languages than English as terrorism, or things about women as "trafficking," and voila. This reminds me of when a bunch of purity unicorns on Twitter decided to define adults who wrote children's fiction as pedophiles. 

Step one: say anything you do is okay if you're doing it to terrorists or p*rnographers or pedophiles. Step Two: Define whoever you like as a  terrorist or p*ornographer or pedophile. Step Three: control of all media and art. Three easy steps to fascism!

Anyway. It's fucked up, that's what I'm saying.

ETA: The Guardian writes about the situation.

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What else is happening here? It's still hot. The puppy is still puppying. His latest favorite thing is to knock the tennis ball under the bookcase and whine until I come dig it out for him. Sometimes he just *thinks* it's under there, so he whines until I come look for it, and then won't believe me when I say it's not there.

Dr. Skull is home from the hospital, though the cellulitis wound is still not completely healed. A home health nurse is coming three times a week to change the bandage and sooth our anxieties. Of which we have many.

It's two weeks until the university takes up and students are arriving daily. These are mostly rich kids from Texas who have been driving about ten minutes and whose parents have bought them huge SUVs and pickup trucks (honestly, some of the trucks are taller than I am) that they speed around town in, weaving in and out of traffic and running red lights. I know they have to learn to be smarter about how they drive, just like I did. I just wish they were doing it in a tiny little pickup or sedan, the way I did, instead of the civilian equivalent of tanks.

The dog park is being renovated, so there's a new temporary dog park, about 1/4 the size of the old one. I've stopped going in the afternoon, since it's usually jammed full of pit bulls and poodle mixes whose owners are not even slightly interested in keeping them from attacking other dogs.  Mornings (we are up before dawn here) are better. Also, it's slightly cooler at dawn.

Everything, I tell myself often, will be better in the fall.

God, I hope so.