PicoBlog

We’re traveling for the first time since lockdown. We have rented a little room, a trail from the driveway leads to a forest dense with redwood trees, and I was reminded during a walk yesterday of “fairy rings,” the phenomenon of trees growing in a circle. They’re easy to spot: groups of similarly aged plants (in this case all enormous trees) standing together in a circle with an emptyish spot in the middle known as a “necrotic zone,” wonderfully enough.

I am so grateful to be sober today. I’m grateful for a little extra sleep, that it’s almost the weekend and for reconnecting with old friends. I’m grateful for getting closer with new friends, for my sponsor who gently pushes me to be better, for coffee and for time spent together. I’m grateful for text from my dad and for working from home tomorrow. Good morning, friends! As always, I hope everyone has been having a lovely week and I just want to take a moment to thank everyone who shared some orchid advice…because of you she’s still hanging in there :)

Imagine your home is filling with shit. Like maybe a kid flushed a Squishmallow and things just escalated from there. The plumber looks it over and says, “Okay, I’ve made a list of nineteen different options for repair, depending on price, grade of materials, length of warranty, and other factors.” I suspect that, standing ankle-deep in waste, you would be in no mood to examine his menu and would instead prefer to be presented with a binary decision: “Either pay to have it fixed, or don’t.

Yesterday, a jury in Washington, DC awarded renowned climate scientist Michael E. Mann more than $1,000,000 in damages in a defamation lawsuit he brought against two bloggers. I was a witness in the case and testified on Tuesday. Here, I’ll offer my thoughts on the case and some personal reflections on my experience. Mann’s case alleged that he was defamed by statements made the bloggers more than a decade ago, which harmed his reputation and career (I won’t rehash the details here, but you can get a full accounting of the trial at this comprehensive podcast).

I know so many men who have fought for custody of their children. All of them have won at least joint custody. And in all cases, a strange thing happens after their win: They begin complaining that the custody system is biased—a system that worked to get them the outcome they wanted. This is what male entitlement looks like: not only should you get what you want; you should get it by default, without having to work for it.

Famitsu only shares physical sales data. Momotaro Dentetsu World: The Earth Spins with Hope - a new game from Konami, reminiscent of Monopoly, topped the sales charts. The game was released on November 16th and sold 413 thousand (physical) copies in just a couple of weeks. Mudstack is the ultimate one-stop solution for digital artists Easy collaboration on projects, no matter the location or timezone Rapid iteration with the integrated review and feedback feature

UPDATE, MARCH 4: The final bid came in at $82,600, not quite the six figures I thought we’d see, but still an impressive number. The money will go toward funding new booths and floors at Holsten’s, which the owner said would cost about $60,000,reports the New York Times. Now the buyer has to cart the thing out of there, which includes the seats, the table, a plaque and a divider, but not the jukebox seen in the final episode — that was a filming prop.

#OTD: March 14, 1977, Fannie Lou Hamer died. Her life, and also her death, remind us that the path of justice is often one of trials and tragedy. Just 59 when she died, she suffered from many maladies including chronic injuries from a brutal beating by police in a jail in 1963. She died in a hospital in Mound Bayou, Mississippi from a combination of breast cancer, diabetes and hypertension. Mound Bayou was a beacon of Black independence and one of the few medical facilities that would admit Black people and employ Black healthcare professionals.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link. Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon probably released at the wrong time. I don’t mean the wrong time of year, though, sure, releasing in March 2010, days after the highly anticipated high-definition debut of the Final Fantasy series, Street Fighter IV, God of War III, and on the same day as the expansion to Dragon Age: Origins probably wasn’t any help to the marketing of a brand new intellectual property that XSeed had to rescue from Namco for it to even get a North American release.