Boston Police report a guy, accompanied by two pals, ended an argument at the Reggie Lewis Center at Roxbury Crossing by lifting his sweatshirt and displaying "what appeared to be a firearm," around 8:20 p.m. on Thursday.
If they look familiar, call detectives at 617-343-4275 or contact the anonymous tip line by calling 800-494-TIPS or texting TIP to CRIME (27463)
A federal judge in Boston has ordered the immediate release of a long-time immigrant ICE locked up under a law that judges keep telling it they can't use against people who have been in the country for years - and who a Justice Department official then said could be kept locked up under that law.
On Friday, US District Judge F. Dennis Saylor ruled ICE has no right to keep holding Gildazio Martins de Oliveira, a Brazilian native who has been in the US since 1999 and who is married to an American citizen, once he makes an $8,000 bond payment.
Although the ruling is similar to many others issued by judges in Boston and the rest of the US in recent months, it added a new wrinkle: Regime lawyers argued Martins de Oliveira had no right to sue for freedom - and ICE had every right to keep him in a cell - because immigrants in both California and Boston courts have filed class-action suits over the practice, he's a part of that class, and members of a class aren't allowed to bring their own suits.
Saylor, however, suggested, in polite judicial terms, that regime lawyers were arguing out of both sides of their mouth, because, at least in the Boston class-action case, they argued that immigration law prohibited the sort of group action the immigrants were pursuing and that only individual immigrants could sue on their own behalf - such as in Martins de Oliveira's case.
Therefore, respondents’ contention that petitioner cannot seek habeas relief in this individual action is unavailing.
ICE grabbed Martins de Oliveira on Dec. 4 and threw him in the Plymouth County jail, under a section of immigration law that relates to "arriving" immigrants, who are normally captured right at the border and who have no rights, including the right to appeal their imprisonment.
For months now, federal judges in Boston and across the country have repeatedly ruled that section does not apply to people like Martins de Oliveira, who have been here for years and so are hardly "arriving" - which means they have full Constitutional rights, such as the right to contest their imprisonment in court - and to be released on bond unless they are judged either a threat to society because of pending criminal charges or present a flight risk.
According to Saylor's summary of his case, Martins de Oliveira did get a hearing before an immigration judge - a Justice Department functionary subject to firing by the White House - who ruled ICE could apply the at-the-border law in his case, but that if somehow he were judged to be not "arriving," he would set bond at $8,000.
The Board of Immigration Appeals, sort of the Supreme Court of immigration cases, ruled in August that, just like the regime wanted, all undeclared immigrants are "arriving" and subject to immediate and sometimes prolonged detention, no matter how long they have been in the US. And federal judges, part of an independent judiciary established by the Constitution, keep ruling that's wrong as well.
Last month Saylor asked regime attorneys to explain themselves. As has become their custom, they admitted that, like in pretty much every other case like Martins de Oliveira's, judges in Boston have concluded the at-the-border law doesn't apply so they won't waste the court's time trying to argue otherwise - although this time, they added the assertion he could not sue because of the class-action suits, which Saylor then rejected.
And so he granted Martins de Oliveira's request for a writ of habeas corpus, which in his case meant an order to Plymouth County Correctional Facility Superintendent Antone Moniz to free him as soon as Martins de Oliveira presents proof his family has paid his bond.
Mosscap and Dex's adventures continue from where they left off. They visit human places, including Dex's large and confusing family. Mosscap has a brush with mortality. Dex does not return to being a tea monk, their vocation still up in the air.
I enjoyed this novella for much the same reasons I enjoyed the first one, though I missed the tea service, which was my favorite part of the first book. Mosscap does turn out to be fallible and learns from Dex as much as Dex learns from it, which was nice. My favorite part of this book was the glimpses of the world, which still seems like an extremely nice place to live in.
Friday morning we had about 8-10cm of snow and public transport wasn't running, so I worked from home. All the main roads around me were clear pretty much throughout, but side roads etc didn't get clear - and then everything half-melted and refroze so anywhere that still had snow got pretty miserable. The pavements on my way to church yesterday had about 3-4cm of lumpy ice, and it was not a fun time, although it also didn't feel particularly dangerous as long as I walked carefully.
At ten minutes before Mass we had six people in the building including me, the priest, and one other altar server. As we went in we'd hit about twenty, and by the end of the homily we were up to 45, which is a bit under half the usual number (although there were a lot of unfamiliar faces, possibly coming to a closer church than they would usually attend?). I was very surprised by the number of latecomers; I left home half an hour earlier than usual, to be sure of getting there OK, and it's not like anyone didn't know there was ice everywhere. I can understand not coming in those conditions, but just, idk, leaving at the usual time? that seems weird to me!
Anyway, it's warmed up a lot today and has been raining for a couple of hours; remnants of the packed ice will no doubt hang around for a while, but hopefully most of the pavements will be more-or-less clear tomorrow morning when I leave for work.
Dad's off to France again this week, so I'm back over there next Monday for the week. My chances of ever catching up with the laundry are receding into the distance and I'm starting to feel stressed about the weekend after, since I'll be there until Sunday morning, then into a double choir rehearsal, then back in the office on the Monday. Probably it will be fine but I need to do a lot of thinking about food planning etc at some point this week. I was having such a nice relaxing time too!!!
In the current iteration of Whatever, the archive here goes back to March 2002, which is a time before all but one of my books (The Rough Guide to Money Online, now out of print and deeply outdated). That is nearly 24 years of writing here on a nearly daily basis, and millions of words, to go along with the millions of words that are in my other books and novels, all but three of which are still in print (the other two out of print books: The Rough Guide to the Universe and The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies, both also out of date). Between this site and the books, there will be no lack of verbiage for people who are interested in me to go by; I will not die a mystery to history.
Nevertheless, there is a substantial part of my writing life which is no longer as easily accessible. Going from most recent to most distant, there are first the out of print books, the rights to which I own and which I might even put online at some point, but haven’t because doing so is a pain in the ass. I’d have to work from either old PDFs or scan everything in, and the effort required versus the value of the text is not there for me. You might find some of these on pirate sites, and inasmuch as I’m not doing anything with them at the moment, you’re welcome to them if you find them there (that said, don’t link to any of them in the comments, please).
Prior to that is the text of Whatever from between September 13, 1998 and March 26, 2002. This was an era where the Whatever was made from hand-rolled HTML rather than typed into dedicated blogging software (first Movable Type, then WordPress). Being hand-rolled meant that it was not easy to just transfer the text over; I would have had to cut and paste a couple thousand entries. Prior to the advent of Whatever there was an even earlier version of the site going back to March of 1998, which is when I secured the Scalzi.com domain and put up a static site, with columns and movie reviews from my newspaper days, new essays I wrote for the site, a couple of book proposals, and some extremely Web 1.0 site design.
None of this material is on the site proper anymore, but it’s still around after a fashion. One, I have a digital archive of it, duplicated in several places to ward off accidental deletion, and also it’s on the Internet Archive site (along with more recent iterations of this site), because I am not adverse to having the site archived in this way, and also because I personally find it convenient — if there’s something from this era I want to look at, it’s easier for me to look for it via the Internet Archive than my own archives. Among other things, the Internet Archive has maintained the architecture of the old site as well as the content of it. The Internet Archive is robust and useful but only gives the illusion of permanence; it could go away at any point. This is why I also have my own digital archive.
(The Internet Archive is also currently the only easy way to find anything I ever wrote on the former Twitter, as I permanently deleted my presence there, including all my tweets. I did, of course, download my own archive of tweets and have multiply saved it.)
Prior to this is my professional work up until I started being a full-time novelist: Work I did for AOL and other web sites, including columns at AMC, MediaOne and my own videogame review site, GameDad, and before then the columns, features and movie reviews I did for the Fresno Bee between September 1991 and March 1996. Again, I have my own digital archives of what I wrote, and the Internet Archive can help you resurrect at least some of this material if you know how to look for it. But much of it no longer available online, due to link rot, revamped web sites, or, in the case of the AOL stuff, originally having been in a walled garden that no longer exists in any event.
For a long time I suspected that the stuff I wrote for the Fresno Bee would never be available online unless I put it there myself, but as it turns out, there’s a site, Newspapers.com, which will allow you to access at least scanned (and sometimes OCR’d) versions of my reviews and columns. I found out about this, weirdly enough, because some of my Fresno Bee movie reviews started being quoted at Rotten Tomatoes. Not the full reviews, just quotes, alas. I may get a subscription to this site just to download all my movie reviews at some point. That will be a project.
We have dug down far enough that now we come to the material that is, truly, not available in any way, shape or form online: Writing from high school and college, which includes but is not limited to, music reviews and columns for the Chicago Maroon, my college newspaper, and my first attempts at short stories from high school. The picture at the head of this essay is of the actual physical archive of much of this stuff. It does not include the big-ass book I have that compiles all the copies of the Chicago Maroon for the 1989-90 academic year, when I was the editor-in-chief of the paper; that’s on a shelf on the other side of the room. Yes, if there’s ever a fire in my office, all of this writing is likely to go up in smoke.
I may at some point scan some or all of this stuff, but I’m pretty confident that almost none of it, save for what I had already put up in the previous iteration of the site, is going to be seen by the public at large. Why? Well, one, at the ages of 14 to 21, I wasn’t that good of a writer. Indeed, there is a real and serious upgrade in my writing skills that happened in 1998, because between ’96 and ’98, I spent a lot of my time being an editor, and much of that time was telling other people how to tweak their writing to make it better. It meant when I looked at my own writing previous to that point, I was very much “who told this jackass he could write” about it. The word to use for my writing in high school in particular is “precocious,” which is to say, showing talent but not a lot of discipline or control.
Two, and again particularly in my high school writing, some of it I’m ashamed of. In more than one of my short stories from the high school era, I made being gay a punchline, not because I was virulently homophobic at the time, but because I was a kid and uncritically absorbed the general 1980s societal attitudes concerning gay and lesbian folks. That explanation doesn’t excuse it, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise. Also, being an ignorant kid in the 80s would not mitigate actual pain and harm posting those stories would have on people here in 2026. So they will stay on their shelf and not online.
I’ll note that wisdom and empathy did not suddenly alight upon my shoulder upon high school graduation. There’s plenty of my writing in the 90s — when I was a full grown adult — that is absolutely cringe on reflection. I’d sorted most of my homophobia by my exit from college, but hashing out my tendency to fall back on casual sexism for a laugh took well into the 21st Century to deal with. I can and do still slip into what I might call “avuncular pontificating” mode, and especially in the early days of Whatever this mode was indistinguishable from generic mansplaining. I try to do better, and I’ve been trying to do better for a while now. We are all permanently works in progress.
But that does mean that, unlike when I was younger and thought everything of mine should be read, I now understand why people curate their work, and let lots of it slip out of view. There is work from every stage of my writing life I am proud of and happy to show people. There’s a lot more I’m fine with letting it be, or, at best, it being of interest to a biographer, should one be foolhardy enough to emerge. There is a reason why, in the Site Disclaimer for Whatever, I mention that when you come across something that sounds like me being an ass, check the date and see if there’s not a more recent piece that reflects my current position on the subject. Also, this is why, if someone presents me with something I wrote a a decade or two (or three!) ago, I am perfectly happy to say, when necessary, that younger me was a jackass on many things and this happens to be one of them.
While I’m on the topic, and this is a thing which I think these days is actually important given the current state of technology, this is why you can’t just feed everything I’ve ever written into a Large Language Model and have it shit out a reasonable facsimile of me. Leaving aside any other issue with the current model of “AI” being an unthinking statistical matching machine, I am a moving target. I am not the same writer at 56 that I was at 16, 26, 36 or even 46. Is there a consistent thread between those versions of me? Absolutely; you can read something I wrote as a teenager and see the writer I am now in those words. But the differences at every age add up. You can’t statistically average the circumstances and choices I made across 40 years into something that reads like me, either as I am today or how I was at any previous stage.
And yes, you could ask an “AI” to control for these things, and it will, but it’s still not going to do a great job. I am me because of the lifetime of experiences I have had, but that’s not all of what makes me who I am in any present moment, What in my experiences contribute to that are not all equally weighted, or of equal consideration when I write… or when I’m thinking about what to write next. An LLM won’t and can’t understand that, which is why an attempt to use one to write like me (or any other author) is an exercise in the Uncanny Valley all the way down. Recently someone tried to convince me an LLM could write like me by cutting and pasting to me something he had it write “in my style.” It was only vaguely like how I would write, and also, I was mildly concerned that this person thought this was actually how I wrote.
All of which is to say that there is a lot of writing from me, and mostly what it does is give you an insight into who I was at the time it was written. Some of it good! Some of it is not. Some of it you can find, and some you cannot. And while I very much want you all to buy every single novel in my backlist, Tor and I both thank you for your efforts on that score, otherwise I’m perfectly okay with you focusing on what I’m writing now rather than what I wrote way back when. I’m related to that guy, and we’re very close. But we’re not exactly the same person anymore.
We did finally get to the Chinese restaurant and it was pretty much a fail. Mostly the food was struggling to get to fair. BUT, good to know. We don't have to go back. It was a pleasant evening so no big loss.
This morning we had breakfast here and then did a short walk through the complex and now we're watching a football game.
Biggie is fairly fond of Bill's lap but Julio got up there just now to get some action. Julio sat for ear scratches from Bill for longer than any other human in his little life. But, then Biggie decided he was done and so then was Julio but it was amazing for a bit.
Our team is winning and I've got an idea for a new knit toy that I'm playing with.
At 9:27 a.m., the MBTA reported a Red Line train pulled into Harvard Square, had had quite enough of all the nonsense, and refused to move, forcing all the better behaving trains to stand by at stations. It took until 11:15 a.m. to talk some sense into the recalcitrant beast and clear the delay, the T reports.
I've got French onion soup simmering away in the slow cooker (I sliced almost 3 lbs of onions last night and my eyes - even with the stupid onion goggles - were not happy with me) and I just took a pan of baked oatmeal out of the oven to be breakfast for the week. I was waffling between the oatmeal and another batch of orange cranberry scones, but the oatmeal won out because it used up a bunch of stuff - the dregs of both a bottle of honey and a bottle of maple syrup; the last 2 eggs in the carton (I still have a carton of eggs in the fridge, but now just the amount a normal person would have); the rest of a bag of frozen strawberries; the rest of a bag of chocolate chips; what was left in the bottom of the jar of cinnamon; and what was left in the container of rolled oats (exactly 3 cups - exactly as much as needed for the recipe). I still have cranberries in the freezer, though, so orange cranberry scones are probably still in my future.
Now I'm trying to decide if I want to make a loaf of bread to go with the soup. I originally bought a small loaf with my groceries on Friday, but then ate it as cheesy garlic bread for a couple of meals. *hands* The heart wants what it wants, and in this case, my heart wanted cheesy garlic bread.
Since the slow cooker is working, I can't use the KitchenAid (it is blocked in by the InstantPot), so I want a no knead kind of bread, but also one that is only going to take 2-3 hours, nothing that needs an overnight rise. I think I might end up making the old, reliable peasant bread (halved to only make 1 loaf). It's easy and fast (for bread), and doesn't require a stand mixer.
Hmm...
*
Elizabeth Perry (watersword) wrote2026-01-1112:32 pm
Fandom: 子非鱼 (Zi Fei Yu) - 林盎司 Rating: T Length: 100 words Content notes: none Author notes: The title is from Flight (extract 1) by Yu Jian, translated by Simon Patton, and A Single Woman’s Bedroom by Yi Lei, translated by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi. Summary: Lin Fei belongs to Ji Leyu.
Summary: After Hudson Oaks, Josh comes to stay with Wolf because he’s afraid to leave Wolf alone. He has no idea if they’ll get back what they had. Maybe they won’t. Maybe, instead, they’ll have something new. Title from “Storms” by Fleetwood Mac. It’s the song playing at the end of 2x05.
What I Just Finished Reading: A novella and two novels since the last time I posted about books, I think: Automatic Noodle (Annalee Newitz), about sentient robots winding up running their own restaurant; Stone Yard Devotional (Charlotte Wood), a very-much-~literary~ book about a woman who winds up living with a group of nuns, although not a nun herself; and The Lovely and the Lost (Jennifer Lynn Barnes), about a search-and-rescue case from the POV of one of a trio of teenagers who're involved with the rescue effort, who was herself rescued from the woods as a child after she'd been there long enough to go feral and was (largely) resocialized and adopted by her rescuer. Many layers of family history and secrets in that last one, which was my favorite of the three.
(And since I've mentioned a couple of YA books recently where their flavor of YA really didn't work for me, I should say that The Lovely and the Lost is also very clearly YA but in a way I could work with just fine as a reader, despite being very much not the target audience.)
On the nonfiction side, I read The Crone Zone: How to Get Older with Style, Nerve, and a Little Bit of Magic (Nina Bargiel), which was...mostly odd, honestly. It's from the same publisher (and I guess the same...product line?) as Goblin Mode: How to Get Cozy, Embrace Imperfection, and Thrive in the Muck, which I read last year, and the presentation and vibe were really (I mean really) similar in a way that might've made more sense to me if they were also by the same author, but they're not. The Crone Zone's subtitle does accurately reflect its contents, so I feel weird saying "it's such a weird blend of exactly what it says it is", but...yeah. Not my thing.
What I'm Currently Reading: Chuck Wendig's Wanderers, which I chose at random from my ebooks and probably would not have started had I actually known anything about it. It's a 2019 novel that starts with a mysterious phenomenon where people just start...walking...somewhere, but also spotlights (*checks notes*) a world-changing disease, AI, and right-wing violence tearing at the seams of the US, all of which are being amply provided by reality. It's also pretty hefty, length-wise. And yet I keep reading.
I've also begun reading Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Robin Wall Kimmerer), as the starting point for my 2026 goal* of "aim to read at least one chapter of nonfiction each week" (swiped from a friend else-net). (Another goal is to aim to read a volume of manga each week, and that one hasn't been started in on yet, but we'll see how strict I feel like being about "each week".)
*I have a full bingo card of goals! I will probably share it at some point! But not this minute.
What I Plan to Read Next: K.B. Spangler's newest Rachel Peng novel, Inside Threat is out/about to come out! (It was supposed to come out this week, but Amazon dropped it early, so she's also released it on her website.)
Plus: What I've Been Watching:scruloose and I are two episodes into Pluribus! I also recently watched Challengers. (A movie? So soon in the year?) Hopefully we'll get the premiere of The Pitt season 2 watched today.
Not a great week. Many things to worry about. Spent a lot of time curled
up on the couch wrapped in a fuzzy green blanket. On the other hand, I
started the week by watching Flow, which I've had on my to-be-watched shelf ever since it
arrived in July. (I'd pre-ordered the DVD in March, as a slightly-belated
birthday present to myself.) Highly recommended. Sunday also
has links to a couple of "making of" videos on YT. Note that it was made
using the open-source 3-D animation program Blender. And I had a really good
cancer support group session Wednesday evening.
Breakfast this morning: Raisin Bread French Toast (for one person; scalable):
I started with two raisin bread buns, sliced vertically into about five
1cm slices. Use what you have.
Beat one egg with a little milk.
Pour the egg mix into a flat-bottomed bowl.
Melt a pat of butter in a non-stick skillet (cast iron counts).
Using a pair of tongs, dip a slice of bread in the egg mix, quickly
flip it over to coat the other side, and transfer it to the skillet.
Repeat as needed.
Use tongs to flip the toast to the other side and to transfer it to
your plate when both sides are done
Add maple syrup, butter, raspberry jam, et. al. (I just used maple
syrup this morning.)
I made the grave precedent-setting mistake of buying the first of 5 nieces and nephews turning 10 this year ten books for his birthday, and now, now I have to do the same for the rest of them, jaysus. Insofar as I'd thought about it at all, I'd perhaps thought I could just buy the same set 4 more times, but it turns out that I have bought a lot of books for these kids and their older siblings over the years, and also, you know, that kids of 10 have individual personalities (??) and tastes (??) and don't all like the same things (??), and also that I have no idea about kids books published in the last 10-15 years. So: help? Let's assume that I've already covered the Tiffany Aching books, the Chrestomanci books, the Borrowers, Dark is Rising, the Snow Spider trilogy, the Hounds of the Morrigan, the Green Knowe books, Howl's Moving Castle &c, the Chronicles of Prydain, etc, and things like Westall's The Machine Gunners and Serraillier's The Silver Sword.
I am specifically looking for books a 10-year-old girl whose reading tastes run to things like Diary of a Wimpy kid might like. I've found the Dork Diaries by Rachel Renee Russell, and someone the other day recommended Dracula & Daughters by Emma Carroll, but: HELP please. I am a fossil. I know only old books!
it only hurts when i breathe (spikedluv) wrote2026-01-1109:12 am
I did not go downtown today. In fact, I went back to bed and slept a couple more hours after Pip left for work and I got the dogs in. \o/
I did a load of laundry, hand-washed dishes, went for several walks with Pip and the dogs, cut up chicken for the dogs' meals, and scooped kitty litter. Pip had leftovers for supper so I didn’t have to cook anything.
I went back to the Christmas Spice tea today. I typed in ~1,000 words on my fic! I’m not even halfway done, but I’m making progress!
I watched the first three eps of Heated Rivalry! No comments yet, because I plan to watch the whole thing, then watch it again once I’m not desperate to see the whole thing. *g*
I read some more in Amelia Peabody, watched new eps of Lottery Dream House and House Hunters International, and an ep of Secrets of the Zoo. Dr. Pol was my evening background tv.
Temps started out at 35.8(F) and reached 41.0.
Mom Update:
I talked to mom and she sounded good. (I like when she sounds good, because it’s better than when she could barely speak, but I’ve stopped thinking that because she sounds good she’s doing really well physically, which is a bummer.) Sister A had visited her earlier, which is nice.
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
universal_hub_feed) wrote2026-01-11 07:09 pm
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
