Jemma Kline

I’m really happy with my song about the Ramses mission:

fawm.org/songs/321922

FAWM has started - here is where you can follow me - my first song is 'American':
fawm.org/songs/318711

FAWM starts in two days! I'll be attempting to write 14 songs in 28 days - but I won't be alone. Many of us will be forming a delightful community for a month or so. My profile is here:
fawm.org/@rocketgrrrl
My songs will be hosted there all through February and into March.

I haven't tried the show yet; I'm making my way through the latest Strange New Worlds season. Looking forward to it.

When it is songwriting season for me (FAWM or 50/90), every morning walk becomes a writing session. It starts with me getting into the mindwandering zone, and then the ideas pop in. Boredom seems nearly mandatory for me to take the time to daydream.

I won’t be back to all those little parks i discovered wandering through the paths between the neighborhoods of New Jersey. Won’t see the little bridge fall apart the rest of the way.
Now I must find new little parks and other overgrown trees where I can shed my crumbs and my tears.

I did taschlich alone, like I often have since COVID came. But today was different. I said the words from Malka Heifetz Tussman: I stroll often in a nearby park —
old trees wildly overgrown,
…
a small bridge with rough-hewn railings–
this is my little park.”

But today, I said goodbye from afar.

I wanted to share just a few lines from Marcia Falk’s beautiful The Days Between:

‘Knowing that we are, all of us, flesh and blood, and our fates are intertwined - sweet with bitter, bitter with salt - and that the fruit of kindness is kindness, and good deeds are its fulfillment.’

Be kind.

A woman with brown hair, wearing a tee shirt, smiling at the camera, with a beach and a Ferris wheel in the background, and a blue sky overhead.

We made it out. Summer and I are in the Netherlands, where I bike every day to my new job. The people I work with are friendly and brilliant, and our organization takes really good care of its people. We move into our new house, which is tiny but pretty, in early September.

We LARPers experience this as ‘LARP drop’ on Mondays after we’ve just spent the weekend solving all our problems at swordpoint.

I wonder about my own professional experience and its relationship to this. From the essay: "Are we sure we’re not just old people yelling at clouds here?"
I tried using ChatGPT professionally a bit at first, and realized it's simply unreliable. Perhaps okay for a student? Not at a job.

Oh, I remember it for sure. Fantastic game, and the start of a genre much like the Traveller pen-and-paper RPG (which has its own PC game adaptations, and some suspect may have influenced Firefly). There's a great free roguelike too: www.prospector.at/forum/

I miss the days when Thomas Sweet was the best ice cream in Princeton - but I think they lost that distinction. Halo Pub was also fantastic; we used to have an annual pilgrimage of the children's Aikido class there at the end of each season.

I’ve seen (I’ve thinking the Alternity RPG) z axis info handled by up arrow/down arrow notation with a number giving units (say LY). But that could really clutter it up. It’s great as is.

You sssswhat? You must see it now!!! Except…grrr…terrible creator. Sigh.

(Only way I could square the circle at the time was to figure that Book was a lot smarter than Mal.)

Reminds me of the error introduced when they changed the intro in Firefly.

Book: "After the Earth was used up, we found a new solar system…” (made sense - nifty setup!)

Mal: "Here's how it is: Earth got used up, so we terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths…”
(Bugged me so much!)

Love you too :)

An excellent article recommended by Or Bialik. It’s encouraging to see academia recognizing its own impact on societal change. The author speaks from personal experience, and highlights the intrinsic value of students who are members of marginalized groups.

Faculty members should always assume there are first-generation students in their classrooms, because there almost always are.

First-generation students have unique needs, which can be amplified when they enter graduate programmes. A Comment article in Nature Reviews Psychology argues that faculty members need to be aware of the needs of this population and how to support them. https://go.nature.com/3FkQDs1 #Academicsky 🧪

Thank you - just tried it - pretty simple and slick, and seems to be nice and non profit and data secure.

Finished up FAWM this evening - 15 songs in 28 days. I'm pretty happy with a lot of what I ended up with - you can see it here:
write.fawm.org/@rocketgrrrl

I just rewatched episode 1 of Strange New Worlds. Captain Pike's speech about the future of Earth meant something much more to me now.
We can all see where we're headed - the terrible place we could find ourselves.
Can we just...not?

I think this is one likely explanation. I'm no economist - I'm speaking completely outside my box - but I've certainly heard that long-term strength and profitability of corporations is not driving business decisions nearly as much as it used to.

Can confirm this just happened on my iPhone. Only *once*, after several tries, but it happened.

Nice to see action on some of them, but the courts clearly still have a lot of work to do with these to defend queer rights.

I had this story in an anthology of children’s stories, and read it to my children many times as they were growing up. Glad to hear it’s finally free.

But responses like what we just saw from AltCDC can go a long way to rebuilding that trust. We need to move beyond the polarization and start finding a way to respond to public health emergencies with compassion and unity - and for those that already exist (COVID), identify a clear path forward.

I'm sure that there was damage done to the credibility of public health officials, the CDC included, in 2020 - and indeed, in the Biden administration as well. Likely mostly due to the politicization of vaccination and quarantine by the Trump administration and supporters.

I agree with this, sadly. I would love to hear of some references (I'm thinking peer-reviewed publications or perhaps similarly reputable sources) that can argue that it is not a pandemic any more. But I haven't heard of them yet.