Powderhorn

I don't want to be redundant, so I'll sum up: We are the couple in movies who damage each other but can't quit.

After initially not wanting me to know where she now lives, she relented and gave me her address for a Lyft. I paid to get up there; she paid to get me home.

Now, this is not the first time my gut has decided to interrupt the conversation ... that happened a few minutes after we met and I was in her kitchen, knowing that I already lived there (moving in would take 12 days). That was supposed to be a one-night stopover on account of weather, and yet here we are 16 years later.

If we're to accelerate things, shit gets spicy in a hurry, as her boys can't know. They hold me responsible for several things I actually did, as well as several poor decisions my ex made that were easier to use me as a scapegoat for.

Anyway, she wants me back up there next week, same payment terms.

Compared to a van in January, an apartment with HVAC holds certain appeal. I just fear we may end up with enough time together to fall into old patterns separate from the supportive ones we sustained over two days in December.

This is the definition of playing with fire. We know it can't work. We know why it can't work.

And yet we are, again, moths to a flame.

So, my dad dying, having a remote call with his lawyer tomorrow, and then ... my ex. This is exactly the point in the trance track right before where shit resolves.

Which is to say chaos.

Two years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accrual of vocabulary was fun. Every lesson earned me experience points – a little reward that measured and reinforced my progress.

But something odd happened. Over time, my focus shifted. As I climbed the weekly leaderboards, I found myself favouring lessons that offered the most points for the least effort. Things came to a head when I passed an entire holiday glued to my phone, repeating the same 30-second Kanji lesson over and over like a pigeon pecking a lever, ignoring my family and learning nothing.

Philosopher C Thi Nguyen’s new book tackles precisely this kind of perverse behaviour. He argues that mistaking points for the point is a pervasive error that leads us to build our lives and societies around things we don’t want. “Value capture”, as Nguyen calls it, happens when the lines between what you care about and how you measure your progress, begin to blur. You internalise the metric – in some sense it supplants your original goal – until it has “redefined your core sense of what’s important”.

He gives the example of American law school league tables, introduced to offer an ostensibly objective yardstick for candidates who had previously relied on promotional material and insider gossip. The new, supposedly hard, data focused on a few, narrow metrics.

It's Dec. 11, 2009, and I'm on the phone with a woman I've chatted sporadically with on OKCupid for a week and a half, working out terms of crashing at her place for a night to avoid a frozen freeway.

Dec. 11, 2025, I have to take a Lyft back from her place, as we got divorced in 2016.

Yes, yes, yes, it's Pete's "woe the hell is me, my life is falling apart" on schedule after four days since my last post.

I know when I've been shot down. She, herself, shot me down in 2004, leading indirectly to my first marriage. It's not out of the realm of possibility that her initial rejection is the only reason we could eventually find each other. (Her kids in 2004 were 1 and 2, and no thank you.)

But that's precisely the issue. I've not been shot down. She claims to not want to date, period, and I'm sort of resigned to our familiar chaos being about as good as I can do -- while remaining a secret from her kids!

Hey, when you live an a van, almost anything looks better. Not that we could make it work. Her kids are in their 20s now and do not like me ... she basically offloaded all failures on her part on me from the time we were together.

In reality, I had to seize control of SNAP benefits in only a couple of months because we were running out of food two weeks into a given month. I'd noted shopping behaviour and was like "no, if we have enough money to make it through the end of the month, sure, buy the smallest Doritos you can at 7-Eleven, but otherwise, I'm done with this bullshit."

The first Wednesday of the month, I'd pore over the circulars and find ways to turn $500 into $1,200 ... I had to leave some on the card because for some reason, one of her sons refused to drink anything but milk. (I was the new guy ... I couldn't just say, "Hey, babe, have you considered telling him to try water?")

Anyway, this is the person whose pajamas I continue to wear. Our reunion really only brought up old ghosts.

During a golden sunset in Memphis in May, Sharon Wilson pointed a thermal imaging camera at Elon Musk’s flagship datacentre to reveal a planetary threat her eyes could not. Free from pollution controls, the gas-fired turbines that power the world’s biggest AI supercomputer were pumping invisible fumes into the Tennessee sky.

“It was jaw-dropping,” said Wilson, a former oil and gas worker from Texas who has documented methane releases for more than a decade and estimates xAI’s Colossus datacentre was spewing more of the planet-heating gas than a large power plant. “Just an unbelievable amount of pollution.”

That same week, the facility’s core product was running riot on news feeds. Musk’s maverick chatbot, Grok, repeated a conspiracy theory that “white genocide” was taking place in South Africa when asked about topics as unrelated as baseball and scaffolding. The posts were quickly deleted but Grok has gone on to praise Hitler, push far-right ideologies and make false claims.

For those who have been yearning for the absurdity of Airplane!, your ship has come in.

Visual gags, bad puns, crazy interpretations of a line ... it's all here. I'm glad they still make these.

Nichol fucking Hahnloser is being ... deliberately obtuse.

It's her right, of course. I brought up our time together from last month, and she kinda went off on a bender.

What is crucial to bring up is that we can't be in the same room without feeling what's happening. That was our downfall in 2009, and it remains the issue today.

I'm not sure we really like each other. But we are drawn like moths to a flame.

I can say that we love each other, but that eventually feels a bit hollow. I think we both love what could have been, but 16 years in, that's less of a possible outcome than a reality.

She had very different goals. She wanted kids. I wanted to avoid kids by all means. The timing of our divorce was to ensure Texas law didn't rope me into child support (at five years, it doesn't matter whether you're the biological father -- this is now your problem). My lawyer got us divorced mere days before hitting that cutoff.

My lawyer, of course, being one of my columnists in college. I think he was better at lawyering than writing, but hey, he was in Austin, and I needed a divorce.

It's sort of crazy that Jonathan, a columnist I decided to give a shot at in the late '90s, would be my divorce attorney. Life can be funny sometimes.

All this notwithstanding, I am left with the reality with Nichol. Her phone is off because she paid for mine, and I don't really care what your metric is there, but it seems pretty damn obvious.

I envy those of you who do not need friction to enjoy a relationship. Those sound nice. I can't do that. Unless someone is mentally and physically challenging me, I'm bored.

My college roommate stumbled into running a couple of pizza places a bit over 20 years ago. He went with flat-rate pricing, because, honestly, pizzas are really cheap to make.

$9.99, any toppings (within reason). I think they were 16 inches (only one size as well). I'd go up to visit from time to time, and he'd tell me to make myself a fucking pizza. The dough was proofed and the toppings at hand. Not sure what the health department would think about that, but they were very good pizzas.

Today's random YouTube find. It's an interesting exploration of the development of America's housing market over the past century.

There are many ways a progressive politician can fail. They can fail to be elected. They can fail to deliver on their platform once in office. And they can also fail to build up the left’s power in a way that outlasts their administration.

This third possibility has often been overlooked by commentary around Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor. However, this scenario fits the tenure of John Vliet Lindsay perfectly: a New York mayor who, from 1966 to 1973, passed progressive legislation that leftists would dream of winning today, but whose administration nonetheless oversaw an erosion of working-class power.

Because of this failure, Lindsay’s good intentions and accomplishments were largely for naught. By the late 1970s, his legacy was all but undone and the ex-mayor himself became, in The New York Times’ words, an “exile in his own city.”

The bunny-ear designs on the window aside, there is little to indicate that the ferry has arrived on an island teeming with rabbits. Then, moments after the passengers disembark, there is activity in the undergrowth. A single rabbit scampers out, wholly untroubled by its two-legged visitors. And then another.

A short walk along the coast takes visitors deep into rabbit territory on Okunoshima, one of 3,000 islands in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. Half a dozen of the animals chase away another as it attempts to join them in a communal meal of Chinese cabbage. The scene unfolds in front of smiling, camera-toting tourists barely able to believe their proximity to Okunoshima’s fabled – but troubled – furry residents.

The two grey rabbits that greeted the ferry from the mainland return to bushes stripped of their leaves. Shallow bowls of water left by volunteers dot the island in places where its estimated 400-500 rabbits tend to congregate in expectation of pellets of food left by visitors in the absence of their natural diet of fallen leaves, bark, roots and grass.

To say Billie Jean Sweeney's had a storied career in journalism would be an understatement. Over more than two decades of experience in the field the longtime journalist, editor and press freedom advocate has worked at the Hartford Courant, the Associated Press, the Committee to Protect Journalists and, most recently, as a volunteer editor at Assigned Media.

She also worked at The New York Times for over a decade, [ed. note: I love that they decide to say "oh, yes, and also the NYT"] until her retirement in mid-2024, eventually becoming the day assignment editor at the international desk. There, as one of the Times’ few trans staffers, she witnessed the highest echelons of the paper's management increasingly push anti-trans bigotry and disinformation.

Trans communities have known, and sounded the alarm, about the NYT’s increasingly anti-trans stance for years. Sadly, too many cis people have ignored these warnings, especially as many of the details have often remained obscured behind the paper's extensive corporate hierarchy and established reputation.