Powderhorn

She stocks 50 vol, which is not fucking around. I never went above 40.

And when we were together, I never paid for haircuts. She did mine just as the boys and her own. A Nr. 6 was long for her.

So I sit with blond hair at a Nr. 6, which has been my standard since 1997 but fell by the wayside during Covid, sitting next to my ex-wife without talking as she watches a TV show and I peruse the internet.

It is a strange thing to graduate to that portion of your life where staying with friends means, for the most part, you self-entertain. Sure, meals, a bit of TV or games, but it's nothing like crashing somewhere in your 20s.

I have clean clothes, and this time I'll be headed back to Austin tomorrow wearing my own. Ahead of fighting possibly hourslong lines at HEB ahead of the deep freeze forecast for most of Texas starting Friday night.

I have a motel for the week already booked, so tomorrow will be rather busy. She's already paid for my Lyft back to the van, then I need to hit up HEB and hopefully can time things to be aligned for it not being frosty by the time I'm checking in.

I made dinner last night for the first time since 2023, cobbling together a red curry soup and mushroom tortelloni (with much garlic and pepper) into a very satisfying dinner. It felt really good to provide nourishment for someone else again.

A lot of "days since" signs have been reset to zero over the course of my visit, with some having previously resided in the four figures.

If I didn't know my own history, I'd be inclined to think this is a totally reasonable way to live. But we can't work right now. It's likely we'll never be able to.

This said, she told me off in 2004 on my first attempt at communication, we finally met via other accounts in 2009, got married in 2011 and divorced in 2016. If nothing else, this relationship scales in years. Not having resolution in a couple of months is not a concern.

She invites me up and into her bed, and then complains in the morning that she's been single for so long that it's difficult for her to sleep with someone else in bed ... even though when we met, sleeping alone was her hell.

I appreciate that she's restored my appearance to residual self-image. But we are back to "there's no fucking way this is over yet." I'm not going to repeat prior posts, but my gut has been telling me she's mine for more than 16 years.

There is a tattoo to that effect, in my handwriting, on her mons.

We make for an interesting couple. Pretty much the only thing we have in common is our last name.

Half the world’s 100 largest cities are experiencing high levels of water stress, with 39 of these sitting in regions of “extremely high water stress”, new analysis and mapping has shown.

Water stress means that water withdrawals for public water supply and industry are close to exceeding available supplies, often caused by poor management of water resources exacerbated by climate breakdown.

Watershed Investigations and the Guardian mapped cities on to stressed catchments revealing that Beijing, New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and Delhi are among those facing extreme stress, while London, Bangkok and Jakarta are classed as being highly stressed.

Separate analysis of Nasa satellite data, compiled by scientists at University College London, shows which of the largest 100 cities have been drying or getting wetter over two decades with places such as Chennai, Tehran and Zhengzhou showing strong drying trends and Tokyo, Lagos and Kampala showing strong wetting trends. All 100 cities and their trends can be viewed on a new interactive water security atlas.

Which way, western man?

That was the title of a racist tract published in 1978 by William Gayley Simpson, a former leftist Christian pastor turned one of the most influential neo-Nazi ideologues in American history. The book helped radicalize an entire generation of white supremacists in the US, with its vicious antisemitism, opposition to all forms of immigration and open praise for Hitler. The purpose of the book, wrote Simpson, was “to reveal organized Jewry as a world power entrenched in every country of the white man’s world, operating freely across every nation’s frontiers, and engaged in a ruthless war for the destruction of them all”.

In recent decades, Which way, western man? has become a popular meme – but only on the far-right fringes of the internet.

Until, that is, the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Last August, the X account of Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted an ICE recruitment poster featuring an Uncle Sam figure holding a “law and order” sign while standing by a crossroads post featuring arrows reading “invasion” and “cultural decline”. The DHS caption? “Which way, American man?”

Shocking? Yes. Coincidence? Nope. Earlier this month, the official White House Twitter account posted a cartoon of Greenlandic huskies with Danish flags on their sleds facing a choice between the White House on one side and China’s Great Wall and Russia’s Red Square on the other. The White House’s caption? “Which way, Greenland man?”

An airport made of bamboo? A tower reaching 20 metres high? For many years, bamboo has been mostly known as the favourite food of giant pandas, but a group of engineers say it’s time we took it seriously as a building material, too.

This week the Institution of Structural Engineers called for architects to be “bamboo-ready” as they published a manual for designing permanent buildings made of the material, in an effort to encourage low-carbon construction and position bamboo as a proper alternative to steel and concrete.

Bamboo has already been used for a number of boundary-pushing projects around the world. At Terminal 2 of Kempegowda international airport in Bengaluru, India, bamboo tubes make up the ceiling and pillars. The Ninghai bamboo tower in north-east China, which is more than 20 metres tall, is claimed to be the world’s first high-rise building made using engineered bamboo.

In the broadest sense, this is news, but there's too much opinion in this to throw it there.

Do you still want to cling to this pretense, Trump supporters? Do you still want to pretend ICE efforts are targeting “the worst of the worst?” Are you just going to sit there and mumble some incomprehensible stuff about “respecting the laws?”

Go ahead. Do it, you cowards. This is exactly what you voted for, even if it now makes you a bit queasy. Just sit there and soak in it. You are who you support, even if you never thought it would go this far.

“Worst of the worst,” Trump’s parrot repeat on blast. “This one time we caught a guy who did actual crimes,” say spokespeople defending whatever the latest hideous violation of the social contract (if not actual constitutional rights) a federal agent has performed. “Targeted investigation/stop” say the enablers, even when it’s just officers turning white nationalism into Official Government Policy. “Brown people need to be gone” is the end game. Full stop.

Donald Trump has stepped up his demand to annex Greenland but said the US would not use force to seize it during a rambling, invective-laden speech at Davos where he once again lashed out at Europe’s political leaders.

The address to thousands of business and political leaders at the World Economic Form in the Swiss ski resort indicated that while the US president was renouncing the use of military force – for now at least – to wrest control of Greenland, he still intended to wield America’s economic and diplomatic power to bend European allies to his will.

He said he was “seeking immediate negotiations to once again discuss the acquisition of Greenland by the United States”.

“I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force. All the US is asking for is a place called Greenland,” he said. “You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no and we will remember.”

Ever the orator, Trump later offered this:

Trump at moments sought to needle his global audience, saying it was “stupid” for the US to cede Greenland to Denmark after the second world war, and that “without us, now you’d all be speaking German, or a little Japanese perhaps.” Davos is in the German-speaking part of Switzerland.

I will say that all the coverage of Davos has my back up because no one seems to know how to pronounce it. The "a" is very nearly a schwa, and the stress comes on the second syllable.

Because that's what the world needs. Spicier ChatGPT.

OpenAI says it has begun deploying an age prediction model to determine whether ChatGPT users are old enough to view "sensitive or potentially harmful content."

Chatbots from OpenAI and its rivals are linked to a series of suicides, sparking litigation and a congressional hearing. AI outfits therefore have excellent reasons to make the safety of their services more than a talking point, both for minors and the adult public.

Hence we have OpenAI's Teen Safety Blueprint, introduced in November 2025, and its Under-18 Principles for Model Behavior, which debuted the following month.

OpenAI is under pressure to turn a profit, knows its plan to serve ads needs to observe rules about marketing to minors, and has erotica in the ChatGPT pipeline. That all adds up to a need to partition its audience and prevent exposing them to damaging material.

Basically the usual setup here ... I get a Lyft up, she insists I do laundry, then she feeds me, then it's shower time. I'm wearing her clothes again because she pointed out that mine -- even having gone through the wash -- still smelled funky.

So I'll be doing the full cycle again tomorrow.

Not that we wear clothes to bed. Which this time led to the one kink activity that drew us together 16 years ago, but neither of us had done with others in years.

In the midst of this, as I'm twitching violently, she whispers into my ear "god, I fucking miss your body."

And here we get the separation of powers. In terms of interaction, we're a fucked-up mess; but when it comes to physical connection, I've not really heard a tale of what we intrinsically have.

We can literally touch each other without anyone realizing it. Hence her foot and my ankle. She's asleep, and she moved slightly at one point. It wasn't until getting out of bed that I realized I had to extricate her from my foot without waking her up.

We were lying down back-to-back (with fewer interruptions), And while I felt warmth from her body in my shoulder and hip to hip, it still, still doesn't feel like I'm touching someone else.

I'm still here for another night (possibly two) before heading back home so that I can stock up on food ahead of fleeing to a motel because of an ice storm.

Her sons do not like me. There are reasons for this, some more valid than others, that mean we can't reconcile. So we are trapped in this weird purgatory where our bodies just know each other, and our minds know why it can't work.

Meanwhile, when I come by, we just act like we never got divorced. I mean, I don't give her a deep kiss after knocking on the door, but practical matters are handled first, then some entertainment, and the intimacy doesn't come until bedtime.

Now, to provide a good example of the sanity of this relationship, three days before the "i miss your body" remark, she was canceling an offer to visit because she thought I was getting "too attached."

This is starting to feel like a movie.

The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions.

A new inverted food pyramid recently released by Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat.

The new guidelines are designed to nearly double the amount of protein currently consumed by Americans. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”

But a surge in meat-eating by Americans would involve flattening vast tracts of ecosystems such as forests to make way for the hefty environmental hoofprint of raised livestock, emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases in the process, experts have warned.

Seriously, what the fuck is going on with fabs right now?

Micron has found a way to add new DRAM manufacturing capacity in a hurry by acquiring a chipmaking campus from Taiwanese outfit Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC).

The two companies announced the deal last weekend. Micron’s version of events says it’s signed a letter of intent to acquire Powerchip’s entire P5 site in Tongluo, Taiwan, for total cash consideration of US$1.8 billion.

China’s population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2025 as the birthrate plunged to another record low despite the introduction of polices aimed at encouraging people to have children.

Registered births dropped to 7.92 million in 2025 – or 5.63 for every 1,000 members of the population – down 17% from 9.54 million in 2024, and the lowest since records began in 1949.

The population dropped by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion, a faster fall than 2024, while deaths rose to 11.31 million from 10.93 million in 2024, figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revealed.

Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said births in 2025 were “roughly the same level as in 1738, when China’s population was only about 150 million”.

It just occurred to me when calling my college roommate that basically, it's three. With my mom, I let it go all the way to voicemail, as she's nearly 80 and may be on the other end of the house.

But with most of my friends, if they don't answer in two rings, it's a lost cause absent external influences.