Stephanie Weaver

YouTube video by L'atelier de Musique Soviet & Socialistic Grooves from 60s-70s / New Year Special by BASIC – L’atelier de Musique Ep006

Need a little joy in your day? Turn on a video of a DJ. Listen to music from another time and place. Watch that person dance as they share what they love. youtu.be/h8htSF9X5sE?...

Boo. Sorry to hear that.

Dividing Up the Autism Spectrum Will Not End the Way You Think The Lancet’s proposal to create a new label of “profound autism” serves only to distract us from the work of ensuring that all autistic people have everything they need to thrive.

RFK Jr. is speaking to a specific slice of parents (mostly) who believe their autistic child is not like the autistic people who, for example, post on this app. Those parents are committed to a diagnosis of "profound" autism. They are wrong. Please read this from me and @juststimming.bsky.social

The cover of When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut shows a black circle eclipsed by a semi-translucent yellow circle with fuzzy edges. Where the yellow has covered the black circle, a texture like the surface of the moon shows.

Book 6/50 of Weaver's 2025 Reading Challenge was Benjamin Labatut's "When We Cease to Understand the World." Thanks, @jlavsm.bsky.social; it took me a while to get around to reading it, but it will stay with me a long time.

Just a little note from the grants world: Even though federal grants are "unfrozen," orgs who have received federal grants can't get anything done because their federal points of contact aren't answering their emails and probably have been fired.

Sometimes I wonder part of the "harm" drag performers supposedly do to minors to show them that even as grown ups they can dress up extravagantly and adopt larger-than-life personas and put on performances that bring joy and not always be the caricatures of adulthood we learned from The Office.

The cover of Mr. Fox shows an illustration of the front half of a fox disappearing into a yellow midi skirt with matching tights and shoes below. By the fox, a disembodied hand in a white glove holds the handle of a closed umbrella. It is as if someone had cut an illustration of a woman in half. Below this, the end half of a fox disappears into the top half of a man in a suit, who is missing his head.

Book 5/50 of Weaver's 2025 Reading Challenge was Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi. I picked this one up from a professor's free book pile in grad school and hauled it through 2 states just because the cover was interesting. This book inspired this whole challenge, and now I can let it go to a new home.

Cover of Gail Carriger's Soulless shows a white woman in a dark magenta dress of approximately Victorian design. She is holding a black parasol with a steam punk style. The tag line says, "A novel ox vampires, werewolves, and parasols."

Book 4/50 of Weaver's 2025 Reading Challenge was Gail Carriger's Soulless. It promised vampires, werewolves, and parasols, and it certainly delivered. (Also, if you're wondering why I'm posting these updates while the whole US government is falling apart, the answer is Spiteful Joy.)

A bottle of Native brand shampoo in the scent Cashmere and Rain.

For people who really love that wet wool smell?

I'm glad we're talking about all the great stuff USAID does/did, like malaria research, but Trumpists never claimed to care about malaria. They do, however, talk a lot about Hamas, and you know who did a lot to counter the spread of violent extremism? USAID. So maybe that should be the story...

My university library is assembling a list of resources for disappeared US government #data. Check it out: subjectguides.library.american.edu/data_rescue

Book cover of The Chemical Choir. A drawing of a hermaphroditic figure with wings and a crown stands on two pieces of stone while a dragon with a head at each end passes below.

Book 3/50 of the 2025 Weaver Reading Challenge was The Chemical Choir: A History of Alchemy by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart. Somehow I didn't realize this was an academic book until the author started getting snarky about Carl Jung in a way only academics can.

If you're wondering how the freeze on federal grants will affect your community, you can do an advanced search on www.usaspending.gov to see what services in your county/city receive federal funds. Spoiler alert: you'll probably see a lot of health care, housing, and transportation services.

It is -11 degrees F outside and I have parked my floor desk next to my space heater.

I know it's irrational and unfair, but I totally judge people based on whether or not they use Oxford commas.

I love working from home -- having so much control over my environment is ideal for my neurodiv brain -- but it can make the line between work and home weird. Like, taking time to tidy your office at work is clearly fair game for on-the-clock time, but I always feel a little guilty for it at home.

The book cover of Nice Dragons Finish Last by Rachel Aaron. A young white man in casual clothes leans against a wall with a neon-lit cityscape behind him.

Book 2/50 for the 2025 Weaver Reading Challenge is Nice Dragons Finish Last by Rachel Aaron, which I found when I was looking for urban fantasy novels set in Detroit. I especially liked the historical context that allows mages and computer-controlled cars to exist in the same world.

A photo of a book page with the following text: Manuel Ortega was no longer thinking about the assignment. He was thinking about himself. He thought about himself and his marriage and his family. Everything was perfect. His wife was perfect, apart from that little bit of corpulence. From the very beginning their marriage had been successful and had never really ceased to be. Sexually, it was technically perfect even now. The children were so perfect it almost scared him. Sometimes he wondered whether the years in this perfectionist little country, with its bad climate, had not transformed them into an ideal family, into museum pieces. He could see them standing in a glass case, with labels. Father of family, 42, born in Aztacan, Latin type. Boy, 7, born in London, utterly satisfactory model. Girl, 5, born in Paris. Woman, 35, mother of two children, well preserved. Perfect relationship between equal partners. Please note their tenderness and absolute openness toward each other.

Finished Book 1/50 for The 2025 Weaver Reading Challenge: Per Wahlöö's The Assignment. It was a reminder that moderation in the face of fascism can far too easily become complicity in fascism. Here was my favorite passage.

Using "Freebird" as the goal song at a hockey game doesn't make any sense because you are literally trying to trap a thing in a net.

My goal for 2025 is to read 50 books I already have in my home. Maybe I can clean out some that I've been hauling around just because I haven't read them yet.

Nevermind, it would be TJ Hockenson.

Also, if there was an award for the NFL player that looks most like their mascot, #Vikings Van Ginkel would win.

Watching Lions v Vikings. Darnold reminds me of evil Cary Elwes in the live action Jungle Book movie.