Crystal

Philadelphia in candlelight.
A city paused.
Love showed up for Renee Nicole Good.

The Cost of Staying Human Remarks from a vigil for Renee Nicole Good

Tonight, I was one of more than 200 people who gathered on Chicago’s North Side to mourn Renee Nicole Good. Several people asked me to publish my remarks from the vigil, so I’m sharing them here.

It figures I'd end up living in a world that increasingly rewards people for convincing others to believe in unreality. Like, I should have seen this coming because literally everything I was told was worthless as a kid is something I see people making gajillions of dollars off of now.

I guess one advantage of having ignored the guitar for a while is that it's a pleasant surprise picking it up and rediscovering that it does in fact sound nice.

Ooh, I love it. It would never work on my family, but for anyone whose family is more handmade-friendly, it sounds awesome!

Organizing my ridiculous number of open tabs into a categorized word processing document is more validating than expected. My computer's CPU and I are happier.

This year may be the year I finally do not resist baking utterly ludicrous amounts of bread. It absolutely seems less insane than some people have been acting lately if I bake 60 types of bread in the next two months.

My latest approach to social media feels not like shouting into the void, but more like tap-dancing into the void wearing a snazzy suit with pastel rainbow pinstripes and sequins, maybe to a ska version of "Singin' in the Rain." (Can you tap dance to ska? I choose to believe.)

Finally got around to unsubscribing from a Mailing List That Shall Not Be Named (<--- 👀) and the unsubscribe message was basically "Thank you! You're unsubscribed," which feels a bit like "Don't let the door hit you on the way out!"

Not sure I've ever been thanked for rejecting a business before.

A thought: If you are using the term "both sides" while expressing that something shouldn't be a binary, you are implicitly reinforcing the validity of the binary. Please check your usage of binary phrasings if you are trying to encourage thinking outside the binary.

Someone casually included me tonight in their self-identified group of magical people, and this instantly helped mitigate the WTFery I was feeling about some very unmagical behavior going on in my community.

Spread the magic. Fairy dust all around.

Validating other people lends them strength.

Whoops. I forgot how reckless it is to go into a craft store when fall/Halloween items are on sale. The number of cauldrons and seasonal baking items in here has jumped up significantly.

A screenshot of part of a Google search results page for the search "silly git." Where an AI Overview would normally appear, instead there is the text "An AI Overview is not availalbe for this search."

It feels oddly like an accomplishment to discover that some Google searches defy AI Overview.

Last month, Congress voted to end public media’s federal funding. Now, local stations across the country are at risk of going dark.

That’s why we built adoptastation.org — a simple way to support a station in need.

Adopt one. Spread the word. Save public media.

Neglected to realize that a mini food processor would be about ten times as high-pitched as a full-sized one, and it seems nobody in the reviews I read thought that was notable. Might have to dig out the ear plugs next time, but at least for today's efforts we have cilantro pesto.

I love #showmeyourknits and am excited to see #sewandtell develop!

Here is my first quilt!

😂

Just came across a Reddit thread from a few months ago, and sheesh — how did I not even get the final NaNoWriMo email announcing its official shutdown? Maybe it slipped into my spam folder and became a sacrifice to the cruel internet gods.

Well. The past 12 months have been quite A Year.

Is anyone else mildly obsessed with the daily LinkedIn games? They are literally the only reason I go on LinkedIn well above 90% of the time.

Overheard

This thread will always deserve a place in my heart and my life.

Belatedly, but still.

Encountering that news item (not here on Bluesky) seriously ruined my day. 😔

So ... we did it again! The July 2025 issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics is now ready for your enjoyment! At 415 pages, we hope that there is something in it that will appeal to everyone. Please check it out! #mathart #poetry #openaccess #mathishuman

scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/

Right? Also the combination of aesthetically pleasing and delicious is one of my favorite things.

Oh, dear. I just discovered corzetti. I really, fairly direly need to locate whatever box contains my pasta machine.

And now in my excessive relief I have used "somewhere" twice in as many sentences, lest I be in danger of feeling overly competent. 😆

Not in my usual range of topics on here, but I had to commemorate it somewhere. Not even joking, I'll probably set a yearly reminder for myself somewhere. You have no idea* how annoying it has been to me for all the time I've been unable to do that.

* (Probably.)

I have the urge to use all caps here, but I'm restraining myself. Feel free to imagine a shouting level of excitement for the next sentence: I have played a partial barre chord.

That may be the first time I have successfully played any kind of barre in all the times I have tried across the years.