In Summary: * At the half, Indiana Fever has a comfortable eleven point lead over the Seattle Storm. Of course, there's still a lot of basketball to play before the game ends.

It was fun following my Texas Rangers this afternoon as they beat the Houston Astos this afternoon, 8 to 0.

When the basketball game ends it will be time to apply myself to the night prayers then put my old self to bed. That's my plan for the remainder of this Sunday.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 235.9 lbs. * bp= 140/83 (60)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:45 – 1 banana * 07:20 – 1 seafood salad sandwich * 10:30 – lasagna * 15:15 – fried bananas w. white sugar, 2 cups of hot chocolate

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:40 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:50 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap, * 10:30 – watching “Replay Rundown” on MLB Network * 11:30 – watching old episodes of Classic Doctor Who * 13:00 – now following MLB, Rangers vs Astros * 15:40 – And the Rangers win, 8 to 0. * 15:50 – watching a documentary on recovered bodies from at least four different extraterrestrial species in crashed UFO incidents. * 16:40 – watching preview for tonight's WNBA game, Frever vs Storm

Chess: * 11:00 – moved in all pending CC games

People of all ages and backgrounds come together outdoors, connecting ideas and technology to illuminate the diverse and collaborative nature of AI innovation.

Okay, this will probably sound controversial, but that's not my intent. I'm just sharing my thoughts because AI is everywhere right now, especially on social media and in blog posts.

These views range from fairly neutral:[1] – Manton Reece – Tom Casavant – Paul Thurrott – Richard Campbell

To fairly positive, with the idea that you need to learn or use AI because... – Jim Mitchell – Numeric Citizen – Leo Laporte – Hey Loura – Ricardo Mendes

To more negative views, often focused on whether AI's value proposition can actually justify the money being spent: - Ed Zitron

People tend to frame the debate as two opposing camps: camp 1 wants nothing to do with AI, and camp 2 wants to hand it control over everything. I live in a quieter third camp. Most people are actually somewhere in the middle, but we don't shout as loudly. I see both the risks and the benefits. AI has let me try things I never would have had the courage to try, and it's helped me grow and learn about technology in ways I likely wouldn't have otherwise.

The loudest voices are camps 1 and 2, yet it's usually the middle camp that makes the real decisions when it counts. So maybe camps 1 and 2 should learn a little from us: camp 1 could be a little less rigid, and camp 2 could be more realistic and grounded.

AI is not going away. It may become less democratized. We are already seeing token, credit, and time limits, but those feel like temporary bumps. Many limits are at least partly artificial, and they may ease as the tech and business models evolve.

Given current politics here and abroad, tearing people down doesn't help. If AI isn't being used to create false narratives or spread “fake news,” people should be free to use it or not. I don't support blanket punishments for anyone who used AI to edit, help, or build something. That kind of hard-line stance, and labeling anything non-factual as “slop,” isn't productive.

The larger economic issue is real and has been building for decades. Automation started with the paperless office and industrial robotics. Robots and AI will continue to displace jobs, and that's a societal and political problem we need to solve now, not shrug off with “it's not my problem.” It's not necessarily tomorrow's crisis, but it's coming in the not-so-distant future.

Job losses mean less tax revenue, and corporations and wealthy individuals are skilled at finding legal ways to reduce taxes, wages, and benefits. We should rethink corporate structures and the single-minded focus on shareholder value. A shift toward an employee-and-business-first model would make more sense. After all, without a functioning business, you don't have shareholder value, and without employees, you don't really have a business unless you fully automate. If companies replace workers with machines and still expect high shareholder returns, they may under-invest in the equipment and long-term stability that would make that strategy sustainable.

That's my two cents. I don't think we should be tearing people down for using technology that helps them, that they pay for themselves, and that helps them communicate and complete their vision.

For full transparency, this post contains my thoughts and my opinions, and it was edited and proofread with AI. I made, directed, and approved the changes. AI helped organize my wording and corrected my spelling and grammar. It did not write this post, create the ideas behind it, or shape my feelings or thoughts. That, to me, is responsible AI usage.

I could not afford to hire an editor or an artist for this post, or every other post, to make a feature image. I told the AI what I wanted for a feature image, and it made it. I think it did an amazing job bringing my prompt alive.

1. I am using “views” broadly here. Some examples come from specific blog posts, while others come from podcasts, videos, comments, or general public statements I have seen or heard. ↩

#ai #opinion #technology

John Fortunato 340 pages Minotaur Books (2015)

Tl;dr summary: Disgraced Special Agent Joe Evers delays early retirement by taking on a decades-old cold case with big political implications.

Read this if you like: Tony Hillerman, gritty mysteries, conspiracy theories

See the book on Bookshop

Here's the thing about tropes: there's a reason why they're popular. Yes, they can be overused, but they're also highly effective and enjoyable to read when they're employed correctly. I don't think any genre exemplifies this fact quite as clearly as mystery, and the washed-up detective trope is admittedly one of my favorites. I love a good flawed hero, always root for the underdog, and will rarely turn my nose up at a redemptive arc, so if a story can hit all three of those points I'm probably going to enjoy reading it. 

And Dark Reservations did just that. The protagonist, special agent Joe Evers, is about to be forced into an early retirement after a grief-induced downward spiral. But then he lands one last major case: discovery of new evidence in a high-profile cold case that could send him out on a high note, if he manages to solve it before his retirement becomes official. And, just to add some extra tension, the victim in the cold case is the missing-presumed-dead husband of Grace Edgerton, a politician who's currently the front-runner in the New Mexico governor's race. It's trope on trope on trope—but it works, because everything makes sense together. John Fortunato uses tropes here in the smart and productive way, as shortcuts to get the reader up-to-speed on the character and situation so they can jump right in on the action and how that character are plot are going to develop. 

I don't want to send the impression that I found Dark Reservations derivative or predictable, either. The story's setting on a Navajo reservation adds another layer of complexity. As Joe digs into the cold case, he realizes that Arlen Edgerton's death was likely connected to the theft and illegal sale of artifacts that belong to the reservation. And not just any artifacts. Their existence is the only thing that verifies controversial research published by Professor Lawrence Trudle, which proposes a connection between the Aztec empire and the Anasazi of New Mexico. His theory was widely dismissed by established archaeologist, and he was made a laughingstock, without the discovered artifacts to prove his assertions. Adding to the conspiracy, Trudle suspects that the then-president of the Navajo nation was involved in the theft, along with a prominent and well-connected art dealer. These aren't necessarily the kinds of complications you expect to have come up in a cold case murder mystery, and they were unexpected in just the right way for me. The interweaving of reservation politics, alongside Joe's personal life travails and the usual justice system drama you'd expect from a police procedural style crime story, really upped the excitement and entertainment level of the story. 

Of course, I was predictably most into the artifact side of the story. In part because my interest piques whenever archaeology enters the chat, and especially when it's one of the Mesoamerican cultures I'm mildly obsessed with. But this was also a very fresh angle to bring to the equation. The “shadowy crime organization” is another trope that makes fairly regular appearances in this style of narrative, but usually those mobs trade in things like drugs or arms or people. Shifting the focus to stolen artifacts also means it deals with a different set of moral questions about the commercialization and exploitation of indigenous culture. The thread with Rushingwater and the fight to get the People of Diné recognized as an independent country reinforces this tension, while also introducing an element of chaos at exactly the right moment to ramp up the story’s pace. 

From a craft standpoint, something I was paying close attention to in this book was its voice and the pacing of the prose. This book is an excellent example of how clean and straightforward writing can still be literary in its attention to language. It's simple in the kind of way that reads effortless but probably took a lot of time and care to craft. This is also reinforced by the structure. The interpolation of very quick scenes in between longer passages gives it a very cinematic kind of pacing, and the descriptive language within the scenes reinforces this. Most importantly, the writing never gets in the way of the story, and every word feels like it was chosen with a mind to building the character and sense of place first. I'd say it's definitely a strong example of a mystery novel that is also literary.

Overall, this is a very satisfying read. I don't want to say much about the plot progression or ending to avoid the risk of spoilers, but suffice to say it kept me interested and invested the whole way to the end, which is something else I think is very important for books in the crime/mystery genre. I've now read a couple of books from Minotaur and they've consistently delivered. This one in particular I'd absolutely recommend—obviously for folks who are into police-centered mysteries, but also for fans of archaeology and readers of literary suspense. 

 

See similar posts:

#BookReviews #Literary #Mystery

Hello again. Hope you had a great weekend.

While you were at home with the family, POTUS was promoting a reading of the bible. He said it was a great optic. This was his portion of the program to push an idiotic idea that the country was founded by christians. This is the christian nationalism program. During the Covid pandemic POTUS stood in front of a church with a book in his hand. He said it was a bible but could not say if it was his own, probably because it was just a prop.

Nothing could be further from the actual truth. The founding fathers were deists. They believed is an unknowable god, certainly not a christian one. This is part of the infamous Project 2025 which wants to force the population into a single religion. They want to remove the portion of the constitution which prevents promotion of any faith.

This is just another reason that this POTUS and his supporters need to be removed from positions of power before they destroy the democracy and your rights get taken away.

Thanks for reading my posts. If you want to see the rest of them, please go to write.as/potusroaster/archive/ Please tell your friends and family if you like them.

BODY WORLDS Wrocław — Facebook-Ad image-grid, May 2026. HIGH NOTE EVENTS sp. z o.o. / Institut für Plastination Heidelberg. Captured for analytical use under §51 UrhG / art. 29 PL Ustawa o prawie autorskim.

The 1992 Robert Zemeckis film Death Becomes Her gave Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn a magic potion that preserved their bodies forever while their flesh kept on dying underneath. The gag was that you could keep the form while subtracting the substrate. A Facebook ad on a Wrocław feed in May 2026 advertises something close. The exhibition is called Body Worlds, the current edition is The Cycle of Life, the venue is IASE on Wystawowa 1, the run has just been extended to the 30th of June. Four photos: a chess player, a cowboy figure with a hat, a school group looking into a vitrine, a posed body with parents and children standing in front.

The text of the ad reads, in Polish, autentyczne eksponaty — ciał i narządów przekazanych przez dobrowolnych dawców do Instytutu Plastynacji w Heidelbergu 🙏 — authentic specimens, bodies and organs donated by voluntary donors to the Institute of Plastination in Heidelberg, with a prayer-emoji. This is a translation that is not a translation. The German Demokratisierung der Anatomie (the democratisation of anatomy — Hagens' own slogan since the 1990s) does not appear; the Polish phrase is prezentacja naukowa (scientific presentation). The Lutheran-Reformation history that gave the German slogan its weight is unavailable here as a resonance-chamber, so the slogan is quietly replaced by its secular-scientific cognate. Heidelberg, however, makes the trip intact. Its name in the Polish feed is doing two jobs at once: it anchors the donor-consent frame, and it answers a question the ad never asks aloud — where else, then, do these bodies come from.

BODY WORLDS Wrocław — Facebook-Ad text, May 2026. Heidelberg-Attribution + Prayer-Emoji quoted analytically above. §51 UrhG / art. 29 PL.

Donor consent is the moral hinge of the entire operation. The Heidelberg programme has nearly twenty thousand registered donors, mostly German, who have signed away their bodies during their lifetimes. In the slogan's logic, this is enough to make everything that follows acceptable. It is also a specific anthropological position dressed as a universal one. The body owned sufficiently to be disposed of after death is the body C. B. Macpherson called possessive-individualist — a self related to itself the way an owner is related to a property. Other anthropologies have other answers. The body held in trust because it was given. The body that belongs to the relational fabric of the living, who carry obligations to it that cannot be signed away in advance. The body partly withdrawn from disposal because death generates a dignity that survives the person.

The consent-anchor presents one position as natural and makes the others unsayable without an argument. The Menschenbild — the conception of the human person an institution operates with, even when it doesn't say so — is here without being named.

The ad lands very quietly in Poland. The resonance-chamber that in Germany would have spoken at length about this — the Lutheran ethics commissions, the dignity-jurists, the medical-ethicists with institutional standing — is configured differently here. The Polish episcopate has issued no position. The political parties across the spectrum have not raised the question. The academic bioethics chairs, where they exist, have produced isolated individual interventions rather than a consolidated voice. This is not a verdict on Polish capacity for critical reflection. It is a structural fact about institutional configurations: a hegemonial-majority church does not produce dignity-statements the way a minority church under public Stellungnahmepflicht (statement-duty) does; a parliamentary system without an established bioethics-rapporteur does not generate the same case-law pressure that a federal system with three legal tracks generates. The ad arrives without the apparatus that, in another configuration, would have surrounded it with thirty years of argument.

Back to the picture. The plastinates are posed — chess, cowboy, dancer-attendant, family-group exhibit. The cycle of life of the title is performed through these poses, and what the poses share is what they exclude. Not one of the four figures is shown frail. There is no Pflege-Bedürftigkeit (the state of needing care), no terminal weakness, no body that has been visibly given up to dying. The anatomist Andreas Winkelmann at the Charité pointed out two decades ago that classical anatomy required a geschützter Raum (protected space) — closed, mediated, conducted under conditions that preserved the precarious tissue between the donor and those who would learn from the donated body. The exhibition removes the protection and keeps the body, and what it shows in compensation is a body shaped to be looked at by anyone, by which it has had to become a body without the iconography of actual dying. Meryl Streep's character in 1992 would recognise the formula.

Form preserved, substrate quietly removed, the question of what is left declared irrelevant.

Hagens describes himself as an Erlebnisanatom — an experience-anatomist, coined from Erlebnisgesellschaft, the sociological diagnosis of a German late-modern experience-society. He has said that in such a society he must communicate emotionally. The muss does a lot of work in that sentence. A historically specific situation — one country, one decade, one sociological diagnosis — has been quietly refitted as a professional necessity. Other anatomists go on teaching in lecture halls without posing dead chess players. Other communicators of medical knowledge goon running textbooks and open-access platforms and dissection courses.

The muss is a commercial decision to operate in an emotional register, dressed up as a sociological law.

The legal move is the most consequential. Hagens has explained that plastinates are Strukturelemente des menschlichen Körpers ohne Leichenqualität — structural elements of the human body without corpse-character. The phrase does not describe a property of plastinates; it relocates them out of the legal regime that protects corpses. If the plastinate is not a corpse, the burial law does not apply, the post-mortem-dignity provisions of the criminal code do not apply, and the carve-outs the jurist Brigitte Tag has spent decades developing — a conditional toleration of plastination only where consent, post-mortem dignity, and public sentiment are jointly preserved — become unnecessary. An ontology has been declared in juridical clothing. The Polish ad has no need to repeat the move because the Polish legal field around plastination is empty in any case. An industrial process with production sites in three countries does not require a great deal of explanation when there is nobody specifically tasked with asking.

The ad's text promises a full arc: Od pierwszych komórek, poprzez rozwój płodu, dojrzewanie, aż po zmiany ze starzeniem się organizmu — from the first cells, through fetal development, maturation, to the changes of an aging organism. The four photographs do not. The cycle of life made visible in the image-grid is the commercially serviceable middle: an athletic figure in a cowboy hat, an athletic figure at a chess board, schoolchildren peering into a glass case, a posed figure with parents and small children. The first cells and the foetus are in the prose, absent from the picture. The aging organism is in the prose; the figures do not show it. The Cycle of Life is, in the ad, the part of the cycle that is comfortable to look at on a phone screen between other Facebook posts.

None of this is unknown. A dense German-language academic literature on Body Worlds goes back to the late 1990s. Stefan Hirschauer's 2002 essay on plastination called the plastinates Scheinlebendige — the seemingly-alive — and traced the operations of denial they perform. The 2001 edited volume Schöne neue Körperwelten, with Brigitte Tag among its editors, contains a chapter titled Von der herrenlosen Sache zum kommerziellen Objekt — from the ownerless thing to the commercial object — that did the value-form analysis these ads still require. The 2017 paper Kapitalistisch verwertbare Körper in Soziale Passagen updated it. The Duisburg Institute for Linguistic and Social Research has been mapping the discourse for decades. The analysis is in print, in German. What is missing in Poland is not the analysis. It is the political and organisational uptake that would carry it across.

The same Menschenbild travels from Heidelberg to Wrocław unchanged. A self that owns the body sufficiently to dispose of it. A body posed in agency-vocabulary, with frailty edited out. A juridical category designed to release the body from the protective regime that would otherwise surround it. A pedagogical muss that converts a marketing decision into a sociological law. These are not four separate operations. They are one operation seen from four angles, and they describe one kind of person: optimised, agentic, post-mortally disposable, available for educational entertainment under conditions that no longer require asking very much. The German configuration has had thirty years to argue with the package and has produced jurists, sermons, parliamentary questions, court decisions, a small library of academic books. The Polish configuration is meeting the same package now, in the form of a Facebook ad with a prayer-emoji and a link to a ticket vendor. The package itself is identical.

The chess player will be in IASE on Wystawowa 1 until the 30th of June. Visitors will see what the image already shows: a body posed for the encounter, with no day in it that looks like the last day of a body. Streep's character drank the potion for what she thought would be eternal youth. The donor signed for what they understood as anatomy education. The visitor buys a ticket. What is the body walking into the exhibition room agreeing to?

Earlier we ate coal buns by the grill outside, I sat in the folding chair with a beer in my hand and the scarf — a neon coloured keffiyeh, which I bought off the thrift store, it pulled me to it, as I was hunting for a suit for a forthcoming wedding, me now having literally outgrown the ones I have — on me watching the embers and the flames, feeling them warm my face, and I thought that this is the life I want to live

A dog on each side, sitting in this comfortable folding chair, in the bright early summer late evening

It is here I want to sit

It doesn’t sound like much, maybe, but it took me all my life to get there.

Berschad ist eine kleine Stadt in der Zentralukraine, im Osten des Oblast Vinnytsia. Es gibt alles was mensch braucht: Kino, Theater, Parks, einige Restaurants, 3x pro Woche ist Markt, Supermärkte, Bekleidungsgeschäfte, Apotheken, ein Krankenhaus, Stadion, usw. Außerdem liegt die Stadt wunderschön am Wasser, an den Flüssen Dochna und Berladynka.

Der Markt findet dienstags, donnerstags und sonntags statt. Dann erstreckt er sich auf mehrere Straßen im Stadtzentrum, sowie 2 Markthallen. In den Markthallen gibt es vor allem frisches Fleisch, dafür braucht es einen stabileren Magen. Und sonst gibt es einfach alles zu kaufen. Frisches Obst und Gemüse, Samen, Jungpflanzen, Käse, Wurst, Brot, Kleidung, Elektronik, Gartenbedarf, Blumen, an sich braucht es keinen Supermarkt mehr. Da es hier kaum möglich ist von der staatlichen Rente zu Leben, verkaufen auch viele ältere in kleinen Mengen eigenes Obst und Gemüse, Apfelchips (sehr lecker), Kräuter usw. Es ist auch ein schönes zusammenkommen, die Leute kennen sich hier ;)

Überhaupt möchte ich betonen, dass die Obst und Gemüse Sorten hier andere sind, als wir sie in Deutschland / in der EU kennen. Insbesondere Karotten sind einfach richtig süß, und so viel leckerer. Allein deshalb lohnt es sich schon, mal hier her zu kommen, und den Schritt aus der EU zu wagen ;)

Die Stadt ist nicht sehr groß, und trotzdem wurden große, schöne öffentliche Flächen am Wasser geschaffen. Dort ist es richtig schön und ruhig. Eine davon ist die Insel Antalka. Sie liegt nicht zentral, aber noch nahe. Eine große, bewaldete Oase, komplett von Wasser umgeben. Am Wasser gibt es viele schöne Orte zum Grillen, viele sind hier zum Fischen. Dass mensch hier an so vielen Ecken in Ruhe am Wasser sitzen kann finde ich richtig schön und erholsam. Flora und Fauna ähneln dem was ich kenne, aber bei genauerem Hinschauen auch wieder nicht. Vorgestern haben wir einen Igel gesehen, der sah von weitem gleich aus, wie ich sie aus Deutschland kenne, aber seine Beine und das Gesicht waren doch anders geformt, und in einem schönen dunkelbraun.

Im Zentrum gibt es das Haus der Kultur, ein großes Theater. Dort waren wir auch bei einer Vorstellung von “Yachta Kochanja” (Yacht der Liebe). Ich hab nicht alles verstanden, aber genug um immer wieder mitlachen zu können. In dem Stück haben einige sehr bekannte Schauspielis mitgewirkt, der Krieg führt auch dazu, dass die Kultur mehr auf kleinere Städte und längere Touren ausweicht. Da die Gefahr für Luftangriffe in den großen Metropolen erheblich höher ist, werden kleinere Städte auch zum Wohnen wieder attraktiver. Katja ist als der Krieg angefangen hat wieder nach Berschad gezogen, ihr Freund aus Kyiv. Keine Einzelfälle.

Und trotzdem, auch aus Berschad sind Leute ins Ausland geflohen. Wenn wir abends durch das Stadtzentrum laufen, sind die Straßen recht leer, viele Fenster sind dunkel. Das war vor der russischen Vollinvasion anders. Auch wirtschaftlich hat sich seitdem viel verändert. Meine Gasteltern haben in ihrem Geschäft z.B. vorher 10 Personen beschäftigen können, jetzt nur noch 3.

Im Folgenden möchte ich zeigen, an welche Ereignisse in Berschad erinnert wird, und wie. Dies soll stellvertretend für die Geschichte der Ukraine stehen. Erinnert wird in der Ukraine ebenfalls klassisch mit Denkmälern. Im Stadtzentrum ist neben einem Park eine schöner grüner Platz entstanden, an dem mit Abstand an folgendes Erinnert wird:

• Holodomor (Völkermord durch Verhungern, von der Sowjetunion an der ukrainischen Bevölkerung begangen)
• Holocaust – im Bezirk Berschad wurden 24 000 Juden* von Nazis und rumänischen Nationalisten ermordet
• Tschornobyl – das ist ein ganzes Stück weit weg von hier, aber auch den Helfenden aus dieser Region wird Gedenken geschenkt. Der letzte Eintrag ist von einem Toten 2025.

Ein Stück weiter ist ein Denkmal an die toten Soldaten der Weltkriege, im sowjetischen Stil. Am zentralen Platz ist ein Denkmal für die “Nebesna Sotnia” (himmlische Hundertschaft) – die Toten der Euromaidan Proteste 2014. Dazu kommt ein Stück weiter das Gedenken an die gefallenen und vermissten Soldaten seit der russischen Vollinvasion. In vielen anderen Städten werden große Fotos der Held*innen gezeigt. Es ist schon verrückt, wie viel davon zur Lebzeit meiner Gasteltern passiert (ist), und Perestroika und die orangene Revolution wurden dabei noch nicht berücksichtigt.

---

Berschad is a town in central Ukraine, in the eastern part of Vinnytsia Oblast. It has everything you need: a cinema, theatre, parks, a few restaurants, a market three times a week, supermarkets, clothing stores, pharmacies, a hospital, a stadium, and much more. On top of that, the city is beautifully situated by the water – along the rivers Dochna and Berladynka.

The market takes place on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, spreading across several streets in the city centre as well as two market halls. The halls are mainly known for fresh meat – not for the faint-hearted. Otherwise, you can find pretty much everything there: fresh fruit and vegetables, seeds, seedlings, cheese, sausage, bread, clothing, electronics, gardening supplies, flowers – a supermarket almost becomes unnecessary. Since it's barely possible to live off the state pension here, many elderly people sell small quantities from their own gardens: fruit, vegetables, apple chips (really tasty!), herbs, and more. But the market is also just a lovely gathering – people know each other here. 😊

I also want to emphasise that the fruit and vegetables here are just different from what we know in Germany or the EU. Carrots, for example, are genuinely really sweet and so much more flavourful. That alone makes it worth coming here and taking the leap outside the EU. 😄

The city may not be very big, but it has created some beautiful public spaces by the water. One of them is Antalka Island – not quite central, but still easy to reach. A large, wooded oasis, completely surrounded by water, with lots of lovely spots for barbecuing and fishing. Really peaceful and idyllic.

In the centre stands the House of Culture, a large theatre. We attended a performance of “Yachta Kochanja” (Yacht of Love) there – I didn't understand everything, but enough to laugh along regularly. Several well-known actors were involved in the production. The war has led to culture increasingly shifting towards smaller cities and longer tours, as the risk of air strikes in the major metropolitan areas is considerably higher. This is also making smaller cities more attractive to live in again – Katja moved back to Berschad when the war started, her boyfriend came from Kyiv. Not isolated cases.

And yet: many people have fled Berschad for abroad as well. When we walk through the city centre in the evening, the streets are fairly empty, many windows dark. Before the full-scale Russian invasion, it was completely different. A lot has changed economically since then too – my host parents used to be able to employ ten people in their shop; now it's down to three.

In what follows, I want to show what events are commemorated in Berschad – and how. This is meant to stand as a reflection of Ukraine's history more broadly.

Next to a park in the city centre, a lovely green square has been created where – with clear distance between them – the following are remembered:

• Holodomor – the genocide by starvation carried out by the Soviet Union against the Ukrainian people
• The Holocaust – in the Berschad district, 24,000 Jewish people were murdered by Nazis and Romanian nationalists
• Chornobyl – far from here, but the helpers from this region are also commemorated. The most recent entry is from someone who died in 2025.

A little further on stands a Soviet-style memorial for the soldiers who fell in the World Wars. In the central square, a memorial honours the “Nebesna Sotnia” (Heavenly Hundred) – those who died during the Euromaidan protests of 2014. And a bit further still, the soldiers killed or missing since the full-scale Russian invasion are remembered. In many other cities, large photos of the fallen heroes are displayed for this purpose.

It's both impressive and deeply unsettling how many of these events fall within my host parents' lifetimes. Perestroika and the Orange Revolution can be added to that list as well.

---

Denkmäler: Holocaust

Holodomor

Tschornobyl

Weltkriege

Himmlische Hundertschaft (Euromaidan)

Helden der russischen Vollinvasion aus Berschad

Eindrücke von der Insel Antalka

Ausblick vom Stadtpark, schön

weniger schön: (#Danger of a single story / picture)

Geschäft meiner Gasteltern Osvita (Bildung)

im Theater

Stadtzentrum

This afternoon I have a baseball game to follow: my Texas Rangers vs the Houston Astros, scheduled to start in just a few minutes.

And a little later today I'll have a basketball game to follow: my Indiana Fever vs the Seattle Storm, scheduled to start at 5:00 PM CDT.

And the adventure continues.

« L'omniprésence de la mort, l'habitude des deuils, la dévalorisation de la vie noire, l'exposition à l'aliénation, à l'expropriation et au génocide lui donnent une signification particulière. Il s'agit moins d'une forme-de-vie que d'une forme-de-mort. Non pas un refus de la mort, une absolue volonté de survie, mais une capacité à habiter la mort. Vivants parmi les morts ; morts parmi les vivants. L'une des raisons de la ténacité des populations noires partout où elles ont eu à subir des violences démesurées tient à leurs propres traditions de pensée. S'ils étaient déshumanisés, abandonnés à un flou entre la mort et la vie, leur dignité résidait dans des imaginaires, des ontologies, des visions de la mort et de la vie qui les rendaient aptes à faire face à ces catastrophes. »

— Norman Ajari, Le manifeste afro-décolonial, p. 57

When We Meet

In justice and forgiven This is Paris- and we stood ahead By the wheels that govern By the stormy willow And Earth to the Sun A tilted view

But a bit of light Would soften our ark And a tiny pillow For you, little bee

Adjusted rain And those reticent tombs Off with Africa At forty degrees

The stall was wet And we made it in Fortune is first In that strange gene of isle

But to better forward And in one’s measure It was Ptolemy here Escaping the impossible Making rounds to within I donned another will In making pair- To thy crossing heart

A maze with you Our together ally Rely on the Lord This plebiscite last

And older people Subjugated less But storms of our capture The currency Earth

For rod to bedlam Made to deliver This deluge of rain Will capture us all

And we were in sync And together that day Now is new And we are still here Our promised day

Together first The Sun is through to me And I know you, my lad Together home And first to Tibet The other day and then I would find you a river To apprehend any favour As justice and forgiven.

For Ace of Base.

Another lunar cycle finds her rhythm. The old brown leaves fall off the tree, and new green buds appear on stems.

I have been attending so-called “town-hall discussions”, in various industries; and cherishing precious moments with friends, and (chosen) family.

I would like to present a haiku from a friend:

no one said the road was easy; but no one said it was not joyful

And today, someone lent me colour markers and I enjoyed myself by playing with them:

As an acquaintance has reminded me:

“Just an ordinary island, with ordinary people, living ordinary lives: what an extraordinary day!”

bookshelf

1. Will Guidara. “Unreasonable Hospitality: the remarkable power of giving people more than they expect”.
2. Dr. S.E. Aw. “Chats with Uncle Loh: First Aid in Theology”
3. Gail Sheehy. “Passages in caregiving: Turning chaos into confidence”.

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That's all, folks! I wonder: what will the next lunar cycle look like, for you and for me? How exciting!

#lunaticus

Stay entertained thanks to our Weekly Tracker giving you next week's Anticipated Movies & Shows, Most Watched & Returning Favorites, and Shows Changes & Popular Trailers.

Anticipated Movies

• Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War
• Colony
• Ladies First
• Passenger
• Tuner
• ☆ Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
• I Love Boosters

Anticipated Shows

• You're Killing Me
• In the City
• Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed
• Kylie
• ☆ The Boroughs
• Mating Season

Returing Favorites

• ☆ Fauda — Season 5
• Game Changer — Season 8
• The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch — Season 7
• Bad Thoughts — Season 2

Trending Shows Status Changes

• Outlander — Returning Series → Ended
• Perfect Crown — Returning Series → Ended
• Good Omens — Returning Series → Ended
• Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine — Returning Series → Ended
• Born with Luck — Returning Series → Ended
• The WONDERfools — Returning Series → Ended
• The Neighborhood — Returning Series → Ended
• DMV — Returning Series → Canceled

Most Watched Movies this Week

• +1 Project Hail Mary
• new The Punisher: One Last Kill
• -2 Apex
• -1 The Drama
• = Ready or Not: Here I Come
• -2 The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
• new Remarkably Bright Creatures
• +1 Swapped
• -2 Hoppers
• new Mortal Kombat II

Most Watched Shows this Week

• = The Boys
• = FROM
• +1 Euphoria
• +2 Your Friends & Neighbors
• +2 Marshals
• +2 Tracker
• +3 For All Mankind
• new Rooster
• new Widow's Bay
• -7 Daredevil: Born Again

Popular Trailers

• In Theaters May 22 — Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
• In Cinemas Now — The Sheep Detectives
• In Cinemas June 3 — Masters of the Universe
• Legends Review — The Devil Wears Prada 2
• Working In The Grey — In the Grey
• Due to popular demand... HIT ME HARD AND SOFT: THE TOUR (LIVE IN 3D) continues its cinema run! — Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D)
• Jon Bernthal is The Punisher — The Punisher: One Last Kill
• Final Trailer — Dutton Ranch
• Get Tickets Now — Scary Movie
• Always be aware of your surroundings, you’re never truly alone. — Passenger

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Hi, I’m Kevin 👋. Product Manager at Trakt and creator of Rippple. If you’d like to support what I'm building, you can download Rippple for Trakt, explore the open source project, or go Trakt VIP.

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