notes

1. I've finally started watching The Handmaid's Tale. Not trusting Hulu, which makes you sign up before it'll even show you what it has, I found the series as a purchasable item on YouTube, $19 for the season, which is more than a Hulu monthly subscription, but it doesn't make you sign up and then, if you don't want any more, cancel. Besides, it will take me more than a month to get through this, I'm sure. More on this then. Interesting music choices.

2. Alabama, living down to its stereotypes. Remember Weird Al's "A Complicated Song" and the verse in which he learns that his girlfriend is his cousin? "Should I go ahead and propose and get hitched and have kids with eleven toes and / Move to Alabama where that kind of thing is tolerated?" That sort of stereotype.

3. Blaming city development policies for the Silicon Valley housing shortage. This is backwards. Cities are actually eager to approve new housing; it's residents who are protesting, and their protests are mostly based on the lack of transport infrastructure to handle additional traffic. Of course, those residents are also opposed to transport improvement proposals, but then those proposals are mostly stupid. Fact is, building more homes won't solve the crisis, it'll only increase demand. Which isn't to say we shouldn't build them, just ... it won't solve the crisis.

4. A commenter elsewhere on a link to my Tolkien filming rights post says that the rights question isn't in doubt. But that's because the post that I'd linked to just finished establishing that.