Blog Post

The Best Dinosaur Discoveries of 2025 - Did you know that 44 new dinosaur species were discovered just this year? This article highlights 4 of them. There's also a video about one of the discoveries, Spicomellus afer, that's well worth a watch.
Cloudflare Error Page Generator - If you've ever wanted to make your own Cloudflare Error Page, here's your chance! I am not an IT person but I have lived with IT people and I appreciated this one.
Experiment to train rats to play Doom reaches a new level - What do you do once DOOM has been installed on anything that didn't run away fast enough? You teach rats to play the game. And then improve on it!

Ceelo's mama picked him up earlier today. It was such a treat having him for a whole week! I miss having a kitty so, so much. Unfortunately there are a few things preventing me from having my own kitty right now. I watched him 3 times over the last few months. His mama doesn't have any future travels planned, but you never know! She had me keep his stuff (toys, food) just in case another trip came up and he needed catsitting again.

I still haven't gotten more floss to complete my one cross stitch project and I haven't gathered the nerve to cut my other one so I did the only reasonable thing and started a new project. Well, it's actually an old project from my stash. Sometime around 25 years ago I bought a Dimensions Sunset cross stitch pattern called Bag Ladies which featured fluffy cats in paper bags. How cute, right? I stitched very little on it before setting it aside. I'm not even sure why I put it aside but after unstitching the little I did (because I couldn't for the life of me figure out what I had been doing) I realized that I must've set it aside because even though it's cute, this pattern is bullshit. There aren't confetti stitches at least (random single stitches) but there are SO MANY blended threads! And also so many little blocks of color! This is not the kind of pattern I'm used to dealing with. I have never had multiple needles threaded and ready to go with a project but I do now. I'm working on it for now but if I get too aggravated with it, I might be pushed into actually buying floss or cutting my other project.

Listening

Some podcasts I've listened to this week:

Absolute Units - Flying Your Drone Through a Michelin-Starred Polytunnel

Reading

I finished up the historical romance I was reading last week, The Protector by Madeline Hunter. I liked the main female character - she was very independent despite the times and maintained that even after the romance started. Not really sure how I felt about the main male character in the beginning because he came on kind of strong but I feel like things evened out in the end. I mean, it's a 25 year old historical romance and, while it wasn't a bodice-ripper, it was still of its time. If I wanted a more consensual book I guess I either need to read more modern mysteries or maybe not read historical mysteries where consent doesn't seem to really play into the setting. And I'm not sure where these feelings of mine are coming from! I read plenty of problematic bodice-rippers in the 80s and quite enjoyed them! I guess it's the "curse" of age and becoming more aware.

I checked out 2 e-books from the library, both of them from series I'm rereading. The one I'm actively reading is The Hippopotamus Pool by Elizabeth Peters, the 8th book in the Amelia Peabody mystery series set mostly in Egypt in the late 1800s/early 1900s. I also checked out The Lady Chapel by Candace Robb, the 2nd book in the Owen Archer medieval mystery series.

I also still have a couple books to read from when I went on a spree buying author-recommended books. I started Skyla Dawn Cameron's The Taiga Ridge Murders but that's a read-in-the-daytime book and every time I think about picking it up, it is not daytime. I will have to make an appointment with myself to read it while the sun is up! I'm about halfway through Librarians in Space, the anthology book.

And, as if I didn't have enough on my plate, literary-wise, I bought some more e-books because of those darn authors promoting other authors' works. They look really cool, though! No Precious Truth by Chris Nickson is the start of a new WW2 series featuring Police Sergeant Cathy Marsden working for the Special Investigative Branch in 1941 Leeds. This story involves espionage, subterfuge and double agents. I like spy stories and I'm very much looking forward to reading this!

The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed is a horror fantasy fairy tale. I have read it may involve feral unicorns and definitely reanimated deer.

Watching

I watched episode 10 of Crusade which leaves me 3 more to go. I mentioned a few blog posts ago that I felt like maybe the show was finally developing into something and it is! (Right in time for it to end forever.) The characters are getting less wooden and it's not so painful to watch. When I asked Best Son what he thought of the series he said it was sad to see what it could have become and I'm getting that now.

I've watched a couple of really great YouTube videos this past week that I'll share with you. One was a PBS Newshour interview between John Yang and Temple Grandin. I've heard of Temple Grandin before and read a little about her work but I've never seen her interviewed. The interview was in honor of her portrait being placed in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. If you don't know who she is, she is very well known for developing humane cattle-handling methods which are now widely used and for being active in animal welfare guidelines. She is also autistic. This was a short 10 minute interview but it was so fascinating that I watched it again and took notes I could share with you.

She developed a squeeze machine for herself to apply deep touch pressure to relieve anxiety. She based this on watching how cattle were calmer once they were in squeeze chutes prior to being vaccinated. You can look up "Temple Grandin squeeze machine" and find out more about it.
She started on her development of cattle handling methods by literally getting down on the ground and viewing things as the cattle did. She says this plays into her strength of being an object visualizer. She thinks visually and was surprised when she realized other people didn't think this way. She calls her autism her superpower because it's her object visualization skills that have led to her achievements.
Her latest book, Visual Thinking, discusses the research on the different types of thinkers - object visualizers, mathematical pattern thinkers and word thinkers. She says she's worked with undiagnosed autistic people who are object visualizer thinkers and work in machine and welding shops, inventing, building and patenting mechanical devices but they also can't do higher math because that's not an object visualizer skill. Object visualizers' strengths are in the arts, photography, animals and mechancial things, not abstract math.
She's concerned that people who have all these other skills but not the math skills are being screened out of the educational system and out of jobs.
A child's strengths should be encouraged based on what type of thinker they are. Children shouldn't be forced to sit in class and work on skills that are basic to them just because that's where the rest of the class is because that leads to bored and then disruptive children. They need to be challenged.
She received early childhood education (she was born in 1947 so this surprised me!) and stressed the importance of this. She said the early childhood education taught her the ability to wait and take turns during games, she was taught language, and basic skills like getting dressed, brushing teeth, etc. It's all about building strengths but you need basic skills before you can build upward. She's worried that too many kids are getting on waiting lists for this type of learning too late.
She also explained that during her childhood, even though she was autistic, her mother had high expectations but also allowed for accomodations. She related a story where they had to take a ferry and when the ferry horn blew she threw herself on the ground and started screaming. Her mother said riding the ferry was an expectation but that to accommodate Temple's needs she would be allowed to ride in the cabin underneath so she wasn't bothered by the horn. I love this illustration of expectations and accommodations! I think it would be a useful trick for any parent to learn.

Anyway, those are the notes I took but if this subject matter interests you at all I would *highly* recommend watching the interview. I'm not autistic nor is anyone in my immediate family but there's a lot of great information in this. I also think maybe this really touched me because of Best Son. He's not autistic but he was diagnosed ADHD when he was in 4th grade. He was always so very smart but if something didn't interest him, he just would not do it. And he often got distracted during school (and "disruptive") because of this and I felt like he was getting a reputation as "that kid." I eventually pulled him out in 6th grade and homeschooled him. He still attended junior high and high school for 2 classes a day and went to a technical school for computer courses so it wasn't all on us. I don't know that I'd necessarily recommend homeschooling but his needs and his strengths weren't being addressed. The system just kept trying to shove my poor little square peg in a round hole.

The other video I watched that I found super interesting was Cults & the Culting of America w/ Knitting Cult Lady. I don't follow this creator but she pops up in my feed every now and then. She herself actually grew up in a cult (Children of God) and then as an adult joined the Army (or, as she says, joined another cult). She's now separated from service and spends her time being a radical knitter. In this video she speaks with Dr. Bryan Pitts, Assistant Director of UCLA’s Latin American Institute. So many people compare the current situation in America to 1930s Germany (with good reason, I think) but Dr. Pitts says what you really want to look at is the Brazilian military dictatorship that lasted from 1964-1985 because that offers a more relevant parallel. It was a fascinating talk! The video description has a list of key takeaways if you're interested but maybe not that interested and want to TL;DR. If you want to read Dr. Pitts' book, Until the Storm Passes: Politicians, Democracy, and the Demise of Brazil's Military Dictatorship it is for sale BUT you can also download a free copy from the University of California Press here.

Oh, one more thing. You may have heard that the magazine Vanity Fair did a series of interviews and, more importantly, took photos of the people in the White House. I've watched a couple of explainers from photography people breaking down the composition of the photos that were taken and I was just amazed. There's a lot of vids out there doing these commentaries if you want to take a look but the 2 I watched were from Matt Richardson and Jessica Stansbury. I'm not one to parse out details like this but once they pointed out certain things (lighting, crap in the background, purposefully crooked shots) I was just like, wow.

This was a long one this week! Congratulations if you made it all the way through! I'll be back on Wednesday with a super dope and somewhat mysterious tiara.

When I first started using Zonelets I had Disqus set up as a commenting system but it looked obnoxiously ugly and I ditched it. Some people are happy to not have blog interaction but I'd love to hear from you if you have any thoughts you want to share! You can respond through my guestbook or email. If you found this link on Discord or the 32-Bit Cafe Discourse, you can message me there or leave a message on my Neocities profile page.