Kate Watson
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loreandordure.com
Kate Watson
@loreandordure.com
Smallholder, writer, erstwhile vetn'ry, PhD student, ADHD+, lexicographer & alleged Pratchett witch.
Letterpress, photography & digital/analogue miniatures.
Long Covid victim. She/they.
🖋️ https://loreandordure.com/
🖼️ https://ko-fi.com/loreandordure/shop/
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For your collective delectation this holiday season:
Quite possibly the silliest thing I've ever written (and definitely the most ridiculous graph I've ever made!)

loreandordure.com/2025/12/16/j...
Jingle Bells (Batman Smells): an incomplete festive folk-rhyme taxonomy
Gather round the fire, everyone, and let me tell you a story. It has everything you could want in a Christmas blockbuster: superheroes and villains, a car crash, children singing, a mystery to solv…
loreandordure.com
Reposted by Kate Watson
I lost my job and had to give up my health insurance when the premiums exceeded $40,000. But at least I know some of those uppity student loan borrowers will have their wages garnished starting next month.
December 26, 2025 at 5:58 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
Come on man you can't do stuff that's so trite it's been a bumper sticker for like 30 years
December 26, 2025 at 5:57 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
And you can't possibly stop using Paypal/Venmo and Amazon, right?
Well done to jazz musician Chuck Redd who canceled the huge Christmas Eve concert he has hosted at the Kennedy Center for 20 years in protest of the orange felon illegally/corruptly adding his disgusting name with President Kennedy.

Love this. 💙👊
December 25, 2025 at 8:36 PM
That’s no billionaire, that’s a fully leveraged asset.
December 26, 2025 at 6:17 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
That’s it. I’m doing it. I’m going to do the Marxist-to-finance-ghoul move like some filthy Trot. My goal? To invent the first big tech bubble since the dotcom era that involves a strategy besides “so first, you buy a shitload of GPUs from my friend Jensen”
December 26, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
Stranger Things' final season releasing in chunks with the finale being the last one and also being offered theatrically is very funny to me. Netflix bumbles into figuring out that spreading a show out keeps the conversation alive and that you can get money from people going theaters
December 26, 2025 at 3:44 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
12YO girl signed up to do “stand up comedy” at the talent show. 13YO boy decided to heckle her. Teacher started to tell the boy to leave her alone, but the 12YO comedian said “no, no, let him go, this is the closest he’s ever going to get to having a conversation with a girl.”
What's an insult you'll never forget?
December 26, 2025 at 4:43 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
This reminds me of the complaints of several of the Sad Puppies. They went to conventions and were treated with the ordinary friendliness extended to newcomers and not with the instant enthusiasm they considered their due.
December 26, 2025 at 5:39 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
I'd believe this anecdote because I've met guys like this at conventions. People do ask (politely) about their work and they can't pitch it because what makes it special is that they are the specialest boy. They go to panels and hear queer and BIPOC writers talk about their work and think "ah ha". +
This shit is made up, actually
December 26, 2025 at 4:27 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
We’re fortunate to have him. 😄
The fact the Menswear Guy is actively dunking on the Bsky user base now instead of just cross-posting the threads where he does that to Twitter users should terrify all of us.
true. that's bc you've allowed your sense of style to be narrowly defined by fashion brands, instead of thinking about it in terms of cultural history. over the course of the 20th century, many groups have dressed well, even if they didn't conform to fashion trends or bourgeois respectability
December 26, 2025 at 5:52 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
I’d never heard of John Doar before. If you haven’t either, give him a google. People like this, all the allies through history, give the lie to “but those were different times”. There have always been people raised in privilege who still knew right from wrong and took on the status quo.
Well, after eight years of research, writing and revision, I just sent the full manuscript for THE DIVISION: JOHN DOAR, THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT to my publisher.

This is happening, people. Whether you want it or not.
a man with a mustache wearing a blue jacket and scarf
ALT: a man with a mustache wearing a blue jacket and scarf
media.tenor.com
December 26, 2025 at 5:37 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
Quite a lot can be explained by the plain fact that our leaders and their hangers on are *enraged* that they can’t send people to prison for doing things that aren’t illegal, and they see this as a very serious problem that needs to be resolved, urgently.
December 26, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
"Well, aktshually it's pointless criticising British arms manufacturers for selling £billions of weapons to an ethonationalist fascist state who is continuing the genocide of Palestinians at Xmas"

I am very smart 🤡
December 26, 2025 at 4:44 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
Sam Bankman-Fried changes careers! from unqualified financier to unqualified lawyer www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/n...
Crypto Fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried Has New Pursuit: Jailhouse Lawyer
www.nytimes.com
December 26, 2025 at 4:44 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
This describes a solid 50% of all the writers I talked to at the library last year as writer-in-residence
They have come to the convention hoping to "break in" and then find themselves -- shocker! -- a "nobody in the book world." Yeah no shit! We all are! I have gently told guys like this a million times that it takes most of us *years* of hard work but they do not believe that could be true for them. +
December 26, 2025 at 5:03 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
I appear to have developed a Boxing Day sandwich dependency.

Sadly, I’m being told I must now go cold turkey
December 26, 2025 at 5:19 PM
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The fact is that to this day, the top earners in genre fiction (and everything else) are straight white men.

Sure, in most cases (Sanderson, Martin, King) they’re straight white men who established themselves a looooooooong time ago.

It’s harder to break in. For everyone. You’re not special.
December 26, 2025 at 5:10 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
“Producers in the Permian Basin…produce copious amounts of toxic, salty water, which they pump back into the ground…It is creating a huge mess.”

Undeterred…

“The basin is trying to lure data centers with cheap land and energy and has plans to become a hub for burying carbon dioxide…”
"Swaths of the Permian Basin appear to be on the verge of geological malfunction."

An unfolding disaster, shielded by centrist pundits who tell us to "support America's oil & gas industry."

Here's an idea: The oil & gas industry should support America, not wreck our land, air, & water.
America’s Biggest Oil Field Is Turning Into a Pressure Cooker
Drillers’ injection of wastewater is creating mayhem across the Permian Basin, raising concern about the future of fossil-fuel production there.
www.wsj.com
December 26, 2025 at 5:07 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
Ruby Wax, further up the Jongleurs bill than my band, took us new girls under her wing in the dressing room. We later watched in adoration as she turned on a heckler and said, “Buddy, shut up. I do my act like you have sex. Alone.”
What's an insult you'll never forget?
December 26, 2025 at 4:51 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
Anyway, it’s okay to say AI was a mistake. If AI people didn’t want everything to be lumped in with the nonsense LLMs are forcing onto society, they had a decade to draw that distinction and never bothered to. Now the branding is stuck, sorry guys you have to have ideas now not just sneers.
December 26, 2025 at 1:37 PM
Though sometimes it definitely should.
Happy Boxing Day, which surprisingly doesn’t involve punching other people in the face.
December 26, 2025 at 4:55 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
Note: in history, there is more than one Galicia and more than one Iberia.
December 26, 2025 at 4:44 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
It is EXHAUSTING not only being made responsible for coming up with new kinds of assignments for our students; it's also tedious reading op-eds that suggest the core problem is a crisis in teaching. But, as Chris and I lay out here, this isn't a crisis in teaching; it's an attack on learning.
"We envision a resistance that is...a repudiation of the efficiencies that automated algorithmic education falsely promises: a resistance comprising the collective force of small acts of friction."

"How to Resist AI in Education" by me & @cnygren.bsky.social
www.publicbooks.org/four-frictio...
Four Frictions: or, How to Resist AI in Education - Public Books
We are calling for resistance to the AI industry’s ongoing capture of higher education.
www.publicbooks.org
December 24, 2025 at 7:39 PM
Reposted by Kate Watson
Public discourse on this subject has utterly failed to direct citizens' attention to the actual problem, which is that a commercial industry is assaulting education. So every week we get another thoughtless op-ed on blue books or the death of the college essay, etc etc.
December 24, 2025 at 7:41 PM