Georeactor Blog

I have a few ideas for what to read next / over the Christmas break / train ride back to Chicago. I might bring a huge Mark Twain biography and one book that's partway done? TBD.

I'm currently putting together a video about tumbleweeds. The one factoid that I 'know' about tumbleweed is that it came to the US years after the Wild West. I planned to highlight newspaper accounts of this plant spreading across the US, but was surprised to learn:

• There were two plants existing in the US already which botanists and press called "tumbleweeds", and Russian thistle was recognized as something new and worse.
• The explanation on Wikipedia for when, where, and how it arrived in the US was more or less known in 1894.
• Russian thistle was blamed on Eastern European migrants, especially Mennonites. Rumors circulated that they grew thistle to feed their livestock, or planted it to retaliate against a landowner.
• The government was often seen as distracted on in denial of tumbleweed as a threat.

Sometimes I think that my YouTube experience is closer to giving Ignite talks, sometime I think it's more a gambling interaction more like crypto and stocks. For 2026 I am thinking I should post less often and try to learn more professional audio and video tools.

Going back to my old topic from last year for a moment - Bloomberg attempted to write an Alice Guo article (paywalled so I didn't read). Every few months someone thinks this story which will take off outside the Philippines, and it never does. Days later, Guo was sentenced to life in prison.
An associate Cassandra Ong was released between Senate sessions and there's conflicting evidence on whether she's still in the Philippines or escaped to Japan somehow.
I recorded a low-quality update for my old channel and this received many more views than my newest science videos =(

Characters

After the National Geographic Out of Eden Walk was waylaid in Myanmar for covid, and after three years in China, Paul Salopek spent the past year walking in South Korea and Japan. He skipped over Russia recently by taking a container ship from Yokohama to Vancouver.
A Japanese walker with a handcart recently crossed over the Darien Gap with the help of a guide: https://www.instagram.com/p/DR0rduzkoCW/

Bugsy Sailor ('the sunrise guy') thinking about how long his thing will be photographing the sunrise every morning: https://www.interlochenpublicradio.org/podcast/points-north/2025-11-21/the-sunrise-guy

Mark Sabbatini, the indie news editor who was expelled from Svalbard in 2021, founded the Juneau Independent this summer.

Saw Malala's book talk in Chicago. I should've waited and included this in my character blog post, because omg. When she walked out on stage my overwhelming thought was that she's a normal person, like you would see on the train.
In 2025 a Chicagoan might have these questions:

• Wouldn't it be crazy for Malala to try deep dish pizza?
• Imagine college and dating when you already have a Nobel Prize?
• Malala would never skip a class, right???
• (for less informed) Who is Malala, did she live 100 years ago?

From the book tour announcement, the goal was to "reintroduce" Malala the person. Malala and her husband are involved with sports for girls, she is a mental healthcare role model (note: SouthAsianTherapists.org). Classic Malala spoke at the UN, but 2020s fame is a different thing, isn't it? What if she could be funny and relatable online? And she could give advice about studying and friends and bad relationships? And of course she will be serious Malala for a bit, too.

I understand that she will be "Malala" her whole life, and she gets to decide who that is. We're gathered in a theater laughing at her college screw-ups because she's a singular figure, but I still don't believe that she has all the answers? A girl in the audience asked a question about romantic love and platonic love, and it was so earnest but horrifying, like when a coworker's kid asked me if I believed in God. The audience was maybe mostly younger kids (plus a high school club) so Malala didn't tell the bong story.

Shifting gears,
The President Show ran in 2017–2018 and is a strange rewatch. It's weirdly prescient except for how invested it was in Russiagate. Anthony Atamanuik (the creator and Trump impersonator) continues to be in some TV and internet media but seems have distanced himself from the Trump character. In 2021 he talked about losing a lot of weight after.

• Containing The Outbreak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjStUJzYkYM
• The President Gets Evicted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53nyFuGdlEk
• "I declassify everything I touch" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw1QSIVid4E

Previous Reads, Notes, TV, Etc.

Pluribus mentioned muscle memory 👍

I finally watched Mythic Quest after trying its more famous standalone episodes a few times. I was describing it to my brother as comparable to The Office? There are a few things tethered to time (NFTs, Covid) but they're more about how those influenced gaming and not super dramatic or a slice of life. It's doesn't try to be realistic or crude or set up big stakes like Silicon Valley.

Robert Jackson was named as one of the justices who objected to desegregating the Supreme Court's holiday party in 1947. After years of smaller events, the Court's first all-hands holiday party took place in 1959: https://ballsandstrikes.substack.com/p/the-alarmingly-racist-history-of

There was a long new urbanism / childcare discourse on BlueSky about whether too many kids are driven to school. School buses are limited in Chicago, I think because this is a neighborhood schools or a city bus thing?
People showed a chart of transport to school, but it jumps from 1969 to 2009, allowing everyone to make up their own theories about what changed and when. There must be better data out there. As an example of a more recent data point, in 1975 my dad had a paper delivery route.

Listening to The Financial Diet, there was an interesting point that mass media happened to sprout in the post-war period and gave us norms of a nuclear family, stay-at-home mom, picket fence, etc. This was actually a weird decade compared to what families would often experience before or after. The guest gave an example of going on a Laura Ingalls Wilder road trip and seeing the 'dugout house' which was just their family living in a hole in the ground. Then I listened to the Wilder podcast which was cool.

Netflix's lawsuit against director Carl Rinsch uncovered that he spent six figures on a super-high-end mattress. This adds to my theory that you can pay any amount for a mattress. Kitchen knives are also like this! You buy it very rarely, and all you know about pricing is not to go too cheap (unless you have to).
What else is this true for? Maybe shoes?

"The Master Plan", a play about the failure of Google / Sidewalk in Toronto, returned again for several shows in October. If I'm more vigilant maybe I could see it in Toronto sometime?

OTR did another Indonesian cuisine video on Makassar and the Wallace Line. When I was there for a few days I had an issue with my credit card and little idea of where to go, so the one super-local not-pan-Asian dish that I ate was ayam palekko (which is Buginese). The horse meat place was in my neighborhood, but the newest reviews are from only four months ago.

A narrative from a parent getting their kid an urgent cancer diagnosis, with AI chatbots giving them background information. I jumped ahead 24 minutes to "AI's First Intervention". I think one more important point was the idea of how the AI can read results from home mold analysis and the kid's medical tests in a way which would be difficult to set up as a conversation between human experts.
This person has a negative experience being opposite family members relying on AI for health advice.

A new CBS video connects Korean fried chicken to Black soldiers, while a Netflix documentary points to Yu Seok-ho, who was inspired during his studies in the US in the mid-70s.
After reviewing a few articles, it looks like there has long been a theory connecting fried chicken to the Korean War / later US presence in Korea / Thanksgiving, but connecting it to Black soldiers is more recent, like extremely recent. As examples, this 2017 article in Smithsonian Magazine covers the origins of Korean fried chicken, the US military connection, and a new store in DC and doesn't mention it. This Reddit thread from February 2022 has over 100 comments, and the one mentioning African-American soldiers was only added in summer 2022.

The Remembering Yugoslavia podcast had an interesting episode on books and the Non-Aligned Movement, particularly an interest in travelogues, and business and decolonization with Indonesia (even after Indonesia turned anti-communist).

At the airport I read a long New Yorker article on Hilma af Klint, an early 20th century abstract artist and theosophist who I knew nothing about. What struck me about this is the family foundation, theosophists, feminist and queer art historians, etc. everyone has a take on this artist and new archival content based on where and how they want the paintings shown today. I'm also noticing a trend of people mentioning a 2020 'pandemic project' years later.

Another article mentioned Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play which depicts a post-apocalyptic group trying to remember an episode of The Simpsons, later performing it as a traveling theater company, and decades later it's evolved somewhat nonsensically.
I haven't watched The Simpsons but know enough to be interested by the premise. The script was writen after The Postman but pre-Station Eleven, which both have post-apocalypse traveling Shakespeare. I watched a performance on YouTube, and wasn't fully on board? I wanted the dialogue to weave between the two concepts, and the final act seemed far too removed.

The Graduate, the hotel in Cornell's Roosevelt Island NYC campus, suddenly closed without explanation. It was great to stay, plus it had Disney-level theming around Roosevelt Island.

Spanish Civil War tour comments on shift from male to female tour groups: https://bsky.app/profile/spaincivilwartours.bsky.social/post/3m65iqixqd22o

Discussion about 'lah' being OG Malay and misconceptions that it was imported from a Chinese dialect. https://www.reddit.com/r/bahasamelayu/comments/1p080s5/lah_is_from_chinese/

Tissue culture underworld for rare plants https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dk3uSLxMI4

Angry jury cannot come to a decision in Ethereum trial https://xcancel.com/NeerajKA/status/1987287864829243513

An update on Gaza Sky Geeks: https://restofworld.org/2025/gaza-sky-geeks-bombing-rebuilding/

"Inks & Paints of the Middle East" getting a revision with some Oxford research https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/majnouna/inks-and-paints-of-the-middle-east/posts/4529816