Lisa Schmeiser
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lschmeiser.bsky.social
Lisa Schmeiser
@lschmeiser.bsky.social
2.2K followers 580 following 4.3K posts
Editor in Chief, No Jitter; podcast @ The Incomparable; writer of an intermittent Substack (lschmeiser.substack.com); parent/partner/community volunteer/aspiring long distance swimmer.
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lschmeiser.bsky.social
Evergreen:
An April 12m 2019, tweet from Pranay Pathole reading: tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart. Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.
February 3, 2026 at 7:43 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
Finally had a chance to read the @adamserwer.bsky.social piece in the Atlantic, and what great timing to read this passage after watching Chuck Schumer today.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
A second MAGA assumption is that the left is insincere in its values, and that principles of inclusion and unity are superficial forms of virtue signaling. White liberals might put a sign in their front yard saying IMMIGRANTS WELCOME, but they will abandon those immigrants at the first sensation of sustained pressure. And in Trump’s defense, this has turned out to be true of many liberals in positions of power—university administrators, attorneys at white-shoe law firms, political leaders.
January 28, 2026 at 11:09 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
Forty years ago today: A snow day, me baking cookies, my dad calling home to tell us to turn on the television, and the incomprehensible sight of the Challenger blowing up. I remember reading "High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee Jr. in the wake of the news.

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/157986...
A six-panel Bloom County strip where a pair of boys is trying to help a penguin fly; over each panel, the poem "High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee Jr.: Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there, I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air .... Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or even eagle flew— And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
January 28, 2026 at 9:21 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
I am, as always, reminded of the passage in @greatdismal.bsky.social's "Zero History" dissecting competence cosplay. What we're seeing in some quarters is profound semiotic confusion because the signifiers of competence/exclusivity are being stripped of meaning for these guys in real time.
‘It’s an obsession with the idea not just of the right stuff, but of the special stuff. Equipment fetishism. The costume and semiotics of achingly elite police and military units. Intense desire to possess same, of course, and in turn to be associated with that world. With its competence, its cocksure exclusivity.’
January 26, 2026 at 6:31 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
Relevant:
A Twitter screengrab of Pranay Pathole's 4/12/19 tweet: Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart. Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and i keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.
January 26, 2026 at 6:15 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
It will surprise absolutely nobody that the United States is the only United Nations member state to refuse to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Here are all the rights of children our nation refuses to recognize: www.unicef.org.au/convention-r...
A graphic depicting the 54 separate rights of the child as outlined by the United Nations and ratified by literally every nation on Earth except the one peopled by the kind of dolts who voted Donald Trump into office twice.
January 22, 2026 at 1:09 AM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
TIL Clem Fandango is WUTHERING HEIGHTS, so I am now interested in the movie and the remote possibility of cameos from Ray Purchase and Stephen Toast.
A schamcy and schlocky character posrter of Shazad Latif as Edgar in Emerald Fennell's sure-to-be-schmexy adaptation of WUTHERING HEIGHTS
January 21, 2026 at 9:01 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
I will be teaching an afternoon session at our Girl Scout council's all-day training on Saturday, which requires me to assemble a slide deck, an informational medium I am still trying to master.

Anyway, here's my slide for when I ask participants about their experience level:
A screen capture of a Google slide titled, "Before We Get Started: Where Are You In Scouts?" The left is a picture of dippy Danny and Sandy at the end of GREASE; they are making funny faces while seated in a car. The right is a picture of Mia Wallace and Vincent Vega, post-overdose, in Pulp Fiction. One is meant to show the freshness of new volunteers, while the other shows how the teens will put you through it.
January 21, 2026 at 7:28 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
Giving big "You stay classy, San Diego" vibes
Ron Burgundy, a satirical newsman who has been embraced unironically by dullards who don't realize they're being mocked for their EVERYTHING, holding a drink -- the prototype for "Whiskey Fridays with Tony Whatisface." I don't care enough to memorize how that guy spells his name.
January 13, 2026 at 10:12 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
If corporations are people, it's clear that under U.S. law, some people's rights to profit as possible supersede anyone else's rights to live at all.
EPA to stop considering lives saved when setting rules on air pollution: In a reversal, the agency plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits, and not the monetary value of saving human lives.
January 12, 2026 at 10:42 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
Rhetoric like this leads directly to laws like the Taliban has imposed on Afghani women.

Never forget: Now that the modern GOP has successfully eliminated women's healthcare, they're coming for our financial autonomy and ability to participate in public life.
Look at this dumb little FB post that reads -- Stop the Madness: "What we are seeing across the country as organized gangs of wine moms use Antifa tactics is not civil disobedience. It iseven even protest. It's just crime," writes David Marcus.
January 11, 2026 at 11:24 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
It's like the ICE agents in Portland read this and failed to understand it was satire.
A screenshot of Kristi Noem -- Mar-A-Lago Face front and center -- beneath a headline from satirical publication The Onion reading, "DHS Warns Any Action By Americans Will Be Treated As Domestic Terrorism."
January 9, 2026 at 2:42 AM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
Tonight, I will be reviewing the Declaration of Independence, starting with this passage:

www.archives.gov/founding-doc...
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
January 8, 2026 at 1:20 AM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
Banger of a headline from the Financial Times:
A screencap of a Financial Times article's headline that reads, "Who’s who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter."
January 6, 2026 at 6:13 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
A screen grab of the very useless good place committee congratulating one another on the memos they send in perpetuity.
January 4, 2026 at 12:52 AM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
The Mean Girls meme, "she doesn't even go here"
December 27, 2025 at 8:26 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
This is the second screen of wholly fact-free Google gibberish. Note that the "beloved symbol of [Smuin's] unique holiday magic" is, in fact, the long feather boa worn during the annual "Santa Baby" number, something that has actually been reported: www.sfgate.com/entertainmen...
Literally nothing on this screen of AI-generated nonsense is factually correct, or actually addresses my query.
December 23, 2025 at 5:51 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
Note that in 8 years of going to the ballet, I have never once seen a number based on "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy," and the dancers do not wear hockey jerseys. I CAN confirm that there's no Nutcracker-esque numbers because I have 8 years of programs & tracked all numbers via spreadsheet.
The incredibly fact-free Ai summary of Smuin Ballet hockey sweater, clearly generated as frontier gibberish extracted from patterns.
December 23, 2025 at 5:51 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
I was going to treat myself to a purchase of this movie to get in the mood for the season but alas, it's only available to rent.
A screengrab of the Apple TV store, where it is a sorrow and a pity that the 1968 Christmas classic, "The Lion in Winter," is not available to be purchased, merely rented or available to stream on BFI Player Classics. Which is serious and enduring horsecrap.
December 23, 2025 at 12:09 AM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
Included for your delectation, two screens in which literally nothing is correct, accurate or useful.
Part of the Ai generated results in which Google alleges, incorrectly, that the Smuin hockey sweater is a beloved holiday tradition. Part of the Ai generated results in which Google alleges, incorrectly, that the Smuin hockey sweater is a beloved holiday tradition.
December 21, 2025 at 4:30 AM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
How one estranged mother reacted when her child did not invite her to their wedding The timing!

(the article: www.wsj.com/lifestyle/re...)
A resident of Old Saybrook, Conn., Wellington opened TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube accounts, launched a podcast and wrote a memoir—self-published on the weekend of her daughter’s wedding—called “Doormat Mom, No More! When Good Parents Finally Say ‘Enough’ to Their Ungrateful Adult Kids.”
December 16, 2025 at 5:39 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
Trend forecasters looked at things like this and decided the white-stuff aesthetic was fine to tack into. Not the millennial-coded "stuff white people like" (including performative diversity). White as an explicity rejection of diversity & a move to aesthetic conformity:
An instagram post where a tradwife influencer shows three white children weaing white and because they have different colored hair, captioned it with "we have all the diversity we need."
December 5, 2025 at 8:19 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
All of these things are possible because retailers offer them. Or, as was brilliantly encapsulated in "The Devil Wears Prada":
This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue. It's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner…where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact…you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room…from a pile of "stuff."
December 5, 2025 at 8:19 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
So the gendered coding is fundamental to fascism -- as is the factually incorrect narrative that we've fallen from some peak, homogenous civilization. The Nazis loved invoking the ancient Greeks for this reason; we have AI glurge about 1950s housewives:
This hilariously terrible meme features a blonde woman who appears to be little more than a beauty queen in an apron stirring a bowl of much while her children gaze adoringly and her husband whispers the Stepford phrases that keep her compliant.
December 5, 2025 at 8:19 PM
lschmeiser.bsky.social
November 24, 2025 at 9:13 PM