Kate Cox

Given what a HUGE number of emails during the Consumerist era (2013-17), to both me directly and also the tip line, were people asking for help with their Facebook or Instagram accounts... I feel like this just highlights how neat it would be for customer service to exist, with online platforms.

A random question inspired by thinking about Hadestown (the musical), Hades (the game), and Stray Gods (the game): Is there any performed version of the story / character where Orpheus *isn't* a very high tenor?

Perennial complaint that the Amtrak boarding process in NYC is patently insane and it doesn't have to be this way

The coinflip game I am now playing in my work inbox: "Is this an AI agent, or the worst possible low-English outsourcing money can buy"

Okay well now that it's confirmed real I'm mad. (Before mostly I was just sad.)

Ren Faire with two kids is a very different kind of tiring than faire with my college buddies was lol but at least we got to be outside on a perfect day

Elisabet is deeply engrossed with today's news, apparently

The McDonald's Monopoly game is *really* cheap and stingy this year and I legit feel like that's a big economic indicator

Steam is a deeply imperfect platform but *man* I wish literally any other platform had similar family sharing, being a two-adult-gamer-plus-teen-gamer household is a real pain in the butt to organize sometimes

About three months as an "assistant director of education" for what turned out to be a very sales-oriented, exploitative private tutoring chain. I called my mom and shouted "GREAT NEWS!" when they fired me.

We started watching Avatar: Seven Havens (short thoughts: I like it) and the 13yo *really* likes it and the concept of having to wait a week for another episode of a show she loves is so foreign to her that she cannot STAND it haha, she is now convinced all years prior to ~2015 were the dark ages.

This is a thing I think about a lot, that your data (privacy, texts, DNA, voiceprint, image, all of it) are only as safe as your most credulous, least thoughtful contact makes them. Seems suboptimal!

After a glorious week of having the windows open nearly all the time, we've finally had to shut them again... not to turn on the heat but to turn the A/C back on instead. October wyd

Honestly? I'm into it. Kind of reminds me of 'A Knight's Tale' in that sometimes the mood and rhythm of a thing are way more important than period details. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDJ-...

We are trying Avatar: Seven Havens tonight and *wow* does it give off Heaven's Vault vibes in the first episode lol

I am fortymumble years old but the weather outside is such prime October that I still want to be like "Mrs Teacher, can we have class outside?"

Why have I had a Holst suite for wind band in my head for two days and why isn't it even one of the fun parts on repeat

"If only there was something warm I could hold to make my fingers warm. And like... drink it?" Tea, I've just invented tea, good job brain

Took me until just about now to work out that this (and similar) image going around is why I've had the Animaniacs theme in my head for 24 hours and the background loop in my brain is thinking about how animation brought vaudevillian musical tropes all the way into the 90s

I realized last night, talking the 13yo through a project she's doing, that the BIGGEST thing I learned through 19 years of formal education and 15 years as a journalist is: NARROW YOUR SCOPE And at the 8th grade end of that funnel, she still wants to answer all the questions at once lol

The Wrath of Khan. Three years old, it turns out, is too young for that. Even on scratchy VHS on a small TV.

I think the October of it all is getting to me: even though it's rainy and humid out today I bought a half-dozen apples of five different varieties at the grocery store this morning and now I have an apple crumble in the oven

I very deeply appreciate how the school nurse at my chaos-prone 8yo's school starts all the calls with, "It's not an emergency and [kid] is fine" before getting to the, "HOWEVER..."

It's not even that I care what the visual language of my Firefox is, it's that changing it means all my muscle memory is 5% off-kilter from reality for a few days and dammit I did not need that this morning, my connection to reality is already sufficiently askew

"the new version... relocates the power button from the bottom of the e-reader to the top right edge ... prevent users from accidentally putting it to sleep when resting the e-reader on something while reading." Look, JUST BECAUSE I do this at least 3x every single day is no reason to call me out

And this is why I want to keep my 2014 car until roughly the end of time, if possible. www.theverge.com/transportati...

There is a giant walnut tree next to our house and the fun thing on days like this, where it's fall but it's warm enough to have the windows open, is that with the offscreen thumps, rolls, and distant crashes it's like there's a foley artist practicing on our roof all the time

Okay, 'Coyote vs Acme' was indeed excellent, absolutely a spiritual successor to Roger Rabbit, but also I left the theater trying to explain the line 'one must imagine Sisyphus happy' to a 13yo lololol

I do in fact send emails like this all the time haha. ( @nickstatt.bsky.social and I kind of had a good cop / bad cop routine going for a while with unreasonable requests lol but after a year of that, the requests mostly got more reasonable ) www.tiktok.com/@decoderpod/...

There is apparently a very small fly in the house and one of the cats just did some kind of capoeira-ass parkour move about it -- and yet, did not get the fly.

I'm not sure if having our children learn co-op through Portal 2 play was the best idea or the worst idea but it sure is an experience

13yo working on a school project just basically came to me with the ask "how do I find meaningful archival news sources on the internet" and I don't think I have ever felt such a strong sense of MY TIME HAS COME as a parent before lolol

I was part of a different blog commenting community that formed ca. 2008 and 18 years later, about 100 of us are still all in touch every day, we've been to each other's weddings, we've babysat each other's kids; it's a *community* and it was cool when blogs could spawn that.

A conversation this morning led me to reflect on just how many influential games and game series will celebrate their 20th anniversaries next year and I just... I think maybe I need to crawl into a ditch and stare at dirt for a while or something, gazing into the abyss is tiring

I woke up to discover a gift from a friend in my Steam inventory. This was her note. The last time she left me such an instruction the game was Blue Prince lol so now I'm wondering what I'm in for. (This one is The Incident at Galley House.)

ICYMI over the weekend, we ran an extra bonus episode after my own antitrust-nerd heart. My favorite line: "If you don’t build a safe and secure product, then perhaps there should be robot jail for your agents and it should be taken off the market.”

My problem with letting the 13yo dye her hair colors is not actually her hair or her appearance, it is that I just had to de-blue half my kitchen and I am pretty sure she's just gonna be smurf-colored on her neck and face for a while

@megmorrone.bsky.social Hey, congrats on the new gig! <3

Some software update I didn't notice has now turned my mouse into a waveform display device when I'm reviewing audio / video cuts lol, how unexpected and distracting

Back at Consumerist I wrote a snarky-but-really-tho post for Jan 1, 2016, written from a decade into the future (e.g. 2026) and talking about how Amazon became the streaming cable company of the Great Rebundling Anyway, 💅