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Good afternoon, Portland! Time to turn the desk lamp on at 10 am; the city's gray skies have returned! Let's take some holistic mood enhancers and check out the ding dang news.

IN LOCAL NEWS:
• In September, a jury awarded $40,272 as compensation for unreasonable force used on a woman working as a medic during the 2020 Portland protests. Tomorrow, Portland City Council will vote on whether it should award $47,500 to another Portlander for injuries she sustained during a similar incident. Mercury News Editor Alex Zielinski has the story.

• While Measure 114 won't "turn guns into knives," as some have asserted (no one has asserted this), opposition isn't merely coming from pro-gun conservatives. A number of people who generally support strengthening gun laws don't like it either. Abe Asher reports the story for the Mercury.

• OKAY, YOU GOT ALL THAT? READY TO VOTE? 

IN ART NEWS:
• Chain Tripping, the 2019 album from former Portland electro-pop group YACHT, was created using AI technology. It turned into an unexpectedly cumbersome process that involved converting their previous recordings into MIDI files and gathering their own song lyrics and those of Weezer, Dirty Projectors, and Kraftwerk, among others. The whole fascinating journey became the subject of The Computer Accent, a documentary that will screen at the Whitsell Auditorium tonight, prior to a live performance by YACHT. 

• If you caught any of Margo Cilker's four (!) sets at Pickathon over the summer, you'll want to note her recently announced show at Mississippi Studios—and check out this brief profile on Cilker, her 2021 album , and how we lost another Oregon folk singer to Washington.

IN SEX NEWS:
• And now for everyone's favorite regular Savage Love installment: Quickies! Asexuality, it's a spectrum! Divorced bi-curious woman on the East Coast, you come first! Get Dan's advice and GTFO.

• MORE SEX NEWS? YES, WE HAVE SOME MORE. Do you have fond memories of sitting in a darkened theater and watching hilarious short films of amateur porn shorts—a little bit funny, a little bit sweet, a little bit teaching you things you never knew?—well the Mercury is offering one more chance to see the hot + horny Hump 2022 films.

IN NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL NEWS:
• Conservative Party member Rishi Sunak took over as Britain’s prime minister today. He's the third to fill the position in seven weeks. The New York Times expects Sunak to pull Britain back to more mainstream policies.

• Representatives of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are backtracking a letter they sent to President Biden yesterday, which asked about exploring diplomacy with Russia—a possible war to end the war created by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The caucus' leader Rep. Pramila Jayapal said the letter was drafted over the summer and released without vetting.

• We noted Leslie Jordan's sudden passing yesterday, but this note from queer filmaker Leo Herrera seems to capture something ineffable. Sure, Jordan was a unique comedic spirit and a daily joy to many of us during the pandemic lockdown, but he also represented queer longevity, vitality, and an indomitable heart. 

 
 
 
 
 
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A post shared by Leo Herrera (@herreraimages)

• A New York Times' Popcast episode about a new Taylor Swift record is one of life's great pleasures. I'll never forget the one where a roundtable of critics and editors—Caryn Ganz, Joe Coscarelli, Jon Pareles and host Jon Caramanica—described an evening where they all read the four different reproductions of Swift's handwritten diaries that accompanied her 2019 album Lover, furiously writing notes into a shared web document. Anyway, the Midnights episode has arrived!

• Hold tight, folks and don't lose heart. It's election season, so it's easy to get discouraged. This too shall pass.