Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

The Constitutional requirement for the President of the United States is that "from time to time" he shall "give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient[.]" This has become, by custom, a yearly address, with the intention of setting agendas and celebrating victories of the previous year by the President and his legislative allies.

Given who's in the White House right now, I expected self-aggrandizement, I expected deeply partisan commentary, and I expected Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics that would be deployed in service of the other two. I expected the current administrator to be more in his element, since he didn't have to make policy pronouncements or answer difficult questions or any of the other things that generally take him away from the things he likes to do and make him work in our reality.

That it appeared to be more of a session much like the Prime Minister's Questions, rather than a speech on the state of the Union, I probably should have expected, but did not. I suspect many of the things said during the speech would probably have gotten someone censured in Hansard or any other such record of governmental procedure, as the deeply partisan part was very much something that he wanted to make a point of.

Running on the Associated Press transcript of the speech itself, let us dive in and see what horrors lie on the surface and below it. Not in the transcript are the several times in the speech where there are either chants of "U-S-A!" or Members of Congress attempting to fact-check the administrator or call him out on his falsehoods (or chants trying to drown out those checks and callouts) or the applause that followed some lines.

(Why do this, you might ask? Some of it is because the record needs to be set correctly. Some of it is spite and malice against someone who is unqualified and ineligible to hold the office he is currently caretaking. And some of it is because I've been doing this for a while, and I'm not letting this joker put me off it, not when I'll have plenty of low-hanging lies to point out.)

( To spare your list, and also because the material contained within is likely hazardous to your blood pressure and your SAN score. )

And, as has become tradition, after the administrator gives their address, a designee of the opposition policy provides a rebuttal and a counterpoint speech to the address. The newly-elected Democratic governor of Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, was chosen to give the rebuttal, and chose to do so from the house of the legislature in Virginia. This transcript also does not indicate places where there were applause breaks in the speech, but there were only applause breaks in the speech, rather than chants or trying to drown out people who were likely fact-checking him in real time.

( The Democratic response is much more grounded in the reality we are experiencing )

In a much shorter form, the response speech was more relevant, more important, and more accurate than the speech that preceded it. If the Democratic Party is willing to actually say the message, at the level of crudity and honesty that it requires, with the volume it requires, and with the repetition it requires, they should be able to instill in that part of the country that doesn't want open authoritarian and fascist government the necessary will to punch Nazis in the face, as many times as it takes to get them to go away, in as many ways as they present their face to be punched.

If we want to say the state of the union is strong, then fisticuffs, metaphorical and possibly physical, are in the cards for everyone. If we're feeling generous, Queensbury rules.

Let's begin with What Massachusetts schoolchildren came up with as names for their snowplows, which have some very delightful puns in them. (I also wonder if some of them were submitting "Abolish ICE" as something, and it might have been rejected for being too political.)

If you are looking for a single spot to find good organizations to support the resistance against the occupation of the State of Minnesota, Stand with Minnesota will help you find places that can use your spare resources. Their testimonies tell you about what life in Minnesota is currently like during this occupation, and they have news outlets and spaces to keep yourself informed of the real situation happening, rather than parroted lies and talking points dreamed up by an administration that desperately needs control of a narrative if they want to convince us that Minnesota has once again gone rogue in some way.

They're linked in Naomi Kritzer's guide about how to help Minnesota and prepare your own communities for your turn at the invasion. Additionally, the guide for helping from inside the cities.

Understand that abolition is not "better training," it is not "reduced funding," it is not "the system is working, but these actors have decided not to follow the system." Abolition is the need to completely get rid of a thing, because it is toxic to the population, and the situation we are currently in is because we have not yet managed abolition of state structures, or state-supported structures, the encourage violence against not-white people.

( A lot about Minnesota, in its ways and nuances, but also about other things in the United States and abroad )

Last out, A community legend in FromSoft's Elden Ring: A player with a request to solo a difficult boss, asking to be summoned in, who wears nothing but a pot on their head and wielding two katanas.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have decided the Oscars, including all of the pre-show coverage, will be exclusively streamed on YouTube starting in 2029.

A single rubber dick from a box of discount sex toys 1, the extremely fragile masculinity that resulted in violence and attacks on those who distributed the single rubber dick in their direction, 0.

And, at the very end, a letter signed by more than 400 millionaires and billionaires asking the governments of the world to tax them appropriately so they can provide revenue for the rest of the world to have a good standard of living.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

snowflake_challenge would like us to recommend to others a way in to finding a place in a fandom that we're already part of.

Challenge #14

Create a promo and/or rec list for someone new to a fandom.

The two of those things are quite different, I might note. The promo is about trying to get people into a fandom based on the strength of the canonical materials (whether the smart writing, the intricate plot, or the hotness of the actors), and the rec list is about getting people into a fandom (or at least the transformative fandom part) based on the fanworks that are available to someone. Neither of these methods are inherently wrong, but depending on your approach, someone might get into the fandom with radically different ideas of what the source material or the fandom is about. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, but approaching something from the fannish side might make you suspect there's more nuance and depth to the source material than there actually is.)

Anyway, since I am both not very good at collecting new fandoms and not very good at getting and remembering works in the fandoms I have, this would normally leave me in a pickle about what to do, except I have plenty of older fandoms and recommendations for you that will make up for my utter lack of newish fandoms for you to experience.

( Pern, RWBY, Into the Woods, In Other Lands, Long Live Evil )

snowflake_challenge would like us to take a moment, for challenge #12, and appreciate the people who make life better for you in your fandoms.

Challenge #12

Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song… whatever moves you!

( I am not a rock, but neither am I someone who is in a great amount of community. )

Finally, I say this almost every time I talk about it, not because I believe that she'll ever come across it, but if that moonshot ever does happen, I want her to know it with certainty: Caroline, if you're still out there, we love 9th Elsewhere. And while we hope that maybe you'll pick it back up and bring it to a close, what we really want you to know is that the journey that Eiji and Carmen have taken holds a special place in all of us, so thank you for what you've done. I hope that knowing you have people who are fans and who have found this particular journey meaningful helps you with your own life, wherever you may be, and whatever you might be doing right now. I would love the opportunity to discuss umbrella-related poses with you again at some point.

The snowflake_challenge has put out challenge number 10, and it works in media that I generally do not think in nor work in.

Challenge #10: Big Mood (Board)

CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).

( I suppose I can make a fanmix for El Higgins? )

Let us begin with an annual roundup of things that had to be removed from rectums, because people make bad decisions about objects without flared bases.

Trans women whose culture includes the quinceañera are celebrating the rite of passage for themselves as an important touchstone of their lives.

A white suit worn by Kate Mulgrew as Captain Janeway in a Star Trek: Voyager episode is about as loud a billboard declaring Janeway queer as you could get away with on television at the time. I get to be part of the Lucky 10,000 in understanding that suit and its origins, and so, hopefully, do you.

People familiar with the culture and traditions of Hawai'i explain why the live-action Lilo and Stitch disrespects that entire tradition, history, and the original animation's messages as well.

The ways that humans have for expressing affection for each other are greater than sex and romance, and many of those acts that WEIRD people would classify as sexual or romantic are instead culturally appropriate expressions of affection. Because there's still not an underlying acceptance of the idea that people can be affectionate to each other without it being sexual, and extra so for people of the same perceived gender.

What we think of as local culture and tradition is global culture and tradition. We have just forgotten that things like food migrate and then integrate really well into wherever they land. Which is why you will occasionally have someone yelling that Italians of an era before the tomato migrated out of the Americas are not having marinara sauce with their pasta. The idea that there is only one human culture, and what we have are a bunch of local implementations and place-and-time specific manifestations of it, is really rather true, but because our memories and our records don't always persist over time, we forget that we have already done this before. Repeatedly.

Research into autism that has done less assuming the neurotypical is "normal" and the standard continues to find things that are classified as deficits and disorders are often strengths and consistencies, just at a different angle than the neurotypical one.

Claudette Colvin, who was getting arrested for not giving up a bus seat in a segregated South before Rosa Parks became the face of it, has died at 86 years of age.

( Murder most foul, an administration gone rogue, and techbros on the warpath inside )

Last for this entry, dressed as the pink ranger from the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers / Zyuranger, Martha Root demonstrated how she had gained control of white supremacist websites, had the members talk to chatbots, and then deleted the sites live during the talk.

A plea to start posting the snippets of our lives again, rather than trying to figure out what would be the best for the algorithm or withdrawing entirely from posting because we are trying not to chase the unsatisfiable algorithm. I think that will be an easier task on sites where there is no algorithm to game, but the difficulty of getting people to those sites is that they also need to have their friends decamp to a compatible network as well, and that's not necessarily an easy sell, even if someone wants to leave a toxic environment. (And, as has been well-documented in places like the Fediverse, for minorities, it's a question of leaving one toxic platform for another, and evaluating whether or not the controls on the new platform are good enough that they won't get subjected to more harassment getting through their filters or not.)

The ways that people are using chatbots as social and erotic companions, even though a fair number of them know they're chatbots. Which is the kind of future the techbros would like - interactions as event flags with characters that aren't human and don't have human needs or changes in mood.

And a method that presumably allows you to not have CoPilot or other "AI" features in your Windows 11 install, and sets things up so that they won't reinstall themselves, either.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

The dreaded "say nice things about yourself" challenge has appeared at snowflake_challenge!

While we’re busy celebrating fandom, it’s good to remember to celebrate ourselves, too. Fandom is all of us! I know it’s often easier to talk about what we like about other people than it is to talk nicely about ourselves, but challenge yourself here --

Challenge #7

LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.

( Challenge: Say good Things About Yourself. Difficulty: Very )

snowflake_challenge's fifth request is upon us, and it asks us to do things taht some of us are not very comfortable with:

Challenge #5

In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, a wishlist of sorts.

( A few things that will hopefully be manageable )

snowflake_challenge has posted prompt #3, asking us to talk about the things we love about the communities that we are part of, or about the properties we form our communities around.

Challenge #3:

Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

( It's often the people. )

The best thing I like about fandom is that it grows and evolves and produces new stories and new interpretations of stories, and new tropes and new ways of telling stories and smashing them together. The next best thing about fandom is how many people there are in it who are there to have a good time and to make community with others. Yes, there are always going to be people who feel like they have to defend their territory against all comers, or who loudly proclaim that their way is the only way and all others must yield, but most fans that I've encountered seem to be less concerned with purity, fortresses, or defense and are instead more concerned with community, mutual aid, sharing, and trying to encourage people who are in the fandom to stay in it or to getr even deeper into it. Maybe I just have good people around me and I've avoided the people who want to drag me into wars, but even if that's the case, the last thing I love about fandom (for this entry, anyway) is that it tends toward self-correction, and with time and maturity, most fen who stay, grow in ways that make their works better and their communities better.

The snowflake_challenge has posted prompt #2, and this time, they're definitely asking for something that will get a lot of people stopping by to say hello, in hopes that people might use the (somewhat limited) amount of image hosting that Dreamwidth has, if they have an account that has access to the image hosting.

Challenge #2: Pets of Fandom

Loosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!

( Pets, in all their forms )

So that's the extended riff about pets in fandom. Hopefully there's something there that you find interesting, or that you want to chase up or find more detail with. If not, have a good time exploring the other entries in the challenge for this time around, and we'll see you back in a couple days.