Still running behind - July-August 02016

Let's start with speculation on what happened to the Winter Soldier.

Following on with that, the many incarnations of Harleen Quinzel.

And, because it's well overdue, time for some Ghostbusters. The costuming choices in the film reflect the personalities of the people wearing them.

Paul Feig made this movie specifically for women and girls to be on screen and doing great. And guess what? Everyone is buying the merch. Seanan McGuire is on board with this movie, because it's miles better than what usually passes as a movie for women. Women get to act with agency and not be just possessed tools of demons. Women get to do science based on the real thing. Women get to be action heroes and Ghostbusters. It is a great movie to put little girls in front of.

Ghostbusters is a movie that tells men who are complaining about women in their clubhouse that the women belong there. It's also a better movie than the original movie.

Kate McKinnon's Holtzmann is gay except for official word from the studio, because gods forbid you have an action hero who's not het. The Internet will correct anyone who says otherwise. As for McKinnon, Gillian Anderson's Scully helped with identification.

Leslie Jones got the Patty role because she was incredibly funny. Patty as a character could stand to have done a lot better on racial tropes. Leslie Jones was subjected to Twitter harassment and vitriol from known trolls and harassers, and Twitter did very little to stem the tide. Better tools to ban known trolls would be helpful/a>. Really, though, harassing someone because they're black, a woman, and successful should be socially reprehensible. Social media platforms can put in place rules and devote resources to cleaning up their trash. Which means effective things - banning anonymity isn't always effective at stopping the trolls.

Ghostbusters needs to have companions - other movies with it that have women in roles normally reserved for men or that work on the Smurfette Principle. Because it really is an action movie for women, starring women.

The Spiritualist traditions of talking to the dead shows up a bit more on the reboot than the original.

Lastly, director Feig on why men aren't particularly funny or comedic.

Lessons for the budding social scientist on programming and tools that will help them greatly in their quest.

Being Black means dealing with hundreds of years of institutional abuse as well as White people taking culture and language for their own purposes. It means stylists not knowing what to do with natural Black hair. It means receiving no sympathy when your child is killed by police. To fix the problem, the institutions must be changed and the people who would be dismissed as "bitter" listened to. They are persisting in the face of a culture determined not to let them have anything. They disagree with those who are styled as leaders on the television screens. And there's a lot under the surface that needs to be unpacked. Actually, there's plenty on the surface that needs to be addressed, too. Which can really be achieved by having White people avoid becoming leaders and spotlight figures in movements about Black people.

An art challenge to draw a black woman in various animation and cartoon styles. Because practice at both drawing and at seeing black people in your cartoons.

Toxic masculinity, defined and shown with the consequences involved. We need men who have a definition of masculinity other than what we have. Like men wearing hijab in support of women not having to wear it, and men in suits to support their wives wearing them. We need women who choose not to play by men's rules and that do things like walking the streets and observing the world. We need woman marrying women who as to avoid being married by men. And the Republican candidate for the presidency does not help this, exhibiting a lot of traits that reinforce the toxic idea.

An account of being trans* and raising a child that is trans*.

Badass disabled women.

A woman cared for hundreds of men dying of AIDS when their families abandoned them for being gay. The memory of tragedy and disaster and war must be carried forward to the next generation, let we forget and have to learn it again the hard way.

Hilary Clinton has had to deal with decades of sexism and her politics, many of them posed as questions from women. It can be a revelation to realize that Hillary Clinton also is deserving of love.

The Republican candidate makes members of the military and intelligence communities very nervous about his abilities.

The ivory tower turns up its nose at those who don't act sufficiently like themselves.

A different type of exploitation has tourists going to areas of low security to experience the thrills of being in a place with low security. Because danger-seekers with money to burn just can't find something more local to get their thrills with.

Have some nice pictures of humans being kind. And an old theater converted to a bookstore.

North Carolina joins two other states in having their 'target Democratic voters' identification laws partially invalidated.

The New York Public Library has long been answering difficult or boggling questions by telephone.

Small self-care suggestions. Which can help if you're a person who can assert that they have a self worth caring for.

Getting really hit in the feelings by this piece about autonomy, attachment, and security in relationships for men, mostly because I can't tell which side of the line I fall on, and whether I've been contributing to difficulties or not. The follow-up post about cognitive distortions didn't help, either, because it suggests that at least some of the issues are things that a self has to work on, and I have a habit of blaming myself for all the problems in my life...

A story of a workplace that inspired a post-traumatic stress response. Which might be applicable outside that environment. The ways in which men can appear to be feminists, but are instead its opposite. Which I hope never to be.

Abuse should never be normalized, no matter where it comes from. Even if someone has been socialized to be abusive to others.

Sometimes realizing everything is fucked is completely liberating.

Intersectionality is everywhere, even in professed anarchism.

Berlin had a great gay and lesbian scene before the purge came.

The reasons went one might not want motherhood, but definitely still wants children in one's life.

What science says is the right course of action to recover from opioid addictions, which is the opposite of what usually is shown on television to be effective. Statistics suggest that drug addictions are recoverable, and usually successfully.

The Old English dictionary and its scholars, currently finishing H, with a long way to go. which I put next to alchemical diagrams because everyone needs pictures with hidden information.

The method by which food is cut may affect the perception of its flavor. A guide to various wok-frying techniques. A sourdough starter guide. Decoding the deli dessert case. Effectively stocking a pantry for Asian cooking. All you need to know to throw a tea party.

An accessible walking trail for those with visual impairment. Which is really rather cool - getting to experience nature and trails and paths shouldn't be restricted to only those with good eyesight.

The history of the dollhouse, as a display of wealth and an instructional item, before it became a toy thing and a place to show off miniature skill.

Getting rid of clothes sometimes helps the psyche more than trying to get rid of weight. Even though the stigma around weight is suffocating and more than a few marketing campaigns want you to be forever afraid of being fat.

Witches are powerful because they transgress, and it is dangerous to be accused of being a witch because of that transgression. Transgression takes many forms, however, and reacts to the culture it is in.

If you believe that women get abortions for kicks or other frivolous reasons, observe this account of a woman who had a child that could not live, and so aborted it at 32 weeks. Even those who do carry to team have issues to work with - a cultural assumption that every woman should get back to the shape she was in before pregnancy, for example.

When women say they are in pain, and it is horrible pain, believe them and offer them things appropriate to the level of experienced pain. Don't ask them whether it's a period thing.

Excuses attempting to disclaim that gender was totally not involved in any a woman got passed up for a promotion. A long list of topics which boys have asked a girl if she is familiar with them. She is.

When men disclaim rape as something else, it might be because calling it rape would make them rapists.

Rant that the profit motive prevents necessary medicines from being affordable, not that the country is over-medicated.

Observe how media outlets treat autism as a horrible thing, when it is as much a culture as a diagnosis. Refuse to buy in to narratives that are sympathetic to parents that murder their children because the children have disabilities. Support companies that produce objects to allow for stimming.

Books have power - they help us tell ourselves what we are, and they help us through the darkest of social times.

In technology, simple ways of making it less likely you will be hacked, food suggestions of yesteryear, a wooden puzzle book, immersive installations, cross-stitched planets, supplements that may actually be worth taking, the likelihood that someone else in the world looks close enough to you to fool another human, the discovery of a 15 year-old bug in software that interprets fMRI, the ability to turn Wonder Bread into insulating foam, attempting to explain good cinematography by making the lines explicit, overwriting graffiti in a more legible typeface, an explanation of the ouzo effect, the e-reader as the Internet's anthology collection, a reusable notebook and associated application, using technology to bring museums to people and make museum visits richer, making truer comparisons of countries to each other, early risers and late sleepers now have the perpetually energetic and their opposite to possibly be, common objects at very high magnification, the difficulties of crossing the ocean floor, Pokemon Go as a way of exposing people to metric measurements, a presidential candidate that dogwhistles the anti-vaxxers, Sojourner Truth's early adoption of photography as an abolition technique, the very common complaint that the younger generations are somehow inferior and fascinated by their technology, and a bug in SwiftKey that used email addresses and other potentially sensitive data as suggestions on new phones.

Game companies with policies on how to deal with abuse and harassment of staff online show their policies. More telling is the amount of companies that don't have one or declined to share theirs.

Roadside attractions of the various states of the Union.

Comics involving lesbian mermaids and lesbian selkies. Inclusive magazines that draw the ire of the Puppies.

Cats attempting jumps, the biodiversity of the Mariana Trench, using a drone to fire vaccine-laced candy at ferrets and prairie dogs, symbiosis between carnivorous plants and bats, a large lizard with a social media following, caring for hundreds of plants in a Brooklyn apartment, the intersection of Pokémon Go and birding, cat as comfort animal, merging objects and animals in art, pictures of sperm whales at play, and interesting fishbowls to purchase.

Last for tonight, tracing the story of family escaping the Holocaust, with the Internet to help and eventually facilitate contact with those who experienced it, factoids about Helen Keller, and reasons why young children can be hazardous to those around them.

A practical guide to titles and forms of address for members of the United Kingdom's aristocracy.

And poutine.