Because there is always something terrible happening.

As a reminder, the "political links" tag can be excluded from your reading list, if you have no interest in this, or you need to not have it near you or in your feeds.

Greetings - let's start with a little of important differences between liberals and progressives, for someone who needs the fine-grained-ness of the differences for accuracy.

One of the architects of the Brexit disaster is planning on enjoying his life in France as a member of the EU. Because there's nothing like being in favor of something that you personally won't have to experience the full ramifications of. Not to mention that there's a possibility that a lot of the financing for Brexit came from the Russian Federation, and that there were several very priminent Leave.EU entities having talks with Russian Federation officials.

Depressive episodes may be a function of believing an untrue class narrative - or having everyone around you insist that narrative is true when nothing could be further from the truth.

( And then there were all of the things happening in the United States. )

I've not been posting much again - May-June-Julyish, 02018

Hello! Here's something interesting, and that is worth remembering - texts in translation, including Tanakh and the Christian Foundational Writings, carry the opinions of their translators with them. Which can make for some very interesting discussions about what the text does and does not say, and whether the context of that text would support that interpretation.

I get to be one of the lucky 10,000 on this: the system of using bangs to distinguish between different interpretations of a character (such as HYDRA!Steve) originates in the beginnings of e-mail routing, so that one could distinguish between two persons with the same name by the path one needed to take to get to them. And fandom picked it up and went with it.

A happy story of a poet who throws their work away...and the mermaid that is always waiting for the next update.

Kids who are praised for being smart eventually get older and find that being smart doesn't carry as much weight as it used to. And that it can mess with your ability to try new things for a while, while you're still in a situatiuon where being smart matters to some degree. Or when you've built an identity around it, because it was the only thing your teachers ever seemeed to notice about you. Even when you explicitly asked them not to.

Language provides space for concepts to exist and be understood. Which can sometimes be difficult to translate across correctly, especially in a case of mental health. Have some fun Tumblr posts.

Given that ABC has a sudden hole in their schedule, wouldn't it be nice if they picked up an extra season of Agent Carter? It could almost be a mea culpa for the reason why that hole appeared.

Conspiracies tend to flock to each other, so it should be no surprise that one of the longer-running ones, like flat earth, has accumulated a few adherents of other things that purport to be truthful.

If things aren't working out for an employee or a student or a partner, there's probably something getting in the way of their ability to perform the tasks they want to do. It could be physical, mental, emotional, traumatic, disorderly, or something else. If you have the ability to make those barriers go away or be lessened, there's a good chance that the thing that's not working out will start turning out for the better.

...there's still something there about taking care of yourself and things in that, if it's something that's going to be a personal relationship. In a work setting, the people with the power are the ones that can make things easier or harder for the people in their employ. In a personal relationship, it's certainly possible for someone to give too much of themselves away trying to help another person overcome the barriers that are getting in their way. Or it's possible for anoher person to present the barriers in such a way that they're taking advvantage of another person, or hurting their mental and physical well-being as the "solution" to those barriers. Even then, I suppose it's not laziness, necessarily, but an unwillingness to come to a situation where both (or more) partners can have healthy and functional lives with and independent of each other. This both makes sense and has pushback based on a traumatic past.

Getting upset over cultural appropriation may make it harder to discover the roots of the appropriation, and why it happens, so that the right head of the hydra can be cut off and buried under a very heavy rock. Finding root causes makes it easier to get all of the weed in a pull, but, like weeds, if you yank out one spot, there's a likelihood that it will grow back in another.

In defense of Sex and the City being a story about women, for as much as it stumbled on all sorts of other things. Because sometimes you want to see the women win.

General Zod, of the Superman movies, was being suggested as a candidate for the premiership of Ontario in the most recent general election. At least a few people clearly found Zod the better choice than any of the other possible options.

Ottawa is dealing with a thorny issue of whether children born to persons who were deep-cover spies for the Soviet Union qualify as citizens of Canada - the government contends they are not, because of the actions of their parents, which leaves teh children in a situation of being potentially excluded from the place of their birth.

Photographs of lava flow and the phenomena that it creates. These are beautiful pictures and also capture the terrifying power of lava. Pictures of Jupiter, and mapping and picture-taking of massive underground water caves. The stone walls of New England, a phenomenon meant mostly to clear fields of stones. A map of literary road trips. A mirror made of an alloy of metal that doesn't distort the reflection, and the tradition that follows its creation. A statue made to ephasise the poverty part of Jesus's mission confused and angered the wealthy people around who thought the statuary was in poor taste.

An incomplete list of autistic experiences. To which Music and musical performance or listening might be useful for someone on the spectrum.

When there are options available to you, the complexity of your identity changes. And sometimes, finally fits into "this feels right" once you have enough options to work with. In the interest of providing some options for those who may be looking for them, asexuality, aromanticism, and agender.

Portraiture where the black backdrop and the black models are not that far from each other's shades, which is an interesting meditation on blackness and the associations that it has.

When things start to move toward equity, the historically privileged start to feel like they're being oppressed and cry out, not understanding what is happening.

Cuckoo Blocks - the timekeeper reimagined as a neighborhood block or an apartment complex or building. A mainstay of a New York neighborhood going under the developer's wrecker, to become yet another gentrified thing.

Black Panther characters in a recognizably Art Nouveau style.

If you intend to write about the alt-right, remember not to fetishize them or make them anything other than exactly what they are, with all the terrible that goes along with it.

A story about trying to find yourself when everyone wants to forget and move on from the event that your origins are tied up in.

A newer work from the late Ursula LeGuin in Earthsea - the beginning is free to read.

A summary of what would make an excellent sequel fiction to The Secret Garden, waiting for someone to write it. Seanan McGuire talks about a take on the Lovecraft Horror Mythos that manages to expose it for all the terrible things it is and craft a satisfying story from that premise.

Being told that queer people get to have happy endings changed a written story into something better. And a life into something less lived in a closet, waiting to be cut short by tragedy.

Waiting out the end of the world in the place close to where you thought you wanted to go helps you realize where you actually want to go and what you want to do. And who your friends might be for the end of the world.

The secret to Anthony Bourdain's travels had little to do with the cuisine, and much more to do with the way that everyone was treated with respect during the travel. Which has a lot to do with other disciplines, including dementia care.

A mountain in New Zealand is being granted the status of a living person, in hopes that it will help visitors treat the space with sufficient reverece and sacredness, as well as recognizing officially what the Māori already know.

The eye color change that signals aggression and fighting in guppies - and eye shifts might be a more common signal than many people think. Flamingoes in Australia. Also, giant ducks in Australia.

Watching the evolution of manga characters over time, which goes well with the evolution of animation in Japan over time, with a coda for how things have shifted since 2010.


A novel way of fighting a cold by blocking it from bonding with a protein that cold viruses need to replicate.

In technology, Microsoft bought GitHub, much to the potential consternation of a lot of projects.

The network neutrality rules of the previous administration are dead. Keep watch for your Internet services changing. And Fight For The Future would like you to take action to bring back network neutrality.

The continued vulnerabilities exposed in the EFAIL attacks make PGP unsafe to use for most implementations and programs with PGP and HTML mail working together. Plaintext mail seems to be the best prospect, if your client's implementation can successfully defeat those known attacks.

Devices attempting to capture the content and metadata of phone usage were found deployed near the White House. The difficulty is that mobile phone systems being used for surveillance were often built for communication and interoperability first, and now security is a concern being bolted on later.

Despite governmental concerns (and associated general tariffs) about various Chinese handset manufacturers, Facebook has been happily sharing data with anyone who pays for it, including those same handset manufacturers. And that the depths of Facebook's data mining and spying on people is pretty far in. Including plenty of stories about Facebook listening in on a phone and tailoring the ads to what was heard.

The requirements for smooth function of 5G phones might see their designs move more toward brickier phones rather than the smooth designs that consumers have come to expect.

Mars and deep space simulations are trying to get useful data for when the real things happen, but humans do human things, like potentially get injured, and that means decisions have to be made on whether to stop simulating.

Guidelines of describing works of art for the visually impaired, making images accessible and describing complex pictures and diagrams, and ways of adding captioning and image descrip[tion to tweets.

Linux distributions may soon be able to run on Google's Chromebooks, assuming that the Chromebook you have is powerful and recent enough to run it properly. Put together with Chromebooks being able to run Android applications, and suddenly, a Chromebook starts looking like a general-purpose device, with the exception of people who very specifically need certain types of Windows software. Between cloud-based Chrome apps and Linux-based applications, you might have a near-perfect low-cost entry-level portable computing device. And for a lot of people, with the right person helping with the setup and the right Linux distribution installed, it could be a self-updating device that always stays current with the newest versions and patches. It could be the perfect device to give to the person that just wants a machine that works. So long as they have a Google account to sign in to and tie all of these things into.

Our smartphones are listening to us, and then mining that data to give us better-tailored ads in other spaces. And that's without anyone having said an activation phrase to get them to acknowledge they are listening to us.

The art of making food into something a person with a swallowing disorder can safely consume and will enjoy eating.

Blood typing is only the first step in trying to find compatible, transfusionable blood. Some people have some marker combinations that are much more rare than just a rare blood typing.

Last for tonight, Book and the dragon, a story of research, of love, and of small winged creatures that show up in the archives.

A smattering of material about the passive, and how most of the rules used or taught about the passive don't work, because they focus on the wrong things.

Also, what it's like to discover that there's a mother cat and kittens underneath your bed. And The things our mothers told us to get us to behave.