Delayed posting because what is time - Early January 02023

Cheers! Let us begin with an example account of how the fervor over trying to control books and learning is having physical and mental tolls on those targeted.

The Government of the United Kingdom has signaled an intention to stop recognizing the gender recognition certificates of other nations, in addition to opposition to Scotland implementing proper gender recognition. Someone in the Tories must think there's more votes to be had by being transphobic. Hopefully, they're wrong and they get sacked at earliest possibility.

Insurrectionists attempted to overthrow the newly elected government of Brazil, were thwarted, and arrested, and the government has promised swift action in figuring out how it happened and why there was so little attempt to stop the attack. In that regard, Brazil is doing much better than the United States did against its own insurrectionists.

The new year turned over and that means a large swath of material officially entered the public domain in the United States! Which is good, but also, a significant amount of things that are now in the public domain have no complete, or even extant, copies in existence, because having to wait nearly 100 years to begin copying and preservation means so many things get destroyed long before they can be preserved.

One of the good things that happens with those works that are preserved and in the public domain is that you can then transform them in really neat ways, like bringing Moby Dick forward into tiresome modern idiom and then having someone read aloud this same tiresome modern idiom, which provides even more hilarity.

( And there's more inside, so much more )

Last out, yet another annual review of the things that got stuck in various orifices over the last calendar year.

Less terribly, Escher's Relativity and Escher's Ascending and Descending rendered in LEGO bricks.

And less terribly than that, would you like to see someone split logs with a sword?

Perhaps most profoundly, on the virtues of goal-setting and the ways that goals can help you grow into the person that you want to be.

(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, and anyone else that's 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 2023 #9: Victory in All Forms

Challenge #9 reminds us that victory comes in many different forms and that celebrating the wins is important.

In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year: it can be a list of fanworks you're especially proud of, time you spent in the community, a quality or skill you cultivated in yourself, something you generally feel went well.

This challenge is fairly open, and is based on people looking back on the last year and thinking about their personal wins.

What we want people to remember for this challenge is: wins can be giant, small and everything in-between. Did you finally finish or publish that novel you've been working on for years? Did you get those bookshelves reorganised? Did you learn a new skill? Did you do something you were scared of? Did you post a certain number of fanworks at A03? Did you master the perfect gooey brownies? Those are all examples of wins and they all count. Just something you can look back on and think, I did that, and I'm proud of that.

But, we know life can be hard for us all at times, so please don't think you have to only share big, memorable wins. If you look back at last year and all you can think to say is, 'I survived' well that counts too.

You don't have to share details if you don't want to. But do celebrate yourself, look back at those wins, big to small, and say, I'm amazing and I did this.

( A list of accomplishments and victories. )

It doesn't feel like a lot, when condensed into paragraphs, but it was a lot, and that's not counting the mundane daily, just one thing wins that I've been counting in my journals and on awesomeers and in places that encourage us to write something every day. Those are sometimes the most important of the wins of last year, because they force me to think about what went well on any given day, so that I can comment about it. And the daily pages are a record of accomplishments and completed tasks and can be referenced when there's an attack of brainweasels about what did get done or didn't get done, or how a situation went. I am, perhaps, in the process of grieving many of the things I have lost or never will achieve, while also trying to forgive myself for the feelings that come with that grieving, and to work toward acceptance of things as they are now, so that I can continue to put up wins and recognize them as such, rather than putting off their celebration for not being big enough and perfect enough to satisfy the impossible demands of the brainweasel horde.