Links now, so I don't forget to post them - Early July 02023

Hello. Let's begin with David Tennant continuing to be vocal (with a T-shirt, anyway) about his support for trans kids. And the victory of Rikkie Valerie Kolle as Miss Netherlands, making her the second openly transgender competitor in the Miss Universe pageant. And, predictably, she's had to work her way through all of the haters, whom she thanks for giving her a much bigger platform to promote herself and her message.

The first person to have been formally diagnosed with autism, Donald Triplett, has passed on at 89 years of age, after having lived a long and full life with friends and great activities.

On the necessity of studying people in their contexts, especially when doing studies of people who studied sexuality and gender, rather than either dismissing them for not being modern or venerating them as models to emulate. Which makes for complicated legacies when the people are still alive and contributing to their own legacies. Witness all the topics covered in this profile of Samuel R. Delany and his works, even though Delany wants things to mostly not be about his works, but about his life and the changing landscape that he's lived it in.

Archivists, librarians, and collection maintainers like Paul Fasana keep the archives not only in existence, but make the things that are part of the archives findable, and for that, they should forever be praised.

The United States Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of an over-the-counter, non-prescription birth control pill, which will open up more access to contraceptives without having to invoke insurance company rules or data sharing requests that certain conservative governments are already demanding to see to make sure people who see medical professionals don't do anything the government disapproves of.

( More inside, with plenty to talk about )

Last for tonight, The Archive Of Our Own suffered a Distributed Denial of Service attack from a group that hoped to foment hateful rhetoric from fans against the kind of people they claimed 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 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.)

Sunshine Challenge 2023 #5: Goldenrod and the Growth Mindset

Another sunshine_challenge prompt, another flower, and more virtues to talk about,

Prompt 5: Goldenrod
Historically, Goldenrod has been used as a symbol of good fortune, growth, and encouragement. Because of its ability to survive in diverse, harsh environments, Goldenrod represents good luck and a pioneering spirit (pretty fitting given its origins in the meadows and pastures of North America).

Bonus Prompt: Orange Rose

Admittedly, I know goldenrod more as a crayon than as a flower, because so many creation boxes of my childhood did not have colors such as red, yellow, and blue, which are specific shades to color with, apparently, but instead would get crimson, goldenrod, and cerulean, along with burnt sienna and several other flower names and shades that were lighter or darker than the colors I had assumed would be part of every box of crayons but definitely were not. Which, as a child, was different to have to work with these wrong shades that I was pretending were much more primary colors. The art parts were fine, anyway, since I was likely coloring in sheets or doing other things that didn't involve any kind of needing to draw my own lines and create something from those spaces. It would have been much more frustrating to me in that regard, mostly because art was one of those things that was very much about "you're talented or you're not" in my childhood, rather than something that's more "art is a process, and for some people, that process comes easier than others, but we can still scaffold someone into something that's uniquely themselves, rather than something that's being compared to a perfect example."

I am less inclined to go along with the "pioneering spirit" association of the goldenrod, but I think that's because a fair amount of my adult life has been finding out just how much those "pioneers" are products of a hagiography designed to erase the presence and history of the first nations of the Americas and treat them as little more then set dressing or adversaries against the march of "civilization" through those spaces, the same kind of "civilization" that brought rampant unregulated capitalism, exploitation, and slavery of black people as a way of life to the country. It may not have had much anything outside of the library world, but inside the library world, there's been an entire fight about whether or not it's appropriate for us to carry the Little House on the Prairie series, given how much of it is about reinforcing the hagiography of pioneering white men, their dutiful wives, and their pleasant children against the Indigenous peoples, Black peoples, and the oppression of government infringing on their freedom to do whatever they want with the land and their neighbors. The Children's Literature Legacy Award from the Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC, a division of the American Library Association) was, up until recently, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, but because of the rampant racism in Wilder's work, ALSC decided to change the name of the award. Because they're still ALA and library folk, the statement about the name change goes to great lengths to assure us that they're not suggesting that anyone change their relationship to Wilder's work because of this name change, because that would be having an unacceptably political opinion in public. Even though it's pretty clear that the name change was specifically so that an award that is supposed to be about lasting contributions to children's literature doesn't bear the name of someone whose works are incompatible with the values of today. (Ana Mardoll's Prairie Fires livetweets and reads are there so you don't necessarily have to read the things yourself, if you don't want to dive into that world and its mindset. And all the fabrication, gaslighting, and lies involved in trying to prop up the idea of the pioneer homestead and the pioneer spirit.)

Goldenrod can be a hardy plant that grows in all kinds of environments, and I'm cool with that, but there's a lot of romanticization of colonialism and The Past That Never Was that gets wrapped up in white people's recollections (and official hagiographies) of the "Wild" West, Manifest Destiny, the Discovery Doctrine, and their belief that they could survive and thrive in such rugged conditions and play out their libertarian fantasies (or their plantation fantasies) rather than admitting to the truth off what happened, and how much subsistence farming is hard work for very small yields and those who believe they don't need their community to sustain themselves and their neighbors are fools or people who have money enough that they can run a hobby farm and not actually care about whether it makes enough.

( And things take a personal turn )

Which is a long way to come back around to, even though I'm kind of "eh" about the plant, I like at least some of the meanings behind it, because they are the things that I still need in my life: good fortune, growth, and encouragement.