Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

The horrors do keep coming, but we also keep meeting them - Late April 02025

Sun, 03 May 2026 06:15:30 GMT

The 2025 Most Banned and Challenged List for the American Library Association is out, and the most telling statistic in the report is not what books are there, or what justifications their censors gave for the censorship, but that fully 92% of challenges recorded by ALA originated in pressure and political groups, lawmakers, and administrators. Less than 3 percent of challenges were issued by individual parents. What brings all these boys to the yard? Well, think about it: Capitalists want to enclose the commons and turn it private, so they can control it and force it to their will, and the United States Public Library is a commons.

Billionaires and the wealthy who want to say that their superintelligent AIs will eventually go rogue are also trying to genetically engineer humans to be smarter than those superintelligent AIs, and just about everywhere you look that they've put their money into, it isn't into things like trying to make healthier people, it's trying to make the children of the wealthy into having all the genetic advances and traits, and the rest of us will just be left behind by their super-genius statuses.

Given that these are people who like to post manifestos about they are already the superior people in the superior culture and we all have to bow down to them and let them do whatever they want, I think this is definitely one of those situations where trust is less than the distance someone could throw.

The public bench seems humble and ubiquitous, and yet it is neither, with a long history and significant amounts of contention involved about public seating and which members of the public are allowed to be seated. When benches aren't being removed, they're often having their architecture turned hostile to try and prevent people from sitting for long or for using a bench as a place to catch a nap or to sleep off the ground for a night. Because the cause of the problem is placed in the bodies of the people who might not have a house to go home to, or whose life activities are related to crime and vice because they have no other opportunities to make a living. Those doing the placing, of course, do not believe they are doing anything wrong, or worse, callously believe that they are not obligated in any way to any other person but themselves, and therefore, they are allowed to dictate who they want to see and what they want to be reminded of in their public spaces.

The goal of liberalism is to make all bodies invisible in the eyes of the law, but the way that people are liberated from oppression and bindings often imposed by law is through mutuality. Law has a role to play in this situation, and often that role is in highlighting and making highly visible the bodies that it considers to be illiberal. Law can lay foundations for others to implement toward mutuality, but as we have seen, and as the article-writer points out, law cannot require anything by itself, and those who have been chosen to interpret and enforce law are often the ones deciding for or against mutuality.

( More of men behaving badly, and the repercussions of having let men behave badly in the past )

Last out for tonight, a reminder to put accessibility into your social media as much as possible, so please provide transcripts, describe your images, and the like, so that everyone who's on your social media or enjoying the content can access it..

And A project that is offering clinicians and others guides on thinking of seemingly disparate conditions in people as constellations because of the likelihood of their co-occurrence with autism or ADHD. And to think of them as constellations because trying to treat one of them well might exacerbate another.

(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.)

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The World Continues To Turn - Early April 02026

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 21:56:29 GMT

Let's begin with this: Inequality produces worse health and mortality outcomes for everyone, but it hasn't been noticed until now because for several decades, advances in medicine managed to get close to balancing the ledger.

Sports betting, and prediction markets in general, aided by mobile apps and Internet betting, have made it very easy for people who are susceptible to problem gambling patterns, or those who don't have the money to gamble, to gamble far more than they want to.

Conversion "therapy" doesn't work to produce the results it claims to, or desires to. Instead, it continues to traumatize and blame, rather than help.

People who are impressed by buzzwords and corporate bullshit tend not to be as good at doing their jobs, according to some Cornell research. And the difficulty potentially is that those who are impressed by such BS tend to hire and promote people who are similarly so, which compounds the problem.

The insistence on seeing someone while chatting to them makes no sense to someone who can't see, and yet, their sighted friends seem to believe that if they can't see them, something is seriously wrong.

People are not ideologies. People have ideologies, and when you treat people as things, well, Esmerelda Weatherwax has things to say about that.

( Victories, setbacks, and other strange things )

Last for tonight, The Archive of Our Own officially ended its status as a beta piece of software. This doesn't change anything, not really, but it does mean that AO3 believes it's out of beta (but definitely not releasing on time.)

The collection of artifacts a billionaire put together and was good about making sure people could see and engage with has been broken up and sold to various other private collectors, because one of the truths of our world is that capitalism always likes to collect important things, and doesn't always share or allow access to them for people. And it's not just billionaires, of course, People who have amassed a collection of historic finds with their metal detectors sometimes sell their collections as well, rather than making them part of a national or regional collection. Or at least letting them have first crack at anything they want to have.

(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.)

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I Met A Person I Thought Didn't Exist.

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:20:11 GMT

I did, in fact, meet someone that I thought did not exist, except, perhaps, as a thought experiment. Fortunately for me, they were quite willing to explain why they had done what they did. Unfortunately, I met them in a work context, and therefore, my ability to both cut off the conversaion and to provide blistering counterpoint commentary were both limited.

(Honestly, it was probably a good thing that this happened at work, so that my professional responsibilities kept me from delivering deeply personal and acidic responses.)

So, a person with an Irish accent explained to me, as part of a shaggy dog story involving donating a book by Bill Clinton to our Friends of the Library sale, that she still felt bad that she was giving away a book by a Clinton that she hadn't actually fullly read. That she was otherwise a staunch Democrat, and had never wanted to vote for a Republican. That she was convinced that the current President was either evil, non compos mentis, or possibly both. The first possible sign was that she had been uncomfortable with the scandalous behavior of Bill Clinton. I mentioned that the starting wars in the Middle East should have gotten more media coverage, especially compared to the coverage his indiscretions in the White House received. And when she asked what I thought about the current administrator, I said, in my best diplomatic tones, "I'm not allowed to have an opinion about that while I'm on the clock." Which is entirely true, and also the strongest signal I have in my toolbox to deploy of "You don't have to convince me that this person and his supporters with power are doing great evil everywhere."

( She turns out to be a member of those who believed in the thrust of the odious lies told about where Kamala Harris's priorities were on queer people. )

I hadn't thought these people existed for the second time around, based on how things went for this administrator the first time around, but thanks to being white and looking like someone who would be willing to assuage her guilt, or at least not berate her for it, I got the story, and more confirmation that yes, indeed, ther are still too many people who vote their -isms over anything else they might consider a calid reason for voting. I realize this is not new to a lot of people who experience those -isms in more direct manners, and that my privilege lets me believe that people wouldn't do that, even in the face of large amounts of evidence to the contrary. In this particular case, though, I had thought this administrator had been sufficiently clear that people knew what they were voting for, and anyone who did it was clearly a member of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

There's no heroic conclusion to this story. No minds were changed, and the person only disengaged because the eide shuttle the county operates had arrived for her. I was reminded that "Democrat" and "progressive" are two very different things, as is "Democrat" and "decent human being.' And that none of us are immune to propaganda, especially the kind of propaganda that preys upon our beliefs about who young people are, and our deeply-held convictions of how the universe is ordered and arranged. It was a sobering experience. I sincerely hope that this person is working against the administrator she voted for at this point, and that she will not make the same mistake for the next person who comes out claiming to be working on behalf of children against the evil educators and trans people. But I can't say for certain, at all, about that, because I keep seeing these kinds of "keep children off social media by forcing everyone to give up identification of themselves if they want to be treated as an adult" bills showing up, and programs that comply with those bills.

In this era, it's not hard to imagine there is someone in conversation with their god, earnestly negotiating on behalf of humans against our destruction and annihiiation. "If there are fifty just people in this world," this person is saying, "will you spare it from your wrath?" Not because they necessarily are sure there are fifty just people in the world, but because they need to set a starting point within spitting distance of where they really want to be. And if the god will grant fifty, then surely forty-five isn't such a stretch, right? Forty? Thirty-five? Thirty? Twenty? Ten? Five? If there are only five just people in the world, surely a being that created the world and peopled it and put all that effort into it would be willing to spare the rest of us for the sake of those five? It wouldn't be fair to those five just people to have their existences cut short because of the follies of the rest of us, would it? It wouldn't be just, right? Each time our negotiator lowers the bar, they're truly concerned that they've pushed it one spot too many, and that the god will call the whole thing off and destroy us anyway. But, so far, they seem to be winning their negotiation. So it's our job to be one of those five people that this negotiator desperately hopes exists. (Because this negotiator isn't saying "five just people who are of my religion," they're saying "five just people.")

I am not sure I am one of those five just people. I'm not sure I will ever be one of those five just people, but my ethics demand the relationships I have with other people should celebrate their virtues and victories and support them in their struggles against their vices and their demons. Regardless of whether there is a god at the end who will say, "That one's mine. You've earned a rest, friend, come celebrate." That's what makes this story a warning, and a tale of horror, not because I Told You So, but because in a moment of following fear rather than solidarity, so many more people than the person casting their vote are suffering. We can always hope that wisdom will prevail in those moments, but it is never a surety, and so we are left with the hope that there are still five just people left in the world, and someone is negotiating to get the number down that low so we can all stay alive for another chance to prove that we learn from our mistakes.

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Of All Things Truly Missed, I Think I Miss My Sense Of Comfort The Most - Late March 02026

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:15:33 GMT

Let's begin with the story of how the industrial musical creator gave a year off of her job to someone he believed had a good novel in her, and how very, very right he was.

The Slacktivist on the death of Nicholas Brendon, and on the ways that his most famous character, Xander Harris, seemed to bleed into the actor's life (mostly to the negative), but also the ways in which revisiting Xander, Warren, and Joss, the one who created them both, provide us with a cautionary tale. Be suspicious of anyone who claims they are a male feminist. The male part, they may have, but the feminism part is almost certainly lacking, and you can tell because they have made a claim to it.

A principal who read the absolutely hilarious and entirely child-appropriate book "I Need A New Butt!" to second graders is going to get his job back, and hopefully with back pay. Because, yes, someone complained about it, and the school decided that reading the book was inappropriate to children. I suspect the people making that decision also want to make sure that there are underpants on the child in In the Night Kitchen, and that there's nothing "objectionable" in their picture book collections.

The International Olympic Committee is historically one of the worst organizations you would want in charge of international sport, and they continue their abysmal track record by announcing genetic testing to determine whether or not an athlete is allowed to compete in the women's division of a sport, with anyone that shows up with an SRY gene banned for not being a 'biological female'. Thus, they ban trans athletes…and anyone else who has this particular gene. They claim they will carve out exceptions for androgen-insensitivity and other situations where an athlete "[does] not benefit from the anabolic and/or performance-enhancing effects of testosterone," but this is still the organization that used to require women athletes to parade themselves nude before a panel of doctors charged with determining whether they were really women or not, so I can imagine they will be just as good with such potential exceptions as they have been with Caster Semanya. (Not that, y'know, there's an entire contingent of trans athletes in every national sport federation looking to take the place by storm, but more than a few organizations are pretending there are so they can continue to get money from bigots, and to avoid having to take a stand on the right side of history against the forces that would ridicule them or make things harder for them to continue making their money if they actually had morals.) If you search for the evidence that supposedly backs these new tests, you are chasing vittras as they laugh at you, and often arrive at the assertion of a eugenicist who can't even prove their own assertion (and who will blame it on the test subjects instead of himself.) Or you land at the fact that these policies have been implemented and abandoned and implemented and abandoned because reactionaries want to classify people into neat boxes, and people, being constructed of multiple combinations of building blocks in nearly-infinite variations, defy being classified into neat boxes, and so the definition of "man" and "woman" is almost always political because it cannot be technical or scientific, and the IOC is certainly a political organization, perhaps even more so than the NOCs and federations that it serves as an umbrella for. We're still in this phase where we believe that women have to look a specific way before we will acknowledge they are women, and so many of our elite athletes are not in the category of being sufficiently feminine to be acknowledged as women.

( And more people who make bad choices, and cover for other bad choices, and otherwise try to legitimize those bad choices )

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Not feeling my best lately.

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:57:18 GMT

I have been on a not-very-great headspace kick lately, and I think some of it has to do with things that are out of my control and that I cannot influence in any way to make the lives of the people around me better. Some of it is feeling foolish and unintelligent that the solutions to puzzles I am trying to work out don't immediately leap out at me and allow me to progress even further along, as other people are doing just fine.

And some of it, in this case, is feeling like I am being misunderstood, or that I am misunderstanding, and that those kinds of things are waking up the slumbering brainweasel that is cousin to "you are an impostor" but instead takes the tack of "you are actually bad at all of this, and you have been clinging to self-delusion that you are anything other than bad at everything."

This is a weasel that is impervious to counterexample and abundance of evidence. Mostly because of the experience I had with my first work supervisor, and how really awful the relationship with my ex turned out to be (and how long I stayed in it and tried to defend it or at least believe that it wasn't really that bad.) You know, the usual things that leave scars as they heal and always threaten to just open up again and start bleeding everywhere if they get poked.

( As usual, something happened at work that has roused this particular weasel, and now I'm probably overthinking it. )

My experiences have led me not to the confidence of the mediocre white man, who can explain away any fault as being someone else's problem, or not actually relevant to them, but instead to the pathways of someone who carries themself like they expect to be hit at some point, and probably without any warning signs they can detect. I'm trying to be good at my job, but being good at my job involves other people, and people are notoriously hard to read properly.

I dunno. Maybe I am bad at my job. (Peter says, after all, that we are promoted to the level of our incompetence, so maybe I've already found mine.)

Maybe I'm bad at relationships. (This is an unknowable item without outside perspectives, and those outside perspectives each have their own criteria for figuring out whether I'm good or bad at it, rather than a single "objective" standard.)

Maybe I'm bad at everything. (That's not true, but it can certainly feel that way if you go too long without something giving you a trout-slap or managing to break through with enough feelings of competence to get above the anhedonia line.)

Guess I'll go eat worms? (But there aren't any gummy worms in the house right now, and also, it's well-past time I was in bed at the time of finishing this entry. Post time on this is after I've had a night's sleep, but this feeling of general incompetence persists even across sleep.)

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Would-be Caesars should always be worried about getting stabbed in the back. - Early March 02026

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:40:07 GMT

Let's begin with this: the fish doorbell is active again! See fish on the camera, push the button to have the keeper go and let them through.

A lovely profile on Diane Duane, who has been in fandom and making fandom and having her own fandom for many decades at this point.

Bruce Campbell, star of Evil Dead, Brisco County, Jr., Bubba Ho-Tep, and frequent guest star on Xena: Warrior Princess, among other roles, revealed a cancer diagnosis that was going to make his tour for a new movie come up short. Gods-cursed cancer. Here's hoping Bruce can beat it and the treatments are effective.

Permission to use more modern music in figure skating programs has meant an entire series of headaches to obtain copyright clearances to use the music, because skating has not yet worked out appropriate blanket licensing permissions, I guess, with all the relevant countries and possible artists. I'm interested as to why copyright holders and/or companies would reject the use of their music during skating programs or the Olympics, outside of "this person using this music is not someone we want associated with the music."

Because the United States is not a safe place to be, nor to try and enter and exit legally, the Ig Nobel Prizes have moved their award ceremony to Zurich, Switzerland. The Annals of Improbable Research have found something far too probable, about the way that U.S. immigration is treating everyone, so they went somewhere safer.

( And speaking of ignoble people... )

Last for tonight, Black Africans are everywhere in history, including in places where the average studier has their focus pinned down to the whiter side of Europe, instead of the greater world Latin Christendom interacted with.

And a searchable database of ukiyo-e prints through several eras of Japanese carving and printmaking.

(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.)

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Shorter month, shorter posting, it seems - Late February 02026

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 07:25:04 GMT

I feel like we need to start with this, because I'm runnning into situations where people have clearly not internalized one of the most important things to remember about stochastic parrots that they are calling Avian Intelligence. It's all based on vector maths and probabilities. It does not know what is true, nor what is accurate, when it is constructing what word to select next. That it manages to get things correct is by accident, and by the providence of having training data that contains the correct information in it. When it constructs sentences and so on, it does so based only on what the training data and the vector math, with some fuzz factor built in, says the next word is, regardless of whether that's the right word or not. (Admittedly, being able to do the vector math is helpful, because it allows for a certain amount of synonym substitution and can make a search engine more robust at finding relevant answers if you don't hit the exact keywords. There's an aside here about how many engines are transforming your queries so that you search for things that will serve you ads or that will steer the results to prioritize those who have paid for top search engine ranking, such that even things that are good that come from machine learning are then transformed to evil purposes by capital and their priorities.)

Also up top, Dreamwidth is recruiting volunteers who would be willing to file documents in United States courts talking about the chilling effects on your speech and online activity that various state laws trying to curb social site use by teens would have, and especially from parents who would be willing to detail the way those laws would interfere with your parenting decisions. Comments screened, signing up is not committing to writing such declarations. Also, risks involve things like having to use your wallet name, and possibly having your wallet name and your Dreamwidth identity linked in publicly-available court materials or at least materials available to the state and the court.

(Because South Carolina is the latest entity to join the circus, South Carolina users are especially helpful right now, but all kinds of states have legislation that's looking to join the circus. Why South Carolina? Well, they're charging people with "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" by being an identified adult in a teen-focused anti-ICE school walkout planning chat and expressing support for the walkout. Among other things they're trying to do to supposedly protect teens from the corrupting influence of adults.)

The worry about the presence of new media is perennial and perpetual, but it's not the new medium, or the new screen, that is the issue, it's the way that content is designed and presented that's trying to fragment attention and deep thinking. Accessibility and multimodality are awesome things, but there's a lot of design work that's been put into keeping us scrolling and viewing ads rather than using our tools to think and engage deeply.

Dr. Gladys West, whose precise measurements of the planet made it possible for the Global Positioning System network to come into existence, and therefore commercial (and military) satellite navigation, has died at 95 years of age. Another contribution of painstaking measurment and mathematics that undergirds so very much of the technological world today.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson, civil rights activist and occasional punchline of a joke, has finished his ministry at 84 years of age.

( What Have the Fools, Grifters, and Bigots Been Up To This Time? )

Last for tonight, twenty-five years of a very popular early-Internet meme, matching visuals to the "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" by the Laziest Men on Mars, who would also give us the Pusher and Shover robots in a different viral video.

(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.)

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A long and boring speech, annual in its delivery.

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 06:55:42 GMT

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.

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It all never really ends - Early February 02026

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 04:54:37 GMT

Let's begin with the understanding that your librarians are dealing with additional stresses than they had been in the past, and that the stresses they have been forced to deal with in the past are increased in velocity, size, and intensity. Beyond that, the current administration, after trying to zero out the funding available through the Institute of Museum and Library Services, has explicitly made it so that IMLS will give preferential treatment to grant applications that are in line with the administration's political ideology, which is about as anti-library as he can get. (Unless, of course, your library is more in line with the traditional duties and ideologies that it had, employing white women as saviors to blacks, browns, and poors to teach them how to act properly white and give proper deference to whiteness.)

Now updated for 2026, Hazel Newlevant's SARS-CoV-2 zine.

Also, if you've used or updated your Notepad++ program within the last few months, you really want to reinstall it from scratch and check for signs of compromise, because apparently some state actors hacked the hosting provider for the program and inserted malicious code into it. So that will be fun for everyone who uses that program.

Under-rated ways of changing the world, which doesn't always mean they're easy, but that many of them are effective, and the kind of thing where you end up celebrating Petrov Day because you managed to correctly recognize a system was malfunctioning, rather than that the United States had decided to destroy the world. (#6 has a certain amount of appeal to me, as someone who doesn't work in a nondescript government office, but who has that kind of pathway available to themselves to make change in the world through boring, unflashy interactions with others.)

Every Olympic organizer has to deal with the fact that they are getting a lot of young people who are at the peak of their physical fitness and putting them all together in close quarters, and they try to plan accordingly to have enough prophylactics on hand. Milan-Cortina's suppy lasted three days.

( And more of people behaving badly, muppets in charge, and techbros being unable to read the room inside )

Last out for tonight, The ways that the mountie falls off the pedestal, and the way that everyone tries to be a bit more like the mountie in due South, which makes the characters and the show better all the time.

The passive-aggressive technique of triangulation, where a person uses a third party to express their difficulties with, or to engage in bullying of, another person. Which I have apparently been victimized by, and only found out after the person who was doing it had left the organization. Which I still have massive issues with, because I prefer direct feedback rather than indirect feedback as both as a "I can't fix what I don't know about" issue, but also because people complaining about me instead of to me was also things that the manager who wanted to fire me took into account. Without telling me there were problems.

And a laugh: Accusations of penis enlargement to provide more lift for ski-jumping costuming in the 2026 Olympics. Yes, we have gotten to the point where penis size matters. Clearly, the condom suppliers didn't get the memo.

(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.)

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It has been a couple of weeks - Late January 02026

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 05:04:07 GMT

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.)

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Snoflake Challenge 2026 #15: Five Stars

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 05:57:45 GMT

Last call for this year's snowflake_challenge, and, it's a bit like all the things asking us to rate and review them with our time.

Challenge #15

How Did the Fandom Snowflake Challenge Go?

I intend to keep going back and checking out entries when I'm not doing something else, and leaving comments, and trying to build that community and see interesting things that people have posted. It probably won't go that quickly, and I may not make it all the way through in a timely manner. But I'll try.

( It was fine, which is not a complaint. )

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Snowflake Challenge 02026 #14: Primers and Recommendations

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 19:02:29 GMT

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 )

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Snowflake Challenge 02026 #13: Community

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 06:03:27 GMT

snowflake_challenge wants us to think about the places where we have come together in shared pursuit of our fandoms, or the same fandom, or many other ways of joining us together and showing us that we are not alone in our pursuits.

Challenge #13

TALK ABOUT A COMMUNITY SPACE YOU LIKE. It doesn’t need to be your favorite, or the one where you spend the most time (although it certainly can be). Maybe it’s even one that you’ve barely visited. But talk about that space and how it helps support fannish community.

( In community, we join, and nowhere else is that more evident than at convention. )

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Snowflake Challenge 02026 #12: A Token of Our Appreciation

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 01:21:20 GMT

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.

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Snowflake Challenge 02026 #11: Wish-Granting Engine

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:09:01 GMT

snowflake_challenge dropped their eleventh challenge, and it's a call-back.

Challenge #11

Grant someone's wish from Challenge #5.

( Merrily a wassailing... )

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Snowflake Challenge 02026 #10: The Aesthetic of It All

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 07:06:17 GMT

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? )

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Snowflake Challenge 02026 #9: Tropes Are Tools

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 18:04:49 GMT

It's time for another snowflake_challenge, and this one is geared more toward those of us who like to talk about the building blocks, the character types, and the storytelling pathways that link and underlie any given specific story being told.

Challenge #9

Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

( Discard the momomyth and understand that Tropes Are Tools )

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This year begins with an increase in atrocity and destruction - Early January 02026

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 04:27:51 GMT

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.)

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Snowflake Challenge 02026 #8: Process the Creative

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 04:49:29 GMT

We're over the halfway line at snowflake_challenge, and this challenge wants us to introspect about how we turn things out.

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

( Not exactly a process that has a lot of visible things )

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Snowflake Challenge 02026 #7: Be Nice.

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 03:01:12 GMT

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 )

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Snowflake Challenge 02026 #6: The Top Ten

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 04:05:52 GMT

snowflake_challenge has sent up number 6 on the challenge list, and it's one of the ones I struggle more with than not, the recommendations-related one.

Every challenge we try to make at least one rec post, and each year, we try to find a new way to make it fun for everyone. This year's attempt:

Challenge #6

Top 10 Challenge.

The category(ies) you choose are up to you. You can give top 10 Fics you read last year, the top 10 songs to create to, the to 10 guest stars on your favorite show, top 10 characters in your favorite book series, top 10... well, you get the idea.

Can't think of 10 of anything? That's okay, 10 is just an abstract. It's totally up to you.

This is one of those situations where being profoundly multifannish is a disadvantage, because a top ten list of anything may or may not make it to me. Or I might not get so deeply into a fandom to where there would be enough material for a top ten list. And while I read and enjoy the gifts that get sent my way in the various exchanges that I participate in, they don't necessarily cohere to any kind of top ten list of anything, either.

Eventually, a random idea will settle into my head, and I can go forward with it and see what might happen from there. So, here you are:

( 10 roles one person played during my formative years )

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Snowflake Challenge 02026 #5: Wishlist

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:09:48 GMT

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 )

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Snowflake Challenge 02026 #4: Page File

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 07:32:51 GMT

snowflake_challenge posted their fourth prompt, and I had to look at it a couple times before I started getting close to an understanding of what was being asked for.

On many of the fannish websites we use, our history is easily compileable into "pages". When we look back through those pages, sometimes we stumble upon things that we think are rather cool.

Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page

Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

( Here's where I admit I don't use fannish websites all that much. )

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Snowflake Challenge 02026 #3: Love

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 06:38:08 GMT

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.

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AO3 Output: 01 January-31 December 02025

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 05:27:07 GMT

Oh, no! This tells you how much of a terrible year 02025 was for me - I skipped out on the mid-year AO3 output post, while thinking I had already done it. So, I guess we get the year-long version, instead. Let's get to it.

( The whole year of 02025 in AO3 output. 16 works, ahoy )

And that will get us through the year's worth of material. Hopefully, I'll be better about things in July and go back to the six-month situation, but no guarantees. Hopefully this year is better for all of us than last year was.

That said, I apparently turned in just over 61k words this year (including one thing that I cross-posted that you've already seen here in this journal). That's a pretty good haul of fic, and it doesn't count all the words here on the journal or in book club. So, once again, a good year's worth of writing, and here's to more of that good writing in the upcoming year, for me and for all of you.

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