Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

Let us begin with Arizona State University launching a bachelor's degree in influencing other's opinion, which is being run out of the journalism and communication school, because they believe that being an influencer is more about presentation and communication than about the more business-related ends of being someone who gets paid online.

There are groups around for transgender women to (re)connect with their bodies through playing baseball, to (re)understand that a transitioned body is still the same one that did athletics, and to also (re)affirm that women and girls can and do play sports, including "men's" sports. This is a great piece of writing, about experiences, and feelings-of-body, and the joy of just being able to do things again that may or may not have been put away because of transition.

Amnesty in the United Kingdom apologizes for telling the truth about several groups being anti-rights, because the alternative was to have to defend themselves against costly lawsuits, lawsuits that Jo Rowling publicly said she would fund for anyone who wanted to object to being called exactly what they are. It is an indicator of the times you live in when the rich are able to get the truth buried about them simply because they can threaten and then drain the resources of organizations.

But also, while there is a vicious and official swing toward reactionaries and those who would see trans people eradicated, there is also all the gains that came from trans people, and allies, and possibility, and the part where trans people became ordinary in many ways. Which will likely leave it to the people who are obsessed with the idea that everyone around them is secretly a Jew a Muslim an immigrant gay and interested in them personally a transgender person interested in corrupting fragile minds to their cause to make complaints and try to police the use of single-gender spaces as new guidelines come into force in most of the United Kingdom. The lie is in the reporting piece on it, where the declaration is that single-gendered spaces must exclude any trans person and send them to the space of their assigned sex at birth, but that trans people are also not supposed to end up in a situation where there are no places for them , on perhaps the mystical assumption that everywhere has gender-neutral facilities that they can point a trans person to. Now that the guidance is in force, expect a fair amount of cases brought before courts about how well those guidelines are being implemented, enforced, and whether they really are exclusionary and onerous or not,

( The usual assortment of strangeness inside )

Last out, the San Francisco Muni system transformed into an aural experience, using the movement of trains and buses to generate notes and musical patterns from their activity.

And some good news: the unionized ProPublica Guild was able to successfully negotiate a contract with ProPublica.

(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.)

Let us begin with the ways in which modern technology corporations create digital poppets of us and then use those poppets for their own nefarious ends, while also selling our poppets and the use of them to government actors who do not have our best interests at heart. The work of getting people out from under those poppets is long and terrible. Sometimes, though, you can do perfectly fine just by using the protocols that have been there this entire time, instead of being inside a walled garden with a corporate wrapper over the protocol. A site built with the idea of using HTML first, and then CSS and Javascript as enhancements to those in modern browsers and connections, generally results in more people able to view and/or use the website.

The Ageless Linux project, which reads the statutory language of California's Digital Age Assurance Act, and will produce an operating system and devices running an operating system, that will be in flagrant violation thereof, because the law is not about child safety, it is about building regulatory moats and engaging in mass surveillance. It also notes the other states where similar legislation has been passed, and how easy it is for someone with Ageless Linux to be in willful and flagrant violations of those laws as well.

The Gender Census is back for 2026, for anyone who doesn't identify solely as a man or a woman, whether cis or trans.

New canonical material dropped for the Softbank fandom.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg offers, grounded in the Law and the interpretations and exegesis thereof, why an observant Jew might argue for religious exemption to the use of generative AI products, or other AI products that were trained on stolen materials and data, which is significantly less in text than the papal encyclical about Artificial Intelligence and moral use for Catholics.

( Have some more materials inside, including schisms, fools, and a mess of technological things )

Last out, congratulations to the now-unionized employees of Hachette Book Group.

The reimagining of childhood into a phase separated from adulthood, and along with it, the need for dedicated children's play spaces and playgrounds. And, as juxtaposition, the ways that children rebel against the imposition of order and discipline on their lives by adults, including through the creation of memes and statements like "six-seven."

(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.)

We must begin with the regrettable news of The death of Anthony Head, best known to children of the 90s in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Giles, and to the children of this era for his role in Ted Lasso as Rupert Mannion, at 72 years of age. (And also many other roles, but for the US audience, those two are the ones that come to mind immediately.) And also, the death of Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, at 56 years of age. Persepolis was one of those books endlessly recommended for a look of what it was like to be a women in Iran before and during the revolution that put the current hard-line government in charge. And also, Jane Yolen, a children's author with more than 450 books to her name, and therefore likely, you've read one of her books, passing onward at 87 years of age.

Neither the French horn nor the English horn are properly named, but instead are the result of misconceptions and translations of those misconceptions.

When someone wants to talk about trans people in UK media, they're four times more likely to mention a cisgender woman with a massive fortune and an equally large hatred of trans people than they are actual trans people. And even more so likely to mention politicians and negative attitudes than actual trans people and their issues. Although, sometimes, you have good stories from the people who aren't the actual trans people, like when the trade unions showed up to help make sure that Durham Pride was able to continue after the anti-queer government pulled their funding. Or Disability Rights UK showing up for trans people and criticizing the EHRC guidance.

Why do they have to reference TERFs? Because most people don't find the idea of trans women in women's spaces threatening, so they can't find anyone but TERFs who want to talk about it to the media.

If you want people to have better sex (and quite likely more of it), the best thing you can do for them is give them a universal basic income. Because people who aren't stressed about money issues often have time to do things they enjoy doing, which is often sex. And so is art. And so many other things that make our lives better.

Governments stop using the vague threat of children being online to force everyone to submit to the surveillance state. Difficulty: impossible. Because they keep doing it. The UK, for example, intends to ban anyone under 16 from having access to any social media at all, on the belief that it will somehow make their childhoods less fraught and less dangerous. (They're not, however, banning messaging apps or online gaming spaces, because they don't understand where things like radicalization and bullying happen, and therefore have no idea what they would have to ban to properly keep kids away from potential harm, as they claim to want.)

( The usual that you have come to expect, and possibly appreciate, inside )

Last out, DistroSea, which offers VNC connections so that someone can test drive a Linux distribution before making a decision to install it. I like this idea. It's certainly more accessible than downloading and imaging a thumb drive repeatedly to decide whether something is worth sticking with. And with this available to people, it might be a really good way for someone to try a Linux system and see if they like it, without having to dedicate space and time to it other than a web browser. (You can at least get a feel for what it's like, and to see how similar and different it is than a Windows or a macOS desktop.

And also, Some very good designs for Michigan's "I Voted" sticker contest. ("I voted, now let me sleep" is the one I like the most.)

(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.)

Let us begin with a pair of bad decisions. The first is that someone enterprising stored a case of cans' worth of beer in one of the microfilm storage areas in an archives. The second bad decision is that they chose Natural Light as the beer to store. Natty Light and PBR are the things that someone drinks at university because they're cheap and terrible, and if you're at Duke, presumably, you have both the means and the willingness to drink better beer than that. I still wouldn't store beer in the microfilm area, because, well, warm beer is nobody's friend, either.

Snaaaaake, snaaaaake, ooooooh, it's a snaaaaake! (has been inducted into the British Film Institue's Archives.)

Pictures from a Black Fae Fest in Georgia, which I love primarily because of all the fae there having a good time. (Admittedly, the idea of Black fae was not much of an issue for me - a collegiate production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Queen of the fairies (Drag Queen of the Fairies, at the bare minimum) and the King of the Fairies throwing up the hood of his hoodie to turn invisible.)

An accurate obituary for Ted Turner, who, as billionaires went, was eccentric, but also had some good ideas, and certainly turned aside from the path of being a completely evil man. Even though he cursed us with CNN.

( The grift, the corruption, the iocaine dilemma pushed on trans people, and, of course, the techbros )

Last out, someone has compiled together operating systems across the decades and tweaked them so they run properly in emulation, as a museum and a way of allowing people to access older OSes and play in them. The full edition is about 174 GB uncompressed, the lite one a mere 21 GB uncompressed and will need to download anything not initially included. This is a good reason to fire up your BitTorrent client for both downloading and seeding, because holy shorts, that's a lot of OSes to look through.

A plea not to remove the thing that makes science work by trying to produce automation and non-human scientific pipelines to get faster results. Just so - new knowledge does not always come from rearranging old knowledge, but from the breakthroughs and evolutionary paths and inefficiencies that come from exploration.

Server Charms, a self-contained small network with a few HTML pages that runs on an ESP32 powered by recycled vape batteries. Which is about small and local networks, and hiding a server in plain sight, or in an art project. Reminds me of PirateBox and its insistence on creating a local network for file-sharing and chatting and other such things, albeit on slightly more power-hungry hardware for slightly more power-hungry applications. The idea of small things, very local, very low-powered, and not connected to the greater Internet, still appeals, although there's always the difficulty that connecting to unknown WiFi networks is not encouraged. If there were some way to help satiate the curiosity, and also potentially be a viable local network, that would be something interesting. I feel like this is the sort of thing that a student might use to generate a network away from prying eyes. Or anyone else who would like a small and local enclave they can use away from surveillance and with community at its heart. (Which would work very well with things like PirateBox.)

(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.)

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.)

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.

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.)

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.)

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.)

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. )