Crafts Dyed a 36x45cm piece of white 14 count aida cloth purple, for Secret Reasons. And now I know that I can get a reasonable result doing that with a large storage box and hot water, winging the quantity of Rit dye. Shenanigans may result.
Food My parents' Christmas present to me, a new frying pan, just made it to me today. I haven't test-driven it yet, but it looks nice. And like it should heat up easier than the cast iron one my stove can't really handle, much as I love it.
Weather Finally cooling down. Good.
Other One of the Discord servers I'm in had a PowerPoint night. I didn't present, but I contributed a very unserious set of slides for someone else to present sight unseen. This was a heap of fun, and I recommend this form of grownup show and tell to other nerds. I am already working on my next such document.
In a different Discord, a discussion of linguistics prompted me to make a series of noises which in turn made Dorian give me a very funny look. If you would like to provoke yourself to make a series of noises that will make your cats give you funny looks, here is the chart.
What if, when you went to a nonprofit/charity/etc website because you want to donate money to them, you could add ?nomarketing on the end of the link, and it would bring up a barebones version of their donation page that would JUST LET YOU MAKE A SINGLE DONATION.
It would not sign you up to their newsletter. It would not give them permission to contact you. It would not ask you to share their link on social media. It would not ask you how you found them. It would not show you a thank you letter written in the first person by a composite version of one of their clients. It would not show you tragic and distressing photographs or descriptions of the horrible things happening to the people you HAVE ALREADY DECIDED TO GIVE MONEY TO HELP. There would not be any animated banners or carousels. There would be no popups. Required fields on the form would only be information they genuinely cannot accept your money without, and they would have checked both the law on what information they actually need and their assumptions about names and titles (e.g. not everyone has a first name, not everyone has a last name, not everyone's name is short, some names have spaces or apostrophes or hyphens, not everyone belongs to one of the four genders Mr, Mrs, Miss, and Dr.) It would not give you a menu with three choices: make your one-off donation a monthly amount, make your one-off donation a monthly amount but more money, or (deselected and in a duller colour) "keep your one-off donation" before letting you donate. Or after you donate. Or both.
I understand they have a job to do, but do they understand how aversive this experience is? It is the biggest thing about charitable giving that I dread, when I have enough to give. "Hi, I'd like to give you some mon-" "CAN YOU GIVE US MORE? CAN YOU GIVE IT EVERY MONTH? KIDS ARE DYING, VASS, ANIMALS ARE DYING, THE PLANET IS DYING, MOREMOREMOREMORE CAN WE TEXT YOU, CAN WE CALL YOU UP AND TELL YOU ABOUT THE DYING KIDS CAN YOU TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS TO GIVE US MONEY TOO-"
If they made it less stressful, I would not have to psych myself up to do this. And by definition this is how they are treating people who already want to help them.
Going into nature, how long does it take till you feel like you’re there? There meaning not sending emails in your head and not wincing at shifts of temperature or humidity when sun turns to rain? There’s a comfort that comes over you. Hands and the heart are no longer so far apart and pulling a thorn out of your flesh is an afterthought.
Working a Grand Canyon rafting trip this month, I listened to familiar conversation from participants, some mentioning it takes a day or two to let their shoulders down. On day five some are still trying to shake the digital wiring that’s seized our analog minds. On longer trips, by ten days the most tech-hardened have given themselves over to sun-time and star positions. By day twenty-one you’d swear you’ve always belonged here.
When I left the river to hike back to civilization, the guide on the oars who dropped me off along with several others shouted, “Don’t let the wonder killer get you!”
I hiked gear onto my back to start up the trail and her sentiment rattled in my head. Wonder killer. That’s what she called the world outside the Grand Canyon, the one I’d get to when my phone reached signal about 5,000 feet over my head, just below the rim.
I was teaching as part of a rotating backcountry writing program, hiking out as another instructor hiked in. Some of the participants were scientists, including two Indigenous women working on their dissertations. We talked about the wonder-killing up on the surface. I saw a tear roll down one woman’s cheek from under her sunglasses when she described how academia beats down creativity, stripping any reference to her heritage and Native perspective. I’ve heard this from many scientists. It’s hard to ever write creatively again. The woman wrote beautiful poetry and said she struggled to hold onto it.
The Bright Angel Trail, the busiest trail in the Grand Canyon, is 5,500 vertical feet river to rim, an effort no matter if you’re going up or down. I was in a group of river people climbing miles of switchbacks out of morning shadows and into daylight. Other hikers began to appear about the time we made the Muav Limestone a third of the way up, first trail-runners and then families still looking spry early in the day. We put our heads down and went into low gear, our backpacks clipped with river shoes and paddle jackets. To hikers coming down in sports gear and calf-high socks, we must have looked like troglodytes trudging up from the mines. When we stopped to rest, I commented to my group that I’d come to appreciate the way we smelled, like sweat and minerals. Passing through detergents and scent industries on the trail was like entering a flower shop. It stung the nose.
Getting into wilderness mind doesn’t take me long. Coming out is harder. I have to work at it. Up Tapeats, up Redwall, up Supai and the bold white cliffs of Coconino we encountered more and more people, languages, ethnicities, accents. A ranger popped along with a smile and paused to see if any of us were dying. A man with earbuds sat alone at the mile-and-a-half resthouse having a conversation about something I tried to ignore. It involved money.
Don’t get me wrong, I love these people I don’t know, their faces unmemorizable. I’m one of them, my group another string of oddities among families with too many kids, families with not enough kids, a veteran with a T-shirt stating so, a woman in a flowing dress, another woman clinging to the wall along the trail as if she’d found herself stranded on the Eiger. You shouldn’t stop to help. They are going through what they need to go through. For some, just looking into the Grand Canyon is shamanic.
If they appear to be dying, then do please help. Ask how their hike is going and if they are dying they will let you know.
I hadn’t been thinking anything like that on the river. Chances of falling, breaking a leg, drowning, or being bit or stung by something poisonous are much higher, yet I hadn’t worried much. You get to know each other on an expedition; there are no strangers among you. Amy Irvine, my co-instructor, found a rattlesnake — a small and venomous endemic called the Grand Canyon pink — coiled up and buzzing where she was putting down her camp. Not much was made of it. One of the guides quietly picked it up with his hand from behind its head and carried it off. Amy commented how beautiful the snake was and she didn’t think twice about laying her bag where she’d planned.
Coming out feels like worry. I didn’t turn my phone on as I hiked, but I could feel it burning from inside my pack. Kinetic energy was growing, questions surfacing that only the outside world could answer. You should be worried, it’s not a false emotion. Phone conversations increased at the Kaibab where if you looked up through chalky tiers of limestone, you’d see pictographs painted in red showing a line of antlered deer, a parade of ancient bucks.
The trick, I’ve found, is not to let go. The woman on the oars had implored me not to let the wonder killer get me. Keep your heart in the Canyon. Carry the place with you. Keep your eyes open, your wits about you. Let your poetry out.
Coming out of wild places, how long does it take to adjust? Everybody’s bumping into each other. We catch a shuttle at the rim and pile in our gear. We plug into the worst of the media we’d missed and the news is unavoidably tragic. There are some holdouts who won’t check till morning, bless their souls. In Flagstaff we get together at an agreed upon time, responding to texts, seeing who can drive, asking if so-and-so was coming or if they said they were too tired. There’d be a menu and questions, loud music, and we’d look like we went through a carwash and were subsequently dressed by machines. The tans we thought we’d been cultivating turned out to be mostly dust and sand washing off in the shower.
Don’t let the wonder killer get you. Notice at the loud dinner table the kind of light shedding on everyone’s faces and the cool that comes in whenever the door opens. Follow the cadence of voices and nod to their rhythms. Feel the phone buzzing in your pocket. Breathe deeply, poised as if a rattlesnake were in your hand.
Photo by me: Colorado River, Marble Canyon, Arizona
Late in May as the light lengthens toward summer the young goldfinches flutter down through the day for the first time to find themselves among fallen petals cradling their day's colors in the day's shadows of the garden beside the old house after a cold spring with no rain not a sound comes from the empty village as I stand eating the black cherries from the loaded branches above me saying to myself Remember this
I love an ekphrastic and this is proof that poetic forms we might think of as nothing but wordplay or for children (e.g., abecedarians or acrostics) can be very sophisticated and serious.
Leaving the Psychologist: An Abecedarian Ekphrastic by Grisel Y. Acosta
after Remedios Varo’s Mujer saliendo del psicoanalista
another face has sprouted in my chest beastly, that’s me, a super freak cavorting with your skull in my grasp displaced personalities cannot be cloaked ever, they will grow like a haunted fever of wispy hair gathered in a basket, along with time, a half-filled vial of poison & illusions of tick-tock-clocking syringe just let me explain: killing myself is not an option let me try to live with my multiple personas and their infinite masks, why not weave them into a poncho of chartreuse green, grow them, pouch them, wear them like horns question my memories, befriend radical thoughts and nightmares solemn my specters behind tenuous doors with intimidating bells understand the unexplainable, develop venom as Tilda Swinton couture when dreams become a snail shell planted X, marks the spot of this treasure I shall reveal, yell on a mountain, YES, this is mine, I will zap my fears—I can face all the faces, darling, of course I can
Reblogging is a core feature of Tumblr that doesn't really translate well to Dreamwidth. There are a couple of different ways to replicate it, but which one you pick depends on what your goal was when reblogging a particular post.
"I want to be able to refer back to this post at a later date." The feature you want for this is likely Memories. Memories are a site-specific bookmarking system that predate tagging. In those times, a lot of LJ users would use it to organize their own posts, such as keeping track of their fics. (Tags were introduced a relatively short time before Dreamwidth split off from LiveJournal.) Memories can be public, access-locked, or private. Any Memories you make on Dreamwidth will be of Dreamwidth posts only.
Unlike with Tumblr's reblog feature, if you add someone else's post to your Memories and the original poster deletes it or locks it, you will no longer have access to it, but it does give you a way to keep track of posts made by other people.
"I want to be able to spread the word about this post." The way most Dreamwidth users do this is by making their own post about it, either in their own journal or on a community, and including a quick blurb and a link to what you want to share. (If it's a post by another Dreamwidth user, it's considered polite to ask in the comments if OP is okay with you sharing the link around. Most people are okay with this if they made a public post, but some may ask you to make your own post about the topic instead, especially if their own post is access-locked.)
That said, there's also technically a workaround made to mimic reblogs, made by astolat (yes, that Astolat), ljwrites, and melannen. I haven't tried it myself and don't particularly want to, so there aren't a lot of questions I can answer about it. However, I would say that it would still be polite to ask for permission to reblog a post in this case, especially since, as far as I'm aware and unlike with Tumblr reblogs, the original poster will not automatically be made aware of your reblogging.
Interestingly, I've heard that this reblogging tool can also work on some non-Dreamwidth site links, such as from AO3.
"I want to share this cool, funny, or interesting thing with other people." Did a friend or someone else you subscribe to make a post that you thought was particularly funny or insightful? I recommend sharing it at metaquotes! Metaquotes is a community specifically dedicated to sharing fun and interesting things made by other people. It's not very active at the moment, but with a little work, we can change that...
"I have something I want to add to this post." If what you want is to share your thoughts on a topic, I recommend replying to the post with a comment! If it's something you would have put in the tags or comment section of a reblog (and isn't rude), I can about guarantee that the original poster would be interested in receiving it.
There are exceptions; if you feel like your comment might derail too much from the original post, or if you manage to exceed the character limit for one comment, you might consider making your own post (with a link to the original), and replying to the original post with a link to your own.
And those are the basics! You may want to mix-and-match on these, depending on the content and your goals for it; for example, if someone posts something really funny that you want to share, you can reply to the post, and post to Metaquotes, and link back to it in a post of your own. But overall, these options should cover most of your needs.
If you have any questions, or if there's something I missed, please feel free to let me know in the comments!
#Purrcy was both happy and regal, sitting in my seat on the sofa with the sun coming the skylight on it. See how he smiles at me in Cat! #cats #CatsOfBluesky
Purrcy the tuxedo tabby is lightly curled on a brocade cushion, looking at the camera with ears alert, whiskers spread wide and white, eyes light green and pupils just slits. He is clearly very happy, as sunlight shines on the cushion and most of him.
I sat out on the porch to eat breakfast today, and the local hive of feral honeybees was awake, buzzing about looking for nectar. The crabapple flowers are opening, so they seem to have their timing just right. The carpenter bees were also out, inspecting the eaves. It was really good to have that 1/2 hour, even though it was so late in the morning (I had errands to run before my stomach was ready for breakfast) that I didn't see or hear any migrants.
Honestly, even aside from me writing my own, there are a lot of tutorials out there for Tumblr users who might be interested in getting started on Dreamwidth. I'm thinking it wouldn't hurt to get all of the ones we know about rounded up in one place.
A Tumblr User's Guide to Dreamwidth by aniamra; has some useful Dreamwidth etiquette. (Full disclosure, it also links an older post about finding things to do and making new friends that I wrote.)
DW for Tumblrites Masterpost by potofsoup; this one has a lot of really fantastic information. Highly recommended. Click here for the table of contents Part 1: How do I follow a blog? Part 1.5: How do I find people to follow? Part 2: Posting and HTML basics Part 2.5: Images Part 2.8: Backdating and Drafting Part 2.9: Scheduling Posts Part 3: Dash/Reading Page curation (Subscription Filters) Part 3.5: Access vs. Join vs. Subscribe, and targeted friends-only posts (Access Filters) Part 4: Likes and Reblogs Part 4.5: Stickies, Sidebar, Anon Askbox Part 5: I miss yelling in the tags! (subtext, icons, and moods) Part 5.5: Actual tags tho Part 6: Themes and mobile Part 7: Sideblogs and tag filters Part 8: Paid features
The official Dreamwidth News post from December 3rd, 2018, right around when Tumblr announced it was banning a certain type of content. While not everything is up to date, there should still be a lot of information in the comments here. I also recommend reading the news post itself, or any dw_news posts, as it'll give you an idea of what the staff here is like. Ditto on the comments reflecting the Dreamwidth community at large. Yeah, there's some trolls and jerks out there, but by and large, Dreamwidth is a pretty welcoming place, if I do say so myself.
Guides by soc_puppet (me): I'm sharing the newcomers links, because that's what I have most easily at hand, but if you check, you can probably find them mirrored at the_great_tumblr_purge on the same date.
This is for Earth Day, but it also now makes me think about Maybe Happy Ending, which we saw in New York last week and absolutely loved. There are some parallels, although this is not (obviously) a poem about fireflies.
Sometimes, when it rains in the night, I hear the sound of it sweeping around the corners, and it feels as if someone is wrapping my house in a blanket. It's a comfortable feeling. Then in the morning when the sun comes up, there are still droplets sparkling on the twigs, calling attention to the fact that this year as ever year, the maple buds are beginning to unfurl again. And I was startled to look out the upstairs window and see a panoply of dandelions already spangling the lawn. Everything is getting out of hand, as usual, while I am out of commission. But how lucky am I to have seen this so many times.
We both had a bit of a relapse yesterday, but the Soarrowhawk's was worse than mine. He ended up staying home from the gym again. It's not fun when we're both sick at the same time. He seems to be doing better today, and we hope to continue our interrupted trajectory of getting better. The stomachs are still not entirely reliable. I did laundry and made him some lime jello with bananas in it, his favorite. I had other things on my list but at that point I got too tired and sat down for awhile. He offered to take me to the botanical garden to see the butterflies, but alas, I was not ready for that. Laster, I pulled myself together and made us some fried rice for dinner, with mushrooms, celery, green onions, red peppers, ham, and an egg in it. You wouldn't think this would be tolerable to a dicey tummy, but it seems to be okay so far. Now I've developed a sore throat and a cough, and that's what's bothering me at the moment.
We're belatedly watching "The Saint" as a tribute to the late Val Kilmer. I saw it when it first came out, but had forgotten most of it. Oh lordy. I so want to believe in the Templar and his operatic, completely implausible multiple personas with a dash of Jim Morrison . . . but . . . lordy!! I can still enjoy it as a gloriously awful movie, bad enough to give one a rococo hangover. But I have to say that the female lead is giving the most embarrassing misrepresentation of a scientist I have ever seen, and I've seen a lot of them. I hope they kidnapped her puppy and blackmailed her into it, because I'd hate to think she did this willingly. It has hints of the very first Mission Impossible in it, and a prefiguring of Jason Bourne as well. This is a movie Harriet M. Welsch would have watched with popcorn. "Look at those rotten things! Oh boy!" said Harriet, and sat down, stuffing a great gob of popcorn in her mouth.
What disabled readers want* from non-disabled sci-fi and fantasy** writers:
Imagine your world where we exist, without being a tragedy, a burden, or (functionally) erased.
Back in 2019, I came up with my own metric for Disability Representation in stories, inspired by the Bechdel-Wallace Test.
I named it the “1,001 Problems Template”
There’s a disabled character,
Who wants something,
Beyond Revenge, Cure, or Death,
And personally takes action to achieve it.
I decided to call it a “Template,” rather than “test,” because I hope that it’s a useful tool, and not something to Pass or Fail. 1,001 Problems, because, Yeah. Disability can be a bitch, but characters can have 1,000 other things they’re dealing with, too. And you can write a story about any one of them.
The point being: If you can imagine us as part of your make-believe future, and fairy tale past, then it’s easier to include us in your real world present.
*With the understanding, of course, that not all readers want the same thing [/standard “Your mileage may vary” disclaimer]
**In other genres, too, while we’re at it.
Quoted tags (from previous):
#I’ll add‚ if the world treats disabled people in ableist ways […] #this needs to be treated as something that’s objectively wrong with the world #point that shit the fuck out. make sure everyone knows it’s fucked up. #“oh this magic academy doesn’t have any disabled students” make your characters COMPLAIN about it
These are all excellent additions. I’ve always thought the argument: “It’s not bad representation, because it’s realistic!” to be the bigot’s lazy way out.
But I wanted to keep this template on the same simplicity level (more or less) as the Bechdel-Wallace test, in order to point out how ridiculously limited Disability Tropes in fiction tend to be.
This is your check-in post for today. The poll will be open from midnight Universal or Zulu Time (8pm Eastern Time) on Tuesday, April 22, to midnight on Wednesday, April 23. (8pm Eastern Time).
Good afternoon, happy Tuesday! I finally spotted the morning doves again-- well, actually, one of the landed on the back porch and made eye contact with me through the sliding glass door, and then another dove dive-bombed the first one and they both flew off. Fun!
Got some links for y'all here! I'm experimenting with formatting this time. Is this easier to read, or worse?
I did most of my schooling in Maryland and I took a civics class in 9th or 10th grade, but I'm pretty sure we went over some stuff before then in elementary school/middle school. We had mock presidential elections, for instance, so I'm sure we at least went over the stuff about voting.
I also remember seeing the Schoolhouse Rock video about how bills are passed, but I honestly can't remember where along my educational timeline it happened. I AM fairly certain a teacher showed it to us, though!
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