Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Someday I may again add to the cornucopia of excellent reading reports available here on Dreamwidth. In a previous life, enjoying these posts would also add to my teetering TBR pile. Now I get vicarious thrills from how folks’ reading made them feel. In particular:

chestnut_pod
https://chestnut-pod.dreamwidth.org/?tag=books+are+the+meaning+of+life&skip=30

dhampyresa
https://dhampyresa.dreamwidth.org/tag/reading+wednesday

rivkat doesn’t tag and does post many, many great reviews
https://rivkat.dreamwidth.org

runpunkrun
https://runpunkrun.dreamwidth.org/tag/book+report

Any recent DW entry with the tag "books" https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest?tag=books

Self-rec: mostly reviews, but also about the mechanics of reading https://jesse-the-k.dreamwidth.org/tag/reading

Reading-focused communities
readingtogether
booknook

Let me know whose reading reviews you enjoy....

Help Me Host a Watch Part for Your Fat Friend

YrFatFriendFilm.com

I loved this excellent documentary about Aubrey Gordon, fatness, family, the complexities of change, and the messy feelings we hold about our bodies. Over six years, director Jeanie Finlay follows Gordon from anonymous blogger yrfatfriend in 2016 to bestselling 2020 writer of What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Fat and beloved Maintenance Phase podcaster with an audience of millions.

Aubrey Gordon urges a paradigm shift in how we view fat people and the fat on our own bodies. I cheered and cried while watching the movie, as it shows Gordon’s strength (and love of her body in water) while also demonstrating her family’s ambiguous support and documenting the abuse she experiences daily, both online and off. It’s got pro captions and audio description (but no AD in the trailer).

Trailer on YouTube https://youtu.be/lodyin_6x3c

( stream it here )

I want to host a free online watch party, but I’ve never done this. I’m willing to subsidize the license fee. Are you the tech whiz who can help make this happen?

The tasks I imagine:

• create a PR strategy to garner viewership
• choose a platform to host the screening; the director has established a relationship with ROCO films, which can supply hosting and logins at FilmForum.net
• test CC and AD to make sure they're working
• attempt to prevent unlicensed distribution of the work
• host a discussion

If you have experience organizing asynchronous, time-limited, online movie showings, and are willing to help spread Aubrey Gordon’s message, please let me know — here or via DW’s direct messaging.

A friend who is not on DW enjoyed the Amazon Prime series Night Sky, an SF show featuring Sissy Spacek and JK Simmons. It ended without resolution, since Amazon canceled it after 8 eps. My pal would love to read the fixit fic.

I tried my fandom due diligence with no joy:

• zip zero zilch on AO3 or FF.net
• a handful of Tumblr posts
• the Reddit sub was folks bemoaning cancelation while mocking the idea of fic
• Fandom.com site with empty pages
• an unrelated Anime Discord server.
• here on DW "night sky" interests yielded amateur astronomers, but nothing on dwfanfic

Do you know of Night Sky fan works?

Or more/better places to search?

I’ve got around 400 books I no longer want to dust. (I'm saving my vision for new graphic novels.)

• 100+ science fiction or fantasy, dating back to Again Dangerous Visions from the Science Fiction Book Club
• 100 fiction, non-fiction, poetry standards found on the bookshelf of every 65-year-old feminist
• 40+ art topics including architecture, type, books, Celtic patterns, beadwork, songbooks
• 160+ disability related: theory, history, memoir — in print or graphic novel formats

I’m not interested in making money, and shipping them out would cost a lot as well. Almost all these titles are already available in my municipal and UW-Madison libraries, so donation seems unlikely.

MyGuy has volunteered to scan the titles into a database. That gives me a list, but what do I do next?

One of my self-soothing activities was browsing for purses on ebags.com. I’ve been doing it for more than a decade!

Then Samsonite bought the brand and now they just sell boring luggage.

ebags offered tight filters (materials; zipper vs snaps; small, medium, large to a site-wide size constant). Unlike Amazon spits it didn’t show me items outside the filter set.

Please tell me about sites I can browse for purses?

I got confused by the ending. ( entirely spoilers — comments too )

I like having a written record of what happened, to supplement my memory.

I switched form Eudora to Mac Mail in the last millennium. I've had at least a dozen email addresses. I've faithfully downloaded everything to my local Mac (IMAP, not POP--I may be old fashioned but I'm not a masochist). I'm more cavalier with my iOS Mail since I know the master version will be on my Mac.

I have 7 gigabytes of *.mbox and sipped *.mboxes.

I know that Mail will be happier if I have fewer "active" messages. Can I somehow export and then delete emails from Mail without losing them?

My search has found no massively helpful article. I want "Take Control of Archiving Your Email" to exist. Can you point me to a step-by-step, handholding resource that will slim down current Mail while still permitting me to read that email I sent to my doctor in 1999?

Thirty days ago, I asked how I might improve my visibility as a wheeling pedestrian. Did you ever have excellent ideas!

MyGuy and I have enjoyed this project: We prototyped, we scrounged, we pinned and unpinned. Today I wore the final version and it works great.

( Design and Implementation )

Summary

Increased peace of mind as a rolling pedestrian: priceless. Total cost US$75 plus five hours of design, sewing and experimentation. Total tabard weight with chain and flashers is 570g (20 ounces). It’s a snap to put on: I fold the back wrong side to the front, place the front over my cape, then flip the back in place over my head. The generous neck hole provides room for my cape collar to be spread down.

• High-Visibility 2-Tone Reflective Safety Vest
  Internet #308848281 / Model # HDX46600-O / Store SKU #1004213989
  $23.00 at Home Depot

• Nathan StrobeLight Bundle of 2 Lights
  Item #159064
  $36.00 at REI

• random chain from hardware store
  ‌$15 at Quality Hardware on Park St

Pictures!

( Vest on floor, vest on me )

I want to toggle Firefox Quantum’s permission for "Allow pages to choose their own fonts"

I can do this in about:config when I set browser.display.use_document_fonts;0

Is there a one-click way to do this with Javascript or Tampermonkey or AppleScript?

I'm using Mac Mojave.

In less than 15 minutes I have three concrete things I can do and I am doing!

I'm slugging back decaf tea and water

I am relaxing in bed with TETRIS on my iPad – which now has a low interaction mode where i just tap an outline instead of swiping and turning. If the first one gets too easy (Ha) – there's a back up circular TETRIS.

After dinner I'm going to write a little story about the woman who got hit in the driveway and turned into an avenging stainless steel angel!

I am so grateful for your thoughts and ideas!