sciatrix: A thumbnail from an Escher print, black and white, of a dragon with its tail in its mouth, wing outstretched behind. (Default)
I returned from Galveston with a nasty head cold that has only gotten worse in the intervening hours, so today I am home sick and rolling around on the couch, slow blinking through the glasses I somehow managed to gouge scratches in over the left eye and trying to work out how to think through about two inches of mucous. I am resolutely taking my Dayquil, which historically does bad things to my brain-to-words filter, so... look forward to me watching the beginning of The Good Doctor and liveblogging shit as it occurs to me, I guess. I was doing a lot of DWing on phone yesterday--my colleage D helpfully drove all the way back from Galveston to Austin with Tribble and his husky baby Arya in the back seat--and I think as long as I route everything through my mobile-friendly theme, it's okay.

Also, I remain completely in love with posting and replying via email. That is magical. It is the most useful thing for mobile, I swear to god, because if the browser dies your email draft remains saved.

Sick-person solidarity to [personal profile] staranise, who I hear is also battling the cold monsters, and a more general joy-in-others'-joy to [personal profile] siderea whose upcoming move sounds like a great change for the better.
sciatrix: A thumbnail from an Escher print, black and white, of a dragon with its tail in its mouth, wing outstretched behind. (Default)
I'm way more likely to be around and possessed of enough focus to write about things in January than December, so I figured I'd steal that prompt and try for a one-post-per-day thing here, too. Plus there's an extra day in January! But I almost always write better if I think someone will actually be interested, so I thought I'd start a list of topics here in case folks have suggestions. Anonymous ones are fine, if that is what floats your boat.

(I will be at an integrative biology conference between the 3rd and the 7th, so I'll try and have a bit of a backlog I can copy-paste in at odd moments so that I keep hitting targets.)

Stuff vaguely knocking around in my head at the moment includes m/f dynamics in all the Brooklyn 99 Jake/Amy I've been reading and comparing gender dynamics between fic and canon and anthropomorphization of animals as a method of understanding them: how that aligns with ability to understand humans who are Different from ourselves, to give you an idea. Stuff I've been meaning to write down for a very long time includes... let's see, whether or not you can argue that animals have gender which doesn't necessarily align with biological sex, why "homosexuality/asexuality is Nature's response to overpopulation" is nonsense, and fleshing out why I side-eye the idea that both historically and currently queer people are less likely to have had children than straight people.

Anyway, I'll put any entries in my list right down here:

January 1:
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sciatrix: A thumbnail from an Escher print, black and white, of a dragon with its tail in its mouth, wing outstretched behind. (Default)
...because it's probably wise for me to tuck everything aside for later as I go so, let's not lie, as not to lose any of it.

Bad sex award 2018: the contenders in quotes
Extravagant metaphors are indecently exposed in the shortlist for the Literary Review’s annual showcase of ‘outstandingly bad’ erotic writing. Haruki Murakami and James Frey lead the all-male shortlist for bad sex award.
Why do are some people unusually resilient?
The discovery that mental illness was far more the rule than the exception made Schaefer more eager to understand who the remaining 17 per cent of the population were – what was it about their approach to life that preserved their mental health? He presumed, at first, that people who’d been born to wealthy parents or who’d maintained good physical health might end up in the temperamentally blessed group, since poverty and ill health are clear harbingers of mental disorder. That didn’t turn out to be the case, though.
The man-eaters of Tsavo, two lions that killed railroad workers in Kenya more than a century ago, have inspired legends, movies and a lot of research papers trying to explain what drove the big cats to prey on humans (a rare menu choice for Panthera leo). A study out today finds that, in one crucial way, the infamous killers were a lot like — surprise — zoo animals.
Between flowers and sex there has long been an enduring link. In the classical age, women (especially virgins) were compared to flowers, whether in Virgil’s agricultural Georgics or else in Sappho – who, in one fragment, makes an analogy between a woman, perhaps married, and “a hyacinth in the mountains that the shepherds trample with their feet.” Shakespeare often resorted to botanical metaphors for females, above all in Hamlet, in which Ophelia strews flowers all over Elsinore. You need only think of the names Rose, Lily, Daisy, Violet… Women’s names, all of them.
Zuleyka Zevallos has a scholarly deconstruction of that one study that came out last year purporting that f/f desire evolved to attract men. I admire her quite a bit, but need to read through this further.


I picked up a writing injury guide from [personal profile] sebenikela.

If you're new to Dreamwidth, [personal profile] beatrice_otter put together a list of good links, which I'm going to repost here.

[personal profile] sylvaine has a big rec list of communities.

[personal profile] umadoshi has a couple of posts rounding up lots of guides and stuff about how to use/get to know DW.

[personal profile] conuly has yet more stuff on how to DW.

[personal profile] siderea wrote interesting meta on how to encourage a flourishing community on DW.

[personal profile] melannen has a few interesting posts I want to chew on for later: how to encourage discussion on Dreamwidth, and how to work out a "kudos" style function as a workaround.

By contrast, [personal profile] jesse_the_k has helpful tips for low-effort interaction on Dreamwidth, which this week I vaguely feel like borrowing. Whoof. (More on that in a minute.)

I found a helpful guide to making your blog (and therefore your reading page) mobile friendly! Colors customizable, but I haven't yet worked out how to turn a palette into something I actually enjoy looking at so I'm sticking with the monochrome for the moment.

Via [community profile] metaquotes, [personal profile] sara has a totally fucking delightful discussion of mushroom fandom:
Tonight's big discussion item on mushroom comm? "I found these mushrooms in a hat on the sidewalk. Can I eat them?" (No.)


last of all, if you want something fun, [personal profile] rachelmanija has a lovely roundup of fun things she's found lately, including werewolves, rainbow fudge, and lesbian chicken farmers.

I swear to god I will respond to comments today--it's been a fairly high-effort couple of days and I am going AUGH WILL YOU NOT, WORK /o\ but I'm really excited to see all of you and all the activity and fun shit flooding into my reading list here!
sciatrix: A thumbnail from an Escher print, black and white, of a dragon with its tail in its mouth, wing outstretched behind. (Default)
...in that there's a whole lot of old tumblr posts I rather like, please and thank you, and I would like them to be hosted somewhere a little more stable. So I'm about to do a whole whack ton of targeted, backdated reposting of some of the originals and discussions I like best from grison-in-space, grison-in-labs, and writingfromfactorx into this bad baby. It'll probably be a long term thing I'm doing and definitely won't be all my tumblr history, but if I lose all that Centaurian xenobiology I know I'll be sad. Anyway, expect a whole bunch of backdated things.

I also need to update my About page thing, because I like the list of Interesting Conversations but the pillowfort framing needs to die.

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sciatrix: A thumbnail from an Escher print, black and white, of a dragon with its tail in its mouth, wing outstretched behind. (Default)
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