sciatrix | Entries tagged with linkspam

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siderea: Croutons, Capitalism, & Conservation (Kondo & the Bibliophibians, Pt 2i)

Kondo's respect for our attachments to things – for our emotional lives vis a vis inanimate things – is a breath of fresh air. For many, Kondo's insight into the fact there are multiple kinds of emotional attachment, and it is profitable and wise for us to distinguish between joy and duty, is a liberatory revelation. Duty is not good enough, she says, only joy. She is the champion of no-fault divorce from things.

With Kondo's focus on getting rid of things – and how that played out with books – one can easily see where bibliophibian backs would be put up by Kondo's philosophy. Less obvious is why bibliophibians might – and often do – feel she speaks to them. Less obvious is the necessary corollary of the above.

In telling us that we should only keep those things which spark joy in us, Kondo is telling us that it is okay to take joy in things. Indeed, she is telling us that it is good and right to take joy in things.

And that is not something bibliophibians hear much from outsiders.

star-anise has been killing it with discussions on disability activism and language on Tumblr this week. Those links go to base posts, but there's a lot of good stuff in reblogs. I've chimed in in a few places, too, but the reblogs are worth glancing at.

The surgeon had a dilemma only a Nazi medical text could resolve. Was it ethical to use it?

Knowing the book’s history, which came to light in the mid-1980s, Mackinnon and Yee wondered, is it ethical to use the Pernkopf illustrations? They reached out to some of the nation’s leading historians of Nazi medicine, bioethicists, and experts on Jewish law to discuss whether Mackinnon acted ethically, as they describe in the May issue of the journal Surgery.

Fighting the power in a southern college town

Parker is just one of hundreds of young people in the South who entered local politics in the wake of the 2016 election. And it’s easy for the national press, which loves a story that will trend in social media, to play Parker up. She’s the one who got sworn in on a copy of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” And she raps!

But it tells us more about the direction of the South to look at how Parker operates on the local level in a college town — and how the movement that brought her and others like her to office plays out on the ground.

This is actually the town I went to college in, although I left before Parker moved in. But I'm so delighted to hear about her work.

and we're back, dammit! The house has air conditioning that works again, I have no massive terrifying looming deadlines, and I'm going to use Wednesday to share links I have open in my tabs. Among other things.

From around DW

Via

rachelmanija: Debunking food, fatness and fitness myths

I would like your best recs for in-depth articles, studies, or books on the most cutting-edge current knowledge about nutrition, body weight, and health.

greywash has been killing it: On mourning, transformative works, and audience manipulation (CW: suicide)

And look. If someone comes into my fandom and writes a story where the character I most relate to dies in a way I find tone-deaf, oppressive, and clueless, I'm sure as hell not going to take that death on board as part of my personal mythology. I'm probably going to get really, really mad; drink some whiskey; drag the author extensively in Discord; write like four Dreamwidth rants where I deconstruct all the bullshit arguments the author was making that I found tone-deaf, oppressive, and clueless; and then write my own goddamned fanfic giving their fanfic all the middle fingers I can muster in a deeply passive-aggressive, naming-no-names sort of way. [...]

But I'm not going to read that story and go into mourning for the death of my avatar character. Why the hell should I? What does that death count? It doesn't even have the (lbr, since I'm a fanfic writer in the first place, to me faaairly spurious) gloss of being "the original source." It's not the fucking original source! It's just some other jerkoff, howling into the void about characters that someone else made up!! They say "he dies"; I say, "hold my beer." Transformative works are transformative works, guys. If they can kill him off, I can bring him back. Why the hell should their version matter more?

via

tzikeh: Avengers: Endgame

I’m not mad at the movie per se; I’m mad about the narrative construct employed by pretty much any movie/show/insert-form-of-storytelling-here that the death of one or more main characters (especially The Grand Sacrifice For All Humanity) is the only option in a high-stakes situation–anything else, and the payoff is just not enough, somehow. There is no closure without death? That’s a pretty terrible position for storytellers to take.

Over here,

siderea brought me a fantastic little discussion from this NPR piece on taxon-specific bias in animal behavior. You can find the paper that Dr. Rosenthal mentions writing in the NPR piece available open-access here, if you want to read more.

One of the things his work really raises for me is the question of what this research is really for. What are we trying to know, and why?

For instance, if why we, like, as a species, are studying the behavior of other organisms because we want to know what the full range of possibilities are - possibly to contextualize and inform human behavior - then, yes, lack of coverage is a problem. The question of what all those under- or un-studied beetles are up to becomes important, and science should get on that.

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staranise: Children and the prodigies we make of them

That, and the idea that white people see our children as gardens to cultivate more than people to raise, which—we do. When my 1yo nephew SHRIEKED all through dinner, and everyone at the dinner table winced, I joked, "Ah, future operatic tenor." When my brother's kids earn money and save up for a big LEGO train, we say, "Future entrepreneurs here." We're preparing kids for a competitive world where every early advantage can translate into tens of thousands of dollars lost, into opportunities missed, lives derailed.

It's that age-old question: At what point does adequately preparing a child for an abusive and cutthroat world in itself constitute abuse? At what point does failing to do so constitute neglect?

Generally interesting

An Evolutionary Psychology Quiz

How do we know evolutionary psychology is perfectly legitimate? Well, for starters, it has not one but two science terms in its name. And furthermore, it’s just common sense: Homo sapiens evolved in a vicious, winner-take-all state of nature, and therefore the deepest, realest elements of human psychology are hardwired, brutal, and individualistic. The false trappings of “civilization” came later, and overlaid our natural psychology with everything about us that’s gentle, feminine, decadent, shallow, cosmopolitan, unnatural, and legalistic. Anyone who attempts to call this “sexist,” “pure ideology,” “vaguely anti-Semitic,” or “extremely convenient” just doesn’t understand science.

Here’s a quiz to test your knowledge of evolutionary psychology. Please keep in mind that evolutionary psychology employs different standards of proof than the hard sciences. These standards are unfalsifiable, and therefore cannot be questioned.

Inside the Growing World of Queer Truckers

In an industry dominated by white men, queer people are finding a community on the road.

I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me.

The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman, 83-year-old author of the industry bible Design of Everyday Things and a former Apple VP.

Excellent additional commentary via

vassraptor here.

Less of a question, more of a comment... (comes with a list of The Worst Questions in ascending order of sin)

If you attend panels or presentations, ever, I need you to read this article because, best case scenario, I need you to help protect me from “less of a question, more of a comment” guy. Worst case scenario, you are “less of a question, more of a comment” guy. Let’s talk about panels in general, panels about diversity and identity topics in particular, and how you as an audience member can make choices and ask questions which improve that experience for both panelists and audience. I’ll also answer some questions we both did and didn’t get to at PAX East’s “Designing Asian Settings and Themes in Analog Games” panel.

What ‘Guardians’ Director James Gunn Learned From High-Profile Firing

My apparatus for being loved was my work, and being famous. I had never really experienced before that feeling of being loved so deeply. It has been a problem for me in relationships, in friendships; I can experience loving another person but I have a very difficult time experiencing being loved. In that moment, the apparatus which was my only hope for feeling love was torn away from me and I had absolutely nothing. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

And then came this outpouring of real love. [...] That amount of love that I felt from my friends, my family, and the people in the community was absolutely overwhelming. In order for me to have fully felt that love for the first time, the thing that needed to happen was the apparatus by which I was feeling falsely loved had to be completely taken away.

Scabby the Rat Is Under Attack—And Needs Our Help

The Trump era presents unions with a range of new threats to their survival, including the 2018 Janus Supreme Court decision revoking the right of public sector unions to collect dues from nonmembers. This erosion of union protections is being met with large-scale protests and grassroots organizing, from picketing school teachers to striking ride-share drivers. But as battles over union rights transpire at the local and federal levels, an unexpected figure has come into focus: a giant inflatable rodent.

In the late 20th century, Scabby the Rat was popularized in the industrial Midwest and grew into a symbol of union solidarity, showing up at protests around the country and the world. Standing as large as 25 feet tall with an aggressive facial expression, claws ready to fight and a stomach covered in inflamed scabs, Scabby is an effective tactic to force negotiation and draw media coverage while shaming those who violate strikes. The rat’s continued effectiveness is a testament to the importance of workplace organizing, particularly in an era of historically low union participation.

Is gender unique to humans?

This summer, in the introductory course I teach on the evolution and biology of human and animal behavior, I showed my students a website that demonstrates how to identify frog "genders." I explained that this was a misuse of the term "gender"; what the author meant was how to identify frog sexes. Gender, I told the students, goes far beyond mere sex differences in appearance or behavior. It refers to something complex and abstract that may well be unique to Homo sapiens. This idea is nothing new; scholars have been saying for decades that only humans have gender. But later that day I began to wonder: Is it really true that gender identity is totally absent among non-human species—even our closest evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos?

Things I keep reading in small bites and then darting away from

Autistic burnout: The cost of masking and passing

Being an autistic seen as “high-functioning” means having your identity doubted and questioned. Exhausting efforts to pass and mask are given little credit. They are tossed aside with an “I do that too” and held against us in those moments of meltdown and burnout when we can longer pretend at neurotypicality. The rewards for passing are the familiar ableist tropes of invisible disability and the expectation to keep on passing, forever.

Access intimacy: the missing link

Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level. Sometimes it can happen with complete strangers, disabled or not, or sometimes it can be built over years. It could also be the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met. It is not dependent on someone having a political understanding of disability, ableism or access.

...in aid of avoiding the manuscript drafts lurking in wait. Or the playout shit. yeah.

I saw a flag with stripes of many shades of blue, and I looked up what it meant. Apparently it was proposed for gay men. Thanks, I hate it.
My old friend Siggy, who is theoretically the target demographic for this flag, about made me piss myself laughing with this one. (Personally, I view the lipstick lesbian flag as a helpful warning that I should either turn around and run briskly in the opposite direction or else gird myself for TERF wars, so I'm pretty sure I would feel the same way if I was over on his side of the fence.)

megascopes made ALL THE CAROL DANVERS ICONS. Excite.

Relatedly, I fucking loved

beehammer's point about Carol Danvers not courting insanity when reaching for great power.

And I commune so much with

kore's rage upon trying to hunt down AO3 fics in the Captain Marvel tag that actually in any way focus on one of the characters in Captain Marvel. Nrghrgh TAG THINGS BETTER, PLEASE GOD

More DW posting styling HTML links.

and... how to make your DW not suck for people who don't like your HTML style.

I've been enjoying Genevive Valentine's posts, as a total fashion neophyte--I have no idea what is going on, but it's at least entertaining, and there are pictures and sensible explanations.

Someone linked this book on estrangement to me somewhere with a lead piece that made it sound really good. I want to read it, but also: reading time is hard.

satsuma found some interesting evidence of an ace presence at '99 SF Pride.

Actually, It's About Ethics in Doctor Who Journalism, or Why I am no longer talking to Doctor Who fans about race

Kompromat: Or, Revelations from the Unpublished Portions of Andrea Manafort’s Hacked Texts - Los Angeles Review of Books

A characteristic arc of the #MeToo-era story is that it begins in innocence, travels through serial abuses of power, and finally (and most importantly) ends. My relationship with the abuser is over. I left him. I left that professional situation. I realized I was being abused. I went to therapy. It’s over. It’s done. I never saw him again. These are stories of survival, escape, resolution, and catharsis.

Life rarely works so neatly, however. The cultural predominance of such narratives can be attributed to a willingness of people to speak only once they are safely finished with a professional or personal relationship. We lack ways to unravel the intricate complicities negotiated when experiencing or witnessing ongoing abusive behavior in the family, in the workplace, among our social networks.

A friend of mine sent me this long and thoughtful article, on allegations I had not seen regarding Paul Manafort pressuring his wife to participate in dubiously consensual semi-private cuck scenes with multiple black men hired to participate. (The allegations are from the hack of their daughter Andrea's texts, deriving mostly but not entirely from conversations with her sister.)

Even if US Politics isn't your current thing, though, I think the piece is interesting as a broader discussion of the way that media handles (and has in the past handled) sexual assault allegations, coercion allegations, and allegations of sexual misconduct--and it does grapple with how to handle things like this allegation, which happened a) without the participation or endorsement of the victim, b) comes along with very racially charged asides that inform the accused's political behavior, c) would have cost the victim much to bring up, including loss of face and possibly loss of livelihood, and d) has been almost startlingly untouched for months despite the scandalous nature of it. What's the media's role and responsibility when things like this come up?

As a total aside, I am also fascinated by the convention of rendering texts rather like lines of poetry, both in the blockquoted presentation of larger conversations and quotations of a few texts at a time.

Goodness! It has been a week. I've been wrung out first by the writing retreat of the weekend and secondly by the head cold I got last week, so things might be a little thin on the ground this week. Or I might be exaggerating! Who knows!

In any case, I am declaring Link Amnesty for myself and bringing you all manner of things I meant to talk about and then didn't, so I can absolve myself of tabs. Yes.

liv is concerned about being boring and finding writing intimidating. Relatedly,

hellofriendsiminthedark expressed some worry and exhaustion about transitioning to DW as a previous lurker and quiet Tumblr user. I found these two posts really interesting to contrast against one another because both people (who I am very pleased to be following) come from really different backgrounds and familiarity levels with DW, and both of them are expressing the same kinds of "gotta-be-interesting-and-articulate-enough-here" stress that I experience, too.

Relatedly for those folks who haven't seen, this is theoretically Shitposting February! (Followup from

melannen.) Relatedly,

kore has an example of the kind of riffing she thinks of as shitposting, involving arguments about Classical Greek flamewars about whether or not Achilles or Patroclus topped or bottomed. (I find the idea of seme!Patroclus to be rib-tickling hilarious, but that might just be my own weird-ass sense of humor.) If you'd rather,

ruuger is doing Shipposting February instead, and

corvidology is doing Stuff I Love February instead.

glorious_spoon had a really engaging discussion about romance in fic and what does and doesn't work for her (particularly in the realm of romantic gestures) which I was really dying to participate in but couldn't find the bandwidth to chime in on. It was total catnip for me, though. Maybe I will come back and comment later this week.

beehammer has entirely the correct reaction to palmetto bugs, which is a polite way of referring to giant flying cockroaches if you're not familiar. This is what we in the South refer to as a polite euphemism, by which we ofen mean "pleasant lie."

If you, too, are an evolution/ecology/behavior/integrative biology sort of nerd,

felinejumper has a history of evo-devo as viewed through the lens of E. O. Wilson's career that I'm looking forward to reading. (One weird thing that recently happened to me was editing a lovely and interesting-looking history of female choice ebook so the format was nicer than the PDF I got it as, scrolling down through it, and being hit in the face with the author's description of the early contributions to the field of two of my committee members at the end.)

I did something similar over at

tweetingmouse as I was writing up the introduction of my current manuscript, so I'm particularly appreciative of

felinejumper doing the same thing--makes me feel less self-conscious!

access_fandom has a really neat article on disabled people being better adapted for space in some respects. There's good discussion in the comments, and I found out about

mcu_cosmic which I immediately went and joined--all for fans of the portions of the MCU currently IN SPACE. Guardians friends--

sholio and

lazaefair, you both came to mind--this looks cool!

cesperanza posted an argument that patreons and ko-fis are like MLMs (you know, like that lady in your knitting group who will not quit trying to sell you essential oils).

fairestcat disagreed quite strongly. On balance, I do believe I'm with

fairestcat on this one.

cimorene posted a really neat discussion about the role of fan favorites in creating nigh-bulletproof ships, using Rivers of London fandom as a centrepiece. This is another one I need to comment on, and I'm using compiling my linkspam as an incentive to go out and talk to people when I next have a moment. (Incidentally, if you also enjoy Rivers of London,

the_folly exists and would love some chatty attention.)

stellahibernis has some good opinions about Steve Rogers. I keep meaning to go and comment again and bounce off of how I vaguely feel like the trend they're talking about is related to the infantilization of tiny!Steve and the idea that out-of-place!old!Steve must therefore be less capable than more modern characters? but I keep forgetting. THERE ARE SO MANY CONVERSATIONS.

breathedout has been doing a rundown of the transition to criminalizing sodomy and homosexuality in colonial India. I liked this post discussing the deeply strange insecurities that colonial Englishmen had about what the Indian people they were occupying might think of them; the invasions, oh, that was fine, but sodomy was shameful.

lovepeaceohana linked a couple of stories from poly blogging contrasting two, ah, not-so-great poly experiences. I meant to link this last week and then forgot, but the discussion is interesting!

staranise has a long piece on emotions and learning how to handle them if you haven't had good role models that I also meant to link two weeks ago. And then followed it up with a really, really good take on Buttercup from the Princess Bride. They are both good things to read.

notasupervillain has been doing peer reviews on the work of mad scientists.

kaberett has some thoughts on the habit of explicitly thanking people for saying no to them. I try to do something similar--I almost always will go "oh, no, how dare you ask me to do $X!" and grin or laugh at someone who sets a boundary with me, in an effort to encourage that kind of thing and set them at ease--and I'm pleased to see someone else talking about that kind of explicitly honoring clear boundaries and praising people for having them.

Not on DW:

Do you have advantage blindness? Probably not, if you're reading this, but it's probably a helpful link to have in mind as ammunition.

My old friend Siggy has written a postmortem of the New Atheism movement.

muccamukk hosted a discussion about opt-in versus opt-out linking, and the ethics of linking in light of the knock-on effects of your readers and what they choose to do.

lannamichaels found out that a Vienna Teng song is about politics, which makes total sense in the context of the lyrics but is not something I would have guessed. I love "Stray Italian Greyhound" to pieces, and knowing this thing just makes me love it more.

For as little as $29, this company promises to "brainwash" an individual person on Facebook. Whether or not the startup in question can effectively pull this off--and neither the author nor I am convinced--this is a really creepy fucking thing to see, and a good nudge to me to turn my adblockers back on. (Fuck, it's hard--I want to give certain places the benefit of the doubt and revenue, but at the same time, I don't like to be manipulated. The internet is very, very bad at working out what I might like, so I hope it's working.)

This piece on what it's like to be an internet advice columnist is pretty hilarious.

So is this list of "unparliamentary language" that NZ politicians have gotten penalized for using. And there's a Canadian edition here, too.

Still giggling at weird Puritan names, okay. Has-Descendants! Tace! Wrestling!

This Maia Szalavitz piece on media coverage of opiods is excellent. I really like her writing generally.

Remember when feral emus roamed Texas?

This reflection on the creation of the bisexual pride flag gave me a lot of feelings.

Man injects 18 doses of semen into arm to cure back pain. Spoiler: did not work.

Via

kabarett: To unlock the brain's mysteries, puree it. Still working out what I think of this one. I work on enough brains to think that cell counting is probably not the best way to go about what we're doing, but most of her conclusions support and inform certain other aspects of comparative neuroanatomy (e.g. the importance of cortical volume, at least for mammals). I notice that the article doesn't mention a thing I would think is completely essential to understanding the findings it mentions in birds, which is that birds don't have a cortex as we understand it--that's a mammals thing. Birds do have an older analogous structure, but their brains are organized a little differently, and they do not rely on cortical surface area to get things done as mammals do. It's really interesting in that vein that bird brains are so much denser in terms of neurons.

I have to wonder how important the specifically cortical structures are outside of a mammalian context, that's all. (I brought it to Metafilter, where a few other neuroscientists weighed in.)

It occurred to me that I've been having some interesting chats on metafilter, so I thought that I might as well archive a few things here, too.

I got very angry about gratefulness lists as a first-line treatment for struggling people, agreeing with the original author:

Like, fuck you, world! Sometimes being depressed and drowning isn't my fucking fault, sometimes it's a totally normal response to external fucking stress, and if a therapist wants to give me some help coping with that she has to acknowledge that I'm dealing with it!

I don't like bars as a locus of queer community, which is something of a sidebar to the original article (which discusses fundamental sustainability of queer media). I'm responding here a little more directly to schadenfrau, who has a particularly good point about media directed at queer media:

I’m sad and dismayed to hear that Autostraddle is apparently looking to be acquired in order to stay alive, but not super surprised. This seems to sort of miss the point:
Lesbian and queer women's media has particularly struggled when it comes to revenue, in part because lesbians are stereotyped as frumpy shut-ins who don’t care about nightlife or fashion — unlike their glamorous male counterparts — which can dissuade advertisers.

They don’t have any goddamn money.

Biologist MeFites have coalesced around discussing the weirdest things we've collectively done for science. I had fun describing the special hell that my efforts to distinguish variation in fine motor skill among singing mice turned into. Highlight:

The problem with this idea is that, well, singing mice are both considerably less docile than lab mice and also considerably more athletic. I have observed a singing mouse leap five inches to the edge of a cage and in the next instant fling itself off the blind edge of a three foot table, apparently without pause. I have watched a determined mouse leap ten inches from a standstill, and seen one with a good head start achieve two feet in a single bound.

I imagine that running them on a traditional rotarod would be something like an exhibition of murine popcorn.

I got really frustrated about the way that this discussion of one man's experiences with precocial puberty got derailed around whether or not he should have screened for the mutation in his children. The article was very fascinating; the discussion... well, put it this way, I wound up missing disability-focused spaces like Feminists With Disabilities and

access_fandom here with an almost physical ache. Between T making connections with the Deaf community in town and some things going back and forth with my own history, I might need to start reconnecting with disability-informed perspectives a little more in my day-to-day. I miss them.

MeFi brought me hagfish! This one is less great for discussion and more great for the links folks brought. Also, HAGFISH.

I countered, of course, with turtle dick. Hat tip to

kaberett, who is I think where I originally saw this. (MeFites helpfully dug up a version of the original link with photos of the dicks in question.)

Also via me, the brittleness of children and the egos of driven men, which has some interesting discussion about a recent IRB failure in the comments:

In the fall of 1938, Wendell Johnson recruited one of his clinical psychology graduate students, 22-year-old Mary Tudor, who was avid but timorous, to undertake exactly that experiment. She was to study whether telling nonstuttering children that they stuttered would make it so. Could she talk children into a speech defect? The university had an ongoing research relationship with an orphanage in Davenport, Iowa, so Johnson suggested she base her study there. And thus, on Jan. 17, 1939, Mary Tudor drove along the high, swooping bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River to the Soldiers and Sailors Orphans' Home. The study she began that morning became the subject of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the State of Iowa and the University of Iowa.

Missed out on last week--whoops!--but better late than never. Just for that, y'all get an extra big signal boost this week...

Stuff Happening Around Dreamwidth:

I didn't realize this, but we have a

theadventurezone comm! I have sneakily gotten T into listening by merit of leaving the Crystal Kingdom arc on while we were gearing up to play D&D and hooking them on the story, so I've been really immersing myself in the Balance arcs lately. I'm enjoying all the different comms people have been digging up and signal boosting, so I figured I should do my part to find neat comms.

With that in mind, I've also gone to post at the latest episode post for

the_good_place, since I just caught up on it last night. Oh, and

brainwane has a communal Metafilter FPP framing request over at

metafilter! I love that kind of thing! Plus,

thisfinecrew has some useful updates on the ongoing LAUSD teachers' strike. ✊🌹

thisweekmeta is also kicking off, and I'm super excited to see it kick off. They're looking for more sources! There's a lot of good pieces I've seen on their latest linkspam here and was going to link, but... they already did and this is getting longish. So. Go check that out.

If you liked

snowflake_challenge, there's a spinoff happening for this summer at

sunshine_challenge! Good to keep our minds on for now, I think.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, but Psychic Wolves for Lupercalia is coming up soon for February! I have a huge thing for psychic bond creatures, so I'm still... well, psyched.

Also in February,

sara is kicking off Dreamwidth Is For Shitposting month. She has kicked off a big list of great ideas--I have some thoughts on "inside a whale"!--and

melannen has gleefully broken out her coding skills to create a shitposting topic generator. (She's still taking suggestions to feed it!)

Stuff I Found On Dreamwidth:

From

jesse_the_k, I learned that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has a dissent necklace and that other people have made an enamel pin for it. I've been eyeing up canvas jackets I could get to display my burgeoning collection of enamel pins as it is, so this is very exciting. (They do other pins! They have one of Alice Ball!)

seperis has a big ol' post about her bunnykeeping. I love people talking about the social dynamics of their pets and the ins and outs of their petkeeping setups, so I rolled around in this like a happy happy dog with a really dead fox.

kabarett has been hosting some interesting discussions about traditionally-recognized autism symptoms being, uh, synonymous with trauma, bouncing off a piece from a parent frustrated that protecting her son from being traumatized has made him "undiagnosable".

breathedout has some fascinating and dramatic details from the real life of Patricia Highsmith. In particular, the first one is an achingly painful image I wouldn't be surprised to find in a tragic poem.

ursula has an interesting piece on researching character names, especially in medieval Europe.

nerdflighter is thinking about how to handle edge cases of dysphoria, and how/whether to offer a particular person an identity that might or might not fit better.

quinfirefrorefiddle has a pretty cool roundup on fannish history. It's been a while since I thought about the Pit of Voles! Now that I work in a vole lab (although not on them), I gotta say that the moniker doesn't work nearly as well as it used to for me.

wanderingnork found a study that argues that you should be aiming to be about 85% wrong when you're learning in order to achieve maximum growth, and has some complaints about the methodology.

Stuff helpful for using Dreamwidth:

I am perhaps the last person to get around to this, but hey, there's a new signal boosting bookmark around!

astolat made the first one, and

melannen helpfully improved it so it warns you if you're trying to share a locked post. It should make it easier to format and share posts, which is nice. I don't know how much I'll personally use it, on account of how this system with a notepad works a little better for me, but we'll see.

tozka has some helpful tips on comm using, and how we should try using them now that we're by and large not using 'em to archive fanfic anymore.

On that note,

novembermond spent some time explaining how to find interesting comms, whether it's worth resurrecting one, and when it's probably a good idea to make a new one. I need to post to comms more often, probably. Hrm. I also really need to scrape together some cash for a paid account; I want that network feature! Maybe after student loans come in and T has a job again.

jesse_the_k has a helpful guide to using Markdown on DW.

h/t

sylvaine,

niqaeli wants to know: if an animal is fully sentient/sapient and consenting, is a human having sex with them bestiality or xenophilia? (So far xenophilia is winning.)

Speaking of,

sylvaine has a guide of HTML basics for those wishing to avoid DW's fuck-awful Rich Text editor. I am personally never touching it again, but then I was already fluent in very very basic HTML from the last time around; this will be a very good cheat sheet for those of us who want to just... have a journal that isn't Weird. Or eating our text, for that matter.

jesse_the_k also has a very helpful guide for using Markdown, which comes in handy for posting to DW via email.

There's been a whole spate of fannish reccing happening at

fancake this week. I am wholeheartedly in favor. If you're not familiar with

fancake, it's a community based around reccing favorite fanworks in any fandom or medium.

staranise is wondering whether the plausible deniability sex workers operate under for legality reasons is confusing the ability of some men to work out what is sex work and what is genuinely women looking to date. Best meat of the discussion is in the comments here, I think.

PSYCHIC WOLVES FOR LUPERCALIA IS BACK. As someone who loves psychic bond creatures unabashedly, I am real real excited by this fest. psychiiic wooooolvvesss~!

A fake nude of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was debunked by foot fetishists. Truly we live in one of the stranger potential timelines.

DeepSqueak is a new analysis program designed to "translate" house mouse ultrasonic vocalizations. As I gear up for looking at the equivalent quieter vocalizations in singing mice, I think this is both pretty cool--it would be so nice not to have to do this myself--and also, like, kind of 'duh.' This last feeling is totally uncharitable, I suspect--it's just what I'm personally trying to put together to better read spectrograms. Anything you personally do already is way less cool than things someone else does, QED.

Some poor fucker ordered some crickets to feed a bearded dragon, opened them, figured he'd deal with them later, and set them in a bathroom. They escaped, and the story is pretty hilarious. Relatedly: who in your ship is the person who releases crickets throughout the house, and who is the person who has crickets visited upon them? (In my house, I am very much the likely cricket source.)

h/t Metafilter, Is estrogen the key to understanding women's mental health? As I fall more and more head-over-heels into fascination with the way that hormones influence our minds and our emotions, I'm spending more and more time fascinated by things like this.

I (and

ursula) am soliciting topic suggestions for a post-a-day in January meme. Here's her suggestions page and mine.(I am working off about four hours of sleep thanks to a helpful dog, so I am going to be taking a couple of days to write things up. nrgh.)

rydra_wong is recruiting tips and books that a doctor-to-be should read, ideally to improve their prowess as a practicing physician. Current target is general practice, but mental health books and bonus stuff for neuroatypical folks is a big plus.

jadislefeu has an enticing list of recent poetry. I like poetry, so I'm pleased to see it.

via

kabarett, a PhD-specific form of 2048 that has had me laughing in painful recognition over the course of this week.

wanderingnork found out about the Great Emu Bubble in Texas, which has apparently resulted in feral Texan emu flocks. Amazing.

franzeska is thinking about bisexuality, fandom, and bi culture.

runpunkrun is also doing weekly roundups, although theirs are on Saturdays. I'm pleased to be doing mine mid-week--the more people do them at different times of the week, the less likely we all are to get Super Overwhelmed.

Relatedly--apparently the kids are calling slash something else now?!? My, I feel old.

From Metafilter, Jonestown victims have a lesson to teach us, so I listened. That lesson has an awful lot to do with race and who gets remembered--and forgotten--when we tell the narrative of tragedy.

What's glitter, anyway?

What is glitter? The simplest answer is one that will leave you slightly unsatisfied, but at least with your confidence in comprehending basic physical properties intact. Glitter is made from glitter. Big glitter begets smaller glitter; smaller glitter gets everywhere, all glitter is impossible to remove; now never ask this question again.

Ah, but if you, like an impertinent child seeking a logistical timetable of Santa Claus’ nocturnal intercontinental journey, demand a more detailed definition — a word of warning: The path to enlightenment is littered with trade secrets, vapors, aluminum ingots, C.I.A. levels of obfuscation, the invisible regions of the visible spectrum, a unit of measurement expressed as “10-6 m” and also New Jersey.

Over on Tumblr,

pluckyredhead mentioned having people ask her about potential Jewish headcanons for Daredevil's Foggy Nelson. She doesn't personally see it, and offered a number of reasons why that I thought were interesting. I personally think that Foggy reads strongly and specifically as Irish-Catholic American, which happens to be my primary background, and I added some commentary on why he seems coded that way to me.

sholio found the best three-sentence fic prompt I have ever seen:

DBZ, Vegeta, call center.

staranise would like to know where to find good-artist vibes with people writing interesting, imperfect, diverse ladies in F/F and LGBT+ relationships, as opposed to the traditional take of "perfect cis lesbians have a perfect frictionless relationship and never do anything wrong." I hope she finds a spot, because I want to know too.

breathedout has some cool discussion about "mannish" women in post-Revolutionary New England, and how gender presentation influenced how women's female-directed affections were perceived by observers.

wanderingnork would like us to take care of mental health, especially under holiday stress. (It's not remotely unusual for mental health to take sharp downturns around the holidays.)

halfeatenmoon has some additional thoughts about queerfic vs. slashfic, bouncing off some discussions I had with

wellthisisnice back in September. (Here's the DW version of my post; here's the original pillowfort version; here's

wellthisisnice's original post that kicked this all off.)

Speaking of,

wellthisisnice has some thoughts about what asexual falling in love looks like.

jesse_the_k has another helpful guide for ex-tumblrites.

Via Deadspin, a guide to all the things America stuck inside itself and couldn't get out without medical assistance.

beatrice_otter ranted about a sweet little porcupine video that winds up being a lot less sweet than it sounds at first glance.

H/t Metafilter, Gritty's evolution from googly-eyed hocky mascot to meme to leftist avatar, explained. Better than it sounds at first glance.

Because I forgot last week, I found a responsive mobile-friendly theme for DW. I keep meaning to tweak my colors, but I like reading on my phone more than I like having a color-scheme that is tasteful and on-brand, and it turns out I'm very bad at translating online palettes to my DW settings. So monochrome it is, at least for the moment.

I have been having all manner of exciting conversations about f/f and femslash lately, notably at

merelydovely' interrogating one's preferences: the femslash gap and a fascinating exchange in

staranise's comments section on the use of language to describe sex in Latin. I've also been chattering away on a repost of an older piece of mine, in which I am greedy. I need to find time to crosspost that to

fem_thoughts and/or

girlgay, but I am currently overwhelmed with end-of-semester work shit + manuscript, so it may be some time before I manage to tackle these.

wellthisisnice's recent rec lists are well worth checking out. Lots of really neat-sounding podcasts on fandom, queer history, and plenty more!

WE HAVE A NATIONAL MOLE QUEEN. Surprisingly bloody and very weird, as is usual for naked mole rats. This came up on MeFi and I immediately spent some time rolling around in glee.

nerdflighter needs advice on structuring a website for refugees. Expertise on building communities for survivors of violence of any kind would be very welcome.

I found these incredibly science awesome t-shirts and am now drooling. I do need more work shirts...

...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.

Infamous Man-Eaters of Tsavo Ate Like Zoo Animals

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.

Erotic blooms: the sex appeal of flowers

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

sebenikela.

If you're new to Dreamwidth,

beatrice_otter put together a list of good links, which I'm going to repost here.

sylvaine has a big rec list of communities.

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

conuly has yet more stuff on how to DW.

siderea wrote interesting meta on how to encourage a flourishing community on DW.

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,

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

metaquotes,

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,

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!