Let’s stop talking about inclusion and just do it…It’s Friday. The third Friday in Pride Month. And both my husband and I came down sick this week, but I still have impossible deadlines at work, so you’ll notice a lot fewer links this week.
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories.
I’ve mentioned before that I collect images and memes and such as potential illustrations for Friday Links posts or political commentary, and I’m always collecting more than I wind up using. So every now and then I’m going to do a post like this where I just publish a bunch.
“The Stonewall Riots were started by trans women of colour and no one is allowed to forget that.” (Click to embiggen)“Love is a terrible thing to hate.”“Who lies more?” Please stop repeating the lies that all of them do it. One end of the political spectrum fails fact checks far more often than the other.(Click to embiggen)“Percentage of Death-Row Exonerations by Contributing Factor.” Gee, several of those categories constitute official malfeasance. (Click to embiggen)This is what “Make America Great Again” meant to far too many of Donald’s supporters (and staff, and Donald himself, to be honest). (Click to embiggen)“When I find myself in tweets of trouble, Mother Russia comes to me, speaking words of wisdom… covfefe!”“You only gave us rights because we gave you riots. Queer Power” (Click to embiggen)“We kept fighting after Stonewall. We’re still fighting the AIDS Crisis. We kept fighting after Anita Bryant. We kept fighting after Jesse Helms. The struggle is far from over. I’ll keep fighting. Will you?”“Pride 2017”
“Clark, my country is all women. To us, it’s not ‘gay marriage,’ it’s just marriage.”It’s Friday. The second Friday in Pride Month. And the news in the real world continues to be both depressing and frightening. So, if you haven’t yet, I highly recommend you go see Wonder Woman, because no matter who you are, it should make you feel empowered (well, unless you’re an alt-right/neo-nazi/MRA jerk with enough self awareness to recognize what the bad guys believe). Seriously.
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories.
Is Trump’s blocking of some Twitter users unconstitutional? A lot of people think the first amendment is only about personal expression and the press, but the first amendment also guarantees citizens the right to petition their government; Trump has turned his personal twitter account into an official policy communication conduit and some would argue a public forum.
“We are all a little broken. But last time I checked, broken crayons still color the same.”We had an extremely productive holiday weekend, getting a lot of errands and unpacking done. There’s still a lot to do. I hoped to continue the work weeknights this week, but we had another impossible deadline at work this week, which meant I worked really long hours Tuesday, Wednesday, and a bit of Thursday. That also means that this week’s collections of links may be a bit smaller than usual.
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories.
“Do or do not. There is no try!”We finished clearing out the old place. I went to bed early two nights in a row. I haven’t really worked on any unpacking at the new place the last few days. We have a lot to do in that regard, but we’ve been spending every spare moment dealing with the move for about six weeks, and we’ve both been exhausted and sore the whole time, so a couple of days of just going to work has been an incredible rest.
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories.
“Hello Darkness, my old friend.”We’re STILL unpacking at the new place and still cleaning the old place. So not having a lot of time to work on things like this post.
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories.
“MP3 is dead” missed the real, much better story.
“MP3 is supported by everything, everywhere, and is now patent-free. There has never been another audio format as widely supported as MP3, it’s good enough for almost anything, and now, over twenty years since it took the world by storm, it’s finally free.”
David Brooks is quite often an idiot, but he nails some important truths here which most of his fellow conservative pundits have yet to admit: When the World Is Led by a Child.
“We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar… And out of that void comes a carelessness that quite possibly betrayed an intelligence source, and endangered a country.”
One of the things that I have enjoyed since moving my blogging to FontFolly.Net hosted on WordPress five years ago has been seeing all the information about traffic to my site at a glance. Such as the Referrers–a section of the dashboard that shows you when someone followed a link on another site to my blog, or used a search engine. That information is available over on my author site (SansFigLeaf.Com), but I have to work harder to get the logs and parse them. WordPress does the work for me.
I used to really enjoy about once a month looking at the list of Search terms that people use to get to the site. As more and more people use private or anonymous browsing options, that list doesn’t change much, with more and more searches lumped into the category of Unknown Search Terms. Not that I don’t begrudge anybody some privacy, but it was amusing to speculate as to why someone had typed “bland relish tray” or “ceramic figurine queen jubilee” into a search engine, and whether whatever post of mine it was that they clicked on was at least entertaining to them.
On the other hand, the person who once typed “collecting dictionaries” so far as I know never left a comment or asked any question about the topic. Which is kind of sad, because if they typed that search term in, I hope it was because they or someone they cared about collected dictionaries, just like I do, and it’s always fun to meet someone who shares your interests.
Search terms aren’t the only thing of interest. Another part of the dashboard lists all of my old blog posts that someone has clicked on today. Certain old blog posts come up again and again. When it is one of my series of posts about why I love science fiction and fantasy (which are usually a review of a book or series of books or a particular author or a movie or sci fi TV series), I understand, and hope that the person enjoyed the post. When it is a particular post I wrote some months back about some infamous closet cases: former anti-gay Congressman Aaron Schock and former Pinal, Arizona County Sheriff Paul Babeu, I know that most likely it means that there has been a new development in Schock’s criminal trial on federal corruption charges, because whenever a story about his case gets published on news sites, I get a few hits. This week, though, it seems the reason why is that there has been a new development in the federal corruption investigation against Babeu. So, it was interesting to learn that he may yet be brought to justice.
I am happy that the all-time most read post is one about writing, Time doesn’t work that way. Makes me think I should get some more of my draft posts about writing, storytelling, et cetera finished and uploaded.
I keep saving various images to possibly use to illustrate a Friday Links post or a political commentary, then wind up using only a fraction of them. We have another busy weekend of hauling things to Value Village and cleaning out the old place, so no time to do much writing or commenting on anything that’s happened since I put together this week’s roundup of links, so, here are some of my recently collected images/memes/what-have-you:
“I hate when I wake up in the morning & Donald Trump is still president”“TrumpCare: Pay more for less; 24 million lose insurance; ‘Age Tax’ for older Americans; Guts Medicaid; Huge tax cuts for millionaires”Nixon is no longer the most corrupt President in our history. Dubya is no longer the dumbest President in our history. Trump stole both titles in only 110 days.Number of times each has been accused of sexual assault/harassment: Trump 14, O’Reilly 7, Ailes more than 20 times, Obama 0 (zero)!“We had a choice between a woman who is the most qualified candidate ever to seek the presidency and a man who boasted about being a serial sex abuser, and some people still want to debate if sexism played a role in the election.”“This man launched his campaign by demeaning Mexicans; spent his entire campaign using racist dog whistles; promised policies to harm refugees, immigrants, and citizens who are people of color; and some people still want to debate whether racism played a role in the election.”“This infamous nemesis of the LGBT community was chosen as Trump’s running mate, and people still want to debate whether homophobia and transphobia played a role in the election.”“The problem with (some) christians: That they think they are bing that guy (points to Jesus being lashed and tortured) whilst behaving like those guys (points to the roman soldiers beating Jesus).”“A bunch of snowflakes = an avalanche” and “Make hate wrong again”“We fight today for a better tomorrow.”
Sam The Bengal Cat & Pip The OtterWe’re still unpacking at the new place and still getting the last straggling things out of the old. I’m looking forward to some mythical day in the future where I’m not constantly exhausted. I have been slightly less sore most of this week, so that’s a good thing, right?
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories.
We had great parking karma at the new place. I took this pic from our kitchen window shortly after the guys started unloading.
I kept trying to block out some time earlier in the week to work on at least a short Friday Links post that I could queue up and, well it didn’t happen because moving and packing eats all of your time, energy, and brain power.
Wednesday night we came home from our last run of things to the new place to find No Parking signs in front of our building and the little house next door. We knew the people over there had sold their house recently. Turns out they had movers coming Thursday, too and they had paid for the permits to shut down parking to make a place for the truck to park. When our former landlady moved out in February, the moving company she hired (and she had raved about how good a job they did so much that we hired the same company) had simply parked their truck in the long driveway that runs along side our old building to the mini parking lot in back. So that’s what we’d planned to do. I had chatted with the property manager and he had assured me that the construction crew (who had come in Monday, just hours after our last neighbors had officially moved out, and in the first day yanked out all of the applicances, sinks, et cetera and removed an entire interior wall) would not park in the driveway so our truck could. So, guess how many vehicles pulled into the driveway the next morning? If you guessed a number less than three, you’re too low…
The next door truck crew shows up and is parked in front of the next door house and debating the pros and cons of having to carry everything between the two cherry trees when our crew shows up in a much bigger truck. There is a lot of chat between the crews, and then the next door two-man crew moves their truck into the empty driveway of the house they are emptying, and our crew parks in the spots that the next door house owners paid to have clear. We walked our guys through stuff and they got busy then a third moving truck from yet another moving company gingerly makes its way through our narrow crowded street and winds up parking around the corner where they start moving someone out of the duplex down at the corner. And then, wait for it! and then a fourth big truck comes through and winds up parking blocking three driveways across the street because they’re delivering new refrigerators, stoves, washers, and driers for the two downstairs units that the new owner started trying to remodel themselves in February before hiring one guy for much of April, and finally turning to professionals this week. So they’re trying to unload and move a bunch of appliances, and three different moving crews are working at three buildings side-by-side… and then a utility truck pulls up and it turns out the new owners also hired someone to come in that day and haul away some of the debris of the renovation.
Our guys handled our stuff quickly, we all drove away from the old place together sooner than I thought (the other two crews were still packing). We got to Shoreline and by a miracle a big chunk of the street parking right in front of our house was open. The guys unloaded and helped us set up the furniture. We settled up our bill (Michael first running around and handing each person a tip because, as he said, when he first moved to Washington back in the early nineties, he worked as a day laborer for moving companies for several months). We all waved cheerfully good-bye. Michael and I started carrying up the bed linens and other things we’d packed in our car before the truck arrived and we were partway through that when Michael noticed that they’d left the sling for carrying mattresses and the like. So I called the company, and they were able to get the crew back to us before they’d gotten on the highway. So we got so see them one more time.
Thursday night we both slept like logs. Michael went into work, his first time riding the new bus route instead of biking, and I spent the day unpacking. If I have counted right, I’ve unpacked 43 boxes of books, a couple of suitcases worth of clothes, and three boxes of kitchen things. Michael has set up the network, his computer, assembled a piece of furniture or two. There is still so much to do!
Anyway, here are the links I found interesting this week, sorted into categories.
Font Folly 