OMG, still another timesink

I've asked permission to share this story that somebody on my flist shared with me. I do not choose to disclose hir user name because I do not want anybody getting all judgmental on them. This has triggers for discussion of suicide.

( I am absolutely certain that there are too many people out there in this boat, but this needs to be heard. )

If you read hir story, I want you to sit there with your discomfort for a moment. Imagine the young people you come in contact with and know that some of them are absolutely certainly in the same boat as hir.

Now, I challenge us to think about ways we can fix this fuckedupness.

I see the work that the Strike Debt movement is doing and wondering about if this has been expanded to cover education debt....

By way of @nkjemisin on Twitter:

Suze Orman describes the devil's bargain of the current state of higher education financing in the US.

The implications of this are mind-boggling, and then I look at my nieces and nephews (and everybody else's kids), and I say: OH SHIT WE ARE ALL SO HOSED.

She's stating some cold hard facts here (US-centric, and I'm interested in hearing from folks outside the US about their situations) that make it damned clear that the current system is rigged to benefit the 1%. Everybody else, you get to get loaded up with debt on the order of magnitude of 30 year home mortgages to get a job that probably won't even make a dent in those payments for a long long time. And, this doesn't just affect the folks going to private universities, the public options are getting less and less affordable every single year. And the for-profit institutions are even more insidious...

How the frakking hell do you expect to keep a society running under these conditions? Things have got to change.

Trigger warning for fatphobia:

whump brought today's poor excuse for an April Fool's joke perpetrated by one of his long time acquaintances to my attention. As I've had time to think about this so-called attempt at humor, I've also had to deal with some personal triggers having to do with fatphobia and Wiscon. Five years ago, I was one of the Wiscon attendees that was targeted by a trolling attack directed primarily at those of us who are fat.

Flash forward to today, and the article screencapped by whump and others brought up a whole lot of memories. When I think back to the Wiscon 32 incident, I felt a bit of compassion for the troll, but today I really don't have any to spare for (redacted). I've seen several folks targeted by his Islamophobia speak out with eloquence and power, but I want to address the misogyny and fatphobia directly.

When he used the name of a historical serial killer as an alias for the con chairs, he directly insulted several people who I've been honored to meet over the last few years through my participation in Wiscon. Then he added a festering pile of snark directed at "sinful, wanton flesh" that needed to be covered up and made invisible with the so-called intention of dealing with lookism and adding the Islamophobic trimmings as a really nasty additive.

He's telling me that I need to cover up my body and silence my voice, and he used the primary newsmagazine covering the speculative fiction field as his medium to spread this message in the guise of a joke. And then, when many members of the community as well as others not as invested in it called the magazine's attention to this post (which has been taken down with an apology), he then managed to flounce on his blog and cry censorship by humorless feminists.

This person is coming from an even more privileged situation than the Wiscon 32 troll (age, gender, etc.) so I have no inclination to cut him any slack whatsoever, especially because he seems to be playing the "oh noes the meen wimmin are harshing my fun" card.

By way of supergee and Geek Feminism, a new hero of mine subverts a dominant paradigm with her little brother.

I bow humbly in admiration at her mad feminist skillz, and say to her little brother, "we accept you, we accept you, one of us!"

A thing of beauty and a joy forever

I see many user pics coming from this.

Yes, yet another riff on "Gangnam Style", only with space! I will note that some of my former comrades over in Mountain View at NASA Ames are probably gnashing their teeth in envy because "Ames" doesn't scan in the song.

Yes, I am posting something silly because if I really went off on what happened earlier today, it would not be pretty.

Santa Clara County allows you to track the status of your vote by mail ballot. You put in your address and your birth date, and it tells you what's up. Mine got counted yesterday, so now I can blow off all the telephone pleas and recycle the flyers.

A total of 598,206 ballots got sent out, and so far 190,339 have been returned (and counted if correctly filled out).

Hey, whump, get going, darlin', don't you want to be in the first set of results?