- a guide for the awkward ones (# 1436) — Bunny
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- Comic Book Costume Contests: Not, Actually, Burlesque Shows at Fantastic Fangirls: Comics and Culture
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- Trigger Warning: Update2 and Teaspoons
- “Richmond High School is accepting cards and donations for the victim and her family, which should be mailed to the school at 1250 23rd Street, Richmond, CA 94804–1011. Checks should be made out to the Richmond High Student Fund, with ‘For sex assault victim’ written in the memo line.”
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- It’s a Man’s World
- So, last night, I’m watching the Amazing Race, and, recapping the previous episode, Phil describes something as “bigger than 20 football fields.” I don’t remember the exact number of football fields. It could have been 50, or 100. Roughly, a fuckload of football fields.Naturally, he meant American football, not soccer. Which makes measuring things in “football fields” an American-centric term for a start, even though America is not the only place the Amazing Race airs. […]Clearly, there are plenty of men who have never played football, either, for whom the term is just as inadequate. And that would be true of any sports reference—it’s 50 soccer pitches, 200 basketball courts, 450 Olympic-sized swimming pools, 1,000 tennis courts!—but it’s interesting that the only one typically used is, by far, the least female-friendly possible, thus making it perhaps the most inaccessible for the general population.
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- So, There’s This Conversation With My Pharmacist…
- This prolonged social interaction agitates me every single time. There’s usually a line. People are glaring at me because I am taking so long. People are rolling their eyes because I insist on having my prescription filled properly. I am trying to control myself, because it’s not the tech’s fault, it’s probably some glitch in their system, but I want to lunge over the counter, throttle someone, and liberate a year’s supply of BC from the back room before fleeing out the side door. I start to hyperventilate. I fidget. I feel like I am exploding inside.And, every single time, I ask if it’s possible to put a flag in the system so that they know that I will pay in cash for a three month supply. So that a 40 minute ordeal every three months could be turned into a five minute in and out trip every three months. Every time, someone says “uh huh, we will look into that,” and then, the next time I come in, this happens again.This is a pretty minor thing, in the grand scheme of things, but it’s yet another tiny little facet of the American health care system which is broken […]I’ve actually had the pharmacist refuse to fill this prescription in the past until I’ve paid for it. And, you know, I think that they think they are doing me some sort of budgeting-related favour by trying to get me to take a month’s supply. But it’s not like I’m not going to need it next month.
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- Monday Blogaround
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- From the Mailbag
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- Some of my best friends are linkspammers (2nd November, 2009)
- “the f word looked at salaries of men and women in science, engineering and technology…; David Eaves examines the alleged structurelessness of FLOSS through Jo Freeman’s The Tyranny of Structurelessness; Sun Labs has a technical report out on the success of their mentoring programs; Matt Zimmerman… was interviewed by Amber Graner, and mentions his goals regarding women’s participation in the Ubuntu community; Mary Alice Crim reports on a workshop at the National NOW conference to explore feminists’ roles in shaping Internet policy: The Internet is a feminist issue; professional work and motherhood; gamer culture; MindTouch has a list of the most influential people in Open Source (from an executive/business perspective) which doesn’t include any women. Mozilla Corporation’s chairperson Mitchell Baker (herself a woman) was not impressed at either women or Mozilla as a whole not appearing; the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision 2010 awards, honouring “women making significant contributions in the areas of Innovation, Social Impact and Leadership” are taking nominations until December 11.”
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- Invisible Illness and Disability Bingo 1.0
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- wtf_nature: The amazing panda poo electricity-making bacteria
- “…discovered a bacteria that lives in panda dung and can break down massive amounts of domestic waste from us polluting humans and turn it into water and hydrogen. The research group is now working on harnessing the produced hydrogen for electricity-producing causes.”
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- Vote No on 1 | Protect Maine Equality
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- Photo Tampering Throughout History
- “Photography lost its innocence many years ago. In as early as the 1860s, photographs were already being manipulated, only a few decades after Niepce created the first photograph in 1814. […] Here, I have collected some examples of tampering throughout history.”
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- Healthcare Open Thread
- “Krugman calls this “the defining moment for health care reform.”
Discuss.”
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- Steal This Trick: The #1 Secret of Confident Bloggers
- “Be a small, ridiculously evolved, very rare and weird fish in a great big pond.”
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- I Want You To Stop Asking That Question.
- On what women want: “Using Freud’s formulation seems like exactly the wrong thing to do–not only because it allows a wealthy, educated western white dude to frame the conversation yet again, but because it relies on the idea that there is this thing called Women that can be encapsulated or explained, and that needs encapsulation and explanation.”
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- Privilege Is As Privilege Does
- Recently I was talking to a friend […] about the feminist blogosphere generally and she said, “You know, sometimes I just get to a point where I’m all Jan Brady and I think to myself, ‘Privilege privilege privilege!’ ”[…] my friend did not so much have an issue with the concept of privilege as she did with its being a sort of conversational bottleneck; you have to get through it to get to the good stuff, but more often than not one stops right there. Even when all participants are in good faith.I actually, myself, tend to think of privilege as a strategy for opening conversations rather than closing them. […]There is a certain feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I know I am about to have a hard conversation with someone. Some people would call it fear; others would call it guilt. It might be something of both of those, and it probably depends on what position I’m in in the conversation. Am I the one informing someone of their mistake, or are they going to tell me how I’ve failed them?[…] I think that [the] question is: do we want to live in a world where there is only one acceptable way of articulating what it is to be human? I kind of feel like we tried that out for a long, long time, and it got us into the ruddy mess we now find ourselves in. I am troubled by attempts to discount experiences that aren’t your own. I am actually not much for relativism, but I don’t think my rejection of it means that I must consider myself to be an equal authority on absolutely everything.And that […] is all that the concept [of privilege] does for me: remind me that I am not judge and jury, and that I have limits. […] in order to understand, we first have to listen. And that’s where privilege steps in to perform a valuable function. I always come back to that Solnit essay, and her line about how Men Who Explain Things are telling women that this is not their world. […]Funnily enough I tend not to challenge my male friends on this; feminist or no, it’s too exhausting to take the average white male through this, and most of my male friends are white. They have been brought up to occupy the objective position, to think of themselves as being able to analyze everything. Because they were told from birth that this was their world. [empasis added by lipsum]
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