Thorns

On Light and Shadow: Polyamory’s #metoo

About Franklin Veaux/tacit, who is an apparently well known author of books about polyamory. I'd never heard of him, but I see a few familiar names in his lj friends list and in general this is dealing with the sort of geeky polyamorous circles I and a bunch of you are in. It's also...educational? seeing how they're approaching this as a process of transformative justice.

Anyway, I hope none of you were hurt by this guy.

EDIT: I originally linked to tacit on dreamwidth, who is entirely unrelated and seems fine! Sorry D:

Livejournal to make all users (or just new ones?) choose one of male or female EDIT: Possibly all a big misunderstanding

Iranian men are posting pictures of themselves wearing women's head scarves as a political statement, supporting both a male protester who the government is trying to humiliate by posting pictures of him in women/s clothing, and Iranian women in general.

Switzerland bans minarets to, amongst other things, "support women's rights" I eagerly wait the banning of church towers to support science.

This is the basic stuff I assume as context when I post. The links are to extra info for the curious, I'm not going to assume people have read them!

I have a lot of social media accounts, almost always under the name sqbr.

Misc
My name is Sean, which isn't my birth name.
I was born near the end of 1979.
I was born and live in Perth, Western Australia.
I'm an atheist, shading into agnostic around the edges.

Social context
I'm afab and genderfluid.
I'm white, a mix of Anglo, Eastern European and Jewish.
I have anxiety and depression.
I have chronic fatigue syndrome to the extent that I can't work, and identify as disabled. (A rundown of my health issues) I also have a lot of food intolerances, use a power wheelchair, and can't walk up stairs without a lot of pain(*).
I'm married to distantcam and biromantic grey asexual.
My parents are well educated lefty artist types working unskilled low-paid jobs, which makes me ambivalent about my class status.

Interests
I'm a science fiction fan, and am involved in local con-going fandom.

I draw a lot, including comics. I also make visual novels (art, writing, and coding). My fanish creative stuff can be seen at my alias_sqbr tumblr and the AO3. I also have Professional Artist And Game Developer stuff that avoid linking to my fannish persona publically but can be seen here if you're on the access list for sqbr or here for alias_sqbr.
I have a Phd in computational mathematics and love science, though I kind of burnt myself out talking about it after working in Science Communication for many years. (My maths page)

Communication

I am sometimes very bad at judging social cues or figuring out what other people are thinking.
I sometimes have difficulty replying to messages.
I have conflict anxiety, but am pretty good with calmly expressed criticism.
I like discussion and expressing my opinions which can sometimes come across as a bit combatitive.
I like most people, and am very happy for random people to join in the conversations on my blog.

I'm very absent minded, so have probably forgotten some stuff :)

(*)These last two are less relevant to my blog and more things I like to mention as often as possible so that people don't invite me for wine and cheese at the top of a flight of stairs.

I've decided to try and approach being stuck at home as I might a holiday (of indefinite duration and limited resources :/) and so am slowly going through all the things I've been putting off for ages. It gives me a nice sense of accomplishment.

Anyway, I just went through my draft posts folder. To begin with I had 84 drafts going back to 2007, now sorted into:

• 34 I had already posted (including a few drafts of comments)
  
• One I posted right away (since it was a teeny post that probably won't get much of a reply)
  
• Two I will post in a little bit when I'm sure none of my posts from the last few days are going to explode in a hurry
  
• 2 about ethics
  
• 3 about gender
  
• 2 long rambles about my personal history that grew out of other ideas (probably won't post these :))
  
• 15 about race
  
• 4 about religion
  
• 9 misc (polls, a discussion of allergies, other random stuff)
  
• 8 I decided were crap
  

Next up: going through each subfolder and seeing if I can combine the various drafts into one or more posts (or additions to the "just crap" folder). Many of these are just variations on the same ideas, there were a HEAP about artistic responsibility going back to some of my earliest drafts but I think I've finally articulated my position on that so they all went into "posted".

Does anyone else do this? And yes, it is scary to think that the huge barrage of rambly crap that makes it onto my journals has already passed through a winnowing and editing process :D (Though most of my posts are written off the cuff. Like this one!)

I'm not sure anyone will care but I made a dreamwidth feed for my lj:
http://alias-sqbr-feed.dreamwidth.org/

Afaict I'm going to get dreamwidth invite codes every now and then for the next two weeks, so if anyone wants an account comment and you'll go in the queue (and yes, I have one now, so first person to ask gets an account)

If you don't know what dreamwidth is you don't want an account enough to ask for one :)

EDIT: No more for now, I'll get back to you all when I have some more.
EDIT 2: Regardless of commenting order, Friends > vague acquaintances not on my flist > complete strangers

So, Dreamwidth is starting up soon(*).

I find it and the OTW (specifically an Archive Of Our Own) interesting (I think I have an invite for that if anyone's interested, btw). Both were formed by groups of mostly female fans(**) who got sick of being messed round by badly written and run online facilities for fandom and decided to create their own, egalitarian, professional, fan-run alternatives. Time will only tell if they work, but they seem to be doing ok so far. (EDIT: Dreamwidth is not just fannish)

They make an interesting contrast to more "male" geek open source projects etc. From my limited experience I'd say there's a lot of differences and a lot of similarities too, certainly the camaraderie and idealistic imagery. I guess fanfic writers and open source programmers both tend to emphasise a free and unfettered sharing of ideas (especially those who are both, like Naomi Novik :)).

Now I'm wondering if there's much/any fanfic written about Linux...

(*) There's a lot of broken links still, if you're interested in seeing what an actual account looks like here's one off metafandom.
(**)I'm not sure how much crossover there is between Dreamwidth and OTW. I'm sure there's some, they certainly seem to come from the same broad social group of lj based fanfic writers, but they're not formally affiliated afaict.

I'm pretty sure I've said this before but I was probably obscuringly wordy about it so (lol, not like this post): I choose to use my lj to talk about social justice (especially race) a moderate amount.

I think this is the right thing for me to do for various reasons and will argue against anyone who says it isn't.

But that doesn't mean I think you all should do it, and are bad people if you don't. People use their ljs for different things, and are suited to different types of conversation, and have different focii and numbers of spoons.
( in which I ramble )

And while I'm at it: If you feel like you should be doing something but don't think posting is it, here are some positive easy somewhat-fannish anti-racist things (3 of which I discovered in the past 2 days :)):
verb_noire (who are taking donations), racism_101, 50books_poc, 12films_poc and The Indigenous Literacy Project.

(*)Ok, if you write a long rant about how racism doesn't exist or whatever, I will be pretty judgmental about it. Just so you know. But hopefully you get my point :)

I am feeling sick and grumpy but also chatty. So, some links from metafandom with rambly commentary.

Failboat! The Cruise Ship of the Damned Sails On summarises a bunch of stuff.

veejane asks what sff fandom is going to do about this crap.

On safe spaces talks about, well, safe spaces.

Re the Will Shetterly/Kathyryn Cramer vs coffeeandink thing(*): outing someone under their real name because they disagreed with you and banned you from their lj? Is unbelievably low. Dismissing the opinions of everyone who disagrees with you "because all their IPs come from Ivy league colleges"? Low and stupid. Arguing against the use of pseudonyms on the internet? Just..argh. The stupid burns.

Also, given that Worldcon is in Australia next year I find myself putting together my opinions on aussie fandom with all this stuff going on in international fandom. I feel a bit stymied about what I can do personally to try to cut down on the fail, though, apart from trying not to contribute to it myself and encouraging anti-fail.

So since coffeeandink asked people to focus on positive things: I am currently reading "Devil in Blue Dress" by Walter Mosley after being recced it on 50books_poc. It is quite good, even if it's not spec fic :)

(*)People are avoiding saying their names because apparently they google stalk and harrass them, but if NOONE says their names noone will know whose been talked about. I feel too obscure to be worried, but incase they do: seriously, you're going to pick on a no-name australian rambling while sick? This will not help your PR.

LiveJournal by ME by aphephobia. Make sure you check out the comments.

What are you guys favourite places on lj you think most people would think are cool?

I went through all the comms I'm on in this post, the ones I think would have most broad appeal are little_details, fanthropology and trashy_eats. Maybe cooking too.

I had to leave vaginapagina because of the constant barrage of nsfw posts waiting for me when I got home from work, but it's pretty cool.