![[sticky entry]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/entry/sticky_entry.png){kind=small}
When you have made enough things that you have trouble holding all the places you've been in your head at the same time, it is time for a welcome post. So welcome!
I'm Kit Harding, writer and podcast host. I write primarily fiction with the occasional review or essay thrown in for fun, and I'm a cohost on WNXS News, a Magic: The Gathering news podcast, which you can find over on Nexus. (It is somewhat intermittently released at the moment due to life stuff.)
I consider myself primarily a fiction writer, but you can find all the places I've been (fiction and non), under the cut!
( Read more... )
I read and really liked Musa al-Gharbi's book We Have Never Been Woke. He discusses very eloquently a lot of stuff I have been slowly realizing about left-wing politics, particularly in the way a lot of people are reluctant to actually live their ideals-- I was particularly interested in an example he gives of someone he spoke to who seemed to want to be able to resolve a labor issue with "privilege awareness," but being aware of her privilege doesn't actually do anything about the fact that she's relying on underpaying her childcare. (It's just that doing anything else would require restructuring how she lives her life.) He makes good points about the way people who have both money and left-wing politics dominate the left-wing political conversation and talk often about how they complain of underpaid and exploited workers while still using many services reliant on underpaid and exploited workers, such as gig economy services. He also discusses the way in certain circles people are turning "having a marginalized identity" into social and political capital in a way that favors those who already have privileged backgrounds and the way a person of a particular marginalized group getting into a position that makes a lot of money is often held as a victory for everyone of that marginalized group even when it doesn't do anything for the real position of the majority of that marginalized group.
He admits at a number of points that this is an academic book which is mostly going to be read by people with money and education and left-wing sentiments... and admits that he is one of these people. But he admits it with kind of a wink-and-nod, like he is one of these people but he sees more than they do, as evidenced by his writing the book. He turns the way a lot of people disliked the book or suggested he shouldn't have called attention to the left's problems in such tumultuous times into political capital in exactly the way he describes in the book: they don't like having their flaws being pointed out; the reaction is itself proof he's onto something. (I mean, I think he is onto something, but I don't think the negative reaction is proof of why.)
And then in his most recent essay, he evinces that he is, in fact, one of the people he's complaining about, with the same focus on ideological purity above practical reality. Differently focused, but the same thing: he says he doesn't vote for anything other than ballot initiatives partially because "putting on a jersey and rooting for a team" interferes with his work (with the added comment that it does so for many social scientists, which... what?) but also because he finds the Democratic Party useless and that voting for them is not going to fix the problems with America, using the example of New York, which is under close to one-party rule in the governments of both state and city, and yet both still have massive inequality and awful segregation.
This is a terrible line of argument. I don't disagree that the Democrats lack the political will to make sweeping changes that could actually solve problems. I don't disagree that fighting this requires more than just showing up at the ballot box, or that mainstream Democrats have done bad things. But I cannot fathom how anyone could look at what's going on with Trump and say that it's possible for Trump to do these things because the Democrats started it.
Al-Gharbi's proposed solution in the linked essay seems to boil down to "If everyone would just" about the intellectual class. If "we" as a group resist the attacks on universities. If we as a group-- but apparently on an individual level, given that he's dismissed politics as an avenue of solution--just allocate our resources in such a way that we're fighting the injustice.
Everyone is not going to just. I have been offering variations on this sentiment for years, usually in the context of third political parties: everyone is not going to just. So if you take that as read, how do you solve the problems?
Politically. And no, it's not going to be quick and it's not going to be easy and it is going to involve fighting the Democratic party as much as it involves fighting the Republican party. Fixing these problems is going to be a giant mess of forcing political will onto people and it's going to be hard (and I will do a separate post on this later but y'all really should go read Michael Walzer's Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics) and take time and not magically save everyone.
Voting is harm reduction. It's not about going out and cheering for a team and the fact that people treat it like that has a lot to do with why America is the way it is at the moment. You aren't always or even often going to get someone with the political will to solve problems, but you can perfectly well get someone who doesn't make it worse, or makes it worse to a lesser degree.
There are two schools of thought about this that I've seen: "Voting for the lesser evil is still voting for evil" and "voting for the lesser evil means you are creating less evil." I'm very much in that second camp. Voting for the Democrats wouldn't have fixed the major problems with our society.
But we wouldn't be facing the dissolution of Head Start either. We wouldn't be facing attempts to get rid of Medicaid. We wouldn't be facing these situations where ICE is randomly grabbing people off the street just because.
To disclaim responsibility for that by not voting on the grounds Democrats should have been better or that the Democrats have also caused harm or to lean as hard into both-sides-ism as the essay does just shows that you value intellectual purity over practical reality every bit as much as the mainstream liberals you so disdain.
(A postscript: There is something about this entire conversation that reminds me of D. Graham Burnett, who I was similarly annoyed at when I read A Trial by Jury in college. Burnett expresses the sentiment that he wanted a hung jury so that it could remain "pure," an intellectual exercise for him without any of that weight of actually deciding someone's fate. Since I had been taking legal process classes in addition to the social psych class where I read it, I was intimately aware that the end result of that would have just been a lot of time and money spent on doing it again with a different group of twelve people and the suspected murderer held in limbo a lot longer, which is very much still impacting someone's fate.)
He admits at a number of points that this is an academic book which is mostly going to be read by people with money and education and left-wing sentiments... and admits that he is one of these people. But he admits it with kind of a wink-and-nod, like he is one of these people but he sees more than they do, as evidenced by his writing the book. He turns the way a lot of people disliked the book or suggested he shouldn't have called attention to the left's problems in such tumultuous times into political capital in exactly the way he describes in the book: they don't like having their flaws being pointed out; the reaction is itself proof he's onto something. (I mean, I think he is onto something, but I don't think the negative reaction is proof of why.)
And then in his most recent essay, he evinces that he is, in fact, one of the people he's complaining about, with the same focus on ideological purity above practical reality. Differently focused, but the same thing: he says he doesn't vote for anything other than ballot initiatives partially because "putting on a jersey and rooting for a team" interferes with his work (with the added comment that it does so for many social scientists, which... what?) but also because he finds the Democratic Party useless and that voting for them is not going to fix the problems with America, using the example of New York, which is under close to one-party rule in the governments of both state and city, and yet both still have massive inequality and awful segregation.
This is a terrible line of argument. I don't disagree that the Democrats lack the political will to make sweeping changes that could actually solve problems. I don't disagree that fighting this requires more than just showing up at the ballot box, or that mainstream Democrats have done bad things. But I cannot fathom how anyone could look at what's going on with Trump and say that it's possible for Trump to do these things because the Democrats started it.
Al-Gharbi's proposed solution in the linked essay seems to boil down to "If everyone would just" about the intellectual class. If "we" as a group resist the attacks on universities. If we as a group-- but apparently on an individual level, given that he's dismissed politics as an avenue of solution--just allocate our resources in such a way that we're fighting the injustice.
Everyone is not going to just. I have been offering variations on this sentiment for years, usually in the context of third political parties: everyone is not going to just. So if you take that as read, how do you solve the problems?
Politically. And no, it's not going to be quick and it's not going to be easy and it is going to involve fighting the Democratic party as much as it involves fighting the Republican party. Fixing these problems is going to be a giant mess of forcing political will onto people and it's going to be hard (and I will do a separate post on this later but y'all really should go read Michael Walzer's Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics) and take time and not magically save everyone.
Voting is harm reduction. It's not about going out and cheering for a team and the fact that people treat it like that has a lot to do with why America is the way it is at the moment. You aren't always or even often going to get someone with the political will to solve problems, but you can perfectly well get someone who doesn't make it worse, or makes it worse to a lesser degree.
There are two schools of thought about this that I've seen: "Voting for the lesser evil is still voting for evil" and "voting for the lesser evil means you are creating less evil." I'm very much in that second camp. Voting for the Democrats wouldn't have fixed the major problems with our society.
But we wouldn't be facing the dissolution of Head Start either. We wouldn't be facing attempts to get rid of Medicaid. We wouldn't be facing these situations where ICE is randomly grabbing people off the street just because.
To disclaim responsibility for that by not voting on the grounds Democrats should have been better or that the Democrats have also caused harm or to lean as hard into both-sides-ism as the essay does just shows that you value intellectual purity over practical reality every bit as much as the mainstream liberals you so disdain.
(A postscript: There is something about this entire conversation that reminds me of D. Graham Burnett, who I was similarly annoyed at when I read A Trial by Jury in college. Burnett expresses the sentiment that he wanted a hung jury so that it could remain "pure," an intellectual exercise for him without any of that weight of actually deciding someone's fate. Since I had been taking legal process classes in addition to the social psych class where I read it, I was intimately aware that the end result of that would have just been a lot of time and money spent on doing it again with a different group of twelve people and the suspected murderer held in limbo a lot longer, which is very much still impacting someone's fate.)
My zucchini are coming up! As are one of my other things-- either the basil or the parsley. Whichever of those two didn't say it takes a very long time to germinate.
The problem is that I now have eight peat pots with active plants and two large clay pots. And pots are expensive. Anyone have a local idea for sourcing pots? Ideally cheaper than Home Depot.
The problem is that I now have eight peat pots with active plants and two large clay pots. And pots are expensive. Anyone have a local idea for sourcing pots? Ideally cheaper than Home Depot.
Rejections
Apr. 27th, 2025 02:16 pmI find it profoundly aggravating when I find out a project to which I have submitted has been cancelled not because the publisher made any effort to, like, send me a rejection or anything like that, but because Submissions Grinder helpfully put out a notice on the closed market listing that the publisher has announced the project has been cancelled.
Given the list of recorded rejection notices, it seems like they didn't do this to everyone-- people do seem to have gotten rejected and submitted that rejection to the Grinder-- but "the project has been cancelled" is the sort of thing where you make an effort to make sure you haven't missed anyone. And even if you assume some people didn't go back to the Grinder to update their submission marker with a rejection, I also seem not to be the only person who didn't get any sort of rejection notice.
Really, given the way submitting anywhere completely ties up a story and the number of chances that are anthologies and therefore cannot be held over to the next submission window, you should be making an effort to reject people promptly in any case, but I especially don't like my story sitting out of circulation for a long period of time when there's zero chance that will result in a sale.
Given the list of recorded rejection notices, it seems like they didn't do this to everyone-- people do seem to have gotten rejected and submitted that rejection to the Grinder-- but "the project has been cancelled" is the sort of thing where you make an effort to make sure you haven't missed anyone. And even if you assume some people didn't go back to the Grinder to update their submission marker with a rejection, I also seem not to be the only person who didn't get any sort of rejection notice.
Really, given the way submitting anywhere completely ties up a story and the number of chances that are anthologies and therefore cannot be held over to the next submission window, you should be making an effort to reject people promptly in any case, but I especially don't like my story sitting out of circulation for a long period of time when there's zero chance that will result in a sale.
So I finally tried the Aldi, because people get really enthusiastic about Aldi, and it's... fine?
It seems like the kind of grocery store where you go to see what they have, not to get things off a list. (Like, I do not think the fact that it's in the same plaza as an Ocean State Job Lot is a coincidence.) It would not work as my sole grocery store in quite the same way as any of the others I visit-- while I would not like being limited to one grocery store, it would be possible for any of the ones in my regular rotation. With Aldi it would not.
It is possible I would be more enthusiastic about it if I had fewer food restrictions, or if I had not decided to cut way down on my snack purchasing as a cost-saving measure. (Although it is possible that buying snacks at the Aldi might have a similar effect, from a cost-saving standpoint.) But there are certain essentials it's definitely lacking. (Though some of the things often described as "quirks" don't really register to me as odd; "you have to unlock the cart with a quarter which you get back when you return it" was a standard element of childhood trips to BJs.)
That being said, it does have some strong points, namely less than half of what I would normally pay for a bag of mandarins with no hesitation about quality-- they passed my "I am going to squeeze the entire bag to make sure they're of the desired firmness" test with flying colors and I didn't even have to try multiple bags to get there; it was the first one I picked up. (This is incredibly unusual.) There was lox that was sufficiently inexpensive that I could not resist buying it. It is wildly less overstimulating than most grocery stores-- one of the things they eliminate as a "frill" is having a background music playlist, and another is Bright! Eye-catching! Displays!
And if any of you not-allergic people are having trouble sourcing eggs, they're currently ~$4.50 a dozen at the Aldi.
So while it's not going into the regular rotation, I will probably drop in there occasionally just to see what's on offer.
It seems like the kind of grocery store where you go to see what they have, not to get things off a list. (Like, I do not think the fact that it's in the same plaza as an Ocean State Job Lot is a coincidence.) It would not work as my sole grocery store in quite the same way as any of the others I visit-- while I would not like being limited to one grocery store, it would be possible for any of the ones in my regular rotation. With Aldi it would not.
It is possible I would be more enthusiastic about it if I had fewer food restrictions, or if I had not decided to cut way down on my snack purchasing as a cost-saving measure. (Although it is possible that buying snacks at the Aldi might have a similar effect, from a cost-saving standpoint.) But there are certain essentials it's definitely lacking. (Though some of the things often described as "quirks" don't really register to me as odd; "you have to unlock the cart with a quarter which you get back when you return it" was a standard element of childhood trips to BJs.)
That being said, it does have some strong points, namely less than half of what I would normally pay for a bag of mandarins with no hesitation about quality-- they passed my "I am going to squeeze the entire bag to make sure they're of the desired firmness" test with flying colors and I didn't even have to try multiple bags to get there; it was the first one I picked up. (This is incredibly unusual.) There was lox that was sufficiently inexpensive that I could not resist buying it. It is wildly less overstimulating than most grocery stores-- one of the things they eliminate as a "frill" is having a background music playlist, and another is Bright! Eye-catching! Displays!
And if any of you not-allergic people are having trouble sourcing eggs, they're currently ~$4.50 a dozen at the Aldi.
So while it's not going into the regular rotation, I will probably drop in there occasionally just to see what's on offer.
Assuaging the Paranoia
Mar. 29th, 2025 09:21 pmToday's prep: buying two gallons of bottled water, one of which came into the house and one of which remained in my car. This leaves me with three gallons of water total in the house. I am trying for the "72 hours of supplies" that various European governments were telling their citizens to have. Given that there are nominally four people in the house and I'm the only one doing this, I'm still a ways off on that point. (If you are about to tell me how very easy it is to store my own water in reusable containers, I am aware. I am doing this in the way that I have spoons to.)
I'm actually just fine on 72 hours of food, but that's because I go grocery shopping exactly once a week. I rarely don't have 72 hours of food in the house-- even in a situation where the power is out.
Tomorrow I really am going to go to a garden center, for real this time. This may wind up being Home Depot, which is not ideal but again, doing the prep at all is better than not doing it-- I am going to attempt bush zucchini in pots.
Also if anyone local wants someone to watch their kids while they protest or knows someone who wants someone to watch their kids while they protest, we should talk. (My one rule for this is that you have to leave me with a plan for what to do with the kids in the event you get arrested at said protest. Doesn't have to be a super detailed plan-- a relative's phone number is fine--but there needs to be something.)
Oh, and apparently the situation with the Canada tariffs has the potential to cause a toilet paper shortage because of the way our lumber mill trading partnerships work, so this might be a good moment to stock up.
I'm actually just fine on 72 hours of food, but that's because I go grocery shopping exactly once a week. I rarely don't have 72 hours of food in the house-- even in a situation where the power is out.
Tomorrow I really am going to go to a garden center, for real this time. This may wind up being Home Depot, which is not ideal but again, doing the prep at all is better than not doing it-- I am going to attempt bush zucchini in pots.
Also if anyone local wants someone to watch their kids while they protest or knows someone who wants someone to watch their kids while they protest, we should talk. (My one rule for this is that you have to leave me with a plan for what to do with the kids in the event you get arrested at said protest. Doesn't have to be a super detailed plan-- a relative's phone number is fine--but there needs to be something.)
Oh, and apparently the situation with the Canada tariffs has the potential to cause a toilet paper shortage because of the way our lumber mill trading partnerships work, so this might be a good moment to stock up.
Tesla Protests
Mar. 23rd, 2025 01:25 amSo apparently there's a local Tesla protest: https://www.boston.com/news/business/2025/03/18/the-back-bay-tesla-location-is-becoming-a-perennial-protest-site/
Every Saturday from 12-2; I might have to look into turning out for one.
Every Saturday from 12-2; I might have to look into turning out for one.
Annual State of the Writer
Feb. 19th, 2025 08:18 pmA post that feels a bit silly to write given the state of the everything, but as we cling to our shreds of normalcy...
Boskone has come and gone (although I was not at it and will not be at it unless it starts requiring masks again) and as Boskone is the anniversary of my deciding to take my writing career seriously, it is also when I take public stock of my writing career, of which there has actually not been much this year. One publication, one sale. The sale, incidentally, was an exercise in matching story to market-- me looking at a story going "This is quite different in tone from most of the other stuff I've written; it will probably want to be in a magazine a bit different from the ones I usually submit to." And indeed it will be. I don't know exactly when yet because publishing timelines, but I'll tell you when I do.
I suppose if one is looking at the year generously one might say it was a time of skill building. I got deeply into fanfiction exchanges (which I am now stopping for a while because I do not have the spoons to do those and original writing and work on the long-term fic projects; I will likely reappear for Fic in a Box and Yuletide each year), and writing to prompt in a variety of different fandoms and genres did a lot to stretch my writing abilities. Honestly, writing to deadline on no spoons did a lot to stretch my writing abilities in and of itself since it forced me to work down from "everything must be a wholly complete epic" to telling smaller, shorter stories just so I could get them done in the allotted timeframes! That is a skill that will serve me well in submitting to anthologies.
Writing the long DS9 epic continues to teach me things about constructing a long, heavily-foreshadowed story, particularly in terms of ingraining "trust the story." The story will get me where it needs to go if I keep writing and don't think too far ahead. It knows where it wants to be; I just need to let it get there.
As far as non-writing aspects of writing career... well, the thing I actually wanted to do when I set out to become a Published Author was become a person it was reasonable to have on convention panels. And I do seem to have become that; they let me be on 5 panels (the maximum I said I was willing to do; I was a bit surprised they actually gave me five) at Arisia, including the potential lightning rod of the Neil Gaiman panel and one panel where the other two panelists were people with incredibly longstanding, impressive careers.
So now I need a new writing goal. I am not certain what that should be, although it should be something achievable within the current state of the world. I am not going to be the person who writes the Great Resistance Novel. (Or at least I'm not going to be the person who sets out to write the Great Resistance Novel. Whatever's going on in the world always seems to creep into the writing anyway--just look at "Flight Plans Through the Dust of Dreams," in which I was tapped into the zeitgeist enough to write an examination of terrorism just before January 6-- but any time I set out to do that it winds up being terrible.) Becoming the kind of person who could be a plausible guest of honor at a convention is a much more long-term goal. But I should come up with something. Because my whole life cannot be how the world is awful.
Boskone has come and gone (although I was not at it and will not be at it unless it starts requiring masks again) and as Boskone is the anniversary of my deciding to take my writing career seriously, it is also when I take public stock of my writing career, of which there has actually not been much this year. One publication, one sale. The sale, incidentally, was an exercise in matching story to market-- me looking at a story going "This is quite different in tone from most of the other stuff I've written; it will probably want to be in a magazine a bit different from the ones I usually submit to." And indeed it will be. I don't know exactly when yet because publishing timelines, but I'll tell you when I do.
I suppose if one is looking at the year generously one might say it was a time of skill building. I got deeply into fanfiction exchanges (which I am now stopping for a while because I do not have the spoons to do those and original writing and work on the long-term fic projects; I will likely reappear for Fic in a Box and Yuletide each year), and writing to prompt in a variety of different fandoms and genres did a lot to stretch my writing abilities. Honestly, writing to deadline on no spoons did a lot to stretch my writing abilities in and of itself since it forced me to work down from "everything must be a wholly complete epic" to telling smaller, shorter stories just so I could get them done in the allotted timeframes! That is a skill that will serve me well in submitting to anthologies.
Writing the long DS9 epic continues to teach me things about constructing a long, heavily-foreshadowed story, particularly in terms of ingraining "trust the story." The story will get me where it needs to go if I keep writing and don't think too far ahead. It knows where it wants to be; I just need to let it get there.
As far as non-writing aspects of writing career... well, the thing I actually wanted to do when I set out to become a Published Author was become a person it was reasonable to have on convention panels. And I do seem to have become that; they let me be on 5 panels (the maximum I said I was willing to do; I was a bit surprised they actually gave me five) at Arisia, including the potential lightning rod of the Neil Gaiman panel and one panel where the other two panelists were people with incredibly longstanding, impressive careers.
So now I need a new writing goal. I am not certain what that should be, although it should be something achievable within the current state of the world. I am not going to be the person who writes the Great Resistance Novel. (Or at least I'm not going to be the person who sets out to write the Great Resistance Novel. Whatever's going on in the world always seems to creep into the writing anyway--just look at "Flight Plans Through the Dust of Dreams," in which I was tapped into the zeitgeist enough to write an examination of terrorism just before January 6-- but any time I set out to do that it winds up being terrible.) Becoming the kind of person who could be a plausible guest of honor at a convention is a much more long-term goal. But I should come up with something. Because my whole life cannot be how the world is awful.
Public Comments
Feb. 12th, 2025 09:33 pmI attended a portion of (meeting started at a bit past six and I left a bit before eight) the public comment meeting regarding the proposed Davis Square redevelopment. It was massively crowded, standing room only (I was glad I arrived early enough for a chair), and criticized by several people for not having microphones. Which, really, there were flyers floating around that meant people actually knew about the meeting; the meeting being large enough to require microphones should have been anticipated. (Someone suggested also including hybrid capacity, which I would 100% get behind.) There was also a lot of snottiness from the people who have been attending all along towards the large crowd of people who only showed up to their first meeting tonight, which... these meetings have not been well-advertised. It is possible that was on purpose, so as to avoid the huge crowd of people many of whom were united in the belief that this is a bad idea. (Also I now need to find out when and where zoning committee meetings are. I presume these are open to the public?) Flyers went around alerting people to the existence of these meetings and being aware that the meetings existed, people went. I even got on a couple of email lists, so perhaps I will know about these meetings in the future.
I had been able to access notes from previous meetings prior to this but I honestly couldn't tell if they were official or not; they were just a random google doc, and I didn't find them; they were pointed out to me. I'm not sure it would be possible to find them without being given a direct link. (I'm not sure I could find them again.) The developer repeatedly referred to "according to our information" without being able to point to anywhere that information was easily accessible-- he said he'd send it to the person who pressed him on that point, but I have to wonder why they don't just have all of that data up on a website somewhere if they're going to be using it to justify things.
Primary impression is that they're using "iterative development process" as a way of avoiding committing to anything-- the reason this feels poorly thought out is that they are trying to keep everything in a state of flux so they can be responsive to community feedback! Which conveniently also means they don't have actual answers to most questions; they want to have "thought partners" on those things. Questions were asked about the parking thing and mostly got the "we are looking for thought partners" line. Other actual questions that were dodged included what kind of price point they're doing with affordable housing. Housing can be classed as affordable if it's 30% of 80% of the area median income for a family of one more people than bedrooms. (Yes, I looked this up.) There are then some income restrictions on who can move in, but what percentage of the area median income you're basing that on is important to how genuinely affordable your "affordable" housing is and when the question was asked it was pretty much brushed aside. (There was also someone in the audience who was like "well maybe if you didn't put in the affordable housing you wouldn't have to build something so big," but the majority of the audience and the developer were kind of like "WTF?" at that comment.)
Since that question had been asked already when I was called on and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jducoeur had mentioned completion bonds as an area of concern while we were talking about this, I asked about completion bonds and was told "we're not at that stage yet." They are also not at the stage for a parking study or a shade study. For all they're going on about iterative process, there really is not much of substance to comment on at these public comment meetings. They're doing an excellent job at being evasive while talking a good game about working with the community and making minor changes like moving which side of the development the residential entry is on. (This gets touted as an example of them Listening! To! The! Community! They were also willing to perhaps commit to banning AirBnbs. I feel like that's usually covered in the standard "no subletting" lease clause?)
One interesting thing that did get definitively stated: if they don't get permission from the city to do this they are going to decommission those buildings "as leases expire" which heavily implies that if they don't get their way they're going to kick everyone out and close up a large chunk of Davis Square altogether. I attempted to call them on this a bit-- "Saying that if you don't get your way you're going to close it all up really makes me feel like you're interested in working with the community"-- but while that line got some amusement from the audience it got entirely brushed aside by the developer at the same time he brushed away the completion bond question.
There was much representation from the musician community who pointed out that it's not just the management of The Burren that's a problem with closing it; there is a huge community of working artists that relies on playing shows there to make money. The management may be able to open another restaurant and then expand back in, but the artists are just stuck. That was another "it's a good question" with only vague answers-- maybe these other places will take the overflow (the artist asking the question had specifically said that won't work when asking her question). I'm not sure whether the "maybe sponsoring some outdoor concerts or something" idea came from the developer or the audience but I'm skeptical that would be enough as a substitute. Pretty much any time someone brought up a way this was going to cause problems the developer said "I understand your perspective" without actually commenting on it.
So yeah, I came away from this with the idea that I need to both find out where and when the zoning meetings are and figure out who my ward councilor is. I imagine the very local politicians are even more strongly influenced by phone calls than the state or national ones.
(I can't do anything about the fascism. But I can go to a public comment meeting and report back about the developers.)
I had been able to access notes from previous meetings prior to this but I honestly couldn't tell if they were official or not; they were just a random google doc, and I didn't find them; they were pointed out to me. I'm not sure it would be possible to find them without being given a direct link. (I'm not sure I could find them again.) The developer repeatedly referred to "according to our information" without being able to point to anywhere that information was easily accessible-- he said he'd send it to the person who pressed him on that point, but I have to wonder why they don't just have all of that data up on a website somewhere if they're going to be using it to justify things.
Primary impression is that they're using "iterative development process" as a way of avoiding committing to anything-- the reason this feels poorly thought out is that they are trying to keep everything in a state of flux so they can be responsive to community feedback! Which conveniently also means they don't have actual answers to most questions; they want to have "thought partners" on those things. Questions were asked about the parking thing and mostly got the "we are looking for thought partners" line. Other actual questions that were dodged included what kind of price point they're doing with affordable housing. Housing can be classed as affordable if it's 30% of 80% of the area median income for a family of one more people than bedrooms. (Yes, I looked this up.) There are then some income restrictions on who can move in, but what percentage of the area median income you're basing that on is important to how genuinely affordable your "affordable" housing is and when the question was asked it was pretty much brushed aside. (There was also someone in the audience who was like "well maybe if you didn't put in the affordable housing you wouldn't have to build something so big," but the majority of the audience and the developer were kind of like "WTF?" at that comment.)
Since that question had been asked already when I was called on and
jducoeur had mentioned completion bonds as an area of concern while we were talking about this, I asked about completion bonds and was told "we're not at that stage yet." They are also not at the stage for a parking study or a shade study. For all they're going on about iterative process, there really is not much of substance to comment on at these public comment meetings. They're doing an excellent job at being evasive while talking a good game about working with the community and making minor changes like moving which side of the development the residential entry is on. (This gets touted as an example of them Listening! To! The! Community! They were also willing to perhaps commit to banning AirBnbs. I feel like that's usually covered in the standard "no subletting" lease clause?)One interesting thing that did get definitively stated: if they don't get permission from the city to do this they are going to decommission those buildings "as leases expire" which heavily implies that if they don't get their way they're going to kick everyone out and close up a large chunk of Davis Square altogether. I attempted to call them on this a bit-- "Saying that if you don't get your way you're going to close it all up really makes me feel like you're interested in working with the community"-- but while that line got some amusement from the audience it got entirely brushed aside by the developer at the same time he brushed away the completion bond question.
There was much representation from the musician community who pointed out that it's not just the management of The Burren that's a problem with closing it; there is a huge community of working artists that relies on playing shows there to make money. The management may be able to open another restaurant and then expand back in, but the artists are just stuck. That was another "it's a good question" with only vague answers-- maybe these other places will take the overflow (the artist asking the question had specifically said that won't work when asking her question). I'm not sure whether the "maybe sponsoring some outdoor concerts or something" idea came from the developer or the audience but I'm skeptical that would be enough as a substitute. Pretty much any time someone brought up a way this was going to cause problems the developer said "I understand your perspective" without actually commenting on it.
So yeah, I came away from this with the idea that I need to both find out where and when the zoning meetings are and figure out who my ward councilor is. I imagine the very local politicians are even more strongly influenced by phone calls than the state or national ones.
(I can't do anything about the fascism. But I can go to a public comment meeting and report back about the developers.)
Local Activism
Feb. 5th, 2025 05:52 pmIn the interest of things we might have a chance of affecting: I'm going to a public comment meeting next week!
It's about the luxury condo monstrosity they're trying to build in Davis Square-- which, sure, they say it's not that, but they're looking at getting rid of all the businesses on that block to build something that's 500 units, only 20% of which are set to be designated affordable (and "affordable" isn't always that affordable around here: affordable rent is 30% of 80% of the median income for a household of one more person than bedrooms), and there's no way a for-profit developer is putting that much effort into a big development if it's not going to be expensive luxury apartments. To say nothing of the existing car congestion there-- sure, let's add an underground parking garage of 100 spaces; that's going to help with anything! (I'd rather see it go the Boston route of it doesn't provide parking and living there means you aren't eligible for street parking permits. If they committed to 50% affordable, a range of prices in the affordable instead of everything being set at maximum you can set affordable, no condos, and no major chains in the proposed retail space, all of that in a legally binding fashion that the city can enforce, I'd even be willing to let it go ahead.)
And the reason there are so many empty storefronts down there now is that they keep coming up with these plans so no one wants to commit to moving in.
So, yeah, the developer is having a Community Meeting on February 12 at 6PM at the Somerville Community Baptist Church and I am going to make polite objections. (Polite being the key word; the email that first informed me of this was encouraging jeering the developer people and I don't think that's productive in this setting. Here's an article discussing it a bit more neutrally.)
It's about the luxury condo monstrosity they're trying to build in Davis Square-- which, sure, they say it's not that, but they're looking at getting rid of all the businesses on that block to build something that's 500 units, only 20% of which are set to be designated affordable (and "affordable" isn't always that affordable around here: affordable rent is 30% of 80% of the median income for a household of one more person than bedrooms), and there's no way a for-profit developer is putting that much effort into a big development if it's not going to be expensive luxury apartments. To say nothing of the existing car congestion there-- sure, let's add an underground parking garage of 100 spaces; that's going to help with anything! (I'd rather see it go the Boston route of it doesn't provide parking and living there means you aren't eligible for street parking permits. If they committed to 50% affordable, a range of prices in the affordable instead of everything being set at maximum you can set affordable, no condos, and no major chains in the proposed retail space, all of that in a legally binding fashion that the city can enforce, I'd even be willing to let it go ahead.)
And the reason there are so many empty storefronts down there now is that they keep coming up with these plans so no one wants to commit to moving in.
So, yeah, the developer is having a Community Meeting on February 12 at 6PM at the Somerville Community Baptist Church and I am going to make polite objections. (Polite being the key word; the email that first informed me of this was encouraging jeering the developer people and I don't think that's productive in this setting. Here's an article discussing it a bit more neutrally.)
On Illegality
Feb. 2nd, 2025 01:34 amI keep seeing people say that certain things Trump has done are illegal.
And while that's good to keep reminding people of, keep remembering that it's not normal, it's also important to remember that laws only mean something if someone is enforcing them.
The avenue of consequences for Elon Musk's DOGE not being a legitimate agency would need to come through Congress or the Attorney General. That is not going to happen.
So yes, remind everyone that this is illegal. But also make your plans assuming that there will be no recourse from the courts, at least in this matter. (I'm not even talking about SCOTUS here; I'm talking about who has the standing to bring a case in the first place.)
And while that's good to keep reminding people of, keep remembering that it's not normal, it's also important to remember that laws only mean something if someone is enforcing them.
The avenue of consequences for Elon Musk's DOGE not being a legitimate agency would need to come through Congress or the Attorney General. That is not going to happen.
So yes, remind everyone that this is illegal. But also make your plans assuming that there will be no recourse from the courts, at least in this matter. (I'm not even talking about SCOTUS here; I'm talking about who has the standing to bring a case in the first place.)
Pandemic Prep: Vaccine Edition
Jan. 26th, 2025 03:06 pmToday, in "prep by whatever thing you are currently having an anxiety attack about": I have finally made an appointment to get my second mpox shot next week, relying on the medical assertion that it's never too late to get your second one. (The first one was something like a year and a half ago.)
Am I expecting to get mpox? No idea, but given that we're about to be overrun with antivaxxers and the public health infrastructure is being removed, it certainly isn't a bad idea to protect myself.
Am I expecting to get mpox? No idea, but given that we're about to be overrun with antivaxxers and the public health infrastructure is being removed, it certainly isn't a bad idea to protect myself.
So once I accept about myself that my prep is going to be fairly anxiety-attack driven and somewhat haphazard and that I am definitely going to be inadequately prepped in some areas and prepped for things that don't happen in others, I am at least getting some prep done. Prepping for whatever I'm currently having an anxiety attack about is not the most efficient way to do this, but it's better than not doing it at all.
So in addition to the HEPA filter I bought while I was panicking about the bird flu, I have now ordered a solar charger that is probably overkill for my purposes.
Also an additional fountain pen and some ink, but that's just common sense; my preferred fountain pen shop is based in China. (Ink, if I am ever in Harvard Square during Bob Slate's open hours, can and probably should be done locally, but they somehow haven't managed online orders and I am never in Harvard Square anymore to go there physically.)
On the list but more challenging for timing reasons: oil change, tire alignment, and maintenance check on my car. I do, however, really need to actually do that; in the event of an evacuation one really does need a functioning vehicle.
So in addition to the HEPA filter I bought while I was panicking about the bird flu, I have now ordered a solar charger that is probably overkill for my purposes.
Also an additional fountain pen and some ink, but that's just common sense; my preferred fountain pen shop is based in China. (Ink, if I am ever in Harvard Square during Bob Slate's open hours, can and probably should be done locally, but they somehow haven't managed online orders and I am never in Harvard Square anymore to go there physically.)
On the list but more challenging for timing reasons: oil change, tire alignment, and maintenance check on my car. I do, however, really need to actually do that; in the event of an evacuation one really does need a functioning vehicle.
You should be afraid of bird flu.
That link is to a Vanity Fair article that's digging into it and the only conclusion I can come to is that we are going to have a bird flu pandemic and the death toll will dwarf COVID and you need to be preparing for an extended lockdown now.
That link is to a Vanity Fair article that's digging into it and the only conclusion I can come to is that we are going to have a bird flu pandemic and the death toll will dwarf COVID and you need to be preparing for an extended lockdown now.
Further Adventures in Con: Antisemitism
Sep. 14th, 2024 10:40 amI was not familiar with Big Bad Con until this and this fell across my feed. Now, since in my experience anyone who uses "Zionism" like that is using as shorthand for "No, we don't hate all Jews, just the evil filthy Zionist ones (which is every Jew who doesn't loudly proclaim that they support the destruction of Israel)," my curiosity was piqued. Based on what I found I'm not sure the boycotters would actually take issue with that characterization of what they believe but rather with my assessment that believing that is a bad thing.
Digging through it, I found that what kicked it off is this demand to know who among Big Bad Con's staff "identifies as a Zionist" because someone was asked to remove "anti-Zionist language." You notice they don't specify what the anti-Zionist language was. (And their explanation website here seems to conflate "being a Zionist" with "being against a free Palestine," which is not true.) They have a demand letter here. I get the impression based on their writing that that the "censored Zionist language" was "from the river to the sea," which... that's a Hamas slogan, people. That's been a Hamas slogan since long before the attacks. It can't be reclaimed as long as Hamas is actively using it and honestly I'm not sure it can be reclaimed after that, if there ever was anything to reclaim there--this is much like the Pepe the Frog thing except with significantly more active violence attached to it. There is no way to interpret that as anything other than a call for Jewish genocide and Big Bad Con was 100% right to want it removed. (And it's incredibly disappointing that what seems to be a decent-sized convention has capitulated to antisemitism here.)
One wonders if these people even are against Hamas; they don't at any point say so while using Hamas rhetoric and while there are people who use this rhetoric who would be horrified to be accused of supporting Jewish genocide, they're few and far between-- well, okay, they'd all be horrified to be accused of it, but then when you ask them what they are in favor of, they list off elements of Jewish genocide without actually using those words.
Certainly I wouldn't feel safe attending Big Bad Con given all this...
Digging through it, I found that what kicked it off is this demand to know who among Big Bad Con's staff "identifies as a Zionist" because someone was asked to remove "anti-Zionist language." You notice they don't specify what the anti-Zionist language was. (And their explanation website here seems to conflate "being a Zionist" with "being against a free Palestine," which is not true.) They have a demand letter here. I get the impression based on their writing that that the "censored Zionist language" was "from the river to the sea," which... that's a Hamas slogan, people. That's been a Hamas slogan since long before the attacks. It can't be reclaimed as long as Hamas is actively using it and honestly I'm not sure it can be reclaimed after that, if there ever was anything to reclaim there--this is much like the Pepe the Frog thing except with significantly more active violence attached to it. There is no way to interpret that as anything other than a call for Jewish genocide and Big Bad Con was 100% right to want it removed. (And it's incredibly disappointing that what seems to be a decent-sized convention has capitulated to antisemitism here.)
One wonders if these people even are against Hamas; they don't at any point say so while using Hamas rhetoric and while there are people who use this rhetoric who would be horrified to be accused of supporting Jewish genocide, they're few and far between-- well, okay, they'd all be horrified to be accused of it, but then when you ask them what they are in favor of, they list off elements of Jewish genocide without actually using those words.
Certainly I wouldn't feel safe attending Big Bad Con given all this...
AO3 Politics
Sep. 5th, 2024 09:38 pmI do not donate to AO3 and I do not volunteer for AO3, despite the fact that I post to AO3. And this is because every time I consider doing so, something else happens to make it obvious just how much it's a broken organization full of petty fiefdoms where no one with higher powers is willing to take action to remove toxic powers. (Really, what AO3 needs is a board that's willing to unilaterally remove a large number of the longtime missing stairs without regard for "but they've been here forever!" or the massive drama-splashback that would cause among a certain subset of enablers. This is never going to happen.) As evinced in the current drama: the destruction of the tag trees.
Now, the destruction of tag trees has been going on for a while and it's been a terrible idea for a while. Child tags are great-- if I just filter on "pregnancy" with no exclusions I should still get mpreg, to offer up the example that comes first to mind-- but there's also synning, when you declare two tags as synonyms, and canonization, when tag wranglers mark tags as "common", which permits you to use them as filters and for the wranglers to syn all the misspellings and things like that to the one tag so searching gets you what you want whether someone wrote it oddly or not. (It also puts it in the drop-down so you know "this is how to tag thing.") And in fandoms with a lot of overlapping canons, there is "all media types," which is kind of the ultimate in parent tags: everything which is a subset of any given thing.
People actually don't tag things straight-up with "all media types" that much... unless you're in something with Frankencanon, where you're not writing a specific interpretation so much as pulling details from everything. My go-to example for this is actually Witcher, where I'm mostly reading modern AUs (sometimes of the "coffeeshop" sort of thing and sometimes "witchers survived into the modern day and are still secretly fighting monsters") which are pulling a mix-and-match characterization from the games and show and books, which has somewhat melded into "this is how people are generally written in these AUs" which is a consistent thing but could not be visibly assigned to any of the individual canons.
Or sometimes we're just not fussy about which version of canon we read and we'd rather not have to check the tags for every single one, or we hate one particular really popular adaptation and we want to filter that one out while seeing all the other things. (Remember this use case. We will come back to this use case.)
My understanding is that originally this was a technology issue; the indexing involved was challenging on the servers, so they moved to cut down on the tag trees. But the technology issue has long since been fixed... and no one mentioned it, so they could continue to justify cutting down the tag trees, because they dislike the tag trees. At no point has anyone given an actual justification for this behavior beyond "people are tagging in a way we don't like." People have been getting upset about this for a while, more people with each fandom they remove it for. People have been communicating that. People have been ignored. This has been going on for years.
And then they made a mistake.
They probably could have gotten away with this if they'd synned it to ACD Holmes. People wouldn't have been thrilled, but it wouldn't have disrupted the most common use cases. But they proved just how much this isn't about convenience for the users or any kind of use case anyone might actually use, because they stuck with the hard rule of "we syn the all media types to the most popular."
The most popular single adaptation in Sherlock Holmes and Related Fandoms is... BBC Sherlock.
The thing is, Sherlock Holmes fandom is such a huge, sprawling thing that while they may have a plurality, they don't have a majority. Actually, a majority of the fandom quite hates BBC Sherlock and wants nothing to do with it. (This is partially an artifact of SuperWhoLock and The JohnLock Conspiracy, which... I'm not even going to try to explain TJLC; suffice it to say they managed to get a Vox article about how badly behaved they were... but it's also got to do with Sherlock being so far from, like, every other adaptation in terms of tone and structure.) This particular change made it impossible to search for "every Sherlock Holmes adaptation except BBC Sherlock" without going around one by one to every adaptation's individual tag.
Sherlock Holmes is a huge, sprawling fandom.
They managed to piss off all of it.
(Sidenote: the broad Cinderella fairytale tag got synned to the Disney Cinderella. Why that's bad should be self-explanatory.)
Hundreds of reports were sent to the support form. Anger spread across social media. AO3 responded remarkably quickly for them, especially for an issue that's been slowly pissing people off for years which they've been quietly ignoring. They produced this mealy-mouthed statement which you note just mentions an indefinite period of looking at it. Note that there is no suggestion of public comment. No suggestion that they will involve the user base. Just "reevaluate the tag wrangling guidelines" as though the people in charge of doing that won't be the very same people who caused this entirely predictable mess in the first place... and they'll discuss it and let us know what they decide. You know what that really means? They're going to try again in six months hoping that the furor will have died down by then.
And some people involved in AO3 have the absolute gall to suggest that write-in campaigns to support ("spamming") are an inappropriate way of handling this. Y'all brought this on yourselves by permitting tag wrangling to exist the way it does. It was suggested to me that it only looks like it gets a response within a week and a single email would also take a week. Which, one, an email to who; the sole official contact point for AO3 is the support form (because AO3 really does not want to have a way to be officially aware of just how much people hate some of their decision making; it would make it harder to feign ignorance), and two, the only way to bring tag wrangling to heel is to involve another department. Sending hundreds of reports to support forces support to go to tag wrangling and ask what the hell, and support has the power to escalate that if tag wrangling ignores it-- which tag wrangling knows, which means they have to respond. Is this ideal for support? No, absolutely not, but until AO3 is willing to fire the tag wrangling chairs and promote someone who's willing to be descriptivist rather than prescriptivist, this is the only way to get results.
Please, AO3. Fire the tag wrangling chairs. Create an organization that wouldn't be toxic to volunteer for. I would love to volunteer for AO3, but not at the cost of my mental health, and that's true of... quite a lot of people besides me. Just the mere fact that non-fandom canonization has been stalled for years solely because the tag wrangling chairs dislike non-fandom tags while they go about these projects everyone hates should be grounds to fire them. They've proven they can't prioritize effectively and that they'll prioritize personal bugbears over anything the broader user base actually wants. This will not get better until you fire the tag wrangling chairs.
Not that my word means anything; I'm not a BNF and none of the people involved care about anything anyone says unless it's said by someone with clout. (Honestly I am kind of wondering which person with clout got pissed off by the change, because I don't think even this level of reaction would have moved the needle without an actual BNF poking them behind the scenes.) But I am willing to say it in namespace, and you may feel free to link this around.
Now, the destruction of tag trees has been going on for a while and it's been a terrible idea for a while. Child tags are great-- if I just filter on "pregnancy" with no exclusions I should still get mpreg, to offer up the example that comes first to mind-- but there's also synning, when you declare two tags as synonyms, and canonization, when tag wranglers mark tags as "common", which permits you to use them as filters and for the wranglers to syn all the misspellings and things like that to the one tag so searching gets you what you want whether someone wrote it oddly or not. (It also puts it in the drop-down so you know "this is how to tag thing.") And in fandoms with a lot of overlapping canons, there is "all media types," which is kind of the ultimate in parent tags: everything which is a subset of any given thing.
People actually don't tag things straight-up with "all media types" that much... unless you're in something with Frankencanon, where you're not writing a specific interpretation so much as pulling details from everything. My go-to example for this is actually Witcher, where I'm mostly reading modern AUs (sometimes of the "coffeeshop" sort of thing and sometimes "witchers survived into the modern day and are still secretly fighting monsters") which are pulling a mix-and-match characterization from the games and show and books, which has somewhat melded into "this is how people are generally written in these AUs" which is a consistent thing but could not be visibly assigned to any of the individual canons.
Or sometimes we're just not fussy about which version of canon we read and we'd rather not have to check the tags for every single one, or we hate one particular really popular adaptation and we want to filter that one out while seeing all the other things. (Remember this use case. We will come back to this use case.)
My understanding is that originally this was a technology issue; the indexing involved was challenging on the servers, so they moved to cut down on the tag trees. But the technology issue has long since been fixed... and no one mentioned it, so they could continue to justify cutting down the tag trees, because they dislike the tag trees. At no point has anyone given an actual justification for this behavior beyond "people are tagging in a way we don't like." People have been getting upset about this for a while, more people with each fandom they remove it for. People have been communicating that. People have been ignored. This has been going on for years.
And then they made a mistake.
They probably could have gotten away with this if they'd synned it to ACD Holmes. People wouldn't have been thrilled, but it wouldn't have disrupted the most common use cases. But they proved just how much this isn't about convenience for the users or any kind of use case anyone might actually use, because they stuck with the hard rule of "we syn the all media types to the most popular."
The most popular single adaptation in Sherlock Holmes and Related Fandoms is... BBC Sherlock.
The thing is, Sherlock Holmes fandom is such a huge, sprawling thing that while they may have a plurality, they don't have a majority. Actually, a majority of the fandom quite hates BBC Sherlock and wants nothing to do with it. (This is partially an artifact of SuperWhoLock and The JohnLock Conspiracy, which... I'm not even going to try to explain TJLC; suffice it to say they managed to get a Vox article about how badly behaved they were... but it's also got to do with Sherlock being so far from, like, every other adaptation in terms of tone and structure.) This particular change made it impossible to search for "every Sherlock Holmes adaptation except BBC Sherlock" without going around one by one to every adaptation's individual tag.
Sherlock Holmes is a huge, sprawling fandom.
They managed to piss off all of it.
(Sidenote: the broad Cinderella fairytale tag got synned to the Disney Cinderella. Why that's bad should be self-explanatory.)
Hundreds of reports were sent to the support form. Anger spread across social media. AO3 responded remarkably quickly for them, especially for an issue that's been slowly pissing people off for years which they've been quietly ignoring. They produced this mealy-mouthed statement which you note just mentions an indefinite period of looking at it. Note that there is no suggestion of public comment. No suggestion that they will involve the user base. Just "reevaluate the tag wrangling guidelines" as though the people in charge of doing that won't be the very same people who caused this entirely predictable mess in the first place... and they'll discuss it and let us know what they decide. You know what that really means? They're going to try again in six months hoping that the furor will have died down by then.
And some people involved in AO3 have the absolute gall to suggest that write-in campaigns to support ("spamming") are an inappropriate way of handling this. Y'all brought this on yourselves by permitting tag wrangling to exist the way it does. It was suggested to me that it only looks like it gets a response within a week and a single email would also take a week. Which, one, an email to who; the sole official contact point for AO3 is the support form (because AO3 really does not want to have a way to be officially aware of just how much people hate some of their decision making; it would make it harder to feign ignorance), and two, the only way to bring tag wrangling to heel is to involve another department. Sending hundreds of reports to support forces support to go to tag wrangling and ask what the hell, and support has the power to escalate that if tag wrangling ignores it-- which tag wrangling knows, which means they have to respond. Is this ideal for support? No, absolutely not, but until AO3 is willing to fire the tag wrangling chairs and promote someone who's willing to be descriptivist rather than prescriptivist, this is the only way to get results.
Please, AO3. Fire the tag wrangling chairs. Create an organization that wouldn't be toxic to volunteer for. I would love to volunteer for AO3, but not at the cost of my mental health, and that's true of... quite a lot of people besides me. Just the mere fact that non-fandom canonization has been stalled for years solely because the tag wrangling chairs dislike non-fandom tags while they go about these projects everyone hates should be grounds to fire them. They've proven they can't prioritize effectively and that they'll prioritize personal bugbears over anything the broader user base actually wants. This will not get better until you fire the tag wrangling chairs.
Not that my word means anything; I'm not a BNF and none of the people involved care about anything anyone says unless it's said by someone with clout. (Honestly I am kind of wondering which person with clout got pissed off by the change, because I don't think even this level of reaction would have moved the needle without an actual BNF poking them behind the scenes.) But I am willing to say it in namespace, and you may feel free to link this around.
Ballot Questions
Aug. 30th, 2024 04:34 pmDoes anyone have opinions on question 1? I'm really not sure which way I fall on it. The previous auditor seems to very against it, state big businesses seems to be very for it, giving the executive branch the power to poke the legislature often seems like a bad idea and people seeking power grabs with these bad ideas often use things like stopping sexual assaults to force through power grabs that will be used for other purposes later... so I have no idea where I fall on this one.
Expiry Dates
Aug. 24th, 2024 10:20 pmHow rigid is the expiry date on a KN95? I'm realizing that it is possible the reason Bona Fide Masks was having a sale has to do with the age of the stock-- the ones I just ordered were manufactured in April 2022 with a listed shelf-life of three years. If I'm not opening the package, how firm is that?
A Booklist List
Aug. 11th, 2024 05:17 pmSoul Jar continues to do well for itself: we're on Booklist's Top 10 SF/Fantasy & Horror list. This covers August 2023 to July 2024, so we're a best-of-year anthology now-- the only book from a small press on that list.
"Cranberry Nightmare" is definitely one of those "never get terribly discouraged by rejection and never give up" stories for me, because I wrote it for a call a very long time ago, and it was something I had about given up on selling... and now here it is sharing space in something on a Top 10 list.
"Cranberry Nightmare" is definitely one of those "never get terribly discouraged by rejection and never give up" stories for me, because I wrote it for a call a very long time ago, and it was something I had about given up on selling... and now here it is sharing space in something on a Top 10 list.
The Ongoing Pandemic Prep
Aug. 9th, 2024 08:06 pmToday's bird flu prep thing: I have retrieved my mis-shipped package of masks from the old address they were shipped to. There are now 200 KN-95s in the house. Given that I'll use the same mask for more than one day, that's actually a pretty solid long-term supply as long as I keep my replenishment at about this level as I go through them.
Next up... well, either the Oxo containers or a HEPA filter. Eventually both, but probably the HEPA filter first; I do have extant Oxo containers containing stuff that can be stored elsewhere.
Next up... well, either the Oxo containers or a HEPA filter. Eventually both, but probably the HEPA filter first; I do have extant Oxo containers containing stuff that can be stored elsewhere.
