throbbing light machine

Women’s Sports Happened By Accident, And Could Be Taken Apart On Purposeby Diana Moskovitz: "I think one of the best characterizations I’ve heard about Title IX is that it’s sort of like the guillotine out in the courtyard," Susan Ware, author of the book Title IX: A Brief History with Documents, told the Harvard Gazette in 2022. "It has an impact just because of its existence that is different from having complaints filed against the school and threatening to withdraw funds."

From "Mar-a-Lago face" to uncanny AI art: MAGA loves ugly in submission to Trump by Amanda Marcotte: Fascism, especially the 21st-century version practiced by the MAGA movement, is at war with reality. The hyperreality of the MAGA aesthetic is about power. Unable to create good or beautiful things, they express dominance by turning everything ugly. Journalist Kat Tenbarge argued Sunday on Bluesky that "looking 'better' is often not the point" of extreme plastic surgery. Instead, "It’s about looking different, looking strange, because it causes people to pay more attention."

Protection Racket: The Right Wing wants women injured and miserable by Karen: "trans women don’t threaten cis women anywhere but in conservative fundraising letters. Conservatives ginned up this threat because they need women to believe we’re in all ways inferior to men. Conservatives are biological essentialists. We are nothing but our chromosomes."

Russia: Life After Trust By Michael Idov: "On one of my first reporting trips to Vladmir Putin’s Russia — of which there’d be so many that they’d blend into residence — my friend Alex and I got stuck in Moscow traffic a few cars ahead of an EMT van. The siren wailed, the lights whirled, but no one would budge: The ambulance crawled along at the same pace as the rest of us. When I noted this, Alex scoffed. Everyone knows that ambulance drivers make money on the side selling VIP airport rides, he said. Who knows who’s in that van right now? Fuck ’em."

Found a forever home for two of my foster kittens today! ~5mos old, born to a feral mom in the neighborhood. Calico girls, adopted together to a home where they'll be the only animals, with a family that's had cats before. <3 <3

Neil Gaiman rape shit + romantasy publishing capitalism bullshit = deep disillusionment with SFF as a current cultural milieu. This is no space for strange ones, wounded ones, or dreamers.

Silver and Glass (11657 words) by ChronicBookworm
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: A Little Princess - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sara Crewe/Lavinia Herbert
Characters: Lavinia Herbert, Sara Crewe
Additional Tags: Coming of Age, Bad Parenting, Character Growth, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Pining
Summary:

“You know most princesses are probably quite horrible people,” Lavinia said, because she couldn’t help it – her mind went to the worst possible interpretation, and then couldn’t dislodge it. “I think most of them must be spoiled rotten.”
“Not in stories. In stories they are kind, pretty, and helpful,” Sara said. “And if I can pretend to be a princess, I can choose to pretend what kind of princess I am.”
“This isn’t a story.”
“Sometimes I feel like my life was a story,” Sara confessed. “The kind of things that happened to me – don’t they seem a bit like a story to you?”
Maybe that was the difference between Sara and Lavinia. Horrible things happened to Sara, but also wonderful things, like in a story. Like she was the heroine of some grand tale. Lavinia was nothing special.

Beautiful writing and characterization, with gorgeous attention to sartorial details!

Tori Amos speaks to the Guardian after Neil Gaiman sexual assault allegations: "She looks crestfallen and hollowed out, as anyone would, but especially someone who has spent so much of their career advocating for survivors."

A Kamala Harris Canvasser’s Education by Julia Preston: "Even on my first day, I sensed dissonance between the campaign’s celebrity-inflected exuberance and the raw divisions I saw in the streets."

-I've been using the Finch self-care pet app for about a month. Your little virtual bird pet gains energy when you accomplish self-care tasks. The app has a decent first-aid kit contained within: breathing exercises, stretches, soundscapes, reflections. And you get to put little outfits on your bird, and build it fancy houses.

-I'm going to stop keeping up with the news. We all tacked in to "staying informed" last time the Orange Menace was in power, and, if anything, it just convinced the media that he's good for business. The media space seems to me very full of gossip, fearmongering, and propaganda, and very devoid of seriousness or expertise. So, I'm not going to follow along with every twist and turn of what's to come at the federal level. I'll stay in touch with my local polity, and the greater city-state we're a part of.

-I've been following the news avidly most of my adult life. In order to fill that space in my brain, I'm going back to some old literature. I mean to work through the last Shakespeare plays I don't know well, and I think I'll read the Aeneid, which I've never done. Ancient literature is still with us because centuries' worth of humans passed it along. There's the merit of the work, and then the meaning created by that chain of transmission. If I want to study mankind, I'm going to turn in that direction for a time, instead of to the news.

-I'm putting more of my juice behind writing regularly. Maybe a poem a day? I know that when I write more, what I write gets better.