So I did a thing...
2025-09-18 21:59![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I would like to wish all the people who fought with me and sneered at me about how Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris were no better than Donald Trump and sat out the election and encouraged others to do the same a very happy DRINK SOME FUCKING BLEACH:
FBI Readies New War on Trans People
“We’re looking at the entire web”
Ken Klippenstein
Sep 18, 2025
The Trump administration is preparing to designate transgender people as “violent extremists” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, two national security officials tell me.
…
Under the plan being discussed, the FBI would treat transgender suspects as a subset of the Bureau’s new threat category, “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” (NVEs).
This is, yes, OBVIOUSLY, a duplication of Putin’s moves to designate target groups as “extremist organisations,” whether there’s an organisation or not, as “LGBT” was designated a couple of years ago, leading to the de facto re-illegialisation of LGBT people and large scale prosecutions.
Every other kind of queer is probably gonna be next.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
Installment ONE: So, I got up, had breakfast, carried my tea to Steve's office, and was at work by 9:15. Surfaced at 11:55 to go down to do my duty to the cats and take a walk. Now need to figure out if I'm going to order in or just zap a Lean Cuisine.
I need to do a couple things in the business office, from which location I write to you. Those include finishing making a list for my PCP visit tomorrow, researching where the new office actually is, and downloading the Word Book from this computer to take back to the writing computer, which had redlined every other word in the manuscript because it hasn't been brought up to date.
Firefly kept me company in the writing room all morning, and Rookie popped in and out. He was clearly a little concerned about me sitting in Steve's chair -- was I actually allowed to do that? Apparently, he went off and checked the paperwork, because he has clearly accepted that, yes, I can do that.
Hope everybody's having a good day. It's lovely and sunny here, warm, but not hot.
Installment TWO: Everyone who asked after the keyboard. It is a Kinesis Advantage2 keyboard. I've been using them for at least 20 years; started when my wrists went bad and I bullheadedly refused to give up typing, because speech recognition did not work for me at all. This is what happens when what you actually do instead of pronouncing words correctly is fake people into thinking you talk good by a combination of inflection and body language, neither of which translates into computer programs.
The Kinesis Advantage2 helps because your wrists are in a neutral position and your fingers can hang down in a neutral position, rather than being Poised! To! Strike! as is the case with a standard flat keyboard.
Yes, the learning curve was vile. And, also yes, the trade off is that I now can't type on a flat keyboard, so if I'm taking my laptop on a trip, I either have to also take a keyboard almost as big as the laptop, or Accept that I'm going to be reduced to two-fingering it for as long as I'm away.
This is always a difficult choice because typing is my mode of expression of choice, right after interpretive dance.
Installment THREE: OK, fun game!
First question: Do the Liaden books have any "tropes"? Examples given "grumpy sunshine," "found family," "the chosen one"? (What on earth is "grumpy sunshine" and do people really push the "tropes" in their books?)
Second question: Can you give us a 1 sentence (30 words) quote form one of your books? ("Yes," which is my go-to, is not in this case a Valid Answer.)
In other news, the Lean Cuisine won, because I made the mistake of checking my mail. My plan is to eat, and then go back and write for another couple hours.
Installment FOUR: OK. I have written to the originators of the Survey which included the Fun Questions.
So far today, I have Scrutinized the chapter-by-chapter, identified holes in the narrative and sketched in a couple of ideas to fill them. I finished writing a scene, for a total of more-or-less 1250 new words, and did more research. At this point, I might as well open my own noodle shop (no, I haven't watched the movie yet; I'm a little leery of spillage, since I'm actively working on this situation for the book). I hoped to write more today, but that's probably not going to happen? Because mail, and also I really ought to wash the dishes so I can find the sink. And see if, one! more! time! I can find LibreOffice's Word Book.
Tomorrow is the much-complained about trip to Bath and the PCP. I suppose I might as well declare a Writer's Day Off at this point, hit the bakery and tour the kitchen store, and plan on getting back to work on Saturday.
It looks like next week, I have, with the exception of Tuesday evening needlework, nothing scheduled, so that's like a whole uninterrupted week of work. Fingers crossed that nothing comes up to force a change of plans.
So, that's it. I feel like I had a very successful test-drive of separating the mundane and the writing work spaces, and I hope this continues to prove out.
Everybody have a good evening; I'll check in as I can.
I do not believe it’s a minor thing that Greg “let’s reclaim the word Nazi” Gutfield is repurposing Hitler’s “Jewish hypnotism” libel against trans people to transfer guilt from a cis white boy from a conservative family:
“[The shooter] was a patsy. He was under the hypnotic spell of a direct to consumer nihilism – the trans cult.”
Greg Gutfield on Fox
There are plenty of other full-on-fascist declarations in this rant, too, not the least of which being the open declaration that they “don’t care” about “what-abouts,” which is to say, the overwhelming share of violence being from the right, or, in this case, the literal assassination of two Democratic state officials earlier this summer by a MAGA supporter with an extended list of targets. Those don’t count, because Democrats. Only MAGA are people, only MAGA have rights, only Trump can be king.
But it’s still important, and the one I think people may miss. This is, again, literally Hitler libel from a many who proposed “reclaiming” the word “Nazi” this summer.
If he wants the word so much, let’s apply it to him.
Greg Gutfield is a Nazi.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
Dept of, inventing the city: Fake History: Some notes on London's bogus past. (NB - isn't Nancy murdered on the steps of a bridge in the 1948 movie of Oliver Twist? or do I misremember.) (And as for the Charing Cross thing, that is the ongoing 'London remaking itself and having layers', surely?)
***
Dept of, smutty puns, classical division: Yet More on Ancient Greek Dildos:
Nelson, in my opinion, has made a solid argument for his conclusions that, while “olisbos” was one of many ancient Greek euphemisms for a dildo, this was not its primary meaning, nor was it the primary term for the sex toy. Rather, this impression has been given by an accident of historiography.
Dept of, not silently suffering for centuries: The 17th-century woman who wrote about surviving domestic abuse.
***
Dept of, another story involving literacy (and ill-health): Child hospital care dates from 18th Century - study:
"Almost certainly she was taught to read and write while she was an inpatient."
He suspects just as part of the infirmary's remit was to get its adult patients back to work, by teaching children to read and write it would increase their employment opportunities.
Dept of, I approve the intention but cringe at certain of the suggestions: How To Raise a Reader in an Age of Digital Distraction:
Active engagement is crucial. This doesn’t mean turning every book into an interactive multimedia experience. Rather, it means ensuring that children are mentally participating in the reading process rather than passively consuming. With toddlers, this might mean encouraging them to point to pictures, make sound effects, or predict what comes next. With older children, it involves asking questions that go beyond basic comprehension: “What do you think motivates this character?” “How would the story change if it were set in our neighborhood?”
***
Dept of, not enough ugh: Sephora workers on the rise of chaotic child shoppers: ‘She looked 10 years old and her skin was burning’
The phenomenon of “Sephora kids” – a catch-all phrase for the intense attachment between preteen children, high-end beauty stores and the expensive, sometimes harsh, products that are sold within them – is now well established.... The trend is driven by skincare content produced by beauty influencers – many of whom are tweens and teens themselves.... skincare routines posted by teens and tweens on TikTok contained an average of 11 potentially irritating active ingredients per routine, which risked causing acute reactions and triggering lifelong allergies.
I was trying to type the information for an art exhibition into the to-do app on my phone. I had typed "University of," and the three options that autocorrect offered me were "Nature," "Art," and "Style."
Obviously none of these were correct, but they're all universities I would have considered attending if I had known about them earlier in my life. ;)
The grim times we’ve been expecting are here.
Congressman Ronny Jackson (R-TX) calls trans people a virus and a cancer that must be censored, isolated, and imprisoned en masse. It’s a call for genocide, or – as they said during the election – for “eradication.”
Laura Loomer, an important Trump confidante and aide, calls for a Trump dictatorship and mass arrests and prosecution of “leftists” (which for her absolutely includes liberals):
Trump and MAGA are following Putin’s playbook on the media, pushing it either into the hands of ideological compatriots or into silence:
Correct commentary from Mastodon:
Kimmel is about as controversial as a goldfish here. They aren’t serious about it being a problem; the whole •point• is that it’s obviously •not• a problem.
They are using something extremely benign to test the waters of government repression of speech, to see just how much they can get away with — and ABC caved like 3rd-grade toothpick bridge.
It’s relevant that there are mergers in process and it’s clear that Trump would fuck with them if they didn’t pull Kimmel down:
Nexstar Media Group, which is seeking FCC approval for a multi-billion-dollar merger with Tegna, said its ABC affiliates would not air Kimmel’s show before ABC announced its own decision.
Even Karl fucking Rove thinks they’ve gone too far, but that won’t stop them, or even slow them down:
‘They’ Didn’t Kill Charlie Kirk. It insults his memory to blame political opponents for one man’s heinous act.
Meanwhile, Trump demands federal investigations into ‘organized’ Trump protesters – this is also out of Putin’s playbook:
Earlier this week, responding to a conservative reporter who said that anti-war protesters near the White House “still have their First Amendment right,” Trump replied, “Yeah, well, I’m not so sure.”
It’s against this backdrop that Politico reported [that] the Justice Department’s No. 2 official said Tuesday that people noisily protesting President Donald Trump could face investigation if they’re part of broader networks organizing such activities.
Worth reading: Keep An Eye on What We Know (And Don’t) – 15 September 2025 – TPM:
In the current environment I think it’s fair to say there’s really no reason to believe anything we’re hearing from federal law enforcement, either formally or on background to reporters.
Worth reading: Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause – 16 September 2025 – Vanity Fair / Ta-Nehisi Coates:
It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views—that he was pro-life, that he believed in public executions, or that he rejected the separation of church and state. It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry.
Finally, an article and a concept that’s been gaining traction: It’s Time for Americans to Start Talking About “Soft Secession”:
Not the violent rupture of 1861, but something else entirely. Blue states building parallel systems, withholding cooperation, and creating facts on the ground that render federal authority meaningless within their borders.
See also: In the disunited states, conflict and uncertainty rule, which also brings up “Soft Secession,” and I’ve seen people holding signs up about it at protests since the original column came out.
I feel I don’t really have to say, “shit’s bad, folks,” but, well – shit’s bad, folks. If there’s a protest near you, find it, and join it.
They can’t arrest literally everyone, and Trump does chicken out – the only response you can have to him is push back as hard as you can, every time.
And that means right now.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
The new writing digs are open for business, and I'm all set up to get started tomorrow, and to work uninterrupted. Pursuant to that point, I'll need to go out in a couple minutes and put gas in the car so that I may drive to and from Bath with dignity on Friday morning.
Likewise pursuant, I may not be around much tomorrow, or Friday, either, ref Bath, above. I'm not avoiding you, I'm just ... busy.
Hopefully.
Everybody stay safe. I'll pop in as can.
What I read
A little while ago Kobo had an edition of CS Lewis's 'Space Trilogy' on promotion, so I thought, aeons since I read that, why not? It turned out to have been not terribly well formatted for e-reader but I have encountered worse, it was bearable. Out of the Silent Planet, well, we do not go to CLS for cosmological realism, do we? But why aliens still so binary, hmmm? (okay, I think there is probably some theological point going on there, mmmhmm?) (though in That Hideous Strength there is a mention of 7 genders, okay Jack, could you expand that thought a little?) I remembered Perelandra as dull, at least for my taste - travelogue plus endless theological wafflery - and it pretty much matched the remembrance. However, while one still sees the problematic in That Hideous Strength (no, really, Jack, cheroot-chomping lesbian sadist? your id is very strange) he does do awfully well the horrible machinations of the nasty MEN in their masculine institutions, and boy, NICE is striking an unexpected resonance with its techbros and their transhuman agenda. Also - quite aside from BEARS!!! - actual female bonding.
Possibly it wasn't such a great idea to go on to Andrew Hickey, The Basilisk Murders (Sarah Turner Mysteries #1) (2017), set at a tech conference, which I think I saw someone recommend somewhere. Not sure it entirely works as a mystery (and I felt some aspects of the conference were a little implausible) - and what is this thing, that this thing is, of male authors doing the police in different voices writing first-person female narrative crime fiction? This is at least the second I have encountered within the space of a few weeks. We feel they have seen a market niche.... /cynicism
Apparently I already read this yonks ago and have a copy hanging around somewhere? I was actually looking for something else by Dame Rebecca and came across this, The Essential Rebecca West: Uncollected Prose (2010), which is more, some odd stray pieces it is nice to have (I laughed aloud at the one on Milton and Paradise Lost) but hardly essential among the rest of her oeuvre.
At the same time I picked up Carl Rollyson, Rebecca West and the God That Failed: Essays (2005), which apparently I have also read before. It's offcuts of stuff that didn't make it into his biography, mostly talks/articles on various aspects that he couldn't go into in as much detail as he would have liked.
On the go
Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918), on account of we watched a DVD of the movie recently. Yes, I have a copy of the book but have no idea where it is. I was also looking for Harriet Hume, ditto.
Up next
Not sure.
Or rather the text message to book my covid & flu vaccinations. "For 75+ and immunosuppressed". I just double-checked and "have had a blood cancer" is still top of the NHS list of qualifying conditions, so that's my armour when the GP surgery gatekeepers are like, you're too young and you might be DEPRIVING someone of this vaccine who NEEDS it. (This has been the conversation the last three times I got invited to get vaccinated, sigh, and then they get a manager to look at my medical record, and then they grudgingly admit that maybe I can has jabs.)
Date is the Saturday when all the Cambridge undergraduates arrive, so just in time. I'll mostly be avoiding students for the first couple weeks of term to let the freshers flu play out, but I will be playing ice hockey so not entirely. Also getting in and out of the city centre that day may be entertaining, probably best done on foot.
What went before ONE: This afternoon, I took a first step in an Adaptation of Household Systems that I've been considering for some time.
The way the household worked in the Before Time was that I ran the business office, and my writing projects, out of my desk and computer. Occasionally, this got Stoopid, because the piles of business stuff would overwhelm the piles of writing stuff, or business correspondence would come in while I was writing and I would feel constrained to stop writing and do business. And, less occasionally, bills would get lost between the printouts of Chapter 6 and 11.
More than once in my career as coauthor/office manager of the Lee-and-Miller Writing Empire, I bemoaned the fact that I didn't have a separate office where I could just leave the business stuff and only deal with it during, err, Office Hours.
It came to me a few months ago that I now have that opportunity.
I let the idea languish, because, What if Steve comes home and is (rightly) corked off because I've appropriated his office?
To which the answer is, obviously: Well, yanno, Miller? You've been gone with nary a word nor a postcard for Five Hundred and Seventy-Four Days. You should expect some changes when you get home. Fight me. Also? Dammit, Steve, I've missed you.
So, today, as I say, I took my first step in separating my writing work -- which will go into Steve's office -- and the business/pr/NOT-WRITING aspect of things. That first step was to move his Windows machine from the desk to the floor between the desk and the wall,* thus opening up valuable desktop space.
And as I was doing this, I made a discovery, and that discovery is that AlbaCon was (probably) right. The connection was (probably) better from Steve's office. Because he had an ethernet cable plugged in from the Fidium-provided booster into the Windows machine.
The above paragraph was the point of this post, by the way.
Steve also has/d a perfectly good System 76 Meerkat desktop back on his desk, so writing can go forth without any more investment in technology.
________
*I've long since put this machine to sleep (yes, it's still plugged in), and disconnected from the internets because Windows kept trying to download whichever its latest and greatest is/was, which -- the machine in hand would blow up; there's simply no way it has enough Oomph to take the new OS.
What went before TWO: So, I got more accomplished in Steve's office than I expected. I still can't figure out where to plug the speakers into the (Dell) monitor. But, arguably, having music isn't necessary to writing.
But! It's a big(gish) desk; half taken up by the computer, and the other half will be for writing ... STUFF.
This will work...
Time to get myself undusty and go to needlework.
Everybody stay safe; I'll see you tomorrow.
Wednesday. The sun has finally burned off the fog, and it's said it will be warm for the rest of the day. Windows around the house are open.
Breakfast was rice cakes, cream cheese, and red grapes. I have no idea about lunch.
WARNING: Long ramble follows
So, I've been thinking about Quality of Life -- partly because of our recent discussion regarding pre-diabetes, partly because I'm reconfiguring Steve's office, partly because of a story I heard a while back, and partly because of an article about marketing I read a couple days ago.
Let's start with that.
The problem the article was addressing is that the marketing Old People Stuff to Old People ... was hard. Very few Old People seemed to want even useful safety devices. And this was baffling to The Industry. The article went on to point out that The Industry actually had very little concept of the group -- Old People -- that they were trying to sell these things to. If they had bothered to ask even the most basic questions, they would have, for instance, discovered that Very Few Old People think of themselves as old. Witness that I have to be continually reminded that I'm 73, not 42, the age at which you have all the answers. I talk about the Old Woman Who Lives With Me, and that's an apt metaphor -- unless I'm looking in a mirror, I am 42. My brain apparently lives according to far different calendar.
And it's not just me: The target audience for, oh, say, the cellphones with the big keypads? Most look at the device, and think, "Well, that might be useful for somebody who's old, but I have my smartphone, after all." They may download safety-feature apps, but clearly the Safety Phone is for somebody else.
The article went on to relate that even among the population of people who have and wear the buttons that you press when you fall (I don't know the proper name, I call them Panic Buttons -- and you see here a illustration of the problem) -- even among the population who had agreed that this device might be useful For Them, and wore them -- after a fall, a disturbing number did not trigger the button for as long as five minutes. Not because they were unconscious, or couldn't reach the device, but because they wanted to solve it themselves.
It is of course Legend that among the many who are prescribed, far fewer actually wear their hearing aids. My father didn't -- more trouble than they were worth, didn't cut out the background noise, too loud, not loud enough -- whatever. The article was ... optimistic that the new law that allows over-the-counter assisted hearing devices -- opening the market to innovation -- will improve the technology, make it cheaper/more affordable, and thus more people would use the devices, as they see fit, and to improve their lives according to their definitions and needs.
We did a lot with moderation. I mentioned somewhere yesterday that, when the cancer ladies insisted that I become Less Thick in order to not give a return cancer an edge, I lost 20 pounds, but I did it by just eating less. You can't tell people -- well. You can't tell ME that I can never have ice cream again, no matter how bad it is for me. But I can, really, get by with one scoop, instead of two.
The key here is, of course, self-determination: choosing or maintaining the quality of one's own life and experiences.
Steve and I talked a lot about Quality of Life as the medical mandates began to accumulate -- blessedly few in Steve's case -- there was no years-long, ever-more-desperate illness, but a slow, inevitable decline to a sudden finish. Still, the drugs, and the side effects, and the don't eat/drink/DO that. We -- I say "we" because I was part of the conversation, though Steve ultimately made his own decisions -- we researched, and talked about each new stricture, and measured it: utility against loss of joy.
Example: heart surgery to install an ICD. Short term unhappiness, followed by years of pursuing one's proper life. ICD is a Go.
The key was that one should use one's life, because that's what it's for, but that one should not come to the point where one either feared or hated one's life, nor forgot oneself.
I don't, by the way, say that we were wise; I'm only saying what we did.
. . . my, how the woman does go on.
So, the story I read backaways had to do with an -- oncology, perhaps? -- doctor who was becoming frustrated and hopeless, on the edge of giving up medicine, because they had realized that no matter what they did, what medicines they prescribed, their patients were going to die, and most of them quite soon. Finally, in desperation, instead of prescribing, they asked. "What do you want me to help you do?" And the patient they asked said, "I want to stay in my own home, I don't want to be in so much pain that I can't process, but I don't want to be so drugged up that I can't recognize my wife and kids. Can you do that for me?" And the doctor stared at him for a long minute, realizing, with a kind of rekindling of their own interest in their calling ... "Yes," they said. "I can do that for you."
And what, you ask, does this have to do with Steve's office?
I don't know and I can't ask him, if he did it for me or for him, or JIC -- but Steve left ... many ... wonderful gifts: He took hundreds of pictures of just daily scenes around the house, that come up on my cellphone as memories and reminders. The house is decorated with cover art, as well as the house itself, which was arranged to serve our necessities. And Steve's office was arranged to serve Steve's necessities. It's crowded with Stuff. Steve Stuff, because he liked to have far more things around him than I do, and even though I've had to get rid of some things so I could move without tripping, it still has a cozy, writer's cave vibe to it. It's probably still a little bit of a risky situation for the Old Woman Who Lives with Me, but for the me who lives in my head, it's a good space.
So! that went on too long. Thanks to everyone who got this far.
What've you been thinking about lately?
Today's blog post title is of course from Lewis Carroll, "Father William"