Month: November 2016

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Mmmm…Thanksgiving dinner! Turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, rolls, cranberry sauce, and jello salad. Plus pumpkin pie for desert (in a bit, when we have room for it). Perfect!

A Thanksgiving Prayer

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W. S. Burroughs reading A Thanksgiving Prayer

It’s been a while since I’ve posted this. Unfortunately, I find it all too topical these days, thirty years after it was written.

Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shat out through wholesome American guts.
Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot.
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
Thanks for the American dream, to vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through.
Thanks for the KKK.
For nigger-killin’ lawmen, feelin’ their notches.
For decent church-goin’ women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.
Thanks for “Kill a Queer for Christ” stickers.
Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs.
Thanks for a country where nobody’s allowed to mind their own business.
Thanks for a nation of finks.
Yes, thanks for all the memories — all right, let’s see your arms!
You always were a headache and you always were a bore.
Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

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We got a two-pack of “grow zombies” (the little toys you put in water so they get bigger) for Halloween, so one went in the water while one stayed dry. After about a month, here’s the end result!

Being feminist is not a shield against criticism

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From Robot Hugs:

Feminism doesn’t give you a shield, it makes you a work in progress. Feminism shouldn’t protect you from criticism, it should give you the tools to critique yourself.

I consider myself to be a feminist — but as with all such things, I endeavor to recognize that I’m far from perfect; that I can, do, and will make mistakes; and when I do, I need to own up to them and try to avoid doing so in the future. Being on the side of women (or people of color, or Muslims, or Jews, or LGBTQ+, or any other marginalized or oppressed population and the intersections among them) doesn’t mean I can say “But I’m one of the good ones!” when someone calls me out on something; instead, it means I have the responsibility of recognizing when I’ve failed in that goal.

Eclecticism is Now Secure (HTTPS)

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Thanks to Dreamhost’s Let’s Encrypt initiative, plus a little nudging while setting up the iOS version of Ulysses, the (simple but very powerful) editor I’m using for writing posts here, my site is now HTTPS enabled.

For those who don’t know the terminology, all that means is that all traffic between my blog and your web browser is encrypted, and cannot be read by anyone who might intercept the data stream in transmission. You don’t have to do anything, it just happens automagically in the background.

While there’s nothing here that really requires the transmission to be encrypted — I don’t sell anything or have any reason to ask for sensitive information, which is the primary use case (and why HTTPS is used by financial institutions, shopping site, and so on) — I’m increasingly of the opinion that it’s just good practice to encrypt whenever possible.

Think of it like sending a physical letter to a friend via traditional snail mail; there might not be anything in the letter that needs to be kept private, but I’d still be pretty disturbed if I got a letter from someone and saw that the envelope had been opened so that someone else could read the contents.

Of course, with electronic communication, there’s no ripped envelope to let you know that someone’s taken a peek at what you’re saying or reading. Unsecure websites (or emails) are more like sending postcards: while for most people it’s pretty unlikely that anyone between the sender and receiver would be reading the postcard, it’s entirely possible that it could happen. Adding encryption means that not only is there an “envelope”, but it’s an envelope that can’t be opened by anyone but the receiver.

Good security isn’t paranoia. Just a good idea.

(Incidentally, I’m also set up with PGP encryption for my email, and would use it more often if I knew my contacts were similarly set up. Just contact me for my PGP public key if you’d like to securely email me (I’ll get it posted here eventually, I’m just finding bits and pieces of my site that need to be recreated after letting it lie fallow for so long, and that’s one).)