Otterday! And Open Thread.

by Lauredhel on December 12, 2009

Today’s Morro Bay sea otter is courtesy of mikebaird at flickr.

Please feel free to use this thread to natter about anything your heart desires. Is there anything great happening in your life? Anything you want to get off your chest? Reading a great book? Anything in the news that you’d like to discuss? Commiserations, felicitations, temptations, contemplations, speculations?

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This article was written by lauredhel

Lauredhel is a forty-something woman with a disability. She lives in her Western Australian family home where books, Lego, and soapmaking gear constantly compete for space. She blogs about feminism, reproductive justice, freedom from violence, the use and misuse of language, medical science, being disabled, her vegetable garden, and whatever else pops into her head. Lauredhel also blogs at FWD/Forward (feminists with disabilities), scribbles at her personal dreamwidth journal Selective and Arbitrary, and co-moderates Hollaback Australia. She joined Hoyden About Town in 2007.

lauredhel has written 1311 posts for Hoyden About Town. If you liked this post, you might like to subscribe to the feed via RSS or EMAIL to get instantly updated for more posts like this.

{ 19 comments }

1 tigtog December 12, 2009 at 9:08 am: Looking forward to Mim’s party this arvo!
2 Deborah December 12, 2009 at 9:21 am: Busy packing, cleaning gardening, taking the cat to the cattery – we’re heading home for Christmas tomorrow.
3 Beppie December 12, 2009 at 9:54 am: I too am looking forward to Mim’s party!
4 Jha December 12, 2009 at 10:41 am: I wrote a rant about the racism, sexism, and ableism in Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters. Then I remembered that it’s Cthulu Month at Tor.com. And then I remembered I have a standing invite to blog for Tor whenever I want. So I decided that instead of keeping it to my small-time blog, I could throw my review to the Tor wolves. So I did. The editor liked it though. Which probably means I should at some point invoice them and actually collect my pay. Now to sit back and wait for the fireworks. Why do I feel so sick?
5 tigtog December 12, 2009 at 10:45 am: Ooh, let us know when it’s published, Jha!
6 meloukhia December 12, 2009 at 11:09 am: Oddly enough, I just put a piece up at Bitch this morning about ableism in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters! I’ll be interested to read yours when it goes up, Jha. I know that the community at Tor isn’t always…friendly…

Here’s a link to my Bitch piece, incidentally. (Don’t read the comments.)
meloukhia´s last blog ..Timbale
7 Jha December 12, 2009 at 12:32 pm: meloukhia, I totally linked to your FWD post on Hipster Ableism for my Tor post! (As well as your hipster racism and liberal sexism posts.) It was, in part, one of the reasons why I found I had to write it and post there. I apologize in advance if any trolls get to FWD via Tor.

I was initially going to link to an article about women being burned by acid too. They posed for portraits for the article, and I thought it really rendered their humanity even through their disfigurement. But then I thought it would be too exploitative to use their images to make my point >_< I'm really glad the editor let me fix that.

And yeah, when I blogged during Steampunk Month (16 posts in total!) I had a couple of personal trolls. One of them loudly denounced me as a bad writer and told my audience to go read another guest-blogger, and another just trolled. I also had a "you should research your audience better" comment. It was interesting because I didn't know I actually HAD an audience.

Not everything is all bad though! I'm getting a reviewer's copy of The Bookman (about a terrorist who places bombs in books!) soon, and interviewing the authour about it. And probably other things too.
8 Jha December 12, 2009 at 12:38 pm: meloukhia: I totally linked to your Hipster Ableism post for my Tor post! So, uh, if you get my trolls at FWD via Tor, I apologize in advance.

I’d read Sense and Sensibility when I was 18, and I was looking forward to it since PPZ wasn’t that bad. I found it almost totally mangled! In PPZ, Austen’s voice was at least a bit more recognizable, and it was more subtly done too, I felt.

I had some modest popularity when I was blogging at Tor for Steampunk Month. It also entailed a couple of personal trolls. I DID, however, get to interview Sydney Padua, who does the comic The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Baggage! ^_^ So yeah. I brought the cool during Steampunk Month. I think people liked me. I got a “you should research your audience” comment but then, I didn’t know I had an audience.
9 Mindy December 12, 2009 at 7:39 pm: *Warning spoiler alert if you haven’t watched the episode of Torchwood that was on ABC2 Friday night but still plan to*

Why, why did they have to kill off my favourite character? Owen I could leave, but Tosh was fantastic. Why did she have to die? She is was the most interesting character there. Very disappointed in Torchwood right now.
10 tigtog December 12, 2009 at 8:32 pm: @Mindy,

I hated losing Tosh too. I understand that Naoko Mori wanted to move on to other projects, so they had to explain Tosh not being part of the team any more in some way, but it would have been nice to think she was out in the wide world somewhere doing something awesome instead.
11 SunlessNick December 13, 2009 at 5:19 am: Tosh was my favourite character too. The only meagre consolation I can take is that she showed more sand during that episode than anyone else has during the entire series.

I’m a little worried about how long I’m going to get to keep the place where I live.
12 Helen December 13, 2009 at 11:23 am: Jill Stark, I hope you realise that – should you ever have children yourself – your children out of sight ethos will mean you will be increasingly stuck at home – unless people like us prevail and Dad’s equally likely to be the primary carer.

I get irritated when people don’t control their sprogs too, but as someone who frequents pubs and other places where bringing children is common, I can’t say it impinges on my conciousness to the point where I have to write a newspaper article about it. Is it too much to assume that one will see / hear a child several times a week as part of normal, you know, life and all that?
13 Lauredhel December 13, 2009 at 2:32 pm: Helen: more of the usual dross I see, though a breastfeeding rant is conspicuously absent. She says she wants child-free space – that’s what her home is for, and the homes of friends without children. In the rest of the world, guess what, children are part of our community, and have a right to exist. Plus, the “silent majority” wants the world to be childfree? I’d like to see her stats.

I can’t get over the way she’s actually also complaining about teenagers exercising, too. I’m guessing she’ll write sniffingly about the Child Obeeeeesuty Epidemic next week.

I must say I’ve been far more annoyed and threatened by adults in public than children, over and over and over again. Changes that need to be made in public space, for me, don’t involve further marginalising oppressed groups[1]; let’s get rid of sexual harassers and assaulters, eh?

[1] yes, children are an oppressed group in our society. Any group that can be legally detained and assaulted for no reason other than their age is oppressed. Add to that gender oppression, and the fact that exclusion of children disproportionately excludes mothers from public life; and talking about confining children to private space no longer sounds quite so rational and fair.
14 Beppie December 13, 2009 at 3:19 pm: I understand that Naoko Mori wanted to move on to other projects, so they had to explain Tosh not being part of the team any more in some way, but it would have been nice to think she was out in the wide world somewhere doing something awesome instead.

Actually, I’m pretty sure that Tosh’s death was RTD’s decision, not Naoko Mori’s. From everything I read about it, the news that Tosh and Owen were going to die came as a huge shock to the entire cast, and it wasn’t because the actors wanted to move on.
15 tigtog December 13, 2009 at 5:34 pm: @Beppie,

Ah. I probably read an interview where she was putting a good professional face on it all then.
16 Jha December 14, 2009 at 2:33 am: Eee! My review went up a bit earlier than I expected! Here it is!
17 Mindy December 14, 2009 at 11:11 am: Great review Jha. I won’t bother with Sense and Sensibility with Sea Monsters now. The disability fail in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies really spoiled a book that I had otherwise enjoyed, despite the odd annoyance as you pointed out in the review. If SSSM is worse, then I won’t put myself through the eye-rolling.
18 Mindy December 14, 2009 at 11:43 am: Stolen from Twisty’s blog

“Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work”

1. Don’t put drugs in women’s drinks.

2. When you see a woman walking by herself, leave her alone.

3. If you pull over to help a woman whose car has broken down, remember not to assault her.

4. If you are in a lift and a woman gets in, don’t assault her. You know what? Don’t even ogle her.

5. When you encounter a woman who is asleep, the safest course of action is to not assault her.

6. Never creep into a woman’s home through an unlocked door or window, or spring out at her from between parked cars, or assault her.

7. When you lurk in bushes and doorways with criminal intentions, always wear bright clothing, wave a flashlight, or play “Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)” by the Raveonettes on a boombox really loud, so women in the vicinity will know where to aim their flamethrowers.

8. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If it is inconvenient for you to stop yourself from assaulting women, ask a trusted friend to accompany you when in public.

9. Carry a rape whistle. If you find that you are about to assault a woman, you can hand the whistle to your buddy, so s/he can blow it to call for help.

10. Give your buddy a revolver, so that when indifferent passers-by either ignore the rape whistle, or gather round to enjoy the spectacle, s/he can pistol-whip you.

Don’t forget: Honesty is the best policy. When asking a woman out on a date, don’t pretend that you are interested in her as a person; tell her straight up that you expect to be assaulting her later. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the woman may take it as a sign that you do not plan to rape her.
19 The Amazing Kim December 14, 2009 at 4:55 pm: Looking for wage gap stats – almost all the search results were for anti-feminist sites “debunking the myth” and otherwise getting their hate fix. Gah.