[links] I accidentally a linkspam

... and this time, I'm going to have to subdivide it into sections. I was going to save it til the weekend, but with the rate it's growing... well, have a Friday afternoon linkspam.

Petitions/Fundraising

• Content note: suicide, transphobia. A petition calling on The Daily Mail to fire Richard Littlejohn, following Lucy Meadows' suicide.
  
  • And in response, Bethany Black: They call it climbing, we call it visibility. On being out; on coming out; and on the children who really aren't fussed. Like with all bigotry, when people can't justify saying "I hate you because I don't understand why you're the way you are and aren't how I want you to be!" They say "I'm alright with it, but I worry about the kids".
  
  
• Help Kate Bornstein Stay Alive: Auntie Kate has cancer and can't afford the treatment that is her best shot at surviving it - and she really can't afford to cover her normal expenses while she's not working, due to aggressive chemotherapy and radiotherapy. I've got complicated feelings about Kate Bornstein, but overwhelmingly I am grateful to her. I'd really love her to stay alive for as long as we can keep her.
  
• Content note: transphobia. An Arizona state representative has introduced legislation that would make it a crime to use public toilets without being able to produce on demand paperwork "proving" one's sex. Sign a petition calling on legislators to reject this proposed amedment.
  
• The Moo Bar in Leamington Spa is kind of horrifically convinced that they're neither sexist nor racist. Petition here.
  

Thinky thoughts

• the incredible CN Lester in the New Statesman: Don't like the Mean Girls' table? Check out the rest of the room, an essay on online feminisms and the bit where, inevitably, it's not a monolith.
  
• Hel Gurney: My name is the name I tell you it is, a piece on the infuriating tendency people have to say "Oh, what's it short for?" or "Yes, but what's your real name?"
  
• Content note: degendering. Smith College, a liberal arts women's college in the US, rejected a female applicant... because she's trans.
  

Actually Pleasant Stuff

• Sailing stones! Very cool sedimentological phenomenon: rocks that move large distances in flat valley bottoms with no human or animal intervention.
  
• Super Queer Artsy Blog: I lost it at the cartoon of hetero/cis people's Ideal Trans* Person.
  
• Yes! Hurrah! Androgyny isn't all about thin white boys in dresses! (Fermenting - or should that be fomenting - away in the stills in the back of my mind, there is a piece of diversity and gender expression and ranges of masculinities and feminities and androgynies that is just waiting to hatch into a beautiful butterfly. Like my mixed metaphors? You're welcome, I'll be here all week.)
  
• A helpful article on The Life And Times of TahDig (crunchy rice). All sorts of vital information - about health, about beauty, about movies, in the military...
  
• Hel Gurney again, this time on the topic of their collection of new fairytales. Hel discusses the tradition of fairytales, the way the means of recording them brought them new meaning, and the challenges of creating new material while writing both within and against the structures of an existing genre.
  
• nusillu! provides a huge pile of beautiful art, including these gorgeous ladies, who are how I came across them.

Ticking them off on my fingers.

1. I've applied to graduate, booked bands and hood, and ordered a suitable wing-collar shirt and white bow tie. I... can't quite believe this has happened, in ways that are a little scary and overwhelming, but there we go. I'll believe it when it actually happens.
   
2. I've cast on a new shawl, Cornwall Coast, in a spirit of attempting to use up some of the stash (and because I appear to have become unfortunately addicted to shawls - unfortunate because I don't actually wear the blasted things).
   
3. Past-self left enough food for lunch, and we had enough stuff in the freezer to Not Need To Brain this evening.
   
4. Sometimes, what I need is the reminder that the small quiet room exists, and I can make it. Thank you, Captain Awkward.
   
5. I have packed the important thing for tomorrow's shenanigans, viz, almost all of Korra on a USB stick.
   
6. Chilli oil. Chilli oil that also contains small sad lumps of tofu and of peanut.
   
7. Warm snuggly clothes, and superglue to stick things back together with.
   
8. In spite of being An Bit Sad, I am still gently plodding away at the lit review; at this point, all I'm doing is digging out tables of data for subsequent use, but actually that is helpful, so.
   
9. Fairytales. I'm reading a lot of them, at the moment, and they help a little.
   
10. That essay I mentioned earlier - the one I've had simmering away for a little while - is starting to take, if not shape, at least coherence.

Some days this is harder than others. Today it was hard. I think this week has just been getting harder; I think it may be time to go back up to 40mg and see if that helps any. I don't know. I haven't experimented with this drug enough to know what half-lives and adjustment periods are like for me, at least not when decreasing doses.