who only by moving can balance

• that cultural appropriation is shitty and gross
  
• that (out-group) fetishising of queer lives is shitty and gross
  
• that queering media, and representing real queer people, is hugely important
  
• that slashfic was one of the ways I explored my gender identity (without realising it) as a kid
  
• that patriarchy is shitty and gross and is the reason we have predominantly male characters (with personalities, etc) to play with; that we are taught that men are interesting and women are auxiliary and nobody else exists is a huge part of the problem

... but actually, what this question mostly makes me think about is: it's been very interesting, running through this set of prompts. There are several questions I've looked at and thought "... not interested, I want to skip this", and then written for anyway - and working out what to say to something that doesn't catch my imagination has been good discipline (in a way that is very, very different from getting a fanwork exchange prompt that doesn't immediately catch me; presumably because it's lower-pressure?), though I am pretty sure it's not something I want to keep up!

... or because you don't have the energy?

Mmm. I don't tend to talk about my relationships much, not so much because it's "too personal" as because (a) I suspect mostly they're not very interesting to anyone who's not involved [obviously I make exceptions for the Hilarious Anecdotes, but I tend to feel my entire access list doesn't need to be subjected to them ;)], and (b) I'd want to get permission before doing it, which sounds like a lot of hassle.

On the topic of "not having the energy", I tend not to talk about politics and activism - particularly the things I find deeply upsetting - because I view this very much as my space to be horrified and exhausted and scared and furious, but - well. I know some people look at me being scared and angry and decide I'm overreacting, or feel the need to patiently explain to me that I'm being silly and hysterical, or conclude that how I write when I am angry and scared is how I write when I'm composing formal e-mails, and think it's appropriate to give me unsolicited lectures on how to communicate effectively, and why I'll never be able to, and how this will harm the cause so I just. shouldn't.

And - no. I can't deal with that. I have dealt with too much of it. I don't need people undermining me, undermining my competence; I don't need people feeding my ever-present self-criticism and self-doubt; I don't need having to explain myself, over and over, to people for whom the conversation is academic, when I am already raw and exhausted and ground down to ashes.

-- there is one other thing: and that's my illnesses. I talk a lot about living with depression, about how it affects me, about analysis of the whole - but I do it only, only when I'm well. To first approximation, the only things I write about depression while actively depressed are pared-down symptoms logs. That, now - what depression feels like on the inside - that is not something I can talk about, really, not while it's happening (because it hurts too much; because no-one will want to listen; because the people who know already know and don't need reminding, and the people who don't can't), and not after the fact (because, blessedly, the stark reality fades to intellectual overview).

There's three things for you.

The first thing that comes to mind is something I've been pleased about for quite a while now, but don't feel comfortable (or perhaps safe? I can't tell) posting about here, though I've discussed it with quite a lot of you elsewhere. (Curious? Feel free to ask - on IM or in PM or by e-mail - but it's not going in comments here.)

Other than things I've made the conscious decision not to talk about, I can't really think of things-that-make-me-happy that I don't talk about?

-- ah, no, there we go: neurodiversity and its interaction with community-building.

At this rate, if I ever get denise to write me a reference for anything, it's going to read something along the lines of "Alex does all the tedious organisational shit that everyone else HATES and they get perverse satisfaction from and THANK FUCK FOR THAT, basically."

Here are some things I enjoy doing that Rah and Kat and other staff actively hate, or are time-consuming and lower-priority than everything else on their overfull plates, or:

• tagging dw_suggestions for easier transferral to Bugzilla.
  
• cleaning up feeds to minimise the number of duplicates, make sure everything's pointing at the right place, etc.
  
• running through 'zilla to pull out lists of babydev bait for dw_dev_training.
  
• prodding dw_volunteers into spitting out code tours for dw_dev.
  
• wiki updates, whenever I stumble across things that are wrong/out-of-date/missing and have the brain.

Plus there's the community-building I do outside of active dev-community work - like signalboost, like trying to leave comments on posts more of the time, and so on. That's nice. It gives me a space to get out of my head on the days when I can't get out of my room, and that's incredibly valuable.

... which is a bit of a distraction from my main point, which is this: one of the things I love about DW dev culture is that my neurodiversity, my brain quirks, are not treated as obstacles that need accommodating: the fact that I enjoy these tasks that other people are desperate to offload isn't viewed as weird (at least not in a negative sense...); it's just A Thing that happens to be Really Useful. And that is some of why a diverse volunteer base is a good and valuable thing to have, and why accessible volunteering is good and valuable.

But I'm afraid I'm going to stop that train of thought there, before it turns into the second half of the essay that's currently in the works. ;)

... How'd they get there?

(I'm going to be away from the Internet for much of Saturday daytime for family stuff, so let's have this now in an attempt to calm me down enough to sleep.)

Yes.

Lots.

• cavalier cookery: see question 12.
  
• flamboyant socks: in my secondary school, the only piece of clothing that might ever be visible that wasn't regulated was socks. I got into the habit. Having stripy feet makes me happy. Having rainbows up to my knees makes me happy. Having dinosaurs up to my knees makes me happy. They are a way for me to pretend to be formal, pretend to be adult and sober and sensible, and hide a little of myself away.
  
• gender geeking: because it helps me understand myself. Because it helps other people understand themselves. Because gender expression versus gender versus oppositional sexism is fascinating. Because sociology.
  
• history of theology: because it was reading about the history of the Bible that set me free, that made me realise I didn't need to feel guilty for not believing.
  
• lumps of rock: see question 12.
  
• male-coded formalwear: because, for a long time, it was the only way I knew how to express my gender, to be legibly myself. I'm learning other ways, these days, but I owe a debt of gratitude.
  
• mantle melting and plate tectonics: rocks. This is what I love most: that I can look at a single volcano, a single region, and if I've chosen it well it will inform global models. Because it's what's underneath us.
  
• other people's libraries: no faster way, I'd argue, to get to know someone; because it's a fantastic way to be introduced to new things; because being permitted to browse feels like an expression of trust, an extended hand; because I love seeing how other people organise them.
  
• proper chemistry labs: because for years I thought I'd be a chemist working in total organic synthesis, and though I love that my laboratory is the planet, I still pine, sometimes, for clean benches and fume hoods and proper pipettes and lab coats and jars of solvents and glassware and the magic that is coaxing clear colourless liquids and white crystalline powders to behave just so. On the plus side, I'll likely be working in something pretty similar again in the near future, and it won't be the same, but it won't be awful either.
  
• snail-racing: because snails are lovely, and yellow-and-brown striped ones especially so (Cornish beaches in the summer, and Mama who never had her hair unhenna'd when guests were staying, even when she was an in-patient), and because childhood.
  
• stompy queer activism: because well-behaved women rarely make history, and the same is true of queers. Because asking nicely rarely works. Because I'm allowed to make noise, to take up space. Because the more I do, the more okay I make the world for kids like me. I'm not likely to ever be a biological parent, but this: this is a thing I can do; this is a gift I can give you.
  
• stories with dragons in: see question 12.
  
• sun dials: because I love the ways we've devised to tell time and to track the skies. Because of Frank King. Because of the beauty and ingenuity of design. Because of the ways we try to tame our world, try to slice it into pieces we can manage, and how large - and how gently amused - it remains in spite of us.
  
• tenor envy: because I knew I wished I were a tenor long before I understood anything else about my gender.
  
• trilobites with eyes on stalks: trilobites are extinct marine woodlice. They lived in shallow oceans; most of them were benthic - they lived on the surface of the ocean floor. Some were infaunal: they burrowed. Most infaunal trilobites were blind. Some, however, had periscopic eyes on stalks. (Also? Trilobites' eyes have lenses made of calcite. Minerals have three optical axes; along two of them, calcite exhibits double refraction. Trilobites very carefully grew their eye-lenses so that the calcite crystals were oriented along the single optical axis that results in them not seeing double. If you don't think that shit is cool, I'm afraid we can't be friends. :-p)
  
• unopened art supplies: because colour and joy and potential are waiting.
  

11. What features do you think Dreamwidth should have that it doesn't currently?

Oh, goodness, I don't know. I've punted everything I want into suggestions/dw_suggestions.

---

Manchester is so beautiful that I cannot even.

And the train on the way back -- oh, my heart. I meant to write about this a little last time -- maybe I did, I can't remember -- about how, more than anything else, I feel like the academic portion of the last five years has taught me to see. I look at bedrock slipping out from underneath grass, pushing up behind trees, and it is - not friendly, but familiar: I see it and I read it and I understand, a little more, about the ground I'm standing on.

Trains are great. Trains take me through cuttings, and they take me past gorse-in-bloom against bright-blue-sky; past drystone walls and hills; past rainstorms with wind turbines silhouetted against them and starkly white beyond their edges; past lambs and cherry trees dripping blossom and tulips and daffodils lurking in the sidings. I - yes. I love this land, this earth.

I put together a recs post recently; does that mean I can cheat on this one? ;)

-- by which I mean: my favourite community on Dreamwidth is, well, Dreamwidth. I love the diffuse, unstructured communities we build among ourselves: there's the web of people I know offline, the web I know via fandom and love memes and activism and counselling and support, the web I know via Dreamwidth development and #dreamwidth, and - you are all so thoughtful and incisive and encouraging and fundamentally lovely, and I look at my access and subscription lists and I draw the lines between us (and the ones I'd like to draw) and I bask, gently, in how we're connected and how we reach out to each other and how we move over to make space.

You're great. ♥

Well, that's an excellent excuse to talk about the magnificent 48 hours I've had. ;)

Yesterday, I slept a lot. I visited high_fantastical, and we flailed happily about perfume; and then I went down to London. And I ate food, and eventually we went upstairs to the tiny gig room, and -- oh, and. Music. Live music, and I always forget this, is one of the other ways to move me into feeling rather than doing - to step outside analysis, to give myself to the moment and the movement and the sound.

The opener was Misogyny Central; but then we had Dave Hughes & The Renegade Folk Punk Band and - oh, oh, they sang to me about Larkin; how could I but fall in love with them? They sang to me about Larkin and about writing and about identity and about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and about music and - oh, my heart, my heart.

And then. Then the Indelicates, launching their latest album, Diseases of England (which contains Not Alone - last night was the first time I heard it - and also Class, which begins a school of gothic arches and a college of them too/and a parliament that looks and feels the same..., and it is on youtube with their glorious video and you should watch it, because they are fantastic) and oh but they did so much that I love. You're too clever to be mentally ill, I shouted along with them, cider in hand, and be afraid of your parents/be afraid of their clever friends/I've read this book before, and darling -/I can tell you how it ends.../be afraid of the line they teach you/be afraid of the way it goes/you'd be amazed at what you can raise/to something everybody knows...

And they did Our Daughters Will Never Be Free, and they did oh so much that was glorious, and behind them on the stage was my fantastic, fantastic friend and her drums (hi! feel free to identify yourself in comments! i am just not sure whether you have talked about this publically and am too sleepy to go ferretting ♥), and - yes. (I still believe in the need for guitars and drums and desperate poetry.)

So much fantastic music. So many wonderful people. ♥

and I came home, and - and this does involve the computer - I worked on some stuff for DW, and various other bits and bobs, and I fell asleep - and then, this morning, I:
- picked up my post;
- dropped off a repeat prescription request (so much of my life is healthwork; I've run out of one set of tablets, a non-serious type; will run out of another by the time I get to pick up my refills next week; and have only 8 days' supply of citalopram left, which is the closest I've ever got to running out and is a little bit scary in terms of what it means about how much the project was taking out of me);
- stared at the sunshine and the graffiti and the trees and my city;
- ate food, and washed up, and packed;
- and got on a train oop t'Norf, where I'm curled up on a sofa with the Moon shining in on me (and it is at times like this that I think about what I've done with respect to selenology, and I am bowled voer by the things I know about it, and by what I see).

Trains are a big part of my life; last night, on the way to the gig, Chris and I ended up working out how many Wise Guys songs are about trains (at least four). Trains scare me, a bit, but I love them and can't not - the motion and the rails and the everything; the taking me places; the hills and the drystone walls I get to see; the... everything. It broke my heart and put it back together, to be travelling through high ground and moorland and the country, and it makes me wonder what on Earth I think I'm doing planning to move to London when I so clearly belong somewhere with skyline and bedrock and - then I disappear into I Go To The Hills When My Heart Is Lonely, and everyone's frankly a bit embarrassed to know me.

So. What do I do away from the computer? Healthwork, both of the physical variety and mental housekeeping. Cooking and eating and enjoying food. Reading - I did quite a lot of that today. Interacting with my mum (today it was on the phone) and with people I love (HI GUYS). Living in my body and in the world. Music. Loving. Things like that, you know.

I am curled up in my pyjamas eating home-made raspberry trifle (including some of our own raspberries, frozen in years gone by) dropped off for me by my mum yesterday.

---

Mostly, yes. I have been experimenting with not, for my other Three Weeks For Dreamwidth posts since Monday (I'll be posting a round-up on Saturday, LJ folks), but actually much as I would like to move across to DW solely (-- all else aside, LJ is about to make the friends' page unreadable for me) I know lots of lovely people who are LJ-only, or predominantly-LJ, and I want to keep in touch with them (you) more than I want to be an idealogue about my blogging platform, by and large. ;) (Plus I'm aware that some of you have Definite Reasons for not-DW, rather than lock-in/inertia, and while I'm okay challenging the latter I am not okay stamping all over people in re the former.)

---

I'm kind of embarrassed by how much I love the BPAL perfume "Appalling Abattoir", but it is delicious.

I'm really enjoying the likely oh-so-brief break from terror.

We welcome the opportunity to discuss the points raised by Glikson in his comment, which discussed evidence for other possible impact-continental flood basalt-mass extinction correlations and also critiqued several aspects of our proposed terrestrial mechanism to create the geologic 'signals' commonly attributed only to large impacts. We will start by briefly clarifying where Glikson has misread and misunderstood several aspects of the proposed "Verneshot" phenomena. Then we will revisit the issue raised by Glikson's advocacy of additional contemporaneous impact-continental flood basalt-mass extinction incidents whose traces are argued to be preserved within the geologic record.

Glikson states/implies that we questioned the standard view that observed shock planar deformation features in minerals require shock pressure less than 8–35 GPa, and that we argued that these features can be made by routine volcanic explosions. We did not.

Excerpt of: J. Phipps Morgan, T.J. Reston, C.R. Ranero (2005) Reply to A. Glikson's comment on "Contemporaneous mass extinctions, continental flood basalts, and 'impact signals': Are mantle plume-induced lithospheric gas explosions the causal link?" [EPSL 217 (2004) 263–285], Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 236:938--941.

I-- am kind of impressed by how vicious this is? I mean, I've seen worse, but - wow. Not looking forward to the point at which I'm causing controversy.

---

I'm going to borrow finch's twenty-one questions for Three Weeks of Dreamwidth. So for today:

1. Why did you sign up for Dreamwidth?

Because of liv, basically. Because (cool) people were talking about it, and LiveJournal had pissed me off one too many times, and I was tentatively delighted by the mission statements, and -

- and perhaps, more to the point, is why I didn't - why it took me so long to get around to creating an account here, too. Because: I was scared that I didn't belong here, because I wasn't (at that point) creating fanworks at all, never mind regularly; because I thought I wasn't creative enough, wasn't cool enough.

Turns out I had fundamentally misunderstood both Dreamwidth's aims and my own level of coolness. The two of them taken together made me scared to participate. Turns out that was a bit of a mistake, really, and I am absolutely delighted to be here. :-)