Short version of this post: At my alma mater, Swarthmore College, documents have recently been revealed that describe a lot of awful behavior by members of the two fraternities on campus. Eventually, both fraternities decided to disband. Much longer version follows. Background Swarthmore is a small liberal-arts college in Pennsylvania. For decades, it’s been home […]
Books! Free to a good home. Let me know if you want any of these. Priority given to locals and to others who I’ll see in person soon (at WisCon or at Swarthmore Alumni Weekend, for example), and to people in the US (for ease of mailing). Haven’t managed to take photos of these, sorry. […]
I recently came across my printed copy of “A Hundred Necessary Rules of Conduct for Children,” by Christopher Dock, Mennonite schoolmaster, originally published in 1764. Occurred to me that (a) perhaps various parents of my acquaintance might find it useful in teaching their children how to behave :), and (b) it might be available online. […]
A friend just posted a comic about the difficulty of getting kids to look for things that they’re missing (like their shoes). It suddenly occurred to me that my experience with asking kids to look for things is that the kids go off to look but seem kind of at a loss as to how […]
My Tesla Model 3 arrived yesterday. I ordered it on the morning of the first day they were open for pre-order: March 31, 2016. The expected delivery date kept getting pushed back (for about a year, starting in late 2017, their delivery estimator said my car would be ready in 4–6 months); even after the […]
Content warning for mention of possible use of publicly available tracking technology by stalkers and harassers. The New York Times published an article last week about creating a face-recognition system using publicly available camera feeds: To demonstrate how easy it is to track people without their knowledge, we collected public images of people who worked […]
In 1989, I wrote a story (titled “Absences”) about a kid and her brother who had survived an alien invasion. Part of the core idea of the story was that the invading aliens were super sensitive to sound; humans who made too much noise got killed, and the protagonist’s brother was deaf, so the protagonist […]
I’m disappointed in the ACES Executive Board’s statement about the incident in which a presenter said the N-word during a presentation at ACES 2019. My post here is a long discussion of the Board’s statement—first my responses to what they wrote, then a description of some things I wish they had said, then a couple […]
Content warning for discussion of a white presenter’s use of a racial epithet. (In this post, I’m writing the standard euphemisms in place of the epithets that the presenter spoke aloud.) Last week, I attended the annual conference of ACES, an organization for editors. (Copyeditors, developmental editors, etc.) On the last day of the conference, […]
This year’s northern-hemisphere vernal equinox will arrive about seven hours from now, so here’s my traditional spring post, even though the rains aren’t over. For winter’s rains and ruins are over, And all the season of snows and sins; The days dividing lover and lover, The light that loses, the night that wins; And time […]
Last week, Kam and I played the boardgame Five Tribes: The Djinns of Naqala. (We had played it before, but it was a while ago.) I more or less like it, but as we went back through the rules to re-familiarize ourselves with it, I felt like the rules just kept going on and on […]
Today is the 14th anniversary of my father’s death. I’ve been mostly okay the past few days, but kind of fragile and mood-swingy. Have gotten some important overdue stuff done at work this week, but have also had multiple instances of getting too anxious to read specific emails and thus ending up being later than […]