sundries

[rm]

While I didn't work on the Bristol paper last night, I did get one third of the way through my Buffy/Angel essay. And it is tight and funny so far. But man, I've got a lot going on in there including Joyce's death, Wesley's masculinity, the terror that I'm Spike and the spectre of my own misogyny. Really, it's funnier than it sounds.

A lesbian actress and activist fighting deportation from England to Iran still needs your help.

Legal wrangling over the National Day of Prayer.

An article on the plight of parents estranged from their children. Perhaps the only thing that's fair for me to say about this article is to echo the observation that a lot of things parents do that seem like love to them, don't seem that way to the child.

Last night bodlon linked me to The Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn, which, to be frank, I haven't checked out yet and many more of you may have specific opinions on. But at some point I have a lot to say about Mystery, elitism, "open source" as a code word for all sorts of things including misogyny, and, maybe, the OTO. That day is not today. That day probably isn't even this month.

The demise of New York Military Academy. The 400 military prep schools that once existed in the US now number merely 25. I remember ads for these things in the back of The New York Times Magazine section, near where the ads where for my arts summer camp, and I always worried a little bit that my parents would eventually decide I was awful enough to send me to one, but sometimes, I remember, I also wished they would.

The moral life of babies.

Are you a woman in the workplace? Here, have some some stuff about why you can't win. via ginmar.

Polling station rules in the UK. via beccaelizabeth.

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

There's a very strong sentiment that the open source software movement is deeply, deeply hostile to women because of a number of things that have happened at conferences. So anything using the "open source" phrase, not matter how legitimate an adjective, is, for me, suspect, especially because of the more obvious Thelema-related issues around sex and gender.

[roy-batty.livejournal.com]

Hunh. I didn't realize that about the "Open Source" movement, and am actually surprised. I seen that many parts of the tech sector still behave as 'boys clubs' (see it all the time, as that's the field I work in). Still . . . perhaps my viewpoint is skewed, as all the open source geek types I know live in that Venn Diagram overlap of geek/alternative* spirituality/alternative* sexuality (*using 'alternative' here as shorthand for a multiplicity of ways of falling outside the normative mainstream). So, perhaps what I've seen is itself outside the mainstream of the 'open source' world for exactly those reasons.

FWIW, I heard the head of the Open Source order of the Golden Dawn on a podcast a while back (Thorn Coyle/ yezida's "Elemental Castings"). I didn't get any sense of misogyny from him, and Thorn's tolerance for it likely approaches zero, but that said . . . how much are ya' gonna get in an hour's worth of podcast from someone on their best behavior?

[mamadar.livejournal.com]

There are two of Thorn's podcasts you might want to listen to: Episode #1 with Ellen Francik and episode #22 with Sam Webster. Both are OSOGD people, and Webster is the founder.

They seem to have gotten beyond or around a lot of the GD/Thelemic sex'n'gender issues, at least from what I've read on their site.