badgerbag

http://jennylin.livejournal.com/79017.html?thread=153513#t153513

"nationalize twitter"

hahahah!

http://gillmorgang.techcrunch.com/2008/05/09/gillmor-gang-050908/

Best part is how they spell DW's name wrong.

This is so horrible, and I hate the people who didn't do anything, and the police, and just, everything.

http://whataboutourdaughters.blogspot.com/2008/05/federal-lawsuit-to-challenge-law.html

Weird! I just looked at this data site for my zip code,

http://www.city-data.com/zips/94062.html

And among the fascinating crap in there, I see that there is a company that SELLS LIVE MONKEYS to the military. over a million dollars of live monkeys!

http://www.primateproducts.com/home.php?cat=30

Ohhhh!

Weird!

Are they like, monkeys with bombs? Disease monkeys? Mad scientist research monkeys undergoing vivisection? What?

The mind boggles.

Also, somewhere up there in the same area, is Koko the Gorilla. Coincidence or not?

If any of y'all who have digg accounts could chime in...

http://digg.com/general_sciences/Plugged_In_Dystopian_Feminist_Futures_Prep_for_WisCon/who

Thanks!

It's all for a good cause, ie, maybe it sells a couple more books for Aqueduct Press, which fucking rocks.

Enjoy...and here is the full link. http://blogs.feministsf.net/?p=349

Okay all you people who have Alanya to Alanya, Renegade, Tsunami, and Blood in the Fruit in a 2-foot-high stack on your to-read shelf. Listen up!

For the ultimate WisCon prep so you can know what everyone is talking about, read the novel Mission Child and then read Duchamp’s analysis, Maureen McHugh’s Mission Child. That makes the perfect combination so you get some insight into the work of the two Guests of Honor for WisCon 2008.

There will also be a fabulous little inexpensive book for sale at WisCon, Plugged In, with one short story from McHugh and one from Duchamp, both very guaranteed to make you run off to your time machine and hack your body into Cyborg-Manifesto-ish feminist futurity while you download James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” straight into your brainstem.

Unplugged, Stories by L. Timmel Duchamp and Maureen McHugh

So, what else?

You *could* read the whole Marq’ssan series before WisCon if you are that sort of person....

I know I just just posted about my wild eyed save the world activism about disability hacks, but before you get that, you are getting THIS...

http://whoresofbath.com/blog/

My sister and I started up a very silly blog that is pretty much just about bath stuff. Fancy bath stuff, and it is all blatantly full of product ads, and links to fancy shampoo and soap you can buy on amazon, and soon the blog will also have real ads plastered all over it. But, it is also very hilarious. We are doing a series of "Fantasy Celebrity Baths" basically just to get the search engine hits on things like "lindsay lohan naked". I think those posts will be a couple of times a week and will end up being the funniest part of the whole thing.

Here is my sister's post on her bubble bath with Lindsay Lohan and here is mine on how I shaved Robert Downey Jr..

Both of us do really like hot baths and especially reading in the tub and have 8 million kinds of fancy soaps...

So, out of all our conversations about how we start a lot of differnt blogs and love blogging, but never make any $$ off it, and what could we do that might bring in more than 10 bucks a month, that will not make us go crazy with boredom or overwork to maintain and research and write about: here is where we got.

Give it a look and maybe some comment love, if you think it's funny!

I have not thought.

Can I just dress in slutty hot topic clothes and claim to be named Britney Shaladra Ravenderine Marysue Sporkina Snape-Riddle, of Sparklypoo?

For the second year in a row, I thought of the wheelchair modification and disability access projects that could and should be at Maker Faire. I'd like to make that happen next year.

At Maker Faire this year, I talked with Miguel Valenzuela, who was showing Lift Assist, a toilet lift device that can be built for $150 out of bits of PVC and junk from a hardware store, powered hydraulically from your own water system. That kind of thing costs thousands of dollars if you buy it as a medical device. If it were a DIY kit, and if it had open source plans and instructions up on the web, it could be useful to thousands of people all over the world.

So I got to thinking. Who would I even hook Miguel up with, to get his plans used? What other projects are spreading disability access devices, open source? Could things like this just be given over to an organization like Engineers Without Borders? How can they be open sourced or copylefted?

There are specific projects like Whirlwind Wheelchair International and its design for the Rough Rider chair, developed by Ralf Hotchkiss and students over many years and meant to be distributed to shops or factories or organizations in developing nations. In other words, partnership with actual manufacturers. There's the Free Wheelchair Mission which has a kit to build wheelchairs for under $50. They seem to take donations and then ship a giant crate of wheelchair kits to somewhere in the world. Those both look great. But neither of them were for a disabled person who might want to build their own stuff.

Then I found some nifty sites like Marty's Gearability blog, which has a DIY category for "Life with limitations and the gear that makes things work". She has made dozens of posts on modifications she's made for her dad, who uses a wheelchair. I especially enjoyed the how-to for a wheelchair cup holder and the elegant, blindingly useful offset hinges to widen doorways.

I'm also somewhat familiar with Adafruit Industries and its projects like SpokePOV. What if assistive devices used something closer to this model? Rather than people patenting, and trying to sell their designs to a medical supply company, which marks it up a million times until disabled people in the U.S. can't afford them unless they have insurance or can wait 5 years and fight a legal battle with Medicare.

I found organizations like Remap in the UK, that takes applications from individual disabled people, and hooks them up with an engineer who will build them a custom device. This I think exemplifies the well meaning but ill advised attempts to help disabled people through a "charity" model rather than through widespread empowerment. If an engineer is donating time and an invention, why not have them write up and donate the plans for whatever they are building, and post the DIY instructions for free? Then, thousands of people all over the world could build that invention for themselves.

OneSwitch, on the other hand, has the right idea. It's a compendium of DIY electronics projects to build assistive devices. Perfect!

Meanwhile, I went looking for the latest news in open source hardware. What's up with the Open Source Hardware License?

My own inventions for assistive devices have tended towards the creative yet slapdash use of duct tape. For example, my Duct Tape Crutch Pockets, an idea easily adaptable to small pouches for forearm crutches and canes, or to get more storage space onto your wheelchair.

My own canes and crutches that fold (with internal bungee cords) could use simple velcro closure straps to keep them folded up while they're in my backpack or in the car. There are some ingenious ways, also, to attach canes or crutches to a wheelchair.

I have thought of, but not made, ways to extend storage space further. For example, I think that the lack of pockets in women's clothing is a political issue. Women's clothes are mostly designed without pockets, because of cultural pressure to look skinny, so women end up encumbered by bags and purses. If you think about how wheelchairs are made, it is interesting that they are assumed not to need storage space, cup holders, things like that. People hang little backpacks off their chairs. And there are a few custom made pouches for walkers, crutches, and wheelchairs, like this thin armrest pouch. You won't find them in an actual wheelchair store - and rarely in a drugstore or medical supply house. Why not?

As wheelchair designs continue to evolve, I hope that manufacturers will create customizable backs and sides and seats. Nylon webbing with d-rings, sewn into the backs and under the seats of wheelchairs, would mean that custom pouches and packs could clip onto a chair. Then it would be easy to set up your chair with interchangeable bits. My laptop could go in a pouch under the seat, for example, so that it wouldn't affect my center of gravity so drastically as it hangs off the seat back in a backpack.

I'd like to see more and more mods for chairs and canes and crutches that are just for fun. The little holes in adjustable-height, hollow metal walking canes -- don't they seem like the perfect size to stick an LED light in there?

Also, meanwhile, I had posted briefly the other day for Blogging Against Disablism Day 2008 with a list of ideas for Practical actions that will help, like smoothing out steps into a small business (ie just freaking pour some asphalt in there or build a wooden wedge even if it is not exactly to code; people do nothing, for fear of being sued, rather than spend thousands to do a to-code ramp, and I'd rather they just stuff in a slope and bolt a rail to the wall than do nothing!). After I made the list, I went looking for online instructions on how to do the things I was suggesting. What did I come up with ? Jack shit! Nothing! Nada!

So, here's what I propose we do:

- Compile free and open source how-tos, plans, designs, etc. on Disapedia. I have made a page for DIY equipment.

- I will go and interview Hotchkiss and his class, and write up more detail on how their open source project works.

- A meeting to share access hacks and start to add to that wiki page on Disapedia.

- I'll head up an effort to organize a really good disability/accessibility hacking booth for Maker Faire next year.

For the Access Hacks booth, I'd like to pull in:
- craft/sewing people for stuff like mobility device storage and mods with velcro and fabric
- metal working people
- electronics people (like the OneSwitch folks)
- Maybe invite Tech Shop and the Bay Area wheelchair stores to participate
- obviously, disabled crafty/makery people. I thought I could try to pull in GimpGirl and put the word out in other communities
- Flyers on how to open source your hack and make it free - license info, where to post, hook up with places like WikiHow.

This could make a super fantastic real life application for hardware/craft hacks. I would love to just hang out all weekend with a bunch of other people with disabilities and share whatever hacks we've already come up with. That in itself would be productive without even doing it at Maker Faire. I'd like an Access Hacks meeting around here and I wonder if people would host them elsewhere and then post tips on Disapedia. (I would like to use them rather than host a new wiki, but I'm willing to make an access hacks wiki if that's what people would like.)

Please, leave feedback in the comments.

Whoops! Just realized I had only the vaguest impression of "Abelard and Heloise" which was... some whatever-th century (French?) religious whatevers who wrote some love letters and were cruelly parted lovers. Have no idea where I even absorbed this: from the opinions of characters in novels, very likely. I figured it was a Classic Thing that I would read sometime in a good translation.

Well, omg:


- read Timmi's alternate history "The Heloise Archive"
- resolved to go looking for what the history is cause the story was mindfucking
- even the most surface reading of what is googleable makes it clear something is very fucked up
- Oh Wikipedia (and the 1911 Britannica) on this subject, how you so very suck!
-- talk page has absolute crap from birching fetishists @ sweet correction UGH
-- whole thing framed super grossly
-- actual letters (still not read, but begun to peek at) obviously not Great Love Story but rather perturbing
--
- Actual "history" books also absolutely suck and just show how fucked up the writers are
-- Here's a gem: Abelard indulged in beatings as a form of sex play (What? actually it sounds like he beat and raped her various ways and she reproached him with it? Or he confessed it? I am looking...)
- Let's skip also to the weird way the castration is framed
-- ppl who go "oh well he was castrated so nothing was left but to be a monk"
-- that was because he was in a church career and I think you couldn't be a priest in that case

Okay I can't continue to talk about this until I go read the sources. The secondary sources and other crap floating around seems really really crappy! & unreliable!

I wish there was a really good book about the myth of them thru history - like the Sappho Companion which ROCKS -

Ugh!

What I mean is that people at different times & places had/have a myth of what "Sappho" means and it is very clearly for a social purpose, it is a social construct with particular meaning & function. And clearly here is another. Almost no one writing about this that I have found on a hour-long browse has any kind of real sourcing or real information. It is all the Myth of Romantic Love. (And, as usual with any digging around into the meaning and function of romantic love, it is scary and gross.)

****
Update

* http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/abelard-histcal.html

* http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/spirit/stories/s99224.htm this looks good.
T. wrote story before this? looking...

* http://nowwhatblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/interview-l-timmel-duchamp-part-two.html

Maker Faire was glorious but I couldn't quite experience it in a usual way, because of being tired and scattered, with kids, wanting to talk w Everyone at once. Hot, mild claustrophobia, not enough to drink, and having to look up at everyone from the wheelchair which hurts my neck. So I am overtired! Rook and Zond-7 asleep. Rook did most of the kid-wrangling including doing what must have been an hour long rocket-building project with them and then standing on line in the sun for forever to launch the rockets!

I tried to go around with Minnie in the Bazaar but it was too crowded and loud. At one point I lost it and nearly cried when 2 people called my phone at once, 2 people texted me at the same time, Minnie was talking to me, in a giant crowd where I could not move and was surrounded by other people's elbows, purses, and butts. I hung up on everyone and left the building. It was too hard to meet people and to coordinate and do things in groups. Just impossible!

I am also not really over the strep (though not infectious as I have been on penicillin for almost a week) so it got to wehre it hurt me to talk at all much less yell over the crowd.

Highlights

- doing little projects with kids, taking them around
- tesla coil going off (with kids, again, double great)
- rocket launch
- bristlebots thrilled me since they look so easy and cheap
- gawking at fire, bike powered things
- had fun at wikimedia booth, got to see b. and a., represented, nice conf. with andy o. and then some high school girls from Piedmont who said "please explain to our teachers"
- walking around holding hands with zond-7 with him pulling me along
- running into Leanne and then later her partner Mr. Paranoid
- Moomin getting to see his classmates and his excitement
- Moomin explaining what he knew about light, prism, color, and refraction to someone from Exploratorium (he knows it from reading Magic School Bus books)
- Other people saying things like "this is the BEST DAY EVER" and hopping around all lit up
- making a barrette with an LED in it
- talking w Minnie about how we could make a better LED lit barrette
- kids in my lap exhausted; them cuddling up together in my lap so sweetly
- running into like 12 million people i know. though that was also the down side as i could not go from point a to b with out hugging 10 people and chatting. You see how that is both awesome and difficult.
- seeing all the other people in wheelchairs (I did not expect this)
- moments with ice cream

I want a glue gun! And need some little motors and switches to play with to make some nifty bristlebots. COMBAT BRISTLEBOTS. I would point out as well that they need googly eyes. in fact they would combine well with Jodi's hamster craft things. Pom pom hamstlebots?

I would like a maker faire or Make/Craft disability posse. I want more cool wheelchair/cane/crutch mods. I would really have liked to talk wheelchair nerd tech with random people but was a little too shy. It would be really cool to have a booth for that though. Invite the SFSU wheelchair tech dept and local stores as well as the geeky community. do i have the energy to organize this? errrgh. not sure. I had this same thought last year and wondered if I would still be in a wheelchair this year. Guess that's a yes.

The social overload!!!

We stopped by the comic shop on the way home so that the kids could have the strange thrill of Free Comic Book Day. FREE! v. exciting. I was too tired to get out of the car. Zond-7 bought me a comic book and pack of iron man cards which cheered me greatly.

I have made scrambled eggs, raisin toast with butter, strawberries/melon/banana for kids for dinner and I hope to god that counts as Healthy Food because that's what is here and is easy to make if you are a person as tired as I am right now. The last of the leftover pizza is mine - along with a beer. GOES DOWN SMOOTH WITH THE MOTHERFUCKING PENICILLIN.

yay! I liked it! funny! good blowing-up and flying around and cheesy science and comic booky banter and monologuing villains and combat! (More combat would have been nice.) Oh and good computer scenes that made us all crack up. I must find a screen shot of the scrolly bits behind the "progress bar".

* review from Mari Ness - I agree with pretty near everything she says.

* part 1 of Mari Ness's review. OH HELL YES on the comment on the heels. What were they thinking? What was up with that? It was SO not necessary and it seriously messed with my enjoyment of the film. There I was basically dealing with Pepper Potts' role and doing okay with it all, because it was done well. And then, the stripper shoes. Those weren't even like, actress shoes, or sexy office lady shoes, or going out clubbing shoes, they were STRIPPER SHOES or fuck me pumps, something you would put on to pose for a pin up photo, not wear around for your day job, office break-ins, hacking, arresting psychotic criminals with federal agents, and running away from OH WAIT AM I SPOILING ANYTHING.. I don't think so. They were kind of like this, but much worse. She had to take tiny little baby steps and was about to fall over, every second.

* entertaining review from king eljay - I disagree with the damsel in distress part! Sure, she didn't get picked up and used as a hostage, but she ran screaming and ON THOSE DAMNED HEELS.

* War Machine details, tip from king eljay!

Meanwhile in more awesome yay-like news I am going to London end of June/early July.

I was there once hauling a backpack in like 1988 and I had a drastic desperate fever & sinus infection the whole time and no money. So I remember mostly walking endlessly with a backpack and hallucinating in a hostel bunk bed with horrible german girls waking up at 5am to do calisthenics and then backpacking bulgarians playing guitar and singing Beatles songs till 3am every night. And I was a strict vegetarian and ate nothing but bread and cheese, and my one survival jar of Very American peanut butter, for the whole trip as well. In short, Hell on Earth. But, the good parts were (I am hoping this will amuse)

- There was one meal where we figured out how to get to a neighborhood with cheap indian restaurants
- Wandering through the British Museum basically crying with sentiment over historical things
- Buying books (which I shipped home the slow way using all my remaining money)

So, this time I will stay in what looks like posh and cool hotel! Food will be lovely and varied! The neighborhood looks interesting! I will find cafes with wireless, and haunt them! I will work from cafes or the hotel! I'm sure I will curse the sidewalks!

Zond-7 has promised to take me punting on the Thames 3-Men-in-a-Boat style, wearing a funny punting outfit, but I am not sure if this is actually required or desirable, and imagining the outfit and the punting, like Des Esseintes' entire trip to London, might be enough as the real thing might make me DIE OF GIGGLING.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/theatre/2008/05/johnny_vegas.html

I can tell you with 100% certainty, as it is one of my main skills in life, that I would have reacted instantly, and been up on the stage grabbing the microphone, and speechifying and telling the guy to stop it and explaining what was wrong with it. And, I would have been FUNNY - and entertaining - while doing it.

Also I would have been effective. Unlike the idiot other dude on stage whose solution was to relieve the audience from having to see the assault by COVERING THEM UP WITH HIS JACKET. Oh, whew, all better now.

The woman he focused on was about 18 or 19 and was very obviously unnerved by his attention. I saw her expression clearly - I was in the front row too, just three seats along. Vegas insisted that she allow herself to be carried on to the stage by six members of the audience - he called them "pall bearers". She must pretend to be dead, he said, and he would bring her back to life with an onstage kiss. He warned her that there probably would be tongues. As James Williams, writing on the NOTBBC forum after the gig, put it, "Honestly, you couldn't have found a nervier or more passive girl if you'd scoured all of London - she was like a rabbit in the headlights, but she was giggling and clearly somewhat enjoying the attention, so it just sort of went ahead without so much as a yes or no from her." As she was carried on stage, Vegas repeatedly goaded one of the pallbearers to "finger" the girl.

Once she was on stage, Vegas told her to lie very still. She couldn't stop her nervous giggling; he threatened to kick her in the ribs. It didn't come across to me as a joke - and near to where I was sitting, no one was laughing. Eventually Vegas crouched down beside the nervous girl and started stroking her breasts while repeatedly saying, "don't fucking move". Then he ran his hand up her leg and began pulling her skirt up. Every time he looked up to address the audience, she would reach down and pull her skirt back down, but he kept pulling it back up. According to Williams, who had a different view of the stage from me, Vegas ended up "fingering her through her clothes for a second or two". What I heard was an audible sharp intake of breath from the audience as they realised that the woman was getting much more than the kiss Vegas had told her to expect.

There was an air of menace from the outset, made worse by the fact that Vegas clearly had no idea where he was going with his act. The more the young woman was groped, the more anxious one of the "pallbearers" looked. Then Vegas straddled the young woman, pinning her to the floor, and kissing her for quite a while. Most disturbing, perhaps was that around half the audience seemed to find this really funny.

Nifty!

p.s. Talking to yourself is a sign of impending mental collapse!

( Results after the cut )

Fortunately I have been completely cheered up by this



Must watch all the rest of them tomorrow! omg!

I feel a little shell shocked by the Fritzl case and I need a serious group hug. People are either like deadly fascinated by it or else going La la la can't think about that.

And I know horrific things are happening all the time everywhere, and this is just one of them, it's just so stomach turning when it's something that is actually under the surface of the world you live in. That all those people were living there and didn't know!

I also note, I hate the way people talk about the incest part, not the beaten and raped and imprisoned part. Call it what it is.

here are the details I read on it.

- Elisabeth was sexually assaulted by her dad from age 11 onwards and ran away from home twice, returned by authorities
- Fritzl built this bunker under his house with a government grant, and permits, as a nuclear shelter
- when she was 18 in 1984 she was locked up, drugged, handcuffed to a pole "kept like an animal" beaten and raped for 2 years until the birth of her first child
- At some point after that Fritzl started building the place out to be more like an apartment
- how was heavy electronic door installed? maybe during original construction?
- okay fast forward through the 24 years and 7 children born
- The 19 year old - surely he would be raping his other children too?
- Some news articles say she was taken to hospital from a "self induced coma". what?
- another said it was "kidney failure as a result of the incest" (here is a fine example of where the word "rape" would be more appropriate than "incest") But what does this mean? perhaps disease or infection. A far cry from "self induced coma".
- Elisabeth must have persuaded him to take the 19 yr old to the hospital - and she hid a note in her daughter's pocket begging for help
- Then afterwards she persuaded Fritzl to take her to the hospital to see her daughter (perhaps promising to cooperate)
- She was either threatened with arrest or actually arrested
- But she didn't tell anything about the situation until she finally believed that she and the other children would be protected from Fritzl and not returned to be in his power.


I think I find it so perturbing and many of us do because of the ways the family normalcy and lying plays out and how good people are at that lying. Aside from being upsetting and horrible just in itself. Meanwhile, FLDS . http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/83517/

My throat is still moderately awful - but not so swollen - still a little fevery and incoherent - sinus infection not quelled at all - constant snot and pain and still bleeding and hard to swallow - but how glorious to not be driving. My legs are crap also with the stiffness and cramps and buzzing and weird numbness. I escaped the shooting back/sciatica pain, which is fantastic.

Today in bed I kept nodding off and then jerking awake with a panicky feeling that I was about to crash the car!

Basically I am ill in bed completely wiped out by strep.

I rather miss bork and our funny sporadic conversations and her stuffed reindeer. She has converted me to a love of Vintersorg and Borknagar. Her un-dramatic reading of Inter Ocean Hypothesis had me in hysterics!

Algae and plankton sporadically rinsed up effectively.
Seaweed clad naked continents in green veils.
From stardust constructions, cells elusively.
Rearranged the scenery in numerous scales.

And then to Star-Guided Coronation, which deserves quoting at length:

The noctilucent cloud's extensibility
Engorges my ocular ardour
Hiding in the auroral breakup's visibility
Its genie I once saw

Growing in the binocular's prism,
Systematic in the substorm's fractions
With a trapping boundary like magnetism
A lodestar in flaming actions

Awake! All you constellations
To space's serene sonata
Forget the daily tribulations
And join the nebular multicoloured strata

I crown you kings of the hemispheres
Burn wild, like an untamed lion
The stellar eruption throws out like spears
From the offspring carnival within Orion

Tell it, Andreas.

I would like to know what "offspring carnival" backtranslates to if you try to figure out what he meant in Swedish or whatever.

I should write more about the trip but I'm too tired and am going to watch The Wire instead with zond-7 and rook.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/04/29/austria.cellar/index.html?eref=rss_latest

* I love Marcotte for years, but I'm not gonna be an apologist for her fuckups

* a side note that i feel mildly smug in having loathed seal press for quite a while (mutually) but chagrin that I had not criticized them. Out of, retardedly, not wanting to be Divisive on their ass since they are seemingly "trying" to be feminist press. This, a big mistake, which I hope I don't repeat. Any feminist endeavor that can't stand up to criticisms, tough shit for them

* for every one of her bad moments or white people's appropriations there has to be a thousand people reading WOC blogs and engaging well

* I think of them -- but I also think of myself and the benefit I have had from reading blogs by WOC over the last few years and getting a basic antiracist education that i otherwise pretty much missed and I am grateful for all that education & otherwise I'd be so much more of an asshole than I am.
* So it is not much help really, but, think of the assholes! sort of like "save the whales"

* More than that of course, the communities that do form, and connections & support that happens & is possible when you put your voice out there . Despite appropriations. I believe in that. I hope, not just believing in it for my own benefit.

* the women of color who stopped blogging, i get it, i wish them support, people cant carry that burden always, they are missed, i wish fervently their voices get heard in safe space and they make/get that space and all