gryphonsegg

Like a fool, I tried to follow discussions on tumblr instead of just looking at nice pictures and keeping that as my fluffy fan art and fuzzy animals happy space. I tried to follow non-fandom feminist discussion on tumblr. Ugh! Everything people say about "gender/sexual identity" and "social justice warrior" tumblr is true. EVERYTHING. Tumblr: where radical feminism is about hating women for not being perfect, all other types of feminism are about how female-assigned-at-birth people should shut up and stop complaining because every kind of oppression is so much worse when it happens to male-assigned people, trans safe space is for people who want to "socially transition" and exclude those weak and unradical people who have actual sexual dysphoria, queer activism isn't for those mean and icky lesbians, and asexuality is about wanting to have sex but not preferring or getting emotionally attached to a specific partner. I never want to look at that bullshit again. Also, I never realized how protective of Ellen DeGeneres I could feel until I saw someone ~critiquing~ her for not being Radikewl Queer enough. It wasn't the first time I'd seen someone dissect a female celebrity's image for any and all possible points of failure to appear sufficiently threatening to whitecisheteropatriarchy (somehow the Very Progressive Feminists and Queer Activists never seem to get around to subjecting any male celebrities to this particularly personal kind of "critique" where they go after not what the person has actually said but who and what the person is), but Ellen was the last straw for me.

I've been superbusy recently, but I'm finally starting to get things under control. It's been stressful at times, but it's much better than not having anything important to do. I'm going to try to get back into posting regularly in my journal instead of just reblogging stuff on tumblr. I enjoy having a tumblr for fandom stuff and cute animal pictures and awesome space pictures, but I don't want to touch the serious discussion parts of tumblr with a robotic arm. I don't know if it's something about the format or just that tumblr is attracting a wider cross-section of the population, the popularity of wishing violent death, sexual assault, or graphically described maiming on another user over disagreement on fairly obscure points is really out of hand over there. By tumblr standards, I probably just erased five distinct identities, demeaned someone's humanity, and earned a death threat for each of them in this paragraph.

I've been really busy with grad school things lately, but I just had to post about this:
Curiosity rover has found the best evidence to date that liquid water used to flow on the surface of Mars. The video explains the find very well, and the related video about river fans is worth watching too for the similarities between the recent Martian find and the dry streambeds of Death Valley.

I only have two days of on-campus work this week. On Thursday, I'm leaving for a miniconference (My advisor sent a written excuse to Friday's lecturer, which included the sentence "Don't worry about them missing out, they'll be listening to lots of presentations. :)" )and won't get back until Sunday. I have to make sure I get my motion sickness medicine in the next two days.

I have fandom stuff I kind of want to post, but I keep freaking out about the trip and R programming and the papers that are expected later in the semester.

I've made my big move and gotten mostly settled into my new apartment, bought and assembled my own furniture for the first time, opened a new bank account with no maternal assistance, and done about a fourth of the ton of paperwork I have to do to get everything in order for the semester. I have more paperwork to complete and a second graduate student orientation to attend tomorrow. Right now, I'm ridiculously tired. I have a chair that's not hell on back now, but getting it into and then back out of my car, cleaning it, and then moving it inside the building took some work. I'll probably be rested enough to get back to fandom shenanigans this weekend. At least, I hope I will.

While I was busy last week, something terrilarious happened on the internet. ( Warning: Hugo Schwyzer and Jezebel )

I've gotten rid of so much stuff in past few days, it feels freakish. I'm beginning to feel like I'll never get this place properly clean, though. I'm moving in less than ten days. I've already paid my fall semester fees (ouch!) and given my age-appropriate books most of my stuffed animals away to my students, who I'll see for the last time next week (sniffle).

In the meantime, I've got to get ready for my best friend's last visit to the apartment. I'm hoping she'll be able come see me in my new place over break next year, but this is going to be it for a while.

Who made the decision to turn Jezebel into a platform for sexually predatory men?

( cut for Jezebel, Reddit, and an avalanche of rape and rape apology )

I am just about fed up with books in which the main character is female but all the important supporting characters are male, especially when the setting is one which appears to have equality on the surface (no expressions of surprise to find a woman doing the heroine's job or holding certain titles, no evidence that family law favors husbands/fathers over wives/mothers, girls going to school with boys presented as completely normal and unworthy of comment, some high-ranking women referred to in passing or given walk-on roles) and yet all the people who really matter in Our Heroine's life and career and adventures just happen to be men. This is bothering me so much more than it used to. Maybe it's because I've begun to notice it more, or maybe it's just because I've recently started two different books which I picked up in part because they featured female main characters, and in both cases, after I got into the story, it occurred to me that they were completely surrounded by male characters. One of them looked very promising at first, with women other than the main holding positions of authority and/or jobs that are heavily male-dominated in the real world, but as the plot progressed, they turned out to be very minor characters, whereas there are multiple male characters who are moving the plot as much as or more than the heroine and who have much more character development than any of the other female characters. I don't just want fantasy about a world where one woman is special enough to have a story told from her point of view; I want fantasy about a world where women are half the population and the story reflects that.

A planet smaller than Earth has been detected only 33 light-years from our own solar system. Most of the known exoplanets are gas giants. In fact, the team that found this new planet did so while studying a Neptune-sized planet that orbits the same star. The Mars-sized planet is unfit for human habitation for a different reason-- it's too close to the star to be hospitable to life as we know it. But its existence is a good sign for those hoping that humans will someday walk on the surface of an extrasolar planet. In fact, there is some evidence that the same system that is home to the superhot Mars-sized planet and the Neptune-sized planet may contain more planets that are farther out from the star and intermediate in size.