Good Things Friday (220) and Link Love
May 12, 2023
1. I was happy to find out that Staples takes tech recycling, not just the ink cartridges, and they’re giving $10 in rewards for one recycling item per month until mid-June. I have a couple things we hadn’t gotten around to recycling so we dropped off one of those things this weekend and I’ll take an old phone next month. Declutter and a bit of spending money, woo!
2. We FINALLY saw our friends with a new baby, 8 months after the baby was born. We meant to see them the first month after but that coincided with the last several months of being sick all the damn time. Every time I thought we could set something up, BAM, sick again. I worried about jinxing ourselves but decided to ask them for three possible times they’d be free that we could pick from and hope for the best. We made it happen! So much fun was had. So much fun I was wrecked, but fun!
JB adored having a new infant to cuddle. Smol Acrobat was less enthused and more jealous that their big sibling had so enthusiastically ditched them for this new baby. They were fine with the baby if JB wasn’t snuggling them, though!
3. We baked Monday cupcakes! YUM.
Helping Folks!
I’ve been tied up working on setting up a sponsorship for a Lakota family but Bethh asked me to share this. It sounds like these folks could really use a helping hand:
“I visited this school in Kenya – it’s the only school in the region, it’s community-supported and run, and it was just attacked by armed men who looted and burned this sanctuary. They’re going to rebuild but it won’t be easy.” Here’s the Facebook post with the link to help.
Angry Users Want DoNotPay to Pay Up. I’d mostly been following a lot of this real time via Kathryn Tewson’s tweets but it’s interesting to see a write up.
I had wondered whether Scholastic’s apologies were sincere and whether Maggie could cut a deal with them: The Answer is Still No.
Oh. Great. First I heard of this was a tweet that was little more than rumor but now I see there’s some truth to it: A new COVID variant called Arcturus is linked to pink eye. Here’s what you need to know. Honestly even though we’re still masking everywhere unless we’re entirely outdoors and even then if we’re around a lot of people, I’m weary. We can’t get good data anymore, governments and organizations have decided it just doesn’t matter anymore, even as people are suffering from LongCovid for months on end. My GP and I had a long talk this week and she mentioned treating a patient with LC who’d been trying the same naltrexone treatment regimen I recently tried and discontinued. I hope it’s working better for her than it did for me. It feels hopeless. We’ve done a great job avoiding COVID so far but it feels like it’s inevitable with so many people acting like it doesn’t matter anymore and I can’t afford any more long term conditions! My plate is full! And my family cannot take on more. Our collective plates are full!
I’m actually shocked (but very glad!) that this case went this way: Former Federal Agent Sentenced to Life in Prison for Sexually Assaulting Two Women and Preventing Them from Reporting Attacks. Cops commit sex crimes (and against children) all the time and nothing seems to deter them.
Dooce was one of the first (mommy) blogs I read in the earliest days of the blogosphere. I stopped reading her after a couple years but it’s still a bit of shock to hear that she’s died at age 47/48(?). What a terrible thing for her daughters to have to work through. Her last post was, fittingly, an ode to her eldest.
The Serendipity of Twitter that I will miss when it’s gone
I watched this one happening in real time and it was DELIGHTFUL: Trigun Fan Account’s Tweet Turns Queer Sci-Fi Novel Into An Amazon Bestseller
And then this from Matt Wallace came up on my timeline, my heart bounds with joy!
Just a quick note that Dooce’s youngest kid is nonbinary. Much of the press coverage has misgendered them.
Oh, thanks for that note. I hadn’t read her blog in so long I knew nothing about her younger kid.
Thank you for sharing the link to the school! They’ve been posting more pictures and it’s really sad. The small library/classroom where a young woman was reading a book I’d loved as a kid is now a burned-out shell. But they have plans to rebuild!
I’m so glad they’re planning to rebuild, I hope we can get enough support here to make some kind of difference.
I was really annoyed when Martha Wells books stopped coming out. Though to be honest, I’ve never been a fan of dragon series and dragons weren’t popular when the cloud roads came out (I think vampires and werewolves were in), so timing wise that wasn’t great. (Like, I only bought the series because it was Martha Wells.) But she shouldn’t have lost a publisher.
I’m so glad she got back in the saddle and found fame with Murderbot which is different and am selfishly quite glad she’s writing fantasy again. Hopefully more people will discover her amazing amazing back shelf.
I knew she had a backlist but haven’t explored it yet. I should! I love Murderbot so.