Good Things Friday (161) and Link Love
March 25, 2022
1. I wish I’d also gotten the manufacturer coupon to stack with the deal but I found our usual brand shampoo and conditioner (2 each) from Walgreens for $20 (before tax) and $5 Walgreens reward cash, making it $7.50 for a pair. I’d have had to buy 5 sets plus their $10 off $40 to come close to the same pricing from Target.
2. Smol’s very vocal but has only experimented with lots of different sounds without any real attempt to assign meaning to them yet. Still. They still don’t call any of us anything, we are just “high pitched excited shriek”. So it was a real shocker when they were asking for apples and SAID “Ah-pa” several times. Practically a word!
Giving
I’ll do another round of donations to support refugees in Ukraine and trans kids in the states.
Shep shared to their friend Jelena and friends’ campaign to provide food and supplies for those in Afghanistan.
Arlan Hamilton shared Beauty 2 the Streetz.
Challenges this week: Kid germs are the pits.
We’re having to schedule activities for JB and family plans through the end of summer but we still know nothing about under-5 vaccines. Sigh. I’m using this NPR page to keep an eye on the status of the review of vaccines. This latest on Moderna efficacy has me disheartened. I feel like I’m grasping at straws trying to find hope in the CNN overview.
Return to work has been especially rough on the adults.
It’s still the apocalypse, let’s give ourselves and one another some grace. This post says everything I’ve been feeling in my marrow and haven’t been able to say.
Heatwaves at both of Earth’s poles alarm climate scientists. I would really like articles on what can actually be done because a piece full of this is depressing and makes it feel like there is no hope: Mark Maslin, professor of earth system science at University College London, said: “I and colleagues were shocked by the number and severity of the extreme weather events in 2021 – which were unexpected at a warming of 1.2C. Now we have record temperatures in the Arctic which, for me, show we have entered a new extreme phase of climate change much earlier than we had expected.”
Lauren Hough complains about losing a Lambda Literary nomination because of her defense of her friend’s book (said book also includes some seriously insulting bastardization of AAVE) and rants that YA readers are, apparently, idiots: “…The premise of her book is “what if all the men disappeared.” When she announced the book on twitter, YA twitter saw it. This is the single most terrifying thing that can happen to a writer on twitter. YA twitter, presumably fans of young adult fiction, are somehow unfamiliar with the concept of fiction. YA twitter doesn’t do nuance. They don’t understand metaphor or thought experiment. They expect fictional characters to be good and moral and just, whether antagonist or protagonist….” I comment on this because YA Twitter hadn’t anything to do with this but I’ve seen many trans folks take issue with Sandra Newman’s book for things such as the “AAVE” and (from Ana Mardoll who slogged through the damn thing): “Anyway, it’s fun that random people online can lie about me because I reviewed a book and warned that it tortures trans women in hell and has a trans man being graphically sexually assaulted by a crowd of cis women as its “inclusion” of trans people.” That’s useful info because if, as Lauren so pointedly explain, someone insists on including a marginalized group in their book, but primarily by torturing them and assaulting them, it tells me a lot about the author. It tells me both Lauren Hough and Sandra Newman don’t get a place on my shelf, and they really gross me out. I didn’t know this about Hough before and I know I retweeted some of her tweets in the past. I’ll have to search and rectify that.
A malamute’s saddest day of the year (TikTok)
this is my favorite video of all time pic.twitter.com/XwrNB3TEs2
— mo (@drphiIth) March 18, 2022
anne hathaway is a theater kid, you will never beat a theater kid at these types of games (even if you are the untouchable kelly clarkson) pic.twitter.com/FQiopkySqQ
— alex (@alex_abads) March 22, 2022
… that’s consistent with general protection in adults against omicron, too, which wanes quite strongly, though I disbelieve these hospitalization figures for a bunch of science reasons. It’s unlikely to get any better without a big hike in dose, which will come with a big hike in side effects, which will then be closer to the overall risk to children (that’s when we don’t approve things).
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1507007877541625865
I know you’re right about that consistency. I’m just not at all at peace with that because my particular under-5 isn’t old enough to mask so they don’t have that prevention layer and I hate that level of non-protection for Smol and by extension myself.