The Holly Poly Exchange

Let us begin with the formal dissolution of NaNoWriMo, after several bad decisions, scandals, and questionable alliances had many of the participants moving away from the official forums or having official affiliations with the group.

musesfool gives us a poem from Barbara Jane Reyes that is a prayer to the Goddess of Lost Things, but the things that are lost are not merely the things that are physical, and several of the lost things are misplaced at a time where they are needed.

Social media influencers and thrill-seekers are still attempting to make contact with isolated peoples that have expressed a wish to stay isolated. Because the clicks and the potential revenue are worth more than the violation of international treaty, right? Or the possibility of bringing a disease with you that the isolated people have no defense against.

Obscenely wealthy person plans on going to another country because she's no longer getting a tax-preferred status, tries to soften the headline by claiming she'd be happy to pay more tax to maintain her preferred status.

There are burgeoning services for Catholic parishes, dioceses, and schools, to help make sure there isn't financial malfeasance and to give transparency and communication between clergy and laity to make those places work better for everyone. A far cry, indeed, from the Church that expected the laity to attend, say the appropriate prayers at the appropriate time, and otherwise just trust that the men who were priests and administrators were going to do well with it, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

There are a lot of people out there who want the "right" people to have more children, and to have designer babies, and while many of them are also allegiants of eugenetics, people who decry the presence of women in the workplace (or doing anything other than popping out babies and raising them), and ideologies that praise white culture over any and all others, most of them also don't have a thought in their heads about what it would take to actually successfully raise all those kids. They've gotten to "Well, women should do it, because the only women we want are women who will enjoy having and raising children," and they think that will be sufficient as a national policy. Unfortunately for them, history did not begin in the 1950s, and therefore what they believe is timeless and traditional is actually quite newfangled and not very good for a lot of the population.

The National Health Service of the UK has announced that emergency contraception will be available at all community pharmacies for no charge, so as to try and alleviate some of the effects of variations in access and cost. This goes with plenty of other contraception available for no charge through the NHS.

Microsoft employees who protested the company's involvement in allowing Israel to prosecute its war against Gaza received retaliation for their act, either being ordered to retire a few days earlier or fired from their position.

( Your semi-monthly dose of U.S. politics, technology hacks, and people behaving poorly inside )

Last out for tonight, the trend of staying and living at your parents house for longer has been happening for quite some time, admittedly because there's less pressure for someone to leave and get an education, or to leave and put themselves into service in some other household. The people who are gung-ho about repealing child labor laws are probably hoping they can point to this kind of research and call it natural for children to go to work, never mind all the laws that are in place to prevent the exploitation of children and to make sure that they get enough sleep to go to their required schooling the next day.

And something to make you smile - a project to connect children to elders in Saidosho by turning the elders into trading card characters has worked extraordinarily well, with an entire TCG developing of these various community members and their skills.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)