Blogaround

1. The kingdom of heaven is like: Legal quirk allows gay couples in China to get married online in conservative Utah (October 6). I love this!

2. You CANNOT and MUST NOT Solve This Sudoku (October 3) 1-hour-35-minute sudoku solve video, with a very advanced ruleset. (This puzzle illustrates the concept of a "deadly pattern" very well.) I love this. Here are my favorite quotes:

• 55 minutes, with not one single digit in the grid yet: "And if this doesn't work, I'm turning the camera off, because my brain, my brain is already shot to pieces."
• 1 hr 03 min: "Have we been doing sudoku? That is a philosophical question."
• 1 hr 19 min: "What an extraordinary puzzle this is. Imagine if I don't manage to solve it now. I will probably cry, actually. I will probably cry, because this is, it's amazing. It's amazing."

3. Biblical Womanhood T-Shirt. I love this!

T-shirt that has a drawing of a tent peg through a skull, and says "Biblical Womanhood, Judges 4-5"

4. Sign o’ the times, mess with your mind, hurry before it’s 2 late (October 4) "We were 16 years old and our pastor, youth pastor, and the Bible teacher at our Christian school were all assuring us that we’d never be 26."

5. Forced Birth is Torture. (September 22) [content note: medical/pregnancy trauma. Mother and baby survive, fortunately] "What happened next was several hours of careful cutting and suction and burning and stitching while I lay with my arms strapped down and the baby wailed."

6. If the Media Are Reluctant To Properly Label the GOP’s Racist, Christian Nationalist Ideologies, We’ll Have Trouble Hanging on to Democracy (May 20) "Every time a Republican who has voiced “Great Replacement” views in the past is interviewed, he or she needs to be explicitly asked about it—and if they don’t actively disavow their past claims, it needs to be stated that they subscribe to white nationalist ideology—an ideology that has killed hundreds in the US in the last years alone, and millions in the last century worldwide."

7. The New York Times Has Badly Lost Its Bearings (May 13) 

8. I Opposed Abortion Until I Fought To Defeat Personhood In Mississippi. Here’s Why. (May 25) "'We’re just trying to get the amendment on the ballot. That’ll all get figured out later.' The brush-off chilled me. I had an ectopic pregnancy in 2004 and, unfortunately, that is not a pregnancy that will survive. It must be terminated, or the mother will die."

9. What Jesus Said to the Homeless Man (October 2) "In my experience, one hundred percent of people experiencing homelessness battle demons every day."

10. ‘Graduation Day’ for Guide Dogs Highlights Their Rarity in China (October 10) "However, the number of guide dogs in the country is grossly inadequate — a 2019 report by the China Association of the Blind said there were fewer than 200 guide dogs for a country with about 17 million people with visual impairments."

11. Rochester to pay $12M to settle lawsuit filed by Daniel Prude family, largest civil rights settlement in city's history (October 6) [content note: police brutality] "The settlement is not an admission of liability, the court documents show."

12. Angela Lansbury, 'Murder, She Wrote' and 'Beauty and the Beast' star, dies at 96 (October 12) 

13. How SEO Is Gentrifying the Internet (2020) "'Can Cats Eat Blueberries?' was a masterpiece by SEO writing standards and an absolute turd by regular writing standards. A reader might spend five minutes reading the article and still have no idea if it’s OK to roll one (1) blueberry across the floor for their floofy pouncemonster to chase. However, as long as the reader spends those five minutes looking at the page—and more importantly, the ads that are placed on it—then mission accomplished. This is where the SEOification of the internet has brought us, and it [****]ing sucks."

14. Sex Work and the Power of Choice (2011) "When you think about this for ten seconds, you should realize that it makes no sense. People in any other service profession can, and do, turn down customers they don’t want to work with."

15. Sex-Positivity, Compulsory Sexuality and Intersecting Identities (2012) "There are too many issues of power and privilege at play which are not adequately challenged and criticised. The institution of compulsory sexuality still underpins sex-positivism."

16. that female athlete doesn’t look feminine enough (August 18) "Girls looking insufficiently feminine is now a complaint that the government takes 'seriously', and that the government then investigates."

17. The City of Philadelphia Apologizes for Decades of Medical Experiments Performed on Black Inmates (October 11) "From 1951 through 1974, Dr. Albert Kligman, a dermatologist from the University of Pennsylvania, conducted 'the dermatological, biochemical and pharmaceutical experiments that intentionally exposed about 300 inmates to viruses, fungus, asbestos and chemical agents including dioxin—a component of Agent Orange.'" And the article goes on to describe experiments even more disturbing than that. WTF????

18. Epidural-Induced Births ‘Far Behind’ in China, Says Top Expert (October 12) "Mi Weidong, an anesthesiologist at the country’s top health authority leading the taskforce in promoting epidural anesthesia, said that only 30% of female respondents in a nationwide survey were offered anesthetic services during childbirth, despite a large majority of them opting for a more painfree delivery method."

19. (Chill) Ex-Ace Narrative 1: Validation (August 14) "Amidst this chorus of voices, ace communities were the only ones to consistently say 'The subjective experiences you're having are real and okay-- even if they're non-normative and statistically uncommon. You can articulate your own relationship to sex and sexuality on your own terms. You don't need to change your behaviors/desires/attitudes to more normative ones for the sake of fitting a relationship or an ideological ideal. You don't have to organize your life around the expectation that you're someday have a more normative relationship to sexuality.'"