Boy oh boy there is a lot going on right now! THINGS ARE HAPPENING with the book, and also with job stuff, but I’m not going to talk about any of that till the dust has settled a bit. For now, please enjoy this positive affirmation and dance song, because the majority of you are probably very nice people.

Anyway, here is our color scheme, which is every bit as reflective of Chris’ aesthetic as it is mine (what can I say, we were children of the late 80s/early 90s and watched a LOT of television):

These are the reception table assignment collages, which feature our favorite TV shows and one movie (X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Sweet Genius, Troll 2) (also there are blank spaces on the collages because we’re waiting to finalize the guest list before we print any names):

This box (which features images from the wedding venue and surrounding area) is for wedding guest rememberances, i.e. little notes or marriage advice or amusing pornographic sketches:

More shots of the box (the wedding reception will be held in that garden):

And this is the collage explaining the above (I love how this one turned out):

This bowl will contain the wedding guest gifts, colorful 1-2 inch tumbled gemstones:

The reverse (the design is a neon rainbow gradient):

So, I’m pretty happy. Three cheers for gender-neutral neon rainbow weddings!

As I mentioned the other day, I’ve written an article for The Daily Dot in which I argue against the phrase “don’t feed the trolls.” The post just went live, so for a good time check it out. Here’s a snippet:

Instead of agreeing not to feed the trolls, thereby accepting the terms of the antagonist’s game, the target should be encouraged to respond with his or her own game—a game called Ruining This Asshole’s Day.

The first and most basic way to play Ruin This Asshole’s Day is to shut them down, ideally by unceremoniously deleting their comments. (This presumes that the target has some control over the posted content, and that the target can keep up with whatever comments, which isn’t always the case and immediately begs a nest of questions about best moderation practices—a conversation for another day.) This shouldn’t be done passively, as an act of acquiescence, but actively, as an exertion of power—specifically the one-two punch of a raised eyebrow and extended middle finger.

Now go read the rest please!

Yesterday was Chris’ birthday; the above masterpiece was posted to his Facebook wall. Today is my birthday (for one glorious day we are the same age, in this case 29, before the clock strikes 12 and once again I become his wizened elder), and so I am posting it to my blog. Not so much for me as for Carl, god bless him.

Melodrama at its finest! (via Gawker)

The above video, in which an Israeli lawmaker nearly loses it during a legislative session due to a bad case of the hahas, is pretty great on its own. Uncontrollable, inappropriate, infectious laughter is pretty much the best. But coupled with the possibility that Israeli education minister Rabbi Shai Piron was laughing because he saw the word “penetration” in his speech and suddenly reverted to a 12 year-old boy/me? Now that is priceless. Even if that account is false (Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman reports that Piron’s people insist he was just really sleepy), I choose to believe it was a juvenile sex joke, the end.

For the past few days I’ve been working on an article for the Daily Dot in which I argue against the use of the term “don’t feed the trolls,” which is problematic for all kinds of reasons, most significantly because it is steeped in gross victim-blaming logic. The article will be out soon enough, so more on that later. For now, please enjoy the above –in its own way, related– video, in which Patrick Stewart discusses the problem of victim-blaming in the context of domestic violence and confirms once and for all that he is pretty much perfect.

Not that their position is all that surprising; Facebook’s moderation practices have always been pretty weird. While I was in high research mode for my Facebook memorial page trolling project, for example, I was struck by the fact that although Facebook took a hard line against trolls and troll content (which was pretty easy to sniff out via algorithm), they seemed to have little to no interest in addressing non-trollish hate speech (I don’t want to say “real” hate speech, because that gets into motivations which is too hard a nut to crack in a three-parahraph blog post). I couldn’t figure out why a troll saying the N-word was a bannable offense while a Klansman saying the N-word was a-ok until I realized that, as fake throwaway profiles, trolls had absolutely no monetary value to Facebook. They were, from an advertising perspective, worthless, and/so the pushback was swift. But “real” racists (again, I’m not interested in having a conversation about intentions here) were real (persistent; connected) profiles and therefore could be commodified, so apparently were tolerable. Facebook may have found a way to defang the trolls, but their reasons for doing so seemed inconsistent at best and disingenuous at worst.

The question is, does doing the right thing for the wrong (or at least for cynical corporate) reasons negate a positive outcome? In the case of pro-rape and misogyny pages, I would argue that no, it doesn’t — these feminist groups hit Facebook in the only place that matters (to Facebook and its shareholders), the violently sexist content was taken down, and Facebook was forced to acknowledge their considerable failures. That’s good; that sends a message. But it does not mean that Facebook can suddenly be placed in the feminist camp. It means that in this case, Facebook’s bottom line lined up with progressive politics. I’ll happily take that win, but not without shooting Facebook some serious side-eyes first.

In New York, Chris and I would take Nathan to the (from our perspective at the time) mostly adequate dog park in Carl Schurz park. The dog run was about 600 square feet, and depending on the time of day would be packed with anywhere from 8 to 15 large and often aggressive dogs. That wasn’t fun for anyone, least of all Nathan — we’d go through phases where we’d take him a few times, have a bad experience with one of the other dogs and/or owners, then swear off dog parks for good. Eventually we’d worry that Nathan wasn’t getting enough exercise, and the cycle would begin anew. Here in Spokane we won’t have the same kinds of issues; see above, which is nearly 9 minutes of SpokAnimal dog park goodness, shot by doting dogdad Chris. In conclusion, by every metric, I do not understand why anyone would want to live in a big city.

New article on trolling on definitions! The setup: These days apparently everything on the internet that is lame/upsetting is “trolling.” This framing isn’t doing us any favors! From the article:

[I concede that language shifts over time; I'm not mad, bro] But describing all problematic online behaviors as trolling and all online aggressors as trolls is a bad idea. Not because there is only one “correct” way to troll, as some trolls might insist, but because using the term as a stand-in for everything terrible online is imprecise, unhelpful, and—most importantly—tends to obscure the underlying problem of offline bigotry and aggression.

For the thrilling conclusion, go here.