NO WAY

I’m all scratched up and I can still taste spray paint in my mouth and my husband almost fell out of a tree BUT THE GHOST SCULPTURES ARE FINISHED!

They’re finally finished and I’m so happy with them!!

Some progress shots:

does anyone wanna hold hands until we feel a little braver

Oooooooooo

Status report: In the "Adventures In Staying Housed" department...

Greetings to the Bluesky folks who've dropped by! Just to confirm what's going on:

We're hoping to sign the lease on our rented house early next week, but we have some rental arrears that we're very much hoping to be able to deal with in the short term. Some extra cash flow in the short term would be a really big help.

With that in mind, may I possibly point you at the following SF and fantasy ebook bundles at our ebook store? All are DRM-free and come with our lifetime replacement guarantee if you lose the files or your reading device, change platforms, or whatever. (With this caveat only: due to Brexit, we can no longer sell into the UK. Our profound apologies.) And once you buy a book from us, you own it. Period.

Our store's full inventory of the revised/edited Young Wizards young adult SF/fantasy novels, and the interstitial works that go with them, is here:

Ebooks Direct

Young Wizards "All The Wizardry" Bundle

This bundle contains all the Young Wizards material in the Ebooks Direct inventory. That's nineteen ebooks, containing: The nine New Mille

All the current works in the LGBTQ-centered Middle Kingdoms adult fantasy universe are here:

Ebooks Direct

Middle Kingdoms Bundle

This bundle contains all the Middle Kingdoms material in the Ebooks Direct inventory. That's ten ebooks, including: The three main-sequenc

And if you're feeling expansive, our entire store inventory—36 ebooks at present—is here:

Ebooks Direct

Ebooks Direct Whole Store Bundle

This ebook bundle (not available in the UK: details below) contains our complete inventory of non-new-release* works. All our ebooks are DRM

Finally: if you're all ebooked up at the moment, but you'd still like to be of assistance... after some public-demand style noodging we've finally installed a Ko-Fi. If you choose to go this route, please consider yourself thanked in advance for your thoughtfulness! We very much appreciate it.

Ko-fi

Support Diane Duane on Ko-fi! ❤️. ko-fi.com/dianeduane

Support Diane Duane On Ko-fi. Ko-fi lets you support the people and causes you love with small donations

Thanks, everybody! ❤ ...And we very much look forward to enlarging your TBR pile. :)

This is relevant for all Americans but especially those who are chronically ill, immunocompromised, or are otherwise in a vulnerable medical situation

Posted on TikTok on January 22:

My doctor when I was diagnosed with type 2 was surprised that I "hadn't managed to damage my kidneys yet," couldn't be bothered to give me any information about how to stay healthy except for "don't eat such huge servings of junk food," (at the time, I ate a high-fiber vegan diet with only complex carbs), and infomed me that my diabetes was the result of having too much belly fat.

I've had strangers give me crap when they see me testing my bg levels.

My dad, who went to the gym every single day and was in better shape than anyone I knew, was also diagnosed with type 2. My body type is very much like his and his mom's. I seriously doubt that my college-era froot loops binges are the reason I developed diabetes.

News flash: willpower is not actually a metabolic influence, food isn't bad for you, and fat people actually tend to physically cope better with t2d than thin people do.

Also, unlike diabetes, lack of critical thinking skills, empathy, and basic decency are NOT genetically influenced, and respond well to (mental) exercise as an intervention.

Like this is a whole different rant but the way people talk about diabetes in general makes me so pissed off. Diabetes isn't a moral failing. Diabetes isn't something people can "deserve to have". No you can't say only people with type 1 deserve sympathy, what the fuck is wrong with you etc. No you can't get diabetes from eating too much sugar. Stop implying people with type 2 should die

huge recall of frozen waffles due to listeria in the US and canada

october 18, 2024

the source is treehouse foods, who provides frozen waffles to dozens of brands in north america. eggo is not affected.

brands affected: always save, best choice, bettergoods, breakfast best, clover valley, compliments, essentials, food lion, foodhold, giant eagle, good & gather, great value, hannaford, harris teeter, H-E-B higher harvest, kodiak cakes, no name, pics by price chopper, publix, schnucks, se grocers, selection, simple truth, tops, western family.

if you have any frozen waffles from any of these brands in your freezer, please check here for a full list of the recalled food and their lot codes and best by dates, and here for the pictures of the labels (PDF). treehouse says you can return the recalled items to get credit from the place of purchase.

consider sanitizing anything the waffles may have touched, or anything that you may have touched after touching the waffles. listeria is a very resilient fucker.

no illnesses have been associated with this recall so far. but keep in mind that listeria can take months to cause illness, and then weeks to officially connect an illness with a certain recall or outbreak.

again, while most people exposed to listeria will not get sick, listeria can take months to cause illness after exposure. listeria can be deadly, especially to high-risk groups. if you are in a high-risk group or have any concerns due to eating the recalled waffles, talk to your healthcare provider. if they deem it necessary, there are antibiotics you can be prescribed even if you do not have any symptoms.

as a general reminder for this and every listeria recall: although cooking to 165F/74C can kill off listeria itself, heating the food cannot eliminate toxins that may have already been excreted by listeria, which can also be harmful. this especially applies if the waffles have been defrosted or stored in the refrigerator.

hey. listen. when you use too much detergent in your laundry you aren't making your clothes cleaner, you are making them degrade faster. the machine isn't able to rinse out the entire cup of soap you put in, so some of it is left in the fibers of your clothes. when they dry this makes the fabric stiffer and more brittle, so the fibers are more likely to erode and break. over time this makes your clothes wear out much faster than if they were properly rinsed with minimal soap. you are wasting money by overusing detergent, not just on the detergent itself but the clothes you are shortening the lifespan of.

I read Stone Butch Blues when it was first published. I was 18, just barely out, and a sophomore at a liberal arts women's college 45 minutes from my parents' house. That would've been... 1993? Yup. 1993.

The book fundamentally changed my understanding of... pretty much everything.

My great-grandparents were all working class. On my dad's side (his parents were cousins), they were farmers. On my mom's maternal side, they were European immigrants and union bricklayers. On her paternal side, Jewish immigrants. Her dad and his sister were raised by their mom, who was not, I believe, religious, and didn't raise them in the faith. She was a shopkeeper.

My grandparents' generation were college-educated (possibly except for my dad's mom). My dad's father was a math teacher and my mom's father, educated at Caltech, was a civil engineer. My mom's mother ran my grandfather's business, including a real estate office for a while.

Both my parents graduated from Stanford and taught English (my dad, who had a Ph.D., eventually went into corporate management to make more money).

So... I grew up surrounded by both the privileged world of aspirational academia and the, much more resonant for me, family stories about immigrant lives, trade unions, and beautiful craftsmanship.

I can do the academic thing, and do it well, but I have always preferred making things to studying them. I have always felt a bit out-of-sync with my family’s "evolution" towards increasingly academic pursuits. I like using my brain, but I like to keep my hands dirty while I do it.

Leslie Feinberg's writing became, for me, the first place where my own queerness and my identification with my family’s immigrant and working-class roots, made sense to me as parts of a single whole.

The summer after my junior year, I went through a directory I'd gotten my hands on of lesbians working in the arts, and sent out letters to those who seemed interesting, compatible, and far enough away from my childhood in California to let me try my hand at becoming something more than my parents' daughter. I asked for an apprenticeship.

As such things do, the end result wound up being... very different from what I'd imagined. I got a gig in New Hampshire helping a musician and her trans partner, who made their living busking on hammered dulcimer. I was meant to go live in a tent on their land, help with the straw bale house they were building, help babysit their 3 year old daughter, and join the busking on my harp. As it turns out, I have absolutely NO musical improvisation ability and had no clue what to do when there wasn't sheet music. The harp spent the summer in its case. Also turns out that my social anxiety made not having my own, completely private, space to retreat to unbearable. I wound up renting a tiny apartment in a nearby college town. And then... well, it turned out that the weather wasn't great for house building, and my girlfriend, spending the summer outside DC with her parents, was miserable, and so she came to join me, and...

Well. Before my girlfriend arrived, I did a lot of hiking and lake swimming, went to Boston Pride and cheered on my busking "bosses," joined them and their friends for a summer solstice ritual at which I was introduced to the concept of herbed butter and the back-breaking problems of invasive blackberry, and rode in their decomposing old subaru wagon (it's fascinating to warch the road go by through clusters of tiny, rusted out, salt-holes in the footwell) all the way to New York, specifically to hear Leslie Feinberg speak.

I was the most awestruck, hero-worshipping baby dyke imaginable, the youngest person in the room by at least a decade, and I still remember the sensation of blushing for *three hours.* Because. I was. In. The. Same. Room. As. Leslie. Feinberg.

That summer broke me wide open. It was the first time I ever felt like I, as an individual being, might hold power, make something that changed things, in the world.

That feeling, of urgent, hopeful agency, swells and recedes in my life, but I never experience it without thinking of Stone Butch Blues and of Leslie Feinberg. And yes, I still blush. Every damn time.

Happy (early) Nov 15th! Remember that Stone Butch Blues is free now and always to read here

Leslie was a communist, a butch lesbian, a nonbinary and transgender activist, and the person who made me who I am today. Consider checking out Stone Butch Blues if you haven’t already 😘 Do it for Leslie, and for hir surviving partner, Minnie Bruce Pratt 💕