Gondwanaland: a moral panic-free zone
Saturday I went to Clark Park, where I'd volunteered to petition to put Olivia Faison, the Green Party's candidate for Philadelphia Council at-Large, on the November ballot. The sign-up sheet hadn't described the nature of the event, but what I found was Science in the Park, part of the Philadelphia Science Festival. So I led my pitch with the fact that Olivia is a retired scientist, and gathered 28 signatures in an hour. Then I spent 45 minutes selling One Step Away and made $25.75.
The president of the national NAACP has just attacked the democratic rights of his members to appease his politican friends.
https://blog.simplejustice.us/2019/04/28/naacp-to-missouri-black-men-your-lives-dont-matter/?fbclid=IwAR1cnuoRD0oVg2fO-tgo8GJOznpVkljx62jhTuvYwqHIlYR_Rc6v8_XDnwo
Our friends at Open Democracy have shown once again how closed their minds are with a story about the role of the "manosphere" in Donald Trump's election.
They do have a comments section and I tried to use it, but I just got an error message no matter whether I logged in with Disqus, Facebook, or Twitter and regardless of which browser I used. So instead I posted my comment with Gab's Web commenting tool Dissenter. Below is a link to what I wrote.
https://gab.com/stripey7/posts/eHl4K29vVFc4TnlVaEZMTSs0MWdtUT09
As part of a job application today, I was asked to write about one of two topics. The one I chose was, "Describe the most important criticism you've ever benefited from. Describe the event and explain how it changed you."
When I was 16-17 years old I was part of what I now regard as having been a political cult. Perhaps the most critical moment during my membership was when I stood alone in objecting to a proposed change in line on an upcoming ballot measure. All of the other ten members of the chapter were ready to vote for it.
The group was nominally democratic, but didn't really encourage independent thought, and I was already struggling with social anxiety. And so, despite having just argued that the proposed line change was unprincipled, I found myself saying I would abstain on the question. Immediately thereafter, another member leaned over and whispered to me that if I thought the line change was unprincipled, I should vote "no" on it, not abstain. I realized she was right and, fortified, voted no.
Looking back on it, I recognize this as the moment when I was in greatest danger of losing my intellectual and emotional freedom. I thank Mindy Brudno, wherever she is.
http://theeroticsalon.com/category/press-release/
In addition to my reading, I will use the opportunity of the intro to inform people of my new project writing a screenplay based on Hbrushed's short story, "Poor Beth."
I performed two song parodies at the salon in March, which got the biggest applause of the evening.
Today I attended my first meeting of the Philly Writers meetup group. I was hoping to get tips on writing my screenplay, and I wasn't disappointed. Based on what one of the other members said (which was, in turn, based on a book she's currently reading, Writing the Breakout Novel), I realized I have to add a couple scenes prior to what I'd initially conceived as the first, in order to make the protagonist sufficiently sympathetic and get viewers emotionally engaged with her.
https://www.futurity.org/spatial-reasoning-gap-2035092/
Note that the headline isn’t supported by the research being reported. What the lead author actually says is, “While our results don’t exclude any possibility that biological influences contribute to the gender gap, they suggest that other factors may be more important in driving the gender difference in spatial skills during childhood.” Meanwhile, other research has definitively established that brain sex differences exist in utero: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929318301245 (My thanks to u/SomeGuy58439 for linking to this on r/FeMRADebates.)
Please do not believe anything you read on the Internet.
-- Bared Affair, number 3.01, page 1
Recently, I read an erotic story online and was blown away by it.
I've been reading such stories for years, but it's the first time I found myself thinking as I read one, "This deserves to be made into a movie!" (The only time I'd thought that before was while reading Freedom Road, an historical novel by Howard Fast which, it turns out, actually was made into a movie.) "Magnificent" is the word that first came to mind, both for the very creative plot twists and the striking visual images suggested by the text.
Not long after I read this short story, I was actively imagining how the shots would look and the sequence of the scenes, including ones occurring in the story as flashbacks as well as new ones taking the place of exposition. In my mind the story went from "deserves" to must be made into a movie -- that it would be a cosmic injustice for this not to happen. And I have to do what I can to make this happen -- meaning, at the least, to write a screenplay. I guess this is the feeling I've heard reported by other writers before -- that a story is somehow "out there" and demands that they tell it -- but it's the first time for me.
I mentioned to my therapist that I was hesitating because of my lifetime problem of feeling intimidated by big projects, going back at least to fifth grade when I failed to turn in a report because I had been unable to stop procrastinating on it. She encouraged me to go ahead and just try to write a little every day, and I agreed to do that. And yesterday I actually got started -- I've now completed the "Dramatis Personae" page.
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