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A Dalek spins around repeatedly and then falls down a hole in the spacedeck that somebody carelessly left lying around

Open Thread with New Year Feels

tigtog

Regretting nothing featuresĀ for this week’s Open Thread. How does that gibe with your New Year recovery/resolutions? Please natter/chatter/vent/rant on anything* you like over this weekend and throughout the week.

A Dalek spins around repeatedly and then falls down a hole in the spacedeck that somebody carelessly left lying around
I Regret Nothing
(‘tho I would like a few words with this spacecraft designer)

So, what have you been up to? What would you rather be up to? What’s been awesome/awful?
Reading? Watching? Making? Meeting?
What has [insert awesome inspiration/fave fansquee/guilty pleasure/dastardly ne’er-do-well/threat to all civilised life on the planet du jour] been up to?

* Netiquette footnotes:
* There is no off-topic on the Weekly Open Thread, but consider whether your comment would be on-topic on any recent thread and thus better belongs there.
* If your comment touches on topics known to generally result in thread-jacking, you will be expected to take the discussion to #spillover instead of overshadowing the social/circuit-breaking aspects of this thread.

20 thoughts on Open Thread with New Year Feels

  1. A friend of mine has a cat who is severely ill. She has renal failure and heart murmur, and has recently developed what may be a pleural effusion, a rapidly fatal condition. My friend has been trying her hardest to raise money for the cat’s medical expenses (to the point of using up her own health care savings, which is all the money she has). The treatments will help prolong her cat’s life by several years. If she doesn’t get the care she needs, she will certainly die.

    I feel really bad about asking, but if anyone is able to help out, she and the cat would really appreciate it. Here’s the GoFundMe page for donations, although my friend says that it would be preferrable if she received donations through PayPal (the address is cryptowomyn@gmail.com) with a note added saying it’s for the cat. My friend has almost reached her goal so any help in reaching it would be deeply appreciated. I wouldn’t have made this comment if my friend’s cat wasn’t in an already desperate situation.

    1. It’s not much at all but I kicked in a few bucks via paypal. Not being able to take care of a pet is one of the most heartbreaking things in the world and I remember how helpless it made me feel.

  2. ATTENTION NEW YORKERS (or anyone who will be in NYC in January:)

    There, I got your attention! I am moving overseas this month and have made the decision to pare my library down to two boxes of books and will get rid of the rest (hopefully a charity will be thrilled to cart them off.)

    However, I thought, I’d rather the books go to people that actually want them, so I posted pictures of the bookshelves here. I used a DSLR to take the pics so you can read most of the titles by zooming in.

    If anyone would like any of these books and can come to brooklyn in January email me at stuwhoknew@me.com – also, if anyone knows of a worthy charity that would want them, please let me know in this thread.

      1. I started dating someone new a few months ago and we cuddle on my couch opposite my bookshelf. I have the entire Southern Vampire Mysteries book set (i.e. the terrible books “True Blood” is based on).

        Mostly, I want to say that I understand your book-judging worries, haha.

    2. Hey! I can’t zoom in close enough to read your titles, and the light is reflecting in a weird way, but HousingWorks is a great organization that takes books. I’m not sure if they pick up or not, but you can get in touch with their bookshop here.

      1. Excellent, Thanks for the HousingWorks tip…I just looked at dropbox and the pic that first comes up can’t be zoomed in on, you have to download the original. I definitely can read the titles on about 90% of the books when I open the jpegs in Preview or Photoshop and zoom in.

  3. My dad has restricted up my access to health insurance as a result of signing me up for some kind of family insurance in addition to my Medi-Cal. The family insurance is for anyone he has claimed me as a dependent. And since apparently he still claims me under his tax returns despite vowing to never live in his house ever again, there is a conflict in my record that renders my Medi-Cal unusable. Since I’m an adult I have no obligation to be my dad’s dependent so the process of cancelling the insurance itself is relatively easy.

    What’s hard is that I need to be able to convince him to cancel his coverage of me, and if he has even the slightest suspicion that it’s related to me needing my own insurance to pay for HRT prescriptions, he might make the situation way worse. If things like this continue, prescription costs are going to continue to accumulate, especially if I get a raise in my dosage, which I really need.

    I also won’t be able to get bottom surgery for a very long time. I am already facing difficulty in finding a therapist (I need to see a therapist for a certain amount of time to qualify for the surgery) – now I have all of this insurance trouble to deal with as well. And I certainly can’t cover the surgery out of pocket.

    1. The family insurance is for anyone he has claimed me as a dependent. And since apparently he still claims me under his tax returns …

      Maybe a dumb question, but: if you are supporting yourself, yet he is claiming you as a dependent on his tax returns, isn’t that tax fraud? If you are filing your own tax returns and marking yourself as an exemption (at least on your US return), then he can’t claim you as a dependent. The computer match-up of returns should kick his return out right away.

      I don’t know if that’s exactly what is going on, or whether it would help to press the point, of course.

  4. Hi All,

    I am really concerned about the lack of input and participation here in the past number of months. I wrote about it once before and there was a small discussion about the difficulties of running this site.

    This is not a criticism and I know sites come and go over the years. But Feministe is such a powerful, important contributor to feminist discussion online and I hate to see it fade away like this.

    I’m a male, and while I’m committed to the ideals of feminism, it doesn’t make me appropriate for contributing here.

    There are a lot of great smaller and larger feminist focused sites, but I don’t know that any covered the range and depth that you do here.

    This is my request to start a conversation here about how to reinvigorate the site.

    1. Andrew, I for one still feel very much like a guest on Jill’s blog. I have my own blog where I blog more frequently, here I mostly just try to keep the community threads ticking over.

      I haven’t discussed it with the other bloggers, but I suspect that perhaps none of us really feel like we “own” Feministe enough to take full charge of it now that Jill has stepped back from the blog due to her time commitments with her work at Cosmopolitan etc.

      Unlike sites which were conceived from the start with a structured editorial team such as Feministing or Jezebel, Feministe has never had a plan. It just had Lauren and then Jill blogging prolifically and pertinently back when the blogosphere was tiny, and as their readership grew they invited some other bloggers to join in, some for longer and more prolifically than others. Never having had a Plan A means that there was definitely no Plan B for losing Jill’s input, and going from at least one and often several posts a day, to days and days with no posts at all, has obviously shrunk our readership.

      Essentially we need more authors willing to blog for us, whose work the remaining bloggers know well enough to trust, and who will post frequently enough that on balance from the author pool there will be a new post on more days than there is no new post. How do we find those authors? I don’t know. I don’t read as many blogs as I used to read now that there are so many other platforms out there, and most of the other blogs I do read are by people who don’t comment here at Feministe, so if they don’t comment here then why would they want to write here?

      1. BTW, if any bloggers are lurking who might be interested in writing for Feministe but don’t necessarily want to discuss that in a Feministe thread, then please just let me know so we can talk about how much involvement you’re looking for etc. Hit me up with a DM on Twitter or an email via my about.me page and I’ll bounce it around with the rest of the Feministe bloggers.

      2. Thank you for replying, Tig.

        I know there was a lot of WoC fallout last year around various issues, but I wonder if that wouldn’t be a good place to start. Specifically invite various known WoC to do guest post here.

        It doesn’t need to be focused there, but it could be start and a way to directly address some of the past criticism.

        There are a number of different feminist blogs I read from time to time, but I always saw Feministe as a kind of “feminist central” where whatever the issues of the day were, they would end up being discussed here.
        That’s the strength I see in Feministe.

      3. As I wrote that, I realized it would likely need Jill’s blessing to do that. If Jill has unofficially moved on, would she not be okay with another of you taking over OR seeking a new primary moderator?

        1. 1. Andrew, I’m not comfortable speaking for Jill, nor about whom we have or have not already approached. I’m also not comfortable with the idea that Feministe has any right to expect WoC authors to fix Feministe’s previously evidenced privilege problems, and your suggestion is also erasing the existing WoC authors who have written for Feministe and who still have active logins here but are no longer contributing, and Feministe doesn’t have the right to expect them to fix what’s broken either.

          2. Please understand that there’s a huge difference between moderating a site (dealing with comments) and editorial for a site (dealing with content). Moderation can be challenging at times but it’s mostly a background thing (blogstorms excepted). Being the chief editor of a site with the sprawling history of Feministe needing to be taken into account? Not a background thing. Also not a thing that has a decent budget to compensate someone for the time it eats up by not being a background thing – the ads pay for the server overheads, and when we had higher viewcounts there was a bit of pocket money for everybody on the team based on each person’s number of posts authored and hours spent moderating. Someone with the requisite experience to be a chief editor for a site like this has the right to expect better recompense than that.

        2. For my part… what tigtog said, basically. Part of the problem is a relative lack of bloggers so we can make sure posts are going up even when some are contributing less than others. (Case in point…) But a bigger part is the lack of an overarching structure — in the recent past, that was basically Jill, and in her absence we’re working through the process of Who We Are and How Things Work Sans Jill. Currently, I feel like tigtog does, that this remains Jill’s Blog and I’m just a contributor. Whatever it takes to resolve that is going to involve a lot of back-end discussion (which we are having) and, in the end, probably someone interested in and capable of taking this on as a near-full-time responsibility. So… that.

        3. Tig & Caperton,

          Totally understandable. Having not run a blog, I have no idea what all it entails.
          And I certainly meant no offense in my comment about WoC writers. It wasn’t at all meant to ignore the contributions that have been made and I didn’t meant to imply that new articles from WoC would somehow right a past wrong.
          It was more a stray thought about inviting existing writers in to a central area to bring increased focus both here and to them as individual writers.

          I wish you well in hashing this out and appreciate all that you do to keep the doors open.

  5. Bess Myerson has died at 90. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/nyregion/bess-myerson-miss-america-and-new-york-official-tarnished-in-scandal-dies.html .

    Despite all the “scandal” later in her life, she meant a lot to people like me, once upon a time, including when she was the NYC Commissioner of Consumer Affairs. I remember my mother explaining to me who she was when I was a child, with pride. I had no idea, until I read her obituary, of the problems with anti-Semitism that she faced after becoming Miss America in 1945.

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