Prime Reading

sunshine_revival posted up their fourth topic, even as the heat continues to hammer the Northern Hemisphere, along with humidity, and many of us hide in our climate controlled buildings against it.

We’re heading towards the middle of July, and I hope the weather is treating you kindly this summer, no matter where you are. Any fun plans so far? I’ve spent this week on the mountain, reconnecting with family and staying in a pretty cool house. And talking about houses…

Challenge #4:

Fun House
Journaling: What is making you smile these days? Create a top 10 list of anything you want to talk about.

Creative: Write from the perspective of a house or other location.

( What makes you happy? )

More laughs and happiness later!

sunshine_revival has posted their second prompt. Let's see what they're up to.

The sun is just starting to disappear behind the horizon and crickets can almost be heard over the music and the laughter echoing through the carnival night. You can't see any stars yet, but the twinkling lights of an amusement ride are highlighting the graceful curves of a swan boat and the high arching hearts of the entrance. Grab the hand of a sweetheart or a sweet friend and embark on a journey through the…

Challenge #2:

Tunnel of Love

Journaling: The romance of summer! What do you love? Write about anything you feel sentimental about or that gets your heart pumping.

Creative: Write a love poem to anyone or anything you like.

Sentiment and love are…weird for me. Heart pumping is much easier, but that's usually related to fear and anxiety than happiness.

( Happiness and neurodivergence do not always get along with each other. )

Let's begin this entry with One Hundred reasons Not To Die, which starts with oranges and moves through the ways that communities come together in the face of disasters and help each other. Which stands in stark contrast to the ways that having more wealth than could possibly be earned or expended in one lifetime (at least, not without seriously screwing over everyone and everything you can) has altered the way that the richest think of how they should be allowed to rule without fetters, that their ideas are always the smartest, and the rest of us should be beholden to them for everything so that we can't stop them or tell them no.

Ask most people who go through a university program where there's at least some amount of sport, and they'll tell you that the sports parts of the university are almost always the things that get the most money and what they want the fastest. A non-tenured professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder doesn't make nearly as much as the football head coach, and very little of the money that the football program makes ever finds its way back to the academics, nor does it seem that the football program (or other programs) can be decalred to be self-sufficient and their budget allocations moved over to other places that could desperately use it, like salaries for those doing the teaching. This is the perpetual issue with universities that have well-known athletics programs - they bring in a fair amount of revenue, but a lot of that revenue then gets spent improving the athletics portions and the rest of the university is left to figure out how to get their own funding. (My university was at least fairly explicit that a lot of the revenue from their "revenue-generating" sports is used to ensure scolarships and other materials for the "non-revenue-generating sports," which means that the football program often provides the operating budget for much of the women's sports available at the university, which is not a terrible thing to do with that cash. It also helps that it was a university with a fair number of alumnae who have gone on to prestigious jobs, so there's a lot of regular donations and endowments that they can use for capital and operating expenses. They still don't pay everyone on the teaching side enough, though.)

Harvard University employed someone to find descendants of slaves who had a history with Harvard's founders and prominent people. For doing the job admirably, thoroughly, and well, Harvard fired him, because he was finding far too many people with the associations than what the university wanted to acknowledge. They were willing to peek beneath the hood, but not to fully look at what was found there.

( International Affairs, Domestic Fascism, and the occasional piece of good news )

Out of this post, McSweeney's says "Happy Father's Day, fools" with a post about just what it takes to be a dad.

And the need to remember that you don't know the gender of the person in front of you unless they've told you, which means a lot of habits that people have about gendering people based on things that don't actually say what their gender is need to be unlearned, both in person and in things like describing the contents of photos or other archival content.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)