Friday Linkdump wants you to fear the SUPERMOON for its own amusement

That's right. Tomorrow night? SUPERMOON.

For some reason the SPACE.com staff feel compelled to tell us that, "Though the unusual appearance of this month's full moon may be surprising to some, there's no reason for alarm, scientists warn. The slight distance difference isn't enough to cause any earthquakes or extreme tidal effects, experts say."

Wait, what? Scientists are warning us that there is no cause for alarm? How did that conversation actually go?

"So tell us about the supermoon."

"Well, it's basically a full moon that occurs when it's at a near point in its orbit."

"Makes sense. Hey, since the moon affects things like tides, is there anything to worry about?"

"Nope. The moon orbits like this all the time. And really, a full moon isn't actually bigger than a gibbous or a crescent moon. That's just light and shadow."

"So I shouldn't be afraid if I look up and am surprised by an exceptional full moon?"

"Definitely not. Don't be afraid...or else!"

"..."

Also, how are we terrified by the moon in 2012? People, I am the most tree-hugginist and dirtworshippin' of tree-hugging dirt worshipers and I am not reading portents, ghastly or otherwise, into this. Because, you know, I have a basic elementary school-level working knowledge of my solar system and how orbits work. Is this Hollywood's fault? Did some fringe religious sect say something particularly irrational when I wasn't looking? I'm reasonably certain that when I go outside on Saturday night, I will not look up and see this:

So yes. Thank you, SPACE.com, for the most sublime moment of cognitive dissonance I've had in a few days.

And now, links:

- Mo. lawmaker says he is gay, denounces school bill. Rep. Wyatt is both a Republican and to my knowledge is not running for reelection, but hopefully this will be a useful perspective moment for the idiots who want to pass a "don't say gay" bill here in Missouri.

- A Closer Look Inside Hello Kitty Airlines. Otherwise known as my newest and most urgent reason to play the lottery...

- I Like Ike. A federal judge in Virginia has ruled that clicking "like" on social networking platforms is "not the kind of substantive statement that has previously warranted constitutional protection." Bizarre, and possibly a little scary, though not nearly as scary as the giant blood-sucking moon that intends to consume you on Saturday.

- Lion tries to eat baby at zoo, is stymied by glass wall. Nature: adorable and hilarious in tooth and claw.

- My So-Called Ex-Gay Life. Last month Robert Spitzer, a psychiatrist and the author of a 2001 paper that proponents of "reparative therapy" have used to support their belief that gay people can be converted to straight, made a public statement that his study was flawed, and has retracted the study and apologized to the LGBTQ community. This is a big deal for a lot of reasons, but I think Gabriel Arana's article outlining not just Spitzer's retraction but his own experience as someone who attempted treatment is exceptionally powerful, and an important read. If you can make time for it, do.

Just, uh, get to it before Saturday night. You've been warned. By scientists.

Friday Linkdump emerges from the grave in search of twigs and berries

Wow, I did not intend to leave you all a couple of weeks of radio silence. We're not quite out of the woods just yet -- it's a busy time of year, and I'm adding to that busy by building a chicken coop -- but my fingers aren't so broken today that I can't bring at least a side dish to this party.

- The House just passed CISPA 248-168. While it was mostly carried by Republicans, about 40 Dems joined in. Now might be a good time to tell your Senator that random people shouldn't be permitted to read your e-mail without a warrant. (Don't know about CISPA? Here you go.)

- Insufficient Sleep Affects 30% Of US Workers. At least 15% of those workers are Darren Criss if Tumblr is to be believed.

- Employment Opportunity Commission Ruling Protects Transgender Individuals From Workplace Discrimination. I have literally spent days trying to articulate exactly how I feel about this beyond stunned and unmoored. The short version is that this is really exciting, and I'm proud that the EEOC unanimously agrees that I should be able to work, but I think we still desperately need ENDA in order to a) more explicitly protect transfolk, b) to protect LGB folk, and c) to protect straight and cisgendered folk from the perceptions of others. Also, this is absolutely something that could potentially be affected by case law. This is a foot in the door, not a complete victory.

- While I'm thinking about case law, Reuters has a freaking awesome tool for exploring SCOTUS cases from 2011-2102. Yes, I'm enough of a nerd that I just described this tool as freaking awesome.

- Oh, and while I'm thinking about things germane to gender expression, take 20 minutes of your life to treat yourself to this awesome video of Melissa Harris-Perry interviewing Mel Wymore, Mara Keisling, and Kate Bornstein about gender, gender identity and expression, etc. You might just learn something useful, and will be amazed that this actually aired on MSNBC.

- OMG, dog and cheetah BFFs.

Three weeks, four chickens

I realized today that I hadn't taken any proper, non-phone photos of the chickens. Five minutes spent implementing some state-of-the-art bedsheet and cardboard box technology later (followed by significantly more time spent actually photographing, cropping, resizing, etc.), I am delighted to bring you these pics of my girls in their current, semi-feathery condition. Behold!

Susan (aka Sweet & Sour)

Barbara (aka Ranch Dressing)

Vicki (aka Honey Mustard)

Katarina (aka BBQ)

Today's lesson in chickening came in the form of mealworms. Namely that chickens apparently love mealworms more than anything else ever. If you fill your palm with them and stick them into a chicken-filled enclosure, you basically get to experience a combination of total chicken adoration and what Hitchcock must have had in mind when he was working on The Birds.

Considering this little tub of 100 mealworms ran me about $3, I suspect I'm going to have to start raising the little buggers...

No linkdump is good linkdump

It's been an odd week, and I think needed a little bit of a break from playing aggregator. Consider this a reprieve from giant lists.

Still, it wouldn't be a Friday if I didn't have something to share, so you should go check out the interview I did over at Writers' Tea Party about The World in a Thimble, my novella from (re)Visions: Alice. They also talked with Kaye Chazan, Amanda Ching, and Hilary Thomas, so if you're curious about how we all approached things differently, you should stick around for theirs as well!

Over at Not Broadcast Safe, I've posted a review of Bill Maher's Religulous. Be warned: I do use the words "assless chaps" at one point.

Have a great weekend!

Captain Chook is climbing a mountain. Why is she climbing the mountain?

Roommate: Okay. I think I've almost got this. Australorp, Easter Egger, and Barred Rock. What's the other one?

Me: Buff Orpington, space hero.

Roommate: Action hero, yeah.

Me: Buff Orpington went to school with Tek Jansen and Zapp Brannigan.

Friday Linkdump is your feathery friend

Well, the chickens have officially been named. We ended up going with Doctor Who companions in the end, though the sauce nicknames also seem to have stuck. Thus, the Easter Egger is now Susan (aka Sweet & Sour), the Barred Rock is Barbara (aka Ranch), the Buff Orpington is Vicki (aka Honey Mustard), and the Australorp is Katarina (aka BBQ).

Katarina, incidently, is definitely the chicken most likely to engage in airlock heroics.

Also, ever since somebody mentioned that Buff Orpington sounds like a pulp sci-fi hero, I can't stop thinking about that idea. I really should consider asking my friend Jean about illustrating that for me...

Speaking of brainmeats, it's been a productive week here in blogland! I've posted writeups of The Hunger Games, Repo! The Genetic Opera, and Marco Polo (serial 004 of the epic classic Doctor Who rewatch) over at Not Broadcast Safe.

I also posted some thoughts about Jimmy Carter's departure from the Southern Baptist church over the treatment of women over at The Land, Sea, and Sky, which rather turned out to be more about my thoughts re: individuals' responsibilities within their faith communities, but there you go.

Good times.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Internet:

- Music from places that aren't the United States or Western Europe: I found BIGBANG's "Fantastic Baby" video very enjoyable indeed, while this badass combo of Tuvan throat singing and Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" kicked my ass.

- For all three of you who have yet to see it, the first Doctor Who Series Seven preview. Yeah, I've been humming a particular musical theme all week. Why do you ask?

- From LifeHacker, an interesting thought: Instead of Saying "I Don’t Have Time," Say "It’s Not a Priority." Now, I have feelings about this. On a normal weekday, I have about three hours (usually 6-9 PM) that aren't already spoken for outside of sleep, work, basic self-care/hygiene/nutrition, or writing. Some nights, I don't even get those hours. By that standard I may well genuinely not have time to do everything that needs to be done, or would be nice to do, etc. On the other hand, the way I use that time (and even the time broadly allotted to various tasks)? Well, it's all about choices, isn't it? At the very least, trying this language on could yeild interesting (and probably uncomfortable) insights about what one's real priorities are? Then again, I have in the past done myself terrible harm by telling myself "your X is not so broken you can't also do Y." So. Approach with caution?

- How To Be Creative. Another thing I'm wearing my skeptic pants about, because while the article is very slick in its way, what does it really tell us? How to prime your brain. As someone who's very good (at least in theory) at priming his brain, I can genuinely say that the actual labor of creativity is not as easy as 20 minutes on YouTube. If it were, I'd have written a hundred libraries' worth of books. Instead...well, instead I've seen an awful lot of funny videos on YouTube. Er.

- Some soldiers in Afghanistan have apparently begun adding "infidel gear" to their equipment. While I certainly have a deep, personal understanding of that impulse to act out in frustration in the face of all kinds of pressures, this is pretty much the very definition of bad choices.

- Why hello there, 2012 Clarke Award shortlist. Or, as I like to call it, that list of books that will only make my to-read stack just that much less possible to scale.

- Banana flavored scorpion vodka. Or, as I like to call it, something I am actively refusing to put in my mouth.

- Transgender Miss Universe Canada Finalist Jenna Talackova Disqualified From Competition. And yes, the comments are just as appalling as you'd expect them to be. Still, if you follow the story around a bit, there's a lot of support for Talackova out there right now, too.

- Pictures From a Battlefield: the men and women who started ACT UP.

- “Clicktivism” vs. “real” activism – everybody needs to just sit down.

- While I could live without the whiff of dismissiveness in the headline, this news about IDW making Womanthology becoming an ongoing series makes me very happy indeed.

I now return you to your previously scheduled Friday afternoon.

On the naming of chickens

Seven days ago, I brought home four baby chicks. This is exciting for plenty of reasons, not least because I've been reading about chickens, planning, and so on since last summer.

So far, keeping chickens has been fantastically enjoyable. Baby chicks are cute and fun to watch, and their space and infrastructure needs are pretty minimal. The degree of day-to-day attention needed won't really ramp up that significantly when they get older, either from what I can tell. Leeping a small flock just isn't particularly intense. These are, after all, recreational chickens of the "pets with benefits" variety. I'm in it for the eggs.

One thing I was particularly stubborn about, though, was refusing to name them before I met them. I didn't want to impose something on them unfairly without getting to know them first. Great in theory, but in practice? I'm stumped. I'm probably overthinking, and too attached to the idea that I need to do theme names. They are, after all, a flock.

(The roommate has suggested BBQ, Ranch, Honey Mustard, and Sweet & Sour. He's helpful like that. Because I am a terrible person -- I refer to them in the collective as "The Nuggets" -- I even kind of know which ones those names should go with.)

So far, the two ideas that seem to have stuck are a) giving them full Roman names, and b) naming them after female Doctor Who companions. The latter is easy -- Susan, Barbara, Vicki (I could sneakily refer to her as Cressida!), and Katarina -- while the former is a little more complex. Still, I've worked it out: praenomens Prima, Secunda, Tertia, and Quarta, I can use Gallina for the gens, and I've even picked out some descriptive cognomens.

While the girls don't seem to have a strong opinion either way -- when I asked, they seemed more interested in pecking at the grocery ad on the newsprint I'd just laid down in the brooder -- I'm not sure I'm quite ready to settle. I mean, what about "little old lady" names like Esther, Gertrude, Dora, and Mildred? Those could be fun! Or maybe chicken-edible herbs and wildflowers? Henbit, Violet, Chickweed, and Dandelion could be very nice indeed...

I am apparently an indecisive chicken-namer.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Amusing Commentary? Gentle mockery?

Friday linkdump has been through the wars

Still playing catch-up with my life, but at least I've made sure that write-ups for "The Daleks" and "The Edge of Destruction" happened. I keep telling myself that all progress is good progress.

And now, links:

- Some of this week's excitement came in the form of my first flock of chickens arriving. I've got four pullets, which I brought home as day-old chicks on Tuesday. It's crazy, because I've spent a year reading up on chickens and behavior and care and suddenly holy crap, actual chickens. My source of sanity? Backyard Chickens. Super, super useful.

- I spend an unusual amount of time thinking about how ideas mutate when they're transmitted outside of their original context, culture, or language. My favorite example of this right now is a marvelous quote attributed to Goethe, usually rendered "Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." And it is his words, sort of, except that the context is entirely wrong and the idea has been extrapolated entirely beyond recognition.

- The Sex-Swapped Anime Version of Harry Potter That Never Existed. People, I love this like burning.

- Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read? I've had conversations with friends about how I'm reluctant to move to tablet computing over paper in terms of keeping notes and such because there are elements of the tactile experience (and how I ultimately process information) that are missing for me. And, thinking about it, a lot of those tactile cues are part of the reading experience for me as well. Maybe we're still learning to figure out how to find tactile cues in e-books?

Friday Linkdump is feeling much better, really

I had so many good blogging intentions this week, and then promptly got nailed by the Space Virus. Oof.

Still, I'm making progress digging myself out of this hole. My write up of "The Daleks" will go up over at Not Broadcast Safe either tonight or tomorrow, and I've got some other stuff in the works. This makes me happy. Not as happy as I'd be if I'd done everything I'd intended to this week, but...

And now, linkery-pokery:

- More than Half of Mississippi GOP Primary Voters Believe the President is Muslim. I think it's telling that something like this, which was more than debunked back in 2008, is still going around, and is more prevalent among Evangelicals.

- Go Away, I’m Reading. As if I needed a reason to reaffirm my long-term relationship with various office supply stores, somebody has designed book covers that say exactly what I'm thinking when somebody invades my reading time. <3

- So. Invisible Children. It's a thing. But wow, there are problems with 'Stop Kony'. According to some folks, very big problems. Also, let's not forget that this is Uganda, where the government -- aided and abetted by white American Evangelicals -- keeps trying to give LGBTQ people the death penalty. So. Still, problematic though the thing itself is, how amazing is it that this is actually a conversation?

- The Reproduction of Privilege. As someone with a lot of love for higher ed, and strong feelings about the benefits that access to college has had for me as a person, this whole article depresses me beyond words.

- Sherlock: the Case of the Invisible Women. This and Cat Valente's post about the focused erasure of women from stories in modern literature have me thinking really seriously about some of the long fiction I'm working on, and how not to fall into this trap, even if I happen to be writing a male protagonist.

- Church Puts Legal Pressure on Abuse Victims’ Group. Obviously this isn't all sides of the story, but it looks bad. Catholic friends: I love you, but your leadership genuinely frightens and enrages me.

- One-Way Wantonness. That misogyny is rampant even in the liberal media is a thing is worth talking about because misogyny is wrong. If we take our values seriously, we must also look to our discourse. Still, Limbaugh strikes me as a special case in that, unlike Maher and Olbermann, he pointedly used language in the literal sense in support of an actual political movement to strip women of their rights in terms of access to health care. While bad behavior on the Left is a problem, it's a different problem. So.

Friday linkdump is maximally informed

This week's Not Broadcast Safe offerings have been all about the True/False Film Festival. Check out write-ups of my adventures on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday

Meanwhile, other people did all kinds of interesting things elsewhere on the Internet:

- Over at The Atlantic, we learn that Reading the Privacy Policies You Encounter in a Year Would Take 76 Work Days. So. That's comforting.

- Shockingly Awesome Surreal Sculptures by an artist named artist Nancy Fouts. The photography is great, but I'd love to see some of these up close.

- Some of the best commentary I've seen on the current contraception coverage debate reminds us that, for those of us insured through an employer, health insurance isn't a courtesy, but part of a worker's wages. Women work. Women pay taxes. The whole "paying for women to have sex" thing is a red herring at best. Meanwhile, The Daily Show has also been bringing the awesome, both with Jon Stewart's take on the Rush Limbaugh "slut" thing, and by having Planned Parenthood's Cecille Richards on as a guest as well.

- A study has shown that the QWERTY keyboard may be affecting how we feel about words. Basically, people tend to preference words that use more letters that appear on the right-hand side of the keyboard (and are thus easier to type if one is right-hand dominant). I guess it's a good thing we've got three vowels over there...

- Jim C. Hines' The Wolves, the Pig, and the Retarded Bunny. I'm possibly preaching to the choir here, but it's well worth a read.

- And hey, while you're reading genre authors making social commentary, swing on over to Whatever and see John Scalzi say a lot of sensible things about Kirk Cameron's assertions about homosexuality on Piers Morgan, including how free speech actually works. (And seriously, Kirk Cameron? What on earth is he doing in the national consciousness again? Go away, Kirk Cameron!)

- Speaking of speech, some employers, agencies, and educational institutions are demanding Facebook passwords and/or that applicants log in and click through during interviews. Because, wow, that doesn't curtail speech or invade privacy or cause individuals to make disclosures about their private lives that should not be part of a job interview at all.

- Hey, you in the headdress! As someone who, as a child, did not understand these things because I was actively encouraged by my scouting organization appropriate native cultures, I'm glad this exists. Knowing is half the battle! [insert musical fanfare here.]

- Discovered this week that the Edgar Allan Poe house in Baltimore is under threat of closure after being defunded by the city. Want to help? Donate here.

- Why "Sex Change" Surgery is Medically Necessary, Revisited. Incidentally, if you get insurance through your employer, one way to be a good ally is to a) find out if your coverage includes hormone treatments and gender-affirming surgeries and, b) if not, demand it be included. With transfolk being all of maybe .2% of the population, we're a surprisingly inexpensive population to extend equal coverage to (and, like women, we're also workers and taxpayers who deserve to get the full benefit of our efforts). Plus I'm willing to bet most transfolk are better workers when we're less stressed, miserable, and tired from struggling with our physical and legal status...

- No, the Equinoxes are not magical days upon which brooms and eggs are magically more able to balance on their ends. Next!