...and it is, in fact, happy.

Hanging out on the bed this morning with my fuzzybutt little cat Oolong, I took some time to reflect on my 2013 and 2014 so far, which have been truly astoundingly happy.

I've been writing again (yay, keeping resolutions in advance!). Some long-overdue correspondence to people I care about, some WWIA (the fey novel). It helped, I found, to change up the viewpoint characters and let someone else speak for Chapter 4. Not sure if I'm going to keep it or not--gods is Tam-tam disturbing, but then again he's out of his head--but definitely a good exercise. I feel healthy as a writer--reading things that inspire me, making lists of poems I definitely need to read more of. And, actually, y'know, writing regularly. For the first time in a long, long time.

Did some martial arts over New Year's, which just confirmed that's where it's at for me in terms of exercise and spirituality.

I've been traveling. Went to a lovely burning-man-inspired party for New Year's with A., successfully turned what could have been poly problems into poly opportunities, saw three of my favorite movies (documentary: "Rivers & Tides," anime: "Mindgame" and "Spring & Chaos"), learned some new things about myself, spent some good time with somebody new I like (T.). More traveling scheduled for summer, specifically July, of this year--can't decide if I am doing Firefly and Readercon, or Firefly and a friend's wedding in CO. Is anyone else going to BMC reunion? I honestly don't want to go if my friends won't be there.

My relationship with myself seems healthier than it's been in a long time. Had a dream a few weeks ago about resentment over a close friend's losing weight that really stuck with me, and am turning that resentment into resolve--I want to wear all my genderqueer shiny outfits. Got a new piercing (pic.twitter.com/eKzYGvoDVG)--feel like I am that much closer to looking like the person I am. Am super-comfortable with my body now, due in part to how I've been prioritizing self-care and due in part to some New Year's experiences, and how I'm presenting, even at work, which can be problematic at times. Modern medicine is a frigging miracle. I am not really suffering from SAD this winter for the first time in about a decade.

Work is good. I got a hug and thank you from my boss, and that was really great. I flower under praise, especially because I know I am doing praiseworthy work. Still looking for jobs in the greater Boston area...

....speaking of which, I have made it my goal to move back to MA in 2015. I may not move directly back to Boston proper, but if all works out as I hope it will, that will be because I might be moving in with B. near the Berkshires. A three-hour drive into Boston, and having to deal with the headaches of a car, are small problems if they mean that I only have to drive three hours to see all my chosen-family and friends--the people who matter most to me. I've been driving six or more. It honestly depends on where I get a job. 

A recap of my relationships, for those playing along at home: B. I've known them for over a decade, but our relationship feels both old and familiar and new and deep. They are so joyful and beautiful and playful and giving and just plain good for me that I've recently been contemplating co-parenting a kid with them. A., who continues to be a sexy brilliant mad scientist, hiking partner, and pet. He is my stalwart. Five years has been so deep, and so fast. E., who I am experiencing all kinds of NRE with even though she's on the other side of the country. She continues to wake me up to gender, to spirituality, and to being authentically unafraid to live a complex life. T., a Canadian man <insert Canadian partner joke here>, who I am looking forward to seeing again this summer...

Would you buy a laptop desk/platform that also let your cat (or, I suppose, smallish dog or other animal) sit on your lap? I ask because I seem to have acquired two laptops, one of the black electronic kind and the other of the small brown fuzzy kind, and both of them want to share my lap. Surely I cannot be the only person with this problem who would like to let both laptops share the same space, or the only person with a keyboard full of cat hair as they try to share the same space at the same time. Would people be interested in such a product?

So, I normally like ThinkGeek's products (honestly, who can't like a company that sells things like lightsabers?) But I can't imagine what possessed them (or how legal it is) for them to sell live animals.

They say that these animals are a responsibly-bred offshoot of the Munchkin Cat, but the creation of the Munchkin Cat itself as a new breed has itself been surrounded by so much controversy that I really think it would be irresponsible for ThinkGeek to offer even regular Munchkins, much less a genetically engineered version of the same. If you want a cheap, easy-to-care for item that fits neatly inside your Ikea bookshelf and matches your pillows, you should get a plant, not a cat. Its enclosure isn't even recyclable!
I debated with myself about linking to this product page [warning: disturbing image], because I didn't want to legitimize this by linking to it, but I think it's important to see what we're up against.

How to call ThinkGeek out on their inhumane treatment of cats: I've written ThinkGeek's customer-service email letting them know that I plan on reporting them to the Humane Society, and am posting this so you can, too. Please feel free to copy and paste to your own site.

I am slowly beginning to start reading my lj friends list again, for those of you who were wondering when/if I would start to do this again. It's more of an experiment as to "do I really want to spend time on this?" than anything else, but since it's also one of the main ways my friends and I keep up with each other, keeping up with that is important to me. I just need to get better at skimming, I think.

In other news, I'm sick. I woke up at 6 am today after getting 6 hours of sleep, and then slept until 4 pm with no break. This usually means I'm really sick. I've also been having absolutely horrible headaches, but have remembered to take ibuprofen and they mostly seem to be gone now, as does the ear infection I was working on on Saturday. I *hate* getting my period, which also explains why I cried randomly on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and had trouble sleeping Wednesday evening, without knowing why.

( rant on reproductive health )

For my birthday, I treated myself to a movie Saturday afternoon, Rango [edit: Rango is rated PG], and realized two things:
- I didn't really like Rango. I thought the character design was interesting, and the commentary on water supply and control in urban desert areas was interesting (groundwater policy), and the end-credits had a fun design, but it had a lot of really problematic stereotypes (hicks, Native Americans) which it bought into because it was a movie in the mold of a traditional American Western, and that made the whole movie not really worth it.
- Lots of children's movies that are made with anthro animal characters now are the same movies that would have been made (or were made) with live human actors in the past, and if they were made with live human actors today, they would not get a G rating (I dunno if they'd get a PG rating, either, but in any case Rango was obviously aimed at children). Computer-generated animals can get hurt and have the bad guy fire at them and be trapped in a cell slowly filling with water and almost drown, and computer-generated animal women can be assaulted and threatened by the bad guys with sexual undertones, and computer-generated animals can be stereotypically wise Native Americans or stereotypically uneducated hicks, and it can be funny, and or/dramatic and full of action and shootouts, etc. Whereas if this same movie had been made with human live actors, people would have been more clearly able to see the problematic stereotypes and the violence for what they were, and this movie would have been rated PG-13 at the least. It's really interesting, actually--I found the movie to be a really compelling example of a genre that usually has to be marketed to adult viewers when human actors are used, but can be easily shown to children if all the problematic issues of having humans shoot and assault each other are glossed over by having geckos and snakes and rabbits replace human actors. I realized for the first time that the movie studios are able to market adult plots to children in the guise of anthromoporphic CGI, so they're able to tell stories that they couldn't with human actors in the same roles. (This realization was the reason I kept watching this movie after being disappointed in the stereotyping; indeed it was the stereotyping that led me to this realization). This is good, on one level--kids' movies can have humorous, complicated plots with a lot of drama and quick wit. But on the other hand, why is it so easy for adults and children alike to overlook stereotyping when the actors are groundhogs, as opposed to humans? Then I realized that almost *all* the children's movies I see are about anthro characters. Part of this is the CGI uncanny valley and the long tradition of anthro animals in childrens' fare and the expense of live actors vs CGI, of course, but I think the studios are telling stories with animals in place of humans partly because they can get away with doing things with animals they could never in a million years do with human characters, and still get that G rating and do a lot of merchandising besides.

I was reading this Scientific American blog post on how much it would cost to save "the world's remaining 3,500 wild tigers." The article is titled "Cost to save the world's tigers: $10,000 each per year (or just pennies a day!)" I read the article to find out two things:

- how much money was needed to save the tigers
- how I could contribute that money

I saw these numbers:
42% more than is already spent
$35 million/year
$10,000/cat
$47 million/year
$82 million/year
$10 k per cat
$20,000 or more for an illegal tiger skin
$50,000 or more for a poached tiger carcass
$35 million a year

I read these sentiments:
"The price tag to save one of the planet's great iconic species is not a high one," said Alan Rabinowitz, president and CEO of the wild-cat conservation organization Panthera[...]

a drop in the bucket

a fraction of the profits generated by Apple's OS X Tiger operating system

I like tigers. And I don't have much money. I assume that most people are in this boat. When someone who likes tigers and doesn't have that much money reads an article like this, they find out only how overwhelming the job is, and don't get any idea of how they personally could contribute to that $35 million dollars/year. In this article, there is not a header saying "how can I help?" There is not a "donate to save the tigers" button.

There are five different organizations mentioned--Panthera, the World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the IUCN, and the World Bank.

The names of these organizations are hotlinked above, with links to their tiger-conservation efforts in particular when there is one, in order to enable you to find out more about the organizations' tiger-related efforts and donate, but they are not even hotlinked in the Scientific American blog post. What's hotlinked in the article? A prepared media statement.

People come to read this article prepared to find out how to give money to save tigers.
They are informed about the massive scope of the problem, but not how to solve it. So people close the tab and play Farmville again--because we have placed easily-findable buttons everywhere that make it easy to play Farmville all the time even if that's not what you want to do, but we have placed no easily-findable buttons anywhere that make it easy to donate to tigers all the time.

Even if that's what you want to do, you'll find it too complex and give up:
Anyone who wanted to help had to overcome both psychological hurdles (how much it was going to cost! How little my monies would help!) and technological ones (Typing "panthera" into Google, then finding the big cat donation page three layers deep into the site, then typing in info, then clicking send, was the easiest and most straightforward procedure).

This happens a lot, I think, in popular science reporting.

How could articles like this actually help tigers (3,500 left), or the Bois Dentelle tree (2 (yes two) left), or the Psathyrella cystidiosa mushroom, which is only found in a few places in Minnesota?

What could be changed? These articles could say something like this:
$35 million a year is needed to save these tigers. That's $95,890.42/day. But if 350,400 people give $99.95 right now, we will raise more than we need to save all the tigers. Donate now!

Why doesn't all science journalism [clarification: popular science journalism, not information in a scientific journal] do this already, after (of course) appropriate ethical vetting to reduce conflicts of interest? Does anyone know? Why is there a "tweet this article to your friends" button on each post, but no "donate" button on any post?

And seriously, it's only 27 cents a day for a year.