We're back from JoCo Cruise 2025. It was, hyperbole accepted, a transcendent experience.
The longer story is that the fam went on JoCo Cruise 2016, when Steve Jackson was a gaming sponsor. It was the last year that JoCo Cruise was a partial cruise charter -- it had about 2/3 of a Royal Caribbean ship. We came away thinking, "A floating nerd convention for a week is a great idea, but dang, we really hate big cruises." Stevie never went again -- he said the cruise was growing so fast that it was too expensive for a company his size to justify sponsorship -- and the kid started elementary school. Going again became impractical, but we had enough fun that I never unsubscribed from the mailing list.
Then came the election, and the cruise team sent a letter of encouragement to the list about standing firm in the face of despair and building intentional communities of love and acceptance. I knew I was in one of my most vulnerable moments, but that kind of message was a lifeline to a drowning man. I signed us up on the spot. We made some effort to see if we could get anyone we knew to go, but it's an expensive proposition that doesn't line up with any school breaks, and the cruise was leaving in less than 4 months.
It occurred to me than I'd dropped several grand and committed to pulling our kid out of school for a week for the most savvy marketing mail ever.
But my darker self was wrong. Every word in that email was woven in the personality of the event. It was beautiful. Also, now that the cruise was a full-ship charter, everything we'd hated about the 2016 cruise was dealt with. The sound was turned off in the casino (thank GOD). Up-selling was almost nonexistent. Every sitting area was filled with board games. Banners hung in the hallways saying, "Joy is an act of resistance." Someone left affirmations on post-it notes all over the ship. A really notable percentage of the attendees was out as trans. We also attended all the main theater concerts and loved all the guests.
It was exactly what we needed, and it was hard to come home. If anyone is considering doing this I can't recommend it enough. We can't go for 2026, but we're thinking hard on it for 2027. I can see why a lot of folks go every year.
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Ugh. My team has gotten sucked into doing workshops as part of an executive overview of artificial intelligence offered by the Sloane business school.
I love doing this stuff for kids, but with middle aged execs, the power is balanced the other way. The class is expensive, and they expect every problem to be handled. I can explain the blocks to them, but I can't solve every technical problem with their devices. It gets very stressful.
I always leave the workshop with an icky mix of embarrassment and inadequacy. Maybe I can get out of the next one.
More on the First Event boycott
Heather did some more investigation into the First Event Trans Conference boycott, and we turned up this: change.org/p/boycott-trans-com…
I can see why TCNE said these demands would cost $50k they didn't have. The top demand is to engage a BIPOC consulting firm to conduct diversity training.
They don't like the makeup of the board. It demands that a "fair and agreed-upon stipend" be made available to board members in order to enable a more diverse board. Read this as: The board is 8 people, probably all trans women, probably all on the older side. They are on the board because they volunteered to do it. Nobody in more diverse groups are volunteering, so they'll have to be paid to join.
"Allocate funding and resources to support workshops, performances, and events featuring diverse facilitators and artists, ensuring equitable compensation." Programming is provided by volunteers, and the programming is determined entirely by what community members volunteer to do. So, the demand is that people be paid to produce the programming the boycotters like better.
This is all about money. Lots and lots of it. It's a contrived conflict built around unmeetable demands so the organizer could look self-righteous and powerful.
This Chastity Bowick punched down a major trans power community in New England for a publicity stunt.
Fuck her.
ETA: They do have a video telling "their story" around this boycott. I hate watching videos. If somebody wants to watch it and tell me if it makes anymore sense than the stuff they put in text, please feel free to let me know.
ETA2: Oh, and it looks like Chastity Bowick runs a BIPOC consulting firm. I wonder why hiring one was the first demand. Gee..
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I care about First Event
I recognize that there are probably unflattering details I don't know about First Event and TCNE wrapped up in this boycott. I have no involvement with the board that runs it. But the experience of 5-year attendee is of beauty, positivity, and striving. It's been running over 40 years, starting as a crossdressers event (the first of the year, thus First Event) in a time when trans identities were deeply closeted and incredibly dangerous. TCNE once meant Tiffany Club of New England. Now it means Trans Club of New England. It hosts four generations trans people and allies, and it has lived as an event through unfathomable change in the experience of being transgender.
It is (massively) disproportionately white, disproportionately monied, disproportionately transfeminine, and disproportionately aging. Its programming swings wildly from year to year based on what's on the mind of the volunteers. I'm sure some of the folks on the board are assholes. I'm sure some of the boycotters have good points on what should be done differently.
But it has always strived to be better and more inclusive. There is a joy in all bodies and all identities that fills its space. And there is love for shellshocked cis partners of newly-out trans folks. So many fought for their marriages, winning or losing, that they want to do what they can to help someone else's marriage make it through. That meant, and still means, a lot to me. I'm in a place now to pay it forward, and I really try to do so.
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Back from First Event
I have had all of the emotions in day, and I am exhausted. I would like to break down how this year's First Event went. I have a long narrative in my head, but I don't think I'll make the space to write it. So here are the bullet points for Saturday:
- Arrived in time for the couple's roundtable run by the support group we've been involved with for the last ~2 years. It was lovely.
- Spent about a 1.5-hour lunch chatting in a little alcove with a couple from the support group. We covered a lot of ground about our lives, and I felt very connected.
- Learned that the attendance of the conference seemed small this year because it was: There was a massive boycott going on. Heather ran into a couple of protestors at the hotel and asked what they were upset about and got incoherent answers. I spent a chunk of the rest of the day trying to get some idea of what this conference, which has been a haven for me since Heather first came out, could have done (or failed to do) that would have been worth defanging one of the biggest, oldest trans conferences in this political climate. The best I could get was insufficient outreach to BIPOC trans folks and inadequate accommodation of disabled people. Aren't those ubiquitous problems of all things all the time? Why did it call for a boycott now?
One TCNE member said accommodating the demands of the protest would have cost them $50k they didn't have. This seems to connect with a claim Heather heard from one of the protesters that TCNE had chosen too expensive a venue, and the money would have been better spent on diversity outreach. The venue is expensive because it's in the middle of Boston on top of a T stop. That decision was made for accessibility and because the conference was growing. It's also been at that exact venue for at least 3 years.
Will there ever be a point in social justice where we spend more energy helping each other than eating each other?
And also, there are hostile forces seeding conflict within us. The organization behind the 2017 women's march had devoured itself within 2 years, and we now know that the internal fighting was at least partially shaped by information manipulation by our adversaries.
We are fucking chumps who never miss an opportunity to eat our own young. If we lose our Democracy, our rights, and our lives, people who think they are serving our interests by destroying our power structures in service to purity will be complicit in that end.
- Cried a while.
- Attended a presentation on theology of trans identity. Loved it. In question and answer, got a chance to vent about how hard inclusive churches are trying to be heard, but nobody hears us. I will go toe-to-toe on theology with any conservative Christian, and I am not afraid. They are winning the messaging war for reasons that have nothing to do with theology.
- Ran into an acquaintance from the annual Purity Springs retreat who was here for the first time. Really bonded. She's a Ryan Laukat game fan too! Also, they're in the first year of transition, and her wife is having a really hard time. I tried to conjure up some wisdom to help. Exchanged contact info. I hope we can set up a double boardgame date sometime. Also, I was introduced to her as a man, and this was the first time I'd seen her present as a woman. She looked smashing and so comfortable in her skin.
- The banquet food was quite exceptional. The Park Plaza hotel made some very good changes someplace since last I attended.
- Shared the table with a young cis-trans couple. The cis woman had been at the theology talk and told me that she found my rant really meaningful. We talked seriously about doing some kind of religion roundtable next year.
- The keynotes (there were four short speeches rather than a long one) were about this moment in the rights of trans folks from a variety of perspectives. Some of it was hard to hear. A lot of it was incredibly encouraging and uplifting at a time we needed to hear it.
- Took the train home.
OK, this was not that short. Trust me that it could have been a lot longer.
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A memory from today in 2022
This is something that Facebook is good for. If I shut down my account, I have got to get all the kid anecdotes downloaded somewhere.
Apparently on this day in 2022, @Lady Heatherington was not out on Facebook yet. There's been a lot going on in the last three years.
Autumn: What's the bubonic plague?
Terran: It was a plague in the Middle Ages that killed a third of Europe.
Autumn: Wow! That's a lot of people! It's like a worse COVID!
Terran: MUCH MUCH MUCH WORSE.
Autumn: Were you alive during this?
Terran: Uh
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A friend from church died suddenly last night. The email dropped into my inbox while I was sorting work email this morning and I kind of lost it.
This is a time that it's good to work in a small, flat-hieararchy team that is chronically underfunded. I've had a lot of hugs.
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As an associated thought, I'm long past joking about looking at pictures of what people ate for lunch. Id love to know what you ate for lunch, or what your kid/pet is doing, or the cool hobby you're working on. Also job anxiety or worry about loved ones or the high price of the eggs you just personally bought or the stupid road construction project on your commute that never gets done.
That stuff has value. Caring about people has value.
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Hmmm. I've put a lot of work into following and interacting with folks I'd really like to talk to, and even so this new feed is becoming hellish.
I really want social networking for connection, not news reports and the associated panic. Everyone has to process differently, and I can really see the different ways people approach this dreadful political moment.
I'm probably going to have to start unfollowing folks. Please understand that it's not because of any ill will.
Hmmm. I wonder if @Daniel Lowe has any insight - the Bluesky plugin has two check boxes in settings: Load timeline and Load pinned feeds.
I basically want to see exactly what I would see on the Bluesky feed, which is posts created by follows but not posts that are commented on by follows.
If I check Load timeline, I see posts commented on by follows, which rapidly clogs up my Friendica feed with random stuff. If I don't check it, I don't seem to see much of anything.
I cannot figure out what these two settings do, or indeed what the definition of feed v timeline is.
This may be more of a bluesky question and I don't have much experience with it. Bluesky does have the twitter model of interaction, though, where the timeline by default includes the posts that your follows reply to. I can imagine, maybe, an option where it ignores replies by follows, but we don't have that here. At least not yet.
I've separated my follows into multiple Circles, separating "followed" and "friends" and that's helped a bunch.
@Daniel Lowe Yeah, I don't expect you to know the answer to all this stuff, but you're more likely than about anyone else I can tag, and we're talking stuff obscure enough that Google searches don't help much.
I hate Twitter with the burning passion of 1000 flaming suns, and that's from before the Muskpocolypse. It's designed to discourage personal connection in favor of retweet mongering. I realize I'm in an oxymoronic position of trying to get Twitter clones to stop behaving like Twitter. But I'm trying at least to get the thing that is actually enriching to my life.
Dur. The web is what's giving me a problem. I'm going to disable the Dreamwidth plugin just in case that's the cause 🤔
Chrome says: This page isn’t working
klatch.club is currently unable to handle this request.
HTTP ERROR 500
Firefox says:
This page is in Quirks Mode. Page layout may be impacted. For Standards Mode use “<!DOCTYPE html>”.
network
Source map error: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource.
Resource URL: moz-extension://e65163e5-14b8-4f61-abcc-31f27f3e9254/model/static/DOMPurify/purify.min.js
Source Map URL: purify.min.js.map
I hit it 3 times with Firefox and 3x with Chrome, since I'm seeing different error styles.
Everything else is loading just fine. It just that one page.
The joys of working for free software
Susan Rati Lane likes this.
I did briefly consider writing back with our boilerplate: "We cannot offer support at this address. Please ask your question on our community forum at xxx. Staff and experts are there to help you with your problem."
It would have felt somehow ironic 😅
Experiment
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A bridge to nowhere
Hmm. So the Fediverse-Bluesky bridge seems to work for the most part, though some posts I should be seeing didn't make it through, and I'm not sure what the problem might be.
The primary problem seems to be that it's so weird to ask folks to follow TWO accounts rather than one that almost nobody notices the second part of the request.
OTOH, the remote-Bluesky plugin for Friendica seems to work very smoothly. Right now, I'm using that as a backup to read Bluesky posts and to comment, but I'm only posting through the bridge account.
I think I will probably need to just give up the bridge and switch to remote management of an actual Bluesky account, but I feel bad asking so many people to follow it. 🙄
Also -- someone has my username on Bluesky. I have been using echoweaver for over TWENTY YEARS and it has NEVER been taken. I know intellectually that I don't own it, but it still bugs me to no end.
The account I made over there is "echoweavertoo", which is a backup Google account I made aeons ago that is now used by my kid. Maybe I should do something like celebrities whose names get gakked and be "theREALechoweaver" or somesuch 😁
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Blowing bubbles
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Rumblings
A bit ago, I heard an unusual rumble out on the street. It was like a low-flying aircraft out of Logan but not quite the right pitch. I looked up out of the window to see if there was a big truck rumbling down the street, but it was empty.
Turns out it was an earthquake: earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquake…
(When I first clicked that link, the felt effects were marked, but I don't know how to bring that back. Maybe this is more descriptive: earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquake…)
Feeling Good While the World Burns
This is by my therapist, Dr. Sebastian Barr. It's a reframing that I really needed to hear, and I think most of my friends need it too.
Dr. Barr is an incredibly thoughtful man who I really wish I'd been seeing when Heather's transition was much more raw. (The first therapist I engaged with almost broke up our marriage. At some point I'll post about that.) He is proudly trans and also deeply compassion to cis anxiety around trans issues. All of that has absolutely nothing to do with the post I'm linking to, but I wanted to stick it in there anyway.
"I’ve so strongly linked caring and fighting to feeling bad that my automatic response to feeling this good is that I’m doing something wrong."
sebastianmbarr.substack.com/p/…
Feeling Good While the World Burns
A trans man and psychologist reflects on the role of pleasure amid tragedy and oppressionSebastian Barr (Sebastian Barr’s Substack)
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On leaving Facebook
I haven't killed my account over there or anything. I'll probably keep it in a dormant state because there are just too many situations where I might need it.
THAT SAID
I don't even need to get on a high horse about ethics or the new administration to be bailing on Facebook. My feed there is a disaster. Half of it is groups I didn't follow. I don't know when they added that "feature." Before the election, those unfollowed group posts were inflammatory political crap. Now, they're mostly AI-generated fake images.
And speaking of AI-generated fake images, I clicked ONE VIDEO on their video shorts and managed to train the algorithm that I want to see fake videos of AI-enlarged sea life. That's absurdly specific. How is that even a category?
I get the argument that Facebook holds so many relationships that will be hard to keep up otherwise, but it's gotten so hard to find content from any of those relationships that I'm not sure the argument makes sense anymore
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💖💖! This feels really good. I want to be able to chat with friends like this. It's just that, like a lot of people, falling off Facebook was so good for my mental health that I didn't want to try returning.
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Messing around with Friendica is fun
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Info for Bluesky folks
OK, so compatibility between Friendica/Mastodon/fediverse and Bluesky is not as straightforward as Friendica led me to believe. I think Friendica is a bit optimistic.
HOWEVER, Lifehacker showed me the answer.
If you would like to follow me from Bluesky, use: bsky.app/profile/echoweaver.kl…
If you would like me to follow YOU from Bluesky, follow bsky.app/profile/ap.brid.gy . Then let me know.
Here is the documentation: fed.brid.gy/docs#bluesky-get-s…
Hello Bluesky
This public post will hopefully show up through a fediverse-Bluesky bridge. My bridged Bluesky account should be:
bsky.app/profile/echoweaver.kl…
Susan Rati Lane (@echoweaver.klatch.club.ap.brid.gy)
[bridged from https://klatch.club/profile/echoweaver on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]Bluesky Social
Bridgy Fed
@Daniel Lowe have you looked at this service? fed.brid.gy/
It claims to connect Mastodon and Bluesky.
Sigh. you're not wrong.
I have a philosophical reason for banging on this so hard -- I think the only way that dropping Facebook can gain traction is if we can get a critical mass of people we want to interact with away from it. Consolidating all the Facebook alternatives is one way to make that happen.
I find Bluesky kind of creepy in a way I can't fully define. I hoped that the bridge would work so I wouldn't need to make an account there. But right now it has several times the number of users I want to interact with than the fediverse.
It's just another billionaire's pet project that is architected specifically to avoid criticisms of content sorting and moderation. "We federate so you can make your own!" These systems are all friendly until their growth curve stops, at which point they start the money extraction.
I think what's creepy is just seeing the same thing happen again and again.
Well, I have 10 "Contacts" now
Even though when I look at my list of contacts, only 8 are listed. I know I have a friend request out to Cindy, so I assume that's counted?
The default permissions are private, but I believe that a private post can only be seen by other Friendica users. All the bluesky users are marked as, "I follow them," rather than "mutual friend." Even though Friendica says it's sending contact requests to Bluesky users, I'm not clear if those requests are real or not.
This post is set to public, so everyone who knows how to find me here should be able to see it. Feel free to comment to say hello if that's a thing you can do...
Daniel Lowe
in reply to Susan Rati Lane • •