My job may end at the end of the summer. I work for MIT App Inventor. We're technically a research team at MIT under computer science education luminary Hal Abelson, but we're mostly a haphazard production team that maintains and enhances free software. We do very little research, but we haven't been able to build a solid place to go away from MIT. MIT feels untouchable, but it has really been hurt by the federal hostility. My team doesn't use federal grant money, so it seemed like we were going to be able to keep going, but it really only delayed our damage by a year. Now the cascade effect of the damage to the funding environment has hit us. We just haven't been able to raise the money to make payroll this year. I was told a couple of weeks ago that there is currently no money for software developers when my contract comes up for renewal in September. (And it's a soft-money job, so it's a yearly contract, which means no unemployment for me if/when I'm not renewed.)

MIT App Inventor is at least 17 years old. It's a free development platform focused on, but not exclusively for, computer science education. We have MORE THAN TEN MILLION GLOBAL USERS. Why can't we manage to raise enough money to pay 5 software engineers? FIVE. Your average struggling tech startup has about 20. We've been keeping the lights on with FIVE developers, and we're probably going to have to let them go. Current plan is for my team lead (who counts toward the 5) to be moved into grant writing for the additional year he has until his contract runs out. He's going to hate it, and I don't know how successful he'll be, but he's the only PhD we have and the only one who could really fill that role.

I've been with this team for 8 years. I can't believe it's been that long. Before that, I was driven out of a job in a sexual harassment situation, something I'd never experienced before. And I have documentation that I almost didn't get that interview because I was a woman over 40. Now I'm a woman who is 50, and the tech job market is literally the worst it's ever been. MIT App Inventor has become a lot more than a job for me, but it is also a job, and it might be the last one I can hold as a software engineer. I don't think I can get hired again. Tech has always been ageist, but the amount of sexism has skyrocketed since I started 30 years go. And the approach to tech interviews is so alien to me that I'd have to retrain just to be able to interview.

When I left my last job, I was given referrals to three different recruiters who had recently helped friends find similar jobs in tech. I called all of them and never got a call back from any. I'm not kidding about being past my sell-by date.

So what do I do now? Well, I'm not unemployed yet. We're working hard on some kind of hail mary to save the dev team. I don't actually think this tool can stay running without some of us -- this isn't really a tool you can just leave running without regular development work keeping it going. I'm supposed to be working my butt off so that we can have a great showing at our annual summit in July, and I'm.... having trouble doing any work at all. I'm writing this essay when I should be coding. I'm going to try to go back to coding after writing it.

I don't hate the idea of retraining for something else, but it's hard to figure out how to approach a new career path in middle age. I love software engineering for real, but I have so many different interests that the idea of doing something new is abstractly exciting. I have a serious hobby in film editing. I'm self-taught, but I'm interested in taking classes to fill in the gaps. But that's largely freelance work that involves self-marketing with a portfolio, and that fucking terrifies me.

What I should be doing is my best with App Inventor while I have it, then examine options when I get news about my contract. It's hard to do that, dangling out here just waiting.

My creative hobbies have been sustaining me, and I want to write about those too, but I guess it should be another post. I've started writing again after 15 years. It's very niche fanfiction, which in theory I'm fine with. I gave up on pursuing writing as a career path, well, 15 years ago. But, well, it's hard to encourage my real-life peers to take a look at it when it's built around something they're not going to be familiar with. And then when the subject comes up, I'm confused about how to talk about it, so I come out embarrassed, which I'm actually NOT. I just don't know how to say I wrote, objectively, the best fiction I've ever written, and I'm enormously proud of it, but it probably would be best read with an overview of the story canon, which I also wrote up, and ARGH.

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..

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.

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.

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

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 😁

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…)

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/…

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

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…

This public post will hopefully show up through a fediverse-Bluesky bridge. My bridged Bluesky account should be:

bsky.app/profile/echoweaver.kl…

@Daniel Lowe have you looked at this service? fed.brid.gy/

It claims to connect Mastodon and Bluesky.