Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Who do I know who reliably receives packages via USPS, Amazon, and UPS, wouldn't mind being used as a mail drop for me, and lives close enough / sees me often enough that I could possibly get packages from you? The delivery situation at my house is basically unusable. If the delivery person actually knocks (Amazon doesn't and one of the USPS letter carriers serving my neighbourhood doesn't) and I'm awake, I may receive a parcel. If I miss it, health & transportation issues make my being able to pick it up iffy. And stuff delivered by Amazon contractors winds up in a porch-pirate's hands before I know it's been dropped off. Anything that doesn't fit through the mail slot has only about a 15% chance of winding up in my hands. Anyone in a position to help out, who wouldn't find doing this a burden?

Unrelatedly, but because I just realized I forgot to post this here when I posted it to Facebook & Twitter: How did it take me so long to realize that Freya is the goddess of IT managers?

For it is said, managing programmers is like herding cats ...
... and Freya's chariot is pulled by a team of cats.

(And yes, on FB, someone did reply with a link to the glorious EDS Super Bowl commercial about herding cats.)

A thread by Natalie'Zorah (@TerraSirena), 2019-03-24, in its entirety (but without others' replies), reformatted slightly for this medium:

News media keeps doing this, abusing the flexibility of the word "after", and it should be fucking illegal. Here a school official *demanded to watch a student urinate* but the headline only talks about the much less objectionable things in order to frame it as exaggeration.

The Hill (@thehill), 2019-03-20::
West Virginia assistant principal loses job after after allegedly telling trans student "you freak me out" http://hill.cm/DKJJfxO

This is where the scare stories come from about being fired for using the wrong pronoun. This is what paints the targeted class as being unreasonable and overly sensitive. This is where the hate spreads.

Nobody in the world naturally thinks they're going to lose their job if they say trans people "freak them out"; they're *told* that they are by headlines like this, which then encourages them to double down on whatever idle background distrust they already had.

It only takes a bare handful of headlines like this one to take someone who has never knowingly encountered or even had a conscious thought trans people and turn them towards hate.

A news headline "man in critical condition after eating lettuce" is going to have people avoiding the fuck out of lettuce even if the article goes on to say that he was hit by a truck after going out for a salad.

And this is not some secret news easter egg? That's why writing a headline is an important thing? They know most people aren't going to click through. They know people are going to see the headline and just reblob it with some arse gravy about how society is dying.

[Note that the The Hill article did include some of the more damning behaviour by the assistant pricipal, so the biggest complaint here is about the headline & tweet (which, as @TerraSirena points out, will be the bit many people form opinions based on, and remember), but even the article describes the event more tamely than other outlets that come higher in a Google search for "Lee Livengood Michael Critchfield". Replies to @thehill's tweet, for what it's worth, mostly made the same point about how misleading the tweet/headline was, but I've not seen any response or update from @thehill. (AFAICT, their twitter feed is an automated headline+link poster, so it's possible that no human at The Hill has seen any of the complaints.) A lot of trans Twitter users were already acquainted with the case before that tweet.]

[Note also that, as @TerraSirena mentions, this is not a standalone case. A woman being questioned for police after harassing the mother of a transgender person and accusing her of "mutilating" her child, was reported as being questioned "for misgendering a trans child", for example. And finally, note the similarity between what Lee Livengood did to Michael Critchfield, and what school administrators did to a trans girl at a different school, caught on video (shot by the student) using a yardstick to open the stall door while she was sitting on the toilet.]