Hiiiiii Readercon is happening online right now and it's very exciting and please join us! $25 gets you access to all of this for six months:

https://www.readercon.org/program

Look at this thing, we made this thing, this thing is now really happening for real and it's amazingly great? I'm getting whiplash from being "at Readercon" for hours and then closing my laptop and suddenly being at home, and also my arms hurt from all the fast typing in Discord and everything. But worth it!

(and in two days it will be over and I will no longer be working an unpaid full-time job on top of my paid full-time job, that's going to be pretty great too)

I cannot possibly convey the extent to which this convention is a hallucination that we dragged kicking and screaming into reality—all cons are, but this one we truly had to invent from scratch, and it's fucking wild to me that a spreadsheet and a document we (mostly the godly chellenator) threw together last year have now been Pygmalioned into actual existence through a great many people putting in immense effort. It's absolutely trippy to me that that's a thing that can happen. I'm not, like, mad with power, but there's no experience that compares to just fucking making up a thing that hundreds of people show up and do for a weekend. I haven't felt it this intensely since Callahanicon 1 in 1997, which I guess is the last time I spun gold out of straw like this, and I've been riding that confidence high for a quarter-century, so let's see how long this one lasts.

Not really coherent rn but this is what's up and what's been up, how are you?

I haven't forgotten these; I just haven't been logging them. I read Let the Children March with Kit and had some good discussions with them about racism. (They pointed to an angry white policeman and said "He looks sad," so we talked about how sometimes when you share what you have, you have less, and that can make you sad or angry even when you know it's the right thing to do.) On Monday there was a blizzard, so instead of ordering takeout, like we usually do on Mondays, J cooked and we donated the cost of a takeout dinner to the Ali Forney Center, which gives unhoused queer kids a place to go in a blizzard. And tonight I'm writing a piece for my shul's haggadah about "Dayenu" and reminding people that they can be enough. (Which will take more than five minutes, but not much more—it's short, and I've been thinking about it for a while.)

I also put in three hours of Readercon work on Sunday, but that never feels like activism even though it is in a way—at least, I try to bring an activist sensibility to that work, and I think the con is better for it.