James Baillie @JubalBarca@scholar.social

Very solid trolling work by the Czech Pirate Party by renaming the square where the Russian embassy is after Boris Nemtsov. Imaginative and sharp use of civic-level powers is something we need more of in politics.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51614958

So, on my thread on Exilian that I'm updating through the US Presidential election, I'm trying to keep tabs o Green, GOP and Libertarian primaries as well as the Democrat one, to provide some variation/perspective.

The Green nominating was meant to kick off on the 22nd with Georgia's convention. I still have no idea who won that as they haven't announced it, and all they've put on their FB is an announcement that the convention ratified a massively transphobic policy motion :(

Tomorrow brings the joy of the first exam I've done in a long while. I've been off work ill all of last week and I'm feeling still pretty ill plus a bit terrified.

A huge problem with academia is the way that "off sick" does not in any way lead to a reduction in one's workload, it just means when you get back you have to work twice as fast. And probably get ill again.

I genuinely find it annoying when people who enjoy shitposting but also do useful and interesting toots don't just make a separate account for each. I'm not annoyed with those people, I should add - it's their choice and if that's how they want to use Masto, or they consider their lewd or uncw-ed pol posts or whatever to be a necessary whole with their other stuff, then that's their call. But it does make me sad a bit that I have to choose - good posts and spam or neither?

I'm certainly no perfect arbiter of what any loose group of people believe - though as someone who has actually written elements of the policy of a liberal political party, I do have some standing on that one in particular.

It's just weird that the sort of people who can differentiate just fine between stalinists and marxist-leninists are unable to appreciate the frankly vastly less subtle difference between, say, authoritarian centrists and liberal radicals.

The one thing that makes me want to immediately log off Mastodon on a regular basis is toots saying "Liberals believe [insert X bad thing here]". I don't think I've seen a single toot like that which is actually consistently true, ever (not least because liberal, like socialist, means very different things depending on pol context). It's just extremely annoying. And one can't really point out that these are misconceptions as I'm in no state to deal with resulting dogpiles.

Got to do a very important ep of my comic in which a character who was previously a slave talks about her past.

I think it's one of those things that one can't write "correctly" - there is no good way to handle a subject this big and painful, and doing it in a usually-comedy format is doubly tricky - but at the same time, it's pretty fundamental to who that character is.

I feel like generally being open about health stuff is good. But at the same time, I'm often put off doing so because I worry I'm worrying people too much, and because the well meaning responses I get bugging me to go to the doctor often just make me feel way more anxious.

Water birds of the Danube from yesterday - little grebes, a cormorant, a goosander, and a teal. :)

#birds #wildlife #photography #nature