NaNoWriMageddon: The Whimper

note: this is a bonus post, made to be timely news. hit previous to see a bird post.

I’ve written before about how NaNoWriMo – the org behind the event of National Novel Writing Month – burned itself to bitter ashes.  Wait, no, I thought I had.  I had meant to, but didn’t end up happening.  Anyway, the ashes have been stirring in the wind for a minute, but are finally set to blow away once and for all.  The org is breaking up, their ownership of the url nanowrimo dot org expires right around November 2025.

You may not have noticed this about me but I have a bit of an outsider position everywhere I go, am not much of a joiner for online communities, and so I only dipped my toe in the formerly vast sea that was.  NaNoWriMo had a big forum.  It had very petty moderators.  I barely interacted with it while it was successful, barely tracked the ins and outs of the trash fire, and so I may be getting some details wrong.  Nonetheless, rough timeline of events:

Genial bay area techbro Chris Baty came up with the idea of holding an event where people try to write an entire novel in one month.  I think the idea came from the way there are so many wanna-be novelists that could never seem to get past the first page, never break out of self-editing as they go, doubt unto paralysis.  What if they had no choice but to just go, go, go to get it done?  He published the book No Plot, No Problem to introduce this scheme.  I don’t recall if that book introduced the word NaNoWriMo, to describe “National Novel Writing Month,” or if that came when…

NaNoWriMo became a non-profit org, running a website with tools to track word count, forums, and funtacular culture of whimsy and goodtimin’.  In parallel they got a yewchoob channel and other social media presences to raise funds and to evangelize the movement.  You too can be a writer; dare to dream.  This was a brand similar to the gentler end of turn-of-the-millennium nerd culture: lolrandom squirrel ninja pirate monkey something something.  If u can has cheezburger, u can write novel.

You lost that lovin’ feelin’, owo that lovin’ feelin’…  The org was poorly organized, spending most of its resources on salaries for upper class business majors that did fuck-all, relying way too much on volunteers to actually run the show.  They also spent resources on a “young writers program” to the exclusion of the event that originally brought the people in, I think as a gambit to score themselves “education loot” that doesn’t actually exist.

The participants were problematic.  In the bitter parting shot from the org’s Nero, the acrimony of the participants was blamed for the downfall.  No, I’m thinking of one specific faction.  Christian youths are not allowed to engage in the same culture as the people around them.  No Power Rangers, no Pokeymans.  So they find places to be, and a rather large group found they could socialize on NaNoWriMo’s forums.  They got their own special place to be on the forum and were insular, mostly talking among themselves.

However, being from ameriKKKa’s fascist version of xtianity, they spent some amount of time being offensive to liberal and progressive people in other areas of the site.  And since they got their parents to donate to the org, the moderators turned a blind eye to their shit.  Mods were applying double standards which only became more hypocritical as time went on.

The mods were problematic.  One was a prolific and relentless micromanager who rudely hectored everyone on where and how they were meant to post.  She punished innocent people for dust-ups started by creeps, which resulted in good people leaving the site while creeps stuck around for years.  She helped create a culture of uptight and bitter commenters.

A more problematic mod, RiP, was a disabled trans woman from the rural south, who was part of that culture of hypocrisy and pettiness, but also kind of pervy creep?  She had a parallel presence on a diaper play website and sent some of those xtian youths thattaway when they were still minors.  She was also squirrely as an old growth tree, prolific sock puppeteer, compulsive liar, and just an epic trash fire wherever she went.  She had a history of doing things like taking over a fandom forum and then hijacking and ruining it for most of the participants.  Even the diaper people were not loving her.

That lady’s last communication to the public was about how she was going to release an exposé on all the misdeeds of the org, as it was throwing totally innocent her under the bus.  She shortly died of unspecified chronic illness, after years of crying wolf about how she was going to die at any moment.  A force of nature to the end.

The business people were ragingly incompetent.  They had a functional website that was frequented by tens of thousands of people who could be milked for donations…  but it was a lil’ web 2.0, wasn’t it?  It needed an update, so they spent way too much money on a site redesign and committed to it entirely, even tho it broke most of the basic functionality people had come to rely on, and did everything worse.  In parallel to that they nuked the old forums and rebuilt them anew on a third party platform that had issues of its own, and they ran that as badly as ever – if not worse.

The SJWs were incompetent.  They took a look around and saw not enough diversity, and thought lo, let’s try to make everybody feel welcome by coming up with a thousand rooms for every type of oppressed demographic under the sun.  You know, lock ’em up in little boxes where nobody has to look at them, and in the meantime, forget to actually make forums areas for people to discuss writing?  All the while, maintain the acrimonious mod culture that makes sure nobody feels welcome regardless of where they land.  And never ban those xtian transphobes.  They got money, y’know.

Acrimonious mod number one got outed for making a racist comment in private and the org felt the need to address that with some big public statement.  This was more incompetence from their PR department.  You quietly disappear the racist and say as little as possible, right?  By making a public show of it, they accidentally invited everybody and their mom to come complain about other issues they had not addressed.

This is when perv mod’s crimes came to more direct light resulting in her wacky exposé gambit.  It’s a shame she was lying about that, or just died before she could make it happen.  The one thing of value the org ultimately produced was juicy shadenfreude.

Overpaid business major saw the unfolding rebellion and descended from his dais to reassure the masses the org was hearing them and would do things to resolve all their concerns, which worked for two minutes.  But when it looked like doing the things people asked for would actually take work, and he dragged his feet for a few weeks, some people suggested he might be incompetent on social media.  He famously said of this in a full length article off site, “I experienced cruelty today,” which is, again, the juiciest of shadenfreude.

With mod after mod getting fired from their unpaid jobs, the forums were partially shuttered, and eventually shut down I think?  Meanwhile, the org got a new mouthpiece – a writer of trashy romances known by a pen name and using an AI-generated avatar.  She was rude and belligerent, causing more acrimony and desertion.

The corporate donors were problematic.  One of them was literally a known scam to exploit aspiring authors and they refused to stop taking that money.  One of them was called out for using AI editing tools in their software package.  Again, the org had an opportunity to just not say anything, but the weird new boss came on to defend the use of AI and call its detractors ableist.

Now I’m not in charge of a non-profit org that demographically skews liberal, but if I was, you can bet I never would have published my personal opinions on AI.  If you are on any left or liberal leaning social space on the web for the last few years, you have been exposed to 24-7 hate for AI and nothing positive about it.  It’s a toxic hot potato that no PR person in their right mind would ever say thing one about.  Keep this sponsor despite the callout and just be quiet about it.  No comment.  But what did they do?  Chose to defend AI.

They were basically taking the remaining 8% or so of the donation money they used to have and throwing it into flaming dumpsters at this point.  The only thing they could do to make a tiny bit of dosh was sell t-shirts and they broke their t-shirt shop.  You can’t make this shit up.

So here at the end of the road, announcing they are sunsetting the organization, acrimonious trashy romance weirdo uses the email subscription to tell everybody, “This is really your fault, you know.”  And maybe it is, in a way, but it’s kind of a shame that something born in an innocent time of squirrels and ninjas was reduced to such ignominy and bad blood.

Goodbye whimsy.  Goodbye viking hats.  Goodbye Chris Baty.  I imagine you’ve gone into witness protection by now.  Have a wonderful life, everybody who lived through this.  And enjoy Novel Writing Month (freeware version) for as long as you may please.  I know I do.

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Life List: Vaux’s Swift

You know what’s fucked up as all hell?  Swifts and swallows are not closely related.  They look the same, they fly the same.  Swifts don’t have the iridescence.  That’s it.  They’re drab, but they’re winners.  Perversely, they are more closely related to hummingbirds than the iridescent and flashy swallows are.  I don’t know much about them, but I can paint one little scene for you…

Long before we were married, my husband and I were trying to live in Seattle, on the brink of getting bodily ejected by the cost of rent.  He was in the habit of taking the bus down to see his mother in Federal Way every weekend, and I began to go with him.  Most weekends were just a lil shopping, a visit to a park, eat at a restaurant one time, that kind of stuff.  Some weekends were family parties, crowded affairs where children were showered with gifts.  I appreciated it for food somebody else cooked, my husband felt some other type of way.  I remember the grass being dead yellow, tiny children being in the living room while a movie about lingerie women getting decapitated by a crude 3d sabertooth tiger played.

On one occasion, spring or summer, there were cool birds outside, nesting under the eave of the garage.  This was only about seven or eight feet off the ground, so real easy to see the babies yelling for food, and parents flapping in to give them a little.  They fly so fast, so fancy, it was a treat to watch them.  I’d seen them on the way in, and after the party had been running for a while, I stepped back outside to take another look.

As I was trying to watch the swifts fly above, I witnessed an insect doing a real similar type of predation.  I caught sight of a random gnat just in time to see a dragonfly buzz by and make it disappear.  If swifts or swallows are biting each other’s styles, both of them are biting dragonfly style.

There was some discussion of evicting the birds to do roofing, and I was like nay.  Intolerable!  I looked up the species, found out vaux’s swift fledges in a very short amount of time, and let them know.  As far as I know, they let the creatures live and did the work afterwards.  As far as I know.

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Life List: Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

A lot of people – myself included – have drunk the kool-aid,
Prevaricating propaganda about how ivory-billed woodpeckers
Really are extinct, gone forever.  And yet, the last time that
I hiked the Appalachian Trail, what did I behold?  ‘Round the
Largest oak tree I’ve e’er seen, a convocation of the beasts!

Furiously they beat their beautiful wings, roaring above me,
Over oaken boughs that had been pecked most righteously.
Obviously I would have taken a picture with my cellphone,
Like I know how this all sounds, but you must believe me!
Such is my luck, I had no battery.  And then they were gone…

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They say we shouldn’t do April Fools jokes anymore, but mine are pretty obvious and harmless, right?  I don’t know.  I’ve never gotten an amazing response to them, and the joke may be years overdue for retirement.  Still, I didn’t have any better ideas for a post today, so here you go.

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What it Sounds Like when TDoVs Cry

I do find the most worrisome thing about trans rights and the struggle against fascism broadly at the moment is corporate ameriKKKa’s embrace of the very bad november as a meaningful barometer of public opinion – that fascism is more profitable than progress.  I’m gonna try not to think of that too much.  I’ve got dreams to dream.  But for now, let’s say I can understand trans people wanting to inviso all the way out.

When the very bad inauguration happened (2025 version), I immediately began wearing a pink bandana and makeup and pearls at work, to show my less visible trans coworkers that they are not alone.  I don’t usually bother to shave, so this is a pretty queer-ass look.  I’m more self-conscious in recorded form, so not posting selfies of that right now.  But just tellin’ the tale:  I’ve been trans day of visibilitying since Jan 20th 2025 every day that I’m seen by coworkers.

Except that one day I forgot my eye makeup.  Wotta disaster!

Wait, no, fuckit.  Here’s my work look.

visible’d!  why yes i am craggy like the surface of the moon, and not interested in starting to wear foundation at the moment.

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Life List: Violet-Green Swallow

Swallows is the same.  More or less.  I mentioned how they partition niches based on where they feed, with barn swallows down low?  Violet-green swallows feed higher up, around seven to twelve meters.  They are white beneath, and green and violet on top.  More or less.  At that elevation and as fast as they fly, I’d have never been able to ID them, without a few exceptional sunny days.

My father is harried by demons and can’t stand living in the same place more than a few months.  As he’s gotten old, he’s had to slow down the rate of moves more than he would prefer.  But after the first time he got a housing voucher, he briefly lived in an old folks home overlooking the Green River.  There he went off the rails for birding, for the first time ever, getting too much equipment and drawing too many birds, which bothered the neighbors.  One time he filmed a seal swimming in the river – way upstream from the Sound.  I wasn’t there for most of it – certainly not for the inevitable problem era when he made everybody too mad and flamed out and lost the home.  But I did have one visit.

On that occasion, we sat on his balcony on a sunny day, about ten meters elevation.  Ever sit on a balcony above a body of water?  In the summer?  The fucking insects were huge.  Creepy things I can’t even describe, multiple inches.  They eventually scared me indoors.  But before they did, I saw many violet-green swallows from above, from pretty close by, and that means I could see the violet-green distinctly shining in the sun.

Some years later, at the same Uwajimaya that once made my home boy herfy, I came out into the bright summer sun and saw violet-green swallows swooping around a paved corporate courtyard that usually only has house sparrows, pigeons, and gulls.  Were they nesting in the rafters of Uwajimaya, or the buck nasty hobo bar Joe’s?  It was a little magical.  I have no idea how they were getting enough food without those fat river insects.

Last place I saw them was in (hopefully) the last apartments I ever lived in, up in Federal Way.  There were swallows flying around at the usual height, with white bellies.  I couldn’t make out the top color, but I used the birding app to recognize their squeaks.  Violet-green.

They’re pretty cool.  If you’re in their range, hope you get to see them someday.

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A Clear and Present Danger

Remember when Harrison Ford was playing an action thriller man, who got annoyed with the president and was all like, “How dare you sir?!” in a scene that may have been inspirational to Keith Olbermann’s punditry career?  That was in Clear and Present Danger, right?  The one with the bazooka attack that was used without permission by a TV show?  I don’t care enough to look it up now.

Anyway, now Harrison Ford is playing the president.  I think.  I only saw the trailer once and didn’t care enough to look it up.  He’s taking over for William Hurt in portraying General Thunderballs McDickFuck for Disney’s Marvel’s The Cinematic Universals, but now he’s been promoted from generalisimo to presidente.  Who cares?  He’s el jefe, and now he’s turning into comic book character The Red Hulk.

The Red Hulk debuted in print like fifteen years ago, if I’m not mistaken.  I was hemisemidemi paying attention to comics at that moment.  He was like the green hulk but even angrier and more radioactive.  Could he breathe fire?  I forget.  Now he’s the final boss of the new Cap’m Amurrical movie.

I would have been sooo there for that shit several years ago.  Black Captain America vs. overpowered villain.  At this point, I don’t trust Disney not to use this movie as an excuse to shit on antifa (like they did with their cap spinoff streaming show) or otherwise suck trvnfk’s gnarly scrotum.  I’m still half-hoping irl one of the gun-havers who have sworn to defend the constitution is going to recognize a clear & present danger to it, perform a military coup, and leave Vance with a choice – stop the over-reach or join your bosses in hell.

Can you imagine if our current nightmare nazi deathclown president could turn into an orange hulk?  Ew.  Half the fanart of him kinda looks like the transformation is beginning.

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Life List: Tree Swallow

Swallows is the same.  This one looks like barn swallows but with no orange on bottom – just white beneath, iridescent blue on top.  I haven’t seen them feeding as often as barn swallows or violet-greens, but when I have, it was even higher elevation than VGs, maybe twelve to twenty meters?

I have to imagine they got their name from nesting in trees, but I have seen them in nest boxes barely above human height, right out in the middle of a field.  It’s the only reason I can say I’ve positively ID’d them before.  I have also seen swallows on a bright day flying near treetops (in WA state) and thought, likely but not certain.

The place with the nest boxes was some kind of wildlife reserve next to a busy freeway in Kansas, because of course it was next to a busy freeway.  It was the kind of place people come to have sad outdoor sex, with patchy clouds and drips of rain, the fields wet and marshy – dotted with bushes and small trees.  My brother brought me there on the last day of a poorly planned visit, for last minute birding.

The visitor center had some taxidermy birds of prey.  The red tailed hawk was smaller than I would have imagined.  In the fields we saw a lot of red-winged blackbirds at various growth stages, and a few proud yellow meadowlarks.  The weirdest thing we saw was these orange slimy gelatinous-looking finger-like structures on the branches of a small pine.  Slime molds?  An actual fungus?  Fruiting bodies?  I know next to nothing of these subjects.

The last thing we did that day before I got on the plane was going to a fast food place called Freddy’s.  We don’t have those in WA state.  They have skinny fries and smashed burgers with charred edges.  That makes everything more crispy and rich.  Baller.  I’m not eating as much beef now because global warming, but if I get a chance to have that again, I will do it at least once.  Gag in the Bag recently added “smashed” burgers to their menu, but if they aren’t also charred, they are missing the entire point.

Oh yeah, birds.  Iridescent blue on top and white underneath.  Cute.  Fast.  Maybe you can see them too.

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Red State Leftists Please Start Voting

You heard about all the businesses capitulating to the fresh fashy vibes of the new ameriKKKa?  Tossing diversity initiatives, LGBTetc protections?  Amazon doing this is particularly shit because like many tech companies, they have a disproportionate number of trans women in computer programming.  You’d think that would count for something, but here we fucken are.

Red state leftists don’t want to vote because it feels hopeless, but here’s the thing.  If all of you got up and voted at the next opportunity and lost, it would send a message to the world, loud and clear.  The kind of message electoral politics can ignore, yes, but not the kind of message that corporate america can afford to ignore.  If the nazis win the next one by electoral margins but lose by 80% of the popular vote?  That is a show of force for human rights, for humane policies, for progress.  Corporations will realize that catering to the nazis is not the wisdom, and at least one source of human misery will become substantially less miserable.

That’s where the real power is at the moment.  Corporations.  They have all these fiefdoms carved out in the legalized monopoly game, so boycotts can only do so much.  But demographic information that their advertisers can use, that is something they’ll pay attention to.

Give it a whirl, please?  And who knows?  Maybe there’s still a sliver of a hope in hell that democracy can move this needle slightly away from endless calamity, right?  Throw me a fuckin’ bone here.  Do it on a lark.  Do it on a dare.  Do it high on bin laden weed with a six-pack of beer.  Just do it.

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Life List: Cliff Swallow

Swallows is the same.  I would have been very justified in only doing one life list entry for all of them, because they aren’t all that different from each other, to an inexpert eye.  Normally I wouldn’t be able to pick out differences like this, but I have had some fortunate encounters over the years which made those differences more plain – situationally.

Cliff swallows are much like barn swallows – white and orange on bottom, iridescent blue on top – but the orange white and blue are in funkier stripes and swatches on cliff swallows.  Their look reminds me of over-designed tennis shoes.  That’s why barn swallows are the ones in tattoos.

I guess the main difference would be nesting in cliffs?  And artificial structures that have similar qualities, like under bridges and eaves.  The only reason I’ve ever seen one well enough to positively ID it – to tell the difference between it and a barn swallow – is that there is a nesting site at the Billy Frank Jr Nisqually National Wildlife refuge, which for all I know has an invisible dei in front of its url and is about to be renamed The White Mayonnaise National Pile of Mosquitoes and Birds We’re Going to Kill Wetland Condos.

That nesting site is a covered walkway near the visitor center, which has nests used by multiple species of swallows, rubbing shoulders with each other.  They’re so close to passers by that you could reach out and grab them*.  Fantastic!  I don’t know what season they’re around, don’t remember what time of year I was there because seasons not very distinct in the PNW.  But if you can find that out and pay a visit, you will get swallows on your own life list.

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*don’t, of course.

Gorescalator

Dreamed I got a security job at an airport.  Walking a patrol, I saw a guy with his head ground into an escalator, just a body with shoulders disappearing into the bottom of the escalator like the head got sucked through it.  As I kept going I could see chunks of bodies and blood everywhere like there was a mass shooting that basically jibbed people.

The elevators would only open halfway and people I haven’t seen for years were there, trying to get on but not trusting the machines to be safe.  By the time I got to the bottom floor, I was involved in some kind of superhero fight.  There was a guy with identical powers on each side, specifically the ability to become an incorporeal freezing mist, and use cold and telekinesis powers.

I was one of them and for some reason we required a corporeal hand to make our powers work.  This could be somebody else’s hand, and they didn’t have to be alive, so we were alternating between fighting over possession of a living host that had been knocked out, or taking a random hand from the human jib pile.

I don’t remember much else about the dream, such as who won that fight.  Might have just ended before the plot concluded, with waking up.  Usually my goriest dreams come right before waking – I think my body is telling me to wake up, rudely.

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More recently had on of those turbo dreams interrupted by alarm.  Something was taking over the world with giant flowers and i had to run away from these lady bounty hunters.  Or get smokes for my dad.  Man I wish I could be sleeping.

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