Some loss of privacy accompanies being a public figure

Explain something to me.

Doxxing is bad, OK? If someone doesn’t want their identity published, you should respect their privacy.

Death threats are bad, OK? As someone who has received many, I can assure you, you shouldn’t do that. If I get a death threat, it doesn’t justify me making them. Or you. Unfortunately, there are bad people in every group who are quick to rage.

So, JK Rowling accuses people of doxxing her and sending her death threats. That’s bad, OK? I don’t think the death threats are legitimate grounds to complain about a whole group, like trans men and women. Some of them are assholes, obviously, but the majority would never do that, just as the fact that some cis people threaten trans folk does not imply that all cis people are murderous monsters. Just some of them.

But the doxxing accusation baffles me. The protesters — 3 whole people — took a photo of themselves that included her house in the background. She’s turning that into an accusation. I don’t get it.

Here’s a whole photo essay published in the Mirror. Photographs inside and out of her $2.2 million pound Killiechassie estate near Edinburgh. Is that doxxing?

Here’s a breathless video tour of her Killiechassie estate. It’s kind of terrible, just using publicly available video, and also the narrator pronounces Edinburgh “eden-berg”. Is that doxxing?

All of her homes are discussed in this Wikipedia article, including the dates she bought them, when she applied for remodeling permits, it’s pretty detailed (not that I care at all). Did Wikipedia dox her?

I think this is nothing but a case of a TERF reaching for victimhood status again, while also grasping at a cudgel to harm the transes.

They’re on to us!

I bet you didn’t know you were getting vaccinated with toxins just by reading Pharyngula.

It used to be that you could get away with it by covering your house with lead-based paints, but we closed that loophole.

They haven’t realized yet that asbestos increases your sexual potency and longevity. We banished that long ago, too.

We sneaky, nefarious scientists have been out to get you for decades.

Businnes offer Canon

I was briefly excited by some spam email, forgive me. I can see how sometimes they can get you with just a little bit of plausibility.

Maybe I should have been instantly put off by the subject line, “Businnes offer Canon”, or the Czech return address. But the promise was so enticing. They liked my YouTube channel! They are a PR company who would like to send me Canon products, for free, that I would review on my channel! Awesome! They told me what the value of the products I could choose and keep would be, and it was substantial! They also sent me links to examples of other YouTubers they’d sponsored!

But it’s too good to be true.

I’m small time on YouTube — the channels they claimed to have sponsored had over a hundred times the subscribers I do, and were doing professional photography work, while my videos are crude in comparison. They didn’t ask me for money up front, which would have been a strong tip-off, but I suspect that would come up once they’d hooked me. I tried checking on the company, but they didn’t name it, another troubling sign. They used a generic email distributor, so that was a dead end. My correspondent did give her name, so I looked that up — it led to someone who was a “fraud expert at Capitol One”. Ha ha. Maybe our correspondent had been stung by a fraud expert before, and adopted her name as a pseudonym.

Darn.

The good news, though, is that I won’t be selling out, yet.

Not a great weekend

It’s unhappy news all around. This weekend was the time of the Big Cleanup, when I go through all the spiderling vials and cull out the sickly and the spiders who did not make it — I don’t if it’s me or just the expected mortality for any species that spews out progeny hundreds at a time, but I’ve only got a 30% survival rate. It was kind of expected, but it still hurts when you’re going through all the babies you nurtured for over a month, and well over half are dead. At least the survivors got bumped up to larger living quarters and get more flies to eat.

Then, going through my adult colony, two of them had died, for no discernable cause. I think they looked up, noticed we’re almost to December in Minnesota, and decided it was totally unnatural for them to live through this, and decided it was time to die. I saw this last year. Midwinter is like the expiration date for these northern spiders.

Then, just to add more misery to the tragedy, my camera is acting up — it refused to take any pictures, told me it had lost communication with my lovely Tokina macro lens, and ordered me to clean the lens contacts. So I did. It didn’t help. I’m going to tinker with some other lenses and see if the problem is in my favorite lens (oh no, I would cry) or the camera body (more crying — there is no good diagnosis here). Maybe this is a sign that it’s time to upgrade to a full frame camera, like the Canon 5D mk IV? No it is not, because I looked at the price and went into shock.

It was also bad because the spiders were hungry and happy with their new clean quarters and I had so many opportunities for good, dynamic action shots, but no go.

OK, I’m just going to go grade papers for a bit, as a kind of gravy for sorrow.

It is done — I am boosted

Other than the +5 disease resistance, I’ve observed no significant side effects.

That is, other than my voice acquiring a new resonance — I sound like a Decepticon now — and I occasionally emit a kind of warbling screech, like a 1990s modem, which I’m sure will clear up once the nanobots have sufficiently matured and manage to make a connection to my peers. If you’ve got the shot, we ought to try to make a borg-like hookup.

This is the flibbertigibbetiest

I swear, this abomination reads like it was written by a 15 year old sorority girl high on meth, but it’s actually by Boris Johnson’s sister. Really, try reading it — it flits about from topic to topic, from her dog having puppies to prating about her mother’s maiden name to weird complaints about not being sufficiently conservative while saying…

It has been a source of mystery to me and no doubt many others that I manage to host a radio show without landing in the soup more often. I’m always saying things like, ‘But are we allowed to say Liverpool Women’s Hospital any more?’ and ‘I only want to see someone in a surgical face mask in an operating theatre’ and ‘If lockdowns work, why are we having another one and if lockdowns don’t work, why are we having another one?’ But then I realise I am a mere soggy centrist snowflake compared with some.

Don’t worry, strange lady, you’re a right-wing asshole, no question.

And then she drops this on us:

Wow. Humble bragging, name dropping, and casual sympathy for a procurer for a pedophile. I felt like throwing up over everything between the headline and the final line.

She has a radio show and publishes in the Spectator? Man, the United States isn’t the only country parasitized by a colony of superficial twits.

Minnesota is working hard to achieve northern shithole status

We are so special!

My wife got her COVID booster shot today, and I’m scheduled to get mine tomorrow. Just in time, too, because we just learned of a signal distinction: Minnesota is now the #1 COVID-19 hotspot in the United States! And within Minnesota, the east central and west central regions (where I am) are the very worst areas for COVID hospitalizations and with the lowest vaccination rates!

I’ve mentioned before how lazy and awful the locals here are about wearing a mask. Do you believe me now? I’ve got to get the booster, as well as wear the mask every time I go out, because this place is a plague pit.

In related news, the Department of Defense is now flying in military medical teams to provide relief to overwhelmed health care professionals. Our useless governor, who is more concerned with appeasing the rabid outstate yokels than in preventing citizens from dying, asked them to come in and help, because he sure as hell isn’t going to re-invoke the safety measures, like a mask mandate, that he cancelled months ago.

Help me! I’d like to escape, but I’m stuck here with a Spring teaching load that is going to require that I teach all of my courses in-person, because the university administration is similarly blasé about an ongoing pandemic. FML.

The pandemic is not over, you know

If you’d like to have nightmares, Christopher Stolarski has written up an account of his month of treatment for COVID-19. He was young and healthy, so he survived, but it sounds hellish.

Get vaccinated.

I’d also say, “wear a mask,” but I guess that ship has sailed. We require them at the university and in the hospital, but outside of those places, I never see anyone else wearing them anymore. Does anyone know how to read a graph?