passerine | Reading

At the time of writing, 41 46 51 66 75 MPs have signed the early day motion to reject the EHRC's new guidance:

https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/65938

Write to your MP to tell them to sign it! Praise them if they already have!

If you have Bsky, Trans+ Solidarity Alliance have a skeet about it you can boost:

https://bsky.app/profile/transsolidarity.bsky.social/post/3mnb3wyefxc2g

Scottish Trans (in collaboration with Trans+ Solidarity Alliance and TransActual, because the collaborative work going on here is so phenomenal) have an "email your MP to reject the EHRC code of practice" template form:

https://equalrecognition.eaction.org.uk/rejectthecode

The Hansard transcript of the response to Seema Malhotra's statement on the EHRC guidance yesterday is blistering:

https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-06-01/debates/CE610C68-7093-454F-B897-AF008EE7E7A0/EqualityAct2010CodeOfPractice

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!

EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.

rydra_wong

https://www.transsolidarityalliance.com/post/mass-lobby-date-change-25th-june-2026

It's now the 25th.

mab_browne

And I woke up to a mild morning and the knowledge that I'd watered a few dry spots in my garden yesterday. After all, it is the first of June.

Except that I live in the Southern Hemisphere and we're supposed to be HEADING INTO WINTER!

....

Climate Change (with sly innuendo): "How ya doin'?"

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)

rydra_wong

Via

sabotabby, A Meal of Thorns, from the Ancillary Review of Books.

Jake Casella Brookins (whom I have loved ever since he described Prophet as “Gay X-files slash where they walk away from The Hurt Locker and wind up in Solaris instead”) and a guest do deep exegesis on a sf/f (or adjacent) book.

Every ep I've listened to has been really good.

(Also OMG the next ep is on The Fifth Head of Cerberus.)

rydra_wong

For once in my life, for once in my entire fucking life, it appears that I may actually have been Lacking The Vitamin.

(Iron.)

rydra_wong

Okay, not just the miners; the trade unions as a whole showed the fuck up (and have already been showing up for trans rights in the UK in a big way). But it was, also, very much the miners:

The Guardian: ‘Bigger and better than ever’: how Durham Pride beat Reform’s funding axe with help from the miners

[The LGBTQ+] community “showed their heroism” during the miners’ strikes, he said. “They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.”

He added: “That relationship’s prevailed ever since, [and so] the Durham Miners’ Association have decided to make this a priority in County Durham.”

(For those who don't know the particular history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbians_and_Gays_Support_the_Miners )

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

It's been a while since we've done a full code push rather than just hotfixes for bugs, so we are well overdue! Depending on availability, we're aiming to do one sometime soon; we'll let you know specifics once we've worked out good timing for everyone who needs to be available.

However! The reason it's been so long is we kept trying to get some of the stuff that's pending to "really finished" instead of just "mostly finished", and then we once again looked around and went "oh no, this is a really big code push with a lot of changes". Those make us nervous, because while we do a lot of testing ourselves, y'all are really creative in how you use the site and we inevitably find a bunch of edge cases when we let you loose on new code with your real-world data!

So, if folks have some spare time in the next few days, it would be a huge help if you could spend half an hour or so using the site the same way you normally do but with the "Site-Wide Canary" beta features flag turned on. Canary mode is a sort of "live testing" mode: it's your real data, but running the most up-to-date code.

Canary mode always does have a few glitches -- there may be missing text strings or errors about missing database properties, which is a limitation of how we run it. We don't need to know about those, but anything else weird that you run into, leave a comment with what you were trying to do and the error message you got.

I'll repeat that the "here be dragons" caution that's on the beta features page: some things may be broken, so don't use it for when you're doing something important. But a few more eyeballs on it before the push will help the push go more smoothly for everyone.

For folks who want to concentrate on what's changing, we haven't finished the second code tour of what's going to be in this push, but the ffirst one has a good chunk of what's going to be going live. (We'll get the second half done ASAP!)

watersword

To my genuine astonishment, the Tatler Fairyland story got a pretty positive response in crit group, and I have a great direction to go for revisions. ?!?!

Meeting the person who successfully got the other pollinator garden approved got me a couple of potentially very useful contacts and a copy of their application, which I am shamelessly copying. Cross your fingers that my various ideas, especially for watering, work out, because that is probably the main blocker. (And me being willing to talk to vendors for price quotes, ugh.)

staranise

Small accomplishment this week: Mom's cat Gally has problems walking, and she's been quietly freaking out about the life of a cat she loves vs. her very small amount of discretionary income. So this week I got her talked around so she let me launch a crowdfunding campaign to take him to the vet.

If anyone can pitch in or signalboost it would be much appreciated 💕

rydra_wong

Here's what Peter Watts (author of Blindsight) said about them in Forbes:

Finally, someone I’m sure none of you have ever heard of, because she’s a new Canadian author published by the tiny Bumblepuppy Press, and by the time you read this, her books will be prohibitively expensive due to tariffs. Rachel Rosen, whose ongoing Sleep of Reason trilogy (the second book has only just been released) depicts a future climate-ravaged world in which demons stalk the Rockies and so-called “MAIs” (Magic-Affected Individuals) are used by Canadian politicians to plan their campaigns. Canada falls into dictatorship in the first book; the Resistance hangs on by its fingernails in the second. There are Earthquakes and opera singers and prison camps for human experimentation. There’s a sapient tech-bro submarine. I don’t know how many non-Canadians these books might resonate with, but I’ll bet that number is increasing daily, down below the 49th at least. I would not have believed that a fantasy novel could be so depressingly relevant.

N.B. I would like to point out that the sapient techbro submarine is in fact a sleek black techbro submarine which has been possessed by an eldritch horror from the depths ~~along with the remains of its crew who unfortunately for them may not be wholly dead~~ and it's the resulting entity which may be sapient.

Because personally I feel that Watts is severely underselling how insanely badass this part is. I just really love the submarine, okay?

watersword

My sister spent ninety minutes on the phone with me, helping me rewrite the pollinator garden plan for the THIRD TIME, and she is truly the best and what the fuck is wrong with the Parks Department? Not everyone has a sister who is a literal professional expert on pollinator garden design!!!

celli helped with an Excel thing last week and my friend C. loaned me a cart so I could lug the giant bag of garden dirt up to the community garden, and I am so lucky in my friends.

I wrote the Tatler Fairyland story in slow agonizing 100-words chunks and I hate it, the voice isn't quite right, but it is 1600 words long and I do think the premise is fundamentally sound. I'm going to sleep on it and do a last read-through in the morning before I send it to crit group, at the literal last possible second. (How the fuck do I turn this deadline-driven writing practice into something that can produce a novel, I ask. How.)

Once I send the story to crit group, I will reward myself with ice cream and a meeting with someone from the group building a pollinator garden nearby and then I will send the pollinator garden plan off and call it done for now.

One of my favorite skirts has been mended and it was not even that hard. It's not a perfect fix but it is better than it was! I need to sit down and catalog my sewing stash so I know what mending I have and then I can prioritize. I impulse-bought a couple of patterns from Tammy Handmade and that also needs to be done. The makerspace will be great during the summer: air-conditioning!

This is the weirdest spring ever — a forty-degree (F) swing overnight? Impossible to deal with.

rydra_wong

https://www.transsolidarityalliance.com/mass-lobby-2026

As explained at: https://www.parliament.uk/get-involved/contact-an-mp-or-lord/lobbying-parliament/

A mass lobby is when a large number of people contact their MPs and members of the Lords in advance and arrange to meet with them at Parliament all on the same day.

Trans+ Solidarity Alliance are one of the groups who've been absolutely kicking ass in the last year.

They also now have a crowdfunder if anyone wants to donate:

https://www.zeffy.com/en-GB/donation-form/fund-the-work-of-the-trans-solidarity-alliance

rydra_wong

I am very very wrecked (because of something I did on purpose which I hope was useful, but which I did knowing that it would burn all my spoons and crash me for several days).

If anyone would like to distract me by asking me questions about things I enjoy rambling about (see my DW for recent topics, as well as the perennial ones), PLEASE do so, I would be deeply grateful.

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Social Sparrow

Reading

UK people: trans rights

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Mass lobby date change

It's the 1st of June today

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Podcast rec

Very short health update

Miners Support the Lesbians and Gays

Testing needed in advance of code push!

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While I continue to yell about Cascade and Blight

reminding myself that these are good things if a little stressful

UK people: new trans rights mass lobby 24th June

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October 2011

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