Saturday night bits and pieces

[dolorosa_12]

Marriage equality has been passed into law in Australia (in spite of some histrionics by conservative politicians attempting to stall things by trying to make absurd 'religious freedom' amendments before the bill was passed; thankfully these were all voted down), and the first same-sex couples have given notice of their intent to marry today. There's a one-month notice period, which means the first marriages will happen in early January next year. I'm glad we have marriage equality at last, but my heart hurts at the convoluted and cruel way it was achieved, and the fact that Malcolm Turnbull (and, even worse, Tony Abbott) are claiming credit for this makes my blood boil.

In other Australian news, the horrific blight that is imprisoning refugees on Manus Island and Nauru continues. Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish refugee and journalist who has been held on Manus since 2014, has been an eloquent and vital voice of the resistance, and his latest piece, published in The Saturday Paper, is well worth a read. I urge any Australians reading this to contact both their MPs and Malcolm Turnbull and request that the refugees be moved as soon as possible to a safe country and the camps on Manus and Nauru be closed.

Brexit shambles on. I have to admit I greeted the news of the 'sufficient progress' statement with hysterical laughter. All that posturing, all those lies and nationalistic chest-thumping, and the result, is, apparently, that we're going to end up like Switzerland. I notice that all the Brexiteers are the ones suddenly bellowing for a second referendum.

Patreon made some changes to how it will handle payments, and these changes seem likely to screw over the vast majority of its user base. There have been calls to make formal complaints and sign petitions, but my feeling is that nothing will make them revert back to the way things were before. As I said on Twitter, platforms not created by and maintained by the community they're designed to serve will always eventually change in ways that render them unusable by that community. The only guarantee that your chosen platforms will continue to work in ways that suit your needs is to build them yourself, or have them built by people from your community, sadly. I'm very sorry for all the creators and patrons who have been affected by this.

In slightly happier news, I finished another Yuletide treat, which means I've hit the writing targets I set for myself this year. I might poke around the requests summary and see if any other requests take my fancy.

It's going to snow tomorrow in Cambridge, and I am very pleased about that.

Edited to add: it did snow! Here are a photoset and a video that I took.

Comments

[naye]

Oooh, I hope the snow stays around for a lovely Sunday!

[dolorosa_12]

As you saw on Instagram, it did stick around! It's stopped now, and is starting to melt, but I think it will linger on until the end of the day.

[st_aurafina]

I'm glad the debate is over but I am so, so tired of smugly happy straight people asking me when I'm going to get engaged/married. There's no nice way to say "When I've recovered from the months of torture, maybe?" If you say that, you're somehow ungrateful. I knew it would be like this, and it's as disgusting as expected.

[dolorosa_12]

I think a lot of straight people seem to have switched off their brains when it comes to the survey. To a lot of them, it's just a nice, happy, positive political thing to think about (instead of something horrible or mortifying, like politics is usually), but they forget that for people whom this survey affected directly, it was a traumatising, mortifying, months-long process of begging voters to grant them the same rights as their fellow citizens, putting their relationships and families under scrutiny and having to defend the fact that their relationships and families were as loving, genuine, and worthwhile as those of straight couples/straight parents.

I can partly forgive this of ordinary voters, but the hypocrisy currently emanating from the Liberal Party is pretty galling.

[merit]

It is going to be interesting/terrible to read the Brexit memoirs and historical books in the coming decades. I mean I know a lot of these politicians simply don't know or care about these details... but yeah.

It does feel like platforms like to build themselves up until they think they don't need to cater to their userbase. But LJ and delicious are stories about that epic failure.

[dolorosa_12]

The only thing keeping me going (besides the fact that my husband is German and, with that on top of my three nationalities there are 29 other countries we can move to without a huge amount of hassle) through the horror show that is Brexit is the fact that history will not be kind to Brexiteers, and they will be excoriated for the disasters that will likely unfold. They'll suffer no consequences now, so I have to console myself with that (especially given the fact that so many of them seem to think they're the second coming of Churchill).

I think the problem with platforms like Patreon changing is that the genuinely don't think of most of their users as their userbase (or at least their desired userbase). Unless you're making them astronomical amounts of money, they're not going to listen to you when they make changes that render their platforms unusable.

[dhampyresa]

CONGRATS ON GAY MARRIAGE <3

I finished another Yuletide treat
Damn. How many are you up to?

[dolorosa_12]

It's great news, although I wish marriage equality could've been a achieved sooner, and in a way that was less damaging to LGBT Australians and their families.

I've done the main Yuletide assignment, and three treats. I would like to write at least one more, but most of the fandoms I'm familiar with have requests that don't suit the kinds of fic I write. Oh well.