• Taking identified concerns and going into territory far beyond fair or reasonable to address them
• Putting undue emphasis on proxy measurements for good education and causing corruption of the system to achieve those measurements

There is research to be had, but it seems as though educational management either listens to just what they want to hear, or go with what's fashionable, or go with something that pays mere lip service to the problem.

Take no-fail policies - there has been research available for a couple of decades now.

Many of these "dogwhistles" (the term for something that the public can't detect but members of the movement can) exist in profiles, and like bumper stickers are anywhere from subtle to garish, and many of them show up in posts and images.

Anti-transgender activists are relentless online, often posting links for each other to massively comment on, or "brigade", especially if any public body or celebrity or domestic violence shelter comes out in support of transgender people.

This is an incomplete collection of them, and this will likely be a work in progress, since they pop up with new ones over time, and explanations of their origins may take a while to source.

Some of them are highly indicative of anti-transgender ideology, some overlap with phrases and practices used commonly elsewhere but may merit a second look.

So, what have I learned in those months?

And so I've come to a conclusion: I like being on my own site. While technically it's Ritchie's site, the important bit is that it's not part of a giant conglomerate which passes around intellectual property like Monopoly street cards, casually discarding the bits that they could care less about, regardless of how important they felt they were six months earlier.

So, I'm back here, in my own quiet little corner of the internet where I can write for my own enjoyment and periodically whack the spambots who want to keep me company. It's an audience of about none, but that's enough. I should probably remind Ritchie to upgrade the software to something a bit newer though...

I say "withdrew" since I didn't delete the account; it's still there but deactivated. I didn't want to delete it in case a namesquatter opted to move in; is that likely? Dunno -- there's a lot of odd people out there who do utterly bizarre things for the LULs, or perhaps just an opportunity to make a buck or go phishing.

So, in the last year, what's been the general feeling of going Facebookless, having used it for years prior to that point. Well, apparently a bunch of my family and friends don't realize I've been gone so a lot of conversations and events happen without my knowledge or participation. I suppose that could be a blow to the ego. There was definitely a period of about a month where I wanted to log back in, and, y'know, just check in (every few minutes) so there is a degree of addictiveness there; fortunately it passes. Other than that, there's been so much going on that it's hard to say whether the stress levels are lower or not, whether I'm more focused on the things that matter. To a certain degree, it's a bit like quitting Ingress; you're definitely no longer spending a lot of time worrying about it but have you managed to reclaim all that time and put it to good use? Probably not; there's always something else to soak up those spare cycles.

Will I go back and reactivate the account after de-toxing? I did pop in briefly as there was a friend I needed to get in contact with several months ago and Facebook was, ironically, the only way I knew how to contact him. And, then, after dealing with that, I deactivated it again. I guess the answer to that question is "Yeah, if I need to" but I won't be making it a regular hangout again.

So I'm just going to keep this post around as a spot I can just add silly names to as I think of them :)

I got to be a minor fan of the Defiance TV show in the first couple of episodes because of some of the characters and twists they threw in, but I'm woefully behind; we switched PVRs and are stuck trying to find a time to hook up the old one just to watch some older leftovers.

I will admit that I only tried the game because of being slightly partial to the show and it being a free weekend to try. I had every intention of just letting it go when the free weekend was up... but I didn't.

It's just a lot of fun, despite not being particularly ground-breaking. It's like someone came along and just decided to make sure there was some good solid world-building backstory, and then just write a game that they would really like.

My wins are fairly sparse, but one recent surprise was winning the "Elle Grand Prix 2012 Beauty Product Contest". Products competed for Best Of titles, and the prize here was the best of and runners-up in quite a few categories. We opened up the box and found all manner of cleansers, makeup, moisturizers, hand products, shampoo and other hair products - some of which we found out definitely cost a pretty penny off the shelf!

No shaving products or anything, but hey, Dena can't use all that moisturizer herself, so here are our thoughts on some of these products so far: