stopping hate

I wish my motivation for a non-writing-related post were more cheerful.

Came across two things today. The more recent is this post about a murder that took place not too far from where I live. A couple of guys spent literally hours beating a man to death, dragging him out into the middle of nowhere, leaving him to die, then coming back to find and shoot him, and so far their defense for this has been "he was gay." Which he wasn't. But his actual orientation is in a sense irrelevant; what's relevant is that it's being claimed as a justification, that Indiana has not passed any anti-hate-crime legislation, and that this story has been buried. Almost nobody reported on it when it happened. Not nationally; not locally. Just a couple of smaller, more independent papers. But when a ten-year-old girl was killed, it made news everywhere.

Turning to gender, I'm sure many of you read Joss Whedon's . . . I don't want to call it a rant, or a diatribe, because those words invite you to dismiss his words as undirected anger. Nor was it a manifesto, per say. His post -- a bland word -- about Dua Khalil, a young Iraqi woman who was beaten to death in a so-called "honor killing," and about how spectators stood around and filmed her death on their cellphones, doing nothing to try and stop it. (Those videos are online. I have not gone looking for them. I'm sure you can find them if you try.) Skyla Dawn Cameron and others are putting together a charity anthology of essays, short stories, poetry, artwork -- anything relevant to the issues Whedon raised, regarding misogyny and violence against women. I don't think they've specified yet which charity the proceeds will go to, but it's not for profit.

I figure both of these are issues near and dear to the hearts of some of my readership here. Both links contain information on how you can take action. If you're an Indiana resident, you can particularly help out with the Hall case. Either way, I hope these efforts can do at least a little bit of good.

omg i love computers squeeeee

Why do I not have an icon for hopping up and down in glee?

Earlier today, kniedzw posted about a program called Stellarium. Alas, it seems to base its Julian/Gregorian switch on the continental one in 1582, so in order to calculate anything for Midnight Never Come I have to do the adjustment myself -- England didn't switch calendars until 1752, on account of viewing calendar reform as some kind of sketchy papist plot. But with that done, I could, if I chose, find out what phase the moon is in and where it stands in the sky when Lune goes sneaking outside on March 6th, 1590, to meet with someone in the orchard at Richmond.

Computers are awesome.

But the biggest help is much less impressive. All I have to do is type "ncal -J 1590" into my unix prompt on sundell.net and I can find out what the dates should be for certain events I have taking place on Fridays, because my computer obligingly spits out a Julian calendar for the full year. And if I stick "-e" into that command, I can find out the date of Easter that year, which is actually relevant to the plot.

Computers are freaking awesome.

The fact that I can get this kind of information without leaving my office chair -- okay, so at the moment I have to walk into kniedzw's office for Stellarium, since I haven't installed it on my own computer -- it's just phenomenal. I said last year that I couldn't imagine running Memento without the Internet, since even if it was occasionally inaccurate, it offered me a far greater wealth of information with far greater ease than anybody could have dreamt of ten years ago. I likewise couldn't imagine writing Midnight Never Come without computers. Aside from the issues of writing a hundred thousand words longhand, I wouldn't have Stellarium, the unix cal command, online access to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and dozens of other resources I make use of every single day.

Computers are the most awesome things EVAR.