And we’re back with more decency

Last time I had time to write, I posted about Militant decency and what I’m doing.

Today we’re back with more.

  1. You can’t help others if you can’t help yourself. Do you have a supply of water in your house in case you lost water? Do you have enough to cover some neighbors if it turns out that some disaster has left them without?
  2. What’s your power situation? Do you have a generator or some portable power?
  3. Tell your state Attorney General to stop attacking Section 504 of the federal government. Texas v. Becerra: What it is and How You Can Help Stop the Attack on Section 504 names the 17 states suing to take rights away from people with disabilities.
  4. Here’s Macklemore’s latest music video – called “fucked up“. It’s political, it’s got some strong language, and it’s energizing.
  5. Here’s a video about beaver dams. Don’t worry, it’s short. And for a change, it’s not about the US! Remember, joy is an act of resistance!

Militant decency

Hoo. Been a bit since I dusted this one off.

We’re not done the pinball machine backglass, I just haven’t had time to work on anything in…. checks notes…. a year. Or rather, I’ve had the same amount of time as everyone else, [you get a lifetime] but I’ve been dedicating it to lots of job and medical stuff.

Anyway. Today we’re here to talk about militant decency.

(If you’re following me on bluesky, this is going to sound familiar.)

Tweet by serialephemera: Thematically speaking, the most important thing Terry Pratchett taught me was the concept of militant decency. The idea that you can look at the world and its flaws and its injustices and its cruelties and get deeply, intensely angry, and that you can turn that into energy for doing the right thing and making the world a better place. He taught me that the anger itself is not the part I should be fighting. Nobody in my life ever said that before.
The inspiration for the concept.

Resources to get us started

Things we can do when we’re mad:

  • https://resist.bot – Message our congresscritters (or in some cases our lower level politicians) and say that enough is enough.
  • Donate to a charity that is working against the things we’re mad about. I’ll write later about the year of Everybody Gets $10.
  • Do something in your neighborhood that helps everyone.
  • Blog. Not social media. Blog. In your own space if you can. If you need help setting up a blog, contact me over on my business site.
  • Use https://5calls.org to get scripts for issues that have you concerned and call about them. OR: combine them with resistbot and you don’t even have to talk to anyone

Reading to get us started

Tomorrow, or sometime soon anyway, more. We have things to do.

A love letter to my favorite branch of the government.

Editor’s note: I tried to send this email to NOAA directly when I heard that their email address had leaked and was getting hate mail (NSFW content) Unfortunately, by the time I got done setting up a separate email address to send my message from (because I didn’t really want 13,000 bounce responses if it failed spectacularly going to my main email) they had patched the mail server to not accept email from people like me. Took ’em long enough.

If you know someone at NOAA, please pass this along to them.


I hope this email finds you.

I check your weather site every day. The forecast discussions in the Mt. Airy office help me both understand how weather works and help me understand why all of your jobs are so very difficult.

You do really hard jobs, and you do them very well and I want to say thank you.

Your predecessors kept my dad safe when he was in the Coast Guard in the 1960s, a lightship sailor in the North Seas. Your weather forecasts keep all of our service members safe every day. They keep all of us safe every day. I get a little arrogant when my friends are quoting crazy snow totals at me and I pull up the forecast discussion and go “well yeah but here are the models the feds are looking at and here’s what’s not evening out yet, so they’re calling for less and here’s why” and they’re more consistently correct than anything any other app puts out. Also, the communications that I found on your Facebook channel which shows what the chances are for different snow amounts made some of my family go “wow!”. Thank you.

You research and react to climate research changes, which helps every one of us figure out what to plant and where, from the apartment balcony garden to full-sized farms both here in the US and all over the world. Your educational resources are fantastic and your climate stripes have inspired a lot of knitters I know, even if it does mean they get really mad at how much red yarn they end up using. Your planning and commitment to the real science of the climate keeps us both safe and fed. Thank you.

The work you do around the oceans and coasts mean that cities like Virginia Beach are prepared for storms and the surges they bring. My trips there every summer to relax allow me to recharge and do better at all the work — family and paid — that I do throughout the year. Without your hard work the hotels and tourism industries couldn’t do what they do, and I couldn’t get a chance to watch the dolphins chasing the paddlers at sunrise. Thank you.

We all laughed when the Evergreen got stuck in the Suez Canal, because we definitely needed a laugh when that happened. But if it weren’t for the hard work you do in charting and maps, not only would we have boats stuck all the time, the Coast Guard would be working who knows how much longer to save ships sunk by unknown underwater rocks. You keep us safe. Thank you.

Every time we have a hurricane and we watch the intense graphics and rapid updates, it’s because your scientists are in airplanes flying through those hurricanes. That’s hard dangerous work, and it takes a huge team of scientists and others to produce that data, keep the ones in the planes safe, and communicate the findings out to the rest of the world. Thank you. And thank you to the amazing folks who are putting satellites in space and then telling us the story of our Earth, with pictures of storms and methane emissions and all kinds of other facts we would have no access to without the satellites.

A few years ago someone told me that the overfishing of the oceans and waterways was so bad that the only things really flourishing were jellyfish, so I’d better figure out how I like my jellyfish cooked. (I’m guessing as jellyfish chips since once the water’s out of one there’s not much left.) But the folks working in the Fisheries division are helping to make sure that we don’t get to that point. I like having well-stocked waterways both because hey, fish are tasty, and because the natural ecosystem of the ocean requires, you know, the ecosystem to be alive. I watched an awesome video on SciShow the other day about reducing bycatch and I’m 100% sure that even if your studies weren’t the ones being performed, “reducing bycatch” is something that we wouldn’t be able to research without the baseline of knowledge that you provide. Thank you. And thank you to everyone working with and around the marine sanctuaries to ensure that we have places that are as protected as possible from all the chaos humans inevitably create.

I don’t even know how to begin to talk about your communications teams. The websites, the alerts, the education libraries, the videos, the photos, they’re all amazing. I love you all for every thing that you produce, even when I don’t know it’s coming from you.

You all — every one of you — work really hard jobs that pay dividends in science, health, education, infrastructure, and so many other ways.

You keep us safe. Thank you.

thank you,
anne gibson

Star Trek The Next Generation

Star Trek the Next Generation backglass as described in the post

Star Trek the Next Generation, 1993, Williams.

More branded machines! More marketing!

Since it’s an illustration, everyone looks super young and quite fit. From left to right we’ve got Geordi LaForge, Deanna Troi, Jonathan Riker, Data, Beverly Crusher, Jean Luc Picard, and Worf who’s about to fire his phaser at someone. Wow I forgot that phasers were the size of boxy dildos back then.

Behind our heroes we see the Enterprise-D, a Romulan Bird-of-Prey, a Klingon battle cruiser, and the silhouette of a Borg, probably Hugh.

See, I do know some pop culture!

The Mandalorian

The backglass of Mandalorian as described in the post

Star Wars: The Mandalorian (Pro edition), 2021, Stern.

It took close to 75 pinball posts for me to get to a Star Wars property, which is really an accomplishment considering how many different ones exist.

It’s still a Stern machine and it’s still a licensed property, so yes, the backglass looks more like marketing material than anything else, but at least now that we’re in the 2020s, we’re getting a little more artistic about it again. This is an illustration, not a photo still or mashup. The Mandalorian stands center stage with the child in front of him, one of the Fetts to the right and a woman I recognize but don’t know the name of to the left. A bunch of other characters are milling around, they’re on a desert planet, and typical Star Wars ships hover in the far background.

(Look, I only watched like two episodes, cut me a break.)

It’s very orange and charcoal, but in a way that’s in line with the show’s aesthetic. Yeah, it’s advertising. Gotta sell machines somehow.