ShifterCat

TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike in solidarity. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream. This is a confrontation with global implications.

"You hold more leverage than a cancellation could ever give you, and it works in the opposite direction. A donation that disappears is invisible. It shows up as one anonymous line in a spreadsheet, gets blamed on the economy or a bad fundraising email, and teaches the institution nothing.

"A donor who speaks up is much harder to wave off, because donors are handed a door that the Foundation’s own staff and volunteers aren’t. You should walk through that door instead of slipping out the back.

"In practice, that means writing to the Board of Trustees, whose job is to hold leadership to account, and telling them in your own words that your support has always been a matter of trust, and that trust depends on how an institution treats the people who build it.

While the crab-eating fox’s (Cerdocyon thous) name implies that crabs make up most of its diet, this canid is omnivorous and has a wide-ranging menu that changes with the seasons. It lives in parts of eastern and northern South America, where it’s found in forests, savannas, shrubland, and wetlands. During the dry season, it may snack more on insects; during the wet season, it favors crustaceans.

Pspspsps...come get your stuff over on Bluesky...@galacticgutters

Muscle Memory

Though some members of the party might view Maeve as a lamb, she's had more than enough experience as a lion.

Well...may I introduce you to...my novel! Reality's End, a novel with all of the traits of a good novel.

Oh, what's that? You can't afford it? Well, that's fine, friend; I've serialized it on AO3 for absolutely free!

Too much effort? No matter. I'm also serializing it as a podcast. You don't need to pay for it; you don't even need to look at it. You can just listen to the dulcet tones of my voice, a voice that has been described as "sounding like someone wearing a housecoat", as I read it to you.

doodle

look at them

Lost my mind a little and added (if my math is correct) 5,615 beads to Nim Teasdale's Odenwald pattern. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!

The goal was “soothingly weighted but not uncomfortable to wear, even as someone with chronic pain.” It could have been a little heavier, so maybe I’ll make a shawl with larger beads another time, but I’m very pleased with this one. I used size 6/0 seed beads, applied as I go with a .6mm crochet hook.

Yarn-wise, used 2 cakes of YarnArt Flowers. I knitted the fully purple sections from both, then knitted all the way through the yellow-oranges with a single ball. When I hit the beginning of red-oranges, I used yarn from both cakes, alternating between them. (Not the entirety of both, I played it by ear to make sure I made it through the full rainbow.)

I do have edited charts with bead placements. I will only share them with Nim's permission.