Internet

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~ Cheryl

Thanks to discussions elsewhere I have become aware of problems with the UK’s new Online Safety Act. In theory this legislation is designed to protect children from unsafe material on the internet. It does things like require social media companies to actually enforce their age limits, and to have active moderation policies. In practice it is a poorly-thought-out piece of legislation that will catch a lot of innocent people in its net.

People who run various fora and bulletin boards for volunteer and hobbyist groups have already started taking their sites offline because they cannot afford to comply with the legislation, and can’t afford to ignore it. (You can be fined up to £18m if found in breach of the act.)

My guess is that, much like HMRC puts a lot of effort into prosecuting individuals who might have made a mistake in their tax return, while letting the wealthy and corporations get away with massive tax evasion, the force of this law will fall mainly on private individuals and small companies. There have been suggestions that SWATing-like tactics will be used by internet trolls whereby they seek to place dubious content on sites they have taken against, and then report those sites to the authorities.

In theory, blogs like this are exempt from the law on the grounds that they are not bulletin boards, but rather simply people commenting on things the blog owner has said. However, when the Act was drafted, it did not occur to anyone that it is possible for people to reply to other people’s comments on a blog. And that makes it functionally more like a bulletin board. There is no means in WordPress to prevent that from happening without closing comments altogether. As people hardly ever comment here these days anyway, I have taken the decision to close them entirely. Should things change in the future I can always open them up again. In the meantime, you can always reply to posts via social media.

Of course it would not surprise me if, sometime soon, the UK government decides that all discussion of trans issues is “pornographic” and therefore must be behind an 18+ screen. The Online Safety Act will be the vehicle through which they attack online discussion of trans rights. But I’ll deal with that as and when we get there.

Testing, testing…

~ Cheryl

It appears to be necessary to wean my sites off Jetpack, and eventually all Automattic products. I don’t have the time to investigate Ghost right now, but I am working on reducing the Jetpack features that I use. Having closed my Tumblr account, and with Farcebook and Xitter no longer allowing remote posting, the only thing I was using the Social module for was Mastodon. As of today. I’ve stopped doing that and have installed the ActivityPub plugin instead. Hence a testing post.

Now if only it was possible to stop using Microsoft products as well… Yes, yes, I know, but I still have to work, and clients expect me to use Microsoft.

Update: Well that’s annoying. Apparently ActivityPub doesn’t play well with W3 Total Cache. So for now I’ll have to manually cross-post to Mastodon as I’ve been doing to BlueSky. Not that I blog that often here these days, so it is not much of a pain.

Test Post

~ Cheryl

The main reason for this post is that WordPress finally has an official cross-posting facility for Mastodon. Previous I have been using a special plugin, which worked, but is not an ideal solution. Hopefully the official system will also work.

WordPress no longer cross-posts to Twitter because the Musk Rat is an arsehole and doesn’t understand how social media ecosystems work. Given that it doesn’t, and that not enough of you are on Mastodon, I have reluctantly re-connected Farcebook. So this is a test for that as well.

Finally, because I shouldn’t do a post with no news, I am writing this from a hotel at Heathrow because I have an early flight to Stockholm tomorrow. If all goes well, by this time tomorrow I will be in Uppsala and will have done my first panel.

Farewell to Twitter?

~ Cheryl

As most of you will know, Twitter has been sold to a private investor for an eye-popping amount of money. Again for most of you this will make very little difference, at least in the short term. However, the new owner, Elon Musk, has made it clear that one of his priorities is to restore “free speech” to the platform. This is, of course, the Libertarian version of free speech which is defined as, “I have the right to say whatever I want, you are obliged to listen to me, and you are not allowed to answer back.”

Again, in most cases, this will not affect you, because you are not in one of the minority groups to which Musk takes exception. I, however, am. Notorious transphobes have been rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of being let back onto Twitter, and the moderation system, which is already heavily biased against trans folk, will become more so. I need to have somewhere to go, because Twitter is going to become deeply hostile to the likes of me.

I note also that Musk is not the sort of person who should be in charge of a popular social media network. He likes to think that he’s Tony Stark, but actually he’s what Lex Luthor would be if Lex had to employ other people to do all the thinking for him. I think it behooves us all to make Musk’s time in charge of Twitter as unpleasant as possible. Making his purchase worthless would help a lot with that.

I won’t be going immediately because I want to download all of my tweets and delete them. That will take a while, especially as so many other people are trying to do the same thing. But I have stopped posting, and this will be the last blog post that cross-posts.

I’m not sure where I will end up. I do have a Tumblr account, but I never use it. I’ve signed up for Mastodon (same @CherylMorgan) user name, but it is horribly slow right now because the service has been deluged with new users and needs time to adapt. I am in several Discord servers, but they are all very niche. I loathe Farcebook. Instagram is owned by them, and is very much for visual people whereas I’m a words person.

I will, of course, still be here. Also not spending so much time on social media will probably be good for me.

Attention, Feedburner Users

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

Back in the day, Feedburner was a useful way for people to stay up to date with blogs. That was before Google effectivly killed off RSS. But it isn’t gone. Websites still pump out feeds, and slowly the infrastructure around them is returning.

Meanwhile the WordPress plugins that used to enable people to subscribe to FeedBurner have all gone. I have a dead plugin that I need to get rid of as it might be a security risk. But I have some 30 people still apparently subscribed to this blog via Feedburner. If you are still out there (and not just dead email addresses), I don’t want to lose you.

What I have done is sign up to a new RSS service called Follow.It. You can subscribe to my feed there. It looks to be somewhat more flexible that FeedBurner, which is nice. But I now need to close the Feedburner account for this site. I’d like to make sure I don’t lose the existing subscribers. I have all of your emails so I can transfer you over. If one of those people is you, please get in touch so I can check that the transfer has gone OK.

That Cyber Monday Thing

~ Cheryl

This is the time of year in which half of the internet is yelling at you to buy stuff, and the other half is yelling at you to boycott all of that awful consumerism. Well, you do you. But if you are in a buying mood, please remember that Wizard’s Tower authors get more money if you buy ebooks direct from us then if you buy from that big river in the aether. Also this is pretty much your last chance to do so, because I’ll have to close the store in January thanks to Brexit.

If paper books are your thing, I’m pleased to report that, after a short distribtion hiccup, Wizard’s Tower books are available again from Bookshop.org UK. If you buy from them, we get a cut, and they give money to independent bookshops in the UK as well.

PowerPoint on Zoom

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Those of you who, like me, have been spending a lot of time on Zoom this year will be familiar with this problem. Someone needs to give a presentation on Zoom. They share their screen, but when they try to advance the slides it works for them, but not for the audience. As far as the audience is concerned, the presentation stays fixed on the first slide.

The easy fix for this is to drop back into edit mode in PowerPoint. It isn’t elegant, but at least your audience can see the slides. Alternatively you can give someone else the slides and ask them to screen share PowerPoint, but that means you have to keep asking them to advance the slides. I was sure that there had to be a better way if only you could find out which of the gazillion settings in Windows or PowerPoint or Zoom would fix it. I think I now have the solution.

In PowerPoint, select the Side Show menu, and click on Set Up Slide Show. That will bring up the dialog box above. Make sure that the first set of radio buttons (Show Type) is set to “Browsed by an individual” rather than to “Presented by a speaker”.

Kevin and I tested that this evening and it seems to work. I’m giving a talk on LGBT+ History on Wednesday evening. Fingers crossed it will work for them too.

A New Bookstore

~ Cheryl

If you are part of the UK book community then your social media will have been filled over the past few days with posts about a new online bookstore, cunningly called “Bookstore”, and touted as a rival to Amazon. They launched today, complete with a big article in the Guardian explaining how they support UK bookstores. Lots of people are encouraging you to buy from them, and some have even suggested that you might be a scab if you still have links to Amazon. Well, here’s a publisher view.

The first thing to note is that they are not a replacement for Amazon because they only sell paper books. Wizard’s Tower was founded as an ebook company, and the majority of our sales are still ebooks. The majority of those are through Amazon. I do try to encourage Kindle owners to buy direct from us, but most won’t do so because we can’t offer direct download, and in any case I’ll probably have to close the bookstore in January because of Brexit. So I am not going to stop linking to Amazon from Wizard’s Tower.

Secondly these folks are UK only. Apparently they have a US website as well, but I think I need to spoof a US location before I can look at that. This is the internet. I have readers and customers all over the world. So while I am keen to support UK boosktores, I will have readers and customers who will need to buy elsewhere.

The final issue is making sure that the books are listed. I started by doing a search for Juliet and it only came up with some of her books, but if you search for books by title I think they are all there. I will get on with putting up links to the books on the Wizard’s Tower website. I will also check out the US site. Because we are a Print-on-Demand company, they will put up warning messages about titles being out of stock, but that just means it will take them a few days to get the book to you. I’ll look into signing up as an affiliate, as they have a very good commission rate (10%), and they also donate 10% of the cover price to a fund to support UK bookstores. That’s a good thing.

A Streamyard Test – Cheryl & Kevin at Worldcon

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Because I will be using technology new to me for the CoNZealand Fringe panel on Sunday, I decided to run a test with Kevin. We had a brief chat about how we are enjoying Virtual Worldcon so far. It all went very well, and you can see it below. I so wish I had known about StreamYard when I was doing the One25 fundraiser. It is exactly what I needed.

Coronavirus – Day #104

~ Cheryl

Today has mostly been spent working on the new issue of Salon Futura. It will probably go up on Monday.

In the outside world I woke up to the news that a particularly nasty transphobe has been permanently banned from Twitter. People have been calling for this for months, if not years. What he finally did wrong was go after the Women’s Institute, who had made a trans-supportive tweet.

Twitter bans tend to happen in two ways. Firstly they may be the result of mass reporting. That’s the way that people from minority groups tend to get banned. It doesn’t matter what was actually tweeted, if enough people complain at once a ban is automatic. The other mechanism is when someone important complains. The WI have a lot of members, and they are very respectable so Twitter listens to them.

Anyway, Twitter bans for right-wing trolls are bit like deaths in superhero comics. I’m sure he’ll be back in a few months, once he’s found the right person to whisper in Jack Dorsey’s ear.

Virtual Tolkien

~ Cheryl

Yes, everything is going online these days. That includes the J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature. But the nice folks at Pembroke College have come up with a cool idea. Rather than have poor Rebecca Kuang give a lecture by Zoom, they have invited a bunch of past lecturers to join her in an online symposium. The subject for discussion is: “the importance of fantasy in times of crisis: how science-fiction and fantasy literature respond to, and provide inspiration during, moments of despair and personal difficulty.” In addition to Kuang the panelists are: Kij Johnson, Adam Roberts, Lev Grossman, Terri Windling and VE Schwab.

The symposium will take place on Saturday May 16, 4:00 – 5:30pm British time (11am – 12:30 Eastern).

Obviously this clashes with WiFi SciFi, but I have been assured that the discussion will be recorded so you don’t have to miss me, though I won’t be at all surprised if you do. If you can’t make it, you can send in a question in advance.

To register, or to ask a question of the panel, go here.

Let’s Give It Up for One25!

~ Cheryl


Some of you will remember that last year I walked 125 miles to raise money for the Bristol charity, One25. Well, they are looking for help again this year, and this time the challenge is to give something up for 125 hours. Thinking of something was a challenge in itself because we’ve been forced to give up so much thanks to the pandemic, but I have an idea I think that you’ll enjoy. The image above is a clue. More on that later, but first, why One25?

One25 are a charity who work directly with street sex-working women to provide outreach, casework and essential resources for their future. 80% of women who street sex-work are homeless. In the strangest of times we now find ourselves in, One25 remain focused on keeping contact with women as much as possible and continuing to deliver services. They are doing whatever they can to make sure that some of Bristol’s most vulnerable women know that they are loved and not alone.

UK-based readers might remember that last year the Sussexes visited One25 and Meghan wrote on some bananas.

As a trans woman I am painfully aware that sex work could easily have been part of my life. Thanks to a great deal of luck and Kevin’s love, I managed to avoid that, but numerous people didn’t. High profile trans women such as Roz Kaveney and Janet Mock have written movingly about their experiences in the sex trade. Each year, when I help read the names of the departed at the Trans Day of Remembrance ceremony, I am painfully aware that many of those women died because they had no choice but to sell their bodies, and therefore had to make themselves vulnerable.

I have done several sessions of trans awareness training for One25 staff and have been very impressed by their openness and willingness to provide support to whoever needs it.

So, what’s the plan? Well, for the duration of the fundraiser, 1:00pm on May 15th to 6:00pm on May 20th, I am giving up living in the UK. I’ve had enough of this staying at home lark, and by the magic of the internet I am going to travel the world. And I’m inviting you to come with me. For each of the 6 days I will visit a different country. I will check out the tourist spots, talk to local people, try the local food, play the local music and so on. You will be able to follow it all on social media.

I have four of the six countries inked in. Australia and California are obvious choices as I have lived in both countries. Finland is next as I have been there so often. I’m going to do Italy because it gives me an opportunity to talk about Romans (again). The other two are as yet undecided. Croatia and Canada are obvious picks as I’ve been to each of them several times, but I’m open to persuasion to go somewhere else. It needs to be somwhere I can do a decent job of visiting. Suggest somewhere.

If you happen to live in one of those countries and would like to help by suggesting places to visit, things to eat, or music to play I would be very grateful. If you’d like to do an interview I would be over the moon. Do let me know.

And, most importantly, PLEASE PLEDGE. My fundraising page is here. No amount is too small. Every penny is gratefully received.

WiFi SciFi 2 is Coming

~ Cheryl


Well, that was quick. Then again, WiFi SciFi is a very small convention, so doing multiple iterations is easy. Event 2 is due up this coming weekend. Hopefully I will see some of you there. Click here for instructions on how to reserve a place.

Fair warning: it is my birthday. I may have decided to dress up.

WiFi SciFi – First Impressions

~ Cheryl

Today I participated in my first online science fiction convention. It was a small thing, just two panels and a quiz, but you have to start somewhere. It went very well, all things considered. Of course not everything went according to plan, but the attendees weren’t expecting perfection because we all knew it was an experiment. One of the purposes of the experiment was to find out what worked and what didn’t, so that next time can be better.

Part of the success was definitely down to a great list of panelists that included Mike Carey, Dave Hutchinson, Aliette de Bodard, Gareth Powell and Tade Thompson. Part of it was also due to Anne Corlett and her team who, I understand, have been working hard in the past few days getting to grips with the Zoom software and discovering all of the advertised features that don’t actually work as advertised.

Another great part of the event was the international nature. We had people from the USA (including one Californian who was up at 7:00am), from Canada, from Finland and Croatia, apparently someone from India though I don’t know who that was, and one very keen Australian for whom the con was in the middle of the night. This gives me a lot of hope for Worldcon becoming truly international.

I will be catching up with Anne and her team over the next few days and talking through some of the issues that came up. There are certainly some things that can be improved with minor tweaks to the way things are run, and others that would be better if the software wasn’t so buggy. If anyone who attended it has feedback they want to pass on, do get in touch. The objective is to do a more in-depth review for the next Salon Futura.

The first panel was also streamed live on YouTube. You can watch it below.

I’m not sure what happened to panel 2, but I’m sad if it is not available as it was great (apart from Tade’s internet woes).

Coronavirus – Day #15

~ Cheryl

One of the things that the current crisis has laid bare is just how international and connected our world now is, or at least can be.

On the one hand, my local residents’ group has sent round an email asking whether people are lonely, and offering to host a meeting by some strange new software system called Zoom.

On the other hand I have spent the day on Zoom, Google Hangouts and Facebook. I have given a talk on trans history to an LGBT+ youth group in Somerset. I have recorded interviews for my next radio show with people in France, Germany and the USA. I have chatted to friends in Finland and Greece. And I have participated in a committee meeting in the USA.

I don’t have the time to be lonely.

Coronavirus – Day #12

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

One of the interesting things about the current crisis is how quickly things have changed. Only a couple of weeks ago we were wondering whether travel would be affected. Now conventions as far out as August are being cancelled. And you can get caught out. I’ve been watching a documentary series about British Rivers on Channel 5. It is basically an excuse to do some local history of the back of the region that a major river flows through. The latest episode I watched was on the Warwickshire Avon. (There are lots of rivers called Avon in England because afon is Welsh for river, and the English are stupid.) This is the one that flows through Stratford, but it is also known for Rugby and its sport, Warwick for its castle, Leamington for its spa and several other things. The river is also prone to flooding. At the start of the show the narrator said that 2020 would be remembered as the year of terrible floods on the Avon. Ha, no mate. Nice try.

Keeping up with the pace of change has been hard for some organisations. Today I got email from Tesco to say that they have finally implemented a queuing system (with enforced separation) for getting into stores, and at checkouts, plus a rigorous cleaning regime. They’ve also cut down on the range of products they stock to make sure they have enough basic necessities. I’m not going to risk heading out there for a while though. Goodness only knows how people will be behaving.

What does seem to be working is the Internet. Today I had a long video chat with my friend Otto in Helsinki. That sort of thing is easy. Also Disney+ seems to have got through its UK launch with no capacity issues. But utility systems are complicated. We still have power, water, and connectivity, but what happens if things go wrong? I’ve just had email from my internet provider, Zen, who have been great, but they don’t own vans. If something were to go wrong on the network out in the country somewhere, it is a company called Openreach that would send an engineer to fix it. They have just announced that they can no longer keep to their advertised service level. If your internet goes down, and you are not a priority industry, then you are screwed. In theory I still have the mobile phone, but hopefully I won’t need it.

Without the Internet, of course, I would be completely cut off. I think I would probably still be OK for a while. I’m slightly boggled at the people who are getting cabin fever after a day or two of working from home. Obviously I don’t have kids, which helps a lot, but I’m used to this. I’ve been working for myself, mostly from home, since 2003. What’s more, as a trans person, I’m used to going 2 to 3 weeks over Christmas with no in-person social contact every year. In effect I have been training for this for a long time.

New Year, New Look

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

No, not me, the blog.

As you have presumably noticed, there’s a new theme in place here. This wasn’t planned. Some very old themes don’t support mutliple screen sizes very well. In particular they tend to be designed for PCs rather than tablets or phones. Modern themes are designed with portability in mind. Now you can get clever stuff that will adjust your theme for mobile devices (in the Jetpack plugin, WordPress veterans), but that is being retired this year.

There are a lot of sites that I manage, and many of them use a themes that are up to 10 years old and which need an update. Also many of them are text-heavy, and most modern blog themese assume that every post will have an associated image. So finding a replacement theme that a) works on a text-heavy site; b) is free; and c) isn’t likely to become unsupported in a year or two; will not be easy.

This theme is Penscratch which looks specifically designed for a text-heavy site. It is also created by Automattic who own WordPress so it is likely to stick around for a while.

The header image is from Pixabay. It has cats and books, which seems kind of appropriate.

I will probably fiddle with the look of the thing for a while yet. In the meantime if you spot anything that is not working in the theme (not broken links, there are bound to be lots of those) then please let me know.

Tomorrow on Ujima

~ Cheryl

In the midst of all this I still have to do my radio show. Naturally tomorrow I am devoting most of the show to LGBT History Month. I will be joined by Daryll Bullock, a local writer whose book, David Bowie Made Me Gay, has been receiving international acclaim. Darryl will be talking to me about the queer black roots of modern popular music. He’ll be followed by Ujima’s own Angel Mel who will bring us right up to date with news of the queer music scene in Bristol.

In the second hour Karen Garvey from M Shed will pop in and we’ll preview the rest of the entertainment we have planned for Saturday. If you are in Bristol there will be loads of great talks so do pop in.

I also have a short interview with Sophie Walker, the leader of the Women’s Equality Party, that I bagged when she was in Bristol on Sunday. Naturally we talked about the 100th anniversary of (some) women getting the vote, the gender pay gap and so on.

Finally I’ll be talking about plans to hold an anti-trans event in Bristol on Thursday and how the increasingly hostile media coverage of trans issues is leading to an increase in the number of hate crimes against trans people in the region.

Stuff & Nonsense

~ Cheryl

Every so often I think I should do a blog post rebutting some of the latest nonsense that the TERFs* have come up with. Then things get even more weird. I’m not going anywhere near the nonsense in the Labour Party because it is not my fight, but he’s a few examples of the bizarre things that have been going on.

As you may recall, the current TERF-fueled media assault on trans people is mostly about the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act and is a complete fabrication because a) the legislative changes would not give trans women the rights people are complaining about, and b) we have actually enjoyed those rights under the Equality Act for 8 years. I explained it all here.

Ireland has had a system of self-declaration of legal gender, similar to what has been proposed for the UK, since 2015, and recently there was an article in The Guardian about how Irish trans people had worked together with feminist groups in Ireland to make this happen, and that nothing awful had resulted from it.

Predictably the TERFs started harassing Irish feminists on social media. They also decided to have a public meeting in Dublin to school Irish women on how to be proper feminists. It was billed as being in support of Ireland’s fight for legal abortion, but as it was also part of a UK tour focusing solely on spreading alarm about trans rights the Irish were under no illusions as to what was intended. They issued a scathing open letter.

Since then I have seen TERF accounts on Twitter claiming that the Irish must be anti-abortion for opposing the proposed meeting, and that being pro-abortion is anti-feminist because the only purpose of abortion is to allow men to be less responsible about having sex.

Oh, and Germaine Greer has come out against the #MeToo movement.

Meanwhile it has been a common plank of TERF ideology, despite masses of evidence to the contrary, that trans women are all obsessed with gender stereotypes and act to reinforce the gender binary. Today I learned that, because they insist that being trans is only about gender presentation, they are taking to calling themselves trans because they don’t present in an extremely feminine manner, even though they were assigned female at birth and fully and proudly identify as women.

This is, I presume, another of their silly little psychological games in which they try to mess with trans women’s heads in an attempt to drive us all to suicide. I guess they are hoping that we’ll see anti-trans posts being made by people who claim to be trans in their profiles and be distressed by this. Thankfully you can normally tell because they will write “transwoman” rather than “trans woman” (using transwoman as a noun to indicate that a transwoman is an entirely separate class of being from a woman) and they’ll probably have “XX” in their profile as well).

About the only interesting thing about this is that their tactics are remarkably similar to those used by the miserable remnants of the Sad Puppy movement to harass writers that they don’t like on Twitter. Right down to the fact that their preferred targets are almost always young women.

One day we, as a society, will learn to recognize all of this nonsense and ignore it. Sadly that day is not yet upon us.

* TERF = Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, a term invented by Radical Feminists decades ago to distance themselves from the anti-trans fanatics. TERFs are notable for being neither Radical nor very good at feminism.

History Goes Viral

~ Cheryl

No, I’m not referring to the ongoing-nonsense about whether people of color existed before they were “discovered” by European colonialists. While I was down in Hove I spotted this tweet from one of the best satirical accounts on Twitter:

Naturally I couldn’t resist offering a few comments. Somewhat to my surprise, some of those tweets I made have over 900 likes. One has over 1000. And it is still going, well over a week later.

Interestingly, despite all of the attention, I haven’t got much in the way of new followers. I’m not overly upset over that. After all, hordes of followers generally means endless harassment. As it is I check new followers for TERFs and block them on sight. But this has been something of a window on what social media popularity is like. I’m rather glad it doesn’t happen often.

Oh, and that tweet has lots of very funny replies. The whole thread is worth reading.