LOL, couldn't resist the throwback title.

Welp, the old version of jackalop.es got hacked a while back, as WordPress sites are wont to do in my experience... So luckily while helping out at the Intro to Backdrop training at BADCamp last week I got the opportunity to set up a new website using Backdrop, my favorite CMS. Exciting to have a Backdrop site all of my own to mess around with now! (Funny, I never really considered setting a Drupal site up for myself...)

Things are a bit of a mess right now; lots of broken images and embedded videos and WordPress-specific things that no longer work. I'll gradually be getting this place in shape. And who knows, maybe I'll start posting again, even!

Does the language of diversity and inclusion in tech serve us?

In her autobiography, Assata Shakur warns of the slippery nature of "liberal," both the word and the political concept:

I have never really understood exactly what a ‘liberal’ is, since I have heard ‘liberals’ express every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject...As far as I’m concerned, ‘liberal’ is the most meaningless word in the dictionary.

Similarly, "diversity" and "inclusion" feel like liberal words; like the concept of liberalism itself, they can be rendered devoid of meaning and therefore dangerously susceptible to appropriation, perversion and reversal.

This past week I saw a pair of trumpeter swans a'swimming on Swan Lake in Wyoming.

Since identifying the lake as a destination on our hike, Tchaikovsky's Swan's Theme has been firmly lodged in my brain. When we reached Swan Lake itself I dramatically sang what I knew of it from the shore, one of my companions helpfully picking up the tune, my arms spread wide, for once not really caring whether I disturbed the people or creatures around me. (And hey, it's important to scare off the bears!) I even made a fair attempt at a lesser-known section that leads up to the repetition of the leitmotif.

This morning I found myself sitting in my favorite neighborhood spot, Akat Cafe Kalli, where the politics are as palpable and potent as the coffee. I sat here, eating my breakfast sandwich, drinking my café de olla, reading my book , nodding my head along to the music, which I was growing increasingly aware of and was increasingly digging, but also increasingly scared to trust it. As I listened to the explicitly political lyrics on police violence, racism, sexism and homophobia that seemed to speak directly to me as a queer, leftist, womanish person of color, my suspicion grew that I might feel significantly less in tune with other, yet unnamed politics of the artists whose album was playing. The feeling increased as the words, now in Spanish as well as English, continued to resonate as much as the music to which they were set.

I need to remind myself that, in getting out of the house, I often expose myself to great beauty and blessings.

Yesterday was a day of reckoning with myself and all of my loose ends, among them an overdue shopping trip. I set some lofty intentions for today:

It happens sometimes. I do web work and other kinds of tech support for community organizations, some of whom I work with outside of paid work. Working at this intersection of technology, my activism and my communities means I get shaken up at unexpected times.

Today I was working on a plan for a new website for the Audre Lorde Project, an organization I've worked with both professionally and politically for more than a decade now. I was checking out their site analytics to get a sense of what their site traffic might indicate about who's coming to the site, and for what.

I pulled up a report of their site traffic over the past year and saw two huge spikes. I started looking into the first one.

Lunch time, and nothing at all sounded appealing. It had been a rough morning, and I was looking for comfort. I headed out, bee-lining for an overpriced garlic miso fried chicken rice bowl and a bottle of Mexican Coke. In my adulthood I've realized that comfort food sometimes doesn't so much mean food that is comforting as it means food that is so delicious that even when your emotions have decimated your appetite, you can still eat it.

As I walked down the block I felt the pull of the bookstore just a few blocks further ahead. Books are another reliable source comfort. But then I remembered my Black friend behind the counter there on MLK Day, her complaint earlier that she was the only Black employee there and they scheduled her to work that day of all days, her white boss patronizingly insisting "No, you HAVE to buy local" when she overheard us talking about how it can be hard to get yourself into a local independent bookstore and buy (the more expensive) books there as my friend rang up my $26 plus tax copy of "Between the World and Me."

Originally posted on Facebook.

While lying in bed preparing to get up and face the day, I remembered a dream I had last night and felt compelled not only to write it down but to share it with my friends. (I'm sharing with my Facebook Friends but thinking of the friends in my dream, my friends and comrades in Oakland.)

Scroll down for screenshots of the full Twitter conversation.

On May 28 I started a conversation on Twitter with THEESatisfaction, musicians of whom I've been a fan for a bit, about their upcoming performance at the Allied Media Conference, which I've been deeply involved in since I first attended in 2011.

After a webinar on blogging for social change earlier today, I found myself on the home page of my old blog, AngryBrownButch. Scrolling down the page, I was jarred to read these words from November 18, 2008: