Is it okay if I gloat here like a cold-hearted bitch, just a wee little bit? Another board I lurk at (mostly in order to spare all the non-, a- and antitheists here from my maunderings) has had a recent horrific Zimmerman-flavored troll invasion. The non-trolls have been waging a war of pushback composed equally of snark and talking the trolls to death, which has kind of helped inasmuch as at least the worst of the trolls do their trolling on threads where we don't hang out.

This morning the admins posted an earnest facing-my-unexamined-privilege-and-unconscious-racism post from an earnest young thing that was pure trollbait, and sure enough the trolls descended in a frenzy. One concerted pushback later, I went back in to see what the sane people had to say, and by God the admins had deleted all the trolling. Every derail, every WY U HATE GOD AND AMERICA? post, every YOU'RE THE REAL RACIST!!1!1 post, everything that wasn't reasonably sane and on topic.

I just want to lie down and roll around in all the measured, rational discourse surrounded by vast tracts of empty land. And then I meanly want to spy on the trolls and watch them choke on their uvulas.

Islands of sanity ... what a joy!

John Scalzi will, on occasion, rewrite a troll's posting to blather about cute kittens.

The kittenized posts are adorable.

The moderator at another site, manboobz (Misogyny. We mock it.), once set a particularly difficult commenter an awesome task: The commenter sometimes trolled and raged but sometimes managed, sort of, to keep himself under control and actually say things with genuine content. The rages were so vile and so frequent, though, that he got put on moderation. He begged to be allowed to post again, so the moderator offered him a deal. He could post anything at all he wanted, unmoderated and undeleted, as long as the post also contained either a picture or a video of an adorable kitten doing adorable things. Different kitten for every post. If he had twenty things to say, he had to find twenty kitten videos. And if he could find them all, he was free to post.

He actually stuck to it, and managed to keep from coming unglued, for an impressive length of time. He did finally snap and get banned forever, but he lasted pretty damn long; I can only guess that the extra effort involved in kitten-vid-hunting made it not worth his while to post too often, plus maybe all the cute kitten vids distracted him from his rage.

msbelle, have you checked out Sue's guys-with-eyeliner tumblr?

I have doubled in followers lately, I don't know why. To 35! So after quite a bit of neglect, I've loaded up the queue again. There are lots of models coming up. So much trolling through pictures of pretty men. Such a hardship.

We appreciate you taking one for the team so selflessly, Sue.

Seriously.

Well, a lot of those models do look like babies. They're all so young!

SPEAKING OF BABIES--what's the age overlap between gnaw-drool-on-everything-it-grabs and sitting up solidly?

Have now made two loaves of zucchini bread and some carrot salad. Quinoa is in the pot, so I can add some to the black bean and corn salad I made yesterday, so it's a meal by itself. The zucchini bread is a Paula Deen recipe that makes two loaves -- usually I cut it in half and just make one. Making both at once is kind of horrifying, ingredient-wise: Three cups of sugar, four eggs... Paula Deen.

ION, several things about my father:

1. We set up this website to ask friends to hang out with him when my mom's at work and he's not at his day program, and their friends are so nice! I mean, even people they aren't that close to are signing up for repeat visits. And I like it when they hang out with my grandmother as well, because she likes company too, when she's feeling up to it. (But holy cow, she is now mentally where my father was a few years ago, having wildly different versions of the same conversation within five minutes of each other...)

2. Yesterday, we walked by a guy playing guitar and singing on the street, and my father made a beeline for him. I was worried something weird was about to happen! But no, the guy greeted my father by name and was happy to see him, asked if he was still working, etc. I really don't know how he knows everyone in the world.

3. He brings home his dessert from lunch for my mother, or at least some of it. He always comes home with a little packet of cake or something in his shirt pocket. Cute and nice!