On the days when it starts to feel like the internet is nothing but insult and outrage from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, it helps to go look at some of the other things.

For example:  here’s an informative post from Tumblr, giving workshop instructions on how, exactly to gird your loins (if you’re wearing long skirts, or a robe of some sort.)  Note that the process not only gets the material out of the way, but also provides certain crucial areas with extra padding.

This isn’t the same thing, by the way, as simply kilting up one’s skirt, which is a simpler process, involving tucking the extra fabric into one’s belt to shorten the garment.

And here’s a report on the recent RWA (Romance Writers of America) convention, including some very cogent remarks on the need for representation in romance.  Short version:  Romance is the genre of happy endings, and readers who aren’t cisgendered currently-able-bodied straight white women need books that say they’re just as entitled to happy endings as anybody else.

Finally, a couple of links that are pure catnip for a word nut like me: a compendium of the blogger’s own favorite posts from three years of All Things Linguistic, and a page from which you can buy a copy of Balþos Gadedeis Aþalhaidais in Sildaleikalanda – which is to say, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, newly translated into Gothic by the scholar David Alexander Carlton.

As Katta (the Cat) says to Aþalhaids (Alice), “Weis sijum her woda in allamma” – “We’re all mad here.”