(no subject)

I watched Spotlight on Netflix last night.

There are... very few times in my life, very few, when I have been actively and truly glad I was not born male. This was one of them.

I was born and raised Catholic. As a kid I wanted to be a priest. I was told, straight up, that that was a no, that I was a girl, that only boys could be priests. (The prospect of nuns never came into the picture. Sisters didn't say Mass, they taught school, and if I wanted to teach school I could just be a teacher.) I didn't give up on that prospect for a long time. I even decided at one point that if I'd been a boy I would've tried to become a Jesuit; I had a cousin who was a Jesuit who taught at Fordham and they seemed like the right order.

If I'd been born a boy, and if I'd had the required three people tell me 'have you considered joining the Jesuits?', I'd have gone into the seminary after college. That would've been '96 or '97.

And I do not know what I would have done if I had been a priest when Spotlight broke the news in a way no one could ignore. But I'm glad I never had to find out.

And as it stands... as it stands I am deeply and intensely proud of the Boston Globe for having done it.

(no subject)

questionoftheday asks: What is your relationship with technology? Do you keep up with the latest and greatest, or have you stuck with the older stuff you bought years ago as long as it still works?

My answer: What was that post again? Something like:

Technology enthusiasts: yay! everything in my house is automated and the Internet of Things is the best thing ever!
IT workers: the only networked object in my house is a printer from 2007 and I keep a loaded gun pointed at it just in case it makes any weird noises.
IT security specialists: *swig of whiskey* God, I wish I had been born in the Paleolithic.

I have a smartphone about a year old, and I bought a new laptop back in June or July, but overall when it comes to home tech I tend towards attitudes 2 and 3, there. Hell, when it comes to non-information technology? Do you see the helicopter in my icon? That's the training helicopter at my flight school, a Robinson R22. It's fundamentally unchanged from when the model first debuted in 1979, except for a few updates to keep up with legal requirements for transponders and radio. The engine's a four-cylinder Lycoming that runs on 100 octane low-lead avgas. The controls are all rod-and-link controls, not even hydraulics. The gauges in the cockpit are all actual physical needle gauges. The official procedure for what to do if the tube that provides pressure and speed data for three of the gauges gets blocked is to break the glass over the rate-of-descent indicator so that you reintroduce air pressure differentials into the system. That's how old-school the technology is, and I'm good with that, because it works.

I keep up with new tech because I need to and it's not going to get any easier by ignoring it, but when it comes to what I have to deal with on a daily basis, updating at the drop of a hair is not my thing in the slightest.