and to be clear NaNoWriMo closing is genuinely really sad. I’ve just already done my grieving for it. I wish it hadn’t happened this way, but NaNo’s fall was determined as soon as Kilby took over.
A lot of MLs did take off and make their own groups though. If any participants are reading this who want to continue NaNo participation, check out the reddit!! Lots of people did it from there and many former volunteers for the org are there and if you ask “is anyone from my region still doing nano” I bet you’ll get some replies, or find someone doing it in discord.
After 25 years of operation, Nanowrimo is shutting down.
An email came out in the hours approaching April Fools
A video was attached to the email, which can be viewed here:
The video is on Kilby’s channel and not the long dead Nanowrimo channel. The video is full of…
Kilby logic, but there is some relevant information contained within.
If have anything on Nanowrimo you need to get off the site, take it now. The site will likely not be around for too much longer.
Despite everything that the organisation has been through, the closure of a 25 year old nonprofit is still a tragedy, and my heart goes out to everyone that’s grieving from this. Nano has hurt a lot of people, but it meant a lot to so many, and I will be sorry to see that go.
Even if I don’t agree with many things in the recent video, I can agree with the sentiment of one slide.
I will update you all if and when relevant information comes out. Despite everything, I now doubt that this will be my last post.
No sympathy, no sorrow left. “Don’t write a revisionist history” as if Kilby Blades ever once told the truth of what’s happening in this organization. As a former volunteer, what I have to say is don’t piss on my feet and tell me it’s raining.
>building a community and sustaining it are two different things
Wow imagine if you had engaged your 900 volunteers in sustaining this instead of alienating them, telling them not to represent the organization, keeping information from them and removing them from the site!
>many alternatives to nano popped up this year
I WONDER WHY
NaNo had issues before Kilby Blades. But it also had devoted volunteers and dedicated staff that she alienated with her gaslighting. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I hope to never hear her name again.
The all-or-nothing attitude where if a strategy doesn’t achieve 100% of its goals right away it gets labeled as a useless waste of time needs to end. Because no strategy achieves 100% of its goals right away. It’s just an excuse to do nothing.
the degree that parents of young children seem to think Baby Shark came out of nowhere astounds me. this is a DECADES-OLD camp song, that has spanned generations.
i am not a parent of a young child but i worked at summer camps for years and let me tell you before it was ruined by parents of young children baby shark was the most fun camp song ever. kids went buckwild over baby shark. but then it had to be commercialized. you ruined it. yall motherfuckers stay away from the bear song or we’ll have words
As someone who took etiquette lessons, politeness is an incredibly effective tool for disarming bigots. You can either force them to reconsider their words/actions by directly and calmly confronting their behavior (by using the rules of society in your favor), or you can dip entirely while they appear to be in the wrong.
Both options are great.
Because the thing is, when bigots pick fights, they are 100% counting on you to get louder than them. Or meaner. They want you to react emotionally and provide fodder for their ‘You’re Too Emotionally Immature To Understand’ cannon.
What they aren’t expecting you to do is say one of the following phrases in a polite, concerned tone:
Are you okay?
That’s not the kind of language I was raised to use with others.
Do you need a moment to think on why that wasn’t acceptable?
This is no way to engage in intelligent conversation. Please try that again in a kinder tone if you’d like this to continue. (I really like this one because it lets you turn their public-shame rhetoric around)
For those of you who’d are spiteful and/or dealing with Fundamentalists/Evangelicals/generally shitty Christians:
What’s happening in your life to cause you this much anger? I can’t imagine hurting so badly that I need to hurt other people.
Who taught you it was acceptable to treat other people this way? Certainly not the Jesus I remember.
Whatever happened to ‘judge not lest ye be judged’?
If I talked like that in front of my parents or grandparents I would be ashamed.
I think there’s something you need to pray on before we try and have this conversation.
And my all time favorite:
“It sounds to me like there are some seriously dark and angry forces at work in your heart.”
(Nothing stops a Christian bigot in their tracks faster than implying the Devil is causing their bigotry. But you MUST be calm, polite, and gentle with your tone and wording. It is absolutely fair to twist the rules and play them at their own game, but you gotta play hard.)
TLDR: It’s much faster to use etiquette, politeness, and rhetoric reversal when eviscerating idiots online and in person, because they aren’t expecting you to weaponize their behaviors back in their direction. Don’t get angry, get spitefully polite! 🙂
I once witnessed a very soft-spoken young Southern man take a hateful older woman’s hands gently in his and say “Sister, I am so sorry that the Devil has carved a home for hatred in your heart. I’ll pray for you.”
It was glorious.
This works with all sorts of inappropriate behavior. I work as the archivist in a public library, so I end up on the reference desk a lot, and sometimes patrons will say or do things that aren’t exactly appropriate. When patrons try to hit on me, I put on a teacher voice and calmly ask, “Is that an appropriate question to ask someone at work?” and it shuts them down immediately.
amhrancas 