Any given day I pick out several stories in my RSS feed reader to follow up on, and so far they’ve just been building up. In an effort to un-flag some of them, I’ll be linking to stories that caught my interest this week:

• Fark: “The mayor of the capital of Iceland, a comedian and founder of the Best Party, writes what could possibly be the most intelligent and insightful welcome to the New Year, ever.” Comments. – What the mayor of Reykjavík most looks forward to in 2012:
  

  What I most look forward to in the coming year is acquiring an Obi Wan Kenobi costume and wearing it around and practicing Jedi-tricks. I also hope I will be permitted to marry people. I also would very much like to see more tourists in Reykjavík. I am mostly interested in getting people that are rich, interested in swimming and like to spend a lot of money on nonsense. Others are also welcome, though.

• Slashdot: Ask Slashdot: Setting Up a Wireless Catch-and-Release – This is one of the many projects I have been meaning to get around to.
• Ars Technica: Native JSON features submitted for PostgreSQL 9.2
• Slashdot: Ask Slashdot: Best Open Source Answer to Dreamweaver? – Every once in a while I look for one of these for the non-technical people I work with, and I never find what I’m looking for. The Slashdot consensus seems to be torn between “It’s unnecessary” and “It doesn’t exist”. I’m inclined to agree with the comments indicating a good CMS can eliminate the need for a WYSIWYG editior.
• Slashdot: Tackling Open Source’s Gender Issues – I always hope these threads will be interesting, but inevitably they fill with comments along the lines of “Women just don’t like programming, can’t we accept that men and women are inherently different?” with a side of evolutionary psychology about how women’s lives and behavior revolve entirely around babbys.
• Racialicious: Exploring the Problematic and Subversive Shit People Say [Meme-ology] – I’ve been seeing a lot of these showing up on Facebook and I was curious how/what these all spurred from, and this is a good rundown.
• No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz?: Male Friendship – Linked for the following passage:
  

  This is not even to mention the sentence that was– I am not even joking– included in the video: “men have a hard time seeing women as human.” WHAT? I had to pause the video to glare at it. I think that that’s the epitome of how feminism without masculism is stumbling around in the dark unable to find a light-switch.

• Slashdot: US Supreme Court Upholds Removal of Works From Public Domain
  Ars Technica: Supreme Court rules Congress can re-copyright public domain works
   
  My distaste for the ever-growing length of copyright not withstanding, such a decision threatens web sites like Project Gutenberg, which could share a work which is public domain, only to have it revoked from the public domain and be cited before they have a chance to remove the previously free-as-in-liberty work.
• Fark: Porn sites black out in protest of SOPA. EVERYBODY PANIC Comments
• Fark: Speed-gardening craze hits Maui. This used to be real estate, now it’s only fields and trees. Where, where is the town? Comments – Apparently permablitzing is a thing. Who knew?
• Fark: Anybody can decide to be an atheist. But only the hardcore converted atheists actually have themselves de-baptized Comments
• Kate Bornstein’s Blog for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws: Please Help Me Update My Gender Workbook – Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw changed my life. Although I have not have the pleasure of reading the entire workbook, My Gender Workbook is an interactive exploration of the reader’s gender identity, and probably the closes I’ll ever get to having the chance to have tea with the author.
• Coderholic: Goodbye WordPress, Hello Jekyll! – I love WordPress, but Jekyll’s use of static HTML files is bound to be faster and more efficient than WordPress. I definitely plan to check it out for future projects.
• Ars Technica: Hands on: building an HTML5 photo booth with Chrome’s new webcam API – I dislike Chrome, but this is pretty cool.
• Apartment Therapy: Keeping Your Data Safe – Although it’s light on ideas, this brief article is a decent introduction for a non-technical person to the idea that a backup drive sitting next to your computer isn’t enough. It voices my aversion to putting backups on “The Cloud”, I’d like to add that you can potentially simplify your life by keeping off-site backups at a friend’s house, your office or a safety deposit box, depending upon the value of the data and the privacy it requires.
• Slashdot: Adafruit’s Open-source Wearable Platform, Flora – I’m fascinated to see where this goes.
• Related Topics: The Durability of Motherhood – This story relates to my interest in family dynamics and how people become family. The linked article is about a woman whose mother has been in jail most of her life. The woman’s grandparents took her to see her mother regularly. The author makes an interesting point about the construction of parenthood (which I mentally extend to all familial relationships).
  

  I suppose one is not a parent in isolation (in my view). Affirmation of parenthood by a community around the child is a critical component. Without that affirmation I am not sure what the relationship here becomes.

• The Wild Hunt: Unleash the Hounds! (Link Roundup) – The third bullet-point discusses open marriage and how it interfaces with the pagan community.
   
  The story links to an interesting article by Sierra Black, Our Successful Open Marriage.
   
  Another story linked to quotes Anita Wagner as saying, “It’s not something we’re used to doing. We have no role models for this.” I’m quoting it here because it strikes me as something that comes up frequently not only for people in polyamorous relationships, but for all of us who find ourselves defining our own unconventional families.
   
  This is apropos of a story previously covered on The Wild Hunt about Canada’s recent court decision proclaiming polygamy illegal. It was also covered on Fark.