Author: Dana Seilhan

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I did a thing on Facebook

So, apparently, the “danaseilhan” username on Facebook has FINALLY been freed up after fucking years.

So, here I am for my new public page. The old one was getting zero engagement anyway. This one probably will too, but at least now it’s pretty straightforward. If you aren’t friended on my personal profile, the page is much less gatekept. Feel free to throw me a like. Or not.

I have also corrected the URL in my widgets. The link goes where it is supposed to go. The old one is deleted, so there’s nothing to find there; it’s not completely gone, but it will be shortly.

Also, I updated the social media page here. I like it a lot better now. Still salty, but gets to the point better.

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The incredible disappearing bookmarks page

For a long time, I have been following All Day I Dream About Food on Facebook. Suddenly, recently (maybe in the past month? not more than two months?), Carolyn blocked me. She had posted a recipe with Cajun sausage in it and I had commented on where to look for real Cajun sausage. I am not sure if that offended her or if she looked at my profile and decided I was a horrible person (I make no bones about finding the concept of “gender identity” to be complete bullshit and Carolyn’s Canadian, and we gender-criticals call that country “Tranada” for good reason), but it was weird either way because I had followed her for literal years and we’d always been friendly. I’ll never figure it out, I’m sure.

All I know is that when she blocked me from her page, it broke a whole lot of links in my Saved Links section on my Facebook. And then I couldn’t remove them, either. I would have had to delete the whole category, and I had a whole lot of other links in that category.

So my weirdo Internet OCD kicked in and I thought, Nope, fuck this, I want a bookmark section where I don’t have like a third of my stuff blocked by an idiot. Sorry Carolyn, but it was really stupid of you. Anyway, and although moderation on Facebook has gotten a good bit less insane since they got scared of Trump*, the risk that I will someday lose my account is never zero. The possibility that I might start over with a new account someday is also never zero. So if I’m going to continue to save links, I need to do it somewhere else. delicio.us is gone. A whole lot of other stuff is gone. A website I found that allegedly stores and organizes bookmarks ate several of my links without preamble. Surely there is a plugin that would do the job on WordPress.

Okay… not really. I found one, but… it sucks. So if you noticed I had a bookmarks page and that it was weird, that’s what that was. I was trying out the plugin and it failed me.

I did hit upon a solution, though, at least temporarily. And that is here. Have fun.

—
*I hate Donald Trump, but when you are facing serious bullies and the only thing that scares them is a bigger bully, you celebrate whatever win you can get.

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New Substack

I have a new Substack. It is entitled Born With Ovaries. I still have the domain name titled similarly, and still have not 100% decided what to do with it, but it was long past time I did this.

Don’t expect any brilliance or anything. I just wanted a place to park feminist-themed musings. I don’t have the usual libfem takes, though, so maybe that’ll be a nice change for you.

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Phone stuff

How to contact me by phone:

1. The number in the footer on this website is a Google Voice number. I think you can call it like a normal phone, but I’ve never used the app for a voice call, so I can’t promise I’ll be able to pick up timely. Or, I might be busy. It does happen.

2. Therefore, your best bet is to text me on that number.

3. If you have never texted me, or if you have not texted me since summer 2024, tell me who you are in your first text.

4. If you claim to be someone I know, be prepared to prove it. I think a few of you have changed phone numbers since 2021.

5. Be prepared to be ignored, blocked, and deleted if you can’t follow simple instructions. Or if you’re a dick.

Additional note: I am in the Pacific time zone of the United States (GMT -7 in summer; GMT -8 in winter). Plan accordingly.

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New page: social media

I have this personality quirk where I feel the need to announce my boundaries publicly, loudly, often, and in great detail. It’s annoying and pointless because one, it makes me look too defensive and two, it gives abusive people a road map for getting under my skin. Over the years as I’ve either matured or gotten mentally rusty (still not sure which), I’ve damped down this tendency a lot but it still comes out to play sometimes.

So, look in the site menu. New page. Right now I link to it from my profile photo description and cover photo description on Facebook, but I anticipate gradually replacing my homepage link with it in all my social-media profiles. I’ve had a few weird confrontations on Facebook in the past couple months and I’m kind of tired of it. Like, most of my recent stuff is public. My comments elsewhere are definitely highly visible. You seriously are going to come into MY online space and be surprised that I’m no different with you? People have been doing that to me for literal decades. It got old halfway through the first one.

Not all of my social-media profiles are in the little social-icon cluster there in the sidebar (at the bottom of the site in other site sections), so at some point I may edit the “ground rules” down to something more readable and less ranty and then add a list of whatever’s not represented in the icons. May. As I do periodically, at this point I’m re-evaluating why the fuck I’m on social media in the first place. I ought to at least nope out of whatever I don’t regularly use, just because it’s a security risk.

But we’ll see. Me being the poster woman for ADHD and all.

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Phone number: in case this is applicable

So, I have a phone number down in the info at the bottom of this website’s layout. It is a Google Voice number, meaning it does not ring my phone, though I do get notifications whenever someone contacts it in some way. And I’ve had a voicemail and a text message in the past three days, which is weird; I go literal years with no notifications of any kind usually, other than random spam.

I suspect the voicemail was from someone who dialed a wrong number, because I’ve had this thing for months and it sounded like someone had just recently given the person the number they thought they were calling. Just in case, I’ve texted them back to let them know they dialed the wrong person. My luck it was a landline, though it doesn’t hurt to try. But I don’t know the other person’s circumstances, so I’m posting this here in case here is where they got the number from.

The main reason I have the number on my site at all is so that people who know me but haven’t kept up with my number can still contact me. Primarily it is there for my kids. I am not counting on the older one ever using it, but it’s possible the younger one might at some point. In any case, regardless of who it is, if they’re someone I know then they can’t say they had no way to reach me. This is particularly important as I have not been in a good place to acquire a post office box, though if I ever get around to that I’ll add the address to my contact info here as well.

I cannot fathom why anyone else would want to contact me by phone without so much as an email introduction first. But if you’re wanting me to respond to you, I’m going to need a bit more to go on than “hello.” Google Voice doesn’t seem to have caller ID apart from showing me the originating number. I know you can google phone numbers, but that doesn’t often produce any useful results.

It goes without saying that anyone who leaves me nasty messages will be blocked. That hasn’t happened so far, but you never know. I cannot say whether I will do the mature, sensible thing and pretend nothing happened just so you don’t get your kicks, but if I am immature and non-sensible, very likely I will post your phone number too. Hey, it could be a burner. But maybe it won’t be. You like it? Me too. Let’s not even go there.

I wouldn’t even bring this up as a possibility, but I’ve had too much weird shit happen to me in half a century. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t try to cover all bases.

Speaking of which… and this is a shot so long it’d land me on Pluto. If you’re the big man, better be ready to prove it.

He wouldn’t. But if he did. Just saying.

Rory McCann in The Book Group (2002)

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I stand corrected

It’s a small detail but a big one to get wrong, and is now fixed: For a long, long time I had assumed I had done really well on Duke University’s Talent Identification Program for the ’86-’87 school year. Indicated as such on my About page here. I found my records of same a couple nights ago and it turns out I was just one of the two big shots at my middle school, which was all seventh graders that year (it is now a fully-fledged junior high). Which is fine. Between me and the boy top scorer (I think his was probably math — mine was verbal), we got our school a commendation, so that’s good enough for me.

Anyway, the About page is now corrected accordingly.

Honestly, I’m not sure why the universe saw fit to bestow very good (I will not say top-shelf brilliant) verbal skills upon me when no one fucking listens to me, but apparently it is my best superpower, and I’m still trying to figure out how to put it to best use.

That and art are the only things I ever really won awards for doing. And those were all long ago. I fear I’ve been left behind now.

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Lightbulb moment

I have mentioned on the “woman” page (look at the menu) that I have a domain name called “born with ovaries” but that I hadn’t quite worked out what I wanted to do with it yet.

Last night I was poking around looking at a domain-name seller and seeing what was available and thinking about Our Bodies, Ourselves and how they sold themselves out to troonery many years ago and then up and quit. I thought, You know, we still need a resource like that. I didn’t figure on being able to get the OBO name — even if it’s available, and it’s probably not, the owners likely wouldn’t give or sell to TERFs. (Fun fact: the WordPress software corrects me if I write “terf” in lowercase, but does not correct me if I write it like “TERF.” Fucking genderdorks. They’re like roaches.) So I pondered what the fuck else you could call a resource like that.

And as I was falling asleep, it hit me: I already had a good candidate.

So! I don’t know when it’ll happen, but… it’s a-gonna happen. It probably won’t ever be a book, but we’re gonna bring women’s health information back online all in one place and it WILL NOT be man-intersectional. No men! Ever!

I won’t announce this anywhere else because I have no idea how I’m going to go about it just yet. I have an idea, but we’ll see if it’s practical. We also have to take into account my extreme flakery about stuff like this. Sorry, everybody. But I’m kind of excited now!

It’ll be under the Gynemedia aegis. Obviously.

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Vagueblogging

I see I get hits from Victoria every now and again.

If that’s you, I sent you an email at your subversive dot org email address some days ago. I don’t know how often you check that thing, so maybe you haven’t seen it.

Saw you in photos in MM’s recent piece. Good to see you going to bat for women, but given how you’ve treated me, I find it difficult to take it very seriously. Interested in MM maybe? She’s cute, I’ll give her that. (No lesbo.)

You make me sad. I don’t like people making me sad. I already had people making me sad, and you just made it that much worse. What did I really do to deserve that? Really?

EVEN NOW we could sort this out. If you wanted to. If you felt I was worth the risk.

Will you? Probably not.

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