Announcement-y stuff

Well, that's over.

Image description: The black-and-white photograph is the upper back of a man with a tribal art tattoo across the shoulders and the following "tattooed" just below: "NaBloPoMo '07 Mission Accomplished" with a little skull image after the "'07". Sara made this and the one from the beginning of the month, which I will leave in the sidebar at right for a while because it's cool. Cooler than me, actually.

So. One mission accomplished and another about to begin. Tomorrow I will begin blogging at Alas, A Blog on a regular basis. I've guest blogged there before for a month-long stint, and now Barry (AKA Ampersand) has asked me to be one of his regular co-bloggers. I'm excited about this for a variety of reasons, and I'll say more about it tomorrow, but two things for now:

First, everything I post over there that is disability-related will also be posted here, and some of the sillier stuff here won't all appear over there. The Gimp Parade won't change except that a couple times a week I'll make a point of writing something that will hopefully be interesting for the larger audience over there to read and maybe even discuss. Content here might possibly improve. Plus, I will be able to keep the focus here on disability and use Alas for occasional writing on non-disability stuff that I am often itching to talk about but don't want to use The Gimp Parade for.

And second, I know that some of my strongly anti-porn radical feminist friends won't want to click over there to follow discussion and might be upset I'm contributing there. (No, Amp isn't in the porn business and you won't find porn at Alas, but about a year ago he did sell his domain name in order to pay some bills. The buyer does link to porn, and you can read more about all that here.) I'm not categorically against porn, and while I could say much more about that, I won't just now. But I hope those uncomfortable with participating at Alas will continue to do so here.

What I will say is that Amp has always been committed to inclusion of disability issues on his blog and in discussion of diversity generally. He and I don't agree on everything about disability. For example, there've been long threads on personhood and Terri Schiavo at Alas that made me want to scream and tear my hair out, partly for Amp's contributions and partly for the tone of many commenters. Step outside the disability blog niche and many (if not most) discussions of disability are much more contentious and not as crip-friendly or nuanced to our experiences. I don't expect this will have changed and while I will personally find it very challenging -- partly because I lose patience and interest when thread comments run into the hundreds -- I don't think it has to be a bad thing.

Amp and I have been discussing disability and other things in various online forums for about eight years now, beginning at the long-defunct Ms. Magazine Boards. That predates this blog by about four years. So, I have trust in Amp's commitment to disability issues and inclusion of the disability perspective in any and all debates at his place, though as I've noted the community of people who comment there are not all of like minds. I hope readers will join us over there to enrich the discussion of disability. It's bound to be interesting.