schneefink

Austrian parliamentary elections were today, and the results aren't terrible :) The conservative ÖVP gained a few percentage points despite being involved in several finance etc. scandals, boo, and the social democratic SPÖ lost a few percentage points, but at least the right-wing FPÖ lost a massive amount of votes, and the Green Party gained even more and is back in parliament. I'm relieved, I was worried it would be worse. (Coalition talks are going to be interesting...)

To distract myself from how much studying and sleeping I did not do in the past two days, concentrating on something positive: I did call most of my MEPs about the upcoming copyright vote in European Parliament. (I used pledge2019.eu, idk how international that is, but I know there are more sites that make it easy.) Seems like pretty much all political news I see these days is terrible, let's hope this vote won't be another one. (Terrible and sometimes also plain ridiculous. The fucking police horses istg. What a waste of resources. They haven't even managed to find a stable yet, much less a reason why they are needed. *facepalm*)

Nice surprise of the day: Right now, Sitting by the Tree is the most kudos'd Killjoys fic on AO3 and I'm kinda proud of that :)
I mostly consider my own writing skills to be on the upper end of average, but sometimes I manage to write nice things, and it's always nice to be reminded when others like what I write. And practice -> improvement, even though it's sometimes hard to see.

Yuletide soon! I'm not sure yet what fandoms I want to offer for Yuletide (I haven't even finished writing my requests) but I look forward to it. Maybe I'll even manage to check out some new stuff before sign-ups. If I have the time...

There's an anti-government protest in Vienna today that I wanted to go to, but I'm behind with studying for the exam tomorrow so I don't think I'll manage. Hopefully there'll be enough people to do the same thing next week. Sometimes it seems not as bad compared to what's going wrong in the US or UK, but man our government is terrible.

I'm really uncomfortable with the idea, or rather the unfortunate fact, of data about me and whatever I do on the internet etc. being collected and stored and used, especially without my knowledge. So I was glad to hear that there's an attempt to create a European digital rights NGO based in Vienna, noyb (none of your business), to enforce privacy rights in the EU. The set-up/plans look very professional, with experienced people and a well thought out concept. They've set themselves a deadline of January 31st to crowdfund the necessary seed money, and so far they have € ~210k of €250k. I really hope they get the money to start the organization.
Check it out here, and please consider supporting it and spreading the word.

I was sick for a week, ugh. DD and Christina went shopping and cooked and made sure I was okay; now I'm doing better, but I infected DD (Christina fled the city before she could catch it too) so now I'm responsible for shopping and cooking etc. I'm so glad I don't live alone.

I've been working on two different WIPs and adding words to both, that almost never happens. For November I told myself to stress less about the quality of my writing and get more words out instead, partially inspired by this Tumblr post about a pottery class. Let's see if it works! I'm also still outlining my Yuletide story but I should really start writing soon.

Today after grapefruits DD and I plotted out an epic LotR slavefic, it took us an hour and a half but we had the entire plot, even titles and stuff. Next time we should maybe record stuff like that... Anyway we decided to at least write down the outline. Living with someone else who's also in fandom is awesome.
I also keep reccing her stuff, more than she can read or listen to, but I can't help it, there are so many great things and I want to share them all :)

In less fun news, politics. I need to find a good "getting involved in national politics with baby steps" guide. I always decided that I would do that when I'm better, and now - well I mostly am, even though it currently doesn't look that way when I look at my desk&room, but I'll just pretend it's all because I was sick and not only partially. Among other things I've been thinking about going to more demonstrations, but last week I was sick (I was especially sorry I missed the Novemberpogrom remembrance, "never again" can't be emphasized enough in the current political climate) and tomorrow I already have other plans with family. (Martinigans!) There'll be more opportunities, unfortunately because it'll be necessary.

I have less and less interest in hockey (great for my stress levels), but Julie Chu and Carolin Ouelette having a baby together makes me happy, such a great love story :)

During work I keep coming up with things I want to post about, and then when I'm home I'm too lazy and/or tired, similarly often on weekends. No vacation for me until September, most likely, but I told myself to pay attention and take a mental health day if I need it. I haven't been sick yet so I wouldn't feel bad about it.

( D&D )

I recently found a book again that I'd searched for for years: "Bloodrights" by N. Lee Wood. I was prepared to be disappointed, but to my happy surprise I still like it a lot. It's harsher than I remembered, especially in regards to the cost of striving for power. The surprising reveal at the end made me look at much of it in a different way and made me like it even more. Yay trope subversion. ( Spoiler )
I liked Antonya and many of the other characters, and rereading the book now there are several scenes that I now much better understand the id buttons they pushed (esp. Kerrick & Morgan.) Also, something I'd forgotten about which was a nice surprise, queer people exist and are, while not completely normal, not a big deal.

Politics, because it's unavoidable: The current situation in Poland is scary, it shows how easily things like that can happen. That the protests appear to have had some success is encouraging but not more than a silver lining.
There are so many countries were democracy is under attack…
In Austria I'm trying to focus on the push-back against the surveillance program, but I'm scared about the new government after the next election. The outcome seems almost certain and it would be a bad one imo, but as we've recently seen in the UK a lot can change during an election campaign, so we'll see.

Content note: US election
( just in case )


If you want some distractions and good long things to read, have some recs from the "various" pile. (The length of the rec does not mean I liked one of them better, it just turned out that way.)

Raptors in the Rainforest by DisaLanglois (Jurassic World/Parks)
270k, gen, post-canon
Summary: How intelligent are velociraptors? Very, very intelligent, as Owen Grady discovers in the aftermath of the Jurassic World disaster. But his quest to prove their intelligence and save his raptors will take him further than he ever expected, and the world will never be the same again.
Why I loved it: This series has fantastic raptor culture and humans being adopted into raptor packs, culture clash exploration (from the beginning and then even more (spoilers), great action scenes, very nice h/c, strong loyalty elements, and also dinosaurs. The central relationship is Blue & Owen Grady, hetero-species life-partners, and it's great. I also love many of the OCs, especially the dinosaurs. And did I mention dinosaurs?

Finding Home by darkcyan (Natsume Yuujinchou)
250k, gen, apocafic
Summary:On a school trip, between one moment and the next, Tanuma's teacher and about half of his classmates disappear. Everyone must figure out how to deal with this changed world, and the new dangers it has brought with it. Meanwhile, Tanuma wants to believe that Natsume was not one of those who disappeared that day ... but if not, where is he?
Why I loved it: An amazing ensemble fic, where every character gets a chance to shine. The character voices are great, so are the relationships, and the plot. This is apocafic, and it's not miraculously reversed at the end, but the survivors band together and find unlikely friend and allies and build a community, it's very warm and hopeful despite everything.

Harry Potter and the Natural 20 by Sir_Poley (Harry Potter/Dungeons & Dragons)
300k, mostly gen, crossover, WIP
Summary: Milo, a genre-savvy D&D Wizard and Adventurer Extraordinaire is forced to attend Hogwarts, and soon finds himself plunged into a new adventure of magic, mad old Wizards, metagaming, misunderstandings, and munchkinry.
Why I loved it: This is a WIP that hasn't been updated since early 2015, but it currently encompasses two and a half school years and I found what's there very satisfying. It does mean that many storylines are unresolved though, fair warning.
At first I was very sceptical about this crossover: Harry Potter and D&D? It is, however, brilliantly done. Milos' biology, magic etc. still work according to D&D rules, which leads to some hilarious misunderstandings and very creative problem-solving. Depending on which aspects you concentrate on, HP wizards and D&D wizards are very powerful in different ways. In addition to that the author also did amazing worldbuilding of a world that works according to D&D rules and everyone is aware of that. Milos is aware that he is a PC, and he tries to use his meta knowledge from his D&D adventures in Hogwarts.
Full Disclosure, after book 1 I put this down and didn't pick it up again for a few weeks: book 1 is good, but not outstanding. Book 2 however introduces fantastic new storylines and characters and starts to deviate a lot more from the HP storylines, and that continues in book 3 in ways that would be spoiler-y to mention. The ending of book 2 was a gut punch, and then it got even better.

Tired of US presidential election drama? How about something different: Austrian presidential election drama! Not so over the top that you would have thought it was too ridiculous to even make up a year ago, and with WAY fewer global consequences. Practically relaxing, by comparison.

Some background. The first round of this presidential election was back in April (!), then we had a run-off election between two candidates – one from the left-wing (Grüne), one from the right-wing (FPÖ) opposition party – in May. Fortunately, the candidate of the Green party won by 31.026 votes.

OR SO IT SEEMED. The FPÖ then challenged the election before the Constitutional Court, Austria's Supreme Court (more or less.) They claimed the election had been manipulated. The Court discovered that in several districts there had been instances of sloppiness when counting the votes, like opening the postal votes too early or not getting all necessary witness signatures. However, there was no proof and no indication of manipulation.

You'd think the Court would maybe order the votes to be recounted, something like that, right? Nope. The Court ruled that the election had to be repeated in full, because "there was a theoretical possibility of manipulation" – which the law doesn't even cover, the law clearly presumes an influence on the result! Mathematicians proved that the chance the votes affected by irregularities would have changed the result of the election was one in eight billion. The judgement was plain wrong. (one of many articles (in German.))

Nothing we can do. Repeat the election at the beginning of October. EXCEPT! There was a problem with the envelopes for the postal votes, which are very popular. Some of them opened on their own, making the votes invalid. The glue was faulty. The fucking glue.
ETA: The FPÖ briefly tried to use this to start a "get rid of postal votes" campaign, because they usually do very badly with postal votes, but fortunately that met with so much opposition that it died down quickly.

So the election had to be postponed again! This time, at the beginning of December. (In the meantime, btw, the office of president is being fulfilled by the three leaders of the National Council. The president in Austria, while in theory having not insignificant power, is traditionally not very involved in day-to-day politics.) A new law was necessary to even make that possible. The new law also stated that while in the repeat election in October only the people eligible to vote in April could participate, in the next repeat election everyone who is eligible by December can participate, changing the electorate.

Ahh, but it gets more ridiculous. The weekly newspaper "Falter", which published several articles criticizing the Constitutional Court judgment, recently interviewed one of the judges of the Constitutional Court. He didn't really say anything new, but one interesting detail was that he said he believes FPÖ leadership had prepared to challenge the election result even before the election. This unsurprisingly led to outrage among the FPÖ, who "didn't have a choice" and have now sued Judge Schnizer on multiple counts because of libel and related charges.

There's still a month and a half to go until the election! Let's see what else happens. If we're lucky it'll be the last one for this presidential election. There's a very real possibility that the FPÖ candidate will win in December, which would mean that a political party lost an election, appealed to have it overturned because of formalities so they could try again and hopefully win this time, and it worked. That would be absolutely infuriating. It's bad enough now: I'm so angry at the Constitutional Court, like, what the fuck. Thinking that the highest Court in the land isn't competent doesn't feel good, btw. (Of course I knew judges are fallible, but still.)

Sometimes when I'm frustrated with Austrian politics and the election in particular I tell myself that at least we don't have it as bad as the US, where that orange asshole became the presidential candidate for one of the two major parties despite… basically everything he's said and done. (Fortunately the chances of him actually winning seem very low right now.) Dear Americans, best of luck with the election, with keeping up your health and nerves until then, and fingers crossed that after the first election there aren't any additional complications.

The Austrian presidential election was decided by 31.026 votes, 50,3% - 49,7%. Over 72% voter participation. The most important thing: the right-wing candidate lost. Though it's way too close for comfort; I've seen some international headlines "Austria rejects right-wing candidate" and you can't say that after he got almost 50% of the votes. (3,6% of the votes were invalid, more than enough to potentially decide the election.)

Just to clarify, the most important election in Austria is the election of the national parliament, which determines the government and the chancellor. The president has traditionally had a mostly ceremonial role. However, he does have some important powers and the right-wing candidate said "people will be surprised what is possible." Ugh. It's suspected that he planned to fire the current government to get a new election sooner, which would favor his right-wing party.

Some context: there were five candidates for this presidential election, four from the bigger parties and one independent. Austria used to have two big parties for decades, the conservative ÖVP and the socialist SPÖ, but they lost a lot of popularity due to several different factors. The biggest opposition parties are the left-wing Green party and the right-wing FPÖ.
We had a run-off election between the Green party candidate (Van der Bellen) and the FPÖ candidate (Hofer.) The election was on Sunday, but it was so close that the final result wasn't known until about 1-2 hours ago. (Did it have to take so long to count all the votes? Seriously, Innsbruck? The Pens lost yesterday so not even that was a good distraction.)
A very accurate quote from I-don't-know-who/multiple sources: "100% of Austrians think 50% of Austrians are idiots."

The majority of women, people living in cities, and people with high school degrees voted for VdB, by the way. The majority of men, people in rural areas, and the overwhelming majority of workers voted Hofer. Nobody tell me again that not every single vote counts. Oh and right-wing voters already have their conspiracy theories: this is proof that people are brainwashed at Austrian universities, clearly, and also that the votes were manipulated etc. etc.

I'm SO RELIEVED. It was so close, and the prospect of having a right-wing president was scary. As it is I'm already nervous about the next parliament elections. Hopefully this close outcome will lead to positive reforms in the center parties. DO NOT WANT right-wing chancellor H.C.Strache *shudders*

The EU Commissioner for Migration praised Austria's refugee camp Traiskirchen: "certain things could be improved in the next days, but all in all it's a hospitable and orderly environment. […] refugees are treated in a very humane way", and that Austria should be lauded for establishing this camp. (transl. by me) This is barely a month after Amnesty International visited the camp and reported inhumane conditions because of self-inflicted total systematic failure. During that time from what I can tell some conditions were improved, there are now a bit fewer people there and new management, so at least that's something, but I'm skeptical things changed this much. Since the latest wave of Syrian refugees coming from Hungary the media are reporting a lot less on those already here.

The outpouring of help for the refugees in Vienna + surrounding areas is beautiful. There are a lot of donations, one time when I drove by the train station ten minutes from my home half the pavement was full with refugees and helpers handing out stuff. Currently they're mostly still looking for money to buy tickets. There was already one big demonstration for treating refugees better (unfortunately I couldn't go because I was sick), and so far there has been surprisingly little xenophobia even from the political right and in the public discourse. Unfortunately I'm sure it won't last.
Isn't it interesting how public perception of refugees is much more welcoming when they're not staying here? Maybe I'm becoming too cynical.

I'm actually feeling mostly positive about my country in this regard right now, which is nice. There are many incredibly helpful people who are doing good things, the current wave of refugees is treated relatively well by a combination of volunteers and public institutions (thank you ÖBB), and even politicians seem to not be screwing this up yet. Austria is one of the leading European countries in accepting refugees per inhabitants (4th in 2014, according to UNHCR. 1st is Sweden, 2nd Hungary and 3rd Montenegro, while Germany and Turkey lead in refugees accepted per GDP/capita. data)

On the other hand I'm frustrated with several aspects of public discourse (what else is new.) For example there seems to be this idea that this is all happening very sudden. Maybe this particular group, but Europe has had a refugee problem for years that it refused to acknowledge, and people warned it would get worse and still nothing happened. People talk about the photograph of the drowned Syrian kid as if they only just found out that refugees are drowning on their way to Europe. This has been happening for years, thousands of them, and after every bigger catastrophe for a week people would remember this problem exists and then forget it again. (Props to Italy for actually financing a program to save people. Now the EU has a program but it has a much smaller budget.) That makes it hard to believe that this time a sustainable solution will be found instead of another temporary patchwork fix.

Or how so many seem to put all the blame on Hungary for not treating the refugees better. Hungary has finite resources, is shouldering a large part of the refugee crisis, and that after a recent economical crisis, and many EU states just can't agree on what to do and do very little. When Austrian journalists are talking about how terrible the situation at Keleti is and how terribly the Hungarian police is treating the refugees there's always this self-congratulatory undertone of how Austria is doing much better and acting in a much more humane way. Selective perception.

Unfortunately I have only a limited ability to deal with the refugee topic despite the fact that it's extremely important. (Also since I moved out of my parents' place and don't get their newspapers anymore it's been harder to stay well informed in a non-stressful way.)
Some "regular" political absurdity to end this post: Ursula Stenzel was a member of the ÖVP, Austria's moderate conservative party, and has been for ten years the political leader of Vienna's first and central district despite the fact that the whole city has been firmly in SPÖ, i.e. socialist, hands for years. She's known for not liking fun, like street artists and festivals etc. For the next city elections in October the ÖVP didn't nominate her as their main candidate again, so she recently announced that she will run for election as an independent candidate – on the list of the FPÖ, Austria's right-wing party, the party that the ÖVP has been trying to distance themselves from whenever politically convenient, which is always except when they desperately need a coalition partner. Politics.