Howdy Readers! It has been some time hasn’t it? Excuse the dust and the slight mildew smell, we’re still airing out the place after our hiatus, and there was something Jenny Splitter left in the fridge that may have evolved language. But the lights are back on and the sign has been flipped to ‘Open.” Grounded Parents is back in business beloveds.
Like The Phoenix, Skepchick Rises
Just in time for 20th Century Fox’s final desperate mangling of the most famous X-Men story, The Skepchick Network lives again! Ok… it was actually announced by our fearless leader Rebecca Watson on Mayday after an unfortunate encounter with a trollish lawsuit…
I’ve long had it in the back of my head that I should relaunch, but depression, anxiety, and life found a way to stop me (or allow me to stop myself). Then, a few months back, a lawyer emailed me threatening to sue me over something one of my writers wrote ages ago. I realized I needed to do something, as I was spending thousands of dollars on server space and now I was preparing to spend many more thousands of dollars on a legal case, all for a website I’d been ignoring for years. I decided I would shut everything down.
Then I talked to some very kind lawyers, who told me the person threatening me was a troll who makes his living scaring bloggers into paying him off in the hopes they won’t go to court. They gave me information on how to go about fighting him, and I thought, “Oh yeah, this is what I love doing.” I love fighting bullies. I love exposing scam artists. And I love providing a platform for other writers and activists to do the same.
Amy Davis Roth announced the return of Mad Art Lab two weeks later…
We spent some time getting our creative juices flowing, we recharged our batteries, rebooted our systems, reconvened, and reestablished our love of art, science, geekery and pop-culture. And we have brought that refined, creative energy back here to Mad Art Lab for you to enjoy. Plus, we all just missed having a community of like-minded art-nerds to hang out with and write and make stuff for. This little blog was always a safe, happy space where we could all be creative and supportive and bond over science-art and whatever other nerdy TV shows, or scientific studies, or other shiny objects caught our attention. Without this blog, I for one, felt very much alone on internet. I’m very excited that what I wasn’t alone in, was that feeling, and that a lot of the writers and makers wanted to come back here as well. YAY!
In the following weeks you will see some old and new faces and voices here at MAL.
Our goal is to inspire you, motivate you, get you thinking and most importantly, get you excited about the amazing world and universe around you. We are an art family composed of idealistic stardust and documentable dreams. We bring notepads, frying pans, sonic screwdrivers, crayons and whatever else we can stuff in our backpacks.
We wanna make stuff. We welcome you all back to the Lab.
And now it’s our turn. Grounded Parents started with a bunch of friends, both Skepchick veterans like Melanie Mallon and Mary Brock, or newcomers like myself and J.G. Hovey. For some GP became the launching pad for bigger platforms, like Steph Monty at Romper or Jenny Splitter at Sci-Moms and elsewhere. Or our heaviest hitter, Forbes columnist and cohost of Point of Inquiry, Kavin Senapathy.
We started from a simple premise, that raising children was something that could be understood. That parents equipped with accurate science and inquiring minds could help the little people we had made grow into awesome adults. We could do it free from superstition and pseudoscience, without the irrelevant dictates of religion or the retrograde mandates of patriarchy.
And we succeeded. If we never dropped another pixel into this space we would have created something to be proud of. But after a breather to recharge our batteries we see that our work isn’t done. There’s still woo to debunk, still anti-choice zealots to fight, still TERF’s to punk, and the Cheeto Tinted Tyrant still lords over it all.
Weekly Reads will be here every Sunday afternoon and we plan on plenty more from Grounded Parents both old and new in the weeks to come. We’re excited again, and we hope you are too.
The Grounded Parents are ready to get back into the fight, as soon as we get our coffee and the dishes are done and WHO LEFT THEIR SHOES IN THE SINK!
