Monthly Archives: November 2015

MollyGive 2015

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MollyGive 2015

I am pleased to announce the return of MollyGive for the 2015 donate-all-your-money-to-charity season!

MollyGive will run from December 1st, 2015 – December 25, 2015.

Here are the rules:
1) You donate up to $50 to a charity*
2) You tell me that you donated up to $50 to said charity
3) I then donate a matching amount to said charity**

And we all win!

*If you would like to donate more than $50 to a single charity, tell me and let’s see if I can match it.

**as long as I don’t find them actively offensive

Some more deets

What is this?

Every year I tithe. At the end of the year (December), I take whatever is left and do matching donations.

You can donate to more than one charity

If you want to support the EFF, SCI, PP, and the Red Cross, cool! I will donate to each of them as well.

Handling organizations I expect will get multiple donations

I expect that organizations like the EFF, Wikipedia, and the FSF will get multiple donations from amongst those most likely to donate (i.e. the people most likely to read this, i.e. my friends). I’ll send those in a batch on December 25th.

Why I am doing this

When I was younger, tithing was like $1k a year, which is actually not hard to give away with all the runs/walks/bikes/musicing for charity people do. Now that I have a much fancier job, it’s a lot harder. Sure, I could just drop all the money on the Red Cross and call it a day, but:

  1. I’m not convinced it’s the most useful thing I can do
  2. I want to encourage others to give as well
  3. I don’t care about other organizations that  have needs

We all have our causes. I work in edtech supporting a community developing free software. Great, I care about education and software freedom and I get to spend every day working on both. I’m not very inclined to, on top of that, donate a bunch of money to the cause.

I also care about things like the environment. I ended up in a position in my life where I’m not working on helping out with that (if you have ideas on how I can do more, I’d love  to!), but I can give money to it.

MollyGive enables me to help causes I don’t really think about. I don’t especially care about Native American college attendance more, or as much, as I care about, say, Earth Justice. However, one of my friends thinks the American Indian College Fund is really important. It’s great that, together, she and I can help them.

In Summary

Give early, give often, send me the deets. Let’s help some people.

Resources

Resources

Past MollyGive Donations

Books: Princesses for the People

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One of my coworkers and I ended up talking about his daughters, their fondness of princesses, and his efforts to find princess role models who are the kind of girls and ladies he wants his kids to be.

Below is an incomplete list of princesses (and their books). These are specifically princesses who are the (only or main) protagonist of their books.

Princess Cimorene

Books: The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Patricia C. Wrede

Cimorene isn’t especially good at being a princess, but she is good at languages, sword fighting, cooking, and light magic. She runs off to become a dragon’s princess and adventures ensue.

Angharad Crewe

Book: The Blue Sword, Robin McKinley

Harry isn’t a princess, but she is a noble. Following the death of her father, she joins a group of semi-nomadic warriors and becomes a hero.

Princess Aerin of Damar

Book: The Hero and the C rown, Robin McKinley

Aerin becomes the hero her people need, not the one they deserve. She’s like a ginger Batman, except without a lot of the awful. Actually, she’s nothing like Batman. She is a hero and a princess and sacrifices everything she has again and again for her kingdom and people.

Princess Ben

Book: Princess Ben, Catherine Gilbert Murdock

I don’t actually know how good I would say Princess Ben is. I read this book a few years ago, and liked it well enough. I read it on a plane. I feel like I’d read this story before. Princess Ben is a pretty classic “bad at being a princess” princess who steps up to take control of the situation. This story is very much a romance at its heart.

Pippi Longstocking

Book: Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren

Princess Pippilotta is the strongest girl (and princess) in the world.

Princess Rose

Book: Rose (and Bone), Jeff Smith

Grandma Ben from Bone used to be Princess Rose and then Queen Rose. That lady is so cool. If you haven’t read Bone, you should also check out then. So formative for me.