Jul. 27th, 2015

silveradept: Domo-kun, wearing glass and a blue suit with a white shirt and red tie, sitting at a table. (Domokun Anchor)
Some things are mostly to be remembered as warnings to others. That's why we call them monstrous. For a symbol that was used as the rallying cry for enslavement, racism, and inequality, and continues to be used as such today, one should not be surprised that in the wake of a horrific shooting of black people, Bree Newsome scaled a flagpole on the grounds of the South Carolina legislature and took down the Confederate flag flying there.

And while the South Carolina legislature and governor decided not to let that symbol fly in their state again, there still needs to be a lot more work done on removing the underlying structures that produce the inequalities that still plague minorities today and on acknowledging history as it is and working to build an accurate way of viewing it. Because Confederate Memorial Day exists as an official holiday, state songs still lionize the wrongs done, and not everyone takes the time to examine their previous beliefs.

A compilation of the many many posts of Ta-Nehisi Coates on the matter of the Civil War.

How much emotion work are you doing in your life and at your job, and is that work being compensated or acknowledged? Odds are, if you're a woman, you're not being compensated for all the emotional and other work you're doing, and you have to fight a system that doesn't want to acknowledge it as work in the first place.

Useful information about gaslighting, including how someone suffering from the effect might feel while it's going on.

For his 80th birthday on 6 July, the Dalai Lama requested we share quotes, pictures, and videos of people acting with compassion, and hashtag it appropriately - #withcompassion.

A song of the city of London, of a place that one can hate only by getting used to a small sliver of it for too long.

Hope exists in the dystopian trend. It's just that the dystopian trend better reflects our current world.

Greece teeters on the brink of the decision between the rock and the hard place, with everyone hoping for a miracle rabbit to get pulled out of someone's hat.

There's a lot of really beautiful and great things going on in Sub-Saharan Africa that had nothing to do with images of crushing poverty meant to elicit pity. Similarly, African writers need the freedom of writing about whatever subjects and settings they want.

A standard list of sexist arguments and derails. The use of any of these in any conversation likely signifies the user can be safely ignored and blocked.

What would it look like if we treated men in the rock industry like we treat women? There's also the way those musicians will be described instead of interviewed.

There's a high possibility that people who oppose marriage equality have very specific notions about gender roles and who is allowed to be dominant and submissive in those roles. That idea may be religious or cultural in nature, but there's a good chance it exists. Much like even now, there are people with a sincere and active conviction that people not of their skin color are inferior and that the deity intended for this to happen. You don't have to actively hate someone to hold beliefs that will harm them. All it really needs is a willingness to put your own feelings as more important than the lives of other people, to say that so long as you aren't doing anything, the problem doesn't involve you. That's not true at all. It's not possible to benefit from racism and then claim that it doesn't involve you.

The funny thing is, most of those people are probably looking to make sure their long-lasting love stays together. Additionally, there's a good reason to believe that strengthening individuals and families will produce the desired uptick in marriages that conservatives desire. Although if you listen to prominent conservatives, they're very insistent that marriage is not about love, but about something else. And yes, there's still a lot of hand-wringing about the lack of marriage, wherever you go.

Not obviously related at all - the dwindling fortunes of Rush Limbaugh, who can break actual news about something and have it go uncommented on for nine days.

There's also the exercise of using free speech to combat free speech.

Shame, blame, and guilt, instilled in women, may make them more nurturing and helpful. And also may make them more prone to mental illness. And it probably also works in some subset of men who are prone to the same influences. Franz Kafka sent a letter to his father about all the problems the came from his lack of parenting, which has a lot of prescient information before psychiatry and psychology would pick it up more formally.

Young women and girls who are being sexually advised often end up in the justice system through aggressive enforcement of minor things, perpetrated by a society that believes the victims are perpetrators of crimes, even when too young to consent.

School-age children do better when their responsible adults work with them in determining causes and solutions, instead of imposing punishments, teaching and modeling problem-solving skills they want the kids to pick up.

Your profession is hemorrhaging women (and minorities, too) when it creates conditions that make it impossible to have a life outside of work. And yet, with the way things are set up, the system doesn't have to change, because it can just choose other people who are desperate for anything that they will accept the impossible conditions.

Trans issues today have echoes of the earlier issues of lesbians and gay men - we can both hope that they move faster in getting to acceptance, and use our media outlets to do the right kinds of stories. this that acknowledge gender dysphoria is one possible way to be trans, but there are many others, just as valid, even if dysphoria is the key that unlocks medical diagnosis and treatment.

Doing the right kinds of stories includes not having your characters in literature engage in fat-shaming or invisibling fat characters with book cover choices.

It also means writing your queer women in such a way that they're not there for the Male Gaze and not allowing them to become stereotypes.

It means talking about all the authors who have had influence on your life, not just men and maybe one high-profile woman. And making sure that your women in prominent positions, like actresses, don't have obvious reasons to decry your system.

Your religious belief attracts the people who look or think like you. If you want to attract the marginalized, expect to need someone who looks like them.

More consequences of insightful algorithms - Google Ads will show more ads about high-paying jobs to men than to women.

Yet another example of white privilege - all the things a white woman can still get away with that a black anyone would be arrested or worse for. It should be no wonder that those who can leave the country are doing so, to try and minimize the risk that their child will be harmed by racists, whether on the police force or off it.

President Obama delivered the eulogy for Beau Biden, son of Vice President Joe Biden, and in it, we hear the hope of what we want to accomplish with our lives.

Jeb Bush misunderstands - productivity is supposed to reduce our hours, not increase them, and workforce participation increases if there are meaningful jobs.

Amy Poehler talks about being a woman who is incredibly female-focused and trying to avoid much of what passes for standard reality in television, both on and off screen.

A photo project intended to show First Nations people outside of stereotype.

Attempting to flowchart the processes by which someone can avoid creating or participating in an attacking mob online. Which stands in contrast to decisions made to close commenting because the signal-to-noise ratio was too small and moderators were expending too much effort.

Wouldn't it be nice if your public transit system could sound like a composition of pleasant tones instead of a cacophony of angry beeps?

An abandoned shoe factory transformed into an adult-size playground (kids welcome). That's neat. So is the artist taking child drawings and creating stuffed versions of them. much like how a local glass blowing institution makes glass sculpture out of child drawings.

Klimt paintings are dressed by designs that were real, by a woman whose designs are seeing the fashion stage, far too long after she is gone to appreciate them.

Semicolon markings and tattoos to indicate a point where someone might have stopped, but instead chose to press on with their lives. I'm putting in a description of a game called Final Girls, which plays as the support group meeting for women who have experienced horrors, and also allows for skipping content without penalties.

Con Man continues in the tradition of Nathan Fillion happily making fun of himself and his career - but this time, it's Alan Tudyk in the driver seat, doing the same for his career as well as Fillion's.

A Kickstarter-funded operation about the romantic lives of geek women will have cartoons from Margaret Atwood.

Good friends built small houses and a large common area in Texas so they could live together and socialize with each other for the rest of their lives.

Advice on getting things done and overcoming inertia, paired with advice on getting through your media queue.

The Mary Sue points out The 100 as a show worth watching because of all the women in prominent roles that nobody is quibbling about whether the women should be in prominent roles. And then there's Orphan Black, where all the women there are full characters, despite being clones of each other. Which we can add to buy pointing out how quickly comics are evolving and diversifying now that women are able to headline and do work for them and the upcoming Legend of Korra comic that focuses on the Korra/Asami relationship only made mostly explicit at the very end of the television series.

Hayley Atwell continues to be a fan favorite for her engagement with costars and fans. And Ian McKellen is clearly having a much better time out of the closet than he did when he was in. There's also the amount that fandom may owe the cast and writers of Star Trek for never definitively squashing Kirk/Spock. Unfortunately, there's also the decision to deliberately sideline and fridge the women of the Ant-Man movie, seriously screwing with Marvel's own continuity.

Examining another crowdsourced application from the worker perspective, this one that employs humans to be an Invisible Boyfriend or Girlfriend. Like other crowdsourced things, the wages are abysmal and there are no protections, so naturally there are plenty of people trying to get the jobs.

Research using actual mothers helps to deliver products that are useful to mothers, as well as insight into the lives of mothers. The people in charge of the companies are learning more than they ever wanted to.

Unlike the series it came from, Grey is completed and...is much like the Fifty Shades it came from, which means it's probably worth avoiding.

Better than this, though, is the public awareness campaign about STDs running in Norway involving a person dressed as a penis.

A flight safety video utilizing characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Very neat. The latest flight I took had various Internet memes as their spice to the video.

Tumblr has developed its own language conventions, which are different enough to qualify it as at least a new dialect. Because language will always need new developments to meet the needs of every generation using it.

Your librarians have information for you about how they relate to their collection. Follow their advice. They've been doing it for a very long time and in just about every situation of peace and war as well.

The nighttime photography of Jack Fusco, which is lovely to look at.

Many words that we consider to be commonplace in English entered through India and the way that imperial cultures reacted to East Asia. We can also thank a botched translation across languages for the birth of the unicorn.

Quilts that have the composition of molecules stitched into them, following in the tradition of things like coffee mugs with molecule designs on them.

A backpack with ports, speakers, charging battery, and more, including a place for your stuff, which gets paired well with travel gadgets intended to make being away from home easier.

The subject matter of many European and Appalachian folk songs, many involve either sheep, women, or disasters.

The science consultants to the movie Inside Out talk about the portrayal of emotions and the role of Sadness as useful in the film. I think they see it the same way I did - a sad film with a happy ending.

Infographics about baking and confectionary crafting, and the variations on ramen. Also a guide on the average life of fresh produce.

If you have been wealthy enough to stay at Trump properties recently, your credit data may have been stolen.

In technology, automobiles are distressingly easy to compromise and control, since they are now things connected to networks that need to be hardened. This is a thing that should probably be worked on in conjunction with field tests of self-driving cars.

Sometimes, a technology that will become a mainstream staple has its origins in a carnival sideshow. Like incubators for babies born premature.

And possibly the development of mechanical structures that brains will accept and interface with, which could put our heads in the cloud along with computers using machine learning to both interpret and create images. The question, though, is whether they can help us clear out our earworms, or at least replace them.

There is an application available to match up excess food from parties or cafeterias with those that need food - only currently for San Francisco, but hopefully expandable to other places.

Science builds on the work of itself, even when the results are things that make previous work less accurate. And even then, sometimes the less accurate work is good enough for practical purposes.

Amazon's trying to use algorithms to detect bias, but won't reveal the process, even when it incorrectly determines someone knows an author.

YouTube offers a method of slowing down videos without causing their pitch to lower as well.

Robot fiiiiiight...sometime next year. The United States versus Japan in a big mobile suit battle.

Hold on to your devices for as long as they will last, as much of their construction may involve materials sourced from areas of the world that are distinctly hostile to anyone outside the ruling junta. If you are upgrading, consider donating your used technology to organizations that can make excellent use of it, like domestic violence shelters.

Even if it's only on the promotional art and the title screens, having a character of color as a protagonist in your game says a lot.

A concept design for a kitchen where the table displays recipes and is the cook surface, and pantry and refrigeration are rolled into a single set of shelves. Looks like it would work well with small dwellings and apartments.

The company that makes the Bubble Wrap brand is rolling out a new variety that will not be poppable, meaning substitution or applications will have to take the stress-relieving place.

Despite the many new advances that could make men also able to have a reversible both control method, until it becomes a thing that bodies of all genders can carry children to term unwillingly, only certain people will be tasked with the requirements of preventing pregnancy.

More generally, medical training is failing to teach doctors about women and women's health issues, including how women present symptoms differently and what issues might affect them predominantly.

A 14-foot Starcraft II display made completely of Lego bricks.

The problem of end of life decisions regarding robotic pets - what happens when the company that manufactured them no longer manufactures parts? The ethical idea would be to open source the parts and make it possible for someone to go to a fabrication lab or machine shop and get spares. This will be an ethical question long before we develop robots with their own personalities or that are meant to be companions. We should start on solving these questions now.

Examples of natural adaptation that will help solve human-created problems and disasters.

Touchable holograms...of very small sizes.

Advice on invoking the protection of the Shadow Cat Council to protect your computer from intrusion attempts.

Milk became a staple after being mostly a baby food...thanks to the same person who gave us corn flakes...among others.

Last for tonight, Deadpoolachu, Korra and Asami dressed in the fashion of their setting, boudoir photoshoots of lovely couples, a cat and an owl that get along exceedingly cute, a newborn porcupine, a daily corgi pin, puppies falling asleep in almost any spot, dog adoption success stories, cat adoption success stories, big cats and their cardboard boxes, pictures of animals enjoying belly rubs, methods to lend your talents to animal shelters, tips on what to do if you discover a kitten all by itself, an unexpected shark, a formal dinner with the family cats,

firefly shows in synchronicity, dragonflies close up, using a three dimensional printer to generate artificial rats for anatomy lessons, relieving the need for actual rats to dissect, reasons why cats are giving their humans disapproval, rescuing a cat from choking, what it is like to be a camera operator for the Puppy Bowl, a yoga studio that has shelter cats come and participate with the yoga classes, and more watercolor cats.

And altered pet store labels.

Profile

silveradept: A kodama with a trombone. The trombone is playing music, even though it is held in a rest position (Default)
Silver Adept

September 2025

S M T W T F S
 123456
78910111213
141516 17181920
21222324252627
282930    

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Sep. 23rd, 2025 07:46 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios