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Let's start with the public domain collections of the New York Public Library, free for use for anyone, along with The sounds of space and instruments measuring space, also available for free.
A manga-style avatar generator, next to a concept for tights that would allow for cosplaying characters with short skirts while not displaying anything underneath.
The signs of Japan, in Toyama Prefecture. Neat places of Canada.
Black Girl Nerds is looking for interns and volunteers to contribute.
The Woodland Queen, Rey, as portrayed by Lupita, and A Late Night Painting. Also, dolls with black skin and features, including frizzy hair.
Watching the process of a book becoming a movie is hard on the emotions. Elsewhere, though, roadside serialization of novels is putting feminism and other ideas into the plots of popular books.
People who think that literary tends are new are remarkably a-historic in their perspective.
A Jewish man gave birth to his daughter and will raise her as a single father.
Finn is, perhaps, the most interesting character of The Force Awakens, imbued with both empathy for others and a complete character arc.
Before being on screen as Doctor Crusher, Gates McFadden developed choreography for puppets and humans, including the movie Labyrinth.
A train in honor of the work done by Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. rode again, after worries that it might close due to a lack of subscribers.
There are new things even in gymnastics - a new balance beam mount, successfully done, will now carry the name of the gymnast that invented it in the rulebook from here on out.
Designers are making fashion that takes into account chair users who are younger, to give them options that will be both stylish and comfortable.
another set of empathy cards that ditch the saccharine for a much better message, one that's more in tune with what someone is thinking.
Because they seem uninterested in all the ways that intercourse is different for each person, the United States Government is rather slow in allowing and testing new condoms, as well as updating their testing procedures. Which sticks everyone with materials and dimensions that may not work at all for them, making them less likely to use condoms in the first place.
What constitutes literacy in this current era is much different than what was literacy in the time many standards are developed.
Mmmm, pie.
The current crop of Disney Princesses may have Ariel to thank for their existence, as it was the smash success of The Little Mermaid that brought Disney back into the forefront of animated movies.
Peer inside some of the inner workings of the IKEA store, including accounts of some of the fun the employees get up to. (Totally the right place for laser tag.)
Gillian Anderson reminds us that Hollywood still had a lot of sexist bullshit when it comes to women acting and being paid for it.
The Force Awakens does provide great role models for who gets to be a hero, though.
If you don't get through a manga in its initial run, the way that licensing works, it's quite possible there will be no way of returning to it later, as licenses expire and companies go out of business.
There is a family of possible symptoms of a heart attack, but not everyone gets all of them, or even the ones most heavily associated.
Minorities tend to get less sleep than white people, increasing their risk factor for various diseases, possibly bright on by sleep apnea and the extra stresses often brought on by living in neighborhoods deliberately designed to be poor and stressful.
The human brain may have the memory capacity of the World Wide Web, with research from the Salk Institute suggesting synapses have a greater data storage capacity than previously thought. Human eyes and non-human eyes are often complex items specially evolved for the environments that creatures all their homes.
Advice on writing books where the primary conflict is internal, sorting and filtering revision and critique, along with trying to figure out whether a work needs to be declared a loss and moved on from and utilizing the combine documents function to collect all the feedback into one place.
A series of posts on worldbuilding. Unsurprisingly, the geography of your setting impacts a lot of things that your characters will encounter.
Undersea museums filed with sculptures designed to promote marine life using them.
Images of LGB men and women, and pictures of Victorian women of color.
To maintain balance in the Force, there needs to be a lot more explicitly-marked asexual and demisexual romance novels. There's plenty of market for it, as well as the needed visibility. While fanfic can close gaps and give people knowledge about themselves, it shouldn't be incumbent on fic writers to do all the lifting. Everyone writing needs to think about how they are portraying characters that aren't in their experience. Then, we need to move beyond mere diversity as lip service and into a world where all artists of color have the same system of champions and marketers that white artists do. And where things like zombies retain their tragic history, instead of being convenient shortcuts for fantasy writing, much like how robots should retain some of their history. It shouldn't take an apocalypse to make queer representation a non-starter, after all.
Comics like Faith, where the protagonist is visibly fat, can help. (Weight loss is not a universal thing, it may be counterproductive in otherwise healthy people, there's a metric fuckton of concern trolling about weight, diets do not work at all, because, well bodies change. Take the pictures anyway. Go see the installation dedicated to curvy women's clothing. And get your Girth Guides patches.) Because a diversity of experience is a necessary part of capturing all the perspectives.
If you read the ways that men and women write love and marriage, there's a striking difference in what men are looking for (mostly beauty and domesticity) and what women are looking for (intellectual simulation and companionship) - a miniature reflection of the society in which both writers and readers live. An advice columnist suggests to a woman that her real strength appears when she's not trying so hard to appear perfect, which strikes me as odd - the letter-writer wondered why a person that seemed to match her well fell out of passion with her, and the columnist says it's because the woman is trying to make herself an always-on badass, as opposed to it being about the guy who was only interested in her as a novelty instead of as a badass woman. The advice is good, but it seems misplaced for the question.
A useful expansion of the standard pain scale offered in medical facilities. Among with people who are unafraid of helping someone make plans and directives for their deaths, and then spending their final time with them.
Useful things that can be said to people with chronic illnesses. And people with disabilities request that you not use them as inspiration porn and that you avoid using mental illness as your metaphors of choice.
People with disabilities do not choose to be disabled, as if they could choose to stop being disabled. They are, instead, navigating a long string of tradeoffs and decisions about energy and ability. And whether or not they feel they can talk to their doctors and get a meaningful and effective response.
If you're going to cross the streams of the humanities and data, do the research on what things might be perverting or poisoning the data wells. The humanities scholars have probably already done it and can tell you whether any given data source is usable.
Finding the reason you write, and managing to have an existence outside the writing, helps a great deal when nobody apparently cares about the writing itself. Which I'll put with the first part of an author detailing how they made their sales and the second part of this author detailing how they made several sales, because sometimes encouragement comes in many forms.
Learning to like and love the Mary Sue archetype has benefits - and having more of them might help normalize women characters of all types. Choosing diversity means more than choosing people writing about diverse experiences. It also means not being idle when a review publication admits they only review works by white people and committing to accuracy in your cultural portrayals.
Common, yet nonsensical, reactions to being called out on white privilege. Reasons why everyone needs to be able to contribute to productive conversations about race. And, finally, remembering that allyship is a process, and not an identity.
Fanfiction serves an important purpose - foregrounding minority voices and giving them a place to be that doesn't exist in mainstream media.
Persons claiming to be sovereign citizens of the true United States, acting as the well-regulated militia, are neither citizens nor militia, and their dreams of defeating the government are laughable at best. If for no other reason than that militias die when professional soldiers are set against them.
Actually reading papers and their claims makes it easy to spot when the popular claim and the actual claims don't line up. Of course, that means you have to have access to the papers themselves, which isn't always possible on your local public library's subscriptions.
A study shows that caregivers in lower-income families can still have their children form secure attachments, even if the caregivers aren't trained on optimal technique and even if the caregivers mess it up almost half the time. Even after that, It's still possible to form secure attachments through the use of proxies, visualizations, and being mindful of one's own state of mind. With the caveat that knowing one's mental state may be more problematic than being ignorant of it.
Playing to your strengths is a valid life choice. Even when it seems like everyone else is more interested in your perceived weaknesses. Sometimes, as a trusted adult, your job is to take the venting, complaining, and externalized emotions of your teenage charges, which sometimes means having to sit on your hands while they talk to you.
Women with autism are much harder to diagnose by outward behavior, and may need a different kind of test of social skill to be correctly diagnosed. With an extra piece on doctors who were studying autism before it was formally named.
Despite claiming the contrary, the very system the TSA uses to scan bodies is discriminatory against trans people. And that's before you have the agents that treat trans bodies as security threats. And the way that trans bodies are often excluded from conversations they need to be part of - including ones about menstruation. And then, there's always the specter of the bathroom debate, which is used very successfully, if oddly, to defeat equality measures. At least Planned Parenthood is helping trans people that want it get their hormone therapy.
Being bi involves a lot of dealing with stereotype and with being able to choose how much of being bi you want to show to others.
Even with the revelation of more magical schools, there aren't enough schools for sufficient representation of the world in the Wizarding World. (Also, is it me, or are these new school name revelations basically "Magic School" in a language where they are situated?)
113 attorneys shared their stories about their abortions with the Supreme Court in support of overturning Texas' stringent abortion requirements. Elsewhere, the choice of motherhood is one that every woman should have for themselves, even though it gets improperly substituted for matters of substance, even when discussing women with lots of substance.
The current system of dealing with the severely mentally ill falls them and offers them almost zero solutions - and the ones being offered are usually awful, horrible ones. Being able to talk about mental illness requires some amount of privilege - so there are a lot of people who need the help that aren't able to talk about it. Even more so if your disability is basically medical word soup.
Dancers without performance space and costume to hide them, snapshots of ordinary history, pictures of a celebrity doing ordinary things,
Ko-fi, a way of asking people to purchase you a coffee as a donation method.
In tech, thinking about the platform you are building a port for will help you build a better port, as demonstrated by the app version of Exploding Kittens.
A possibly encouragingly inexpensive prototype tablet that displays full pages of Braille or raised lines.
The Internet is ephemeral. Archive your work in ways that can be recreated later on. This often means having a version of your content that needs nothing more than a text editor or a straight-up HTML browser to see everything.
if you want to have women in technology and gaming, you must treat them in a way that doesn't minimize their expertise and doesn't focus on the superficial at the expense of the real.
Boredom is quite interesting, it appears - as a thing to study.
Biologically speaking: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Don't eat clay laced with lead that claims to be detoxifying.
The difference between economy class and higher classes on twenty airlines.
The presence of particles like um and uhh during speaking may be signifiers of expertise, rather than its lack, as the particles indicate that the brain of the speaker is still thinking about how to finish their sentence, processing a lot of information in a short amount of time. Qualifiers in our speech have been there for a good long while, and not just as things people want to thump women over the head for using.
The cultivation of new antimicrobial agents may start with the use of repurposed equipment in natural environments instead of lab dishes.
Trying to rush a launch with new, bug-riddled technology and software causes failures in more than just computer software, as Target found out trying to expand into Canada.
The beginning of a series about bringing a standard definition series like the X-Files into a high definition era.
The money in advertising is, at best, a bubble that will eventually explode, and then things will settle back down into what advertising used to be.
The next time a corporation with a vested interest in making copyright more about monopoly than limited, check to make sure they aren't breaking the laws they've helped inflict on everyone else. Because they're likely halting the ability of others to put the works considered most important of the current eras into the public's hands to analyze and make more work of.
The idea of sleep as a thing to be cured away neglects much of the research that suggests all of the housekeeping, organization, and memory storage tasks that go on during low-power mode - the kind of stuff that make it possible to stay balanced and alert.
As technology advances, preparations should be made for the possibility of automation producing a class of people without work who cannot necessarily get steady work. It's not necessarily going to be Doctorow's Makers, either. There's a good chance it will be work doing the things that machines cannot do well. The Basic Income Guarantee might be a place to start. Also, many of the things in that article are things that libraries could help with the pivot and transition to. assuming we had the funding and the partnerships and a management that was ready to embrace this as a possible future.
A Google Cloud powered AI defeated a world-class Go player. The AI apparently learned to play from no preconceptions and a lot of watching and analysis of games.
A method for being a cat into a workplace for a day, various properties of wool, light-up unicorn slippers, getting up and close with large colonies of mating snakes, a surfing cat in Hawaii, a cat that has their very own ball pit, many helpful posters about animal behaviors and busy language, the cats that came from coffee cups, the ways that tourists wanting to see turtles affect whether the turtles themselves appear, a list of parrot facts, funerals for cats in the Victorian Era, the winners of the underwater marine life photography contest for 2015, photographs of cats from underneath, the feral chickens of the Hawaiian Islands, crows observed using tools to build nests, and the neonatal kitten unit.
Last for tonight, using very cold weather to make art and comedy with frozen pairs of pants, easy to create origami bookmarks, lamps that create great art on the walls once light is inside them, a coffee table that looks like it is supported by balloons, and storyboards for the 50th anniversary survival of Doctor Who that would have included Christopher Eccleston.
A manga-style avatar generator, next to a concept for tights that would allow for cosplaying characters with short skirts while not displaying anything underneath.
The signs of Japan, in Toyama Prefecture. Neat places of Canada.
Black Girl Nerds is looking for interns and volunteers to contribute.
The Woodland Queen, Rey, as portrayed by Lupita, and A Late Night Painting. Also, dolls with black skin and features, including frizzy hair.
Watching the process of a book becoming a movie is hard on the emotions. Elsewhere, though, roadside serialization of novels is putting feminism and other ideas into the plots of popular books.
People who think that literary tends are new are remarkably a-historic in their perspective.
A Jewish man gave birth to his daughter and will raise her as a single father.
Finn is, perhaps, the most interesting character of The Force Awakens, imbued with both empathy for others and a complete character arc.
Before being on screen as Doctor Crusher, Gates McFadden developed choreography for puppets and humans, including the movie Labyrinth.
A train in honor of the work done by Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. rode again, after worries that it might close due to a lack of subscribers.
There are new things even in gymnastics - a new balance beam mount, successfully done, will now carry the name of the gymnast that invented it in the rulebook from here on out.
Designers are making fashion that takes into account chair users who are younger, to give them options that will be both stylish and comfortable.
another set of empathy cards that ditch the saccharine for a much better message, one that's more in tune with what someone is thinking.
Because they seem uninterested in all the ways that intercourse is different for each person, the United States Government is rather slow in allowing and testing new condoms, as well as updating their testing procedures. Which sticks everyone with materials and dimensions that may not work at all for them, making them less likely to use condoms in the first place.
What constitutes literacy in this current era is much different than what was literacy in the time many standards are developed.
Mmmm, pie.
The current crop of Disney Princesses may have Ariel to thank for their existence, as it was the smash success of The Little Mermaid that brought Disney back into the forefront of animated movies.
Peer inside some of the inner workings of the IKEA store, including accounts of some of the fun the employees get up to. (Totally the right place for laser tag.)
Gillian Anderson reminds us that Hollywood still had a lot of sexist bullshit when it comes to women acting and being paid for it.
The Force Awakens does provide great role models for who gets to be a hero, though.
If you don't get through a manga in its initial run, the way that licensing works, it's quite possible there will be no way of returning to it later, as licenses expire and companies go out of business.
There is a family of possible symptoms of a heart attack, but not everyone gets all of them, or even the ones most heavily associated.
Minorities tend to get less sleep than white people, increasing their risk factor for various diseases, possibly bright on by sleep apnea and the extra stresses often brought on by living in neighborhoods deliberately designed to be poor and stressful.
The human brain may have the memory capacity of the World Wide Web, with research from the Salk Institute suggesting synapses have a greater data storage capacity than previously thought. Human eyes and non-human eyes are often complex items specially evolved for the environments that creatures all their homes.
Advice on writing books where the primary conflict is internal, sorting and filtering revision and critique, along with trying to figure out whether a work needs to be declared a loss and moved on from and utilizing the combine documents function to collect all the feedback into one place.
A series of posts on worldbuilding. Unsurprisingly, the geography of your setting impacts a lot of things that your characters will encounter.
Undersea museums filed with sculptures designed to promote marine life using them.
Images of LGB men and women, and pictures of Victorian women of color.
To maintain balance in the Force, there needs to be a lot more explicitly-marked asexual and demisexual romance novels. There's plenty of market for it, as well as the needed visibility. While fanfic can close gaps and give people knowledge about themselves, it shouldn't be incumbent on fic writers to do all the lifting. Everyone writing needs to think about how they are portraying characters that aren't in their experience. Then, we need to move beyond mere diversity as lip service and into a world where all artists of color have the same system of champions and marketers that white artists do. And where things like zombies retain their tragic history, instead of being convenient shortcuts for fantasy writing, much like how robots should retain some of their history. It shouldn't take an apocalypse to make queer representation a non-starter, after all.
Comics like Faith, where the protagonist is visibly fat, can help. (Weight loss is not a universal thing, it may be counterproductive in otherwise healthy people, there's a metric fuckton of concern trolling about weight, diets do not work at all, because, well bodies change. Take the pictures anyway. Go see the installation dedicated to curvy women's clothing. And get your Girth Guides patches.) Because a diversity of experience is a necessary part of capturing all the perspectives.
If you read the ways that men and women write love and marriage, there's a striking difference in what men are looking for (mostly beauty and domesticity) and what women are looking for (intellectual simulation and companionship) - a miniature reflection of the society in which both writers and readers live. An advice columnist suggests to a woman that her real strength appears when she's not trying so hard to appear perfect, which strikes me as odd - the letter-writer wondered why a person that seemed to match her well fell out of passion with her, and the columnist says it's because the woman is trying to make herself an always-on badass, as opposed to it being about the guy who was only interested in her as a novelty instead of as a badass woman. The advice is good, but it seems misplaced for the question.
A useful expansion of the standard pain scale offered in medical facilities. Among with people who are unafraid of helping someone make plans and directives for their deaths, and then spending their final time with them.
Useful things that can be said to people with chronic illnesses. And people with disabilities request that you not use them as inspiration porn and that you avoid using mental illness as your metaphors of choice.
People with disabilities do not choose to be disabled, as if they could choose to stop being disabled. They are, instead, navigating a long string of tradeoffs and decisions about energy and ability. And whether or not they feel they can talk to their doctors and get a meaningful and effective response.
If you're going to cross the streams of the humanities and data, do the research on what things might be perverting or poisoning the data wells. The humanities scholars have probably already done it and can tell you whether any given data source is usable.
Finding the reason you write, and managing to have an existence outside the writing, helps a great deal when nobody apparently cares about the writing itself. Which I'll put with the first part of an author detailing how they made their sales and the second part of this author detailing how they made several sales, because sometimes encouragement comes in many forms.
Learning to like and love the Mary Sue archetype has benefits - and having more of them might help normalize women characters of all types. Choosing diversity means more than choosing people writing about diverse experiences. It also means not being idle when a review publication admits they only review works by white people and committing to accuracy in your cultural portrayals.
Common, yet nonsensical, reactions to being called out on white privilege. Reasons why everyone needs to be able to contribute to productive conversations about race. And, finally, remembering that allyship is a process, and not an identity.
Fanfiction serves an important purpose - foregrounding minority voices and giving them a place to be that doesn't exist in mainstream media.
Persons claiming to be sovereign citizens of the true United States, acting as the well-regulated militia, are neither citizens nor militia, and their dreams of defeating the government are laughable at best. If for no other reason than that militias die when professional soldiers are set against them.
Actually reading papers and their claims makes it easy to spot when the popular claim and the actual claims don't line up. Of course, that means you have to have access to the papers themselves, which isn't always possible on your local public library's subscriptions.
A study shows that caregivers in lower-income families can still have their children form secure attachments, even if the caregivers aren't trained on optimal technique and even if the caregivers mess it up almost half the time. Even after that, It's still possible to form secure attachments through the use of proxies, visualizations, and being mindful of one's own state of mind. With the caveat that knowing one's mental state may be more problematic than being ignorant of it.
Playing to your strengths is a valid life choice. Even when it seems like everyone else is more interested in your perceived weaknesses. Sometimes, as a trusted adult, your job is to take the venting, complaining, and externalized emotions of your teenage charges, which sometimes means having to sit on your hands while they talk to you.
Women with autism are much harder to diagnose by outward behavior, and may need a different kind of test of social skill to be correctly diagnosed. With an extra piece on doctors who were studying autism before it was formally named.
Despite claiming the contrary, the very system the TSA uses to scan bodies is discriminatory against trans people. And that's before you have the agents that treat trans bodies as security threats. And the way that trans bodies are often excluded from conversations they need to be part of - including ones about menstruation. And then, there's always the specter of the bathroom debate, which is used very successfully, if oddly, to defeat equality measures. At least Planned Parenthood is helping trans people that want it get their hormone therapy.
Being bi involves a lot of dealing with stereotype and with being able to choose how much of being bi you want to show to others.
Even with the revelation of more magical schools, there aren't enough schools for sufficient representation of the world in the Wizarding World. (Also, is it me, or are these new school name revelations basically "Magic School" in a language where they are situated?)
113 attorneys shared their stories about their abortions with the Supreme Court in support of overturning Texas' stringent abortion requirements. Elsewhere, the choice of motherhood is one that every woman should have for themselves, even though it gets improperly substituted for matters of substance, even when discussing women with lots of substance.
The current system of dealing with the severely mentally ill falls them and offers them almost zero solutions - and the ones being offered are usually awful, horrible ones. Being able to talk about mental illness requires some amount of privilege - so there are a lot of people who need the help that aren't able to talk about it. Even more so if your disability is basically medical word soup.
Dancers without performance space and costume to hide them, snapshots of ordinary history, pictures of a celebrity doing ordinary things,
Ko-fi, a way of asking people to purchase you a coffee as a donation method.
In tech, thinking about the platform you are building a port for will help you build a better port, as demonstrated by the app version of Exploding Kittens.
A possibly encouragingly inexpensive prototype tablet that displays full pages of Braille or raised lines.
The Internet is ephemeral. Archive your work in ways that can be recreated later on. This often means having a version of your content that needs nothing more than a text editor or a straight-up HTML browser to see everything.
if you want to have women in technology and gaming, you must treat them in a way that doesn't minimize their expertise and doesn't focus on the superficial at the expense of the real.
Boredom is quite interesting, it appears - as a thing to study.
Biologically speaking: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Don't eat clay laced with lead that claims to be detoxifying.
The difference between economy class and higher classes on twenty airlines.
The presence of particles like um and uhh during speaking may be signifiers of expertise, rather than its lack, as the particles indicate that the brain of the speaker is still thinking about how to finish their sentence, processing a lot of information in a short amount of time. Qualifiers in our speech have been there for a good long while, and not just as things people want to thump women over the head for using.
The cultivation of new antimicrobial agents may start with the use of repurposed equipment in natural environments instead of lab dishes.
Trying to rush a launch with new, bug-riddled technology and software causes failures in more than just computer software, as Target found out trying to expand into Canada.
The beginning of a series about bringing a standard definition series like the X-Files into a high definition era.
The money in advertising is, at best, a bubble that will eventually explode, and then things will settle back down into what advertising used to be.
The next time a corporation with a vested interest in making copyright more about monopoly than limited, check to make sure they aren't breaking the laws they've helped inflict on everyone else. Because they're likely halting the ability of others to put the works considered most important of the current eras into the public's hands to analyze and make more work of.
The idea of sleep as a thing to be cured away neglects much of the research that suggests all of the housekeeping, organization, and memory storage tasks that go on during low-power mode - the kind of stuff that make it possible to stay balanced and alert.
As technology advances, preparations should be made for the possibility of automation producing a class of people without work who cannot necessarily get steady work. It's not necessarily going to be Doctorow's Makers, either. There's a good chance it will be work doing the things that machines cannot do well. The Basic Income Guarantee might be a place to start. Also, many of the things in that article are things that libraries could help with the pivot and transition to. assuming we had the funding and the partnerships and a management that was ready to embrace this as a possible future.
A Google Cloud powered AI defeated a world-class Go player. The AI apparently learned to play from no preconceptions and a lot of watching and analysis of games.
A method for being a cat into a workplace for a day, various properties of wool, light-up unicorn slippers, getting up and close with large colonies of mating snakes, a surfing cat in Hawaii, a cat that has their very own ball pit, many helpful posters about animal behaviors and busy language, the cats that came from coffee cups, the ways that tourists wanting to see turtles affect whether the turtles themselves appear, a list of parrot facts, funerals for cats in the Victorian Era, the winners of the underwater marine life photography contest for 2015, photographs of cats from underneath, the feral chickens of the Hawaiian Islands, crows observed using tools to build nests, and the neonatal kitten unit.
Last for tonight, using very cold weather to make art and comedy with frozen pairs of pants, easy to create origami bookmarks, lamps that create great art on the walls once light is inside them, a coffee table that looks like it is supported by balloons, and storyboards for the 50th anniversary survival of Doctor Who that would have included Christopher Eccleston.
