Fandom Snowflake 2018 #12: Mutley! DO SOMETHING!

In your own space, create a fanwork. Make a podfic, an icon, a sketch, a meta, or a rec list. Arts and crafts. Cross stitch. Draft an essay about a particular medium. Put together a picspam or a fanmix. Write a review of book you love, a ship manifesto, a you-should-be-listening-to-this-band essay. Create something.

So I did. Twilight Sparkle writes a letter to Celestia about many things, but mostly her curiosity about the Cutie Mark Crusaders.

Spoilers for Friendship is Magic, seasons four, five, and possibly six.

This one is potentially difficult for a lot of people. Some people have a process that doesn't do well with creating things on the fly. Others might not have the desire to post a rough something and let other people see it. And still others might not have the tools or the time at hand to be able to create something. In theory, a thing that takes five minutes is equally as valid as one that takes five hours, but to each person their creative process.

Beginner's Mind often helps in these kinds of situations. If you don't know the rules, or can successfully forget them, you can do all sorts of things you wouldn't normally do.

Like writing something on a whim and posting it before the brainweasels can kick in.

Amnesty Dump #2

Still more things as I am not yet even to the point where I've cleared out the reduced backlog.

Starting with the passing of Monty Hall, unintentional creator of probability problems, and intentional host of 'Let's Make A Deal', at 96 years of age. And the death of Charles Manson, for whom we can only guess, if there is a reward, he has finally received his.

Here's something almost noone learned in library school - how to deal with people who need social services but come to the library because they can get to us. Which includes the people getting high and potentially overdosing in libraries.

School Time again. Guess what? It's nearly-impossible to folow ceratin high school prom dress codes for women. Perhaps if they used the doll with realistic proportions and stickers, they'd have an easier time of figuring out a sensible dress code.

Things that aren't immediately apparent when you become a chair user.

It is incredibly poor to assume that women of the past were not somehow as feisty or impressive in their deeds as women of the now, because the evidence will call you a liar. And will probably have looked in an archive to find it. Take a look inside the archives of New York and meet the people whose job it is to make the material findable.

Reunited after thirty years in prison.

Using tiny houses as a springboard for the homeless to get stable and then potentially into houses of their own.

How to leave or change the subject when someone wants to convert you to their lifestyle.

Some of those independent music festivals are doing a damn good job of making the people of color there feel invisible or like they don't belong there. Often in such a way where the flier-holders will talk to the white person in front of a person of color, and the white person behind the person of color, but not the actual person of color themselves. No wonder Get Out made so much money -- it was a horror movie about the Black experience.

A man resigned from the Bronte Society because a woman who graduated Cambridge was appointed to make a creative work about them. Because she couldn't possibly be good enough for the Bronte Sisters because, gasp, she was a model. At this point, I am reminded of a small segment on G4 (when it was G4) that had a big-name adult film actress doing an interview while wiping the floor with her opponents in an FPS, and specifically talking about how the assumption tha women wre bad at those kinds of games made it easier for her to do so.

A person realizes that churches have more function that a house of worship.

Spending a year with the competitive punsters.

Sapphic stories from around the world. There are lots of women in SF/F that should be foregrounded and have their works adapted and promoted big time, instead of parading more white men up and down the promotional column.

Dispatches from the marriage where the wife has the steady paycheck, where it's still difficult for the men in the relationship to adjust to the world around them rather than the world they had been assured would be there for them when they got to it.

A question as to whether romantic attraction and platonic attraction are Not So Different.

An alliance of clergy were responsible for creating some of the standards of what we think of as abortion care in the United States. The scandal regarding mesh implants in vaginas has failed to generate the proper amount of rage that it should have.

Safe falling technique. Not just for stunt personnel.

A police officer springing a booby trap that threw three (butter) knnives at them, and a police officer seizing funds obtained from vending without a permit - by taking them directly out of the wallet of the offender.

A Pirelli calendar with an all black cast doing Alice in Wonderland. Should be fun to see, if you get such a thing.

Makeup is sometimes marker of identity and armor for a person against a cruel world.

The translation of a work can sometimes elide or change the meaning of the words from one thing to another. In a slightly metafictional example of this, Dick Grayson keeps getting cast and recast between being as nearly-queer a character as DC will allow and a character that is ultra-toxic-masculinity, like the other characters in the DC comics universe.

A handy comic primer as to what toxic masculinity actually is, and the reasons why we call it toxic.

A bro suggests that all women need to do to make themselves more happy is to try to be more happy instead of being good, without realizing the amount of not-putting-up-with-men that would actually entail. And substantially more reading with that new free time.

Given how may sexual assaults happen on screen in media these days, an article about how that affects actors, crew, and choreographers is welcome.

Carrie Fisher spent a lot of time threatening Hollywood executives to stop harassing women. When she wasn't making sure that Leia was a good character for all the people who had grown up with her as a role model.

Recreating the style of the 1980s takes quite a bit of work and reference material, as the creators of GLOW made sure of. But they also made sure that someone with small confidence and big knockers could get the confidence up to the level of the cup size.

Bad writing days happen - and are a testament that we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Lean into that, and realize it's hard for everyone else, too.

OKCupid had a policy change that looked a lot like "you must use your wallet name", which was not a smart idea.

Humans are either space orcs or delicate creatures. One of these days, we'll find out which it is. And then they'll have to learn about the differences between the various nations.

Plenty of dudes are lazy when they think about relationships or children, which is going to make it really hard for them to have either later on in life. Plenty of other dudes are more than a bit creepy about their relationships, whether current or past. And then there are those that think a mayo-filled condom is the perfect way to express affection.

An ongoing comic about the issues that come with not really wanting to have large breasts. And the utterly clueless people who don't get it one whit.

An Utena review, if you've been missing one.

A food bank got a can of soup that was 50 years old, and is auctioning it off to raise more money for the food bank,

Drawings of cats matched to their photographic selves, building your own cat hammock, cut paper artwork of exquisite detail, corgi cross breeds, an otter pup, some very good dogs, kittehs, and rats, a senior cat that got a lot friendlier when there wre kittens around, rebranding kitten fostering as kitten rental, bears raiding a pizza shop, rare giraffes spotted in a conservation area, hundreds of polar bears showing up for lunch, otters needing extra space to grow, a person disturbed that children can fill a Pokedex faster than a birdwatcher's catalogue, and a post office position that will require dodging penguins.

In technology, pharmaceutical manufacturers have products that routinely are effective after their scheduled expiry dates, but plenty of places have to throw them out or destroy them because of the expiry points.

A study kept going long after it should have been pulled, due to incidents by study participants, staff that weren't actually trained, vetted, or checked properly, and a lot of other incidents that piled up but were dismissed or hidden in the name of trying to keep the study going.

A major data breach at Sonic restaurants in September of 2017, and a serious breach of data at Equifax in September of 2017 that affected a ridiculous number of people, almost none of who really gave their affirmative consent to have their data collected and monitored by Equifax. Equifax is telling a lot of people they've been affected. But then, things get sicker. People with stock options might have done insider trading with them to make themselves much richer right before the breach was announced. Scammers rushed to take advantage of people while they were afraid of their data being sold. Then we found out who was in charge of security and that the company had not patched against a known vulnerability, which is how the attackers got in. And then we found out the big one wasn't the only data breach that Equifax knew about and was trying to deal with. Even if state-sponsored actors were involved, this is inexcusable.

Ultrasonic commands could be given to Apple and Amazon devices, allowing someone to take control of them without the humans noticing anything but the effects of the commands.

Creating cooling devices using insulated containers, fans, and pipes to direct the chilled air. On a much bigger scale, the engineering involved in trying to keep London's Underground tunnels from roasting the passengers.

The Hosue of Mouse excluded the Los Angeles times from seeing advance screenings of their movies, because they didn't like it when the Times suggested that Disney might not be a good corporate citizen of Anaheim, and that there may have been heavy meddling in City Council elections as well.

Film and studio archivists are encountering the same problems of other archivists - there's not enough storage and not enough backward compatibility to prevent an archive race, where things that are archived have to be continually rearchived to stay current enough to be retrievable. And that's just how it is before there are any infrastructure changes. Photobucket insisting on extorting customers reshapes the web in horrible ways.

a vulnerability in Broadcom wireless chips made it possible for an attacker to gain control over a smartphone, even though the CPU and kernel space were reasonably well secure. Which is one of the ways that people get caught in data breaches, as well - a partner with less security provides the way into an otherwise more secure system.

Archival NASA footage now on Youtube, the story of the discovery of how conception and birth actually worked, determining the precise smell of an old book, flirting by pneumatic tube, a periodic table with common places we would find each element on each block, magnetic clasps for shoes so that they don't have to be tied and untied, electronically cheating at baseball by stealing signs over video, the end of the Cassini mission, how people destroyed camera equipment by just pointing it at the eclipse, the Internet of no fun at all, New York City making their subway announcements gender neutral, an arrest in a case where someone was killed by SWATting, the idea of giving pensioners a tablet and the necessary instruction to make it work for them as a way of staving off loneliness, a complaint about noise in a science institute that wouldn't be out of place in a library, what a viral story about apparent Arabic in a Viking textile tells us about the fraught relationship we have with truth, what should be a worrisome wake-up about all the data that our apps and social media selves post online (parents stalking their adult children's social media and such), an awful flaw in a macOS build that has since been patched, and what sort of infrastructure you might actually need to get more people, and especially women, biking.

Last for tonight, examining the structure of the Choose Your Own Adventure interactive fictions, the possibility that the bad sex is better than usual, and how quickly people discover when you're trying to manipulate rankings on the bestseller list.

An airport is sending the message that it is a dangerous place, if you can read the language of the stone statues out front.

And an extension to Chrome that replaces comment sections with pictures of adorable cats. So if there are generally no productive discussions on a website, you can put something that's much nicer to look at in its place.