Jan. 15th, 2018

silveradept: A kodama with a trombone. The trombone is playing music, even though it is held in a rest position (Default)
Why not start with a decent introduction to the idea of fanworks wrapped around a book review.

A strong argument that the biggest objection to the loud boorish atheists talking about how religion is fundamentally destructive to civil society is that they're being boors about it, and that a liberal society that values tolerance has trouble, in much the same way that stereotypically geek groups of men have trouble, in giving the boot to something that is actively harming them because they don't like the optics of exclusion. A similarly strong argument that it's not about being rude, it's about the people championing this view are also championing doing harm to people based on their religious beliefs, and that the use of language of various terms throws up very red flags for groups who have a similar incident not too far into their history.

Horror movies have a stock character, a woman who understands bad things are about to happen and isn't believed anyway. That stock character is also yelling at us in our own horror movie - the one we call real life.

When someone is hurting, the impulse to fix is often the wrong one. This goes even more so if the hurt is from estrangement.

Recognizing when you're in a low mood cycle, and steps that might help break out of it, with the important caveats that it doesn't cover everything, and especially not situations where people are actively trying to make you feel small, stupid, and worthless.

What having your house burn down feels like, and what happens after.

A WPA program during the Depression had librarians riding horses to deliver books to the remote regions of Appalachia.

Singers and other voice-using people have ben losing it far earlier than they want to. Two people think they might know how to fix it with technique, instead of surgery.

The worries of lost luggage.

Negative self-talk is a big problem for people with ADHD, but cognitively recognizing and reshaping the negative thoughts might be able to help them stop being so damn effective. It seems like mindfulness training is helpful in this regard, to notice, to see the pattern, and then to be able to redirect the thought or let it just hang there without consequence. (Sometimes pretending to be Batman helps kids with focus on a task.

Conceiving of the world of friendships as being short and starting at the best and getting worse over time, which is how a person with BPD might see them.

Science says women, on average, have to be more competent than men in the sciences to be rated the same as them. Yet men are unwilling to believe the science that says they're biased, because it says they're biased, thus perpetuating the bais. This is what they meant when they talked about how evidence sometimes causes people to dig in to their beliefs instead of reform them. It's not just in science, either - two women who wanted to create a startup did a lot better when they had a fake man as a partner. Libba Bray has been trying to get Beauty Queens to go on the screen, but dudes cockblock her at every turn. Lots of dudes write women on the assumption that they're pretty and nothing else matters. Yet they would probably object horribly if women did the same to them, even though women probably have better cause and reason to. After all, the concept of emotional labor is taught to men...but they're taught that they should benefit from it, instead of how to avoid burdening their partners with it.

A useful phrase for setting your culture: "We don't do that here." Useful in plenty of situations. Suggestions on making singing spaces and lessons more friendly for trans* people and enbies, by, surprise, surprise, focusing on the vocal range instead of the body containing the voice.

See which First Nations group your current land used to belong to. If you mouse around, though, you'll find that the imagery is very flickery - be aware if you have photosensitivity.

Cooking used to be a lot spicier, but then everyone could get spices, and so Western Europe went in favor of complimenting, instead of contrasting, flavors for dishes. Working in a spice shop will give you a lot of lessons, only some of them about spices. As it turns out, the kind of salt you use in a recipe will have variant effects on it, sometimes even having differences between brands.

A survey about the regionalisms of Canada.

Narrative structure is as important as the story being told. A story of one culture told in the narrative of another will ring wrong. Speaking of writing, if you want to get into science fiction, magazine publication is the best way to start selling your work. Style suggestions for writing about transgender people.

The editor is often your very best friend, even when they're savaging your manusscript and telling you how much they hate it. Occasionally, Chekov should be ignored, and that occasion may be more likely in science fiction stories. Seanan McGuire talks about novel-writing, as well as how much fandom has changed in the last ten years. Sarah Rees Brennan on writing a book online as a project that then became a published book. Advice on writing the boring bits. Writing fat characters. Published authors describing their first drafts in a single sentence. What it was like building a country in Africa where there had been no colonization.

Bryan Fuller would like to bring Pushing Daisies back. WE WOULD, TOO.

The Last Jedi is all about a story where a man ignores women leaders and everyone suffers the consequences. Competent women in power. The series as a whole owes a lot to Carrie Fisher, both on and off the screen.

The Last Jedi is very specific about the way it destroys the dynasty the previous movies built and points out and deconstructs the Jedi as the saviors of everyone. It's all about the way The Last Jedi doesn't really care about your Star Wars expectations or your fan theories.

Anticipated movies of 2018 with lots of women in them and about them. A group of Thor fans got to see the third movie get the Rocky Horros stage show treatment...with the actual cast of Thor doing it.

A guide to comics terminology, which is pretty straightforward until you start talking about volumes of something, and then it gets wibbly-wobbly. A photograph of Wonder Woman meeting the Bionic Woman. Canonically-Jewish superheroes. Props in science-fiction shows that looks suspiciously like objects from a much earlier time period,

A practical guide for getting your credit straightened out with credit reporting agencies if you have had your identity compromised and accounts opened in your name without your approval.

Gorgeous artwork for Wonder woman, a maternity shot taken during the eclipse, illustrations of the wonders of living alone (or with an animal), creative barcodes, IKEA near to Halifax causes mass...something...when it opens, the reasons why not to purchase things supposedly supporting autism that are created by people who aren't autistic, what one can hope to gain by looking at the complete run of centerfold models for Playboy magazine, shoes with carved wooden heels, kimonos with African patterns and fabric, artistic representations of city designs of improbable narration, the art people will construct when they are not otherwise engaged in work (which might help their productivity, believe it or not), famous people of this era mimicking glamour shots of yesteryear, architecture with a spiteful bend, how a professional photographer developes the eye to take good photographs, the ways that films can be intimately personal, the weaving of sea silk, the painting of shadows for whimsy, the connection of a great trail across Canada, an unintentionally, then intentionally, feminist magazine in Japan, the ghosts and creatures of the bathroom in Japan, the tartan to be used while exploring Mars, guides for gifting someone a thing they really want...without spending a lot, photographs from the Silk Road, holiday cards with the message of resistance, how acrobatics helps conquer fear (and note aerial training is not a thing you want to DIY and that it is possible to be working out too hard for your body), excellent pictures of black girls with natural hair, creating time-lapses of your children as they age, pulling out pictures from the vault, learning to take pictures of comedic value, an Olympic fencer gets her own Barbie doll, beautiful mandalas, a calendar of merb'ys, deliberately sinking a steel kraken with a ship to create an artificial reef, Alice illustrations, a Gorey typeface, the Voynich manuscript, which you can now have your own digital copy of to peruse, and art installations made of tesselated items.

A plea to resurrect telling ghost stories at the time of the new year, because the messages of many of them provide hope for us before things have gone too far. Dark stories for dark times. (And some new carols.)

It's easier for people to complain about a destroyed burger than a bullied person - one can hope that we can all teach our children to recognize when they're being bullies and stop it.

The secret powers of the asexual. (And a quick primer on the matter.)

Pictures of what the world will look like when all the people are gone, birds in urban spaces, cats of London past, more cute cat poses, cats with unique fur markings, making cats unique so that they get adopted, foxes enjoying life, horse moustaches, the ways that humans make it easier for rats, IKEA furniture for cats and dogs, the best wildlife photographs of the year, the ways that human fascination with wolves is causing problems for the wolves when they behave like wolves, tiny cattle calves, more adorable cats, photographs of snakes with colorations that say "Stay away", what living with dogs can be like, trying to preserve the diversity of chickens, a city constructed by octopi, very large dogs that believe they fit just fine on a human lap, vintage photographs of children and animals, color photographs of children and animals, livestreams of kittens, hens doing what they do best, owls in various poses, a small child helping the feral cat colonies of Philadelphia, a doggo on some pretty cool adventures, really cute kittens, famous people and dogs that would like to be adopted, why Seanan McGuire has no reason at all to ever trust the TSA to determine the obvious, the possibilities that jellyfish sleep, the ways that octopods rearrange their own genes, creating giant straw animals after the rice harvest, nineteen new geckos discovered in a small area, the food of the 17th century, the genetic differences of uptown and downtown rats of New York City, photographic black cats so they have a better chance of adoption, sculpting fruit so that it looks like animals, an Irwin taking great wildlife photographs, more wildlife photographs, great bird pictures, the beautiful creatures in the very deep, and grated daikon sculptures.

In technology, remastering StarCraft to make it visually pretty and better able to run on modern machines without touching the core gameplay, confessing to the breaks from reality that video games employ to make the games themselves more fun to play, photographing palimpsests so as to discover their layered writing, how a badly, horribly blinkeredly-unintelligent translation ended up saying the exact opposite of the message it wanted to convey, a group of white volunteers that will step in to a discussion to help educate another white person about white supremacy, relieving people of color from having to do the job, a computational facility at NASA named for one of the computers that helped put people on the moon, the shopping mall finally starting to become what the creator had envisioned for it, continued production of the NES and SNES Classic machines to meet demand, various websites with specific purposes in mind, the ways that Dutch greenhouses and farmers are producing a lot more food with much bettter sustainability and conservation techniques, the sound design of the new Star Wars movies, along with remaking a beloved friend and generating the porgs, attempting to convey a critical message in a single tweet, the last of the iron lungs in service, and advice on being safe in a powerchair when there are roads or sidewalks, and thus other people (many in cars) involved.

What a decade of sex toy reviews and sex blogging will do for a person's confidence and self-knowledge. (And what prophylactic envelopes looked like in previous years.)

Facebok quietly revises the numbers upward of how many fake accounts they have.

An infographic about common myths and misperceptions, although it lacks a certain amount of linkking to sources on all of these matters, which makes me a little "mmmm" about it.

a free online dictionary of Akkadian. It only took 90 years to put together. Nice work, academics! While you peruse that, have a playlist of Shakespeare with lots of great actors in it.

Last for tonight, sometimes being the old bot is the best thing ever, and a stunt double fight between Elektra and Black Widow.

Plus the sound of the warp core idling from The Next Generation, as white noise, but if that doesn't do it for you, there are plenty of custom noise generators you can use.

And a free course that can help you get the best research use out of your library. There's at least one thing you can get started on: learning how to examine a source critically.

(Due South's first season is on Youtube. Legally.)

Now go wash your hands. Properly. That way you can go down this rabbit hole of random.
silveradept: The emblem of the Heartless, a heart with an X of thorns and a fleur-de-lis at the bottom instead of the normal point. (Heartless)
In your own space, write a love letter to Fandom in general, to a particular fandom, to a trope, a relationship, a character, or to your flist/circle/followers. Share your love and squee as loud as you want to.

Okay, Fandom, we need to talk. I know things have been scary for you for a while, because there's so much going on that's new, and more than a few people are scared or dismissive of change. With good reason. Fandom has been the place where you find yourself, and also find that there are others who think and believe the same way you do. It's a network connecting the may disparate of places. It saves lives by giving hope and assistance to those who need it, and there are few things in life more purely happy than squee.

Relatively young (age-wise) fen, such as myself, look at what we've built with the assistance of the Internet and say how remarkable it is that we no longer have to communicate with ourselves through the letters pages of our magazines or at the single annual convention that is the place of pilgrimage for fans. We no longer have to know someone who receives our creates zines to share our stories outside our own circles (if we had the to start with). We have created a space for ourselves that is wider and more expansive than the ones originally envisioned, and we have brought our stories out in the real world and effected change with them. Fans and creators alike told stories of themselves and their characters, and in many places of the world, it's no longer a criminal act to act upon your love for another (so long as you're safe and consensual about it.)

We still have things to do, though. There are still a lot of things we had that made sense in the before that aren't as useful now. Being protective of your fandom because it made you unique, and because people would see you as weird and make fun of you makes sense when you're in an environment that will do that. Most of us, though, manage to get out of those environments and into situations where we don't have to hide any more. The more people are visibly fannish in their lives, the more acceptable it is to be fannish, and that includes being proud of your fanworks. (Discussing them in detail with the creators or their representatives may not be the wisest idea, though.) You can create your fanworks now, so any not go for it?

We also need an open-door policy for fandom. Lots of people come in to escape the things in their lives and to find companionship and fellows. There are plenty of us that still take the attitude that being part of fandom requires being gatekept and tested to see if your fandom is true enough to be worthy. Works great if you're delivering the One Ring to an active volcano, but it's a terrible idea for fandom. Anyone who wants in should be let in. Rest, sentinels that seek to guard their fandom against the outside, lest you find out that your creator is someone you would never let in to the fan club.

That open door policy is not, however, a "walk all over us" policy. I'm thrilled that we've started to take the idea of harassment seriously, with the implementation and enforcement of codes of conduct. The door being open means that we welcome people in easily, and it should also mean that we have people leave easily when they prove themselves bad actors. Preferably with an understanding of why what they did was wrong, but if we can't consistently get that out of politicians that are image-obsessed, the rest of us may have to deal with the possibility that someone else might not learn either. We need to start with the premise that stories are likely true and them investigate them to see if they can be proven. We might not get it right all the time, but we can certainly improve our percentages so that when people behave badly, they get punished appropriately the first time, instead of ascending to higher places.

We can do a better job with diversity, too, Fandom. Mostly in this case, it involves putting pressure on creators to be more diverse and respectful in their works and pushing back hard against a narrative that says people only want to watch and read and listen about straight white men saving everyone. There are more than a few tactics you can employ to bring this about, and those of you in greater positions of privilege can help a lot by being more active in helping. There's a lot to be had out here that's good and deserves recognition and support.

We also need to have a serious conversation about making sure that we're not doing the censor's job for them. Part of making a space safe for a new person, a young person, and a person with traumas is signposting things correctly. Use your content notes and ratings so that someone knows what they're getting in to before proceeding. Teach people that the back button exists, and that we operate on the principle of Your Kink Is Okay, It's Just Not My Kink in the space where works are legally allowed to exist. Think hard about whether advocating for the removal of something you don't like will rebound onto something (or someone) you do. (It almost always does.) Teach how to navigate the space so that you can respect others and demand you be respected.

We've accomplished a lot, Fandom. We can be proud of those things. We can use those things to ascend to even greater heights, and we can build structures along the way for others to follow us with, so they, too, can join the work-in-progress that is Fandom. I wouldn't be telling you this if I didn't think you could do it.

Live long, and prosper.

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