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Amnesty Politics.
Jan. 26th, 2018 07:38 pmThese are excludable - block out the tag "political links" and you will not have to see them.
( Yet more politics problems )
( Yet more politics problems )
Jan. 26th, 2018
Good morning. Let's start with the return of Esperanto as a language people want to learn and a request to turn the second Monday of October into a celebration of the interruptions that happen when you're trying to do something important.
We must note and hold silence on the passing of Ursula K. LeGuin, a novelist who made science fiction that always took a unique perspective on everything. WisCon misses their three-time Guest of Honor, as do more than a few science fiction authors. Locus Magazine has an orbituary, as does the Book View Cafe.
If you're hesitating on whether or not to dive into fandom, you have our permission. Dive right in. Because there's a lot there to get excited about, sometimes even as a good counterpoint to the rest of what's going on in the world. Deep Space Nine is twenty-five years old, and it's one of the best serialized Star Treks around.
Advice from binary people to binary people about using proper pronouns for everyone, binary and nonbinary alike. Making relationships better by maximizing the number of positive interactions you have with another person.
Yet another person engaging in bad behavior - a date with Aziz Ansari that went terribly, consent-violatingly bad. Afterward, Ansari denied anything terrible happened, saying that in the morning after, he talked to her and she said that everything seemeed okay. One might note that dudes are not particularly good at figuring out when everything is okay, on account of not being the person the experience hapepned to. And also that with as many bad behaviors as are going around, the burden of "this was okay, no really" is much higher than it would normally be in society. (It's right about where it should have been all along, honestly, but unless there's things to refuel the public consciousness, it will drop back down to some lower level.) Mario Batali apparently included a recipe for cinnamon rolls in his apology letter, and they're terrible. So is the apology letter.
We can't just talk about sexual violence in terms of assault - there's plenty going on there that doesn't get physical and still counts. If "no" gets ignored, instead of respected, it leads to bad outcomes. Because what constitutes "sex" is a very wide spectrum, unless you're specific about what you want out of it. #MeToo has a lot going for it in inspiring solidarity and getting everyone to think about the prevalence of violence. Even when other women denounce the idea as puritanical and removing agency from women, the conversation is helping people find their voice and position. The discussion has been going on for quite some time, with the idea of having your own good sex contrasted with the idea of what the mainstream things good sex is as a central tenet.
Every time a man decides to defend bad behavior and the status quo, they're sending clear signals about what kinds of men they want to be.
Perhaps the best way to get someone to like the music you want to put for seducing them is to let the person you want to seduce put on the music. That way you know they're going to like it.
If you are an organization, or a person who volunteers, and there's only one person doing the thing, that's bad. If you're the volunteer, go ahead and step away from it when you can. If you're the organization, have several someones else that can step into that role, or train new someones that can do it, before the person who's always done it has an accident or gets entirely burnt out with you about it. Because sometimes your most trusted, loyal, and reliable volunteer has a heart attack and doesn't survive it.
Black women die at a much higher rate from postpartum-related complications than anyone else in the United States. The reasons why are depressingly familiar - a higher stress quotient from life and medical practitioners that don't seem to want to treat a black women like a human being deserving of the best care.
Examining the statistics of high-profile gender research has at least a couple scientists suspicious of the results, but getting someone to officially acknolwedge this is less swift than drowning in molasses.
Henry Ford wanted square dancing, because he thought jazz was a corrupting influence created by Jews to control black people. Recall that, if that description doesn't make it abundantly clear, Herny Ford was an inveterate Hitler-supporting racist and anti-Semite. There are some other issues involving gender roles that are present in some dancing squares, as well.
People telling you to forego your morning coffee or your avocado toast sandwich to make yourself a millionaire are probably not doing the math right. And they're encouraging everyone to essentially put off fun until they're too old to enjoy it. Healthy balance is a great idea.
Seanan McGuire reminds us that the only people who believe politics should stay out of fiction are the people who are already getting more than enough fiction catering to their tastes.
Intersectionality at its finest, in dealing with being both trans and disabled. Bring on the exoskeletons.
How the suits of Dana Scully are exactly right for the character in her era. Shaving leg and underarm hair can be attributed most strongly to razor makers and magazine creators that wanted to push products on women. Bad posture causes pain if you have boobs - yet having boobs means insulting commentary about them enough to cause bad posture.
It is entirely possible to do work in creative fields and still maintain all the other things that you have to for house and family. (Because women have been doing it for years, chumps. Admit it to yourself - there are other reasons than the supposed needs of the art why you're not contributing more around the house.)
Drag queen story times in Toronto. And a lot of other places, some of which have canceled theirs because the community around them squawked at the idea of diversity in people being shown to their children.
Amazon is pitting cities against each other to come up with the most lucrative deals for their warehouses and jobs. Which means the city that wins their contract also loses big.
Still one more year before some works might actually enter the public domain in the United States. While others around the world are more than able to use those same works because their copyrights have expired.
Journalism needs to be willing to show everything that goes into it, including costs, relative knowledge, the data sets, where it knows there are gaps, everything. Give your readers all the tools they need and see if they come to the same conclusions you are. Because readers need to be able to evaluate sources and methods, too.
Luke Skywalker is a hero, bound up in compassion for others. It's what makes him the legendary figure he is...and why he has no interest at all in returning as a Jedi to anyone or anywhere. Instead, we get to see General Leia demonstrate her Force abilities for once. We need Leia as our hero more than ever.
A campaign to portray the gods and goddesses of Hindus as dark-skinned, rather than impossibly light-skinned.
The Archive of the Bay Area Reporter, a newspaper serving the LGBT community in the Bay Area. Yay, digitization of important parts of the human experience.
Nothing like being cuffed, jailed, and interrogated for a thing you didn't do, because someone else accidentally matched your bought phone's serial number to phones that were stolen from the same shop.
There's still a lot of rebuilding to be done even after a group gets broken apart for being a cult -- coming back into the world is difficult when all your life has been of a particular style.
The bus stops of the Soviet era, popular tatoo designs rendered as 3D objects, trolling the Williams-Sonoma catalog for 2017, the reason why A Knight's Tale is a favorite among the actual medievalists, fragments of reading materials discovered about Blackbeard's ship, Seanan McGuire talking about books, Doug Jones, who has plenty of credits to his name, most of them with makeup appliances over his face, the incredibly quotable Carrie Fisher, a crocheted Porg, the librarian action figure, now in version two, typographical errors that impart a completely new meaning to the phrase, the ways in which fans who were looking for representation have (finally) managed to get Supernatural to do at least a pilot about an all-women group doing the same thing the Winchesters have been doing, the big call for authenticity in the depiction of the Klingon language for the latest Star Trek, the ways that effects get made on The Good Place, including an interview with the actor playing Janet on The Good Place where she talks about stunt falling. A lot. Jameela Jamil is tickled at receiving Eleanor/Tahani fic, but less so with Ted Danson's willingness to spoil the first season, Manny Jacinto is totally in favor of more Asians on screen in non-stereotypical roles...and also knows that Ted Danson can do all sorts of gross pranks, William Jackson Harper thought he would never get the role...and sees Ted Danson as a nice guy, the re-emergence of some very interesting costumes from the 1920s, and the music of Neil Young available for free until June 2018.
The life of the pirate is not the romantic or tale-filled affair that many of the books and movies make them out to be.
Cats in nativity scenes, a story of opposite-personality cats finding harmony, finding the hummingbird tongue, cut-paper animals that look like they were drawn on paper, avant-garde pie crust designs, horses photobombing, explanations of common cat behaviors, cats with captions well before LOLcats, the reason one does not mention an orangutan in the presence of Poe scholars, the use of black pudding to free oneself from being locked in a freezer, the way in which small batches of food made by monks and nuns is fitting in very well with current attitudes toward food, and the Easter Mass incident...where the food was good, even if the re-enactment got a bit out of hand.
In technology, a laundry-folding robot that uses machine learning to determine what it is that its folding.
Also, serious vulnerabilities in all processors that allow for stealing things in memory. The fix is UPDATE. NOW.And if you're one of the unlucky people who has a tablet or other device that doesn't roll out with regular updates, now might be a fine time to examine custom operating systems that will allow you to stay patched for longer.
There's also a hardcoded backdoor into certain Western Digital devices, the knowledge that Apple deliberately slows and drops the performance of old devices in new versions of iOS, and a battery recall from HP on certain laptops
Always-on microphones are always recording, which has some pretty serious privacy implications, which you can combine with the way that agencies engaging in surveillance on us all have developed very sophisticated techniques to identify us by voice.
A resolution for the new year for people who are on Facebook - ditch Facebook. For news, for stories, for ads, for all of those things that it does for aggregation and bubbling of you. Keep it maybe for keeping in touch with relatives and friends and the occasional LOLcat. Otherwise, ditch Facebook and make your own decisions about what media to consume.
A person who SWATted another person was charged with involuntary manslaughter. Consequences are a definite necessity here. And also, if there's a way that we can get rapid-response teams to be able to stop and assess the situation for a moment once there's no obvious things that need immediate attention, like weapons or threats, so that we don't end up with people running on twitchy decision-making once the need is past.
Relying solely on an application to tell people when they can have sex has had...complications.
The city of Barcelona is making a transition to open-source software, which I hope is thoroughly documented. I very much like the idea of Public Money, Public Code, a movement to make tax-funded software available under Free and Open Source licenses.
The Equifax breach was worse than expected. 200,000 credit card numbers were stolen in the data breach, because Equifax had credit card transaction data unenecrypted on the servers. Its Argentine portal was insecure in the worst way. Data on several hundred thousand citizens of the United Kingdom was also stolen. Faced with that kind of massive intrustion, the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation and top officials are being allowed to retire from the company rather than being fired unceremoniously and without their golden parachutes.
Gift cards may be tampered with, to the point where the thieves that have the activation code just wait for you to buy the bad card before using it themselves to purchase something.
Patreon's decision to change their fee structure essentially burnt the bridges of the people they needed to survive while chasing people who might or might not actually contribute. Even though they walked it back fairly quickly after proposing it.
Trying to find a sustainable way of dealing with the fact that we will always lose an arms race with evolution, by trying to find other bacteria or materials that will help the body not die from being infected long enough to fight off what's trying to kill it.
A phone case that reveals an engagement ring when opened. For the person that wants to livestream their proposal to the Internet. This sounds like a bad idea. Asking someone to marry you in public as a surprise bad. Surprising your girlfriend with an escort to try and get her to have a threesome bad.
improving your wireless signal with some reflectors and aluminium foil, the ways in which caching and mobile-serving platforms make the credible and the incrediblie look similar, the difficulties of replicating a recipe that is done in narrative rather than recipe, customizing a keyboard with LEGO-variety materials, a question on whether or not a white cane is the right cane for a person with a visual disability or whether colors are good as well, typefaces for just about every situation, the elements of Terra that are endangered, cleaning smells out from your sinks and garbage disposals, the history of flammable and deadly garments for women, remembering to keep disabled people in mind when designing products like menstrual cups, a hair clip that also functions as a multi-tool, how a bureau that is legally forbidden from having a computer database can still manage to trace weapons used in crimes back to the people that purchased them, the fabric that nobody wants to wear any more, yet that North Korea still produces in large amounts, and the difficulty of making deep connections when there is far too much breadth to keep up with.
Disney characters, mostly Princesses, and their Pokemon.
The prospect of the world where people do less work for less pay, enjoy themselves more, and, oh yes, still manage to make ends meet with things like the Universal Basic Income.
Last for tonight, a game about incubi, succubi, and most importantly, consent. The game itself is a visual novel with sexual content, so be aware of what you're getting into when you download it. Also, peruse this list of suggestions about good sex for trans people, a lot of which is just "good sex for people" on things that apply universally, like consent and communication.
And The Tea Dragon Society, which is a fantastic story with great representation and a lovely story. I love it so much that I want to have a copy on my bookshelf and one for just about anyone who has a smalling that has questions about themselves and their futures.
We must note and hold silence on the passing of Ursula K. LeGuin, a novelist who made science fiction that always took a unique perspective on everything. WisCon misses their three-time Guest of Honor, as do more than a few science fiction authors. Locus Magazine has an orbituary, as does the Book View Cafe.
If you're hesitating on whether or not to dive into fandom, you have our permission. Dive right in. Because there's a lot there to get excited about, sometimes even as a good counterpoint to the rest of what's going on in the world. Deep Space Nine is twenty-five years old, and it's one of the best serialized Star Treks around.
Advice from binary people to binary people about using proper pronouns for everyone, binary and nonbinary alike. Making relationships better by maximizing the number of positive interactions you have with another person.
Yet another person engaging in bad behavior - a date with Aziz Ansari that went terribly, consent-violatingly bad. Afterward, Ansari denied anything terrible happened, saying that in the morning after, he talked to her and she said that everything seemeed okay. One might note that dudes are not particularly good at figuring out when everything is okay, on account of not being the person the experience hapepned to. And also that with as many bad behaviors as are going around, the burden of "this was okay, no really" is much higher than it would normally be in society. (It's right about where it should have been all along, honestly, but unless there's things to refuel the public consciousness, it will drop back down to some lower level.) Mario Batali apparently included a recipe for cinnamon rolls in his apology letter, and they're terrible. So is the apology letter.
We can't just talk about sexual violence in terms of assault - there's plenty going on there that doesn't get physical and still counts. If "no" gets ignored, instead of respected, it leads to bad outcomes. Because what constitutes "sex" is a very wide spectrum, unless you're specific about what you want out of it. #MeToo has a lot going for it in inspiring solidarity and getting everyone to think about the prevalence of violence. Even when other women denounce the idea as puritanical and removing agency from women, the conversation is helping people find their voice and position. The discussion has been going on for quite some time, with the idea of having your own good sex contrasted with the idea of what the mainstream things good sex is as a central tenet.
Every time a man decides to defend bad behavior and the status quo, they're sending clear signals about what kinds of men they want to be.
Perhaps the best way to get someone to like the music you want to put for seducing them is to let the person you want to seduce put on the music. That way you know they're going to like it.
If you are an organization, or a person who volunteers, and there's only one person doing the thing, that's bad. If you're the volunteer, go ahead and step away from it when you can. If you're the organization, have several someones else that can step into that role, or train new someones that can do it, before the person who's always done it has an accident or gets entirely burnt out with you about it. Because sometimes your most trusted, loyal, and reliable volunteer has a heart attack and doesn't survive it.
Black women die at a much higher rate from postpartum-related complications than anyone else in the United States. The reasons why are depressingly familiar - a higher stress quotient from life and medical practitioners that don't seem to want to treat a black women like a human being deserving of the best care.
Examining the statistics of high-profile gender research has at least a couple scientists suspicious of the results, but getting someone to officially acknolwedge this is less swift than drowning in molasses.
Henry Ford wanted square dancing, because he thought jazz was a corrupting influence created by Jews to control black people. Recall that, if that description doesn't make it abundantly clear, Herny Ford was an inveterate Hitler-supporting racist and anti-Semite. There are some other issues involving gender roles that are present in some dancing squares, as well.
People telling you to forego your morning coffee or your avocado toast sandwich to make yourself a millionaire are probably not doing the math right. And they're encouraging everyone to essentially put off fun until they're too old to enjoy it. Healthy balance is a great idea.
Seanan McGuire reminds us that the only people who believe politics should stay out of fiction are the people who are already getting more than enough fiction catering to their tastes.
Intersectionality at its finest, in dealing with being both trans and disabled. Bring on the exoskeletons.
How the suits of Dana Scully are exactly right for the character in her era. Shaving leg and underarm hair can be attributed most strongly to razor makers and magazine creators that wanted to push products on women. Bad posture causes pain if you have boobs - yet having boobs means insulting commentary about them enough to cause bad posture.
It is entirely possible to do work in creative fields and still maintain all the other things that you have to for house and family. (Because women have been doing it for years, chumps. Admit it to yourself - there are other reasons than the supposed needs of the art why you're not contributing more around the house.)
Drag queen story times in Toronto. And a lot of other places, some of which have canceled theirs because the community around them squawked at the idea of diversity in people being shown to their children.
Amazon is pitting cities against each other to come up with the most lucrative deals for their warehouses and jobs. Which means the city that wins their contract also loses big.
Still one more year before some works might actually enter the public domain in the United States. While others around the world are more than able to use those same works because their copyrights have expired.
Journalism needs to be willing to show everything that goes into it, including costs, relative knowledge, the data sets, where it knows there are gaps, everything. Give your readers all the tools they need and see if they come to the same conclusions you are. Because readers need to be able to evaluate sources and methods, too.
Luke Skywalker is a hero, bound up in compassion for others. It's what makes him the legendary figure he is...and why he has no interest at all in returning as a Jedi to anyone or anywhere. Instead, we get to see General Leia demonstrate her Force abilities for once. We need Leia as our hero more than ever.
A campaign to portray the gods and goddesses of Hindus as dark-skinned, rather than impossibly light-skinned.
The Archive of the Bay Area Reporter, a newspaper serving the LGBT community in the Bay Area. Yay, digitization of important parts of the human experience.
Nothing like being cuffed, jailed, and interrogated for a thing you didn't do, because someone else accidentally matched your bought phone's serial number to phones that were stolen from the same shop.
There's still a lot of rebuilding to be done even after a group gets broken apart for being a cult -- coming back into the world is difficult when all your life has been of a particular style.
The bus stops of the Soviet era, popular tatoo designs rendered as 3D objects, trolling the Williams-Sonoma catalog for 2017, the reason why A Knight's Tale is a favorite among the actual medievalists, fragments of reading materials discovered about Blackbeard's ship, Seanan McGuire talking about books, Doug Jones, who has plenty of credits to his name, most of them with makeup appliances over his face, the incredibly quotable Carrie Fisher, a crocheted Porg, the librarian action figure, now in version two, typographical errors that impart a completely new meaning to the phrase, the ways in which fans who were looking for representation have (finally) managed to get Supernatural to do at least a pilot about an all-women group doing the same thing the Winchesters have been doing, the big call for authenticity in the depiction of the Klingon language for the latest Star Trek, the ways that effects get made on The Good Place, including an interview with the actor playing Janet on The Good Place where she talks about stunt falling. A lot. Jameela Jamil is tickled at receiving Eleanor/Tahani fic, but less so with Ted Danson's willingness to spoil the first season, Manny Jacinto is totally in favor of more Asians on screen in non-stereotypical roles...and also knows that Ted Danson can do all sorts of gross pranks, William Jackson Harper thought he would never get the role...and sees Ted Danson as a nice guy, the re-emergence of some very interesting costumes from the 1920s, and the music of Neil Young available for free until June 2018.
The life of the pirate is not the romantic or tale-filled affair that many of the books and movies make them out to be.
Cats in nativity scenes, a story of opposite-personality cats finding harmony, finding the hummingbird tongue, cut-paper animals that look like they were drawn on paper, avant-garde pie crust designs, horses photobombing, explanations of common cat behaviors, cats with captions well before LOLcats, the reason one does not mention an orangutan in the presence of Poe scholars, the use of black pudding to free oneself from being locked in a freezer, the way in which small batches of food made by monks and nuns is fitting in very well with current attitudes toward food, and the Easter Mass incident...where the food was good, even if the re-enactment got a bit out of hand.
In technology, a laundry-folding robot that uses machine learning to determine what it is that its folding.
Also, serious vulnerabilities in all processors that allow for stealing things in memory. The fix is UPDATE. NOW.And if you're one of the unlucky people who has a tablet or other device that doesn't roll out with regular updates, now might be a fine time to examine custom operating systems that will allow you to stay patched for longer.
There's also a hardcoded backdoor into certain Western Digital devices, the knowledge that Apple deliberately slows and drops the performance of old devices in new versions of iOS, and a battery recall from HP on certain laptops
Always-on microphones are always recording, which has some pretty serious privacy implications, which you can combine with the way that agencies engaging in surveillance on us all have developed very sophisticated techniques to identify us by voice.
A resolution for the new year for people who are on Facebook - ditch Facebook. For news, for stories, for ads, for all of those things that it does for aggregation and bubbling of you. Keep it maybe for keeping in touch with relatives and friends and the occasional LOLcat. Otherwise, ditch Facebook and make your own decisions about what media to consume.
A person who SWATted another person was charged with involuntary manslaughter. Consequences are a definite necessity here. And also, if there's a way that we can get rapid-response teams to be able to stop and assess the situation for a moment once there's no obvious things that need immediate attention, like weapons or threats, so that we don't end up with people running on twitchy decision-making once the need is past.
Relying solely on an application to tell people when they can have sex has had...complications.
The city of Barcelona is making a transition to open-source software, which I hope is thoroughly documented. I very much like the idea of Public Money, Public Code, a movement to make tax-funded software available under Free and Open Source licenses.
The Equifax breach was worse than expected. 200,000 credit card numbers were stolen in the data breach, because Equifax had credit card transaction data unenecrypted on the servers. Its Argentine portal was insecure in the worst way. Data on several hundred thousand citizens of the United Kingdom was also stolen. Faced with that kind of massive intrustion, the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation and top officials are being allowed to retire from the company rather than being fired unceremoniously and without their golden parachutes.
Gift cards may be tampered with, to the point where the thieves that have the activation code just wait for you to buy the bad card before using it themselves to purchase something.
Patreon's decision to change their fee structure essentially burnt the bridges of the people they needed to survive while chasing people who might or might not actually contribute. Even though they walked it back fairly quickly after proposing it.
Trying to find a sustainable way of dealing with the fact that we will always lose an arms race with evolution, by trying to find other bacteria or materials that will help the body not die from being infected long enough to fight off what's trying to kill it.
A phone case that reveals an engagement ring when opened. For the person that wants to livestream their proposal to the Internet. This sounds like a bad idea. Asking someone to marry you in public as a surprise bad. Surprising your girlfriend with an escort to try and get her to have a threesome bad.
improving your wireless signal with some reflectors and aluminium foil, the ways in which caching and mobile-serving platforms make the credible and the incrediblie look similar, the difficulties of replicating a recipe that is done in narrative rather than recipe, customizing a keyboard with LEGO-variety materials, a question on whether or not a white cane is the right cane for a person with a visual disability or whether colors are good as well, typefaces for just about every situation, the elements of Terra that are endangered, cleaning smells out from your sinks and garbage disposals, the history of flammable and deadly garments for women, remembering to keep disabled people in mind when designing products like menstrual cups, a hair clip that also functions as a multi-tool, how a bureau that is legally forbidden from having a computer database can still manage to trace weapons used in crimes back to the people that purchased them, the fabric that nobody wants to wear any more, yet that North Korea still produces in large amounts, and the difficulty of making deep connections when there is far too much breadth to keep up with.
Disney characters, mostly Princesses, and their Pokemon.
The prospect of the world where people do less work for less pay, enjoy themselves more, and, oh yes, still manage to make ends meet with things like the Universal Basic Income.
Last for tonight, a game about incubi, succubi, and most importantly, consent. The game itself is a visual novel with sexual content, so be aware of what you're getting into when you download it. Also, peruse this list of suggestions about good sex for trans people, a lot of which is just "good sex for people" on things that apply universally, like consent and communication.
And The Tea Dragon Society, which is a fantastic story with great representation and a lovely story. I love it so much that I want to have a copy on my bookshelf and one for just about anyone who has a smalling that has questions about themselves and their futures.
