Mar. 14th, 2018

silveradept: A kodama with a trombone. The trombone is playing music, even though it is held in a rest position (Default)
Let's greet the day with a bank of lava lamps that feed an algorithm that generates security out of randomness.

Fictive kin, or how someone could be part of a household without having married or been born into it all the same.

A PDF guide from the Interfaith Council on Peace and Justice on how to be a bystander that can intervene in a situation that hopefully doesn't escalate the situation.

Observe a cogent explanation of the concept of the microaggression, with additional material on how you can actively be trying not to be an -ist and still commit those kinds of fouls, because many of them aren't based in conscious motivation.

What might be this generation's Train Man - a teenager wants to ask out a girl, but he's afraid bad things will happen to him socially if he does. The Internet is hoping for updates, shoould they arrive at any point.

A photographic project intends to show that people who participate in BDSM activities are not strange nor exotic, but are instead, people who look and live mostly as you do. The Crave Portrait Project puts two photographs next to each other - the same person or couple, first as they presented themselves at the Folsom Street Fair, and then them as they present themselves in their daily lives. I'm glad there were people who felt able to do this - more than a few people might enjoy participating, but can't because their employers would find a legal reason to dismiss them if they knew. Or because their community would socially shun them if they knew. So real people are forced into hiding while sensationalized portrayals are given nationwide releases in theaters.

The idea of a touch crisis is greatly exaggerated. What the author (and people who believe in this) are likely reacting to is the increased awareness and space being given to people to say "no, don't touch me" even to people where society assumed they had the right to touch regardless of the recipient's preferences. And the increased scrutiny being applied to people in positions of social or institutional power and how they interact with people who have less power than them. Consent is a magic thing, people, and it applies to touches as well as more intimate activities. I doubt there is less touch from people who ask and have consent to do so, but there's probably less touch from people whose consent status is ambiguous. (I am also reminded of a line in My Teacher Glows In The Dark where an alien asks a human child if he is touchable. It stuck in my head because of course, other societies would evolve with different rules regarding touch.)

Weird Al has jamemd together a significant part of Hamilton into a five minute polka medley. Go give a listen, even if you're not a fan of Weird Al, generally. Weird Al and Lin-Manuel Miranda geeked out with Jimmy Fallon about the Hamilton Polka. Which, I might note, is a work of technical brilliance in the same way that Hamilton itself is. Weird Al and Lin-Manuel Miranda both talk about their lifelong friendship and the challenges that come with wanting to make something really good for your friends.

The Polka is part of Hamildrops, a project of remixes of Hamilton songs by various other artists, which is distinct and different from the Hamilton Mixtape.

A course is now available on learning about black horror and the things that feed into a movie such as Get Out.

An offering to St. Valentine, which has polyamory, people able to have their pronouns respected, and pagan ritual, all of which could have more good representation in media.

Webseries with a lot more representaiton than what you'll find on television these days of LGBTQ women or femmes of color.

The virtues of having books, and having books read to you, when you are a child and this reading thing is new and strange. Barnes and Noble just laid off a lot of its key bookstores staff, which may be the signal of the beginning of the end for the company.

A filmmaker has accused the #metoo movement of engendring hatred against men and sparking a witch hunt. There's already a mismatch of possible terms here, but there were accusations of men in the trials, so. He has Arthur Miller to thank, at least in part, for the ability to transform a narrative about women victims to one where men are the victims and women the temptresses and villains. But since the powerful people are the ones claiming they're the victims of what's going on, whatever it is they think is going on, it's not a witch-hunt.

Ted Danson is excellently cast as Michael in The Good Place, and that article has spoilers for s2e10, at least. More talk about how exquisitely cast The Good Place is adds spoilers all the way up to the second season finale. The Ted Danson stories of his antics on and off the set are relatively spoiler-free, though. And then there's The forking season finale for season 2.

How, exactly, does one deal with a book that is quite straightforward about the fact that it contains enough arsenic in the pages to kill someone who touches it?

The state of California has launched an investigation into Aetna, after a medical director admitted that the company didn't provide him with enough actual data to make a good recommendation on whether a patient should be given care.

Women have been socialized to expect pain during sex, and do sex anyway, to the point where things that should be taken seriously as medical issues aren't even reported, because men have been socialized that their pleasure is the most important thing about sex. Even to the point where they hesitate on telling their sexual partners about the other parts of their sexual life, because it presumably might mean they have to stop.

Women deserve the ability to manage their own reproduction, and that includes the abillity to terminate pregnancies. And therefore, women deserve safe and secure information and answers about the use of pregnancy-ending drugs.

Forward movement, possibly, on finding the criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome and possibly working toward ways that can help those who suffer get back lost function.

Ritualistically setting ground rules can impair a good facilitation, instead of bringing out the best in a group. As can adhering to the white supremacist idea of what an organization and its power should be.

The state of Alaska has decided to stop using the bail system, considering it to disproportionately affect the poor with regard to incarceration.

Jason Isaacs playing on his experiences in the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, which contain utter spoilers for the season, including in the slug of the URL. Michelle Yeoh on the prominent role of women in Discovery and the reasons why she almost turned down the role of Captain Georgiou, also spoilery for the first season.

Information from the Black Panther sets and movie - before the movie came out, so not much information. Building Wakanda for the movie, and there was a stub of an article also on io9 pointing out that the Infinity War people were making sure both movies had a unified idea of Wakanda, since they both have at least some part set there.

Michael B. Jordan had a big fan. A fan big enough to crush her own retainer.

The unveiling of portraits of President and First Lady Obama, and a little bit about how they came to be.

Drawing attention to the things that have been left unfinished by recommissioning them as artistic works.

The terrible story of a journalist trying to get a story on a submarine creator who killed her and did further grisly things to her corpse.

The story of a high-level KGB agent who defected to the United States...and then decided he wanted to go back to living in Russia.

The lesson in this article is one that also appears in The Boy Who Cried Wolf. When a prominent conservative publication tells other conservatives to knock it off with constant conspiracy theories and lies, it's a sign that things have gone too far away from the universe of facts.

Seeking relief from life in drugs is not new, and the ways in which opiates have always been things white people could get easily and use socially makes the current drug crisis much more resilient against the War on (Some) Drugs. I think the writer's premise that people are becoming more isolated from each other and lack human contact is simplistic to blame media, as is the idea that the United States sets people up for addictive behavior in one way or another, but the idea that people need social lives and economic circumstances that aren't abject and terrible is spot-on. Imagine what someone could do for the public good if they decided to reinvest their profits in communities and the social safety net, instead of returning the money to shareholders and investors that will use the money to enrich themselves.

This article appears to be a walking conflict of interest, even if the authors believe they have none. Because it names a product and says that it can do things. The product itself probably doesn't do much. I would expect an analysis of the ingredients and trying to figure out which of those does the trick, without reference to brand name. That there is a named thing in there, published on an NIH web site makes me wonder why it was accepted as a proper scientific paper in the first place.

Pictures of endangered species, a "cheese"-rolling competition that's taking a year off, apple-wassailing, eating stew made with very old bison, what exactly goes into the production of the Puppy Bowl, cats on a Siberian farm, tiny kittens being brushed, more cats interacting with each other and the world, and birds that are not baby corvids.

In technology, apps for a particular form of femininity, one very specific set out of all the possible ways one can do femme. Some of those apps might be useful in other situations, but as a group they're pushing a pretty specific way of doing things. The founder of Thinx does not get a sunshine and rainbows review from those who have worked for the company, even though they do like the product and want it, and its missions around the world, to succeed.

A popular registration system for fur conventions will give up real names and associate them with fursonas if you know one of the two. This can be obscured somewhat and opted-out of, but it's still startlingly easy to make the associations.

Google's insistence on relevance means that you probably can't rely on it to have indexed old things that weren't linked to heavily. And the way Google wants to enclose you in their own walled garden is extending to things like e-mail.

European data protection and privacy regulations are forcing Facebook to be more transparent about privacy and to create videos to teach users how to control their sharing. Thank you, GDPR, for helping us gain back some control. Also, ditch Facebook as a source of news or other information, given how easy it is for things that aren't news and aren't relevant to be pushed to your feed and in your face.

Burger King posts a video about net neutrality and why it's a bad idea to treat Internet traffic differently according to the whims of corporations.

The Toast is getting archived!

Scientists reviewing objects we believe have regular uses and telling us about all the ways that they exercise their creativity.

A company that believes it may be able to retrofit diesel engines to run on hydrogen, then commercial cars, and then add hydrogen capacity to housess and buildings, such that, if it works, could go a very long way toward reducing the use of carbon as a primary energy source and make a greater amount of energy generation and use significantly less polluting. (Which could, in turn, help us find other ways to clean surfaces and use technology without emitting volatile organic chemicals.

Unsurprisingly, if you give a fan even a small amount of data, they will find a way to try and recreate a character's genitals. Which is a testament to creativity, most certainly. The Victorians were not, however, having doctors use vibrators on their patients, which is a great story, but regrettably lacks truth value.

Plug-in wireless extenders, meant essentially to help your network expand and connect on optimum paths. Which is a little more expensive and expansive than the use of aluminium foil to get better wireless signal.

Adventures in text substitution that cause corrections, and the comments that have suggestions for text substitutions to use. (Regex manipulation, ahoy.)

In a less silly way, people attempting to build keyloggers out of pure CSS, exploitations of Unicode to assist in phishing and other scams, and a proof of concept about the use of CSS to exfiltrate data.

Building a home network surveillance system using old smartphones and devices - if it has a camera, and is compatible with an application that will turn it into an IP-camera, there's a good chance you can use another application to build a monitoring system for your inside and outside, while ensuring that your old technology has new life as surveillance devices.

An approved blood test to try and detect the presence of a concussion.

Last for tonight, see the world the way that children do in Miyazaki films. And then enjoy a story of a temple cat that clung to their duty, long after the life that was in the temple had passed.

Exhaustion is different from tiredness - exhaustion is the brain and/or the body needing a break away from stressors. If you're tired, you can sleep to restore it. If you're exhausted, sometimes you sleep a lot more to no gain.

And remember, For as long as there has been the Internet, there have been people telling women how much they hate them for being good at anything.

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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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