First one in for this year - December 02018-January 02019

Hello! Let's start this new year's bash with Captain Awkward talking about several things that can happen to people with ADHD. Some of which may sound disturbingly familiar to myself or other readers of this...something.

The honours list for the UK for 2019 includes some very famous names getting their knightings, service medals, or in Margaret Atwood, CE's case, joining one of the very highest honours offered by the Crown.

If you are so inclined, Year Eight of a fest involving psychic wolves and any other things that you feel like you can add is ready to happen.

Whether you can function in society is not a symptom of mental illness. There are plenty of people who have them that can perform society. And that can make finding a competent professional to listen to you all that much harder if you're not obviously in distress. Or, worse, will say there's nothing they can do to make accommodations for a child because the child hasn't suffered enough trauma to get diagnosed. That's...a clear point of the system that needs addressing.

Children must be thought of as people with wants, desires, and, crucially, the ability to give consent about the things their parents, caregivers, and other adults post about them on the Internet. Not just for all the security-employment-nefarious uses of Big Data mentioned (and categorized as secondary concern) by the article-writer, but for their primary reason as well -- what kinds of things are you teaching a child about consent and self-determination when you, as their parent and primary role model, don't ask their consent to talk about them and furthermore don't agree that their objection to your posting about them or characterization of them needs to have any weight in your decision? Does a child that's been posted about by their parents over their objections magically grow boundaries when it's a peer posting about them on-line? If a kid's been taught by their parents that people in higher authority positions than them are to be obeyed, or that they won't listen when you raise objections, do you understand how badly you're sabotaging relationships that child is going to need a trusted adult for, even if it never rises to the level of sexting or abuse?

I'm also including siderea's comment on rmc28's journal (where I was linked to this piece) taking great issue with the way the drakkinabraian article is framed, in relation to cultural assumptions being made about who has the right to privacy, what kind of behavior gets covered up, whose work is valued and authoritative, and whether anything actually said in the article itself is the intense violation portrayed. I think the main point still stands - children who are able to understand consent can exercise it, and it is incumbent upon a parent to respect that exercise (and to ask consent) wherever it can be done safely.

A man threatened his neighbors with a toy gun and attempted a kidnapping because he wanted those neighbors to be less friendly with everyone in their housing unit. Regrettably, there's not much more to the article than that, as I'm sure it's quite fascinating for someone to discover the reasons why someone might want scared and non-communicating neighbors.

From 1999, Sly Stallone on wanting not to be just Rambo, Rocky, and all of the other meatheads in his life. I'm not sure he ever got what he wanted out of it, but this except from the book is a really good encapsulation of toxic masculinity at its finest. I'll slip this next to the idea that the best things in life happen when we're not working, and if we could reform our systematic inequalities, all of us might end up with more time for leisure and for pursuing the things that we really want to engage with. Including those hobbies (or professions) that have a significant time requirement attached to them. Rather than sliding into burnout, slack, or daydreams that get crushed by the insistence that we all be cogs, nothing less, nothing more.

Working as a cable technician often means seeing the very worst parts of humans, regularly, because the richest people who call teh techs are the people most likely to treat them like hired help, rather than the people who are turning on their Fox News so they can get back to whichever Two Minutes Hate is currently required of them.

Becoming who you are is not a process that happens instantaneously, as fans of Murderbot know, but that sort of thing is also helpful to humans undergoing transitions of their own.

Clipping had an album nominated for a Hugo in 2017, which I did not know, or didn't pay near enough attention to before Daveed Diggs hit it big and everyone started paying attention. The idea of a concept album getting on the Hugo list is important, and also opens the door for more of that to continue happening, which I'm pretty sure the Janelle Monáe fans will be hoping to have happen. Or the Years and Years fans might be interested in. Continuing in the theme of things I did not know, Peter Capaldi is a caricature artist, and you can watch him do Doctors 1-4 in about 12 minutes of runtime. A guide to all the various lines being curently written by Seanan McGuire.

Into the Spiderverse's screenplay is available for download and perusal, as a PDF. Also, Scalzi talks about the films as being exactly correct - set in the right medium, with the right amount of understanding between viewer and creator, and centering the experiences of someone who's not the white default.

Actually, the screenplays that are nominated for awards at certain shows are available for download, too.

A very rich person bought a monastery, then added significant space to it underground and into a mountain so as to create an art museum and associated studios. The stories that accompany objects taken by refugees as they fled. Gargoyles with more modern looks mized in with their more traditional counterparts.

A severe spider fear triggers a police response, because the person was shouting at the spider phrases like "why won't you die", and that understandably got a concern from the other people around, a pregnant elephant seal attempting to cross a road, a varsity squadron of dogs all trying out for a long sled dog race, dinosaur fossils that became opals instead of sandstones, pictures of cats taken while they are resting on glass shelves or tabletops, a chandelier filled with algae to help purify the air while casting a nice glow, and a flavoring ingredient derived from sacs on beavers.

In technology, the difficulties of naming objects when the names have been used / occasionally are still used by fringe groups and propagandist ideologies. And also the services that seem to be tilting toward allowing those same fringers to speak while silencing people using terms that paint those fringers as not the default.

2018 was a year of Mark Zuckerberg, to all of our detriment. Including to those of us outside his empire, because there are still enough people who are inside it, or who had access to data from people inside it, that we're all touched in some way by Facebook's data and algorithms. To our aggravated detriment.

A Chinese probe touched down on the far side of the moon to do some exploring, the first known successful mission on that side of the moon.

A video of sending electronic messages, mostly using a BBS, it seems, from 1984. Also contains, at the end of the video, over the credits, what is apparently a software transmission over audio. I'm sure someone has built/programmed an appropriate emulator that can listen to the data as it is transmitted (assuming that the original copy has all the appropriate tones) and see what sort of software was being transmitted down the line. I'm very curious about that.

muccamukk is having a salon about how Dreamwidth now and Livejournal then are different, with regard to fandom expressions, hangouts, and the general fragmentation of fandom across platforms that has progressed in that time.

Music that is said to be relaxing, including one that was designed to be so that may appear to do the job. If you like synth-based things, that is.

Folk cures for being hung over.

Last for tonight, A dictionary of words used as IKEA product names

Media conglomerates are raising their prices again, claiming it's due to network fees, although there's a good chance it's also because more and more people are deciding to go with a strong internet package and streaming services, which can often be significantly cheaper than even the smallest of bundled packages and usually comes with more of the channels that people want to have.

Also, Making sure that when people give you unsolicited advice, they feel like they're helping! So much! That they stop giving unsolicited advice!

And also a virtual fire to chat around during the holidays.

Fandom Snowflake 2019 #9: Do A Good Turn Daily

Commit an Act of Kindness.

And, if you're so inclined, there's also More Joy Day on the 17th, a couple days after Snowflake ends.

I find many of the acts of kindness we do to others are the things we don't think about, but mean significant things to others. We laud conscious acts of kindness, like making decisions to donate monies to charity, or paying for someone else's coffee, or leaving a note for someone about how awesome they are (because they are, and you are), but I often think that there are small kindnesses that we do to others without thinking about them.

Or perhaps, not kindnesses, because that implies the sort of thing where someone doesn't have to do something, and they do it anyway, but acts of respect. The sorts of things where when someone says "My name is Alexandra Wilhemina Desdemona Katherine Margaret Derkins, and my pronouns are xie/xem/xers", you call xie by xer proper pronouns immediately and consistently. (Or at least make the consistent effort to -- sometimes we mess it up and we have to correct ourselves and move on.)

Even if what happens when you hear someone using your correct pronouns and correcting others on that is a certain amount of "aw, how nice", because you're happy that someone is making sure they're doing it right and others are, too. But if you asked me why I use the right pronouns for people, I won't say "because it's kind to do so," but something more like "because those are the right pronouns to use, and people deserve to have their pronouns used." It's only seen as an act of kindness because we have too many examples of people doing just the opposite of that, refusing to believe in the agency and humanity of others and insisting that their view of the world is somehow objectively superior to someone else's self-determination.

Which is to say that I've already committed one act of kindness today just in helping make sure my household is able to get where they need to go so they can be self-determining people. And I probably will commit more of them today without thinking about it, because that's the kind of person that I strive to be in my life and at my workplace. Signal-boosting something I think is important, or well-put, or saying there's a gift work or two that I'm working on are also acts of kindness - I'm writing a thing for someone else, and I hope they enjoy it.

Perhaps the thing I find most difficult about doing a conscious act of kindness is trying to avoid being one of those people who have already received their reward about it. A bit that might be familiar (to Christians) is the beginning of Chapter 6 of the account of Matthew.

Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

There's a certain amount of secrecy that's supposed to be involved in giving and praying for Christians, and some of that is borne out of the ideas and newness of the religious movement needing a certain amount of secrecy, but also there's truth in that people get annoyed or discount when people do good things flashily or splashily, thinking it more for the public relations than for the actual good being done.

So, all of these many words later, and the truth is this: I have done something kind today, and yesterday, and will do so tomorrow, because that is part of who I am. (Also a reason that I identify as a Hufflepuff, but anyway...) Most of these acts of kindness will be un-commented on, un-remarked upon, because they will be unremarkable. Many of those things may change a person's life or direction in subtle or profound ways, but it will take a significant amount of time before those acts come to fruition, and by then, the people who received those acts of kindness may no longer know who it was that provided it to them.

I suspect this is the same for you, as well. And, disheartening as it is to consider, most of us are unlikely to have a situation in our lives where all of our students come back to play a piece commissioned in our honor on the day of our retirement. But the good that you have done is still there in the world, and while it may be small comfort to everyone who comes to this realization, it is the comfort I have for you.

If you are well, then I am well.