Let's begin with an interesting chain of posts. First, Jude Doyle on the ways that well-meaning feminism can result in transphobia, if that feminism wants to compress gender into "those doing the oppressing" and "those being oppressed" and does not recognize that trans men are still men, and still being oppressed. Trans men do not fit well into that conception, or any other conception that believes transitioning into manhood accords you with all the privileges you would have had if you had been assigned, raised, and socialized as a cisgender man. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sqbr tries to un-flatten some of Jude's reductions, especially in relationship to non-binary people, and provides examples that will reinforce the point of "reduction of people to The Oppressed and The Oppressor is a foolish idea." as well as pointing out some of the ways that zero-sum thinking also infects people who want to reduce the fight to Oppressed and Oppressor. liv then looks at the ways that good intentions can still create bad results, and that there's still a tendency to see trans men as privileged men first and trans men second, while also looping in kiya talking about the specific cultural context of being of high school age in the United States in the 1990s, and the way that HIV/AIDS and the still very enforced closet on people created a disconnection of scared children who didn't have all that many ways to find their community. (That era specifically had a commercial where a couple had unprotected sex, and then there was fretting about all the possible consequences of that, like pregnancy, and AIDS, before the characters explicitly realized they were characters in a commercial, and therefore they didn't have to worry about it, unlike you, the viewer.) HIV/AIDS had advanced past being Gay-Related Immune Disorder, but it was still largely considered a disease of gay men, and that if women contracted it, it was because her man was clearly having sex with other men, regardless of whether he told her about them or not. And so, in the way of so many things, the focus was about what men were doing with each other, and what men were doing with women, and the misguided beliefs about how one contracted HIV/AIDS and the promiscuity and sexual voraciousness of gay men trying to seduce the straights (and or the children.) There's a great amount of rhyme in the ways that cis people relate to trans people and the ways that straight people related to gay people during the period before most people found out they already knew someone who was gay and that we all knew a lot more about how HIV/AIDS was transmitted. (And then came the antiretrovirals that helped take HIV/AIDS away from a painful death sentence and instead into a condition that needed specific kinds of management.)
If you have the capacity to distribute them, there are some shortly-expiring COVID tests that you can order from the National Stockpile until they run out or are destroyed by a capricious administration.
Five years into the declaration of SARS-CoV-2 as a public health emergency, and some time after governments have decided to ignore it as a serious threat, it's still out there, killing people, disabling them, and otherwise still retaining its status as a public health emergency.
Clarivate, owners of the ProQuest series of books and databases, the Web of Science, and several other corpuses of databases, books, and periodicals, has decided to go all in for artificial silliness and rent-seeking behavior, and will be removing any options to purchase their resources for a one-time fee in favor of a perpetual subscription model. I'd like to believe that many libraries will decide they can do without those things as a way of trying to force Clarivate back into behaving sensibly, but given that they're part of an oligopoly in research databases and resource access, I doubt anything will happen except Clarivate getting richer off all the new rents that they're getting.
Michelle Tractenberg, known for several different roles, including a stint in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has died at 39 years of age. That hurts when there are younger actors who die. And then Gene Hackman and his wife were both found dead, him 95 years of age.
( What else is in here? An awful lot of U.S. politics, and technology things )
Last for tonight, a method to abuse Unicode in such a way that any given code point could be accompanied by variation selectors being used to generate bytes of data that will not be rendered, but can be decoded if you know to look for the additional information accompanying the Unicode code point and can translate that into the appropriate bytes/characters. The additional data generally accompanies the code point it is attached to, so theoretically, yes, this is steganography in Unicode, in that most standards-compliant Unicode renderers will not render the additional data along with the selected code point.
And the inspection paradox, where looking at things from specific perspectives biases the data away from a more "objective" value, because the experience of a person in the situation tends to shape how they observe it.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
sqbr tries to un-flatten some of Jude's reductions, especially in relationship to non-binary people, and provides examples that will reinforce the point of "reduction of people to The Oppressed and The Oppressor is a foolish idea." as well as pointing out some of the ways that zero-sum thinking also infects people who want to reduce the fight to Oppressed and Oppressor. liv then looks at the ways that good intentions can still create bad results, and that there's still a tendency to see trans men as privileged men first and trans men second, while also looping in kiya talking about the specific cultural context of being of high school age in the United States in the 1990s, and the way that HIV/AIDS and the still very enforced closet on people created a disconnection of scared children who didn't have all that many ways to find their community. (That era specifically had a commercial where a couple had unprotected sex, and then there was fretting about all the possible consequences of that, like pregnancy, and AIDS, before the characters explicitly realized they were characters in a commercial, and therefore they didn't have to worry about it, unlike you, the viewer.) HIV/AIDS had advanced past being Gay-Related Immune Disorder, but it was still largely considered a disease of gay men, and that if women contracted it, it was because her man was clearly having sex with other men, regardless of whether he told her about them or not. And so, in the way of so many things, the focus was about what men were doing with each other, and what men were doing with women, and the misguided beliefs about how one contracted HIV/AIDS and the promiscuity and sexual voraciousness of gay men trying to seduce the straights (and or the children.) There's a great amount of rhyme in the ways that cis people relate to trans people and the ways that straight people related to gay people during the period before most people found out they already knew someone who was gay and that we all knew a lot more about how HIV/AIDS was transmitted. (And then came the antiretrovirals that helped take HIV/AIDS away from a painful death sentence and instead into a condition that needed specific kinds of management.)If you have the capacity to distribute them, there are some shortly-expiring COVID tests that you can order from the National Stockpile until they run out or are destroyed by a capricious administration.
Five years into the declaration of SARS-CoV-2 as a public health emergency, and some time after governments have decided to ignore it as a serious threat, it's still out there, killing people, disabling them, and otherwise still retaining its status as a public health emergency.
Clarivate, owners of the ProQuest series of books and databases, the Web of Science, and several other corpuses of databases, books, and periodicals, has decided to go all in for artificial silliness and rent-seeking behavior, and will be removing any options to purchase their resources for a one-time fee in favor of a perpetual subscription model. I'd like to believe that many libraries will decide they can do without those things as a way of trying to force Clarivate back into behaving sensibly, but given that they're part of an oligopoly in research databases and resource access, I doubt anything will happen except Clarivate getting richer off all the new rents that they're getting.
Michelle Tractenberg, known for several different roles, including a stint in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has died at 39 years of age. That hurts when there are younger actors who die. And then Gene Hackman and his wife were both found dead, him 95 years of age.
( What else is in here? An awful lot of U.S. politics, and technology things )
Last for tonight, a method to abuse Unicode in such a way that any given code point could be accompanied by variation selectors being used to generate bytes of data that will not be rendered, but can be decoded if you know to look for the additional information accompanying the Unicode code point and can translate that into the appropriate bytes/characters. The additional data generally accompanies the code point it is attached to, so theoretically, yes, this is steganography in Unicode, in that most standards-compliant Unicode renderers will not render the additional data along with the selected code point.
And the inspection paradox, where looking at things from specific perspectives biases the data away from a more "objective" value, because the experience of a person in the situation tends to shape how they observe it.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
