![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptOne time-sensitive matter - If you fit the idea of queer, and especially queer pain of color, consider applying to be a freelance writer for Autostraddle. Deadline for applications is 31 October.
Let's start with An explanation of the construction of (relation)ship name smashes for fandom, which is fascinating to see why certain names are preferred.
kaberett has a comprehensive guide for anyone who is looking to purchase their first wheelchair - the prices and available insurances are UK-based, but the information is awesome.
In their continued quest to destroy what they consider unholy, ISIL destroyed another heritage site and priceless remnant of the past.
Persons who think of themselves as involuntarily celibate or that they deserve women because they are Nice Guys and then go destroy lives are, in essence, recreating Richard III, with the same disastrous consequences.
The reasons why fried chicken and watermelon are racist stereotypes when used in association with black people.
The creator of Bitch Planet in how to make people who are at rest in their stereotypes uncomfortable, possibly with the side effect of connecting to people and moving people out of their stereotypes.
Ally work is unglamorous, and often means having to take a back seat to others who have the lived experience you don't. (Being asked not to be in a particular space is not a personal insult.) And supporting them as they work through studying the painful history that affects them today. Which does things like change speaking patterns because they're always on the defensive.
Balancing this is the question of whether waiting for someone with the experience to write about it is also a bad idea. Because people need allies to be able to reach groups that would otherwise ignore minority writing. Because we need reports on the abuses the government commits against minorities and the generational legacy that leaves.
It's not just Catholics who have to deal with abusers in positions of power and a structure that encourages covering it up. You could probably argue that the farther away from mainstream acceptance your group and culture is, the more that pressure comes to bear, because people excluded from the group often end up being shorthand for what members of the group are, even though they were excluded. Because lurid stories about subcultures are grist for the "mainstream".
One way of not making a book that has people with disabilities into a Very Special Story is to make it about everyone having to adjust to a new reality.
There will be screw-ups. Well-intentioned ones. But flouncing on allyship because of a mistake only increases the error. (Says someone who is terrified of being wrong and called out on it.)
Stars and their turntables.
Volkswagen was able to lie about their emissions results by taking cover under things like the DMCA that prevented the inspection of the code. Blindly trusting the technology can also lead to things like clear overdoses not being caught as they work their way through the system.
An unofficial source for development tools for the iPhone in China turned out to be inserting malware into any app that used the unofficial copy of the tools. The malware was sufficiently well-hidden that the apps made it into the App Store. This came about because the official servers were too slow to serve up the requested tools.
Security researcher and blogger Brian Krebs details a saga of a doxxer that tried to get him arrested by sending him pure heroin in the mail.
Data sharing initiatives for health data in the United Kingdom often put conflicting responsibilities about disclosure and confidentiality on doctors, along with the dubious results.
A UN Women report on the prevalence of cyber violence against women.
xkcd is most definitely the cartoon of the 21st century, blending technology with simple stick figure drawings that look primitive.
If you're not feeling the new 2015 Muppets series, perhaps a better interpretation comes from putting them into a dystopia. For me, it's not that the Muppets have always made jokes meant for older audiences, or even that the Muppets are dealing with uniquely adult situations, is the way that some of the Muppets, including Kermit, are being used for things that seem orthogonal to their personalities.
If you live in a capitalist society, money is necessary. Which means having to get over the idea that charging money for your talents is dirty or spiritually impure.
If you're the kind of man that complains about having a workplace where HR might get involved if a man "helps" a woman, you are probably the kind of man that woman needs to go to HR over. Also, if men are so paralyzed by the possibility of harassment that they're not helping women advance their careers, there's an easy fix to it - have multiple women all along the chain of power so that way they can help women in safe ways. Then get over your stereotyped fears and realize that all you need to do is maintain a properly professional environment.
Just understand that doing so would mean being better than the Harper government was on the issues.
Call it chivalry, if you like, but only if your chivalry is the kind that basically follows Wheaton's Law.
The difficulties of being bi - invisibling from the gay community, lack of acceptance from family and friends, and straight-up homophobia from a lot of straight bigots.
And finally, dysphoria as metaphor - the difference between the cake being a lie or delicious, delicious cake.
Amanda Marcotte talks about the appeal of the noncon fantasy, in the context of misogyny and sex robots. Which might be a better solution than Nice Guys(TM) and their insistence that they are Inherently Superior, but as is mentioned, the problem usually isn't that women won't date them, it's that you won't date them.
Recognizing that "can't" really means what it says is the difference between a good experience and a miserable one.
There have been more awards given to cis men writing about cis men in SFF awards than to women writing about any kind of protagonist. This and other useful conclusions, with graphs and data, at the link.
Have I Been Pwned is a way of checking to see if your email address has been compromised in any serious data breach, so that you can decide whether to discard it.
Speaking of compromises, Experian had data stolen from them of customers that had their credit checked for T-mobile accounts, a mere 15 million people with their data compromised. Trump Hotels had a credit card data breach,
And then there was the Office of Personnel Management hack, where significant data was stolen, so much that intelligence assets and spies in China are being recalled on the likelihood that they have had their cover blown.
A group threatened, and then had someone toss a Molotov at the office of, an anti-virus firm that had exposed their ATM virus code. I don't such simple intimidation is gong to dissuade them, but it is unique in that some entity was persuaded to follow up on that threat.
It takes an incredible amount of wealth and money to be able to live and outsource the entirety of your home life to others, and so, for as much as someone thinks a billionaire living out of hotels with few possessions is worth emulating, we note that they are still a billionaire and likely making decisions that affect the normal lives of many more people more severely than their attempted ascetic lifestyle.
The correct answer when someone asks what science thinks about weight and obesity is "Fuck if they know."
Domestic abuse comes in many, many forms, including financial entanglements, gaslighting and mental abuse and isolation, and things that start small and roll up very quickly afterward. And then there are the roommates from hell, who will be creepy, steal food, and generally do things that are unsanitary and make you not want to be around them.
Relationships can have conflicting emotional needs, but burying that truth often leads to relationships being horrible and trapping.
John Boehner resigns as Speaker of the House, having been hounded out, finally, by the wing of Congress that wants to prevent the government from working. The solution that would work is get the moderates interested in governance to join with the Democrats against the fringe right.
Elsewhere, Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler served the Donald Trump campaign with a cease-and-desist regarding the use of "Dream On" as a campaign song. Presumably, this means nothing if the Trump campaign paid their licensing fees, but I'm beginning to wonder if artists will want to retain those kinds of rights in the future when they sign on with recording labels.
Non-monogamy offers a very large range of possibilities, but many stories still tend to focus on things that reflect cisnormative relationships.
Black Lives Matter is not too violent to be included in the legacy of the civil rights movement - it is exactly the right type of violent, and the violence done against it is also in accord.
No single microagression may be too much, but added up, they're all quite effective at hurting. In the same vein, racism comes in many more subtle forms than overt ones.
There's still a lot of child labor going on in the world that needs exposure and rectification. And plenty of places that are being excluded from useful services because the city doesn't want to annex a poor neighborhood full of people of color and other things that aren't overt racism.
And then there's the overt racism, as expressed to interracial couples.
Lots of commentators on globalization are very insistent that you not pay attention to the actual people that aren't being helped by globalization, and that if there's someone doing worse than you, you have no right to speak.
An argument towards trying to build a big tent and include people in social justice movements, including adding more generations and finding ways to acknowledge that people screw up and to try and have fun making big social change.
It should not take desperation for a toymaker to put women in charge of designing action figures for girls, but Mattel has decided to put women in charge of designing action figures for girls because they are losing ground to others. Unsurprisingly, the new designers are moving toward trends that provide more realistic proportions and costumes to the characters.
The more we try to force the mind to be still and silent, the more it fights back - and our own minds fight dirty. This is part of the reason we're willing to attribute the results of hard work and learning to innate talent. It's also part of why it takes effort just to believe that the thing we want most of all for ourselves is possible. So there's some things we can do to try and find and maintain a good attitude, but sometimes that requires some extra effort or luck to keep it going. That also includes deciding not to call your reading habits something you should feel guilt over.
A new comic, Secret Coders, sneaks in computer science fundamentals in the context of a great mystery. Which I'm putting with a system of labeling pigments based on the proportions of primary colors used to create them, thus pointing out the secret that mixing various amounts of pigment can produce basically any desired shade, instead of having "colors" with names.
Strange lights and atmospheric effects in the sky, some kind of well known, some not very well known at all.
Forest pictures that look like meditative aids or otherworldly locations.
NASA confirms - liquid water exists on Mars. The terraformers are interested again in Mars. Those looking for more New Horizons data have pictures of Charon indicating big canyons and a possible internal heat source for the body, too. And if you want to understand a small amount of the truly impressive size of the universe, watch someone build a model that truly emphasises the vastness of space.
Those looking to piece together how our current species came into being have a new item to examine - a new entry into genus Homo, discovered in South Africa in a very tiny cave element.
Betty Boop is based on an actual person, a black performer, and the animators didn't do much exaggeration of her features or dimensions.
The simple and addictive games included with Microsoft operating systems have hidden agendas, to reach good mouse usage, to check and make sure technology works properly, and to promote new features. That they are simple and addictive is important - but they also aren't included in the operating systems any more. I suspect they would need one to teach various touch gestures these days. Instead of spying on us all the time.
The Nazis engineered many destructive devices, often disguised as ordinary objects - drawings of them, commissioned at wartime, have just resurfaced.
A service that allows you to rent an umbrella for free for two days, then changes you a nominal fee for each day afterward. Perfect for unexpected rain or that occasion when your personal umbrella breaks.
Last for tonight, Biofluourescent turtle, using bees as a method to deter elephants, the anxiety alligator (if only it were that easy to rid one's anxieties), whales under the aurora, the biodiversity of the eastern Himalayas, a racoon raised as a dog, with dogs, small dogs in knit sweaters, well-timed pictures involving cats, proud dog parents and their litters, a kitten with ferrets as family, swimming wolves with diets from the sea, illustrated sea dragons, painting pictures of women and their cats,
and life that thrives in environments very toxic to other forms of life.
There are more than enough animals in shelters that will give you a full life's worth of love, and many of them are older, or disabled, or black-colored, and thus need you more.
Okay, and a shower head with LEDs attached so that one's water becomes rainbow colored.
Let's start with An explanation of the construction of (relation)ship name smashes for fandom, which is fascinating to see why certain names are preferred.
kaberett has a comprehensive guide for anyone who is looking to purchase their first wheelchair - the prices and available insurances are UK-based, but the information is awesome.In their continued quest to destroy what they consider unholy, ISIL destroyed another heritage site and priceless remnant of the past.
Persons who think of themselves as involuntarily celibate or that they deserve women because they are Nice Guys and then go destroy lives are, in essence, recreating Richard III, with the same disastrous consequences.
The reasons why fried chicken and watermelon are racist stereotypes when used in association with black people.
The creator of Bitch Planet in how to make people who are at rest in their stereotypes uncomfortable, possibly with the side effect of connecting to people and moving people out of their stereotypes.
Ally work is unglamorous, and often means having to take a back seat to others who have the lived experience you don't. (Being asked not to be in a particular space is not a personal insult.) And supporting them as they work through studying the painful history that affects them today. Which does things like change speaking patterns because they're always on the defensive.
Balancing this is the question of whether waiting for someone with the experience to write about it is also a bad idea. Because people need allies to be able to reach groups that would otherwise ignore minority writing. Because we need reports on the abuses the government commits against minorities and the generational legacy that leaves.
It's not just Catholics who have to deal with abusers in positions of power and a structure that encourages covering it up. You could probably argue that the farther away from mainstream acceptance your group and culture is, the more that pressure comes to bear, because people excluded from the group often end up being shorthand for what members of the group are, even though they were excluded. Because lurid stories about subcultures are grist for the "mainstream".
One way of not making a book that has people with disabilities into a Very Special Story is to make it about everyone having to adjust to a new reality.
There will be screw-ups. Well-intentioned ones. But flouncing on allyship because of a mistake only increases the error. (Says someone who is terrified of being wrong and called out on it.)
Stars and their turntables.
Volkswagen was able to lie about their emissions results by taking cover under things like the DMCA that prevented the inspection of the code. Blindly trusting the technology can also lead to things like clear overdoses not being caught as they work their way through the system.
An unofficial source for development tools for the iPhone in China turned out to be inserting malware into any app that used the unofficial copy of the tools. The malware was sufficiently well-hidden that the apps made it into the App Store. This came about because the official servers were too slow to serve up the requested tools.
Security researcher and blogger Brian Krebs details a saga of a doxxer that tried to get him arrested by sending him pure heroin in the mail.
Data sharing initiatives for health data in the United Kingdom often put conflicting responsibilities about disclosure and confidentiality on doctors, along with the dubious results.
A UN Women report on the prevalence of cyber violence against women.
xkcd is most definitely the cartoon of the 21st century, blending technology with simple stick figure drawings that look primitive.
If you're not feeling the new 2015 Muppets series, perhaps a better interpretation comes from putting them into a dystopia. For me, it's not that the Muppets have always made jokes meant for older audiences, or even that the Muppets are dealing with uniquely adult situations, is the way that some of the Muppets, including Kermit, are being used for things that seem orthogonal to their personalities.
If you live in a capitalist society, money is necessary. Which means having to get over the idea that charging money for your talents is dirty or spiritually impure.
If you're the kind of man that complains about having a workplace where HR might get involved if a man "helps" a woman, you are probably the kind of man that woman needs to go to HR over. Also, if men are so paralyzed by the possibility of harassment that they're not helping women advance their careers, there's an easy fix to it - have multiple women all along the chain of power so that way they can help women in safe ways. Then get over your stereotyped fears and realize that all you need to do is maintain a properly professional environment.
Just understand that doing so would mean being better than the Harper government was on the issues.
Call it chivalry, if you like, but only if your chivalry is the kind that basically follows Wheaton's Law.
The difficulties of being bi - invisibling from the gay community, lack of acceptance from family and friends, and straight-up homophobia from a lot of straight bigots.
And finally, dysphoria as metaphor - the difference between the cake being a lie or delicious, delicious cake.
Amanda Marcotte talks about the appeal of the noncon fantasy, in the context of misogyny and sex robots. Which might be a better solution than Nice Guys(TM) and their insistence that they are Inherently Superior, but as is mentioned, the problem usually isn't that women won't date them, it's that you won't date them.
Recognizing that "can't" really means what it says is the difference between a good experience and a miserable one.
There have been more awards given to cis men writing about cis men in SFF awards than to women writing about any kind of protagonist. This and other useful conclusions, with graphs and data, at the link.
Have I Been Pwned is a way of checking to see if your email address has been compromised in any serious data breach, so that you can decide whether to discard it.
Speaking of compromises, Experian had data stolen from them of customers that had their credit checked for T-mobile accounts, a mere 15 million people with their data compromised. Trump Hotels had a credit card data breach,
And then there was the Office of Personnel Management hack, where significant data was stolen, so much that intelligence assets and spies in China are being recalled on the likelihood that they have had their cover blown.
A group threatened, and then had someone toss a Molotov at the office of, an anti-virus firm that had exposed their ATM virus code. I don't such simple intimidation is gong to dissuade them, but it is unique in that some entity was persuaded to follow up on that threat.
It takes an incredible amount of wealth and money to be able to live and outsource the entirety of your home life to others, and so, for as much as someone thinks a billionaire living out of hotels with few possessions is worth emulating, we note that they are still a billionaire and likely making decisions that affect the normal lives of many more people more severely than their attempted ascetic lifestyle.
The correct answer when someone asks what science thinks about weight and obesity is "Fuck if they know."
Domestic abuse comes in many, many forms, including financial entanglements, gaslighting and mental abuse and isolation, and things that start small and roll up very quickly afterward. And then there are the roommates from hell, who will be creepy, steal food, and generally do things that are unsanitary and make you not want to be around them.
Relationships can have conflicting emotional needs, but burying that truth often leads to relationships being horrible and trapping.
John Boehner resigns as Speaker of the House, having been hounded out, finally, by the wing of Congress that wants to prevent the government from working. The solution that would work is get the moderates interested in governance to join with the Democrats against the fringe right.
Elsewhere, Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler served the Donald Trump campaign with a cease-and-desist regarding the use of "Dream On" as a campaign song. Presumably, this means nothing if the Trump campaign paid their licensing fees, but I'm beginning to wonder if artists will want to retain those kinds of rights in the future when they sign on with recording labels.
Non-monogamy offers a very large range of possibilities, but many stories still tend to focus on things that reflect cisnormative relationships.
Black Lives Matter is not too violent to be included in the legacy of the civil rights movement - it is exactly the right type of violent, and the violence done against it is also in accord.
No single microagression may be too much, but added up, they're all quite effective at hurting. In the same vein, racism comes in many more subtle forms than overt ones.
There's still a lot of child labor going on in the world that needs exposure and rectification. And plenty of places that are being excluded from useful services because the city doesn't want to annex a poor neighborhood full of people of color and other things that aren't overt racism.
And then there's the overt racism, as expressed to interracial couples.
Lots of commentators on globalization are very insistent that you not pay attention to the actual people that aren't being helped by globalization, and that if there's someone doing worse than you, you have no right to speak.
An argument towards trying to build a big tent and include people in social justice movements, including adding more generations and finding ways to acknowledge that people screw up and to try and have fun making big social change.
It should not take desperation for a toymaker to put women in charge of designing action figures for girls, but Mattel has decided to put women in charge of designing action figures for girls because they are losing ground to others. Unsurprisingly, the new designers are moving toward trends that provide more realistic proportions and costumes to the characters.
The more we try to force the mind to be still and silent, the more it fights back - and our own minds fight dirty. This is part of the reason we're willing to attribute the results of hard work and learning to innate talent. It's also part of why it takes effort just to believe that the thing we want most of all for ourselves is possible. So there's some things we can do to try and find and maintain a good attitude, but sometimes that requires some extra effort or luck to keep it going. That also includes deciding not to call your reading habits something you should feel guilt over.
A new comic, Secret Coders, sneaks in computer science fundamentals in the context of a great mystery. Which I'm putting with a system of labeling pigments based on the proportions of primary colors used to create them, thus pointing out the secret that mixing various amounts of pigment can produce basically any desired shade, instead of having "colors" with names.
Strange lights and atmospheric effects in the sky, some kind of well known, some not very well known at all.
Forest pictures that look like meditative aids or otherworldly locations.
NASA confirms - liquid water exists on Mars. The terraformers are interested again in Mars. Those looking for more New Horizons data have pictures of Charon indicating big canyons and a possible internal heat source for the body, too. And if you want to understand a small amount of the truly impressive size of the universe, watch someone build a model that truly emphasises the vastness of space.
Those looking to piece together how our current species came into being have a new item to examine - a new entry into genus Homo, discovered in South Africa in a very tiny cave element.
Betty Boop is based on an actual person, a black performer, and the animators didn't do much exaggeration of her features or dimensions.
The simple and addictive games included with Microsoft operating systems have hidden agendas, to reach good mouse usage, to check and make sure technology works properly, and to promote new features. That they are simple and addictive is important - but they also aren't included in the operating systems any more. I suspect they would need one to teach various touch gestures these days. Instead of spying on us all the time.
The Nazis engineered many destructive devices, often disguised as ordinary objects - drawings of them, commissioned at wartime, have just resurfaced.
A service that allows you to rent an umbrella for free for two days, then changes you a nominal fee for each day afterward. Perfect for unexpected rain or that occasion when your personal umbrella breaks.
Last for tonight, Biofluourescent turtle, using bees as a method to deter elephants, the anxiety alligator (if only it were that easy to rid one's anxieties), whales under the aurora, the biodiversity of the eastern Himalayas, a racoon raised as a dog, with dogs, small dogs in knit sweaters, well-timed pictures involving cats, proud dog parents and their litters, a kitten with ferrets as family, swimming wolves with diets from the sea, illustrated sea dragons, painting pictures of women and their cats,
and life that thrives in environments very toxic to other forms of life.
There are more than enough animals in shelters that will give you a full life's worth of love, and many of them are older, or disabled, or black-colored, and thus need you more.
Okay, and a shower head with LEDs attached so that one's water becomes rainbow colored.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-10-28 07:13 pm (UTC)(there's also a hilarious video of the cast and crew hearing the name for the first time)
A service that allows you to rent an umbrella for free for two days, then changes you a nominal fee for each day afterward.
My local library actually just started doing this as well. To prevent water damage to the books, they're now lending out umbrellas - you check it out the same way you check out books and there's a 28 day loan period and same late fees as with books.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-28 08:09 pm (UTC)Good for umbrella loaning. I wonder how many come back looking like they've been in a strong windstorm.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-30 12:58 pm (UTC)There's nothing like "Do as I say, not as I do."
Volkswagen and the DMCA. The Librarian of Congress added an exclusion for the next three years that people can hack their cars. Had this been in place previously, VW could have been caught a long time ago. There was a headline news piece on Wired this AM that the VW emissions cheating has been directly linked to 60 deaths.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-30 01:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-30 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-30 10:58 pm (UTC)