Things less likely to bring the rage all the time - August-October 02018

[silveradept]

Good day. Would you like to start with an application to learn the business language of several Native tribes of Oregon. This comes from The Confederated Tribes of Grande Ronde. Also present in the original post was a link to the Where Are Your Keys techniques and game for immersive language learning to quickly create more people who speak an endangered language and can then teach others the same.

offers a fantastic guide on how to still do lots of things on your smartphone when your data plan is limited or nonexistent. A large amount of it is "know where your public wireless points are, and plan beforehand about what data you'll need to download before you go so that you can have something to do when not connected to a public network.

The sincerity and conviction of someone's beliefs have no bearing on the truth value of those beliefs. Mistake the two at your own peril.

The comics industry is essentially a bunch of freelancers with no power depending on whatever jobs come their way, which makes it much more difficult for them to say things about people or practices that they find terrible, like sudden cancellations of solicited work or demanding alterations of that work to fit what editorial and the higher-ups think will sell.

Human trafficking and slavery are more than just matters of the sex work industry - agricultural, service, and other industries often have people who have been trafficked as well.

ElfQuest has wrapped its run, after forty years of stories from two creators. Which doesn't mean the universe is done, just the original work.

Anticipation is very high for the Captain Marvel movie to arrive, not just because Marvel has finally put a woman front and center (where's our Black Widow movie? Or our Scarlet Witch movie?), but because it's a good choice, given the way Carol Danvers has been treated well (and very poorly) in her various incarnations.

I will admit to jaded cynicism in this case, but I question whether Jennifer Aniston is the correct person suited to adapting a book about a girl of size deciding she's going to become a beauty pageant star, mostly because I don't really trust that she can make sure the humor is always punching upward and not down.

I am much more thrilled about a viral Twitter thread being adapted to movie form, because it looks like the sort of thing that hppens when you have people who are so well-versed in the tropes that they can then start playing with them with abandon.

Netflix is giving the green light to a live-action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It does have the showrunners and the head writer on board, and it's already explicitly said that the casting will be appropriate to the cultures that are portrayed in the Avatar world. We are...cautious about this.

[deadpan dull surprise, like Alan Rickman in Galaxy Quest]Oh, my. It appears that girls read better than boys do from an early age, and this means girls do better in school than boys do as well.[/dull surprise.] Gee, I wonder why this might be the case. It certainly wouldn't have to do with the ways that we exclude girls from various domains from an early age, the ways that we insist that boys reading choices aren't real or to be encouraged, the ways that reading becomes inexorably linked with not-masculinity in a toxic culture, or, or, or...

Media cannot be all things to all people. Media can be flawed and imperfect and still really good at what it does. In a lot of cases, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and it's on us, as potential consumers, to figure out whether the bad things about a media piece make it unsalveageable or just really annoying. I had an excellent example of that when I got to hear Seanan McGuire talk about My Little Pony from the perspective of someone who had seen the original series and some of Friendship is Magic, as well as noticing the way certain elements of fandom coalesced around the new show. They are different, and some of the things in the new show don't work for Seanan, enough that it's not going to be Seanan's My Little Pony. All the same, Seanan had an understanding of who the show might be for, and who it might work well for. I think this might be related, if only tangentially, to the differences betweeen curational fandom and transformative fandom, but I don't quite have enough of a handle on it to tease out the differences of how a fandom obsessed with details and trivia values and demands a perfect product in all ways and stands in opposition to a fandom that sees the work for what it is, and what it could be, and tries to fill the gap or extend the material in expansive directions to try and either fix the flaws or tell the story in new (and better-to-the-writer) ways. But that's about as far as that idea has gotten into my head. Maybe with enough examples, it would be a more fully-fledged thought.

On the question of compassion fatigue and how one is supposed to stay human in an era where every information feed provides tragedy in high definition. Also, the possibility of the way that RAICES is shuffling their donations into the creation of a bond fund that can be used to pay the immigration bonds of persons detained. Because the bail and bond systems are geared entirely for the rich to walk free and the poor to suffer in jail or plead out.

On the further question of how a generation born to a world that insists they are only as good as their economic value from birth, pushes a large amount of the duty of building that value onto children, and then demands they accept terrible conditions and the expenses of caring for an older generation's entitlements manages to come to themselves, apocalypse or no. (How things are priced also determines the perception of their value. We have also seen how even Warren Buffet thinks the number in the bank account is mostly meaningless.)

Someone is trying to push the idea that trans kids are infecting other kids with trans ideas and turning them trans, too. Which sounds very specifically like how people were thinking that gay people were recruiting children to the gay lifestyle. With as much pseduoscience and lack of truth, as well. The burden is always on the person making the extraordinary claim to provide their proof, not on anyone else to "entertain" their hypothesis.

Certain segments of people who hate others think that it's a valid strategy to chop the T off of LGBT and pit trans folx against the rest of the acronym, so that they can achieve their own goals of making anyone not-straight into a pariah. Ohio has decided that it's a felony for a therapist to help a child with gender dysphoria or questions about their own possibly trans- or enby-ness without informing their parents that the child has come to them, which is a gigantic "fuck you" from the state to children or teens who have parents or guardians that don't support exploration of identity. Other states are insisting that the gender recorded on a birth certificate is an immutable thing and that persons seeking to change that can't possibly do so, and that people trying to live an identity that was not the one assigned to them at birth cannot do so, because their birth identity is immutable. To call that line of argument horseshit is an insult to horseshit.

On taking criticism and determining if it's valid and what you intend to do about it, and how to try and stop a person whose reaction to criticism is to declare they're a terrible person and have you soothe them instead. I'll admit that I have a certain amount of insecurity about whether or not I'm behaving virtuously and well by others. It tends to be of the "would any of my friends tell me when I'm being a boor unintentionally" variety, and a not-entirely-surety that I could take that with the method that's outlined here, instead of spiraling down into negative self-thoughts. I'm predisposed to belive that I'm not a good person to start with, so there's a lot of confirmation bias working against me there. (And no, I'm not sure why entirely. Perhaps because I keep seeing plenty of examples of people who look like me doing terrible things, and because I worry that I'm going to turn out to be more of a person of my upbringing than I want to be. And maybe there's a certain amount of "if you miss on even one thing, then everything you said you would do is a lie and a failure" that's stopping a more definitive statement of active resistance. Which isn't to say I'm not trying, but I still have a lot to unwind from earlier on in life where I very strongly felt that there were only the options of being perfect or failing.)

Being aware of what stories you've been told helps you unlearn those stories avoid acting them out again.

Suggestions on how to prevent a brain that prefers the immediate over the long-term from discarding long-term goals in favor of immediate actions. Most of which have to do with making it as easy as possible to get started on things and in taking advantage of mechanization and technology to set intentions and automate good habits so that they don't have to become decisions made by the brain.

The possibility of managing insomnia through acknowledging the reality of the situation and changing behavior such that sleep (and sex) are the only things that happen in the bedroom and to not enter the bedroom until it's sleep time. It also might have the effect of exhausting the body sufficiently to achieve the sleep so desperately needed, from reading the descriptions of how it goes.

The mysterious closure of an observatory located near Roswell, New Mexico is due to entirely mundane reasons (someone allegedly downloading child pornography) rather than extraterrestrial ones. Which wouldn't be a thing, except for the fame Roswell has accumulated.

The indigenous peopls of the Americas were far more "civilized" than the Europeans who came and then destroyed those same civilizations.

It is becoming more difficult to travel outside the Russian Federation due to more controls and less freedom to travel becoming the norm in the country.

Various bank officials joked about the fraud and toxic loans they were selling to the Untied States that precipitated the housing meltdown of the past decade.

Here's a demographic interest - approximately 70 percent of the population of the United States will, within a few years, be concentrated in only a few states, which means the house represented proportionally by population will be filled with a few states representatives, while the "every state gets the same number of people" body will have most of its power concentrated in the rest of those states.

You can't live on minimum wage, even if your minimum wage is in a state that has their wages set well above the federal minimum. If you are renting a house, and following the rule that says your rent should be no more than 30 percent of your monthly income, here's a graph of how much you actually have to make in many states for that rule to be accurate. Because inequality continues to rise, and the rich get richer without any thought or concern from them or government to equalize things. Of course, it's not just rent that's rising, but all the things that used to define a "middle class life".

Tax policy that was constructed to benefit corporations and the supre-rich...has, even though it was specifically touted as something that would raise actual wages. Perhaps what we need is tax policy that eats corporate profit by the amount its workers have to rely on government assistance to make their ends almost meet.

The evangelical churches of the United States cannot grow beyond the toxic purity-obsessed institutions that cover up and deny abuse and harassment if they aren't willing to admit the -ist pasts and presents of their most famous founders and adherents and then do the work to distance themselves from them and their ideologies.

Senators asked the Labor Department to calculate the economic costs of sexual harassment in the workplace. After a very long delay, Labor refused, and so now the Senators are lookig elsewhere to get that data. I have a feeling Labor refused because they don't want to do the work and admit how high the costs are.

Academia has to change its culture, as well, to prevent and reduce the staggeringly large amount of sexual harassment in its own space.

Women in corporate settings are being encouraged to see each other as competitors in a zero-sum game.

All in all, The United States ranked tenth on a list of countries deemed the most dangerous for women.

A need to change the culture of the United States around vacation and rest, in the name of being able to get more done in a shorter amount of time. The possibility that putting certain things off may result in better thinking and work on those things. The role that sleep deprivation plays in feeling lonely (and spreading that feeling to others). Putting in more and harder hours means less recovery, and may make the work suffer as well.

Getting children involved in chores willingly involves letting them help meaningfully when they're small.

Pulling the threads on the possibility that Enlightenment philosphers had knowledge and exposure to Buddhism, Hinduism, and other sources from the east helped a scholar get a greater understanding of it all, but also to help them move past a crisis where all the things they had defined themselves by had all vanished.

The story of how someone hired to help with security of the Monopoly game pieces ended up stealing all the winners and distributing them to others, and then was arrested and prosecuted by the FBI.

The possibility that handedness is already determined by the time a child exits the womb, along with various stories about left-handedness.

A cookbook filled with the recipes of the prisoners of the National Socialists. And The Monday Morning Cooking Club, a group of Australian Jews who test, curate, and publish recipes of Jews worldwide. They're related to each other, and not just because there's a certain amount of necessary food preparation for ritual and for gathering.

A gift, long ago, from the Choctaw nation to those suffering in Ireland, when Ireland suffered its most famous famine.

Taco Bell has quietly become the fast food chain with the best variety of healthful food options. Not that anyone would necessarily believe that if Taco Bell said it. Also, A chef who spent time in prison will soon be giving back to the community with ramen noodles for prison commissaries that are healthier and with a bigger variety of flavors.

A narwhal accepted into a group of belugas, giant sloths of Costa Rica, the shared gestural vocabulary of infants and chimpanzees, the need for a properly tuned metabolism for survival of a species, eels affected by the presence of drugs in their habitat waters, the understanding that Pyrex dishes are not well-suited oto extreme temperature changes if they were manufactured after 1998, the ways in which border walls can hurt more than just humans through disruption of conservation areas and breeding grounds of wildlife, the more that we learn about life around us, the more we have to revise our ideas of how life works, weed killer showing up in oat products, salmonella and cyclospora showing up in unwanted places, the impacts of fish oil production on the environment, the possible reasons why some people get mosquito-munched and others don't, and a pair of boots, each boot with one butterfly-inspired wing attached.

In technology, a Roman folding cutlery implement that resembles the designs of the Swiss Army Knife. Also, a short meditation on what someone might have used before the widespread adoption of toilet paper. Glasses that turn dramatically opaque at the appropriate moment, reflecting an animation convention.

The names that cars and automobiles could have had, before a standardization of language happened.

A VR film of a Toronto reclaimed by nature, created by an Indigenous artist as a request and reminder that there is still nature around us and to take better care of it.

Models and data sets that can account for the increased amount of carbon dioxide, and particular types of carbon dioxide, from the burning of fossil fuels.

Opioid research suggests a class of drugs that would only affect the necessary parts of the body, while other research might have a form that relieves pain and is not habit-forming.

A possible channel that could be used to help diabetics regain better insulin response.

The suggestion that cooler indoor temperatures result in slightly higher blood pressures.

The suggestion that short, intense workouts repeated only a few times have as much benefit as long, intense workouts, unless your goal is to build muscle mass.

Convenient, witty explanations for word origins or other things found in memes have a high probability of being wrong. They may get you points on QI for being interesting, but generally, that irresistible, pat solution to a question is eliding, erasing, or has been constructed entirely of whole cloth. Which sucks, because our brains like simple and elegant solutions (that tend to also be wrong).

Following the lead of Nintendo, Sony is offering a Playstation One Classic for about $100 USD that would contain 20 games to relive from the PS1 era. That's not enough games to cover even the greatest hits of the RPGs of the PS1 era, much less everything else, so I look forward to seeing what the modding community will do with the devices to expand their catalogue.

Twitter is finally rolling out an option to ake your timeline chronological, rather than algorithmic. I think they'll find a lot of people taking them up on that particular offer.

Facebook had a security breach and up to 50 million accounts were potentially compromised from it. Given that we are now in the GDPR world, I'm wondering how much or little the regulators will stomp on Facebook to convince others that they also need to tighten up their privacy and security.

The story, as of the year 2000, about how lead came to be in and then be taken out of, gasoline.

If you are using the Google Chrome browser, or Chromium as of version 69, signing in to a Google account will also sign you in to the browser, which is a terrible thing to do without asking someone if they actually want to do it. There is a workaround for Windows and OSX copmuters.

Several states are taking their own actions and defying the FCC's repeal of network neutrality, placing their own laws in place to enforce the principle.

Trans* people may find themselves locked out of their own bank accounts because systems and tellers have policies that say if you sound like someone other than their perception of your gender, you can't get to your money.

If your model of medicine is a white male, you're going to miss studying a lot of things you really should be paying attention to.

Last for this post, Seanan and Mira as Futurama-esque heads-in-jars. And myths about the decade of life from 30-39.

It's a bittersweet thing to put here, but a comic about a shared universe that was wonderful, but that eventually disappeared when one of the creators moved on is a lovely thing, and probably a very familiar feeling to those who have started collaborations that one person really wanted to continue, even if the others did not.

And then The Field Biology of the Wee Fairies, about a girl who doesn't want to catch a fairy for the same reasons that all he others do, and what happens when she finally does catch one.

Comments

[silveradept]

Makes sense. Definitely not a thing that works for everyone.