One last once before we click the clock - Novermber-December 02018

[silveradept]

Hello. Here's a thing. If a person's life consists of experiences that build anger, and there's no way of usefully channeling that anger, that becomes a world of rage. The article is also about axe throwing as a way of being able to channel the anger about things that are more difficult to control into something that can be controlled. Or at least destroyed through the flinging of bladed weaponry. It's a reminder of the volcanic potential of those who are actively suppressed by society. I like the way that Le Guin talks about a father language and a mother language, one which seeks to divide and distinguish, the other that cares and tries to bring things and people together.

Holidays can be fraught, and Buzzfeed offers some possible suggestions on making them less so.

A recommendation, brought by kate_nepveu, called 7:55:46 AM, EDT. It is a story of an astronomer, an exploratory robot, and a planet, all three bound together in a shared dream, as one who has gone before meets the one who has just fulfilled their final mission. It's a story that will tug the heartstrings, and also is the sort of story that I really enjoy. Although it would be nice to have something like that happen without the intervening period of being dead before that vision is fully realized.

A brief thought about the profession - there are a lot of people who don't have the professional title that are doing the work of the librarian, and they deserve recognition and appreciation, not scorn.

Also, for the first time in a long, long, time, on January 1, there will be new material officially in the public domain in the United States. You can blame the House of Mouse for why it took so long to get there.

A day of more joy for everyone is set for 17 January 2019.

Remember, kindly, that the culture of Christmas over everything in the States does a lot of making everyone else who isn't interested in it feel very unwelcome.

A comment builder for fic, using templating and macros to help scaffold people into leaving comments. This is a project of longlivefeedback, and I like the way they position the idea that commenting is a learned skill, one that requires a certain amount of confidence, closeness, and belief that the author will appreciate the comment. So, scaffolding materials to help people who want to leave comments figure out a form to use, until they can confidently generate their own comments.

Requiring the assumption of good intent often promotes tone over content as the important thing when someone gets aggressed at. Because if someone being uncivil is treated with the same severity as the person stomping on someone else with their steel-heeled boots, there's something very wrong going on. Tumblr, foall the faults that we're heaping on it now, seemed to be a great place to be exposed to liberal and queer ideas that may not have been sought out, because of the way that Tumblr culture threw everything together and let stuff spread as the speed of a reblog. Which, you know, is a technique usable for both good and ill, but Tumblr seemed to be trying to use it for good. For the most part.

kalloway Pillowfort had a hole in their TOS and banned someone doing something that wasn't against the TOS at the time they did it. Silently, that is. The erson doing the thing was even practicing good fannish behavior by posting it under a cut so that someone had to click through to see it, and they warned and tagged properly. Yes, that does mean Pillowfort had to create a policy when they realized what had happened and they didn't want a part of it, but the policy needs to come before the "Oh, hey, we realize we haven't said anything about this, but we aren't going to be allowing that content here. Thanks." announcement. Not ban before, policy after. Because that's caprice, and that makes people nervous about using your platform. Plus, there are a lot of fans out there whose fandom is specifically about things that various TOSes need to be clear about up front. (jamethiel is specifically about Harry Potter, where a lot of the characters are underage for much of their canonical life, but there are lots of others.)

Plus, there's all the difficulties that come with trying to enforce an arbitrary standard, examples collected by erinptah.

ineptshieldmaid posted about the ways in which fandom communities decamping and moving is somewhat like moving to a new city - some people go, others stay, communities reform, contacts sometimes get re-made, and everything...continues, although not the same as it was before. And then, sometimes, there's the anxiety about whether or not you'll make any friends in the new place. (I also very much like how it's not always about the technology or the TOS that prompts these moves, although that's a big part of it.)

The Oregon Trail Generation - the people who grew up with the ubiquity of computers, but before social media and the Internet remember everything, a time in which you could be an awkward adolescent in public and then watch it disappear with websites and forums shutting down as you matured into yourself and created the person that you wanted to be as an adult. The last generation that got out alive before your employer wanted to make sure that you haven't done anything in your life that might reflect poorly on their brand, even though you might have done it long before you considered working for them. There's a big angry rant in there about privacy and the ways that kids and teens now have to navigate having a public life, a private life, and making very damn sure that those things don't get crossed and that only the very most trusted of people get to cross between the two places, but it doesn't have a crystalizing focus yet, so it's still going to roil and construct itself more.

Hot on the heels of Tumblr turning itself inside-out trying to scrub out the NSFW material from the site (a href="https://dbdspirit.tumblr.com/post/180775367379/in-response-to-the-nsfw-ban-being-enacted-by">and an attempt to have a site-wide signing-out of Tumblr on the 17th of December), Facebook says it's actively going to try and police any sort of sexually suggestive content on its platforms. Which, as you might expect, leaves the most vulnerable people open to being systematically abused by the reporting and flagging system by trolls that want to drive them away. It's not even all that hard to notice the glaring double-standard with regard to nearly-naked women and mostly-clothed men on various social media sites, because a significant amount of online trolls believe in toxic rules that say men are only allowed to be sexy in very specific circumstances and anyone behaving outside that narrow and constantly-shifting definition are to be driven away. (For an example of how that played out on a movie set, look no further than The Magnificent Seven...or at least the stuff that went on behind the scenes there.)

The Warwick Rowers have a 2019 calendar all full of athletic bodies without clothing but with things that obscure the genitals conveniently placed. As one possible thing that you could do to support the expression of sexy bodies. And it would burn the chumps in charge of Tumblr who are deciding they only want to cater to men that see women as sex objects. (Thanks, james, for the excellent rant.)

The frontman for the Buzzcocks, Pete Shelley, has passed on, and it's important to remember him as he was - punk and a very out bi man.

A PDF version of a book of autism experiences with diagnosis, and how that changed lives. Neurodiversity is an important part of being able to exist the way that you are.

Being well-endowed is not the thing that it's represented in adult films, says someone who has to deal with the reality of it. Elsewhere, despite knowing of its existence for decades, there's still not a whole lot of research anyone's done on the clitoris and how it works. (And now this post would be banned on Facebook.)

Beware the team who has enough flair but fails to actually do more than the minimum, claim the people whose job it is to find every way possible to not pay those workers what they are worth.

The Boy Scouts of America may file for bankruptcy protection to shield their assets from being taken in paying out judgments against the organization for their cover-up and failure to act upon the allegations of inappropriate conduct of the employees of the organization. There is a certain amount of spite that wants me to see them dismantled entirely because of that, and then, once they've paid it all out completely, they can re-form as an organization and try again, perhaps keeping better tabs the next time around.

We're happy that Chanel had a black professional model officially walk during a show, and rather annoyed about how long it took for that to happen.

A comedian sued by her ex for defamation over including him in her comedic routine has reached a settlement agreement. And a lot of comics breathe a small sigh of relief that their experiences are once again part of their potential material.

melannen has quite a bit to say about how the writing of het relationships in most productions has troubles and problems that make it hard to believe the relationship itself is actually important. And a bit about the way in which het relationships start all looking the same and going through the same storylines. Both of these things can make them hard to ship.

Plus, the wys that we look at relationships have changed pretty radically over time, and a lot of things that are front-and-center transgressive now aren't nearly as much so in the historical context. (Additionally, it validates a family in-joke as entirely historically accurate, and that's just awesome.)

A small peek from inside the Into The Spider-Verse has produced an EP of the various Spiders doing holiday-themed material.

A map of India and Pakistan that shows the embroidery technique of each of the various regions of each country, a cheese theme park, crocheted giant sea urchins, Pink Floyd on a different stringed instrument than first comes to mind, (although it's unlikely the surviving members of the band will be anywhere near each other and playing the tunes any time soon), a knit, scientifically accurate, brain, how a good design on a handle and a really sharp blade helped make the OXO peeler as good as it is, how to finish the last seasons of a show when the person that everyone was watching the show for, Anthony Bourdain, isn't there any more, and bringing drag queens to a care home improved the quality of life, possibly by putting a spark of life into the home.

Mark Twain and his cats, using a neural network to come up with cat names, pictures of cats and their paws, a lioness and cubs playing with a photographer's camera, the ways that the terrarium both helped bring plants to life and helped people understand the dangers of the air pollution created by burning coal, the tradition of a skeletal horse and demands of song, booze, and cheese, illuminated manuscript creatures reimagined as creations to be thwacked apart by children with sticks, cat collars that intentionally evoke the outfits of the Sailor Senshi (which I'm setting next to a jazz rendition of the main theme to Sailor Moon for no real reason at all, honestly...), and https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-21/rare-seahorses-found-on-sydneys-northern-beaches/10635152">endangered seahorses rescued when accidentally discovered during routine repair work.

In technology, the leader of a group responsible for bomb threat hoaxes and DDoS attacks received three years in jail for his crimes after confessing and pleasing guilty to them a few months earlier. One can always hope that the time spent out of society helps the truly criminal get out of crime.

type_wild has useful insight into the problem of the walled garden and how experiencing the World Wide Web through apps gives the app store people undue power about what content can be seen on their devices. Those of us whose primary form of interaction with the Web is through a desktop or laptop browser don't have those issues, but there's a significant power that Apple takes away from its users when it insists that only authorized apps from its own store can be installed and used on its devices. (Windows 10 and its store, and Google Play are also walled gardens, but Android and Windows at least allow for the installation of programs outside of their store, so there's some ability to get around the garden.)

American Telephone and Telegraph wants to try and make you believe they've produce 5G wireless, years ahead of the specification and potential rollout of actual 5G.

An instrument made of rotating bowls of glass designed by Benjamin Franklin was soon accused of killing people soon after it was created.

A network of small satellites got to capture the entirety of the life cycle of a stellar nova by being reconfigurable enough to catch the whole thing almost as soon as it had gotten into the notice of the satellites themselves.

Using a particular guideline from the CDC as an iron-clas rule has allowed pharmacists, legislators, and insurance companies to make it exceedingly difficult for people with pain management regimens to get what they need to manage their pain. (And there are as many ways currently underway to combat the problem as there are people who suffer from both chronic pain and addictions.) There's also the investigation to see whether or not generic drug companies have been engaging in anticompetitive price-fixing practices for their own profits.

Elsewhere in medical things, Consumer Checkbook is partnering with Choose Wisely to offer advisories about when tests and medical procedures might be warranted, in an attempt to reduce costs to everyone by not performing those things until they are necessary.

Talc and the powders from it may have contained enough asbestos to produce cancerous responses...or not. Because the people involved in producing the powders have an interest in saying they don't have it, and the studies trying to find it have sometimes do and sometimes don't, which is less helpful.

I may also be sticking melannen's analysis of a scientific paper that's been very popular...but not actually saying what it claims here for...reasons. Mostly because I know that I know little about science things and how they're supposed to work.

Maslow's ideas about self-actualization may yet have reason to continue being studied - albeit perhaps in a slightly more compacted form.

Visualizing the cities of the world, and the way that population density works, as mountains rather than dots.

The technical and artistic decisions made on Into The Spider-Verse tried to capture both what was good about comic books as a medium and what you could do in three dimensions with computer animation, going for something that was in-between photorealism and complete stylization. There's a lot of hand-made decisions involved in all of that, apart from the things the computers did to help. A more traditional review also talks about the differences in animation technique with other praise for the movie. And an interview, which I think covers much of the parts above, but also contains a couple new things.

On the popularity of the Squatty Potty footstool, and the constant conversations that humans have about shit and the desire to make sure their own shit is perfect.

Grandma Got STEM, a blog devoted to disproving the idea that old women don't understand anything technological at all, which is an extremely silly position to take, given the prevalence of scientists that we owe our lives and knowledge to. And also the fact that most of you probably had a scientifically literate woman as a teacher at several points in your life.

Putting independent mobility into the hands of very small children with disabilities, by improving an already-existing toy to make it work with the needs of those children.

Last for tonight, some of the magic, such that it was, behind Myst, and how that managed to keep audiences entranced for more than 25 years. It took The Sims to dethrone Myst for most copies of a game sold.

And finally, If we want to get useful things out of reading things, it means reading them slowly and enjoyably, not trying to speed through as much material as possible.

(Okay, one more. There's always one more - observe the skill involved in both whirling yourself about a pole and in playing a song on clarinet. Contains a shirtless person slowly rotating about a pole. If you find that inherently sexual, that's on you.)