silveradept | Another one before the end of a month! (January 02019)

Hello, everyone! Let's see if we can't get this rolling with this: A memory of Ursula LeGuin, before everyone knew her, and how she handled the earnest and the pretenders.

Constructing a language with feminist principles in mind, and writing stories around them to put them to use. Additionally, the digitization of the papers of pioneers of LGBTQ literature.

It's Hugo Nominations time! So

forestofglory has some resources for you.

The hiring of an intimacy coordinator to help keep track of comfort and movement and boundaries during televised sex scenes has made fioming them much better for the actors and the crew involved all around. If for no other reason than to have someone other than the actors thinking about their comforts and advocating for them so the finished product is something they can all agree on as a good thing.

The high femme / weaponized feminine look of Senator Krysten Sinema for her swearing-in is a pretty big middle finger to the idea that women have to make themselves more like men to do powerful and important jobs.

When talking about burnout and the ways that modern life seems to be impacting millenail health, it's worth noting that much of what's being described is very closely related to how people with disabilities experience the world, even if the burnout isn't to the degree that the disability is. But not acknowledging this makes it easier for someone to dismiss it as a failure of bootstrapping, instead of a systemic problem that deserves change, and where abled people could take some lessons from how disabled people have been managing their own care. With that idea in mind, take a look at some narratives of millenials feeling burnt out on existence long before the establishment thinks they should be.

And after that, some ominous positivity.

Using Silk Ring Theory to guide a person's allyship behavior, which functions both as exercise in figuring out where you are in relation to everyone else and as a way of ascertaining what your likely role is in helping with the problem.

Captain Awkward on ways of still staying positive when it's very clear that your body hates you and wants to do nothing with you. And then ways of trying to not get over-whelmed and to not drown in the firehose of data being slung all the time, especially when a lot of that data is upsetting and related to people best not amplified.

A large part of what makes Scandinavian countries as happy as they are is the strong social democracy that underpins their society. It's not a thing that can be adapted to a primarily capitalist society oriented toward consumerism.

After they thought they had hung up, persons at a care clinic went on for several minutes about their trans client, including misgendering significantly. Which is terrble as a profeessional practice, but also continues to confirm the idea that trans people should be afraid of their care people and that they can expect difficulties and have to resign themselves to a certain level of microaggression just to get the care they need.

An attempt to diss the Gilette ad boomeranged on the person trying to diss, both for being well off the mark and for being an example of the thing she thought was disproving the point.

Ana Mardoll talks about how telling women to speak up and take charge usually results in powerful backlash, because women speaking up for themselves is nearly a universal negative to the men around them. (And also, the way they dress has to be exactly as the men around them think they have to, and they can't be too gay, either.)

The head of mental health services for Palestine says you can't really define Palestinians as having post-traumatic stress, because that denies the reality that the trauma is ongoing. So behaviors of Palestinians that seem maladjusted are probably having to adjust to a profoundly, ongoingly, traumatic world.

K. Tempest Bradford on missing stairs and how not everyone has long enough legs to hop the gap when it appears. The best thing in all cases of missing stairs is to repair the staircase.

Tarot decks aren't great at depicting bodies of every size. Even some of the ones that are described as being more body-positive than others aren't doing a lot in those departments.

Every Heart A Doorway is for those who are sure of their own portal fantasy needs, but also for those who have a need to draw strength from the things not normally seen.

Rachael Hartman talks about using an emotional map as the structure for writing a story, although it's not necessarily a recommended thing to do for everyone, as laying out your emotions, even by proxy can be a daunting, terrible task.

Seeing too much cute can provoke aggression and negative reactions to try and deal with the cute overload. And suddenly a certain part of Aggretsuko makes a loooot more sense...

That said, here are some places that are for taking a break from the firehose and looking at or listening to things that are cute and soothing.

A single town in Japan that supplies most of the country's brushes, a letter sent with a map and some data arrived safely at its destination, and a downloadable image catalog of fireworks.

Maine coons made to look like majestic creatures, in addition to being giant balls of floof. The competing ideas between beauty as an adaptation for advantage and beauty as an adaptation for preference and beauty as an adaptation for environment, all of which are potentially right, wrong, and indifferent. A cat finds the catnip section of a pet store and does what cats do when there's catnip.

A future story about how a disease-analysis robot managed to go beyond its initial programming and help stop an outbreak of a virus. The tricky part about all of that? The AI that we have now is nowehere near good enough to be a Robot. Or, for that matter, even possibly ur smol.

ursula shows us the process by which a recipe that does not have exact quantities and baking times might be successfully used to create a delicious dish. There's a certain amount of cooking knowledge that you probably want to have so as to be able to fill in the gaps where the recipe creator has left things out on the assumption that you already know how to do those things.

legionseagle asks that if we're going to offer an apologia for the Problem of Susan, we need to actually be talking about the Problem of Susan, and not something else that's inadequately supported and off the mark.

A bit of research about significant literacy in Ottoman Turkey, where popular conception of it was likely informed by a bad source being taken as authoritative for far too long.

slashmarks found it interesting and shared.

Watch the way that an image is swiftly devoided of its credit ad then spread and mutated all over the Internet.

In science and technology, The people behind Have I Been Pwned now offer a form where you can type a password, it will get hashed, and then compared to the hashes of passwords found in data dumps.

A city in Alaska stopped flouridating their water, and it looks like the results of studying their kids suggests that flouridation is good for dental health.

The Into The Spiderverse score has a lot of goodies for the discerning ear...and for those that can recognize when something else has been remixed back into the score.