![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptTo begin with, in another world where you can effortlessly teleport to the people you care about, school violence resolves with a lot less massacre and tears. [Updated with correct origin link, thanks alexseanchai.]
notasupervillain posted a request asking about what technologies directly lead to social justice outcomes.
Most things we think of as grammar rules are really the constructions of prescriptivists somewhere in the 18th or 19th centuries CE. So if someone takes the idea that fundamentally, writing is about making good sentences rather than obedience to arbitrary rules, then you might get a style guide that's about style, rather than grammar.
Suggestions on good practice for citing authors that may have changed their names, pronouns, or gender markers so as to avoid deadnaming or other offenses.
Adults need vaccination as well as children.
Living with a chronic illness makes your normal seem odd to people who aren't dealing with your chronic issues. Which might also mean how you think about and plan travel activities might be different than others.
Bob Costas is no longer doing gridiron football broadcasts, and it's nor hard to see why - the NFL is generally upset with his continual statements on the dangers of head trauma associated with gridiron football. His network doesn't seem to have had much trouble with it, given how much of it they were fine with him putting on air, but the league is not interested at all in having someone remind them that traumatic brain injuries are a regular part of the sport as they have it arranged.
Taking a wider perspective on this idea might result in a planned podcast that wants to talk about how as much as journalism wants to portray itself as unbiased neutral reporters of facts, the reality is very different. (as it always has been. For libraries, as well.)
jadislefeu has a tutorial on configuring Calibre to be effective at download and keeping fics up to date. (Which is helpful, given that AO3 is moving toward standardizing for Calibre in their downloads.)
lovetincture offers compelling questions about the ethics of monetizing fanworks, having noted that copyright is for protecting both big corporations and small authors from stealing from each other.
Something that I think other members of the Non-Statistical Division might enjoy reading.onyxlynx, these many years gone, and I might have had a good discussion about it - baseball fans care about baseball, the product. Not necessarily the owners or the players or anyone else who is fighting over the money the fans put into the game. Which was linked in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thisweekmeta as perhaps another perspective on fandom that's entirely, aggressively, monetized and how that works out for everyone.
And then there's an argument made in the context of a book review (in 2007, no less) of how the lack fo ability to gain influence (and money) their work keeps women (who produce a lot of fanfic) poorer in both the capitalist and the influential sense. The book being reviewed covers a lot of ways that people dismiss women's work, and especially women in writing, in all the ways they can so they don't have to acknowledge that women do excellent work on the regular and that it's not just a story of Great Men Doing Things.
The book industry, even as it seems to be consolidating, is fragmenting, instead. This series continues from there to talk about how the audience for books is spread around a hunudred thousand different platforms, many of which don't report their sales numbers to any entity trying to track them, that bookstores and libraries are better to market to and get into directly rather than trying to get published by one of the Big 5, audio is one of the biggest markets right now, and the Big 5 will want to eat that along with all your other rights with their contracts, before the imprint you signed with gets shuttered or merged into something else that doesn't care at all about you (assuming they did in the first place. Which is to say, hold on to all of your copyrights and IP and make someone else pay out the nose to acquire them. Because they will be making way more money off you over time than you would be if you had held on to those rights yourself. And past that, write early, write often, and realize profitability and career is a snowball rolling downhill. It'll start small, and each individual thing may stay small, but together, they'll influence each other and the net effect will be bigger than trying to make it big right off the top.
This will set you back half an hour, but Rainbow Ellis's video on the history of queer characters on film and television is worth a listen. You can watch how the Hays Code created a new normal that severely restricted the possible stories that could be told, and that even now, there are still studios in the States that think that either queerbaiting or queercatching are acceptable practices. Which, by extension, is saying that they believe there's more money to be made with less fuss by catering to the queerphobic audience or that they only consider queer representation worth the fans that it could theoretically bring long enough for them to make their money. And then there's what happens when a show doesn't follow The Romantic Formula and we wnd up with people getting thirsty about Joan and Sherlock, which doesn't actuallly happen. But also, genre fiction has been both effective and terrible about getting actual queer content into the mainstream. And there's always a very real danger of a queer narrative being twisted so that it centers and lionizes straight white dudes.
Not to mention you can always do more and show more in animation than you can in any live action. (In this case, animation makes it possible for someone to understand their own genderfluidity and how it works, because animation can show us things that might not be possible to do without lavish effects budgets.)
As with all things, it seems, in the States, there is a parallel history of black press, black papers, and black journalists doing solid and important investigative work that goes unnoticed and unheralded, despite being a vitally important part of the history and continued future of the United States.
Midwestern school bonds often find themselves opposed by a book-burner who believes public schooling should be abolished because his brand of Christianity says they're not in the Bible.
The Krewe of Zulu is defending their practice of having members paint their faces in black for Carnival, arguing that it is distinct from other, negative and racist, portrayals of people in blackface. There's a lot of tradition and greater awareness around the harmful symbols of blackface and...yeah, there's a lot going on there, most of which will have to be sorted out by the Krewe and black leaders' opinions and calls on the matter.
Some people are so averse to the spontaneous or the idea of a free moment that they try to schedule their day down to the minute regularly. These are the same sort of people, I suspect, that suggest that you should do more in your creative hobbies because it will exercise the skills you need to be successful at your work, which is to say, doing something for the opposite reason of having a hobby. As much as I like the idea of "spend less time working and more time hobbying," I want that because truthfully, we spend more time working than we absolutely need to, and I think we would all enjoy our work more if we were doing it for as long as we actually needed to.
Worries that The Good Place has found the edges of what it can do with its conceit and plotting, based on the third season. Finding a justification for why the Klingons have different looks in the second season of Star Trek Discovery.
Social media curation and survival tips from Captain Awkward. Which I'm putting next to what it is like to battle despair regularly.
The many words for the involuntary diaphragm spasm.
The end to a story involving seal poop and a USB drive that survived the trip. As it turns out, it was the person that found the poop whose USB drive it was that ended up in the poop. Cats stuck in trees, bulls in a Chinese shop, the love between a dog and their actor, sled dog puppies that are probably much more grown now, the very beautiful art by Ernst Haeckel of things in nature, and nuns keeping salamanders alive.
In technology, the terrible, and yet still codified, design flaws of the United States toilet stall.
A long Twitter thread about how expected behaviors can sometimes come crashing down in disaster because the expectation has drifted sufficiently far from the specification that people forget the specification. Or don't see the drift as a problem that needs documenting and research and reworking. References and uses a picture of the Challenger disaster as the first post.
Using a toast test to determine where the hottest places in an oven are, so that when it comes to baking, you can identify the places to encourage or avoid. Also, why tea kettles, especially the ones with variable temperature control, often produce the best-tasting teas.
Tools for journalists to keep their work saved and available in case the site they were writing for closes down or otherwise disappears.
The ways that pottery is still as much an art, with as many things as can go badly, as it is about the science of making things.
A reminder: Flickr will soon begin deleting photos - if you have more than 1,000 images, there will be culling involved, and it will not be done by humans.
The difficulties of finding a good VPN include people outright lying about what they do, or having their configurations wrong so the VPN doesn't do what it says. And it's difficult to check their claims to know without technical know-how.
A hacked gaming site led authorities to arrest a person who would do DDoS and call in bomb threats to schools so that students would have a day off for money.
A significant number of applications on Apple products secretly record all the interaction that a person does with that app, which can include sensitive data, and then send it to a company so they can use it for evaluation of the app experience. No, the apps themselves don't actually say that's wha they're doing, and no, not all of the apps correctly scrub sensitive data from their captures when they send that data on. Yet another place where someone can expect all sorts of bleurgh and possible data exfiltration.
Spotify insists that you listen to advertisements along with your streaming media, if you are on an account that does not pay for the privilege of losing the ads, and is giving themselves the right to terminate any accounts they come across that have the ads blocked.
Modeling what cities might experience in the future based on what some cities are experiencing now, in relation to emissions and climate.
Examining images to see where a program tasked with generating convincing-looking people might have failed. Which leads into This Person Does Not Exist, which shows images generated by those algorithms, in case you wanted to try spotting the things that might make the pictures falsified.
To end with, A palliative care doctor talks about the things in our lives that help us accept the inevitability of our deaths, and some of the things she's learned in caring for the dying that might make that idea easier on the one dying and the ones who have to deal with the dying.
An iconic organ piece on harp instead.
And a further improvement to the bookmarklet for making posts with excerpts - it now uses the right user tags for sites that Dreamwidth understands how to find their user pictures for.
alexseanchai.]notasupervillain posted a request asking about what technologies directly lead to social justice outcomes. Most things we think of as grammar rules are really the constructions of prescriptivists somewhere in the 18th or 19th centuries CE. So if someone takes the idea that fundamentally, writing is about making good sentences rather than obedience to arbitrary rules, then you might get a style guide that's about style, rather than grammar.
Suggestions on good practice for citing authors that may have changed their names, pronouns, or gender markers so as to avoid deadnaming or other offenses.
Adults need vaccination as well as children.
Living with a chronic illness makes your normal seem odd to people who aren't dealing with your chronic issues. Which might also mean how you think about and plan travel activities might be different than others.
Bob Costas is no longer doing gridiron football broadcasts, and it's nor hard to see why - the NFL is generally upset with his continual statements on the dangers of head trauma associated with gridiron football. His network doesn't seem to have had much trouble with it, given how much of it they were fine with him putting on air, but the league is not interested at all in having someone remind them that traumatic brain injuries are a regular part of the sport as they have it arranged.
Taking a wider perspective on this idea might result in a planned podcast that wants to talk about how as much as journalism wants to portray itself as unbiased neutral reporters of facts, the reality is very different. (as it always has been. For libraries, as well.)
jadislefeu has a tutorial on configuring Calibre to be effective at download and keeping fics up to date. (Which is helpful, given that AO3 is moving toward standardizing for Calibre in their downloads.)lovetincture offers compelling questions about the ethics of monetizing fanworks, having noted that copyright is for protecting both big corporations and small authors from stealing from each other. Something that I think other members of the Non-Statistical Division might enjoy reading.
onyxlynx, these many years gone, and I might have had a good discussion about it - baseball fans care about baseball, the product. Not necessarily the owners or the players or anyone else who is fighting over the money the fans put into the game. Which was linked in thisweekmeta as perhaps another perspective on fandom that's entirely, aggressively, monetized and how that works out for everyone.And then there's an argument made in the context of a book review (in 2007, no less) of how the lack fo ability to gain influence (and money) their work keeps women (who produce a lot of fanfic) poorer in both the capitalist and the influential sense. The book being reviewed covers a lot of ways that people dismiss women's work, and especially women in writing, in all the ways they can so they don't have to acknowledge that women do excellent work on the regular and that it's not just a story of Great Men Doing Things.
The book industry, even as it seems to be consolidating, is fragmenting, instead. This series continues from there to talk about how the audience for books is spread around a hunudred thousand different platforms, many of which don't report their sales numbers to any entity trying to track them, that bookstores and libraries are better to market to and get into directly rather than trying to get published by one of the Big 5, audio is one of the biggest markets right now, and the Big 5 will want to eat that along with all your other rights with their contracts, before the imprint you signed with gets shuttered or merged into something else that doesn't care at all about you (assuming they did in the first place. Which is to say, hold on to all of your copyrights and IP and make someone else pay out the nose to acquire them. Because they will be making way more money off you over time than you would be if you had held on to those rights yourself. And past that, write early, write often, and realize profitability and career is a snowball rolling downhill. It'll start small, and each individual thing may stay small, but together, they'll influence each other and the net effect will be bigger than trying to make it big right off the top.
This will set you back half an hour, but Rainbow Ellis's video on the history of queer characters on film and television is worth a listen. You can watch how the Hays Code created a new normal that severely restricted the possible stories that could be told, and that even now, there are still studios in the States that think that either queerbaiting or queercatching are acceptable practices. Which, by extension, is saying that they believe there's more money to be made with less fuss by catering to the queerphobic audience or that they only consider queer representation worth the fans that it could theoretically bring long enough for them to make their money. And then there's what happens when a show doesn't follow The Romantic Formula and we wnd up with people getting thirsty about Joan and Sherlock, which doesn't actuallly happen. But also, genre fiction has been both effective and terrible about getting actual queer content into the mainstream. And there's always a very real danger of a queer narrative being twisted so that it centers and lionizes straight white dudes.
Not to mention you can always do more and show more in animation than you can in any live action. (In this case, animation makes it possible for someone to understand their own genderfluidity and how it works, because animation can show us things that might not be possible to do without lavish effects budgets.)
As with all things, it seems, in the States, there is a parallel history of black press, black papers, and black journalists doing solid and important investigative work that goes unnoticed and unheralded, despite being a vitally important part of the history and continued future of the United States.
Midwestern school bonds often find themselves opposed by a book-burner who believes public schooling should be abolished because his brand of Christianity says they're not in the Bible.
The Krewe of Zulu is defending their practice of having members paint their faces in black for Carnival, arguing that it is distinct from other, negative and racist, portrayals of people in blackface. There's a lot of tradition and greater awareness around the harmful symbols of blackface and...yeah, there's a lot going on there, most of which will have to be sorted out by the Krewe and black leaders' opinions and calls on the matter.
Some people are so averse to the spontaneous or the idea of a free moment that they try to schedule their day down to the minute regularly. These are the same sort of people, I suspect, that suggest that you should do more in your creative hobbies because it will exercise the skills you need to be successful at your work, which is to say, doing something for the opposite reason of having a hobby. As much as I like the idea of "spend less time working and more time hobbying," I want that because truthfully, we spend more time working than we absolutely need to, and I think we would all enjoy our work more if we were doing it for as long as we actually needed to.
Worries that The Good Place has found the edges of what it can do with its conceit and plotting, based on the third season. Finding a justification for why the Klingons have different looks in the second season of Star Trek Discovery.
Social media curation and survival tips from Captain Awkward. Which I'm putting next to what it is like to battle despair regularly.
The many words for the involuntary diaphragm spasm.
The end to a story involving seal poop and a USB drive that survived the trip. As it turns out, it was the person that found the poop whose USB drive it was that ended up in the poop. Cats stuck in trees, bulls in a Chinese shop, the love between a dog and their actor, sled dog puppies that are probably much more grown now, the very beautiful art by Ernst Haeckel of things in nature, and nuns keeping salamanders alive.
In technology, the terrible, and yet still codified, design flaws of the United States toilet stall.
A long Twitter thread about how expected behaviors can sometimes come crashing down in disaster because the expectation has drifted sufficiently far from the specification that people forget the specification. Or don't see the drift as a problem that needs documenting and research and reworking. References and uses a picture of the Challenger disaster as the first post.
Using a toast test to determine where the hottest places in an oven are, so that when it comes to baking, you can identify the places to encourage or avoid. Also, why tea kettles, especially the ones with variable temperature control, often produce the best-tasting teas.
Tools for journalists to keep their work saved and available in case the site they were writing for closes down or otherwise disappears.
The ways that pottery is still as much an art, with as many things as can go badly, as it is about the science of making things.
A reminder: Flickr will soon begin deleting photos - if you have more than 1,000 images, there will be culling involved, and it will not be done by humans.
The difficulties of finding a good VPN include people outright lying about what they do, or having their configurations wrong so the VPN doesn't do what it says. And it's difficult to check their claims to know without technical know-how.
A hacked gaming site led authorities to arrest a person who would do DDoS and call in bomb threats to schools so that students would have a day off for money.
A significant number of applications on Apple products secretly record all the interaction that a person does with that app, which can include sensitive data, and then send it to a company so they can use it for evaluation of the app experience. No, the apps themselves don't actually say that's wha they're doing, and no, not all of the apps correctly scrub sensitive data from their captures when they send that data on. Yet another place where someone can expect all sorts of bleurgh and possible data exfiltration.
Spotify insists that you listen to advertisements along with your streaming media, if you are on an account that does not pay for the privilege of losing the ads, and is giving themselves the right to terminate any accounts they come across that have the ads blocked.
Modeling what cities might experience in the future based on what some cities are experiencing now, in relation to emissions and climate.
Examining images to see where a program tasked with generating convincing-looking people might have failed. Which leads into This Person Does Not Exist, which shows images generated by those algorithms, in case you wanted to try spotting the things that might make the pictures falsified.
To end with, A palliative care doctor talks about the things in our lives that help us accept the inevitability of our deaths, and some of the things she's learned in caring for the dying that might make that idea easier on the one dying and the ones who have to deal with the dying.
An iconic organ piece on harp instead.
And a further improvement to the bookmarklet for making posts with excerpts - it now uses the right user tags for sites that Dreamwidth understands how to find their user pictures for.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-19 04:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-19 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-19 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-19 05:36 pm (UTC)