Dump more stuff! - February-March 02019
Mar. 19th, 2019 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGreetings. Let's start with Javier Grillo-Marxuach on the reality of becoming a Fandom Ancient.
Netflix has decided to reboot the Baby-Sitters Club, and the Mary Sue is really hoping that we'll finally get a canonically queer Kristy. Given that we now know the creator of the series is gay herself, it seems like a good time to go forward with the idea, given that Kristy reads very much like a sporty and possibly a bit butch lesbian once you are old enough to have the vocabulary to understand and describe her that way, the various dating partners available to the Club aside.
And also, Fred Rogers has become the ultimate unicorn, after the Internet discovered (rediscovered?) that he made statements that are pretty unambiguous about being bisexual. So not only is he the winner of the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, he can also be a queer icon, admittedly posthumously, but since Fred Rogers built himself on the idea of being kind to your neighbors, and seeing everyone around you as your neighbors, it seems fitting that he has a strong tie to just about every marginalized group there is.
A thing I occasionally have to keep in mind so that I don't start sliding back into blaming myself for how terrible relationships ended - emotional intimacy also requires consent, and several of the tools used to foster communication between people having trouble in relationships forget this or weaponize someone's unwillingness to consent to make the problem about them.
If someone is claiming to have done research into topics further out on the fringe of sex research, check to make sure they're not a scammer who has yet managed to get themselves published in peer-reviewed journals.
What qualifies as polite is very context-dependent. Where you are and who you are talking to changes how much off-topic talking you can engage in without being rude.
Inflation-adjusted costs of vcollege have doubled, while wages have remained stagnant. And, becuase it's Forbes, for them that means making sure that you have4 the basics of personal finance down and not using your college education to learn about yourself, but to go in with a plan on what sort of work you want to do when you get out of college. And possibly using community colleges to make your first couple years less costly. (But also requires knowing which of those community colleges your intended destination will accept credits from, if any at all.
While many of the universities and colleges in the state where I got my degrees had a collective agreement that credits from one would qualify as credits from the other, the instittution I went to did not, because they belived everyone else lacked the academic rigor they demanded of their students.) Which is missing the point that they're talking about all in that article, which is that successive generations are being saddled with debt just to complete the entry-level requirements of a potential position, and then have to find ways of satisfying that debt before they can think about the eventualities of retirement, assuming they ever manage to get far enough out of debt to achieve that. And yet, several talking heads seem confused as to why there's been a sudden uptick in the popularity of social democracy and the idea that certain things, at a baseline level, should be provided to everybody.
Faced with an inability to be clear about what societal and structural problems might be causing an uptick in depression, sucidial ideation, and attemtps and successes at suicide, the best an article can come up with is to limit screen time and social media use, failing to realize that social media and the Internet is also often one of the things that provides the connections that the article suggests are necessary to avoid becoming depressed. Except, aself points out, there's a lot of speculation out there about what causes depression, but that's only if you take it axiomatic that depression is an individual thing that individuals can fix. If, instead, you think depression comes about from living a life with unmet needs, then chemicals aren't going to help all that much past the short term. If they help at all.
If rats could resist the pull of addiction more effectively by having more things to do and more rats to hang out with, then what might that mean for humans suffering from the same situations?
[ETA:rydra_wong alerts us to checkered history of Hari, along with a reminder that depression is a unique experience and sweeping generalizations are often wrong, but most importantly, the science in the book is not sound, no. really, the book needs an editor to have the arguments make sense, and where some of the un-cited sourcing might be coming from. Always check your sources before taking any idea in uncritically, and never trust me to be always right or authoritative, for fork's sake, because "interesting" is a way lower standard (and the only one I can really say is the one I use) than "accurate". The beginning of five-part series on the claims and their problems in the Hari book.]
Christchurch, New Zealand suffered two terrorist attacks at mosques that has killed more han fifty people. Almost immediately, the NZ government indicated it will pay costs for funerals and provide financial support to the victims of the families, as other groups mobilize to raise funds to support the victims.
The mayor of South Bend, Indiana (home of Catholic university Notre Dame) expressed assurances to the Muslim community, and one of many examples of people expressing solidarity with their Muslim communities happened in Machester, United Kingdom.
More than 50 victims, each a life of their own ccut short by this act of terror.
The New Zealand government is also springing into action to tighten and remove loopholes in their gun laws to try and make an act of terror likt this even harder to perpetrate again, leaving more than a few US-based people to be struck with wonder or to remark that their own government should be so good and swift at such actions.
C.L. Polk suggests that what makes your character relatable is the vulnerabilities they have, because their strengths may not be something another person can undersand in any way. Lucy Liu's artwork may not care what you think about it as it depicts erotic subjects.
Learning how to dance where both dancers switch back and forth on who is the lead and who is following.
Understanding if your community is likely to tend toward caring or combative may help you decide whether or not you actually want to be there.
A photographer caught a very rare terrestrial phenomenon of supercharged gases interacting with the ionosphere. How rare? The thing lasted three frames.
Mermaid-tail swimmers are encountering resistance or refusal to allow them to swim with their tails on at swimming centers in Australia. There's not much reason why this is given, and the closest thing I can guess is that the squares are getting freaked out and having a "think of the childrens" pearl-clutch.
Applying Marie Kondo's philosophy of asking whether something sparks joy in your life helped someone sort out thei gender presentation and brought them into a space where they could look more authentically themselves.
Comics, like other collectibles, are valuable only if several things not necessarily in your control happen. And, for the most part, if you never actually read them and have them sealed away. Which, to put a fine point on it, is the opposite of what they're intended to do.
"It's not what you do, it's who you know" apparently applies to the art work around the erly 20th century, which has a certain amount of both despair and encouragement for those making art now.
Cohousing aims to take a bunch of people and make a neighborhood out of them, by designing space that is meant to share assets and build community through the interactions of the residents. Almost-not-quite doirmitory-life-with-houses.
In celebration of her 60th birthday, a photoshoot intended to showcase that Barbie can still be beautiful in her age.
Signs of wear on objects are reflections of their provenance and clues to their usage. Especially on Pac-Man cabinets.
The Book of Kells is available to browse hough a digital collection at Trinity College, and said college has produced a six-week course for those interested in taking a dive into the manuscript and its history.
The hashtag #ThanksForTyping attempted to bring to the foreground the barely acknowledged but significant contributions of wives and families to the output of Visionary Men of Science, where a single person was doing many of the things it might take a team of graduate student assistants to achieve now, and for perhaps a single line in a paper or manuscript thanking them for typing it all up.
A school-aged child in Sweden has become the public front for a global movement encouraging striking from school until their elected leaderes commit and act on reducing carbon emissions.
Everyone is dealing with more baseline stress in the current political climate. People with diabilities can be much more strongly affected by this additional stress, because, well, they're already dealing with the disability, and if resources that were available are being eaten by the new situation, then things that seemed to be working before might not continue to work.
The MCU Captain Marvel asks us to think differently and empathize with the Other, wherever they may be, which is a stark departure from how this particular Other is handled in the comics continuity. (If it isn't obvious, there's some spoiler content at the destination of that link.)
A short clip of an alpaca cafe, like 15 seconds of short. A cat shelter that's a boat in Amsterdam. What polar bears being in human spaces says about climate change. An infographic about some of the most interesting deep-sea creatures found. a video with rendering suggesting what young T. rex looked like, given how much we know now about feathers being a possible dinosaur thing, and other developments, the Canadian Mint's collector coins that showcase the finding of dinosaur eggs in the country that also happen to glow in the dark, a musher who broke his leash and completed a leg of the Iditarod, trying to follow in the footsteps of the teams (including a significant number of women) who are attempting to make the 1,000 mile trek, needing to relocate a bear family from their den in a highway median, a sleeping moose causing a closure of a library, the orange-bellied starry dwarf frog, and the increasing presence of a poisonous mushroom that tastes good and kills someone within a week of consuming it.
In technology, we've discovered a set of twins that share the egg's DNA, but appear to have DNA from two different sets of sperm, which is not unique, but definitely exceedingly rare.
The decision to terminate a pregnancy later on in gestation does not come lightly, and is made with the best interests of the child and the person carrying the child at heart.
A bone marrow transplant appears to have helped a person fight off HIV sufficiently that their levels of the virus were not measurable. This is not, however, a procedure that can be systematized, and so research continues.
The sleep state seems to be useful in repairing cell DNA damage, with the analogy being that in the sleep state, the roadways get closed so someone can fill in the potholes.
As a unit to measure energy expended to heat water, a calorie is excellent. For anything else, it's probably not as helpful as we've been led to believe. Because humans have bodies, and bodies do all sorts of interesting things with energy when they get fed.
A suggestion that the personal motor vehicle should return to being a luxury item that only certain people need, based on their requirements, and the grand majority of infrastructure investment be put into efficient and effective mass transit systems, for climate and personal health reasons. Which would also require the reworking of a lot of places in the States to be closer to each other and better high-speed transit lines to be created.
A piece on data hoarders, the people interested in preserving (usually ephemeral) materials before they disappear from the Internet, or their physical items degrade into illegibility. The tools that these people develop, and the data they preserve, assuming they can have their data migrated through formats and transferred to new storage without loss, will likely form the impressions of what future societies have of this time period, in complement to our physical artifacts that survive the time. Because it often turns out that the ephemera is the most informative thing we have about times gone past.
Unsurprisingly, the dominant language of any given space over time tends to track with who the dominant military power or cultural power is in that space at that time. This one covers the British Isles from when the Romans said "Wait! There are people here!" in about 400 CE to about 2000 CE, in hundred year jumps.
The difficulties, both pihlosophical and practical, of preserving beautiful buildings in Eritrea that are inextricably tied to fascism and colonialism from Italy.
The Stain Solution page maintained by the University of Illinois extension, which I have probably linked to before, but it worth doing so again because it it handy and it helps, possibly, that I will remember it exists later on in life.
Vizio would like your smart televisions to display ads to you, because we need to have yer one more place in our lives to have to write an ad blocker for.
If you're going to use stock photography, be damn sure your stock photo isn't already famous for other reasons.
Last for tonight, A Hurt/Comfort plot generator, based on the delightful ways that various tags in a hurt/comfort exchange were accidentally lining up with each other. Probably equally usable for crack as for trying to write something serious.
Postmodern Jukebox does Pinky and the Brain. With the two actors for Pinky and the Brain as part of the song, playing bartenders.
Postmodern Jukebox is a lot of fun to watch and listen to, but I think they also represent a challenge or a dare to the idea that music-making is uniquely human in some way and that it can't be fully captured by algorithm or artificial intelligence.
Netflix has decided to reboot the Baby-Sitters Club, and the Mary Sue is really hoping that we'll finally get a canonically queer Kristy. Given that we now know the creator of the series is gay herself, it seems like a good time to go forward with the idea, given that Kristy reads very much like a sporty and possibly a bit butch lesbian once you are old enough to have the vocabulary to understand and describe her that way, the various dating partners available to the Club aside.
And also, Fred Rogers has become the ultimate unicorn, after the Internet discovered (rediscovered?) that he made statements that are pretty unambiguous about being bisexual. So not only is he the winner of the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, he can also be a queer icon, admittedly posthumously, but since Fred Rogers built himself on the idea of being kind to your neighbors, and seeing everyone around you as your neighbors, it seems fitting that he has a strong tie to just about every marginalized group there is.
A thing I occasionally have to keep in mind so that I don't start sliding back into blaming myself for how terrible relationships ended - emotional intimacy also requires consent, and several of the tools used to foster communication between people having trouble in relationships forget this or weaponize someone's unwillingness to consent to make the problem about them.
If someone is claiming to have done research into topics further out on the fringe of sex research, check to make sure they're not a scammer who has yet managed to get themselves published in peer-reviewed journals.
What qualifies as polite is very context-dependent. Where you are and who you are talking to changes how much off-topic talking you can engage in without being rude.
Inflation-adjusted costs of vcollege have doubled, while wages have remained stagnant. And, becuase it's Forbes, for them that means making sure that you have4 the basics of personal finance down and not using your college education to learn about yourself, but to go in with a plan on what sort of work you want to do when you get out of college. And possibly using community colleges to make your first couple years less costly. (But also requires knowing which of those community colleges your intended destination will accept credits from, if any at all.
While many of the universities and colleges in the state where I got my degrees had a collective agreement that credits from one would qualify as credits from the other, the instittution I went to did not, because they belived everyone else lacked the academic rigor they demanded of their students.) Which is missing the point that they're talking about all in that article, which is that successive generations are being saddled with debt just to complete the entry-level requirements of a potential position, and then have to find ways of satisfying that debt before they can think about the eventualities of retirement, assuming they ever manage to get far enough out of debt to achieve that. And yet, several talking heads seem confused as to why there's been a sudden uptick in the popularity of social democracy and the idea that certain things, at a baseline level, should be provided to everybody.
Faced with an inability to be clear about what societal and structural problems might be causing an uptick in depression, sucidial ideation, and attemtps and successes at suicide, the best an article can come up with is to limit screen time and social media use, failing to realize that social media and the Internet is also often one of the things that provides the connections that the article suggests are necessary to avoid becoming depressed. Except, as
elf points out, there's a lot of speculation out there about what causes depression, but that's only if you take it axiomatic that depression is an individual thing that individuals can fix. If, instead, you think depression comes about from living a life with unmet needs, then chemicals aren't going to help all that much past the short term. If they help at all.If rats could resist the pull of addiction more effectively by having more things to do and more rats to hang out with, then what might that mean for humans suffering from the same situations?
[ETA:
rydra_wong alerts us to checkered history of Hari, along with a reminder that depression is a unique experience and sweeping generalizations are often wrong, but most importantly, the science in the book is not sound, no. really, the book needs an editor to have the arguments make sense, and where some of the un-cited sourcing might be coming from. Always check your sources before taking any idea in uncritically, and never trust me to be always right or authoritative, for fork's sake, because "interesting" is a way lower standard (and the only one I can really say is the one I use) than "accurate". The beginning of five-part series on the claims and their problems in the Hari book.]Christchurch, New Zealand suffered two terrorist attacks at mosques that has killed more han fifty people. Almost immediately, the NZ government indicated it will pay costs for funerals and provide financial support to the victims of the families, as other groups mobilize to raise funds to support the victims.
The mayor of South Bend, Indiana (home of Catholic university Notre Dame) expressed assurances to the Muslim community, and one of many examples of people expressing solidarity with their Muslim communities happened in Machester, United Kingdom.
More than 50 victims, each a life of their own ccut short by this act of terror.
The New Zealand government is also springing into action to tighten and remove loopholes in their gun laws to try and make an act of terror likt this even harder to perpetrate again, leaving more than a few US-based people to be struck with wonder or to remark that their own government should be so good and swift at such actions.
C.L. Polk suggests that what makes your character relatable is the vulnerabilities they have, because their strengths may not be something another person can undersand in any way. Lucy Liu's artwork may not care what you think about it as it depicts erotic subjects.
Learning how to dance where both dancers switch back and forth on who is the lead and who is following.
Understanding if your community is likely to tend toward caring or combative may help you decide whether or not you actually want to be there.
A photographer caught a very rare terrestrial phenomenon of supercharged gases interacting with the ionosphere. How rare? The thing lasted three frames.
Mermaid-tail swimmers are encountering resistance or refusal to allow them to swim with their tails on at swimming centers in Australia. There's not much reason why this is given, and the closest thing I can guess is that the squares are getting freaked out and having a "think of the childrens" pearl-clutch.
Applying Marie Kondo's philosophy of asking whether something sparks joy in your life helped someone sort out thei gender presentation and brought them into a space where they could look more authentically themselves.
Comics, like other collectibles, are valuable only if several things not necessarily in your control happen. And, for the most part, if you never actually read them and have them sealed away. Which, to put a fine point on it, is the opposite of what they're intended to do.
"It's not what you do, it's who you know" apparently applies to the art work around the erly 20th century, which has a certain amount of both despair and encouragement for those making art now.
Cohousing aims to take a bunch of people and make a neighborhood out of them, by designing space that is meant to share assets and build community through the interactions of the residents. Almost-not-quite doirmitory-life-with-houses.
In celebration of her 60th birthday, a photoshoot intended to showcase that Barbie can still be beautiful in her age.
Signs of wear on objects are reflections of their provenance and clues to their usage. Especially on Pac-Man cabinets.
The Book of Kells is available to browse hough a digital collection at Trinity College, and said college has produced a six-week course for those interested in taking a dive into the manuscript and its history.
The hashtag #ThanksForTyping attempted to bring to the foreground the barely acknowledged but significant contributions of wives and families to the output of Visionary Men of Science, where a single person was doing many of the things it might take a team of graduate student assistants to achieve now, and for perhaps a single line in a paper or manuscript thanking them for typing it all up.
A school-aged child in Sweden has become the public front for a global movement encouraging striking from school until their elected leaderes commit and act on reducing carbon emissions.
Everyone is dealing with more baseline stress in the current political climate. People with diabilities can be much more strongly affected by this additional stress, because, well, they're already dealing with the disability, and if resources that were available are being eaten by the new situation, then things that seemed to be working before might not continue to work.
The MCU Captain Marvel asks us to think differently and empathize with the Other, wherever they may be, which is a stark departure from how this particular Other is handled in the comics continuity. (If it isn't obvious, there's some spoiler content at the destination of that link.)
A short clip of an alpaca cafe, like 15 seconds of short. A cat shelter that's a boat in Amsterdam. What polar bears being in human spaces says about climate change. An infographic about some of the most interesting deep-sea creatures found. a video with rendering suggesting what young T. rex looked like, given how much we know now about feathers being a possible dinosaur thing, and other developments, the Canadian Mint's collector coins that showcase the finding of dinosaur eggs in the country that also happen to glow in the dark, a musher who broke his leash and completed a leg of the Iditarod, trying to follow in the footsteps of the teams (including a significant number of women) who are attempting to make the 1,000 mile trek, needing to relocate a bear family from their den in a highway median, a sleeping moose causing a closure of a library, the orange-bellied starry dwarf frog, and the increasing presence of a poisonous mushroom that tastes good and kills someone within a week of consuming it.
In technology, we've discovered a set of twins that share the egg's DNA, but appear to have DNA from two different sets of sperm, which is not unique, but definitely exceedingly rare.
The decision to terminate a pregnancy later on in gestation does not come lightly, and is made with the best interests of the child and the person carrying the child at heart.
A bone marrow transplant appears to have helped a person fight off HIV sufficiently that their levels of the virus were not measurable. This is not, however, a procedure that can be systematized, and so research continues.
The sleep state seems to be useful in repairing cell DNA damage, with the analogy being that in the sleep state, the roadways get closed so someone can fill in the potholes.
As a unit to measure energy expended to heat water, a calorie is excellent. For anything else, it's probably not as helpful as we've been led to believe. Because humans have bodies, and bodies do all sorts of interesting things with energy when they get fed.
A suggestion that the personal motor vehicle should return to being a luxury item that only certain people need, based on their requirements, and the grand majority of infrastructure investment be put into efficient and effective mass transit systems, for climate and personal health reasons. Which would also require the reworking of a lot of places in the States to be closer to each other and better high-speed transit lines to be created.
A piece on data hoarders, the people interested in preserving (usually ephemeral) materials before they disappear from the Internet, or their physical items degrade into illegibility. The tools that these people develop, and the data they preserve, assuming they can have their data migrated through formats and transferred to new storage without loss, will likely form the impressions of what future societies have of this time period, in complement to our physical artifacts that survive the time. Because it often turns out that the ephemera is the most informative thing we have about times gone past.
Unsurprisingly, the dominant language of any given space over time tends to track with who the dominant military power or cultural power is in that space at that time. This one covers the British Isles from when the Romans said "Wait! There are people here!" in about 400 CE to about 2000 CE, in hundred year jumps.
The difficulties, both pihlosophical and practical, of preserving beautiful buildings in Eritrea that are inextricably tied to fascism and colonialism from Italy.
The Stain Solution page maintained by the University of Illinois extension, which I have probably linked to before, but it worth doing so again because it it handy and it helps, possibly, that I will remember it exists later on in life.
Vizio would like your smart televisions to display ads to you, because we need to have yer one more place in our lives to have to write an ad blocker for.
If you're going to use stock photography, be damn sure your stock photo isn't already famous for other reasons.
Last for tonight, A Hurt/Comfort plot generator, based on the delightful ways that various tags in a hurt/comfort exchange were accidentally lining up with each other. Probably equally usable for crack as for trying to write something serious.
Postmodern Jukebox does Pinky and the Brain. With the two actors for Pinky and the Brain as part of the song, playing bartenders.
Postmodern Jukebox is a lot of fun to watch and listen to, but I think they also represent a challenge or a dare to the idea that music-making is uniquely human in some way and that it can't be fully captured by algorithm or artificial intelligence.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-20 04:59 am (UTC)I loved the Marie Kondo and gender post.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-20 02:09 pm (UTC)The Kondo gender post is a really good one.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-20 04:16 pm (UTC)Something I've been thinking myself in circles over, in relation to the end of a not-particularly-terrible relationship, is that I ended it abruptly, with little explanation. In no small part because even in a context of finality I could no longer muster up the emotional vulnerability required to express 'i am unhappy and hurt about x y and z'.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-20 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-23 04:01 am (UTC)I'm still fairly angry with a person who still felt entitled to my trustful and honest communication after performing a particular "mean girl" type action that I was available to witness. The fun thing about that social dynamic is that it makes an example of the target, and witnesses are implicitly told that when they do something like say "you are picking on this dude for his writing but many of your friends write similar stuff, you seem to be bullying this guy why?" you will in turn be subjected to the same bullying.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-20 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-20 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-20 05:08 pm (UTC)Narf! Gotta find a way to purchase it or strip out the audio for an MP3...
no subject
Date: 2019-03-20 05:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-21 11:27 pm (UTC)MacOS and a Windows laptop. I can VM a Linux on either of them. And it's entirely possible that I have a YouTube downloader somewhere.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-20 06:20 pm (UTC)On antidepressants, I'm glad to see that more journalism is out there about how little they work, though I am encouraged by the medical community starting to look into the ketamine angle. (Self-dosing can work; this isn't substance abuse; damn them for having to modify the chemical slightly just to guarantee a patentable revenue stream, positively anti-human of them.)
Justin Trudeau flew out to NZ within hours of the Christchurch shootings. How's that for leadership? (https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/politics/trudeau-offers-condolences-to-new-zealand-prime-minister/ar-BBUSKnB?li=AA521o)
I'm *so happy* to see the questionable Kondo fad helping someone with gender issues, thank you for that lovely story.
The Pac-Man anthropology article was fascinating, thank you for that. I intuitively remembered this from my days in the arcades back then, but had forgotten.
THe Stain Solution page is so....midwestern. So very Illinois. (And yes, a very valuable resource.) I've been pondering on the je ne sais quoi of Illinois recently, culminating in this fascinating film archive: http://www.chicagofilmarchives.org/collections/ I'd like to plan a visit someday.