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silveradeptGreetings! Let's start with the ways that transformative works of the 20th and 21st centuries CE are close cousins to the style of writing practiced by Byzantium that made heavy use of quotes, tropes, and references to produce both authority of writer and to give the audience things to recognize and enjoy in the words themselves.
elf explains the nomination of the Archive Of Our Own for a Hugo award is both about the underlying code/infrastructure and the content that makes that underlying infrastructure deliver exactly what sort of transformative work someone is looking for when they search the Archive. If so desired, the full list of the 2019 Hugo finalists and the 1944 Retroactive Hugos is now published for your perusal.
Relying on the good skills soemone has with writing can help them figure out the skills that need practice and work. Because writing is definitely a thing that needs practicing.
For some people, scheduling all the fun things they want to do in a planner and then fitting in their work around that will help with procrastination. Others can be helped by taking the task in small chunks and then continuing if there's the mojo there for it.
After receiving permission to create a community of housing, the planners changed, with the "permission" of the company, the arrangement so as to block the poor children (who had to be included for the project to get off the ground) from easily accessing a courtyard play area that the wealthy children will have no trouble accessing. I put "permission" in quotes because I suspect that was the original plan all along, but it had to be fudged enough to get governmental approval and then it could be changed back after that was done. Once exposed, it became clear that this was not an isolated incident, and that and several other places with restricted play spaces were told or volunteered to make sure their play spaces were not segregated between rich and poor. Although the women ultimately responsible for bringing this to light don't wnat it to be turned into a story of rich versus poor, despite it structurally being just that.
On that same topic, after residents complained their historical lamp-posts were being replaced with more technological-looking ones (and their suspicions about their posts being sent to somewhere for gentrification), the council in charge suspended the program.
Even though we knew that Betsy DeVos would take the opportunity of being Education secretary to raid the public treasury and divert as much of that money as she could to private and religious schools, seeing the budget and its consequences for programs for the blind, visually impaired, and disabled [PDF] by itself is still aggravating. Zeroing out assistance programs (and IMLS) and things that will make it easier for students to actually succeed at school proves that Betsy knows nothing and her budget should be rejected. If you have legislators who sit on the appropriate committees, please explain to them that public education is something that deserves love, care, and more funding.
As a follow-on from the Guardian piece about the fanfic writer, The Emilia report for this year points out what we know - men get much better coverage when they write and do things than women do.
A parent of a student at Notre Dame penned a letter insisting that the good Catholic students at the university do not want to stare at the nearly-naked women in leggings. Just in case you believed that the grip of purity culture somehow excluded Catholicism (haaaaaa, no.) The students went at mockery with a vengeance and with a leggings protest. (We might also note that the mother who claimed her sons would never look at a woman in such a way has a very inflated sense of her sons' behavior. They might not do it around her, because she would scold them, but she's not always around.)
If you're looking for the fashion on display in Shrill, you won't find it in stores, because nobody deigns to design good fashionable things for plus-size women. After a certain point, it becomes all about hiding a body rather than allowing it to look good. Despite there clearly being an audience and money on the table for anyone willing to take up the call of designing good fashion for all body sizes.
Gender Minorities Aotearoa offers free binders to those in New Zealand who need them and cannot afford them, along with instructions on their proper care and use, so that people can have the body shape that matched with their identity.
A list of 50 inventions first created and attempted-to-be-patented by women, even if some of them don't actually get patented by those women so they can enjoy the results.
The United States-based National Rifle Association attempted to influence one of Australia's political parties into proposing weakening of Australian gun laws, so as to get relief in their own country from persons advocating for responsible gun ownership. The recorded suggested tactics say that women protecting themselves and associating mothers with guns will be the best way of weakening laws. It certainly seems like calling the NRA an international terror group won't be all that far out of order.
One of the University of British Columbia's libraries about the indigenous peoples of Canada uses an adapted classification system created by an indigenous person and emphasizes place in its organization, rather than name. For that collection, it looks very successful. I think it could be built upon, with other subject-type classification systems, to help mitigate the biases put in DDC, LC, and other general classification systems about specific subjects.
A charter school that started and founded in the idea of getting prisoners educated has refurbished a bus into a classroom and parks itself in the poorest neighborhoods of San Fransisco, trying to help people who have long since left public schooling still get their GEDs and diplomas. Which is the obverse of the coin of just about every place that's rolling in affluent dollars on the face they show to everyone else.
The argument that without colonialism, the idea of plastics becomes significantly less appealing, as there is both no "away" to gather and extract the resources from to produce plastics and no "away" to send those plastics to when they are done and disposed of.
Anger is not a thing for people of color to stuff down and pretend not to have when the White people around them are using the tools of white supremacy against them. Which doesn't have to be conscious racism. While there's plenty of that, there's just as much racism and white supremacy in things that don't look like it to the white audience.
(As mch as I have to be comfortable with the idea that allyship is a process and that there will be mistakes along the way, often unintentional, it's disheartening at times to know there isn't an end point that can be seen shortly, and just a little while longer and we'll get there. I can only hope that when I mess up, and someone takes the time to point it out to me, that I can take it with good grace, thank the person who pointed it out to me, and then not do it again.)
If you want to stop bullying, you have to stop bullies. And that requires a lot more skills and in-depth awareness than most people who work with kids get.
Linguistically speaking, words change and sometimes are thrust into new roles they did not have before. And if people are upset about that, that's their preference. (Down with linguistic prescriptivism.)
The #AbledsAreWeird hashtag gives insight into the many different ways people with disabilities are invisible, aggressed, or otherwise told they can't possibly be real humans who have real lives. And that includes medical professionals who should know better. And that's without the ways in which devices are designed for men and don't listen at all to the complaints of women about how the device is poorly designed for them.
The MCU origins of Captain Marvel and several of its supporting characters are smart decisions in our current era. (Spoilers, y'know.)
Chris Evans on being Captain America (and occasionally being like Capain America off-screen) and others.
Netflix's business model seems to suggest that only the biggest hits will ever get past a third season, and the people that debuted on Netflix will be unable to move elsewhere because of their contract requirements. Which could be preventing loads of cult classics from ever getting off the ground.
A woman who had just given birth to a child swiftly gave birth to a pair of twins from a hitherto undetected second womb. There was a significant amount of "WTF" involved all around, although all three children are healthy.
Always read the plaques! Sometimes you discover the darndest things.
And sometimes, you can also find the most interesting things when doing citizen science with the archaeologists.
And every now and then, you get to find out about the daring escape and faking of her own death of a nun that faked her own death so that she could get away from the convent where she had been committed, so that she could have a more normal life. (Whoo! This is the sort of stuff to make a movie about!)
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization has suggestions about improving getting food from harvester to consumer, many of which talk about ways to make the chain more efficient so there's less loss in poorer nations and ways of re-educating consumers in richer nations to be less concerned about appearance and more concerned about having food.
How children behave in books that are fantasies for children and how children actually behave in situations like those, and the ways that influences writing and whether or not a child might enjoy a book where they have to accomplish something without adult help and intervention.
The use of cheap pigments took the color out of a Van Gogh skyline, which was only discovered when the frame surrounding the piece came off and showed the actual intended color, since that part had been preserved, if accidentally. A world map meant to be assembled large, which gives the mapmaker plenty of space for details, sashimi arranged in exquisite artistic presentation,
Flamingoes are thriving in a polluted area of Mumbai, but the people tracking the pollution say that this windfall will only be temporary. In other pollution-related things, a mystery involving Garfield phones washing up on shore that had gone on for decades is solved, now that the shipping container from whence the phones came has been located and excavated.
Doctor Leopold, a ragdoll that helps people relax and open up to therapists, a mouse that has been putting small scraps back into a bin every night, the discovery of another transition animal - a webbed-foot, hooved whale, the difficulties of trying to move a derelict submarine, including the raccoon infestation, crown shyness that has trees refuse to touch each other at the tops of their branches, the real-world horse origins of a lot of strongly-bonded companion fantasy creatures,
In technology, a jury awarded a significant sum to a man claiming that the weed-killer Roundup was a carcinogen and responsible for the cancer he developed from using the product.
Credit card breaches have become background radiation in our lives -- this one at various Buca di Beppo restaurants and others under the same parent company.
A man who called in a SWAT raid against an innocent man over a small gaming bet has received 20 years in prison for the deed, not least because three deaths are attributable to that one phone call.
For as much as it touts being an evolution up toward 5G, American Telephone and Telegraph's devices don't fare particularly well compared to other carrier's 4G devices. Verizon is getting ready to deploy actual 5G, but it will only work with one phone in two cities, and you'll pay extra for the privilege of accessing the 5G network in those cities.
greywash offers a useful primer on semantic HTML and why you want to separate visual CSS from content HTML as much as possible. (Because people with disabilities, feature phones, and/or Netscape Navigator 4 still use the World Wide Web and want to consume your content.)
Good reasons why the Domain Name System needs better security (and why you might want to switch your DNS provider away from your ISP to something different.)
The idea of Amazon as the answer to questions and specific limitations reagrding space and quality that were first encountered by Walmart, as well as some of the problems that Amazon is now having to fight based on how they chose to answer some of those questions.
Science-themed Peep dioramas.
Last for tonight, Millions of Cats, the oldest picture book created in the United States that's still in print. Also, Nathan W. Pyle's Starnge Planet, a comic series about aliens looking at and doing common human practices with delight and curiosity. (ETA: We are informed that the creator of the comic is not a fan of bodily autonomy for women. Further information about the preferences of the creator and how much their belief is private versus public.)
And you know how difficult it is to find trans and enby rep in stock photography? (Exceedingly.) So the folks in a Vice Department created the Gender Spectrum Collection, a series of stock photographs of trans and enby people (and not just all white people, too) available to the public for use.)
Finally, A Twitter thread about things that are common knowledge in all sorts of industries but would otherwise be completely shocking to anyone outside of that industry. Some of which are very familiar. And many that involve the House of Mouse.
elf explains the nomination of the Archive Of Our Own for a Hugo award is both about the underlying code/infrastructure and the content that makes that underlying infrastructure deliver exactly what sort of transformative work someone is looking for when they search the Archive. If so desired, the full list of the 2019 Hugo finalists and the 1944 Retroactive Hugos is now published for your perusal.Relying on the good skills soemone has with writing can help them figure out the skills that need practice and work. Because writing is definitely a thing that needs practicing.
For some people, scheduling all the fun things they want to do in a planner and then fitting in their work around that will help with procrastination. Others can be helped by taking the task in small chunks and then continuing if there's the mojo there for it.
After receiving permission to create a community of housing, the planners changed, with the "permission" of the company, the arrangement so as to block the poor children (who had to be included for the project to get off the ground) from easily accessing a courtyard play area that the wealthy children will have no trouble accessing. I put "permission" in quotes because I suspect that was the original plan all along, but it had to be fudged enough to get governmental approval and then it could be changed back after that was done. Once exposed, it became clear that this was not an isolated incident, and that and several other places with restricted play spaces were told or volunteered to make sure their play spaces were not segregated between rich and poor. Although the women ultimately responsible for bringing this to light don't wnat it to be turned into a story of rich versus poor, despite it structurally being just that.
On that same topic, after residents complained their historical lamp-posts were being replaced with more technological-looking ones (and their suspicions about their posts being sent to somewhere for gentrification), the council in charge suspended the program.
Even though we knew that Betsy DeVos would take the opportunity of being Education secretary to raid the public treasury and divert as much of that money as she could to private and religious schools, seeing the budget and its consequences for programs for the blind, visually impaired, and disabled [PDF] by itself is still aggravating. Zeroing out assistance programs (and IMLS) and things that will make it easier for students to actually succeed at school proves that Betsy knows nothing and her budget should be rejected. If you have legislators who sit on the appropriate committees, please explain to them that public education is something that deserves love, care, and more funding.
As a follow-on from the Guardian piece about the fanfic writer, The Emilia report for this year points out what we know - men get much better coverage when they write and do things than women do.
A parent of a student at Notre Dame penned a letter insisting that the good Catholic students at the university do not want to stare at the nearly-naked women in leggings. Just in case you believed that the grip of purity culture somehow excluded Catholicism (haaaaaa, no.) The students went at mockery with a vengeance and with a leggings protest. (We might also note that the mother who claimed her sons would never look at a woman in such a way has a very inflated sense of her sons' behavior. They might not do it around her, because she would scold them, but she's not always around.)
If you're looking for the fashion on display in Shrill, you won't find it in stores, because nobody deigns to design good fashionable things for plus-size women. After a certain point, it becomes all about hiding a body rather than allowing it to look good. Despite there clearly being an audience and money on the table for anyone willing to take up the call of designing good fashion for all body sizes.
Gender Minorities Aotearoa offers free binders to those in New Zealand who need them and cannot afford them, along with instructions on their proper care and use, so that people can have the body shape that matched with their identity.
A list of 50 inventions first created and attempted-to-be-patented by women, even if some of them don't actually get patented by those women so they can enjoy the results.
The United States-based National Rifle Association attempted to influence one of Australia's political parties into proposing weakening of Australian gun laws, so as to get relief in their own country from persons advocating for responsible gun ownership. The recorded suggested tactics say that women protecting themselves and associating mothers with guns will be the best way of weakening laws. It certainly seems like calling the NRA an international terror group won't be all that far out of order.
One of the University of British Columbia's libraries about the indigenous peoples of Canada uses an adapted classification system created by an indigenous person and emphasizes place in its organization, rather than name. For that collection, it looks very successful. I think it could be built upon, with other subject-type classification systems, to help mitigate the biases put in DDC, LC, and other general classification systems about specific subjects.
A charter school that started and founded in the idea of getting prisoners educated has refurbished a bus into a classroom and parks itself in the poorest neighborhoods of San Fransisco, trying to help people who have long since left public schooling still get their GEDs and diplomas. Which is the obverse of the coin of just about every place that's rolling in affluent dollars on the face they show to everyone else.
The argument that without colonialism, the idea of plastics becomes significantly less appealing, as there is both no "away" to gather and extract the resources from to produce plastics and no "away" to send those plastics to when they are done and disposed of.
Anger is not a thing for people of color to stuff down and pretend not to have when the White people around them are using the tools of white supremacy against them. Which doesn't have to be conscious racism. While there's plenty of that, there's just as much racism and white supremacy in things that don't look like it to the white audience.
(As mch as I have to be comfortable with the idea that allyship is a process and that there will be mistakes along the way, often unintentional, it's disheartening at times to know there isn't an end point that can be seen shortly, and just a little while longer and we'll get there. I can only hope that when I mess up, and someone takes the time to point it out to me, that I can take it with good grace, thank the person who pointed it out to me, and then not do it again.)
If you want to stop bullying, you have to stop bullies. And that requires a lot more skills and in-depth awareness than most people who work with kids get.
Linguistically speaking, words change and sometimes are thrust into new roles they did not have before. And if people are upset about that, that's their preference. (Down with linguistic prescriptivism.)
The #AbledsAreWeird hashtag gives insight into the many different ways people with disabilities are invisible, aggressed, or otherwise told they can't possibly be real humans who have real lives. And that includes medical professionals who should know better. And that's without the ways in which devices are designed for men and don't listen at all to the complaints of women about how the device is poorly designed for them.
The MCU origins of Captain Marvel and several of its supporting characters are smart decisions in our current era. (Spoilers, y'know.)
Chris Evans on being Captain America (and occasionally being like Capain America off-screen) and others.
Netflix's business model seems to suggest that only the biggest hits will ever get past a third season, and the people that debuted on Netflix will be unable to move elsewhere because of their contract requirements. Which could be preventing loads of cult classics from ever getting off the ground.
A woman who had just given birth to a child swiftly gave birth to a pair of twins from a hitherto undetected second womb. There was a significant amount of "WTF" involved all around, although all three children are healthy.
Always read the plaques! Sometimes you discover the darndest things.
And sometimes, you can also find the most interesting things when doing citizen science with the archaeologists.
And every now and then, you get to find out about the daring escape and faking of her own death of a nun that faked her own death so that she could get away from the convent where she had been committed, so that she could have a more normal life. (Whoo! This is the sort of stuff to make a movie about!)
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization has suggestions about improving getting food from harvester to consumer, many of which talk about ways to make the chain more efficient so there's less loss in poorer nations and ways of re-educating consumers in richer nations to be less concerned about appearance and more concerned about having food.
How children behave in books that are fantasies for children and how children actually behave in situations like those, and the ways that influences writing and whether or not a child might enjoy a book where they have to accomplish something without adult help and intervention.
The use of cheap pigments took the color out of a Van Gogh skyline, which was only discovered when the frame surrounding the piece came off and showed the actual intended color, since that part had been preserved, if accidentally. A world map meant to be assembled large, which gives the mapmaker plenty of space for details, sashimi arranged in exquisite artistic presentation,
Flamingoes are thriving in a polluted area of Mumbai, but the people tracking the pollution say that this windfall will only be temporary. In other pollution-related things, a mystery involving Garfield phones washing up on shore that had gone on for decades is solved, now that the shipping container from whence the phones came has been located and excavated.
Doctor Leopold, a ragdoll that helps people relax and open up to therapists, a mouse that has been putting small scraps back into a bin every night, the discovery of another transition animal - a webbed-foot, hooved whale, the difficulties of trying to move a derelict submarine, including the raccoon infestation, crown shyness that has trees refuse to touch each other at the tops of their branches, the real-world horse origins of a lot of strongly-bonded companion fantasy creatures,
In technology, a jury awarded a significant sum to a man claiming that the weed-killer Roundup was a carcinogen and responsible for the cancer he developed from using the product.
Credit card breaches have become background radiation in our lives -- this one at various Buca di Beppo restaurants and others under the same parent company.
A man who called in a SWAT raid against an innocent man over a small gaming bet has received 20 years in prison for the deed, not least because three deaths are attributable to that one phone call.
For as much as it touts being an evolution up toward 5G, American Telephone and Telegraph's devices don't fare particularly well compared to other carrier's 4G devices. Verizon is getting ready to deploy actual 5G, but it will only work with one phone in two cities, and you'll pay extra for the privilege of accessing the 5G network in those cities.
greywash offers a useful primer on semantic HTML and why you want to separate visual CSS from content HTML as much as possible. (Because people with disabilities, feature phones, and/or Netscape Navigator 4 still use the World Wide Web and want to consume your content.)Good reasons why the Domain Name System needs better security (and why you might want to switch your DNS provider away from your ISP to something different.)
The idea of Amazon as the answer to questions and specific limitations reagrding space and quality that were first encountered by Walmart, as well as some of the problems that Amazon is now having to fight based on how they chose to answer some of those questions.
Science-themed Peep dioramas.
Last for tonight, Millions of Cats, the oldest picture book created in the United States that's still in print. Also, Nathan W. Pyle's Starnge Planet, a comic series about aliens looking at and doing common human practices with delight and curiosity. (ETA: We are informed that the creator of the comic is not a fan of bodily autonomy for women. Further information about the preferences of the creator and how much their belief is private versus public.)
And you know how difficult it is to find trans and enby rep in stock photography? (Exceedingly.) So the folks in a Vice Department created the Gender Spectrum Collection, a series of stock photographs of trans and enby people (and not just all white people, too) available to the public for use.)
Finally, A Twitter thread about things that are common knowledge in all sorts of industries but would otherwise be completely shocking to anyone outside of that industry. Some of which are very familiar. And many that involve the House of Mouse.
