The times roll by - March-April 02019
Apr. 24th, 2019 07:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGood morning! Let's get started with pictures of a black hole. Using a telescope array and supercomputers to piece the data together, we have a picture of the black hole and the surrounding area.
(We also have the metaphorical black hole of the concentrated harrassment campaign against one of the visible faces of the project because she's a women and a bunch of men believe that women should never be in science at all.)
Secondly, a high school in New Jersey adapted the film Alien as a stage production and created everything they needed for it out of recycled materials. The few clips linked in the Mary Sue article show excellent production values, set design, costuming (have a look at the Xenomorph they created!), and acting. That's awesome.
elf is producing a three-part series on the future of Pillowfort, a hybrid blog-Tumblr social media site. Part One talks about how Pillowfort doesn't appear to have a plan in place on how to make itself sustainable and work on the things that will bring in value, once the money from their Kickstarter and beta keys runs out. Part Two focuses on administrative decisions and policies, many of which aren't made in public and aren't strongly worded and swiftly enforced in public either. They can't build enough trust to get people to stick around without making decisions where people can see them, read the reasoning, and then decide whether that makes Pillowfort the place they want to invest time and resources in.
Updates to the Associated Press style guide that look to moving in a good direction, courtesy of the 2019 ACES conference.
astolat posted the idea of AO3 as a community garden, built with care, maintained by community, supported by visitors and regulars alike in the context of the AO3's nomination for a Hugo.
Non-humans in a book communicate in non-human ways that say a lot about the non-human society. That's important worldbuilding. So is acknowledging that reality is unrealistic, and therefore what seems improbable or impossible to you is someone else's lived experience most of the time.
Generation X was raised by parents that believed most things could be recovered from without the doctor. Including things that really did need to be seen by a doctor. There's probably some interesting research that could be done about whether it was because the parents wanted to raise "tough" children, or whether there were very real concerns about finances and costs. Because now-a-days, even if you have insurance, going to get medical treatment is a thing that can completely screw up your finances. (Unless, of course, you live somewhere that has sensibly decided that medical care is a thing that should not bankrupt you.)
If you market a short-story dispenser as an alternative to people being lost in their social media distractions on he commute, you fundamentally misunderstand what people are doing on their commutes and why they are seemingly so absorbed in their portable devices.
The concept of the bibliophile who has built their social status around having books, as a way of trying to explain the (often racist) backlash against Marie Kondo's inclusion of books as things that need to be evaluated as to whether they should continue to be in a household. The article doesn't do a great job of providing support to the idea, with adjective choices that suggest that books are, more and more, a thing to be associated with women, even though their greater point is supposed to be about how books are still being deployed as status symbols and cultural signifiers rather than existing as things people would like to read. I think thatsiderea does things better in Marie Kondo and the Bibliophibians, which talks about books as signifiers of class, aspiration, and values, and the ways that people who see books as class signifiers and a way of passing their legacy on to the next generation do not react well to someone telling them a thing that sounds suspiciously like "you should not be who you are -- stop being weird and things will be better for you."
And if that phrase strikes a chord (scare or otherwise) in you, for some of you, that chord has its origins in the schooling system. You cannot learn anything if you are focused on more important things, like survival, remarksslashmarks, which is a thing that we have known for a while, but still seem unwilling to apply in the broadest possible sense when it comes to required schooling. (And sometimes complement it with recognition that what is ostensibly being taught in schools is different than what is actually being taught.)
Getting pictures of brains having migraines has helped understanding of them be more like "this is a sensory processing problem that produces these symptoms" rather than "it's like an allergy, avoid stress and drink water and you'll be fine."
IF you have been waiting for the perfect reason to point and laugh at Nigel Farage (because there are so many other ones already present) this particularly sick burn of Nigel Farage's knee-jerk antintellectualism is about as good as you will get.
Also, if you would like an example of "white fragility" to use when it would be appropriate to do so, a bunch of white people compmlained about a presenter pointing out that a pro-Brexit rally had "so many white people in one place”. Because fragility demands that any time someone actually marks the unmarked default, it's for some nefarious or insulting purpose, rather than someone being accurate about the fact that it's a bunch of white people, not a bunch of people.
Thailand elected a non-binary MP, which is news for a lot of trans right issues, and also because this MP has been making films about the experience, s oone can hope that they are able to be effective at their aims.
Corpoations are beginning to engage in conservative-baiting, producing ads deliberately designed to offend the sensibilities of groups like the American Family Association, because they know the conservatives will take the bait, and that will generate media coverage and social media sharing, which puts the brand in the minds of people. I wonder if something like this is closer to the concept of "virtue signaling", as it's used by people who want to discredit whatever they're looking at as being insincere.
Comedy that punches down is increasingly being called to account. But that doesn't mean that comedy is somehow being pulled backward. It just means that if you want to be funny, you have to always be oriented toward punching up and not taking easy ways out that will get a laugh because of reliance on -ist stereotypes.
And it's not just in comedy, either. Advertising has to take a hard look at itself and what sort of images it wants to promote. It's another place where having people in positions of power, not tokenizing them, and then listening when there are concerns brought up would make things a lot easier and better.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals of the United States says that Seattle (and other cities in its jurisdiction) can't interfere with someone's right to have a place to sleep, so if they want to stop people experiencing homelessness from encamping, they have to offer hem a place to sleep. Which is something that would require some investment to produce and provide, both in the short term and the long term.
Mr. Kavanaugh is going to spend a summer in the UK teaching about the United States Constitution. Please select whichever piece of humor is apppropriate to the context and then react as if I had delivered it with timing and sensitivity. Because otherwise there will be a lot of "on what grounds does this person get to talk about anything at all that would require jurisprudence and an understanding of the law?" on repeat.
Journal publisher Elsevier does not appear to have enough editors to catch and weed out articles making spurious claims under racist acronyms, and at least one of the higher-ups in the company thinks this is a problem that will always exist.
Journalism producers can use their content management systems to signpost more obviously how old or discredited various things they have written on are, and especially with the idea in mind of making sure accurate information about date and provenance appears in social media previews.
Julian Assange has been arrested, after the embassy that he had sought asylum in expelled him. There's a robust debate to be had about whether or not the United States' request for extradition should be allowed to proceed, but there's enough evidence and charges that can be filed against Assange that someone is going to put him on trial for something, somewhere.
A fire, so far classed as an accident, ravaged a significant amount of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. The damage, while extensive, was not total. Some of the artwork embedded in the cathedral survived the blaze.
On the same day, a fire broke out in the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, although it was smaller, moreo easily contained, and there's no link between the two fires at all. But still, one gets a lot of coverage, the other didn't.
Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed: Unity got a significant raise in review score because of its extremely detailed rendering of the Notre Dame (which I have heard rumors might be used as a blueprint for restorers to try and recreate it as much as possible.)
The Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab fed all the names of previous scents to a nural network and developed a collection based on the names that it returned for new scents. Peruse the collection for the artwork associated with the names, if nothing else.
Small farms producing the vegetables of Asia are keeping heritage alive and offering an alternative to the mass production agribuisness technique that wans to make them as exotic as possible.
Tattoo art designed to look like an embroidery patch sewn on to the skin. Utilizing a light display to visualize the amount of air pollution in various spaces around the world. The more lights there are, the worse the air pollution is. Hostile Infrastructure, an art installation that invites the observer to participate in what navigating the world in a wheelchair is like, including many of the common accessibility failures of our spaces with regard to wheelchairs. The Establishment closed, although their content will remain. Pink lakes in Australia, thanks to algae.
Large, multiply-colored squirrels of India, a suspected rhinoceros poacher killed by an elephant and then eaten by lions, a fungus that indiscriminately kills amphibian species, a paper on the use of a Skrillex song to disrupt mosquito attack and mating behavior, and shelther dogs getting sleepovers to reduce their stress levels.
In technology, The Russian Federation insists that even places that provide virtual private networking censor the sites they have demanded be censored. Given that VPNs are often the item of choice for avoiding government censorship, this seems like a bad deal for everyone.
As usual, the market for finding digital manga is fragmented, and if you want to read widely, you'll be using and paying for a wide swath of apps.
The 737 Max crashes are not just a failure of software -- there's a significant amount of regulatory failure and possible collaboration with Boeing that can be blamed for everything that lined up just right to produce the crashes.
Sand, a resource that seems infinite, is anything but. Which means changes in concrete, cement, and other materials so that we don' run out of sand.
Social media accounts of those who clean up after crime scenes, or otherwise do forensics on them. Because there's a market for everything, it seems.
Visualizing prime numbers as if they were crystalline diffraction patterns produces some interesting light patterns.
The source code for Infocom text-adventure games of the 1980s is available on GitHub, for however long, and someone can learn the language used in the creation of those games from a helpful manual involved. And ot supplement your reading, The Infocom Cabinet, an archive of documents, notes, and more about the creation of those same games.
If you're still on Tumblr, Tumblr posts the source IP of comments and asks in the posts themselves, which means you have some way of blocking someone, so long as they use the same IP address all the time.
Last for tonight, a gentle reminder - petrol is not an effective infield-drying agent, as much as people might want it to be, and as much as it sounds like it might be some sort of effective method to spread it and light it on fire to draw the moisture out.
Championship level tag - use parkour equipment in a confined space, and see if you can last 20 seconds without being tagged. It's harder than it sounds.
Also, turning candies and peeps into sushi-like creations. Mostly by taking the heads off Peeps, but there are other things to do with the decapitated marshmallow puffs.
(Okay, one last thing, no really - A Pole Sport Organization where a Deadpool takes to the art of the pole [Video, Youtube].
(We also have the metaphorical black hole of the concentrated harrassment campaign against one of the visible faces of the project because she's a women and a bunch of men believe that women should never be in science at all.)
Secondly, a high school in New Jersey adapted the film Alien as a stage production and created everything they needed for it out of recycled materials. The few clips linked in the Mary Sue article show excellent production values, set design, costuming (have a look at the Xenomorph they created!), and acting. That's awesome.
elf is producing a three-part series on the future of Pillowfort, a hybrid blog-Tumblr social media site. Part One talks about how Pillowfort doesn't appear to have a plan in place on how to make itself sustainable and work on the things that will bring in value, once the money from their Kickstarter and beta keys runs out. Part Two focuses on administrative decisions and policies, many of which aren't made in public and aren't strongly worded and swiftly enforced in public either. They can't build enough trust to get people to stick around without making decisions where people can see them, read the reasoning, and then decide whether that makes Pillowfort the place they want to invest time and resources in. Updates to the Associated Press style guide that look to moving in a good direction, courtesy of the 2019 ACES conference.
astolat posted the idea of AO3 as a community garden, built with care, maintained by community, supported by visitors and regulars alike in the context of the AO3's nomination for a Hugo.Non-humans in a book communicate in non-human ways that say a lot about the non-human society. That's important worldbuilding. So is acknowledging that reality is unrealistic, and therefore what seems improbable or impossible to you is someone else's lived experience most of the time.
Generation X was raised by parents that believed most things could be recovered from without the doctor. Including things that really did need to be seen by a doctor. There's probably some interesting research that could be done about whether it was because the parents wanted to raise "tough" children, or whether there were very real concerns about finances and costs. Because now-a-days, even if you have insurance, going to get medical treatment is a thing that can completely screw up your finances. (Unless, of course, you live somewhere that has sensibly decided that medical care is a thing that should not bankrupt you.)
If you market a short-story dispenser as an alternative to people being lost in their social media distractions on he commute, you fundamentally misunderstand what people are doing on their commutes and why they are seemingly so absorbed in their portable devices.
The concept of the bibliophile who has built their social status around having books, as a way of trying to explain the (often racist) backlash against Marie Kondo's inclusion of books as things that need to be evaluated as to whether they should continue to be in a household. The article doesn't do a great job of providing support to the idea, with adjective choices that suggest that books are, more and more, a thing to be associated with women, even though their greater point is supposed to be about how books are still being deployed as status symbols and cultural signifiers rather than existing as things people would like to read. I think that
siderea does things better in Marie Kondo and the Bibliophibians, which talks about books as signifiers of class, aspiration, and values, and the ways that people who see books as class signifiers and a way of passing their legacy on to the next generation do not react well to someone telling them a thing that sounds suspiciously like "you should not be who you are -- stop being weird and things will be better for you."And if that phrase strikes a chord (scare or otherwise) in you, for some of you, that chord has its origins in the schooling system. You cannot learn anything if you are focused on more important things, like survival, remarks
slashmarks, which is a thing that we have known for a while, but still seem unwilling to apply in the broadest possible sense when it comes to required schooling. (And sometimes complement it with recognition that what is ostensibly being taught in schools is different than what is actually being taught.) Getting pictures of brains having migraines has helped understanding of them be more like "this is a sensory processing problem that produces these symptoms" rather than "it's like an allergy, avoid stress and drink water and you'll be fine."
IF you have been waiting for the perfect reason to point and laugh at Nigel Farage (because there are so many other ones already present) this particularly sick burn of Nigel Farage's knee-jerk antintellectualism is about as good as you will get.
Also, if you would like an example of "white fragility" to use when it would be appropriate to do so, a bunch of white people compmlained about a presenter pointing out that a pro-Brexit rally had "so many white people in one place”. Because fragility demands that any time someone actually marks the unmarked default, it's for some nefarious or insulting purpose, rather than someone being accurate about the fact that it's a bunch of white people, not a bunch of people.
Thailand elected a non-binary MP, which is news for a lot of trans right issues, and also because this MP has been making films about the experience, s oone can hope that they are able to be effective at their aims.
Corpoations are beginning to engage in conservative-baiting, producing ads deliberately designed to offend the sensibilities of groups like the American Family Association, because they know the conservatives will take the bait, and that will generate media coverage and social media sharing, which puts the brand in the minds of people. I wonder if something like this is closer to the concept of "virtue signaling", as it's used by people who want to discredit whatever they're looking at as being insincere.
Comedy that punches down is increasingly being called to account. But that doesn't mean that comedy is somehow being pulled backward. It just means that if you want to be funny, you have to always be oriented toward punching up and not taking easy ways out that will get a laugh because of reliance on -ist stereotypes.
And it's not just in comedy, either. Advertising has to take a hard look at itself and what sort of images it wants to promote. It's another place where having people in positions of power, not tokenizing them, and then listening when there are concerns brought up would make things a lot easier and better.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals of the United States says that Seattle (and other cities in its jurisdiction) can't interfere with someone's right to have a place to sleep, so if they want to stop people experiencing homelessness from encamping, they have to offer hem a place to sleep. Which is something that would require some investment to produce and provide, both in the short term and the long term.
Mr. Kavanaugh is going to spend a summer in the UK teaching about the United States Constitution. Please select whichever piece of humor is apppropriate to the context and then react as if I had delivered it with timing and sensitivity. Because otherwise there will be a lot of "on what grounds does this person get to talk about anything at all that would require jurisprudence and an understanding of the law?" on repeat.
Journal publisher Elsevier does not appear to have enough editors to catch and weed out articles making spurious claims under racist acronyms, and at least one of the higher-ups in the company thinks this is a problem that will always exist.
Journalism producers can use their content management systems to signpost more obviously how old or discredited various things they have written on are, and especially with the idea in mind of making sure accurate information about date and provenance appears in social media previews.
Julian Assange has been arrested, after the embassy that he had sought asylum in expelled him. There's a robust debate to be had about whether or not the United States' request for extradition should be allowed to proceed, but there's enough evidence and charges that can be filed against Assange that someone is going to put him on trial for something, somewhere.
A fire, so far classed as an accident, ravaged a significant amount of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. The damage, while extensive, was not total. Some of the artwork embedded in the cathedral survived the blaze.
On the same day, a fire broke out in the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, although it was smaller, moreo easily contained, and there's no link between the two fires at all. But still, one gets a lot of coverage, the other didn't.
Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed: Unity got a significant raise in review score because of its extremely detailed rendering of the Notre Dame (which I have heard rumors might be used as a blueprint for restorers to try and recreate it as much as possible.)
The Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab fed all the names of previous scents to a nural network and developed a collection based on the names that it returned for new scents. Peruse the collection for the artwork associated with the names, if nothing else.
Small farms producing the vegetables of Asia are keeping heritage alive and offering an alternative to the mass production agribuisness technique that wans to make them as exotic as possible.
Tattoo art designed to look like an embroidery patch sewn on to the skin. Utilizing a light display to visualize the amount of air pollution in various spaces around the world. The more lights there are, the worse the air pollution is. Hostile Infrastructure, an art installation that invites the observer to participate in what navigating the world in a wheelchair is like, including many of the common accessibility failures of our spaces with regard to wheelchairs. The Establishment closed, although their content will remain. Pink lakes in Australia, thanks to algae.
Large, multiply-colored squirrels of India, a suspected rhinoceros poacher killed by an elephant and then eaten by lions, a fungus that indiscriminately kills amphibian species, a paper on the use of a Skrillex song to disrupt mosquito attack and mating behavior, and shelther dogs getting sleepovers to reduce their stress levels.
In technology, The Russian Federation insists that even places that provide virtual private networking censor the sites they have demanded be censored. Given that VPNs are often the item of choice for avoiding government censorship, this seems like a bad deal for everyone.
As usual, the market for finding digital manga is fragmented, and if you want to read widely, you'll be using and paying for a wide swath of apps.
The 737 Max crashes are not just a failure of software -- there's a significant amount of regulatory failure and possible collaboration with Boeing that can be blamed for everything that lined up just right to produce the crashes.
Sand, a resource that seems infinite, is anything but. Which means changes in concrete, cement, and other materials so that we don' run out of sand.
Social media accounts of those who clean up after crime scenes, or otherwise do forensics on them. Because there's a market for everything, it seems.
Visualizing prime numbers as if they were crystalline diffraction patterns produces some interesting light patterns.
The source code for Infocom text-adventure games of the 1980s is available on GitHub, for however long, and someone can learn the language used in the creation of those games from a helpful manual involved. And ot supplement your reading, The Infocom Cabinet, an archive of documents, notes, and more about the creation of those same games.
If you're still on Tumblr, Tumblr posts the source IP of comments and asks in the posts themselves, which means you have some way of blocking someone, so long as they use the same IP address all the time.
Last for tonight, a gentle reminder - petrol is not an effective infield-drying agent, as much as people might want it to be, and as much as it sounds like it might be some sort of effective method to spread it and light it on fire to draw the moisture out.
Championship level tag - use parkour equipment in a confined space, and see if you can last 20 seconds without being tagged. It's harder than it sounds.
Also, turning candies and peeps into sushi-like creations. Mostly by taking the heads off Peeps, but there are other things to do with the decapitated marshmallow puffs.
(Okay, one last thing, no really - A Pole Sport Organization where a Deadpool takes to the art of the pole [Video, Youtube].
no subject
Date: 2019-04-25 02:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-25 10:15 am (UTC)... in hindsight I realise my level of venom toward the Assassin's Creed story is a bit excessive. It's just a bit galling to see that all over the headlines when people I call my colleagues have worked so hard on digital heritage projects and here's what would be a great opportunity to publicise that.
... but then, 80% of 'talking about what historians / archaeologists ahve to say about notre dame' ends up in Bad 'Western Civilisation' Places, so perhaps it's better if we don't
no subject
Date: 2019-04-25 02:10 pm (UTC)The "Bad Western Civilization" situation tends to crop up with a lot of things. It's still worth telling that story, but in the wake of what happens, I suspect there would be concerns about how well it would be received.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-25 03:20 pm (UTC)