Shovel The Stuff! May-June 02019
Jun. 15th, 2019 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet's begin with an issue of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies exploring the intersections between disability and fanfiction, which complements nicely The Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures issue on fans and creators of color and their interactions.
Fork Theory, a complement to Spoon Theory, that says everyone has a certain amount of being stabbed with forks that they can tolerate before everything unravels. And pulling out forks can take spoons, so sometimes people do a lot more and longer-lasting damage than they might otherwise think.
melannen is asking for information about pain, pain tolerance, what causes pain, and how people perceive it, with some pain scales that seem much more suited to those with chronic pain or the acuteness of the pain rather than the not particularly helpful one that might be in use in most medical offices.
This year's Wiscon Guest of Honor speech from Charlie Jane Anders highlights a certain amount of being okay with being silly and with not having all the answers. I'd call it Zen, but specifically the sort of Zen (which may not be Zen at all) practiced by the Dragon Conspiracy and its members in Ozy and Millie (and that clearly bleeds through into Phoebe and Her Unicorn).
We salute the passing of Zura Karuhimbi, who used her reputation as a woman with magic to save lives from a mob outside determined to engage in genocide.
If you are a customer of JPMorgan Chase, you have until early August to tell them, by postal mail sent to a specific address, you wish to opt-out of their forced-arbitration clause. There are plenty of other companies also adopting this "you must agree to arbitration and you can't join class-action lawsuits" language as a condition of employment or doing business with them, which, in a legal system that had any shred of decency, would send up immediate and persistent red flags, because anything that companies rush to implement likely has consequences that will screw over the customers or the workers. Maybe the CFPB could step in on this, were it headed by someone who has consumer interests in mind.
A campaign to prevent work dress codes in Japan from requiring their women to wear heels. Good, sensible, comfortable shoes for all, I say.
Tulsa's opera breaks new ground by casting Lucia Lucas as Don Giovanni in the titular opera. More information from NPR and the hope that trans people of all sorts should get roles they audition for, should they have the talent and the range, which Lucia clearly does. More pictures and Lucia's plans to keep singing at Accent, where there are topless shots, if that's a thing you need to be careful about seeing.
A knitting project by a Canadian mayor that tracks the amount of time men are speaking versus women, on a council that is pretty close to even in parity of people. The mayor has specific people that she thinks like to hear the sound of their own voice as contributing to a lot of the disparity.
More severely, the suggestion that moral arguments about abortion and access are a smokescreen for capitalists who desperately need more children as workers and intend to force women into having them by removing all their other options. Which is entirely possible as one of the reasons these restrictions and prohibitions are being sought after. Another is to take them at their word and face and say the ultimate idea is to criminalize the ability of a woman to choose whether or not she has a child. Which highlights the weaknesses of having the effects of laws determined through litigation and political processes, because there's always the possibility that people who are ideologically opposed to you will gain power and set precedents to favor themselves rather than you. That's not necessarily something that can be controlled, unless you like the idea of authoritarian rule where nobody ever gets to be an opposition, much less an opposition in power.
Any claim is a good enough claim if it furthers their agenda, regardless of its truth value. Which should bring scorn and shame from those who believed that their religion was supposed to be for everyone, no exceptions, and that meant including where others sought to exclude.
And if we want to take the capitalists out at the knees on this, Universal Basic Income seems to do pretty well as slowing or reversing many of capitalism's intended terrible effects.
Consider this: is masculinity, the entire concept of what it means to be a man, so fundamentally terrible that it should be scrapped entirely and renamed terrorism? Not just the "toxic" variation, which is pretty clearly over the line, but the general conception of manliness, acceptable masculine behavior, and what is appropriate for men to be doing as opposed to women. There was a piece some time ago talking about how if what you do to define yourself as a man is to say "it's not being a woman," then you've made it something impossible to define or to have any hard boundaries on, because what's "womanly" can always shift so that it's always out of favor, even if it was in favor not that long ago. Masculinity is IngSoc, in this case, always at war with something, always having been at war with something, but what that something is can shift at a moment's notice and nobody is expected to bat an eye at it.
What happens, then, to fill the void if you declare the current form of masculinity too toxic to be redeemed? Does it become that men are still defined as being not-women and things go ever harder about trying to define women? Or will a useful articulation of what being a properly part of society man will appear, and be debated, and amended, and eventually adopted with some amount of delineation and differentiation and the like? I don't know, but I'll bet there's a speculative fiction writer who already has a few books out about it.
The provision and availability of public toilets says a significant amount of what a society values and what it wants to erase. Especially for those places where having a place to relieve yourself has become the domain of commercial entities instead of public ones, and how much capacity there is available between people with penises and people with vaginas for that relief.
Long-haul trucking is increasingly being used and seen as a place where gender minorities can find decent wages and at least some amount of acceptance and community.
And, also, Princess Awesome, another fine attempt at melding cool things and clothing for young dresses, shorts, and leggings-wearers. (And their older and bigger ones, too.)
The richer you are, the longer you are likely to live. And the gap is getting worse, as richer people have more and better access to health care, for both routine things and the really expensive stuff.
A group of students are making packages of menstruation products to send to countries where there is not nearly as easy access to control periods.
Aboriginal Australian communities gifted Christchurch, NZ's Islamic communities with paintings symbolizing shared grief in the wake of the attack.
Fragrance sensitivities cause significant problems for workers, sometimes resulting in lost days due to exposure. About 9% of those surveyed had to take days off because of exposure to fragrance.
After an incident where a guest failed a lie detector and then subsequently took their own life, ITV axed a very popular, but very terrible, chat show. Comparing this show to its compatriots in the States is perfectly on target. For example, distressing and humiliating teenagers, making fun of poor people, and generally being a chat show that cares more about the sensationalism and the audience than the traumas of the people on it.
The poetry of Xu Lizhi, describing the conditions of his life and work at Foxconn, which were created before he completed suicide at 24 years of age. As with many poets, the truth and the rawness of the situation comes through more in poetry than in prose or journalistic writing.
Pride as a militant act against actions by the State, such as what happened at Stonewall, and that raises, centers, and assists those who are most marginalized, rather than what is currently thought of as Pride. Which may have to do with the generational difference of definition about "freedom" to be queer. Because you get one side that wants to have the freedom from being discriminated against or made unsafe, and the other that wants the freedom to be their full and authentic selves without someone bringing down the force of the State on them because they don't feel safe around them. (Or, more often, because they don't feel they would be safe around children, even though we have plenty of age-appropriate ways of talking to children about sex and sexuality.)
Accessibility is always an important thing to consider, and for queer communities, it's very important to not be good on one axis and terrible on another.
Suggestions on finding the interesting things that are often hidden in plain sight.
A Korean film took the top award at Cannes, and the festival released data on the gender breakdown of the directors of the movies screened and judged. Collage and flowers starting very late in life indeed, a look at the nightstands of the people who suffer from chronic illnesses, donations of money to print books of an indigenous sign language, Yonglu, in Australia, the translation of The Very Hungry Caterpillar into Yuwi, one of the other indigenous languages of Australia,
Chimpanzee behavior regarding storing food has scientists wondering if that means future planning is part of their cognitive abilities. A fungus strain that uses gold to decorate itself, a five-second animation, done lovingly in embroidery for each frame, of a cat and a yarnball, accidentally capturing the best thing ever in the form of a bat flying in front of the moon, using solar power to help run a large macademia nut processing facility (and tracing back the ancestry of the known macademia nut families), old trees rediscovered through a storm removing everything covering them, an emu that has adopted a family and joins in the work, dropping penguin huts to help a population find safe places to breed, sea otter pups rescued to Georgia, cute floofs in double dose, a table designed for both cat and human, helping koalas out with some drinking stations, art in New York City that intends to immerse someone in the undersea edxperience, and what happens when you put cameras on cats.
In technology, your reminder that algorithms are making increasingly complex decisions that affect you in subtle and obvious ways, often without human oversight, on the presumption that computers can't have biases encoded into them, and that a significant amount of technology that has the possibility to be helpful is also being used to surveil you and report on you.
Proving they can act as a nonpoliticized entity when they feel like it, the Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to allow telecommunications carriers to block automated calls by default.
Lesiglation was introduced into a United States committee to ban the use of microtransactions for games that minors could conceivably get their hands on. We'll have to see what the full and actual legislation looks like if it gets out of committee. I wouldn't mind seeing a lot of loot-box and pay-to-win type games (or their mechanics in other games) disappear entirely, mostly because I think any game that heavily relies on that kind of randomness could stand to be a better game, instead of having its difficulty determined mostly by the randomness of the loot drops.
Speaking of minors, Teens in Adelaide hacked into Apple's systems, thinking that proving they could do it would result in Apple offering them work. I mean, that is a thing to have on your resume, I suppose, and there's something to be said for hiring the people who prove that your security still isn't as good as it could be.
The limitations of broadcast and streaming bandwidths mean that even if something is filmed with the most cinematic ideas in mind, the actual broadcast might not reflect that vision. Especially for dark scenes, due to current biases in codecs that want to save space on things they don't think are moving.
A recorded video of a solar eclipse by a magician that wanted something for the guests to see.
An app in Australia is connecting businesses and places with excess unsold food and food charities and banks that can use that food to feed the hungry. Which is a great stop-gap solution when there isn't a more coordinated effort to get people fed. Which is way more common than most people think, even today, in a world with a global food supply chain. Whcih itself leads to questions about authenticity and colonialism versus tastiness and locality and discovering the rich culinary history of groups that were forced together by racist laws.
Potato chips reflect culture, and their packaging, construction, and flavor are all part of that reflection. Which is to say, we tend to eat the potato chip that is most culturally relevant to us at the time.
Lox is lox is lox, and the pronunciation of such may not have changed since it first came into being.
The zeer pot, a refrigeration-by-evaporation technology involving two ceramic pots, sufficient sand to fill the space between them, a lid for the smaller pot, and water enough to wet the sand so that it can draw heat out of the inner pot and keep things cool.
An experiment to see whether mathematical predictions of duplication were accurate, using "find two packs of Skittles candy with the same color distribution" as the criteria of duplication. In this experiment, a duplication was found squarely in the predicted range of 400-500 packs of candies.
The Internet Archive received several takedown requests from France, claiming that coverage of the U.S. Government, public-domain works, and scientific papers were all related to terrorism. The demands came with a one-hour deadline to examine and remove the material or face being blocked in France. The Archive said "Um, no. And furthermore, what you're asking is impossible."
Last for tonight, having someone enter your house and clean it is unnerving, so say the least.
rachelmanija requested the most recent scientific material one has on food, nutrition, weight, and so forth. The comments respond in droves. As well as more than a couple justifications for the Space Orcs trope. Having a relationship with food that doesn't rely on starvation, guilt, or other stressful feelings probably helps.
Ballet done intergenerationally between preschoolers and seniors.
The way we signify fairy stories is different across cultures and places.
Leaning on the image of the biker to provide safety and security for children that are victims of abuse.
And A song, in words and ASL, about the fraught negotiations between opposing parties when at least one of them feels their lives are on the line.
Fork Theory, a complement to Spoon Theory, that says everyone has a certain amount of being stabbed with forks that they can tolerate before everything unravels. And pulling out forks can take spoons, so sometimes people do a lot more and longer-lasting damage than they might otherwise think.
melannen is asking for information about pain, pain tolerance, what causes pain, and how people perceive it, with some pain scales that seem much more suited to those with chronic pain or the acuteness of the pain rather than the not particularly helpful one that might be in use in most medical offices.This year's Wiscon Guest of Honor speech from Charlie Jane Anders highlights a certain amount of being okay with being silly and with not having all the answers. I'd call it Zen, but specifically the sort of Zen (which may not be Zen at all) practiced by the Dragon Conspiracy and its members in Ozy and Millie (and that clearly bleeds through into Phoebe and Her Unicorn).
We salute the passing of Zura Karuhimbi, who used her reputation as a woman with magic to save lives from a mob outside determined to engage in genocide.
If you are a customer of JPMorgan Chase, you have until early August to tell them, by postal mail sent to a specific address, you wish to opt-out of their forced-arbitration clause. There are plenty of other companies also adopting this "you must agree to arbitration and you can't join class-action lawsuits" language as a condition of employment or doing business with them, which, in a legal system that had any shred of decency, would send up immediate and persistent red flags, because anything that companies rush to implement likely has consequences that will screw over the customers or the workers. Maybe the CFPB could step in on this, were it headed by someone who has consumer interests in mind.
A campaign to prevent work dress codes in Japan from requiring their women to wear heels. Good, sensible, comfortable shoes for all, I say.
Tulsa's opera breaks new ground by casting Lucia Lucas as Don Giovanni in the titular opera. More information from NPR and the hope that trans people of all sorts should get roles they audition for, should they have the talent and the range, which Lucia clearly does. More pictures and Lucia's plans to keep singing at Accent, where there are topless shots, if that's a thing you need to be careful about seeing.
A knitting project by a Canadian mayor that tracks the amount of time men are speaking versus women, on a council that is pretty close to even in parity of people. The mayor has specific people that she thinks like to hear the sound of their own voice as contributing to a lot of the disparity.
More severely, the suggestion that moral arguments about abortion and access are a smokescreen for capitalists who desperately need more children as workers and intend to force women into having them by removing all their other options. Which is entirely possible as one of the reasons these restrictions and prohibitions are being sought after. Another is to take them at their word and face and say the ultimate idea is to criminalize the ability of a woman to choose whether or not she has a child. Which highlights the weaknesses of having the effects of laws determined through litigation and political processes, because there's always the possibility that people who are ideologically opposed to you will gain power and set precedents to favor themselves rather than you. That's not necessarily something that can be controlled, unless you like the idea of authoritarian rule where nobody ever gets to be an opposition, much less an opposition in power.
Any claim is a good enough claim if it furthers their agenda, regardless of its truth value. Which should bring scorn and shame from those who believed that their religion was supposed to be for everyone, no exceptions, and that meant including where others sought to exclude.
And if we want to take the capitalists out at the knees on this, Universal Basic Income seems to do pretty well as slowing or reversing many of capitalism's intended terrible effects.
Consider this: is masculinity, the entire concept of what it means to be a man, so fundamentally terrible that it should be scrapped entirely and renamed terrorism? Not just the "toxic" variation, which is pretty clearly over the line, but the general conception of manliness, acceptable masculine behavior, and what is appropriate for men to be doing as opposed to women. There was a piece some time ago talking about how if what you do to define yourself as a man is to say "it's not being a woman," then you've made it something impossible to define or to have any hard boundaries on, because what's "womanly" can always shift so that it's always out of favor, even if it was in favor not that long ago. Masculinity is IngSoc, in this case, always at war with something, always having been at war with something, but what that something is can shift at a moment's notice and nobody is expected to bat an eye at it.
What happens, then, to fill the void if you declare the current form of masculinity too toxic to be redeemed? Does it become that men are still defined as being not-women and things go ever harder about trying to define women? Or will a useful articulation of what being a properly part of society man will appear, and be debated, and amended, and eventually adopted with some amount of delineation and differentiation and the like? I don't know, but I'll bet there's a speculative fiction writer who already has a few books out about it.
The provision and availability of public toilets says a significant amount of what a society values and what it wants to erase. Especially for those places where having a place to relieve yourself has become the domain of commercial entities instead of public ones, and how much capacity there is available between people with penises and people with vaginas for that relief.
Long-haul trucking is increasingly being used and seen as a place where gender minorities can find decent wages and at least some amount of acceptance and community.
And, also, Princess Awesome, another fine attempt at melding cool things and clothing for young dresses, shorts, and leggings-wearers. (And their older and bigger ones, too.)
The richer you are, the longer you are likely to live. And the gap is getting worse, as richer people have more and better access to health care, for both routine things and the really expensive stuff.
A group of students are making packages of menstruation products to send to countries where there is not nearly as easy access to control periods.
Aboriginal Australian communities gifted Christchurch, NZ's Islamic communities with paintings symbolizing shared grief in the wake of the attack.
Fragrance sensitivities cause significant problems for workers, sometimes resulting in lost days due to exposure. About 9% of those surveyed had to take days off because of exposure to fragrance.
After an incident where a guest failed a lie detector and then subsequently took their own life, ITV axed a very popular, but very terrible, chat show. Comparing this show to its compatriots in the States is perfectly on target. For example, distressing and humiliating teenagers, making fun of poor people, and generally being a chat show that cares more about the sensationalism and the audience than the traumas of the people on it.
The poetry of Xu Lizhi, describing the conditions of his life and work at Foxconn, which were created before he completed suicide at 24 years of age. As with many poets, the truth and the rawness of the situation comes through more in poetry than in prose or journalistic writing.
Pride as a militant act against actions by the State, such as what happened at Stonewall, and that raises, centers, and assists those who are most marginalized, rather than what is currently thought of as Pride. Which may have to do with the generational difference of definition about "freedom" to be queer. Because you get one side that wants to have the freedom from being discriminated against or made unsafe, and the other that wants the freedom to be their full and authentic selves without someone bringing down the force of the State on them because they don't feel safe around them. (Or, more often, because they don't feel they would be safe around children, even though we have plenty of age-appropriate ways of talking to children about sex and sexuality.)
Accessibility is always an important thing to consider, and for queer communities, it's very important to not be good on one axis and terrible on another.
Suggestions on finding the interesting things that are often hidden in plain sight.
A Korean film took the top award at Cannes, and the festival released data on the gender breakdown of the directors of the movies screened and judged. Collage and flowers starting very late in life indeed, a look at the nightstands of the people who suffer from chronic illnesses, donations of money to print books of an indigenous sign language, Yonglu, in Australia, the translation of The Very Hungry Caterpillar into Yuwi, one of the other indigenous languages of Australia,
Chimpanzee behavior regarding storing food has scientists wondering if that means future planning is part of their cognitive abilities. A fungus strain that uses gold to decorate itself, a five-second animation, done lovingly in embroidery for each frame, of a cat and a yarnball, accidentally capturing the best thing ever in the form of a bat flying in front of the moon, using solar power to help run a large macademia nut processing facility (and tracing back the ancestry of the known macademia nut families), old trees rediscovered through a storm removing everything covering them, an emu that has adopted a family and joins in the work, dropping penguin huts to help a population find safe places to breed, sea otter pups rescued to Georgia, cute floofs in double dose, a table designed for both cat and human, helping koalas out with some drinking stations, art in New York City that intends to immerse someone in the undersea edxperience, and what happens when you put cameras on cats.
In technology, your reminder that algorithms are making increasingly complex decisions that affect you in subtle and obvious ways, often without human oversight, on the presumption that computers can't have biases encoded into them, and that a significant amount of technology that has the possibility to be helpful is also being used to surveil you and report on you.
Proving they can act as a nonpoliticized entity when they feel like it, the Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to allow telecommunications carriers to block automated calls by default.
Lesiglation was introduced into a United States committee to ban the use of microtransactions for games that minors could conceivably get their hands on. We'll have to see what the full and actual legislation looks like if it gets out of committee. I wouldn't mind seeing a lot of loot-box and pay-to-win type games (or their mechanics in other games) disappear entirely, mostly because I think any game that heavily relies on that kind of randomness could stand to be a better game, instead of having its difficulty determined mostly by the randomness of the loot drops.
Speaking of minors, Teens in Adelaide hacked into Apple's systems, thinking that proving they could do it would result in Apple offering them work. I mean, that is a thing to have on your resume, I suppose, and there's something to be said for hiring the people who prove that your security still isn't as good as it could be.
The limitations of broadcast and streaming bandwidths mean that even if something is filmed with the most cinematic ideas in mind, the actual broadcast might not reflect that vision. Especially for dark scenes, due to current biases in codecs that want to save space on things they don't think are moving.
A recorded video of a solar eclipse by a magician that wanted something for the guests to see.
An app in Australia is connecting businesses and places with excess unsold food and food charities and banks that can use that food to feed the hungry. Which is a great stop-gap solution when there isn't a more coordinated effort to get people fed. Which is way more common than most people think, even today, in a world with a global food supply chain. Whcih itself leads to questions about authenticity and colonialism versus tastiness and locality and discovering the rich culinary history of groups that were forced together by racist laws.
Potato chips reflect culture, and their packaging, construction, and flavor are all part of that reflection. Which is to say, we tend to eat the potato chip that is most culturally relevant to us at the time.
Lox is lox is lox, and the pronunciation of such may not have changed since it first came into being.
The zeer pot, a refrigeration-by-evaporation technology involving two ceramic pots, sufficient sand to fill the space between them, a lid for the smaller pot, and water enough to wet the sand so that it can draw heat out of the inner pot and keep things cool.
An experiment to see whether mathematical predictions of duplication were accurate, using "find two packs of Skittles candy with the same color distribution" as the criteria of duplication. In this experiment, a duplication was found squarely in the predicted range of 400-500 packs of candies.
The Internet Archive received several takedown requests from France, claiming that coverage of the U.S. Government, public-domain works, and scientific papers were all related to terrorism. The demands came with a one-hour deadline to examine and remove the material or face being blocked in France. The Archive said "Um, no. And furthermore, what you're asking is impossible."
Last for tonight, having someone enter your house and clean it is unnerving, so say the least.
rachelmanija requested the most recent scientific material one has on food, nutrition, weight, and so forth. The comments respond in droves. As well as more than a couple justifications for the Space Orcs trope. Having a relationship with food that doesn't rely on starvation, guilt, or other stressful feelings probably helps.Ballet done intergenerationally between preschoolers and seniors.
The way we signify fairy stories is different across cultures and places.
Leaning on the image of the biker to provide safety and security for children that are victims of abuse.
And A song, in words and ASL, about the fraught negotiations between opposing parties when at least one of them feels their lives are on the line.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-23 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-23 11:51 pm (UTC)