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silveradeptGreetings! If you've joined for Write Every Day, what's in here is what I usually end up doing with my journal space, and can be safely skipped over. Or perused if you want, but there's usually a lot in here and it takes time to go through. What's in here is generally stuff pulled in from people on my Reading Page, annotated and commented, and then packaged into a big blob of post. There's not necessarily rhyme or reason, even when I try to put what I think are similar topics together. So, enjoy the show!
The live-action Little Mermaid movie will star Halle Bailey, making Ariel into a young black redheaded mermaid. (Which she has been before, on stage and such.) Which means more opportunities to have Black Mermaids and pride striping, courtesy Briana Lawrence and a mermaid with darker skin. (The entire Mermay sequence and even more are available on Marcus Williams' Twitter feed, and they're gorgeous!)
Unfortunately, it also means people start coming out of the woodwork to proclaim why it would be impossible for a black girl to be a mermaid, demanding refutation in the most scientifically accurate and profane way. And also, perhaps, a pointed point about perspective and whether choosing that particular place to stake your position might be ill-advised.
Westminster voted to extend the same legality of abortion and same-gender marriage to Northern Ireland, bringing it into line with the rest of the United Kingdom, with strong hopes that if and when Northern Ireland can reconstitute an executive, they will recognize and enforce the legality of the measure (or have it get passed in the devolved parliament there?)
An arson attack at Kyoto Animation killed 33 people, as yet another instance of mass violence occurs. (And that's not even counting all the shootings that have happened in the States, because they've become so frequent as to be a statistic.)
We can all stop and take a moment to appreciate Georgia Tennant Twitterbombing various people commenting about her husband. It's at least on par with Queen Elizabeth photobombing sport athletes in smoothness and skill.
During Prime Days, the workers in Amazon's warehouses staged a work strike to protest their difficult conditions and low wages.
You can now check and see if you are eligible for compensation from Equifax due to their breached data. Just know that the settlement pool has been capped at an absurdly low amount, so the more people that choose the money, the less everyone gets. So the FTC wants you to take the thing that costs no money to Equifax instead of going back and telling them that they need to pony up more money for everybody.
Trying to evade taxes by declaring that God does not want you to usually means the government will get their taxes anyway. Besides, jubilee years only came about once every seven, so you still have to deal with the other six.
stultiloquentia offers Pride and Prejudice as the most conservative of Austen's novels. Which is not to say that it's a conservative novel as we would understand it, just the one that's most willing to work with the strictures of the society of the time. Which fits nicely next to Amelia Bedelia as a subversive figure regarding all the work it actually takes to do domestic things.
A retrospective roundup of things relating to the Choose Your Own Adventure novels and books like it, from before the time they were bought by Chooseco and reissued with their narrative maps on the back cover. Not that they say which path is which necessarily.
Learning to read encompasses more than deciphering squiggles on a page, but also catching rhythm, rhyme, and context, each of which is unique for the author you are trying to read. So one must both forget and learn to read at the same time to be able to read most authors. Sounds kind of Zen, actually. And then remember there's more to reading works than just words said or read on the page, and that actions and body language are important, too.
The Current Administrator hates Megan Rapinoe, because she's fucking awesome. And also stands for a lot of things this administrator doesn't. (Also, Megan and Sue are a couple of world-class athletes who are also a couple, but they've got enough hardware to demand respect from anybody.) We also want the US Women's team to continue in their victorious ways, to give ever more ammunition to the lawsuit the team has filed with US Soccer over the serious pay disparity between men and women's soccer, which Rapinoe's teammate Alex Morgan has joined in on as well. The women's team has been making it big for nearly a decade, but their salaries are not commensurate with their abilities. It's really interesting to watch the eggs come out in force on another social media site proclaiming that the women don't get paid as much because they don't make as much money, and because there's no audience for their game or their league. (And also, usually, they trot out some sort of "the women's national team lost to a men's practice squad, come back when they can beat men consistently.", as if the only way women can be good at anything is by beating men at it.)
Except it's not just women's soccer. It's women's ice hockey, it's women's basketball, it's all of these places where men have no interest in watching athletes at their peak levels or giving them any space or audience to develop. Presumably because they're women, and "everyone knows" women and girls shouldn't/can't do sports professionally, or that women's sports aren't real sports because it's for women.
Their loss that they don't get to see some really good sport, I suppose. Which includes another Women's World Cup trophy, as the United States beat the Netherlands 2-0, with Rapinoe converting a penalty and Rose Lavelle providing an insurance goal on a fabulous left foot strike.
Women Making Bees In Public is and isn't a story about free will, emergent consciousness, and choice. It is definitely a story about mansplaining and all the ways that men with more confidence than knowledge keep interrupting things they have no business being a part of. (And unlike stories in our world, when the men interrupt, they are summarily dismissed without having affected anything at all.)
Stress responses more generally attributed to women may be better for everyone in most stressful situations, as coalition-building and providing a united front are often the most effective ways of getting stresses and threats to go away. (And why it's a tactic of abusers to separate their victims from (or prevent them from building) their support networks.
The tactics put to use by protesters in Hong Kong are masterful at communicating in sign to request what they need, which human chains run from supply stations to the front lines.
The power of nostalgia is quite strong - it's what provoked a backlash against the new Coke formula, even though everyone agreed the new stuff tasted better in the tests. But then again, we know full well that looking backwards gives you much greater clarity than otherwise. Witness ll the people who have now changed their opinions on Iraq, given that they now know how it turned out.
The power of idealism is equally strong, and is much more easily co-opted by market forces and those who want us to believe our failures are our fault and our successes lie in other people's opinion of us.
Hey, look, a book review done by someone who appears to get music fandom and notes the author does, too, instead of dismissing women and girls as insane or otherwise driven by base emotions.
If you have enough brain to do so after being subjected to an extreme or edgy marriage proposal, say no. And if you can't, break off the engagement as soon as you can. (Unless this was absolutely all scripted out, planned out, and agreed to in advance because you wanted that kind of thing as your wedding proposal, of course. If it's sudden or unexpected or otherwise not been fully consented to, getting away soon is a good idea.)
Because there exist magistrates who will absolutely decide that the prospects of a rapist are more important than seeking full justice for his rapist, and those judges would probably laugh at the thought that a husband would endanger their wife so, or chide her for agreeing to this sort of thing.
Witness all the people arrested for smaller violations of sex offender registry violations while Jeffrey Epstein suffered no consequences for serious violations of the same. And yet, his lawyer proclaims that his client is being treated far more harshly because he's rich and people are baying for blood. The obvious in this case is that Epstein, with his vastly superior financial resources, is a way bigger flight risk. That question becomes more moot, as Epstein no longer has a mortal body to stand trial with. Given his connections and the charges put against him, however, while incompetence is still the default position, there is more than enough suspicion to warrant making sure that malice, whether physical or mental, wasn't involved.
Choosing to write about imperfect sex seems to result in everyone thinking all of your work is about imperfect sex. Because people get hung up on the sex part. Or, say, you get profiled as a sex worker because you look Asian, even if you're a doctor.
Being concerned about a birth rate often means focusing on the wrong thing (what the capitalists want) as opposed to the right things (what women want, or even, just possibly, that it's none-ya-business).
Saudi Arabia has eased several restrictions on women, allowing them to travel, get passports, apply for guardianship, and otherwise participate more in society without the requirement of getting permission from a man judged their keeper.
The knowledge that viruses can cause cancer came from a woman. The creators of the space suits on the Apollo missions were seamstresses and engineers who worked in making brassieres and girdles. Because women (and especially women of color) have always been part of history and making history, even though the narrative seems to suggest completely the opposite, and tends to default toward White women if it has to include women at all.
What is professionally called African American Vernacular English is a language unto itself, rather than just a dialect, and while it shares words with other forms of English, what it communicates is often vastly different.
The state of Florida is selling their driver information database to brokers, who are using it to conduct direct marketing and spam to residents in possible violation of the law and in utter contempt for the idea the compulsory data you provide to government agencies should not be used as marketing fodder, even if they use public records request laws to obtain it.
Determining whether or not someone is healthy may have more to do with grip strength, walking speed, and ability to do push-ups than with weight or other more common (and often unpredictive) metrics. A person with mental health issues might be interested in seeing if some of their misery is due to inflammation firing at all times.
There's also the need to look structurally and outside ourselves if we want to be truly mindful about what makes us stressed, because there are a lot of things in our lives that are stressing us and aren't internal. If you live in a society with ablist attitudes, for example, that's a significant source of stress for any disability, temporary or otherwise. (So props to the newly-elected lawmakers of the Japanese Diet who have severe disabilities on being visible in a society that is less friendly to the disabled.)
The Yurok Nation has established the rights of the Klamath River, and intend to use their ability to ensure the river stays unpolluted and available as much as possible.
Sometimes even a deeply flawed work can end up doing good, if it sparks interest in discovering the sources used (and misused) by said book. That's the most charitable thing that can be said in this review.
Follow your passions is bad advice…ifyou have a fixed mindset instead of a growth one, because if you have the fixed mindset, then you drop things when they become difficult, because difficulty is the sign of approaching your limits. In a growth mindset, where it's possible to increase your stores of both skill and interest, difficulty is less threatening, and a person can bring as many tools and others to bear on the difficulty as they want to or feel they have. (Of course, this assumes you don't have other people also interfering with your ability to develop new skills and interests by stifling your creativity or dismissing you out of hand (or from your job) if you don't please them with instant solutions to intensely complex problems.) Being okay with being as good as you are and working from there is better in the long run. (Although I'm still a lot grumpy at them about prioritizing "in-real-life" connections over digital ones. I'll give them the research about touch, physical contact, and vulnerability being important to forging good connections and getting human needs taken care of, but I do get shirty at the idea that our digital friends are somehow always lesser than our meatspace ones.)
Especially when you have a situation where you've made yourself into something smaller, lesser, and not yourself at the behest of someone in meatspace and all of the people around them, and sometimes you don't exactly know how to spring back into being the person you expected to be before that situation.
Reedy Press asked someone to write them a book for free, and told them they should beg restaurants to give them free meals so they could write about them for this book they were doing for free. The only person potentially making money on the deal would be Reedy Press when the books sold. Everyone else would apparently have to live on the exposure. So, when everything was retweeted and shared widely about this contract idea of writing a book for zero dollars and asking restaurants to provide food for zero dollars, Reedy Press got a rejection from the person they'd approached, who helpfully pointed out all the work they had done to give Reedy Press exposure, so they should have people knocking down their doors with offers to write books for them for zero dollars.
A dancing cockatoo might be exhibiting creative behavior for social purposes, which is fascinating, as humans are generally the only beings humans thought did that thing. Echidna mating may keep you up at night, but it will also help the scientists learn more about them. So, tradeoff, I guess...? Also, following a research scientist who works on pests like bedbugs and cockroaches. [CN: Pictures and descriptions of said pests and their habits.]
In technology, a laity-friendly explanation of what the Joint Photographic Experts Group did when they created their file format, which apparently involves a significant amount of various compressions and operations to make a file size small and to make the smaller image mostly the same to the human eye. It's fascinating, and also interactive.
A search engine that plants a seedling for every forty-five searches run with them, hoping to get as many trees in the ground as possible to soak up CO2 emissions. Which may be good for all of us, if having leafy trees in our environments helps reduce the stress in our lives.
Solving the problem of blurriness from lenses at the edges, by adding a second lens to shape the light so that the first gets what it wants. Which, regrettably, means there's no general solution, only specific ones for particular lenses and distances.
Simulations suggesting that local neighborhoods could generate and distribute renewable energy to each other instead of every person connecting solely to the grid and trying to route their renewables that way. I presume there will still be connections to the larger grid for those smart neighborhoods, but local energy management seems like a good idea to engage with in places where there's widespread adoption of local renewable energy generation. Which goes with the public health problems of dealing with extreme heat and the energy-intensive ways that most people try to combat that heat. (Where, if we're honest, most of our First Nations and Indigineous people have been experiencing a form of apocalypse for as long as they've been displaced from their lands by settlers and their governments.)
Subsidization keeps oil and coal around and alive rather than forcing them to become clean to the point of unprofitability or making them switch to other renewable energy sources that could actually turn a profit. And if private and institutional investment dollars continue to pull away from fossil fuels, it could squeeze them from both ends. There's also a handy list of climate change objections and the truths behind the ones that have been disproven and still stick around.
Creating artificial glaciers to trap water long enough until it can be used for irrigation. Why ice sometimes forms in spikes instead of smooth sheets.
Browsing popular sites with Javascript turned off and seeing how well, or terribly, they can be used. If at all.
Last for tonight, the mischievous adventures of Ken-chan and Go-chan, attempting to enter a museum on the regular, only to be foiled by the guard standing outside.
And also,forestofglory details the process of coming into the fanfic-reading part of fandom, and it's got warm and fuzzy feelings to it. And a forkton of recommendations of various things in the comments, in case you were looking for more material to read.
Not everyone who exhibits behaviors that could mean autism spectrum or ADHD actually has either of those realities. There's entirely the possibility that they experience things a lot more intensely than the average, and are otherwise neurotypical.
At the same time, I don't want someone who really could use the diagnosis (or even running the battery of tests) to be dismissed as "merely" overexcited and that they really truly can do better if they just be neutrotypical, instead of being the person they are and learning how to work with their own brain. Perhaps the actual solution in this case is developing and funding an educational system where each child receives enough personal attention to learn in their most effective manner, rather than rote and standardization that insists it is the only way forward. To do that, though, someone might have to make the military hold a bake sale for their toys.
Lastly, they-as-singular has been around for centuries, and humans are really good at resolving ambiguities in language, so suck it up and use what pronouns a person says to use for them.
Using kindness as a life philosophy is nearly complete, and also really hard to achieve. We're talking Fred Rogers kinds of kindness here, not the kinds of kindnesses that would kill people because of warped views of their values as humans. For that, we have a story-sketch about what happens to people who believe firmly in their version of heaven, only for it to turn out to be exactly what they wanted byysobel.
And finally, the most simple of truths - not all women are monoliths, and the White woman's experience is the world is vastly different than the Black woman's experience. Knowing the context helps make things understandable, and understanding means things like realizing solidarity and support is way more important and a signal of being helpful when your context is a Black woman who has been expected to go it alone, usually with a child, since they were children.
The live-action Little Mermaid movie will star Halle Bailey, making Ariel into a young black redheaded mermaid. (Which she has been before, on stage and such.) Which means more opportunities to have Black Mermaids and pride striping, courtesy Briana Lawrence and a mermaid with darker skin. (The entire Mermay sequence and even more are available on Marcus Williams' Twitter feed, and they're gorgeous!)
Unfortunately, it also means people start coming out of the woodwork to proclaim why it would be impossible for a black girl to be a mermaid, demanding refutation in the most scientifically accurate and profane way. And also, perhaps, a pointed point about perspective and whether choosing that particular place to stake your position might be ill-advised.
Westminster voted to extend the same legality of abortion and same-gender marriage to Northern Ireland, bringing it into line with the rest of the United Kingdom, with strong hopes that if and when Northern Ireland can reconstitute an executive, they will recognize and enforce the legality of the measure (or have it get passed in the devolved parliament there?)
An arson attack at Kyoto Animation killed 33 people, as yet another instance of mass violence occurs. (And that's not even counting all the shootings that have happened in the States, because they've become so frequent as to be a statistic.)
We can all stop and take a moment to appreciate Georgia Tennant Twitterbombing various people commenting about her husband. It's at least on par with Queen Elizabeth photobombing sport athletes in smoothness and skill.
During Prime Days, the workers in Amazon's warehouses staged a work strike to protest their difficult conditions and low wages.
You can now check and see if you are eligible for compensation from Equifax due to their breached data. Just know that the settlement pool has been capped at an absurdly low amount, so the more people that choose the money, the less everyone gets. So the FTC wants you to take the thing that costs no money to Equifax instead of going back and telling them that they need to pony up more money for everybody.
Trying to evade taxes by declaring that God does not want you to usually means the government will get their taxes anyway. Besides, jubilee years only came about once every seven, so you still have to deal with the other six.
stultiloquentia offers Pride and Prejudice as the most conservative of Austen's novels. Which is not to say that it's a conservative novel as we would understand it, just the one that's most willing to work with the strictures of the society of the time. Which fits nicely next to Amelia Bedelia as a subversive figure regarding all the work it actually takes to do domestic things.A retrospective roundup of things relating to the Choose Your Own Adventure novels and books like it, from before the time they were bought by Chooseco and reissued with their narrative maps on the back cover. Not that they say which path is which necessarily.
Learning to read encompasses more than deciphering squiggles on a page, but also catching rhythm, rhyme, and context, each of which is unique for the author you are trying to read. So one must both forget and learn to read at the same time to be able to read most authors. Sounds kind of Zen, actually. And then remember there's more to reading works than just words said or read on the page, and that actions and body language are important, too.
The Current Administrator hates Megan Rapinoe, because she's fucking awesome. And also stands for a lot of things this administrator doesn't. (Also, Megan and Sue are a couple of world-class athletes who are also a couple, but they've got enough hardware to demand respect from anybody.) We also want the US Women's team to continue in their victorious ways, to give ever more ammunition to the lawsuit the team has filed with US Soccer over the serious pay disparity between men and women's soccer, which Rapinoe's teammate Alex Morgan has joined in on as well. The women's team has been making it big for nearly a decade, but their salaries are not commensurate with their abilities. It's really interesting to watch the eggs come out in force on another social media site proclaiming that the women don't get paid as much because they don't make as much money, and because there's no audience for their game or their league. (And also, usually, they trot out some sort of "the women's national team lost to a men's practice squad, come back when they can beat men consistently.", as if the only way women can be good at anything is by beating men at it.)
Except it's not just women's soccer. It's women's ice hockey, it's women's basketball, it's all of these places where men have no interest in watching athletes at their peak levels or giving them any space or audience to develop. Presumably because they're women, and "everyone knows" women and girls shouldn't/can't do sports professionally, or that women's sports aren't real sports because it's for women.
Their loss that they don't get to see some really good sport, I suppose. Which includes another Women's World Cup trophy, as the United States beat the Netherlands 2-0, with Rapinoe converting a penalty and Rose Lavelle providing an insurance goal on a fabulous left foot strike.
Women Making Bees In Public is and isn't a story about free will, emergent consciousness, and choice. It is definitely a story about mansplaining and all the ways that men with more confidence than knowledge keep interrupting things they have no business being a part of. (And unlike stories in our world, when the men interrupt, they are summarily dismissed without having affected anything at all.)
Stress responses more generally attributed to women may be better for everyone in most stressful situations, as coalition-building and providing a united front are often the most effective ways of getting stresses and threats to go away. (And why it's a tactic of abusers to separate their victims from (or prevent them from building) their support networks.
The tactics put to use by protesters in Hong Kong are masterful at communicating in sign to request what they need, which human chains run from supply stations to the front lines.
The power of nostalgia is quite strong - it's what provoked a backlash against the new Coke formula, even though everyone agreed the new stuff tasted better in the tests. But then again, we know full well that looking backwards gives you much greater clarity than otherwise. Witness ll the people who have now changed their opinions on Iraq, given that they now know how it turned out.
The power of idealism is equally strong, and is much more easily co-opted by market forces and those who want us to believe our failures are our fault and our successes lie in other people's opinion of us.
Hey, look, a book review done by someone who appears to get music fandom and notes the author does, too, instead of dismissing women and girls as insane or otherwise driven by base emotions.
If you have enough brain to do so after being subjected to an extreme or edgy marriage proposal, say no. And if you can't, break off the engagement as soon as you can. (Unless this was absolutely all scripted out, planned out, and agreed to in advance because you wanted that kind of thing as your wedding proposal, of course. If it's sudden or unexpected or otherwise not been fully consented to, getting away soon is a good idea.)
Because there exist magistrates who will absolutely decide that the prospects of a rapist are more important than seeking full justice for his rapist, and those judges would probably laugh at the thought that a husband would endanger their wife so, or chide her for agreeing to this sort of thing.
Witness all the people arrested for smaller violations of sex offender registry violations while Jeffrey Epstein suffered no consequences for serious violations of the same. And yet, his lawyer proclaims that his client is being treated far more harshly because he's rich and people are baying for blood. The obvious in this case is that Epstein, with his vastly superior financial resources, is a way bigger flight risk. That question becomes more moot, as Epstein no longer has a mortal body to stand trial with. Given his connections and the charges put against him, however, while incompetence is still the default position, there is more than enough suspicion to warrant making sure that malice, whether physical or mental, wasn't involved.
Choosing to write about imperfect sex seems to result in everyone thinking all of your work is about imperfect sex. Because people get hung up on the sex part. Or, say, you get profiled as a sex worker because you look Asian, even if you're a doctor.
Being concerned about a birth rate often means focusing on the wrong thing (what the capitalists want) as opposed to the right things (what women want, or even, just possibly, that it's none-ya-business).
Saudi Arabia has eased several restrictions on women, allowing them to travel, get passports, apply for guardianship, and otherwise participate more in society without the requirement of getting permission from a man judged their keeper.
The knowledge that viruses can cause cancer came from a woman. The creators of the space suits on the Apollo missions were seamstresses and engineers who worked in making brassieres and girdles. Because women (and especially women of color) have always been part of history and making history, even though the narrative seems to suggest completely the opposite, and tends to default toward White women if it has to include women at all.
What is professionally called African American Vernacular English is a language unto itself, rather than just a dialect, and while it shares words with other forms of English, what it communicates is often vastly different.
The state of Florida is selling their driver information database to brokers, who are using it to conduct direct marketing and spam to residents in possible violation of the law and in utter contempt for the idea the compulsory data you provide to government agencies should not be used as marketing fodder, even if they use public records request laws to obtain it.
Determining whether or not someone is healthy may have more to do with grip strength, walking speed, and ability to do push-ups than with weight or other more common (and often unpredictive) metrics. A person with mental health issues might be interested in seeing if some of their misery is due to inflammation firing at all times.
There's also the need to look structurally and outside ourselves if we want to be truly mindful about what makes us stressed, because there are a lot of things in our lives that are stressing us and aren't internal. If you live in a society with ablist attitudes, for example, that's a significant source of stress for any disability, temporary or otherwise. (So props to the newly-elected lawmakers of the Japanese Diet who have severe disabilities on being visible in a society that is less friendly to the disabled.)
The Yurok Nation has established the rights of the Klamath River, and intend to use their ability to ensure the river stays unpolluted and available as much as possible.
Sometimes even a deeply flawed work can end up doing good, if it sparks interest in discovering the sources used (and misused) by said book. That's the most charitable thing that can be said in this review.
Follow your passions is bad advice…ifyou have a fixed mindset instead of a growth one, because if you have the fixed mindset, then you drop things when they become difficult, because difficulty is the sign of approaching your limits. In a growth mindset, where it's possible to increase your stores of both skill and interest, difficulty is less threatening, and a person can bring as many tools and others to bear on the difficulty as they want to or feel they have. (Of course, this assumes you don't have other people also interfering with your ability to develop new skills and interests by stifling your creativity or dismissing you out of hand (or from your job) if you don't please them with instant solutions to intensely complex problems.) Being okay with being as good as you are and working from there is better in the long run. (Although I'm still a lot grumpy at them about prioritizing "in-real-life" connections over digital ones. I'll give them the research about touch, physical contact, and vulnerability being important to forging good connections and getting human needs taken care of, but I do get shirty at the idea that our digital friends are somehow always lesser than our meatspace ones.)
Especially when you have a situation where you've made yourself into something smaller, lesser, and not yourself at the behest of someone in meatspace and all of the people around them, and sometimes you don't exactly know how to spring back into being the person you expected to be before that situation.
Reedy Press asked someone to write them a book for free, and told them they should beg restaurants to give them free meals so they could write about them for this book they were doing for free. The only person potentially making money on the deal would be Reedy Press when the books sold. Everyone else would apparently have to live on the exposure. So, when everything was retweeted and shared widely about this contract idea of writing a book for zero dollars and asking restaurants to provide food for zero dollars, Reedy Press got a rejection from the person they'd approached, who helpfully pointed out all the work they had done to give Reedy Press exposure, so they should have people knocking down their doors with offers to write books for them for zero dollars.
A dancing cockatoo might be exhibiting creative behavior for social purposes, which is fascinating, as humans are generally the only beings humans thought did that thing. Echidna mating may keep you up at night, but it will also help the scientists learn more about them. So, tradeoff, I guess...? Also, following a research scientist who works on pests like bedbugs and cockroaches. [CN: Pictures and descriptions of said pests and their habits.]
In technology, a laity-friendly explanation of what the Joint Photographic Experts Group did when they created their file format, which apparently involves a significant amount of various compressions and operations to make a file size small and to make the smaller image mostly the same to the human eye. It's fascinating, and also interactive.
A search engine that plants a seedling for every forty-five searches run with them, hoping to get as many trees in the ground as possible to soak up CO2 emissions. Which may be good for all of us, if having leafy trees in our environments helps reduce the stress in our lives.
Solving the problem of blurriness from lenses at the edges, by adding a second lens to shape the light so that the first gets what it wants. Which, regrettably, means there's no general solution, only specific ones for particular lenses and distances.
Simulations suggesting that local neighborhoods could generate and distribute renewable energy to each other instead of every person connecting solely to the grid and trying to route their renewables that way. I presume there will still be connections to the larger grid for those smart neighborhoods, but local energy management seems like a good idea to engage with in places where there's widespread adoption of local renewable energy generation. Which goes with the public health problems of dealing with extreme heat and the energy-intensive ways that most people try to combat that heat. (Where, if we're honest, most of our First Nations and Indigineous people have been experiencing a form of apocalypse for as long as they've been displaced from their lands by settlers and their governments.)
Subsidization keeps oil and coal around and alive rather than forcing them to become clean to the point of unprofitability or making them switch to other renewable energy sources that could actually turn a profit. And if private and institutional investment dollars continue to pull away from fossil fuels, it could squeeze them from both ends. There's also a handy list of climate change objections and the truths behind the ones that have been disproven and still stick around.
Creating artificial glaciers to trap water long enough until it can be used for irrigation. Why ice sometimes forms in spikes instead of smooth sheets.
Browsing popular sites with Javascript turned off and seeing how well, or terribly, they can be used. If at all.
Last for tonight, the mischievous adventures of Ken-chan and Go-chan, attempting to enter a museum on the regular, only to be foiled by the guard standing outside.
And also,
forestofglory details the process of coming into the fanfic-reading part of fandom, and it's got warm and fuzzy feelings to it. And a forkton of recommendations of various things in the comments, in case you were looking for more material to read.Not everyone who exhibits behaviors that could mean autism spectrum or ADHD actually has either of those realities. There's entirely the possibility that they experience things a lot more intensely than the average, and are otherwise neurotypical.
At the same time, I don't want someone who really could use the diagnosis (or even running the battery of tests) to be dismissed as "merely" overexcited and that they really truly can do better if they just be neutrotypical, instead of being the person they are and learning how to work with their own brain. Perhaps the actual solution in this case is developing and funding an educational system where each child receives enough personal attention to learn in their most effective manner, rather than rote and standardization that insists it is the only way forward. To do that, though, someone might have to make the military hold a bake sale for their toys.
Lastly, they-as-singular has been around for centuries, and humans are really good at resolving ambiguities in language, so suck it up and use what pronouns a person says to use for them.
Using kindness as a life philosophy is nearly complete, and also really hard to achieve. We're talking Fred Rogers kinds of kindness here, not the kinds of kindnesses that would kill people because of warped views of their values as humans. For that, we have a story-sketch about what happens to people who believe firmly in their version of heaven, only for it to turn out to be exactly what they wanted by
ysobel.And finally, the most simple of truths - not all women are monoliths, and the White woman's experience is the world is vastly different than the Black woman's experience. Knowing the context helps make things understandable, and understanding means things like realizing solidarity and support is way more important and a signal of being helpful when your context is a Black woman who has been expected to go it alone, usually with a child, since they were children.
