Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2019-08-26 08:50 am
silveradept) wrote2019-08-26 08:50 am
More commentary than usual, perhaps. - July-August 02019
Hi! Let's start with the conception of fandoms as cities, some of which are thriving meglopolises, some of which clearly used to be, but have since been deserted, and some of which never really were, although you can clearly see the foundations laid, and some that are more like a nomadic camp that you can see, but that never stay in one place very long.
The concept of micromastery, where someone takes focused effort to learn a small skill. It's not "learn to play a whole song" but more like "learn to play three chords well" (which, if you ascribe to various punk aesthetics, is enough for a whole song), but the point is to engage the brain and the body in doing something unfamiliar until you have a sense of competence with it. Have been doing some of that lately, like using a utility knife to carve cardboard and rewriting a story into an early reader form so it could be displayed in a limited space. (And there's the perennial bit of "someone is having trouble with the technology, let's see what it is this time." that is a hallmark of library work.)
A wave of time-traveling lesbians in fiction reflects the ways that history itself is being corrected to include people who were always there but had been written out of the official accounts, but also the ways in which being something other than the default hero in those stories is inextricably a political act.
Publishers continue to believe that libraries are their business rivals, rather than paying customers who also give their authors exposure and generate new readers for them. Blackstone Audio decided to sign a deal with Amazon's Audible that would make their digital products available exlusively there for 90 days, and in retaliation, the Washington Digital Library Consortium is asking everyone else to boycott Blackstone Audio products for six months. Blackstone signing an exclusive deal with Audible is giving yet more power to Amazon to control things, but also, guess who's going to get the brunt of complaints from useres that they can't get their favorite authors on audio? It's not Blackstone...
Furthermore, after MacMillan decided they would sell a single copy of any new digital release of theirs to a library (library system) for the first eight weeks of that release, the Public Library Association and the American Library Association went "WTF?!" MacMillan's new model is an extra twist of the knife for public libraries, who already have to deal with vastly inflated prices for electronic materials that they can't then sell to each other, loan to each other, and that expire automatically after a certain amount of time or checkouts and have to be rebought at those exorbitant prices. Jessamyn West is entirely correct in blaming MacMillan for taking a stance that is wrong-headed, wrong-footed, and wrong on the particulars, as well. And in addition to suggesting that libraries and their consortia tell MacMillan to take a long walk off a short pier until they come to the table with a more reasonable idea in mind, I think it's high time that libraries petitioned the Librarian of Cngress to say that the exemptions and privileges afforded to libraries and others regarding physical materials should be immediately extended to their digital counterparts as well. If someone thinks of it as a book, or a movie, or a TV show, or a peice of software, or any other physical item, then it should be treated like one, and both individuals and libraries should be able to own them, purchase them for reasonable prices, and then do with them what they want once they have bought them. If libraries want to get some short-term additional copies for rent, like they do with physical books, that's entirely a doable thing, but I'm tired of having to spend more and more budget to get less and less electronic product, when there is electronic product available at all, and if publishers want to think of libraries as their enemies, then by all means, let's be hostile right back.
Tools do not have inherent moral value, so putting a child on a tether is not necessarily good or bad, so long as care and consideration is put into why such a tool might be used. Which, as with many things, starts to show the underlying assumptions being made about parenting, who should be doing it, what children and parents should be doing in "polite" society (in contravention to what we know physiologically and psychologically about the development of small children), and who inevitably gets blamed when something happens that we don't approve of.
The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton has heard the prayers of those in power who send "thoughts and prayers" to victims of mass shootings. He says, "Get to work fixing the problem or admit you're all fucking hypocrites worshiping a false god.". Related, Dork Tower, like many other comics, saw the writing on the wall long before the rest of society was paying attention. And while a significant portion of the elected governance refuses or is told to refuse to do anything about it, the community will show up to pay their respects, even to people who didn't have any family to help them mourn.
Even small measures like buying back weapons so they can be destroyed could help a little in reducing the number of weapons out and available.
White supremacy, as an idea, seems to be losing ground with the latest generation of white supremacists, who commit their murderous deeds in the name of white nationalism now. As demographics continue to prove out, I suspect the Eurasia/Eastasia swap already underway to solidify such that it was always about having pride in your White heritage and its superiority and needing not to mix with others to preserve that culture, rather than White people being somehow inherently culturally, mentally, morally, and physically superior and more numerous. Those reasons should sound familiar to people who have done a little study on the history of Jim Crow and both the de jure segregation laws and the de-facto segregation practices of the very recent past most visibly seen in states that were part of the rebellion against the Union.
In their time of tragedy, several of the hospitalized victims of a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, refusd to be used as political propaganda tools for the Current Administrator, placing a significant amount of blame on him for rhetoric that incites white supermacists to gather weapons of mass murder and act out their anger.
Given that there are still unpaid bills from a campaign visit to El Paso from earlier in the year, one wonders what recourse the city has to seizing or garnishing campaign contributions to pay the bills still owed them, since they will need that money to help victims and their families.
Participation in sport should be voluntary, and other opportunities afforded for those students who want to do something else on their carnival days. So the competitive can be competitive, and everyone else can have a good time doing something else that they enjoy and gets them moving, if "appreciation of physical activity and exercise" is the main goal there.
In one community, toilets are being revamped so as to make it difficult for anyone other than an average-weight able-bodied user can use them, under the guise of protecting them against people who want to have sex in them or deface them with graffiti. Elsewhere, A London council denied a proposal to demolish a historic gay leather and rubber club and replace it with a high-rise. The developers said they would pay for storage and let the club continue to exist in the basement of the new building, but the councilors were unconvinced the club would continue to thrive in the new space.
A reminder to people with penises that the numbers you have heard about the average size are almost certainly inflated.
A fool spoke the belief that non-consensual and illegal acts were so common in history that the world would be far less populated than it is now, with the implication that no exceptions should be granted at all to those seeking to abort a pregnancy generated by those acts. Instead, the party in power decided they would prohibit federal funds in the Title X program to anyone who acknowledged the existence of abortion, forcing several organizations, including Planned Parenthood, to withdraw from the program.
Title X is one of the most utilized federal programs for providing health and contraceptive care, and now any organization that wants those dollars has to officially pretend that abortion doesn't exist and they cannot tell anyone where they could find such services. Which is a boon for any organization that wants people who can get pregnant to carry all pregnancies to term, regardless of how they were initiated or what the person carrying thinks or knows about their ability to successfully raise a child.
The cruelty is the point. The control of uteruses and tghe destruction of promising talent and ability through endless child-rearing is the point. The reimposition of a radical religious agenda on a nation that explicitly states no law should be made regarding establishing an official religion or preventing citizens from exercising their religious beliefs is the point. Add it the growing list of things that could be prosecuted as high crimes and misdemeanors.
This story of a mother-in-law that expects the royal treatment when she comes to visit reminds me fairly significantly of how my terrible ex thought about the relationship we haad. She had done her part in life and seemed to believe that I could provide for her and the animals all the way to the end, and when I started not being able to provide her fantasy life, she kicked in immediately with how much she had already contribued and the work she was doing at home that should have allowed her not to have to consider returning to work, changing spending habits, or any of the other adustments that would have been needed to make things work on my singular salary. Which hsan't changed that much, but I'm doing a lot better now at being able to keep costs and income closely aligned to each other. Who would have thought that ditching someone who insists on doing things that are actively harmful to you, even after you've articulated what the harm is, what the severity is, and that they're still doing it would turn out to be a sensible decision? And much more strongly than my terrible ex's insistence that anything other than an unambigious "no" meant "convince me."
A columnist thinks that "no drama" in dating means nobody wants committed relationships where there's the danger that people might not be Pollyanna, and berates dudes for not being open to relationships where there might have to be difficult things worked through. Which requires a willful misreading of "drama" to achieve, but even so, I think it's a fine thing for a prospective partner to say up front how much they want to invest in the relationship at the early stage. And if it isn't working out, and nobody wants to inveest more, then why suggest that someone needs to dig in and that their true happiness will happen after they resolve this thing? Because resolving deep and important things needs all people involved to want to resolve the thing and work at it. (Once again, my terrible ex provides the examlpe of someone who puts on the apeparance of wanting to fix things, but doesn't actually do anything meaningful to achieve a fix.) It's fine to have casual partners and dates that aren't going to turn into soulmate-gazing, and it's okay for people to decide they want to leave if they're not getting what they want out of the relationship. (It's not okay to put someone in a position where they can't leave, nor is it a good idea to put yourself in a position where you can't leave.)
Pick-up Artistry by another name: The "Daygame" idea that wants you to believe it's above-board because it's stopping to chat someone up on the sidewalk in broad daylight. It also makes the asumptions that the other person in the conversation is free to leave at any time and will suffer no social consequences for it, that the person instigating it is doing so for the pure and honest reasons of complimenting a pretty person on the street, and that there absolutely does not exist an entire web of interactions, expectations, and other things hiding right behind that means no matter how someone responds to the innocent question, they're going to be blamed for what happens next. And while they may boast stats and stories about their successes, it's still Pick-up Artist stuff, whih has always been nore focused on transactional values than on building friendships or other longer-lasting interactions.
Coasters for alcohol that offer messages about finding mental health services and checking in with your friends and asking how their mental health is, trying to put resources in hand in a place where there may be a lot of people self-medicating or otherwise not able to access trained professional help.
Sex workers need safety and decriminalization. There is nothing about being a sex worker that should make it acceptable for violence to happen to them or for them to have somehow "invited it" by being a sex worker.
Rather than fix the problem of reunaway halth care costs, the Current Administrator thinks it's a better idea to import medicines from countries that keep their costs down by subsidizing with tax dollars and negotiating for low prices. Because that would make things cheaper by insisting that other countries subsidize the costs for U.S. persons. Admittedly, they're already doing it in small and individual amounts, because it can be cheaper to fly to the border, cross, get medication, cross again, and fly back than to buy individually at the pharmacy. Or, maybe, they could fix the problem. (But that would mean less profits fo the rich, so that won't happen in any world where the Rs have even a toehold of power.)
Do your research before embarking upon your studies or other actions. It will save you time and help build the case for the question you're asking. Or it will show you that it's already been done repeatedly and you might have to find some way of making it novel or doing something differently.
Hedgehog mating keeping people up at night, the discovery of fossils suggesting a one meter tall parrot existed at some point on the planet, to exist with the 1.6 meters tall penguin of New Zealand, koalas in human spaces, which like any other wildlife appearing, is a worrisome thing, programs to get penguins that have been oiled by oil spills jumpers/sweaters to protect them from accidentally consuming the oil when they try to get it off of their bodies, bioflourescence that takes light toward the violent end, absorbs it, then re-emits it at a lower wavelength to glow in darker spaces, more penguins adopting eggs, what goes into providing neonatal care for very tiny kittens, a cut-paper octopus with very fine detail crafted from a single sheet, and dolphins needing better wild relations than human ones, and a report from the IPCC that says not only should humans transition toward clearner energy sources, land management and use practices will have to change to make food production more sustainable. As one of the biggest carbon creators, meat production is specifically mentioned, along with deforestation, as things that need to be reworked immediately.
In technology, attempts to reconcile classical models of the world wtih quantum models suggest that certain states are more robust at being measured and replicating themselves into their environment. At least, that's what I think is going on there. Quanta are not always easy to understand.
HyVee store gas stations and other attached items had malware installed in their systems, meaning yet another round of credit and debit card numbers and items being sold on the black market. Yay.
An app that allowed Australians to book appointments with medical practiioners is facing steep fines for having sold patient data to law firms, in addition to allegations that it changed user reviews to make the app more positive than the review actually was. Because someone is always looking to make a buck off your information, and most of them just say it's in their TOS that they can do so.
Protestors in Hong Kong pulled down "smart" streetlamps on the suspicion they might be used to capture faces and other identifying information about them and transmit it back to Beijing.
Data from the Cassini probe suggests that, as universal time goes, the rings of Saturn are relatively new. And speaking of new knowledge, The storm on Jupiter called the Great Red Spot is slowly running itself out of energy. It won't be gone in our lifetimes, likely, but our descendants will get used to the idea of Jupiter without the Spot.
Spend a little time with volunteers who maintain and help run the lighthouses in southern Australia, who get to see some very interesting aurorae, wildlife, and get to do some interesting things in repair and in using a lighthouse as an outdoor cinema screen.
Evaluating your own voice suggests you find things about it you didn't realize you were saying.
What might have been, had playgrounds continued to be places for adventure and exploration, instead of seen as lawsuits waiting to happen from something unsafe.
Choosing good names for your vanity plate, like NULL, may expose a system or convention failure. Wired has a few more times where someone's choice has exposed the problem in the data entry.
Last out, a short video of someone using their hair as an art form.
Japan's KitKats are going to be paper-packaged, and come with instructions for folding the used wrapper into an origami form. Perfect to go along with your October holiday-themed advent calendar.
A reunification of twins, one who was taken by Chinese authorities and adopted out to the States. And a photo archive that needs returning of a wedding where the pictures were seized and not returned by the photo developers.
And get some sleep, if you can. Your brain does better after a nap or a sleep.
The concept of micromastery, where someone takes focused effort to learn a small skill. It's not "learn to play a whole song" but more like "learn to play three chords well" (which, if you ascribe to various punk aesthetics, is enough for a whole song), but the point is to engage the brain and the body in doing something unfamiliar until you have a sense of competence with it. Have been doing some of that lately, like using a utility knife to carve cardboard and rewriting a story into an early reader form so it could be displayed in a limited space. (And there's the perennial bit of "someone is having trouble with the technology, let's see what it is this time." that is a hallmark of library work.)
A wave of time-traveling lesbians in fiction reflects the ways that history itself is being corrected to include people who were always there but had been written out of the official accounts, but also the ways in which being something other than the default hero in those stories is inextricably a political act.
Publishers continue to believe that libraries are their business rivals, rather than paying customers who also give their authors exposure and generate new readers for them. Blackstone Audio decided to sign a deal with Amazon's Audible that would make their digital products available exlusively there for 90 days, and in retaliation, the Washington Digital Library Consortium is asking everyone else to boycott Blackstone Audio products for six months. Blackstone signing an exclusive deal with Audible is giving yet more power to Amazon to control things, but also, guess who's going to get the brunt of complaints from useres that they can't get their favorite authors on audio? It's not Blackstone...
Furthermore, after MacMillan decided they would sell a single copy of any new digital release of theirs to a library (library system) for the first eight weeks of that release, the Public Library Association and the American Library Association went "WTF?!" MacMillan's new model is an extra twist of the knife for public libraries, who already have to deal with vastly inflated prices for electronic materials that they can't then sell to each other, loan to each other, and that expire automatically after a certain amount of time or checkouts and have to be rebought at those exorbitant prices. Jessamyn West is entirely correct in blaming MacMillan for taking a stance that is wrong-headed, wrong-footed, and wrong on the particulars, as well. And in addition to suggesting that libraries and their consortia tell MacMillan to take a long walk off a short pier until they come to the table with a more reasonable idea in mind, I think it's high time that libraries petitioned the Librarian of Cngress to say that the exemptions and privileges afforded to libraries and others regarding physical materials should be immediately extended to their digital counterparts as well. If someone thinks of it as a book, or a movie, or a TV show, or a peice of software, or any other physical item, then it should be treated like one, and both individuals and libraries should be able to own them, purchase them for reasonable prices, and then do with them what they want once they have bought them. If libraries want to get some short-term additional copies for rent, like they do with physical books, that's entirely a doable thing, but I'm tired of having to spend more and more budget to get less and less electronic product, when there is electronic product available at all, and if publishers want to think of libraries as their enemies, then by all means, let's be hostile right back.
Tools do not have inherent moral value, so putting a child on a tether is not necessarily good or bad, so long as care and consideration is put into why such a tool might be used. Which, as with many things, starts to show the underlying assumptions being made about parenting, who should be doing it, what children and parents should be doing in "polite" society (in contravention to what we know physiologically and psychologically about the development of small children), and who inevitably gets blamed when something happens that we don't approve of.
The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton has heard the prayers of those in power who send "thoughts and prayers" to victims of mass shootings. He says, "Get to work fixing the problem or admit you're all fucking hypocrites worshiping a false god.". Related, Dork Tower, like many other comics, saw the writing on the wall long before the rest of society was paying attention. And while a significant portion of the elected governance refuses or is told to refuse to do anything about it, the community will show up to pay their respects, even to people who didn't have any family to help them mourn.
Even small measures like buying back weapons so they can be destroyed could help a little in reducing the number of weapons out and available.
White supremacy, as an idea, seems to be losing ground with the latest generation of white supremacists, who commit their murderous deeds in the name of white nationalism now. As demographics continue to prove out, I suspect the Eurasia/Eastasia swap already underway to solidify such that it was always about having pride in your White heritage and its superiority and needing not to mix with others to preserve that culture, rather than White people being somehow inherently culturally, mentally, morally, and physically superior and more numerous. Those reasons should sound familiar to people who have done a little study on the history of Jim Crow and both the de jure segregation laws and the de-facto segregation practices of the very recent past most visibly seen in states that were part of the rebellion against the Union.
In their time of tragedy, several of the hospitalized victims of a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, refusd to be used as political propaganda tools for the Current Administrator, placing a significant amount of blame on him for rhetoric that incites white supermacists to gather weapons of mass murder and act out their anger.
Given that there are still unpaid bills from a campaign visit to El Paso from earlier in the year, one wonders what recourse the city has to seizing or garnishing campaign contributions to pay the bills still owed them, since they will need that money to help victims and their families.
Participation in sport should be voluntary, and other opportunities afforded for those students who want to do something else on their carnival days. So the competitive can be competitive, and everyone else can have a good time doing something else that they enjoy and gets them moving, if "appreciation of physical activity and exercise" is the main goal there.
In one community, toilets are being revamped so as to make it difficult for anyone other than an average-weight able-bodied user can use them, under the guise of protecting them against people who want to have sex in them or deface them with graffiti. Elsewhere, A London council denied a proposal to demolish a historic gay leather and rubber club and replace it with a high-rise. The developers said they would pay for storage and let the club continue to exist in the basement of the new building, but the councilors were unconvinced the club would continue to thrive in the new space.
A reminder to people with penises that the numbers you have heard about the average size are almost certainly inflated.
A fool spoke the belief that non-consensual and illegal acts were so common in history that the world would be far less populated than it is now, with the implication that no exceptions should be granted at all to those seeking to abort a pregnancy generated by those acts. Instead, the party in power decided they would prohibit federal funds in the Title X program to anyone who acknowledged the existence of abortion, forcing several organizations, including Planned Parenthood, to withdraw from the program.
Title X is one of the most utilized federal programs for providing health and contraceptive care, and now any organization that wants those dollars has to officially pretend that abortion doesn't exist and they cannot tell anyone where they could find such services. Which is a boon for any organization that wants people who can get pregnant to carry all pregnancies to term, regardless of how they were initiated or what the person carrying thinks or knows about their ability to successfully raise a child.
The cruelty is the point. The control of uteruses and tghe destruction of promising talent and ability through endless child-rearing is the point. The reimposition of a radical religious agenda on a nation that explicitly states no law should be made regarding establishing an official religion or preventing citizens from exercising their religious beliefs is the point. Add it the growing list of things that could be prosecuted as high crimes and misdemeanors.
This story of a mother-in-law that expects the royal treatment when she comes to visit reminds me fairly significantly of how my terrible ex thought about the relationship we haad. She had done her part in life and seemed to believe that I could provide for her and the animals all the way to the end, and when I started not being able to provide her fantasy life, she kicked in immediately with how much she had already contribued and the work she was doing at home that should have allowed her not to have to consider returning to work, changing spending habits, or any of the other adustments that would have been needed to make things work on my singular salary. Which hsan't changed that much, but I'm doing a lot better now at being able to keep costs and income closely aligned to each other. Who would have thought that ditching someone who insists on doing things that are actively harmful to you, even after you've articulated what the harm is, what the severity is, and that they're still doing it would turn out to be a sensible decision? And much more strongly than my terrible ex's insistence that anything other than an unambigious "no" meant "convince me."
A columnist thinks that "no drama" in dating means nobody wants committed relationships where there's the danger that people might not be Pollyanna, and berates dudes for not being open to relationships where there might have to be difficult things worked through. Which requires a willful misreading of "drama" to achieve, but even so, I think it's a fine thing for a prospective partner to say up front how much they want to invest in the relationship at the early stage. And if it isn't working out, and nobody wants to inveest more, then why suggest that someone needs to dig in and that their true happiness will happen after they resolve this thing? Because resolving deep and important things needs all people involved to want to resolve the thing and work at it. (Once again, my terrible ex provides the examlpe of someone who puts on the apeparance of wanting to fix things, but doesn't actually do anything meaningful to achieve a fix.) It's fine to have casual partners and dates that aren't going to turn into soulmate-gazing, and it's okay for people to decide they want to leave if they're not getting what they want out of the relationship. (It's not okay to put someone in a position where they can't leave, nor is it a good idea to put yourself in a position where you can't leave.)
Pick-up Artistry by another name: The "Daygame" idea that wants you to believe it's above-board because it's stopping to chat someone up on the sidewalk in broad daylight. It also makes the asumptions that the other person in the conversation is free to leave at any time and will suffer no social consequences for it, that the person instigating it is doing so for the pure and honest reasons of complimenting a pretty person on the street, and that there absolutely does not exist an entire web of interactions, expectations, and other things hiding right behind that means no matter how someone responds to the innocent question, they're going to be blamed for what happens next. And while they may boast stats and stories about their successes, it's still Pick-up Artist stuff, whih has always been nore focused on transactional values than on building friendships or other longer-lasting interactions.
Coasters for alcohol that offer messages about finding mental health services and checking in with your friends and asking how their mental health is, trying to put resources in hand in a place where there may be a lot of people self-medicating or otherwise not able to access trained professional help.
Sex workers need safety and decriminalization. There is nothing about being a sex worker that should make it acceptable for violence to happen to them or for them to have somehow "invited it" by being a sex worker.
Rather than fix the problem of reunaway halth care costs, the Current Administrator thinks it's a better idea to import medicines from countries that keep their costs down by subsidizing with tax dollars and negotiating for low prices. Because that would make things cheaper by insisting that other countries subsidize the costs for U.S. persons. Admittedly, they're already doing it in small and individual amounts, because it can be cheaper to fly to the border, cross, get medication, cross again, and fly back than to buy individually at the pharmacy. Or, maybe, they could fix the problem. (But that would mean less profits fo the rich, so that won't happen in any world where the Rs have even a toehold of power.)
Do your research before embarking upon your studies or other actions. It will save you time and help build the case for the question you're asking. Or it will show you that it's already been done repeatedly and you might have to find some way of making it novel or doing something differently.
Hedgehog mating keeping people up at night, the discovery of fossils suggesting a one meter tall parrot existed at some point on the planet, to exist with the 1.6 meters tall penguin of New Zealand, koalas in human spaces, which like any other wildlife appearing, is a worrisome thing, programs to get penguins that have been oiled by oil spills jumpers/sweaters to protect them from accidentally consuming the oil when they try to get it off of their bodies, bioflourescence that takes light toward the violent end, absorbs it, then re-emits it at a lower wavelength to glow in darker spaces, more penguins adopting eggs, what goes into providing neonatal care for very tiny kittens, a cut-paper octopus with very fine detail crafted from a single sheet, and dolphins needing better wild relations than human ones, and a report from the IPCC that says not only should humans transition toward clearner energy sources, land management and use practices will have to change to make food production more sustainable. As one of the biggest carbon creators, meat production is specifically mentioned, along with deforestation, as things that need to be reworked immediately.
In technology, attempts to reconcile classical models of the world wtih quantum models suggest that certain states are more robust at being measured and replicating themselves into their environment. At least, that's what I think is going on there. Quanta are not always easy to understand.
HyVee store gas stations and other attached items had malware installed in their systems, meaning yet another round of credit and debit card numbers and items being sold on the black market. Yay.
An app that allowed Australians to book appointments with medical practiioners is facing steep fines for having sold patient data to law firms, in addition to allegations that it changed user reviews to make the app more positive than the review actually was. Because someone is always looking to make a buck off your information, and most of them just say it's in their TOS that they can do so.
Protestors in Hong Kong pulled down "smart" streetlamps on the suspicion they might be used to capture faces and other identifying information about them and transmit it back to Beijing.
Data from the Cassini probe suggests that, as universal time goes, the rings of Saturn are relatively new. And speaking of new knowledge, The storm on Jupiter called the Great Red Spot is slowly running itself out of energy. It won't be gone in our lifetimes, likely, but our descendants will get used to the idea of Jupiter without the Spot.
Spend a little time with volunteers who maintain and help run the lighthouses in southern Australia, who get to see some very interesting aurorae, wildlife, and get to do some interesting things in repair and in using a lighthouse as an outdoor cinema screen.
Evaluating your own voice suggests you find things about it you didn't realize you were saying.
What might have been, had playgrounds continued to be places for adventure and exploration, instead of seen as lawsuits waiting to happen from something unsafe.
Choosing good names for your vanity plate, like NULL, may expose a system or convention failure. Wired has a few more times where someone's choice has exposed the problem in the data entry.
Last out, a short video of someone using their hair as an art form.
Japan's KitKats are going to be paper-packaged, and come with instructions for folding the used wrapper into an origami form. Perfect to go along with your October holiday-themed advent calendar.
A reunification of twins, one who was taken by Chinese authorities and adopted out to the States. And a photo archive that needs returning of a wedding where the pictures were seized and not returned by the photo developers.
And get some sleep, if you can. Your brain does better after a nap or a sleep.
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preach
is there a typo in the Dork Tower link?
*eyes the 'your own voice' link* I'm surprised this is news? but then the fact it's in the Guardian clearly means somebody with research money talked to people who know the thing…
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Have you ever seen erectionphotos.com? It's a health and sex ed and body positivity project where the site runner... solicits dick pics from the public and posts them on the internet with commentary. Somehow without making it weird/creepy or at all mean. Just in a tone of "here for your information are some erect penises and the natural range of shapes and sizes they can be."
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Because every other digital thing seems to be running in that direction, having seen how well it worked out for software and how much control and profit they got to retain from licensing rather than selling.