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silveradeptCheers! Let's get started with the idea of a Sailor Moon-themed cafe with live stage show that will do three performances every night. (Wisely, they split the performances between two actors, so nobody is doing twenty-one shows each week all by themselves.)
On the other side, a restaurant chain that specializes in people dining by themselves, with reasonably-priced food, power for electronics, and connectivity. Which would make them excellent places to work and dine by yourself.
More naked men on television! Especially in period dramas where men stripping down to swim in the water would be entirely culturally appropriate.
As hurricane season continues, remind yourself that the Waffle House chain of restaurants probably has better emergency preparedness logistics than the federal government does.
The linguitic utility of "like" is much the same as "fuck", but without the profane connotations. And has similar groups slagging on it, thinking it a particle of the unrefined and otherwise lower-class, when it is far more useful than that.
If you think there's a dearth of novels these days that wear their politics on their sleeves as well as having their narrative, you're not looking in the right place. They even hint at the most fertile ground for such a campaigning novel (Young Adult) before dismissing them as too dystopian to count. Because stories about Black kids getting shot and then having to deal with corruption in the neighborhood and in the police don't qualify, I guess. Or any of the many stories being written by women about women stuck in repressive patriarchal societies that find their way through (and possibly cause a great deal of carnage while they are at it.)
The columnist should probably just come out and say "where have all the utopic political novels written by men gone?" because that seems to mostly be the sole thing they believe counts for what they're looking for.
And I'll just put this announcement that an award named after someone who doesn't measure up to the standards of today will be changing the name to the magazine instead for no apparent reason.
One way of producing a compelling villain is by giving the reader reasons to believe the villain is correct in their assessment of society. I don't think it's quite as something as "heroes and villains have similar ideals, but heroes only use specific methods to reach those ideals," but if you want people to follow or espouse what the villain believes, it has to make sense to the people who are doing that. You can't have Always Chaotic Evil who do things for the lulz all the time, because "doing it for the lulz" often has a second, underlying motivation, whether that's "I believe that I should be allowed to do this behavior and suffer no social consequences" or "the person I am attacking has several terrible things they have done in their past, and this is the most effective way of making sure they don't get anywhere near the levers of power" or "I think women should stay in the kitchen and make babies, so I will attack them relentlessly until they give up on any hope of public change." Not every villain or allied entity has to have the same motivations to do what they're doing, and that might be an important part of untangling what's going on, because someone who allies themselves with supremacists because they think they're going to be most effective at hurting a detested minority has less loyalty than, say, someone who aligns themselves with them because they really do believe in the supremacy of their chosen race or religion. They may have faulty premises and bad conclusions, but if it's clear how a villain got to where they are, they work better. "Bitches be crazy" might be something a villain says, but it's not a full justification unto itself, and the narrative needs to make sure it does the job of showing the how and the why that statement got uttered.
If you had to choose just two genders to represent everything, what would you choose? Plenty of good examples in there of "the two genders" that have all sorts of things to do with classification, but very little to do with sexual equipment.
If you're looking for somewhere that strongly reinforces the idea of the gender binary, your local sport federation is probably one of your best examples. There's a significant amount of discourse around women's sport that would be classed as TERF-y at the very least.
Women also get told their pain is less important and treatments for that pain are less important, when anyone bothers to believe them that they're in pain in the first place. Oh, and the additional work that women generally end up doing makes it seem like they're multi-tasking, but they're not. Additionally, it takes a lot longer for someone to do rigorous studies on women's anatomy to learn as much as possible about it.
Menstrual cups are fairly old technology, but things that are old are new again, although hormonal contraception continues to be the item of choice for a lot of people who want to control their periods.
A theater production was succeeding at getting the audience engaged, until a dude decided his experience of the play was more important that everyone else's and shushed everyone as it being "just a play". William Shakespeare would like a word with you, sir, about what the proper decorum for a theater production is, and no, it's not silence and decorum.
Being out as a medical professional or student has significant risk of phobic behavior from both patients and other staff, and because of the entrenched hierarchies in medicine, it can be very difficult to call a senior professional to the carpet for their -ist behavior around you.
Tasmanians get to change their identity documents to properly reflect their gender identity.
October 8 will be an important day for questions about whether federal discrimination protections based on sex also extend to gender identity and sexual orientation. As one might guess, the administration is all about keeping the ability to discriminate. One hopes that the courts recognize those protections extend to all persons, cis or trans, and whomever they might be interested in.
Several prominent names in independent games have been publicly accused (with others supporting those accusations) of significant sexual misconduct. How nice it would be if we had a world where the people who are good at what they do are also able to be good human beings. I realize for a lot of them, it would be contradictory, as being good at what they do requires them to be terrible human beings.
What does it take for children to sever contact with their parents?. From the experiences described in the article, generally, parental abuse will fit the bill nicely. (Even when it's a different parent that's doing the abusing, as the part that spends the longest on the person estranged from her children because her ex abused and gaslit everyone around.)
Japan's cultural issues with groping and harassment of women continue to produce useful workarounds, including a stamp to mark gropers that can be revealed under UV light, or smartphone apps to help make the assailant's acts public and shameful. Which has a friend in South Korea's market for hidden recording devices to document workplace harassment and bullying.
And the women that need to curtail the actively-harassing charity solicitors in Australia.
One way of plotting out a novel-length work. Which, like all writing advice, needs appended to it that anything that works can be kept and anything that doesn't work is to be yote into the sun. (It may work later, sure, with time and experience, but if it isn't working now, don't hang on to it.)
The public theology of Rachel Held Evans was no less evangelical than the fire-and-brimstone that usually graces Christianity, but since it was a theology that aimed and succeeded at being inclusive and widening the tent rather than excluding it only to the select elect, it hasn't had nearly enough attention paid to it. If Christianity were practiced more like it is written about in this piece, as Rachel Held Evans practiced it, there would be a lot less reflexive aggravation at someone saying they were a Christian. Because there's far too many examples of people who want to use their Christian status to damn others, rather than hold space for dialogue and to show the wonders of their practice by seeing them in practice. It seems that Rachel Held Evans found a way to remain true to the origins and pronouncements of the religious history of Christianity and incorporate the message of Christ into that, so as to create a practice and a belief that holds true to the idea of a Being who made a contract with the people that required sacrificing himself to make it work and extrapolating what kind of Being would make that kind of sacrifice. Not necessarily a gentler Christianity, but certainly a kinder one.
The expletive Jesus H. Christ seems to have been derived from a corruption of the first three letters of the Hellenization of Jesus's name.
The virtue of the semicolon as pause and as something that bends or flips off the rules of grammar with its presence.
When thinking about horses and their SF/F equivalents, understand that horses are bred for specific purposes, which influences their morphology. Describe a horse built for the purpose you intend to put it to. Which sometimes means you need a mule instead.
The archaeological trace of sea otter populations, how the beach transformed from a place of danger and worry to a place of leisure, the return of an ecosystem to the River Thames (amazing what those environmental regulations will do for you, isn't it?), and the way a Singaporean airport becomes a place for locals and visitors to congregate together by incorporating the best of nature and people.
In technology, a treasure of coins discovered exposes a taxation scam from the era of William the Conqueror.
mrissa has some musings on how difficult it is to know why people subscrube and stop subscribing to patronage. It's a little better for starting than for stopping, but for people who are doing the creating for their patrons, it's entirely possible they are doing things the patrons aren't interested in and there's no real way of knowing.
If your city doesn't have public and accessible places for people to handle bodily functions, you're creating a problem for more than just the unhoused in your community. Yes, people are going to complain about those facilities being used improperly or defaced or otherwise, but there's a certain value to having it concentrated in a single space instead of spread everywhere. For the people doing it, though, it's probably more about intentional cruelty to the unhoused or being subtly discriminatory based on assumptions of who you think needs to use those facilities.
The idea of living out of one's vehicle deliberately is quickly replaced by the reality of the expense of living transiently. As anyone who has done cursory study on the matter knows, poverty is fucking expensive.
The process of constructing Oak Ridge, Tennessee, meant to be a top-secret space for nuclear research, and the deliberate obfuscation (and discrimination) built into the construction so that it would be as secret as possible.
A suggestion on how to defeat earworms by redirecting what the mouth and jaw do so there's less space for a signal to sing along to get to the mouth.
When your vehicle's locks and starters depend on connectivity and power, suffering a glitch in a dead zone leaves you stranded and without recourse. This is the sort of thing were even 99.99999999999% working still leaves people with a not-working thing in a potentially life-and-death situation. A manual override is a really necessary thing in this case, even if it might only be used 1 in 1,000,000 times.
Last for tonight, The recycled art of Thomas Dambo, turning refuse into trolls and other large-scale sculptures. Also, jewelry meant specifically to disrupt facial-tracking software and cameras (by displaying shapes they will dismiss as "not-face").
Additionally, A neural net attemtps to write fanfic. It does reasonably well in coherence of narrative and sticking with characters and themes. It's not quite fic, or at least, it's a good start to a fic, but the machines aren't taking over any time soon.
If you want a snapshot of the fandoms that write stories on the Archive of Our Own, there's a top-100 pairing list, which gives some insight into what's popular right now.
Translation of a work is less a matter of word-for-word shifts and more making sure that what happened in the original comes through in the translation. It is definitely art, and for as much as we might groan at a Woosleyism, "son of a submariner" does get the idea across!
A weary Twitter thread about how little breasts need be described, and their general lack of animation and sentience.
On the other side, a restaurant chain that specializes in people dining by themselves, with reasonably-priced food, power for electronics, and connectivity. Which would make them excellent places to work and dine by yourself.
More naked men on television! Especially in period dramas where men stripping down to swim in the water would be entirely culturally appropriate.
As hurricane season continues, remind yourself that the Waffle House chain of restaurants probably has better emergency preparedness logistics than the federal government does.
The linguitic utility of "like" is much the same as "fuck", but without the profane connotations. And has similar groups slagging on it, thinking it a particle of the unrefined and otherwise lower-class, when it is far more useful than that.
If you think there's a dearth of novels these days that wear their politics on their sleeves as well as having their narrative, you're not looking in the right place. They even hint at the most fertile ground for such a campaigning novel (Young Adult) before dismissing them as too dystopian to count. Because stories about Black kids getting shot and then having to deal with corruption in the neighborhood and in the police don't qualify, I guess. Or any of the many stories being written by women about women stuck in repressive patriarchal societies that find their way through (and possibly cause a great deal of carnage while they are at it.)
The columnist should probably just come out and say "where have all the utopic political novels written by men gone?" because that seems to mostly be the sole thing they believe counts for what they're looking for.
And I'll just put this announcement that an award named after someone who doesn't measure up to the standards of today will be changing the name to the magazine instead for no apparent reason.
One way of producing a compelling villain is by giving the reader reasons to believe the villain is correct in their assessment of society. I don't think it's quite as something as "heroes and villains have similar ideals, but heroes only use specific methods to reach those ideals," but if you want people to follow or espouse what the villain believes, it has to make sense to the people who are doing that. You can't have Always Chaotic Evil who do things for the lulz all the time, because "doing it for the lulz" often has a second, underlying motivation, whether that's "I believe that I should be allowed to do this behavior and suffer no social consequences" or "the person I am attacking has several terrible things they have done in their past, and this is the most effective way of making sure they don't get anywhere near the levers of power" or "I think women should stay in the kitchen and make babies, so I will attack them relentlessly until they give up on any hope of public change." Not every villain or allied entity has to have the same motivations to do what they're doing, and that might be an important part of untangling what's going on, because someone who allies themselves with supremacists because they think they're going to be most effective at hurting a detested minority has less loyalty than, say, someone who aligns themselves with them because they really do believe in the supremacy of their chosen race or religion. They may have faulty premises and bad conclusions, but if it's clear how a villain got to where they are, they work better. "Bitches be crazy" might be something a villain says, but it's not a full justification unto itself, and the narrative needs to make sure it does the job of showing the how and the why that statement got uttered.
If you had to choose just two genders to represent everything, what would you choose? Plenty of good examples in there of "the two genders" that have all sorts of things to do with classification, but very little to do with sexual equipment.
If you're looking for somewhere that strongly reinforces the idea of the gender binary, your local sport federation is probably one of your best examples. There's a significant amount of discourse around women's sport that would be classed as TERF-y at the very least.
Women also get told their pain is less important and treatments for that pain are less important, when anyone bothers to believe them that they're in pain in the first place. Oh, and the additional work that women generally end up doing makes it seem like they're multi-tasking, but they're not. Additionally, it takes a lot longer for someone to do rigorous studies on women's anatomy to learn as much as possible about it.
Menstrual cups are fairly old technology, but things that are old are new again, although hormonal contraception continues to be the item of choice for a lot of people who want to control their periods.
A theater production was succeeding at getting the audience engaged, until a dude decided his experience of the play was more important that everyone else's and shushed everyone as it being "just a play". William Shakespeare would like a word with you, sir, about what the proper decorum for a theater production is, and no, it's not silence and decorum.
Being out as a medical professional or student has significant risk of phobic behavior from both patients and other staff, and because of the entrenched hierarchies in medicine, it can be very difficult to call a senior professional to the carpet for their -ist behavior around you.
Tasmanians get to change their identity documents to properly reflect their gender identity.
October 8 will be an important day for questions about whether federal discrimination protections based on sex also extend to gender identity and sexual orientation. As one might guess, the administration is all about keeping the ability to discriminate. One hopes that the courts recognize those protections extend to all persons, cis or trans, and whomever they might be interested in.
Several prominent names in independent games have been publicly accused (with others supporting those accusations) of significant sexual misconduct. How nice it would be if we had a world where the people who are good at what they do are also able to be good human beings. I realize for a lot of them, it would be contradictory, as being good at what they do requires them to be terrible human beings.
What does it take for children to sever contact with their parents?. From the experiences described in the article, generally, parental abuse will fit the bill nicely. (Even when it's a different parent that's doing the abusing, as the part that spends the longest on the person estranged from her children because her ex abused and gaslit everyone around.)
Japan's cultural issues with groping and harassment of women continue to produce useful workarounds, including a stamp to mark gropers that can be revealed under UV light, or smartphone apps to help make the assailant's acts public and shameful. Which has a friend in South Korea's market for hidden recording devices to document workplace harassment and bullying.
And the women that need to curtail the actively-harassing charity solicitors in Australia.
One way of plotting out a novel-length work. Which, like all writing advice, needs appended to it that anything that works can be kept and anything that doesn't work is to be yote into the sun. (It may work later, sure, with time and experience, but if it isn't working now, don't hang on to it.)
The public theology of Rachel Held Evans was no less evangelical than the fire-and-brimstone that usually graces Christianity, but since it was a theology that aimed and succeeded at being inclusive and widening the tent rather than excluding it only to the select elect, it hasn't had nearly enough attention paid to it. If Christianity were practiced more like it is written about in this piece, as Rachel Held Evans practiced it, there would be a lot less reflexive aggravation at someone saying they were a Christian. Because there's far too many examples of people who want to use their Christian status to damn others, rather than hold space for dialogue and to show the wonders of their practice by seeing them in practice. It seems that Rachel Held Evans found a way to remain true to the origins and pronouncements of the religious history of Christianity and incorporate the message of Christ into that, so as to create a practice and a belief that holds true to the idea of a Being who made a contract with the people that required sacrificing himself to make it work and extrapolating what kind of Being would make that kind of sacrifice. Not necessarily a gentler Christianity, but certainly a kinder one.
The expletive Jesus H. Christ seems to have been derived from a corruption of the first three letters of the Hellenization of Jesus's name.
The virtue of the semicolon as pause and as something that bends or flips off the rules of grammar with its presence.
When thinking about horses and their SF/F equivalents, understand that horses are bred for specific purposes, which influences their morphology. Describe a horse built for the purpose you intend to put it to. Which sometimes means you need a mule instead.
The archaeological trace of sea otter populations, how the beach transformed from a place of danger and worry to a place of leisure, the return of an ecosystem to the River Thames (amazing what those environmental regulations will do for you, isn't it?), and the way a Singaporean airport becomes a place for locals and visitors to congregate together by incorporating the best of nature and people.
In technology, a treasure of coins discovered exposes a taxation scam from the era of William the Conqueror.
mrissa has some musings on how difficult it is to know why people subscrube and stop subscribing to patronage. It's a little better for starting than for stopping, but for people who are doing the creating for their patrons, it's entirely possible they are doing things the patrons aren't interested in and there's no real way of knowing.If your city doesn't have public and accessible places for people to handle bodily functions, you're creating a problem for more than just the unhoused in your community. Yes, people are going to complain about those facilities being used improperly or defaced or otherwise, but there's a certain value to having it concentrated in a single space instead of spread everywhere. For the people doing it, though, it's probably more about intentional cruelty to the unhoused or being subtly discriminatory based on assumptions of who you think needs to use those facilities.
The idea of living out of one's vehicle deliberately is quickly replaced by the reality of the expense of living transiently. As anyone who has done cursory study on the matter knows, poverty is fucking expensive.
The process of constructing Oak Ridge, Tennessee, meant to be a top-secret space for nuclear research, and the deliberate obfuscation (and discrimination) built into the construction so that it would be as secret as possible.
A suggestion on how to defeat earworms by redirecting what the mouth and jaw do so there's less space for a signal to sing along to get to the mouth.
When your vehicle's locks and starters depend on connectivity and power, suffering a glitch in a dead zone leaves you stranded and without recourse. This is the sort of thing were even 99.99999999999% working still leaves people with a not-working thing in a potentially life-and-death situation. A manual override is a really necessary thing in this case, even if it might only be used 1 in 1,000,000 times.
Last for tonight, The recycled art of Thomas Dambo, turning refuse into trolls and other large-scale sculptures. Also, jewelry meant specifically to disrupt facial-tracking software and cameras (by displaying shapes they will dismiss as "not-face").
Additionally, A neural net attemtps to write fanfic. It does reasonably well in coherence of narrative and sticking with characters and themes. It's not quite fic, or at least, it's a good start to a fic, but the machines aren't taking over any time soon.
If you want a snapshot of the fandoms that write stories on the Archive of Our Own, there's a top-100 pairing list, which gives some insight into what's popular right now.
Translation of a work is less a matter of word-for-word shifts and more making sure that what happened in the original comes through in the translation. It is definitely art, and for as much as we might groan at a Woosleyism, "son of a submariner" does get the idea across!
A weary Twitter thread about how little breasts need be described, and their general lack of animation and sentience.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-12 07:13 pm (UTC)Steppe ponies that can ride forever and crush anything in their path!
I have seen several of the adversarial designs for license plates, yes, and I think it would be great if they could be adopted and customized for your particular locality.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-12 10:45 pm (UTC)Customization would be great. I was actually at the panel those shirts debuted at, and that was the top thing people asked for.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-13 05:34 am (UTC)Customization would be helpful so that you can feed your data into a system and make it less easily detectable. If they're all in-state (or province) plates, that makes it harder for anyone to ferret them or and delete them.