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silveradeptHello. It's big again.
Our condolences to the friends, family, and fans of Terry Jones, one of the members of Monty Python, and a right medievalist, who passed at 77 years of age.
Similarly, our condolences to the friends and fans of Kobe Bryant, dead by a helicopter crash at 41 years of age.
Larry Tessler, responsible for the trio of functions we refer to as "cut, copy, and paste", has passed at 74 years of age.
And additionally, the passing of Kirk Douglas at one hundred and three years of age.
Let's start with a sweet video of people getting ready for a fashion show they may be the only people to see.
Attendees of a furry convention stopped a domestic violence incident in progress and detained the assailant until police could arrive.
Using Mx. as the honorific in place of "ma'am" or "sir", and the other honorifics that have gendered-ness, along with some useful words about language choices regarding non-binary trans people.
Significant rainfall and flooding in several parts of the United Kingdom, which is causing many of the rivers to overflow their banks and flood the cities and towns that have been built next to them. The storm also has the additional effect of washing up an abandoned cargo ship, having transited from the Caribbean to the Irish coast.
Strikes at the University of Cambridge over several unresolved issues regarding fairer pay, pension security, and not forcing the staff and lecturers to work obscene hours for not nearly enough pay. This also requires getting rid of myths about what's actually going on there.
A thought about reframing questions of White Supremacy around different axes that take into account the different ways that White Supremacy looks at and characterizes other bodies, whether as labor, as people to disappear to take their land, or as an Other that is a threat.
fairestcat has a proposal: nominate the Yuletide fanwork exchange for best fanzine in the Hugo Awards. There's discussion in the post about answering the common questions that might be asked about whether Yuletide qualifies as such or not.
anneapocalypse has neatly articulated something that I have been thinking about in relation to The Discourse, its platforms of choice, and how people are reacting to the presence of seeing things they don't like on the Internet. To wit, fandom Olds and Ancients had a completely different Internet and World Wide Web in their formative years. People in a panopticon behave very differently than people who have a place to be that is not constantly under surveillance. Which is why I think the GPDR idea of "the right to be forgotten" is one that's crucial to the generational differences in how people approach being on the Web. If you can be in places where you can be anonymous, forgotten, and not followed, that makes learning and growth much more possible than if everything you do is permanently associated with you and follows you no matter where you are.
Reports of applications monetizing works available in the Archive of Our OWn prompted the OTW to talk about what recourses a person has if they feel their copyrights are being violated.anneapocalypse points out that what's more likely is that someone built a web browser, gave it some good bookmarks, and stuck some ads on it, so that it has less to do with work being stolen and more to do with someone developing a thing through which works could be viewed. Now, monetizing fic is always a dicey proposition, and muccamukk linked to a set of points that the conversation about unofficial apps and their monetization could be that would be significantly productive. After all, fandom history isn't so short that fen don't remember when they were on the receiving end of panics about works being "stolen". You know, the sections that officially don't exist because their authors were/are perfectly fine flexing their legal muscle to get anything that uses their characters in any way nuked from orbit?
This ties in to the other bit about The Discourse, and several conversations I've had offline about the cognitive differences between using apps as your way of interacting with the Internet and using web browsers to do the same. Apps, after all, are discrete objects meant for limited purposes (and are also a lot easier to gather metrics and other data from their use). "There's an app for that" is a dual-edged statement, and neither Google nor Apple really wants people to do things on devices running their OS that aren't mediated through apps, specifically apps through their official stores. (iOS is a much bigger offender than Android on this, to the point where certain iOS devices make it nearly fucking impossible to store a thing locally instead of in a cloud account. Whomever was responsible for that decision should be sacked immediately and possibly dragged through town by all of us who have to deal with the consequences of that design decision.) Apps, as programs, can collect a lot more data about habits to tailor advertising, and the bait for that is that apps promise different kinds of functionality than visiting the site in a web browser, even with a responsive design. Neither AO3 nor Dreamwidth have apps, and neither of them really plan on having apps, either. (I mean, certain apps built for LiveJournal can work with Dreamwidth, due to a shared underlying codebase, but as more and more of that gets torn out or turned from a kludge into an actual thing, that compatibility is going to lessen.) Which turns both AO3 and Dreamwidth into places that have to be visited through the web browser, which is a more complex and less integrated way of interacting. AJAX and frameworks and similar things are meant to make websites less like a series of static pages and more like interactive objects and apps, but ultimately, web browsers keep much of the site at a distance and don't produce quite as much twining things together.
Also, and perhaps crucially, with a web browser, you can visit all the sites on the Internet, each to their own tab or window or container, and set things so that those web sites can't see, hear, or talk to each other. (Often at the cost of functionality, or so the site creators would have you believe.) Apps only do their limited set of things. They'll visit one site, they'll interact with one site, they'll send all their data to one site. If you want to visit another site, or interact with another entity, you'll have to put another app on your phone, and maybe they'll share with each other, or maybe they'll scrap with each other, or maybe one actually owns the other and they get along far too well. Apps want us to think of the Internet as a series of discrete entities, each of which has absolute control over their domain and the rest of us are visitors and things to be packaged and sold to the advertisers. Admittedly, not a whole lot of that changes when we talk about web browsers, but web browsers at least make it possible for us to visit other places with one program.
Getting back to the point, it looks like this unofficial application crossed paths with the virulent strain of puritanism of protecting one's works from exploitation (and, if I read the lines correctly in the tumblr post thatmuccamukk linked to, where may have also been significant cross-pollination with the strain of puritanism called the "antis") which resulted in things being pulled from app stores through mass complaints about what the app could access and/or people using the DMCA to send takedowns to the creator of the app and tell them not to display the content. If it's a web browser, those are the wrong tools to use. Even if they are the only tools outside of talking to the person who made the thing and trying to understand what they did and why they did it. If the thing were scraping a site and making available a local cache of AO3 (hah, good luck!), then I could see why there would be complaints about work being stolen and presented in unauthorized forms, but if it's just accessing them through a web browser, there's nothing the app can do to stop people from using it to access what they want. (Also, younger fen, you understand that crusading against the porn that you find distasteful will eventually come bite you in the ass when whatever it is that you end up doing gets classed as porn and unsuitable and the cancel culture turns on you, right? You don't have to experience it firsthand, you can just read what happened to others.)
This will tie into the thing that I've been writing about intellectual freedom, once I finally get off my tukus and finish writing the damn thing.
kalloway offers some ways of curating your Dreamwidth experience, including some workarounds for things that are not built-in Dreamwidth features.
A book industry is more than willing to publish and sell stereotype about immigrants, rather than let immigrants tell their own stories. The book failed to use the experiences of the people the author read for research, instead producing pablum specifically geared toward a white audience that wants their stereotypes reinforced. And that may have simply repackaged the experiences written in other, better, works.
Skepticism about whether artificial intelligence will ever be able to really innovate in any writing form, based on the idea that those AI will never have the experiences that drive humans to write novels that other humans can understand. With a gratuitous swipe at EL James, who became massively famous for being able to change the names and publish fic that people bought in droves. It was not, however, mere imitation that drove the success of Fifty Shades of Grey - it was telling a story that had not been told with the characters in canon. Quality of work discussions aside, EL James did something transformative and got it published. If AI ever figures out how to write proper fic, then AI might very well be able to generate novels that will sell exceedingly well.
On the pleasures of genre reading , especially the kind that look like they'll be utter trash and are yet wonderfully enjoyable (and sometimes very experimental). And on the women most usually accused of reading trash and other things instead of getting on with the business of serving men, to the point where men really have women to thank that there are books at all for them to read when they deign to do so. And, of course, the sad fact of existence that most girls and women will have read plenty of books that star or exclusively have boys and men in them and the reverse will not be true. (Blame the publishers, for lo, they are very short-sighted about what will actually sell, to the point of actively denying the evidence in front of them, based on sales and library checkouts.)
As the market believes there is profit to be had, it is bringing menstruation more into the public conversation and attempting to develop different products to handle menstruation. Similarly, products are being marketed designed to cause shame and insecurity about the state of a person's vulva, because many of those same hucksters make their profits by casting having that anatomy as something shameful or otherwise in need of something to be acceptable.
Trademark law and defamation law are being used as weapons against people who want to talk about the phenomenon of men choosing to see masturbation and sexuality as things to be feared and controlled. There's always the risk of abstainers getting the feeling that they are somehow superior to the people who don't, but in this case, there are a lot of intersections between the no-masturbation crowd and several other awful -isms, especially misogyny. Weirdly enough, I would expect the no-nutters to have very common cause with the people yearning for the Past That Never Was, where women were submissive and stay-at-home and posting to social media about how much better it is that they don't have to do anything difficult, and instead enjoy having their husbands do it all. Which, like, if that's your kink, that's okay, but I'd say to exercise the same amount of caution you would otherwise in picking a partner for this particular expression, because there's a high chance you'll run into someone who actually believes it and will go to whatever lengths they feel is necessary to make sure you never break character.
The Good Place continues to draw attention to details as it provides us with what life might be like for someone who knows a lot about a lot of things, and yet still has to assert the very basic parts of identity, repeatedly.
Words and phrases in English with -ist origins or connotations, in case you needed something for an -ist to shout in fic, or for words to phase out and remove from your own language choices. Which I'm going to put next to classical examples of arguments about grammatical categorization and making translation decisions from languages that have a way of not gendering a person or a thing into ones that gender everything because languages are ever-shifting.
Spending time as a child in multiple places and cultures allows you to both fit in easily and not feel like you fit in anywhere at all.
Emily Hale's characterization of her own relationship with T.S. Eliot in contrast to the way Eliot characterized it. Which is also a nice introduction to the collection of Hale letters at Princeton.
George Orwell wrote letters asking for someone outside his marriage to be his lover. And this is either a matter of scandal or of ridicule. From the piece linked, they seem to think ridicule is the way to go. Also, the suggestion that Charles Dickens was far moe interested in a quiet and private burial than in the large and prestigious one he received, and who benefited from that.
Nine Dantean Circles of linguistic transgressions, most of which are in the eye of the beholder and those who are condemned to that circle.
Repetition is not something that makes things boring, if you discover new nuances or things you missed the first time. Which is the story told to me by my parents about seeing the first Star Wars. They saw it once, and it was interesting, and then they went to see it again, because they were sure they'd missed out on seeing things the first time. And then someone said "Isn't the music for that movie the best?" and so they went to see it a third time to concentrate on the musical score. The more times a thing is watched and rewatched, the more details come out of it, because the brain gets to focus on different things.
Speaking of the theme of boredom, it should come as no surprise that people doing sex acts that don't spark their desires, or not being able to find what they want and actually get it don't have much desire to keep doing what they find boring and unfulfilling. When your society places an extreme focus on only one half of a presumption of heteronormativity, it should also come as no surprise that the non-favored side isn't all that interested in participation in good fulfilling sex. This is not new knowledge, and yet it doesn't appear to be getting through to those parts of the culture that have high insistence on patriarchal everything. Perhaps because those parts have set themselves up as having the true and received word of the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, in opposition to whatever the secular and therefore demonic world says (and has a certain amount of research on) is the best way to run your relationships so that everyone is satisfied.
Visiting sites of mass murder, only to see it twisted into a very specific narrative of nationalism is very disturbing. (Those sites, in this case, are Auschwitz and Birkenau, the most internationally infamous sites of mass murder by the Nazis.) On many levels. One of which is that because Jewish people don't have a unified narrative (and perhaps because a unified narrative is impossible) of the Shoah, because it's all dialogue and questions and each person taking from it the things they see, then why should anyone else do the same? Any narrative that claims to encompass it fails, because each person involved in the story is their own narrative that needs to be told. And, when you have a unified narrative about something, it often ends up reducing the humans in it to ideological points, or, in many of the cases I have seen, elevating the good Christians to heroic status while reducing all of those killed to symbolic or sacrificial status. It is worth remembering what evil people are capable of, and very specifically, what evil people are capable of when they wield religion and ideology as swords and clubs. There's an entire history behind what happened at those camps, and a lot of it is good Christians believing that Jews are evil and have to be converted or killed.
If you think a pandemic is coming, it's probably time now to do your supply run, if you can.
Where perimenopause begins varies pretty heavily with time, so knowing what possible symptoms and remedies are can be helpful when it decides to visit earlier than expected.
The question of whether the idea of the threesome is a ubiquitous fantasy or a practical means of expressing questions or desires about getting needs and desires fulfilled in relationships.
Someone would like you to believe that designing your own doctoral project is a viable way of getting to your Ph.D doing what you want to do. Conspicuously absent from this piece is anything to do with what happens when the bills are due and your doctoral proposal so lovingly crafted hasn't been accepted, or whether the place accepting it hasn't funded you enough to be able to live. work, and do your research all at the same time. Or what happens if you are trying to be a minority in higher education and your institutions are all (un)subtly telling you to take a hike, because you're not what they want as a student. There's some pretty impressive elision of privilege in this piece.
Huey Lewis, lead singer for Huey Lewis and the News, is unlikely to ever go on tour again, due to hearing loss that can go anywhere from being able to understand a conversation to being unable to hear anything, depending on what day it is. This is, understandably, an issue when you've been a musician for all of your life and now you can't necessarily be sure you'll be able to hear anything on any given day.
The most common family names of the countries of the world, with notes and trivia about the meanings of the name and those that have them.
A study that attempted to categorize various neuroatypical strategies to appear neurotypical or to behave like a neurotypical person, which was linked from a personal narrative of hiding and trying to compensate for their own neuroatypicality.
Speaking of hiding and telling, Christopher Eccleston, most famously known in the United States as the Ninth Doctor, found hat writing about his difficulties was much easier than talking about them on the book promotion, which also talks about struggles with body image and gender presentation in a situation where there were stringent expectations of roles. Which I'm going to put a little next to an older (2017) article about Adverse Childhood Experiences and situations where children have to take on parenting roles (and the deep scars that kind of trauma leaves in those who are forced to perform those roles and those who are being parented by their siblings.)
Inviting an indigenous curator to demonstrate and also correct the record on the history and artifacts in a museum's collection, finding the right place and the right time to take a picture of the architecture, translating the works of Shakespeare into an indigenous Western Australian language, which is keeping the language alive because the actors all have to learn it, as is an endless runner game using its own indigenous language to name the things that will be encountered in the game, the history of a club routinely complained about for having people be openly gay and openly in interracial relationships, but that was routinely raided and investigated for trying to evade liquor licensing requirements, the process in which the first book of the Harry Potter series was translated into Yiddish, with many of the specific things that needed to be done to integrate the translation into Yiddish as deeply as the original uses English, destruction wrought on a traditional West African musical instrument by the United States Transportation Security Administration, and with, of course, a note apologizing for the inconvenience, because this is just that for them, an inconvenience, First Nations contemporary fashion shows, a trove of photographs of dance, many in black and white, many of the subjects Black, and preserving the practice of making clothes from the skin of fish.
Living in the house of a wombat rescue, as opposed to the wombat that was relocated after not knowing how to behave around humans and their structures. Cat pictures, the possibility that consuming bananas makes someone more attractive to biting mosquitoes, trying to give credit where it is due to the women who produced botanical art that greatly increased our understanding of the natural world, a fox expressing their opinions in the house of Parliament in the UK, a page about helping to identify what just bit you by the marks it leaves behind, a book made about varieties of apple that generally do not appear in stores, a chance meeting providing excellent photographs and casts of dinosaur footprints, an owl that had done exceedingly well for itself, to the point where it couldn't take off, trying to track penguin populations by seeding nesting boxes into their habitat, and the possible reintroduction of cheetahs into the Indian subcontinent.
The Current Administrator insists that buildings of the government follow a uniform style, one (probably not coincidentally) favored by despots, dictators, and persons who committed atrocities by the millions.
In technology, what was old has become new again as the design of a parka both keeps people warm, keeps wind out, and allows First Nations designers and designs to flourish again.
The use of electric and pedal bikes to make delivering items more carbon-neutral or carbon-negative, which works well in densely populated areas.
A quick guide to which episodes and movies of Star Trek might be worth a rewatch to get fully primed for Picard. Or, possibly, note how history eats its own tail, as the logo designs for the United States Space Force look remarkably similar to the Starfleet of the United Federation of Planets. And, possibly, this might be things feeding back into each other for logo designs.
A solar-powered hot-air balloon took a record-breaking flight. I would like to know what the balloon was made of that made it work that well, as if it were something relatively common that could be constructed in such a manner, and adapted to various places where there is less sun and heat, then travel by balloon certainly seems like it would be interesting. Even if it had to be restricted to specific zones where sun and heat could produce enough lift.
Germany is taking aggressive steps to try and close down their coal production entirely, providing a blueprint of how a country of Germany's size and connectedness could find a way of getting rid of at least one large creator of greenhouse gases.
Yet another consequence of Brexit - UK data could become subject to U.S. standards regarding privacy, instead of the far more stringent GDPR instituted in the EU.
There are fundamentally incompatible ideas about technology floating around. One wants to connect, another to commodify, and a third to destroy. Only one of these will prevail, and it should hopefully be the one that uses technology to connect people together.
More card data stolen and offered for sale, but also a major player in the card fraud and selling game has been arrested.
Facebook allows a tiny bit more control for people to not be tracked everywhere by Facebook. A very tiny bit. AT the very least it's a little clearer how much data is being shared with Facebook, and how you can limit some of that.
College and university campuses are embracing tracking and monitoring of their students' behaviors, ostensibly for reasons related to academic performance or trying to spot students in crisis or difficulty, but I wouldn't be surprised how much of it is being used to try and control student behavior at the first time in their life where they have to figure out how to motivate themselves to continue with academics, social relationships, and other such things that are fairly crucial to success as adults. I'm waiting for the data to be used by someone to stalk someone else, or for it to be used in one way or another in allegations of criminal activity, and many other ways that will demonstrate just how much it is being used to continue the chain of surveillance started right from the beginning of any given person's life.
The suggestion that smartphones and other such mobile devices have reached their saturation point, without any particular drive toward features that still frustrate consumers about them, except for their price. Which has a point, after all - at a certain point, it becomes more about the software than the specifications of the device. And, possibly, the amount of storage space available. Much like how the design of desktop machines hasn't changed in a good long while, we might have reached the point where the smartphone is going to stay basically what it is, and will just continue improving performance and other things until there is nothing more than can be squeezed from it. Or until it's replaced by some other multipurpose device that fulfills a few more functions than the pocket computer does.
Citizen scientists taking photographs have helped researchers in Finland learn more about a new type of aurora.
Scientists and archivists have determined that information about the coronavirus is more important to be shared and disseminated rather than kept locked behind paywalls of publishers, committing copyright violations in service of public health. The fact that I'm typing that probably says a lot about the system of copyright in place and how much it needs improvements.
New license plates from the province of Ontario have significant legibility problems as soon as the lighting conditions become less than lab-ideal.
The supposition that transforming ingredients into the convenience foods enjoyed in many U.S. and UK spaces changes them sufficiently fundamentally for their nutrition value or how they are processed by the body. In with all of this is at least acknowledgement that not everyone has the time or the money to be able to purchase ingredients and cook them from scratch, even as there is a lot of hand-wringing about how "ultra-processed" foods are contributing to weight gain and other potentially associated health risks. The thing that makes them stable and long-lasting is the thing that makes them "ultra-processed", and this becomes an issue when you have to make those kinds of trade-offs and deal with people yelling at you about how you're a failure if you can't keep yourself or your kids to a culturally-mandated and enforced range, often based on things that are not science.
Last for tonight, in honor of the palindromic construction of the Second February of 2020, a few examples of the palindrome. Additionally, the differences in culture of speaking a common language.
Also, bathing was a habit and encouraged in the time of the medium aevum.
There is very little historical data to support the contention that Christmas is a new religious practice derived from old pagan practices. Which says squat about what value they have as practices, but since Christianity is such a dominant worldview, it isn't surprising for a lot of people leaving from that space to try and find something that diminishes Christianity in their own thinking.
And finally, taking a musical look at Bach's Prelude Number 1, with a world-class cellist on hand to guide us through, and a short video about the consequences of trying to replace your indigenous culture with someone else's.
Our condolences to the friends, family, and fans of Terry Jones, one of the members of Monty Python, and a right medievalist, who passed at 77 years of age.
Similarly, our condolences to the friends and fans of Kobe Bryant, dead by a helicopter crash at 41 years of age.
Larry Tessler, responsible for the trio of functions we refer to as "cut, copy, and paste", has passed at 74 years of age.
And additionally, the passing of Kirk Douglas at one hundred and three years of age.
Let's start with a sweet video of people getting ready for a fashion show they may be the only people to see.
Attendees of a furry convention stopped a domestic violence incident in progress and detained the assailant until police could arrive.
Using Mx. as the honorific in place of "ma'am" or "sir", and the other honorifics that have gendered-ness, along with some useful words about language choices regarding non-binary trans people.
Significant rainfall and flooding in several parts of the United Kingdom, which is causing many of the rivers to overflow their banks and flood the cities and towns that have been built next to them. The storm also has the additional effect of washing up an abandoned cargo ship, having transited from the Caribbean to the Irish coast.
Strikes at the University of Cambridge over several unresolved issues regarding fairer pay, pension security, and not forcing the staff and lecturers to work obscene hours for not nearly enough pay. This also requires getting rid of myths about what's actually going on there.
A thought about reframing questions of White Supremacy around different axes that take into account the different ways that White Supremacy looks at and characterizes other bodies, whether as labor, as people to disappear to take their land, or as an Other that is a threat.
fairestcat has a proposal: nominate the Yuletide fanwork exchange for best fanzine in the Hugo Awards. There's discussion in the post about answering the common questions that might be asked about whether Yuletide qualifies as such or not.anneapocalypse has neatly articulated something that I have been thinking about in relation to The Discourse, its platforms of choice, and how people are reacting to the presence of seeing things they don't like on the Internet. To wit, fandom Olds and Ancients had a completely different Internet and World Wide Web in their formative years. People in a panopticon behave very differently than people who have a place to be that is not constantly under surveillance. Which is why I think the GPDR idea of "the right to be forgotten" is one that's crucial to the generational differences in how people approach being on the Web. If you can be in places where you can be anonymous, forgotten, and not followed, that makes learning and growth much more possible than if everything you do is permanently associated with you and follows you no matter where you are.Reports of applications monetizing works available in the Archive of Our OWn prompted the OTW to talk about what recourses a person has if they feel their copyrights are being violated.
anneapocalypse points out that what's more likely is that someone built a web browser, gave it some good bookmarks, and stuck some ads on it, so that it has less to do with work being stolen and more to do with someone developing a thing through which works could be viewed. Now, monetizing fic is always a dicey proposition, and muccamukk linked to a set of points that the conversation about unofficial apps and their monetization could be that would be significantly productive. After all, fandom history isn't so short that fen don't remember when they were on the receiving end of panics about works being "stolen". You know, the sections that officially don't exist because their authors were/are perfectly fine flexing their legal muscle to get anything that uses their characters in any way nuked from orbit?This ties in to the other bit about The Discourse, and several conversations I've had offline about the cognitive differences between using apps as your way of interacting with the Internet and using web browsers to do the same. Apps, after all, are discrete objects meant for limited purposes (and are also a lot easier to gather metrics and other data from their use). "There's an app for that" is a dual-edged statement, and neither Google nor Apple really wants people to do things on devices running their OS that aren't mediated through apps, specifically apps through their official stores. (iOS is a much bigger offender than Android on this, to the point where certain iOS devices make it nearly fucking impossible to store a thing locally instead of in a cloud account. Whomever was responsible for that decision should be sacked immediately and possibly dragged through town by all of us who have to deal with the consequences of that design decision.) Apps, as programs, can collect a lot more data about habits to tailor advertising, and the bait for that is that apps promise different kinds of functionality than visiting the site in a web browser, even with a responsive design. Neither AO3 nor Dreamwidth have apps, and neither of them really plan on having apps, either. (I mean, certain apps built for LiveJournal can work with Dreamwidth, due to a shared underlying codebase, but as more and more of that gets torn out or turned from a kludge into an actual thing, that compatibility is going to lessen.) Which turns both AO3 and Dreamwidth into places that have to be visited through the web browser, which is a more complex and less integrated way of interacting. AJAX and frameworks and similar things are meant to make websites less like a series of static pages and more like interactive objects and apps, but ultimately, web browsers keep much of the site at a distance and don't produce quite as much twining things together.
Also, and perhaps crucially, with a web browser, you can visit all the sites on the Internet, each to their own tab or window or container, and set things so that those web sites can't see, hear, or talk to each other. (Often at the cost of functionality, or so the site creators would have you believe.) Apps only do their limited set of things. They'll visit one site, they'll interact with one site, they'll send all their data to one site. If you want to visit another site, or interact with another entity, you'll have to put another app on your phone, and maybe they'll share with each other, or maybe they'll scrap with each other, or maybe one actually owns the other and they get along far too well. Apps want us to think of the Internet as a series of discrete entities, each of which has absolute control over their domain and the rest of us are visitors and things to be packaged and sold to the advertisers. Admittedly, not a whole lot of that changes when we talk about web browsers, but web browsers at least make it possible for us to visit other places with one program.
Getting back to the point, it looks like this unofficial application crossed paths with the virulent strain of puritanism of protecting one's works from exploitation (and, if I read the lines correctly in the tumblr post that
muccamukk linked to, where may have also been significant cross-pollination with the strain of puritanism called the "antis") which resulted in things being pulled from app stores through mass complaints about what the app could access and/or people using the DMCA to send takedowns to the creator of the app and tell them not to display the content. If it's a web browser, those are the wrong tools to use. Even if they are the only tools outside of talking to the person who made the thing and trying to understand what they did and why they did it. If the thing were scraping a site and making available a local cache of AO3 (hah, good luck!), then I could see why there would be complaints about work being stolen and presented in unauthorized forms, but if it's just accessing them through a web browser, there's nothing the app can do to stop people from using it to access what they want. (Also, younger fen, you understand that crusading against the porn that you find distasteful will eventually come bite you in the ass when whatever it is that you end up doing gets classed as porn and unsuitable and the cancel culture turns on you, right? You don't have to experience it firsthand, you can just read what happened to others.)This will tie into the thing that I've been writing about intellectual freedom, once I finally get off my tukus and finish writing the damn thing.
kalloway offers some ways of curating your Dreamwidth experience, including some workarounds for things that are not built-in Dreamwidth features. A book industry is more than willing to publish and sell stereotype about immigrants, rather than let immigrants tell their own stories. The book failed to use the experiences of the people the author read for research, instead producing pablum specifically geared toward a white audience that wants their stereotypes reinforced. And that may have simply repackaged the experiences written in other, better, works.
Skepticism about whether artificial intelligence will ever be able to really innovate in any writing form, based on the idea that those AI will never have the experiences that drive humans to write novels that other humans can understand. With a gratuitous swipe at EL James, who became massively famous for being able to change the names and publish fic that people bought in droves. It was not, however, mere imitation that drove the success of Fifty Shades of Grey - it was telling a story that had not been told with the characters in canon. Quality of work discussions aside, EL James did something transformative and got it published. If AI ever figures out how to write proper fic, then AI might very well be able to generate novels that will sell exceedingly well.
On the pleasures of genre reading , especially the kind that look like they'll be utter trash and are yet wonderfully enjoyable (and sometimes very experimental). And on the women most usually accused of reading trash and other things instead of getting on with the business of serving men, to the point where men really have women to thank that there are books at all for them to read when they deign to do so. And, of course, the sad fact of existence that most girls and women will have read plenty of books that star or exclusively have boys and men in them and the reverse will not be true. (Blame the publishers, for lo, they are very short-sighted about what will actually sell, to the point of actively denying the evidence in front of them, based on sales and library checkouts.)
As the market believes there is profit to be had, it is bringing menstruation more into the public conversation and attempting to develop different products to handle menstruation. Similarly, products are being marketed designed to cause shame and insecurity about the state of a person's vulva, because many of those same hucksters make their profits by casting having that anatomy as something shameful or otherwise in need of something to be acceptable.
Trademark law and defamation law are being used as weapons against people who want to talk about the phenomenon of men choosing to see masturbation and sexuality as things to be feared and controlled. There's always the risk of abstainers getting the feeling that they are somehow superior to the people who don't, but in this case, there are a lot of intersections between the no-masturbation crowd and several other awful -isms, especially misogyny. Weirdly enough, I would expect the no-nutters to have very common cause with the people yearning for the Past That Never Was, where women were submissive and stay-at-home and posting to social media about how much better it is that they don't have to do anything difficult, and instead enjoy having their husbands do it all. Which, like, if that's your kink, that's okay, but I'd say to exercise the same amount of caution you would otherwise in picking a partner for this particular expression, because there's a high chance you'll run into someone who actually believes it and will go to whatever lengths they feel is necessary to make sure you never break character.
The Good Place continues to draw attention to details as it provides us with what life might be like for someone who knows a lot about a lot of things, and yet still has to assert the very basic parts of identity, repeatedly.
Words and phrases in English with -ist origins or connotations, in case you needed something for an -ist to shout in fic, or for words to phase out and remove from your own language choices. Which I'm going to put next to classical examples of arguments about grammatical categorization and making translation decisions from languages that have a way of not gendering a person or a thing into ones that gender everything because languages are ever-shifting.
Spending time as a child in multiple places and cultures allows you to both fit in easily and not feel like you fit in anywhere at all.
Emily Hale's characterization of her own relationship with T.S. Eliot in contrast to the way Eliot characterized it. Which is also a nice introduction to the collection of Hale letters at Princeton.
George Orwell wrote letters asking for someone outside his marriage to be his lover. And this is either a matter of scandal or of ridicule. From the piece linked, they seem to think ridicule is the way to go. Also, the suggestion that Charles Dickens was far moe interested in a quiet and private burial than in the large and prestigious one he received, and who benefited from that.
Nine Dantean Circles of linguistic transgressions, most of which are in the eye of the beholder and those who are condemned to that circle.
Repetition is not something that makes things boring, if you discover new nuances or things you missed the first time. Which is the story told to me by my parents about seeing the first Star Wars. They saw it once, and it was interesting, and then they went to see it again, because they were sure they'd missed out on seeing things the first time. And then someone said "Isn't the music for that movie the best?" and so they went to see it a third time to concentrate on the musical score. The more times a thing is watched and rewatched, the more details come out of it, because the brain gets to focus on different things.
Speaking of the theme of boredom, it should come as no surprise that people doing sex acts that don't spark their desires, or not being able to find what they want and actually get it don't have much desire to keep doing what they find boring and unfulfilling. When your society places an extreme focus on only one half of a presumption of heteronormativity, it should also come as no surprise that the non-favored side isn't all that interested in participation in good fulfilling sex. This is not new knowledge, and yet it doesn't appear to be getting through to those parts of the culture that have high insistence on patriarchal everything. Perhaps because those parts have set themselves up as having the true and received word of the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, in opposition to whatever the secular and therefore demonic world says (and has a certain amount of research on) is the best way to run your relationships so that everyone is satisfied.
Visiting sites of mass murder, only to see it twisted into a very specific narrative of nationalism is very disturbing. (Those sites, in this case, are Auschwitz and Birkenau, the most internationally infamous sites of mass murder by the Nazis.) On many levels. One of which is that because Jewish people don't have a unified narrative (and perhaps because a unified narrative is impossible) of the Shoah, because it's all dialogue and questions and each person taking from it the things they see, then why should anyone else do the same? Any narrative that claims to encompass it fails, because each person involved in the story is their own narrative that needs to be told. And, when you have a unified narrative about something, it often ends up reducing the humans in it to ideological points, or, in many of the cases I have seen, elevating the good Christians to heroic status while reducing all of those killed to symbolic or sacrificial status. It is worth remembering what evil people are capable of, and very specifically, what evil people are capable of when they wield religion and ideology as swords and clubs. There's an entire history behind what happened at those camps, and a lot of it is good Christians believing that Jews are evil and have to be converted or killed.
If you think a pandemic is coming, it's probably time now to do your supply run, if you can.
Where perimenopause begins varies pretty heavily with time, so knowing what possible symptoms and remedies are can be helpful when it decides to visit earlier than expected.
The question of whether the idea of the threesome is a ubiquitous fantasy or a practical means of expressing questions or desires about getting needs and desires fulfilled in relationships.
Someone would like you to believe that designing your own doctoral project is a viable way of getting to your Ph.D doing what you want to do. Conspicuously absent from this piece is anything to do with what happens when the bills are due and your doctoral proposal so lovingly crafted hasn't been accepted, or whether the place accepting it hasn't funded you enough to be able to live. work, and do your research all at the same time. Or what happens if you are trying to be a minority in higher education and your institutions are all (un)subtly telling you to take a hike, because you're not what they want as a student. There's some pretty impressive elision of privilege in this piece.
Huey Lewis, lead singer for Huey Lewis and the News, is unlikely to ever go on tour again, due to hearing loss that can go anywhere from being able to understand a conversation to being unable to hear anything, depending on what day it is. This is, understandably, an issue when you've been a musician for all of your life and now you can't necessarily be sure you'll be able to hear anything on any given day.
The most common family names of the countries of the world, with notes and trivia about the meanings of the name and those that have them.
A study that attempted to categorize various neuroatypical strategies to appear neurotypical or to behave like a neurotypical person, which was linked from a personal narrative of hiding and trying to compensate for their own neuroatypicality.
Speaking of hiding and telling, Christopher Eccleston, most famously known in the United States as the Ninth Doctor, found hat writing about his difficulties was much easier than talking about them on the book promotion, which also talks about struggles with body image and gender presentation in a situation where there were stringent expectations of roles. Which I'm going to put a little next to an older (2017) article about Adverse Childhood Experiences and situations where children have to take on parenting roles (and the deep scars that kind of trauma leaves in those who are forced to perform those roles and those who are being parented by their siblings.)
Inviting an indigenous curator to demonstrate and also correct the record on the history and artifacts in a museum's collection, finding the right place and the right time to take a picture of the architecture, translating the works of Shakespeare into an indigenous Western Australian language, which is keeping the language alive because the actors all have to learn it, as is an endless runner game using its own indigenous language to name the things that will be encountered in the game, the history of a club routinely complained about for having people be openly gay and openly in interracial relationships, but that was routinely raided and investigated for trying to evade liquor licensing requirements, the process in which the first book of the Harry Potter series was translated into Yiddish, with many of the specific things that needed to be done to integrate the translation into Yiddish as deeply as the original uses English, destruction wrought on a traditional West African musical instrument by the United States Transportation Security Administration, and with, of course, a note apologizing for the inconvenience, because this is just that for them, an inconvenience, First Nations contemporary fashion shows, a trove of photographs of dance, many in black and white, many of the subjects Black, and preserving the practice of making clothes from the skin of fish.
Living in the house of a wombat rescue, as opposed to the wombat that was relocated after not knowing how to behave around humans and their structures. Cat pictures, the possibility that consuming bananas makes someone more attractive to biting mosquitoes, trying to give credit where it is due to the women who produced botanical art that greatly increased our understanding of the natural world, a fox expressing their opinions in the house of Parliament in the UK, a page about helping to identify what just bit you by the marks it leaves behind, a book made about varieties of apple that generally do not appear in stores, a chance meeting providing excellent photographs and casts of dinosaur footprints, an owl that had done exceedingly well for itself, to the point where it couldn't take off, trying to track penguin populations by seeding nesting boxes into their habitat, and the possible reintroduction of cheetahs into the Indian subcontinent.
The Current Administrator insists that buildings of the government follow a uniform style, one (probably not coincidentally) favored by despots, dictators, and persons who committed atrocities by the millions.
In technology, what was old has become new again as the design of a parka both keeps people warm, keeps wind out, and allows First Nations designers and designs to flourish again.
The use of electric and pedal bikes to make delivering items more carbon-neutral or carbon-negative, which works well in densely populated areas.
A quick guide to which episodes and movies of Star Trek might be worth a rewatch to get fully primed for Picard. Or, possibly, note how history eats its own tail, as the logo designs for the United States Space Force look remarkably similar to the Starfleet of the United Federation of Planets. And, possibly, this might be things feeding back into each other for logo designs.
A solar-powered hot-air balloon took a record-breaking flight. I would like to know what the balloon was made of that made it work that well, as if it were something relatively common that could be constructed in such a manner, and adapted to various places where there is less sun and heat, then travel by balloon certainly seems like it would be interesting. Even if it had to be restricted to specific zones where sun and heat could produce enough lift.
Germany is taking aggressive steps to try and close down their coal production entirely, providing a blueprint of how a country of Germany's size and connectedness could find a way of getting rid of at least one large creator of greenhouse gases.
Yet another consequence of Brexit - UK data could become subject to U.S. standards regarding privacy, instead of the far more stringent GDPR instituted in the EU.
There are fundamentally incompatible ideas about technology floating around. One wants to connect, another to commodify, and a third to destroy. Only one of these will prevail, and it should hopefully be the one that uses technology to connect people together.
More card data stolen and offered for sale, but also a major player in the card fraud and selling game has been arrested.
Facebook allows a tiny bit more control for people to not be tracked everywhere by Facebook. A very tiny bit. AT the very least it's a little clearer how much data is being shared with Facebook, and how you can limit some of that.
College and university campuses are embracing tracking and monitoring of their students' behaviors, ostensibly for reasons related to academic performance or trying to spot students in crisis or difficulty, but I wouldn't be surprised how much of it is being used to try and control student behavior at the first time in their life where they have to figure out how to motivate themselves to continue with academics, social relationships, and other such things that are fairly crucial to success as adults. I'm waiting for the data to be used by someone to stalk someone else, or for it to be used in one way or another in allegations of criminal activity, and many other ways that will demonstrate just how much it is being used to continue the chain of surveillance started right from the beginning of any given person's life.
The suggestion that smartphones and other such mobile devices have reached their saturation point, without any particular drive toward features that still frustrate consumers about them, except for their price. Which has a point, after all - at a certain point, it becomes more about the software than the specifications of the device. And, possibly, the amount of storage space available. Much like how the design of desktop machines hasn't changed in a good long while, we might have reached the point where the smartphone is going to stay basically what it is, and will just continue improving performance and other things until there is nothing more than can be squeezed from it. Or until it's replaced by some other multipurpose device that fulfills a few more functions than the pocket computer does.
Citizen scientists taking photographs have helped researchers in Finland learn more about a new type of aurora.
Scientists and archivists have determined that information about the coronavirus is more important to be shared and disseminated rather than kept locked behind paywalls of publishers, committing copyright violations in service of public health. The fact that I'm typing that probably says a lot about the system of copyright in place and how much it needs improvements.
New license plates from the province of Ontario have significant legibility problems as soon as the lighting conditions become less than lab-ideal.
The supposition that transforming ingredients into the convenience foods enjoyed in many U.S. and UK spaces changes them sufficiently fundamentally for their nutrition value or how they are processed by the body. In with all of this is at least acknowledgement that not everyone has the time or the money to be able to purchase ingredients and cook them from scratch, even as there is a lot of hand-wringing about how "ultra-processed" foods are contributing to weight gain and other potentially associated health risks. The thing that makes them stable and long-lasting is the thing that makes them "ultra-processed", and this becomes an issue when you have to make those kinds of trade-offs and deal with people yelling at you about how you're a failure if you can't keep yourself or your kids to a culturally-mandated and enforced range, often based on things that are not science.
Last for tonight, in honor of the palindromic construction of the Second February of 2020, a few examples of the palindrome. Additionally, the differences in culture of speaking a common language.
Also, bathing was a habit and encouraged in the time of the medium aevum.
There is very little historical data to support the contention that Christmas is a new religious practice derived from old pagan practices. Which says squat about what value they have as practices, but since Christianity is such a dominant worldview, it isn't surprising for a lot of people leaving from that space to try and find something that diminishes Christianity in their own thinking.
And finally, taking a musical look at Bach's Prelude Number 1, with a world-class cellist on hand to guide us through, and a short video about the consequences of trying to replace your indigenous culture with someone else's.
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Date: 2020-02-25 02:28 am (UTC)That First Nations parka article is really interesting! I never understood why hoods have that fuzzy rim, and now I do. I love finding out that people had it all figured out long before modern technology showed up.
Good point that ultra-processed food is shelf-stable, and lots of people need that feature.
Entertaining typo: "A solar-powered hoot-air balloon took a record-breaking flight"
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Date: 2020-02-25 05:05 am (UTC)Have fixed the typo.
And that bit about ultra-processed food is important. Just not sure how you get to the point of the "good" food being easy enough to not require intense preparation by a dedicated person.
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