A flood of materials - April-May 02020
May. 9th, 2020 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet us begin, then, with a story nominally about a food blog when a pandemic strikes. It is definitely about more than food, even though it doesn't stray that far from being about food. As one might guess however, it comes with content warnings about being a little too close to on the nose about the current pandemic. Beyond that, though, the author of the story, Naomi Kritzer, talks about having written the story and about what it's like to live in it now.
Difficulties arising from the adoption of the Campbellian monomyth, especially when used as a formulaic checklist rather than as an observation about how many stories take the same arc. Topes Are Not Good, Tropes Are Not Bad, Tropes Are Tools. It's what you do with them that makes for such interesting reading.
That said, if there are tropes, pairings, or other things that are going to make a bad day for you if you should come across them, it is worth going throughbeatrice_otter's AO3 Savior tutorial so that you can calibrate your experience of the Archive, at least (I wonder whether it works for other places that use similar nomenclature for tags?) and not unintentionally encounter works that will be an issue for you. I support the Archive's stance on being a place for all works to exist. I also think that people should have the ability to customize their Archive experience, such that if they really don't want to see it (or it would be injurious or triggering to see it), they can avoid it, rather than insisting the Archive match their personal morality. (To most of my readership, of course, this is not news, but it's worth knowing that I'm one of those Fandom Olds that gets really touchy about "purity" and believes firmly in the principles of "don't like, don't read". Thus, this tool will help you do exactly that!)
Pin-up model illustrations of many of the male heroes of the Marvel and DC canons, which are brilliantly executed, in both design and palette choices. Defeinitely worth a look on both artistic and eye-candy metrics. (And on the other end, a finely-tuned sense of the macabre, in works by Vergvoktre, also worth checking out on artistic and eye-candy merits.)
We lost one of the co-founders of Kraftwerk, Florian Schneider, at 73 years of age and cancer. Kraftwerk were extremely influential in the direction and creation of electronic music. Daft Punk, among so many others, did their homework on Kraftwerk and similar groups.
More Shakespeare, for those who would like to keep getting good performances and viewing them. And yet more Shakespeare, some of it region-locked. And one more.
Coloring pages from the city of Boston, including several of the city's known landmarks. Additionally, papercraft versions of the upcoming Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games. And also, to shift things severely, academic books available temporarily for free, and yet more available resources and academic works.
A useful reminder that JRR Tolkein wrote books to support his linguistics nerdery, such that the names of his iconic characters are, more often than not, a translation from their names in their native tongue.
Captain Awkward talks us through the process of creating the Master List, figuring out When the things on the Master List are due, figuring out Why something made it to the Master List (and, conveniently, which things don't actually belong there), classifying them as Musts, Wants, and Shoulds (the last of which might often be gleefully told to fuck off or delegated to someone who has them as a Want), and then selecting things from the Master list (no more than three) as the Things To Do In A Day. At which point, you've done your obligation for the day. If you keep doing stuff, great, write it on the daily list and cross it off, so that you can see what "productivity" actually looks like in any given day. If not, you still made it through your list for the day.
It looks like a really good system of managing things and helping a brain that's reeling from All The Things figure out what it means to do All The Things.
Museum staff are making petitions for their organizations to keep their jobs and to have the much higher-paid management and directorship draw far smaller salaries, or even, gasp, zero salary, in the interest of keeping the people lower down on the hierarchy employed and paid, since the people with the higher salaries likely also have personal reserves they can draw on. (And because it would be a great gesture of solidarity with their workers.) If you want to see some of those disparities, there's a document with those variances and a request for others to add their own information. Other museums and cultural institutions face closure from not getting their admissions and not getting additional support from arts councils or other bodies that can provide funding. What might be the worse casualty of these closures and furloughs are all the non-white artists and educators who would enrich the art world if they had the ability to make a living doing their art and art education.
We can see one museum's efforts in trying to stay relevant, even if they're not staying open.
Offices are terrible, soul-sucking places that try to get people to work who may not be inclined to such things. And also offer the possibility of a clear work-life divide, for those who are actually able to have such a thing. Which suggets to me that the best thing for an office or an employer to do is to have people in the office when they need to be, allow people to do work wherever works best for them, and otherwise leave them to their leisure. All while providing them with a salary that will allow them to not have to be concerned about being able to provide for themselves and their dependents. Outside of sectors with direct public service or handling of goods, there probably isn't actually forty hours of work in any given week to get done. In theory, we're all supposed to be having our George Jetson futures, where our time at the office is there just to make sure things don't go pear-shaped. Wouldn't that be a nice workplace to be at?
I tripped on the (polyamorous) missing stair are several accounts of the partners of one Franklin Veaux, a co-creator of a well-known work about polyamory, as a rebuttal to the stories that Franklin tells about his partners that they contend are misrepresentations of how their relationships went. There are very many stories, which all have content warnings for gaslightings and other abuser tactics, and the way they are written may sound very familiar for people who have stories of their own of abusers and their tactics, poly or no. Which I am putting next to an excerpt from a book that suggests Stockholm Syndrome, as it was first coined, may have been because a psychiatrist got disgruntled at the knowledge that a hostage trusted their captors to be more rational and interested in survival than the police were. Which, for some people, is life rather than any sort of shocking new thing.
The magician Teller has always been interested in seeing how the illusions work in our brains, possibly in the service of making better ones or making them more understandable. Sometimes, of course, the illusion has visual components, but sometimes, it has a very long lead-up, like a trick composed exclusively of people who would have read a specific story about the appearance and disappearance of a person from the past and who traveled to the place where the person from the past was scheduled to appear. Of course, it's not actually a trick, in that someone was there, and performed their role accordingly. You wouldn't know about Teller's involvement, except as an observer, from the article he wrote. Instead, you'd have to go looking for a completely different interview with Teller, about theft of illusions and the possiblity that the greatest builders and designers of illusions were getting out of the game because the mechanics were available so easily to be performed by others, to see a paragraph about what Teller might have done to help make this particular dream become reality. Because, as is noted, the point of a good illusion is only a little about the mechanics and making sure everything goes off correctly. Much more, the illusion is about telling a good story and then having some really spectacular special effects done live. I wonder what Penn and Teller think about podcasts and the revival of live shows of podcasts, especially ones that might have effects and other things needed for their live performance. Because doing a live radio show like that would involve many of the same things as their stage illusions do, work shown on stage in front of the audience, who can appreciate what is happening and still marvel that what their ears are hearing is a story, even if their eyes are seeing a radio play. (I still appreciate the con-panel size lesson on stunt choreography that Robert deJesus provided when I was at an animation convention lo, those many years ago. Some of the neat tricks that can be done for a live show that provide authenticity and safety together also taught us who is really in charge of any given stunt, even if it doesn't look like it.)
To think of NK Jemisin (and Nnedi Okorafor, and Jeannete Ng, and, and, and) as an exception to the idea that own voices works won't sell is a mindset rooted firmly in the past, and yet, publishing is more rooted in selling and promoting white stories about the various places and people of the world. Which I'm going to put nicely next to authors who are doing the profession no favors at all. I've seen some of those behaviors widely criticized across different authors that have come across my social media dash, so it's not just one author's opinion on the matter.
It's not the only retrograde idea out and about, and there's a lot of ink spilled on the persistent myth that mothers don't actually want to work and hold a career, and they would be the most happy in patriarchal domesticity. The reality is always more complex than someone's usually heavily-Christian influenced fantasy about a stay-at-home wife and mother.
And, of course, as much as the official story is that there's no racism at all that would result in the killing of unarmed Black men not doing anything illegal at all, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery by white men with guns who believed, with no proof, that he was responsible for crime reminds us that the official story is a lie and always has been. (Finally, there have been murder charges filed against the killers.) At least a Minnesotan white man who believed he was in danger from a black man after a car accident is being charged with murder after he fatally shot the black man. Won't know how the results are, but at least there were charges brought.
Our reality is that literature influences us, or at least begins to show us the possibilities. (At this point, I should be able to type Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop in my sleep because of the theory of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors.) So you can see how people find themselves, exactly as they are, by reading about the last unicorn, and the form of the girl she had, and all the things that went with it and didn't fit.
An exhortation to build, and to hold accountable those with the greatest power to build when they do not do so, so that instead of a system that makes scarce things that should be plentiful, there are plentiful things for everyone to have, such as housing, education, and other goods typically restricted for the profits of others. For the conservative, embrace the value of competition and exhort yours to compete fairly and avoid gaining advantage by controlling government to make up for your shortages. For the liberal, figure out how to produce the thing that will beat the market, and then implement it and prove it.
Now that I look at it, it seems like it would make a good exhortation for conservatives to get out of government, since they find it worthless and a place for greed and corruption, and for liberals to get into government, so they can put their ideas into practice and figure out which ones are the best ones to go forward with. If someone believes the market truly is the best place for everything, they are encouraged to get into the market with their thing and compete. If they think government can do a better job, they get into government to prove it. Which would mean the market having to accept that regulation is there to make sure things don't go off the rails and everyone is taken care of, and the government having to acknowledge when the market has made an innovation, or is doing something better than the government can do, and work accordingly to incorporate the new knowledge. (A functioning government? That's unpossible. A non-exploitative market? Even more so. Of course, I have often said that one of the ways that's best for a government to function is if it could receive the full share of revenue to which it is entitled, rather than being shorted by people who get government to write in all sorts of tax breaks for people who have the wealth to spare.)
A companion piece to the one above suggesting that one of the things that needs to happen is for the government to shed processes and encumberances that will allow it to move at the speed of information, instead of the speed of obstruction. Which, essentially, is the problem that caused the situation in the Mira Grant novel Feed, to once again loop around to "someone wrote this thing before it came into existence." as a thought. In this essay, the act of building is about destroying the old, clearing the space, and putting newer things in its place that can do better with the speed of everything.
It's beginning to look like the new coronavirus isn't just affecting respiratory systems, which is all sorts of fun times for everyone when you're in a phase where knowledge is limited about how the novel virus causes people to die. Scientists are now looking at a much wider range of possible organs under attack.
One bit of potential good news, if an antibody that was effective against SARS-CoV-1 continues to prove effective against SARS-CoV-2, it might pave the way for treatments or vaccinations.
Because of the nature of the virus, we're getting to see much more of the scientific method and paper process in the open than we might otherwise achieve. Including having to revise and rework models to try and get a better picture of how things are actually going. These things still normally happen for other research, just at a slower pace and much more behind closed doors. And primers about how all of this actually works, both for small scale and trying to explain the entire thing are popping up to help the laity try and understand what is going on. As well as entire reams of opinions written about a paper that posted some useful data before the full paper about the realities of how much distance is needed between people, depending on how in motion they are.
Regrettably, the answer to the question of whether you can do something that might be risky to others regarding SARS-CoV-2 is no. And it's also entierly okay to be mad at the incompetents that have produced this particular situation, because they have a lot of blame to take for the situation. The model of exposure and hoping for herd immunity isn't one that's going to work, so we have to deal with other options. Because that model doesn't really work, we should be paying attention to when the WHO says there's no evidence yet that recovering from one infection protects you from a subsequent one. Which, by itself, becomes an issue when the CDC says its likely there will be reinfection and that could pull us back toward the bad timeline because some people will have been sick of dealing with it the first time that they might decide not to follow the guidelines the second time. Flu season may provide significant confounding and additional pressures on hospital capacity, as the last thing people want is two pandemics going on at the same time.
There are significant economic impacts to a global lockdown. Flowers, for example, are not doing well as an industry, because so many events that would use flowers are restricted or interdicted. For a multitude of reasons, the art form known as jazz is suffering greatly, as jazz is not only about lineage and experimentation, but also about social gatherings and music made for those who come to listen to it.
Rebecca Solnit on the transformative power of experiencing crisis and emergency, although there's a lot more nuance to it than this description provides, mostly because Solnit's idea of transformation is one that goes toward building better community bonds, toward noticing and maybe trying to replicate the better ecological conditions that have come from the humans and their vehicles staying inside for a bit, rather than tansformation in capitalist ways.
Which makes for an interesting juxtaposition next to this biographical piece on a scientist responsible for all sorts of vaccines, because I'm not sure that lionizing the individual is the way to go in this, even if it is quite possible that a single person will suddenly become a well-known name for developing a treatment or a vaccination against SARS-CoV-2.
Getting back on the theme of taking a breath in the middle of this pause, an exhortation that merely thinking "positive" is not a substitute for real solutions to the problems exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic, paired with the possiblity that enough people are ready to see the failures of capitalism for what they are and institute better policies and politics. After all, one of the major ideas driving the desire to return to work is that humans are only as good as their productivity, rather than that people do work so that they might instead have leisure. Given the opportunity to think about what normal is for you, what parts of that normal do you want to encourage, and what parts do you want to discard?
Working from home, even though several of us are now in the pipeline to return to a much-changed workplace, still has a certain amount of adjustment and transition required. There's a video at the end of the article that suggets some things that might help if your neurodiversity makes it easay to do both the thing you're supposed to be doing...and all the things you could be doing, since you're still at home with all of those things nearby. Many of which are now far more accessible than they otherwise would have been, because instead of being accommodation for people that polite society wishes would simply go away and not bother them, it's a necessary part of doing things for everyone. I would hope that all of this stays normalized, instead of people going "Whew, glad that's over and we can go back to ignoring the very real needs of other people."
Given that Zuckerberg's Folly is a very common platform for all sorts of opinions and organizations, it makes sense that after being pressured, his company is finally removing posts intended to organize protests of stay at home measures and distancing requirements. Why is this important. Well, history may not repeat, but it rhymes. Observe how much the 1918 influenza pandemic got worse when the citizens refused to wear masks when a second round of the flu was starting up. Additionally, we have to think of the leaders whose machismo interferes with their ability to make sound decisions that are looking for excuses to say their macho is correct and the rest of us are wrong and the lessons that appear to have worked elsewhere and that would be good to adopt here that are likely to be ignored because they came from someone else in the world.
Think upon this, as well: Systemic racism and institutional oppression mean that black people are suffering and dying more from SARS-CoV-2 than their white counterparts, but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone, say, in this Administration who believed that enough to act toward mitigating those circumstances and improving black health outcomes at all. Apparently, because there are so many other, more compelling, and easier to digest narratives to choose from that absolve the system of the responsibility and place it firmly on the individual instead. Despite how obvious it is that communities of color in rural places where their mostly white administrators have essentially declared they don't believe in preserving life are dying and getting sick at a much greater rate. You can see similar absolution of the system with regard to how people of size are treated during the pandemic as well, because there's still a prevalent strain that says the first and most important thing a fat body can do is lose weight, and that all problems are related to their being fat, instead of what those problems are actually related to. But, of course, this is not a time to reinforce bad ideas about body image, food, and exercise.
Actually, that sounds really familiar. Like lessons being learned in the pandemic might be applicable to other large world-spanning problems, like climate change. (And, of course, on a less wholesome matter, the presence of the conspiracy theorists who believe the pandemic is a hoax and are willing to harrass the people doing the lifesaving work. And the hucksters looking for a quick buck, even if they want to donate it to research. And, of course, the ones just looking to make a quick buck.)
The novel virus situation has given some traction to the idea of states cooperating with each other more and thinking regionally rather than just with their own state, since that seems to be the most effective way of keeping infection in check. It might have some additional benefits, like better urban planning and public transit. Worth additionally noting, though, is that working together in our communities, taking the lead from those who have the experience of living in disaster conditions, is the best way of survivng the disaster already here and the one to come that puts a fair amount of the privileged in the same space a those they hoped they were above. (That piece also talks a pretty significant amount about the survivalist reactionary rhetoric that expects, when the police fail, to have to defend themselves violently against hordes of black, brown, and poor people that want to seize their wealth for themselves. Which might be a tip-off as to how they feel about who they exploited to gain that wealth.)
What little data there is might give us a clue about how widespread the pandemic is, and it might not.
One problem is bad enough, but wildfire seasons is going to start soon in Canada, and having to deal with both virus and fire might make for a very bad combination.
One bit of unsurprising news - For those with access and devices, libraries closing has meant mostly that book borrowing has shifted to digital without any trouble at all.
And then, a procedure for putting a small soap coating on your glasses to help prevent their fogging while you wear a mask.
And, the states that are slowly or aggressively starting to open back up in the month of May. Which gets coupled with the various international responses to the possibility of things starting up again, with the possibility of a second wave on the way.
The people who brought us the idea of the Hammer and Dance are now beginning to talk about what they mean by the Dance phase, now that so many of us are into or getting through the Hammer.
A Bean Collector's Window, showcasing some rare and lesser-known varietes of bean in hopes of preserving their genes and making them available to the next generation, the way in which one company's came to dominate the tortilla market with their corn flour and a lot of government assistance, (and the consequences of that singular company gaining such dominance, The Olympus Image of the Year for 02019, which involves a lot of really neat fluorescence, rediscovery and preservation of a bumper crop of apple varieties, an affectionate raven named Loki, a whale sanctuary for Nova Scotia, Canada, cat pictures of two adorables, and a trend of chalking the names of plants in one's vicinity, and the people who would enforce the laws against such street and pavement chalking, which, I suspect, underlies a very different debate that is not actually about plants and more about perceptions of what's acceptable and unacceptable in polite society. Because if you let the botanists chalk, then what will stop the anarchists from doing the same?
In technology, Upgrade Available, a person taking a look at ideas of planned obsolesence and how one might design and build things that can keep up with the times, rather than being something that exists in a moment and then is actively shoved out by a corporation wanting you to purchase the latest model, even though the hardware is still going to be good for quite some time after they stop supporting it in software.
The inventors who came to regret the uses that their inventions have been put to. And, occasionally, one who just regrets the design of the thing in its entirely. But mostly people who have become annoyed or aggravated about how their inventions have been put to use by others.
A video tutorial on the process of building a wall to section a room into two, and then building a wardrobe with a secret back door that will allow you to access the room you've created. Contains, you know, time-lapse photography to get a big project done in a half-hour video.
Making things in miniature, including that sometimes you have to make your tools in miniature to make the miniatures.
The use of community currency, how it works with the increasingly digital nature of transactions, and the difficulties of keeping them in circulation. I came in contact with a community currency at a local farmer's market. Some of the local farmers took the market token, which they could then exchange back for legal tender. The encouragement for shoppers to take the market token was that they would receive a better than 1:1 ratio for each unit of legal tender they put into it, such that the farmers could receive additional value and the shoppers could receive additional goods for shopping with those who were willing to take the token. It was a really good encouragement (and also, I remember that those on Supplemental Nutrition also got a multiplier on their tokens when they spent their limited SNAP funds on market tokens, which would be a very good incentive for people trying to make that budget stretch.)
A sweepstakes for two Nintendo Switch consoles and accessories, which can be entered without a donation, but if you do donate to an entity, each dollar will help you out with more entries into the contest.
Last for tonight, some of the less well-known and very much more creepy or disturbing artifacts of various museums. Because someone will be interested in them and find them fascinating.
Additionally, IKEA released an official stay-at-home alternative to the meatballs and cream sauce available in their store cafeteria.
Take Me To The World, a celebration of Stephen Sondheim's 90th Birthday, containing a lot of people very famous for singing (Sondheim or otherwise) singing a lot of Sondheim (famous or otherwise).
The concept of inside clothes, and their applicability to a life being lived more inside. I had not been exposed to the idea of inside clothes in any sort of systematic way, and I think it's an interesting idea for not just these times, but all times.
And finally, a paper about what the correct ways are to refer to thousand-year periods, according to international standards, and several other possible epochs to measure time from, depending on your inclinations. (And, additionally, a lot of requests for clarification on whether or not the game of fuck, marry, kill allows for the possibility of fucking the person you're married with.)
Difficulties arising from the adoption of the Campbellian monomyth, especially when used as a formulaic checklist rather than as an observation about how many stories take the same arc. Topes Are Not Good, Tropes Are Not Bad, Tropes Are Tools. It's what you do with them that makes for such interesting reading.
That said, if there are tropes, pairings, or other things that are going to make a bad day for you if you should come across them, it is worth going through
beatrice_otter's AO3 Savior tutorial so that you can calibrate your experience of the Archive, at least (I wonder whether it works for other places that use similar nomenclature for tags?) and not unintentionally encounter works that will be an issue for you. I support the Archive's stance on being a place for all works to exist. I also think that people should have the ability to customize their Archive experience, such that if they really don't want to see it (or it would be injurious or triggering to see it), they can avoid it, rather than insisting the Archive match their personal morality. (To most of my readership, of course, this is not news, but it's worth knowing that I'm one of those Fandom Olds that gets really touchy about "purity" and believes firmly in the principles of "don't like, don't read". Thus, this tool will help you do exactly that!)Pin-up model illustrations of many of the male heroes of the Marvel and DC canons, which are brilliantly executed, in both design and palette choices. Defeinitely worth a look on both artistic and eye-candy metrics. (And on the other end, a finely-tuned sense of the macabre, in works by Vergvoktre, also worth checking out on artistic and eye-candy merits.)
We lost one of the co-founders of Kraftwerk, Florian Schneider, at 73 years of age and cancer. Kraftwerk were extremely influential in the direction and creation of electronic music. Daft Punk, among so many others, did their homework on Kraftwerk and similar groups.
More Shakespeare, for those who would like to keep getting good performances and viewing them. And yet more Shakespeare, some of it region-locked. And one more.
Coloring pages from the city of Boston, including several of the city's known landmarks. Additionally, papercraft versions of the upcoming Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games. And also, to shift things severely, academic books available temporarily for free, and yet more available resources and academic works.
A useful reminder that JRR Tolkein wrote books to support his linguistics nerdery, such that the names of his iconic characters are, more often than not, a translation from their names in their native tongue.
Captain Awkward talks us through the process of creating the Master List, figuring out When the things on the Master List are due, figuring out Why something made it to the Master List (and, conveniently, which things don't actually belong there), classifying them as Musts, Wants, and Shoulds (the last of which might often be gleefully told to fuck off or delegated to someone who has them as a Want), and then selecting things from the Master list (no more than three) as the Things To Do In A Day. At which point, you've done your obligation for the day. If you keep doing stuff, great, write it on the daily list and cross it off, so that you can see what "productivity" actually looks like in any given day. If not, you still made it through your list for the day.
It looks like a really good system of managing things and helping a brain that's reeling from All The Things figure out what it means to do All The Things.
Museum staff are making petitions for their organizations to keep their jobs and to have the much higher-paid management and directorship draw far smaller salaries, or even, gasp, zero salary, in the interest of keeping the people lower down on the hierarchy employed and paid, since the people with the higher salaries likely also have personal reserves they can draw on. (And because it would be a great gesture of solidarity with their workers.) If you want to see some of those disparities, there's a document with those variances and a request for others to add their own information. Other museums and cultural institutions face closure from not getting their admissions and not getting additional support from arts councils or other bodies that can provide funding. What might be the worse casualty of these closures and furloughs are all the non-white artists and educators who would enrich the art world if they had the ability to make a living doing their art and art education.
We can see one museum's efforts in trying to stay relevant, even if they're not staying open.
Offices are terrible, soul-sucking places that try to get people to work who may not be inclined to such things. And also offer the possibility of a clear work-life divide, for those who are actually able to have such a thing. Which suggets to me that the best thing for an office or an employer to do is to have people in the office when they need to be, allow people to do work wherever works best for them, and otherwise leave them to their leisure. All while providing them with a salary that will allow them to not have to be concerned about being able to provide for themselves and their dependents. Outside of sectors with direct public service or handling of goods, there probably isn't actually forty hours of work in any given week to get done. In theory, we're all supposed to be having our George Jetson futures, where our time at the office is there just to make sure things don't go pear-shaped. Wouldn't that be a nice workplace to be at?
I tripped on the (polyamorous) missing stair are several accounts of the partners of one Franklin Veaux, a co-creator of a well-known work about polyamory, as a rebuttal to the stories that Franklin tells about his partners that they contend are misrepresentations of how their relationships went. There are very many stories, which all have content warnings for gaslightings and other abuser tactics, and the way they are written may sound very familiar for people who have stories of their own of abusers and their tactics, poly or no. Which I am putting next to an excerpt from a book that suggests Stockholm Syndrome, as it was first coined, may have been because a psychiatrist got disgruntled at the knowledge that a hostage trusted their captors to be more rational and interested in survival than the police were. Which, for some people, is life rather than any sort of shocking new thing.
The magician Teller has always been interested in seeing how the illusions work in our brains, possibly in the service of making better ones or making them more understandable. Sometimes, of course, the illusion has visual components, but sometimes, it has a very long lead-up, like a trick composed exclusively of people who would have read a specific story about the appearance and disappearance of a person from the past and who traveled to the place where the person from the past was scheduled to appear. Of course, it's not actually a trick, in that someone was there, and performed their role accordingly. You wouldn't know about Teller's involvement, except as an observer, from the article he wrote. Instead, you'd have to go looking for a completely different interview with Teller, about theft of illusions and the possiblity that the greatest builders and designers of illusions were getting out of the game because the mechanics were available so easily to be performed by others, to see a paragraph about what Teller might have done to help make this particular dream become reality. Because, as is noted, the point of a good illusion is only a little about the mechanics and making sure everything goes off correctly. Much more, the illusion is about telling a good story and then having some really spectacular special effects done live. I wonder what Penn and Teller think about podcasts and the revival of live shows of podcasts, especially ones that might have effects and other things needed for their live performance. Because doing a live radio show like that would involve many of the same things as their stage illusions do, work shown on stage in front of the audience, who can appreciate what is happening and still marvel that what their ears are hearing is a story, even if their eyes are seeing a radio play. (I still appreciate the con-panel size lesson on stunt choreography that Robert deJesus provided when I was at an animation convention lo, those many years ago. Some of the neat tricks that can be done for a live show that provide authenticity and safety together also taught us who is really in charge of any given stunt, even if it doesn't look like it.)
To think of NK Jemisin (and Nnedi Okorafor, and Jeannete Ng, and, and, and) as an exception to the idea that own voices works won't sell is a mindset rooted firmly in the past, and yet, publishing is more rooted in selling and promoting white stories about the various places and people of the world. Which I'm going to put nicely next to authors who are doing the profession no favors at all. I've seen some of those behaviors widely criticized across different authors that have come across my social media dash, so it's not just one author's opinion on the matter.
It's not the only retrograde idea out and about, and there's a lot of ink spilled on the persistent myth that mothers don't actually want to work and hold a career, and they would be the most happy in patriarchal domesticity. The reality is always more complex than someone's usually heavily-Christian influenced fantasy about a stay-at-home wife and mother.
And, of course, as much as the official story is that there's no racism at all that would result in the killing of unarmed Black men not doing anything illegal at all, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery by white men with guns who believed, with no proof, that he was responsible for crime reminds us that the official story is a lie and always has been. (Finally, there have been murder charges filed against the killers.) At least a Minnesotan white man who believed he was in danger from a black man after a car accident is being charged with murder after he fatally shot the black man. Won't know how the results are, but at least there were charges brought.
Our reality is that literature influences us, or at least begins to show us the possibilities. (At this point, I should be able to type Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop in my sleep because of the theory of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors.) So you can see how people find themselves, exactly as they are, by reading about the last unicorn, and the form of the girl she had, and all the things that went with it and didn't fit.
An exhortation to build, and to hold accountable those with the greatest power to build when they do not do so, so that instead of a system that makes scarce things that should be plentiful, there are plentiful things for everyone to have, such as housing, education, and other goods typically restricted for the profits of others. For the conservative, embrace the value of competition and exhort yours to compete fairly and avoid gaining advantage by controlling government to make up for your shortages. For the liberal, figure out how to produce the thing that will beat the market, and then implement it and prove it.
Now that I look at it, it seems like it would make a good exhortation for conservatives to get out of government, since they find it worthless and a place for greed and corruption, and for liberals to get into government, so they can put their ideas into practice and figure out which ones are the best ones to go forward with. If someone believes the market truly is the best place for everything, they are encouraged to get into the market with their thing and compete. If they think government can do a better job, they get into government to prove it. Which would mean the market having to accept that regulation is there to make sure things don't go off the rails and everyone is taken care of, and the government having to acknowledge when the market has made an innovation, or is doing something better than the government can do, and work accordingly to incorporate the new knowledge. (A functioning government? That's unpossible. A non-exploitative market? Even more so. Of course, I have often said that one of the ways that's best for a government to function is if it could receive the full share of revenue to which it is entitled, rather than being shorted by people who get government to write in all sorts of tax breaks for people who have the wealth to spare.)
A companion piece to the one above suggesting that one of the things that needs to happen is for the government to shed processes and encumberances that will allow it to move at the speed of information, instead of the speed of obstruction. Which, essentially, is the problem that caused the situation in the Mira Grant novel Feed, to once again loop around to "someone wrote this thing before it came into existence." as a thought. In this essay, the act of building is about destroying the old, clearing the space, and putting newer things in its place that can do better with the speed of everything.
It's beginning to look like the new coronavirus isn't just affecting respiratory systems, which is all sorts of fun times for everyone when you're in a phase where knowledge is limited about how the novel virus causes people to die. Scientists are now looking at a much wider range of possible organs under attack.
One bit of potential good news, if an antibody that was effective against SARS-CoV-1 continues to prove effective against SARS-CoV-2, it might pave the way for treatments or vaccinations.
Because of the nature of the virus, we're getting to see much more of the scientific method and paper process in the open than we might otherwise achieve. Including having to revise and rework models to try and get a better picture of how things are actually going. These things still normally happen for other research, just at a slower pace and much more behind closed doors. And primers about how all of this actually works, both for small scale and trying to explain the entire thing are popping up to help the laity try and understand what is going on. As well as entire reams of opinions written about a paper that posted some useful data before the full paper about the realities of how much distance is needed between people, depending on how in motion they are.
Regrettably, the answer to the question of whether you can do something that might be risky to others regarding SARS-CoV-2 is no. And it's also entierly okay to be mad at the incompetents that have produced this particular situation, because they have a lot of blame to take for the situation. The model of exposure and hoping for herd immunity isn't one that's going to work, so we have to deal with other options. Because that model doesn't really work, we should be paying attention to when the WHO says there's no evidence yet that recovering from one infection protects you from a subsequent one. Which, by itself, becomes an issue when the CDC says its likely there will be reinfection and that could pull us back toward the bad timeline because some people will have been sick of dealing with it the first time that they might decide not to follow the guidelines the second time. Flu season may provide significant confounding and additional pressures on hospital capacity, as the last thing people want is two pandemics going on at the same time.
There are significant economic impacts to a global lockdown. Flowers, for example, are not doing well as an industry, because so many events that would use flowers are restricted or interdicted. For a multitude of reasons, the art form known as jazz is suffering greatly, as jazz is not only about lineage and experimentation, but also about social gatherings and music made for those who come to listen to it.
Rebecca Solnit on the transformative power of experiencing crisis and emergency, although there's a lot more nuance to it than this description provides, mostly because Solnit's idea of transformation is one that goes toward building better community bonds, toward noticing and maybe trying to replicate the better ecological conditions that have come from the humans and their vehicles staying inside for a bit, rather than tansformation in capitalist ways.
Which makes for an interesting juxtaposition next to this biographical piece on a scientist responsible for all sorts of vaccines, because I'm not sure that lionizing the individual is the way to go in this, even if it is quite possible that a single person will suddenly become a well-known name for developing a treatment or a vaccination against SARS-CoV-2.
Getting back on the theme of taking a breath in the middle of this pause, an exhortation that merely thinking "positive" is not a substitute for real solutions to the problems exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic, paired with the possiblity that enough people are ready to see the failures of capitalism for what they are and institute better policies and politics. After all, one of the major ideas driving the desire to return to work is that humans are only as good as their productivity, rather than that people do work so that they might instead have leisure. Given the opportunity to think about what normal is for you, what parts of that normal do you want to encourage, and what parts do you want to discard?
Working from home, even though several of us are now in the pipeline to return to a much-changed workplace, still has a certain amount of adjustment and transition required. There's a video at the end of the article that suggets some things that might help if your neurodiversity makes it easay to do both the thing you're supposed to be doing...and all the things you could be doing, since you're still at home with all of those things nearby. Many of which are now far more accessible than they otherwise would have been, because instead of being accommodation for people that polite society wishes would simply go away and not bother them, it's a necessary part of doing things for everyone. I would hope that all of this stays normalized, instead of people going "Whew, glad that's over and we can go back to ignoring the very real needs of other people."
Given that Zuckerberg's Folly is a very common platform for all sorts of opinions and organizations, it makes sense that after being pressured, his company is finally removing posts intended to organize protests of stay at home measures and distancing requirements. Why is this important. Well, history may not repeat, but it rhymes. Observe how much the 1918 influenza pandemic got worse when the citizens refused to wear masks when a second round of the flu was starting up. Additionally, we have to think of the leaders whose machismo interferes with their ability to make sound decisions that are looking for excuses to say their macho is correct and the rest of us are wrong and the lessons that appear to have worked elsewhere and that would be good to adopt here that are likely to be ignored because they came from someone else in the world.
Think upon this, as well: Systemic racism and institutional oppression mean that black people are suffering and dying more from SARS-CoV-2 than their white counterparts, but you'd be hard-pressed to find someone, say, in this Administration who believed that enough to act toward mitigating those circumstances and improving black health outcomes at all. Apparently, because there are so many other, more compelling, and easier to digest narratives to choose from that absolve the system of the responsibility and place it firmly on the individual instead. Despite how obvious it is that communities of color in rural places where their mostly white administrators have essentially declared they don't believe in preserving life are dying and getting sick at a much greater rate. You can see similar absolution of the system with regard to how people of size are treated during the pandemic as well, because there's still a prevalent strain that says the first and most important thing a fat body can do is lose weight, and that all problems are related to their being fat, instead of what those problems are actually related to. But, of course, this is not a time to reinforce bad ideas about body image, food, and exercise.
Actually, that sounds really familiar. Like lessons being learned in the pandemic might be applicable to other large world-spanning problems, like climate change. (And, of course, on a less wholesome matter, the presence of the conspiracy theorists who believe the pandemic is a hoax and are willing to harrass the people doing the lifesaving work. And the hucksters looking for a quick buck, even if they want to donate it to research. And, of course, the ones just looking to make a quick buck.)
The novel virus situation has given some traction to the idea of states cooperating with each other more and thinking regionally rather than just with their own state, since that seems to be the most effective way of keeping infection in check. It might have some additional benefits, like better urban planning and public transit. Worth additionally noting, though, is that working together in our communities, taking the lead from those who have the experience of living in disaster conditions, is the best way of survivng the disaster already here and the one to come that puts a fair amount of the privileged in the same space a those they hoped they were above. (That piece also talks a pretty significant amount about the survivalist reactionary rhetoric that expects, when the police fail, to have to defend themselves violently against hordes of black, brown, and poor people that want to seize their wealth for themselves. Which might be a tip-off as to how they feel about who they exploited to gain that wealth.)
What little data there is might give us a clue about how widespread the pandemic is, and it might not.
One problem is bad enough, but wildfire seasons is going to start soon in Canada, and having to deal with both virus and fire might make for a very bad combination.
One bit of unsurprising news - For those with access and devices, libraries closing has meant mostly that book borrowing has shifted to digital without any trouble at all.
And then, a procedure for putting a small soap coating on your glasses to help prevent their fogging while you wear a mask.
And, the states that are slowly or aggressively starting to open back up in the month of May. Which gets coupled with the various international responses to the possibility of things starting up again, with the possibility of a second wave on the way.
The people who brought us the idea of the Hammer and Dance are now beginning to talk about what they mean by the Dance phase, now that so many of us are into or getting through the Hammer.
A Bean Collector's Window, showcasing some rare and lesser-known varietes of bean in hopes of preserving their genes and making them available to the next generation, the way in which one company's came to dominate the tortilla market with their corn flour and a lot of government assistance, (and the consequences of that singular company gaining such dominance, The Olympus Image of the Year for 02019, which involves a lot of really neat fluorescence, rediscovery and preservation of a bumper crop of apple varieties, an affectionate raven named Loki, a whale sanctuary for Nova Scotia, Canada, cat pictures of two adorables, and a trend of chalking the names of plants in one's vicinity, and the people who would enforce the laws against such street and pavement chalking, which, I suspect, underlies a very different debate that is not actually about plants and more about perceptions of what's acceptable and unacceptable in polite society. Because if you let the botanists chalk, then what will stop the anarchists from doing the same?
In technology, Upgrade Available, a person taking a look at ideas of planned obsolesence and how one might design and build things that can keep up with the times, rather than being something that exists in a moment and then is actively shoved out by a corporation wanting you to purchase the latest model, even though the hardware is still going to be good for quite some time after they stop supporting it in software.
The inventors who came to regret the uses that their inventions have been put to. And, occasionally, one who just regrets the design of the thing in its entirely. But mostly people who have become annoyed or aggravated about how their inventions have been put to use by others.
A video tutorial on the process of building a wall to section a room into two, and then building a wardrobe with a secret back door that will allow you to access the room you've created. Contains, you know, time-lapse photography to get a big project done in a half-hour video.
Making things in miniature, including that sometimes you have to make your tools in miniature to make the miniatures.
The use of community currency, how it works with the increasingly digital nature of transactions, and the difficulties of keeping them in circulation. I came in contact with a community currency at a local farmer's market. Some of the local farmers took the market token, which they could then exchange back for legal tender. The encouragement for shoppers to take the market token was that they would receive a better than 1:1 ratio for each unit of legal tender they put into it, such that the farmers could receive additional value and the shoppers could receive additional goods for shopping with those who were willing to take the token. It was a really good encouragement (and also, I remember that those on Supplemental Nutrition also got a multiplier on their tokens when they spent their limited SNAP funds on market tokens, which would be a very good incentive for people trying to make that budget stretch.)
A sweepstakes for two Nintendo Switch consoles and accessories, which can be entered without a donation, but if you do donate to an entity, each dollar will help you out with more entries into the contest.
Last for tonight, some of the less well-known and very much more creepy or disturbing artifacts of various museums. Because someone will be interested in them and find them fascinating.
Additionally, IKEA released an official stay-at-home alternative to the meatballs and cream sauce available in their store cafeteria.
Take Me To The World, a celebration of Stephen Sondheim's 90th Birthday, containing a lot of people very famous for singing (Sondheim or otherwise) singing a lot of Sondheim (famous or otherwise).
The concept of inside clothes, and their applicability to a life being lived more inside. I had not been exposed to the idea of inside clothes in any sort of systematic way, and I think it's an interesting idea for not just these times, but all times.
And finally, a paper about what the correct ways are to refer to thousand-year periods, according to international standards, and several other possible epochs to measure time from, depending on your inclinations. (And, additionally, a lot of requests for clarification on whether or not the game of fuck, marry, kill allows for the possibility of fucking the person you're married with.)
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Date: 2020-05-11 08:44 pm (UTC)