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silveradeptBefore we begin, have you checked your password lately? If you haven't changed it since the days of Livejournal, or if, like some of us did in our earlier years, you used the same password for both services, that password should be dead to you, as there appears to be a list of Livejournal names and passwords out in the wild, and nefarious actors have been using them to see if other accounts, like Dreamwidth, can also be compromised. Which is no fun at all to have happen. So, change that password on any account it might have been used with, and move forward yet more into the realm of generating and storing strong passwords that do not crack under pressure easily.
Hello! Let's begin with You Must Not Go Outside, a satirical set of instructions for people in the United Kingdom to do while they are on quarantine. (There are other satirizations on the same concept, because humor is often shared.)
Staying in the realm of satire, an illustration of the collegiate campus as it exists in the mind of the United States conservative, which blends many of the things that conservatives take issue with when it comes to college faculty and organizations they believe are engaging in liberal indoctrination and attempting to silence any dissenting voices.
If you intend to engage in humor, though, it's almost always worth making sure all the people that will be involved are okay with it. Zoom-bombing your partner by wearing costumes is funny, but it's a lot less so if it's unwanted.
Not funny at all, however, is the last laugh from the Roe of Roe v. Wade saying her choice to be a shill for the anti-choice movement had nothing to do with becoming a true believer and all to do with getting enough money from the anti-choice movement to keep on living, with the implications that the anti-choicers knew what they were getting into when they agreed to it. Which says quite a bit about what that movement is willing to do to make it seem like their view is somehow the better one. It was supposedly worth almost one half-million dollars over the remainder of the person's life, which is a pretty good amount, but some part of me wishes she'd soaked them for more.
IKEA in released blanket fort designs, the sort that take their own products but can easily be adapted for whatever furniture you happen to have on hand to make them with.
Imagine what might happen if the government focused its work on raising up the most hard-hit, the most affected, and the people who have been served the least by this capitalist scheme, rather than being at the beck and call of the wealthiest who want to maintain their positions of power and privilege. Despite all the fear-mongering involved (and note how this fear-mongering is not a new thing by any means or measure), actually doing things to make the people who have the least succeed will result in everyone benefiting from those investments. Because many of those investments are things that more privileged people can take advantage of, as well, like better transport networks, a wide pool of possible people to patronize and employ, and an economy where there's more money in it for people to buy your goods and services. It's positives for everyone, if people really believed in the supremacy of the market over all other things or if they believed in equity as a guiding principle for governance.
synecdochic has a long-form explanation of what licenses and rights you are granting sites (like Dreamwidth) so that they can do the things you want them to do, like display your posts and aggregate them for your followers.
We must say goodbye to Little Richard, who helped lay the foundations of rock and roll.
Grief support when physical proximity isn't possible is still doable, but it's different.
Without legal recognition or other arrangements, or documentation that gives the power of decision-making over to named persons, young LGBTQAI+ people might find their phobic families in charge of their affairs should they perish. Which is still true even if in sharper relief due to current circumstances. And obtaining the money, seals, and documents for such things is not easy, especially when the person in question is still considered a minor.
Volkswagen went to all the trouble to produce a racist ad, only to pull it when people started pointing out that it was a racist ad.
When schoolchldren wrecked on an island, they swiftly organized themselves into a cooperative and survived for more than a year until they were rescued by someone who saw the signs of people living there. The comparisons made to Lord of the Flies are swift, of course, and in the article, but there's a good point made that the people stuck in this situation were people who already got along with each other and were inclined to cooperate and help.
If you were looking for actual lawless behavior from people who were supposed to be doing better things, look no further than the white police officer harassing the black doctor for no apparent reason other than that he's black and the paper that seems to suggest that him being a doctor is the only reason that this is a scandal and a problem.
Variations on the tuna sandwich to give it different tastes, accompanied by a mayonnaise recipe for something different than what one might find in a grocer's, unless your grocer happens to have the style of mayo mentioned here.
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fictional_fans is swiftly becoming the pan-fandom discussion place long sought and despaired that might not happen ever. Solid things available here include a long discussion on the qualifications of a redemption arc and how our fandoms are integral to us and help us make it through our days.
Which linked to some useful ideas about how one views redemption is firmly rooted in one's cultural and religious beliefs and contexts such that it becomes worthwhile to discuss whether what you mean and want is atonement rather than redemption and to keep in mind that forgiveness is a thing that other people do to you rather than a thing you can demand from others. (Although in certain contexts, people may insist that you have to forgive someone who has done the appropriate rituals for forgiveness and atonement, regardless of whether they are truly atoning for the wrong.)
Dealing with the virus in the now is giving us perspective and understanding of how we might recognize and deal with other problems where the time horizon is long and the temptation to leave it to our descendants is large.
The current liminal state is not that different than being in a fairly tale, except, for the part where it's more like having fallen out of the fairy tale. Which sounds much like what happens to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hopefully without the being dead at the end. Fans of Calvin and Hobbes may recognize our current situation intimately well, as many of us are under the same strictures that Calvin is, at a much older age than Calvin was, and time has melded and flowed into something very different in this liminal space.
It creates visuals like a priest performing blessings with holy water delivered by a squirt gun.
Many museums will not reopen at all due to the lost funding coming from being closed. Similarly, theaters are going to need more funding soon, Possibly including the Globe Theater in the UK.
Infrastructure that would already deliver students to schools is being repurposed to deliver food and connectivity to students, because one of those things that gets mentioned but doesn't really get thought about a lot is that the mandate for schools to have food available means that the most regular source of food for more than a few children is the food they get (either free or reduced lunch) at school.
The game of whether to reopen is a game of disease-laden hot potato, and the entities that should be holding the potato and being willing to take responsibility are doing their best to avoid it. Which has the problem of leaving the matter to completely uninformed people who are more afraid of the politics than the deaths. So there have to be decisions made by individual practices about whose safety they are going to risk, which gets more complicated when they're being told they have to reopen or else. Given that those places opening don't actually know what they need to know, nor have they managed to reach the guidelines for reopening, we don't actually know whether they'll get lucky, be good, or they'll cause yet another explosion of cases and tax hospital capacities even more. There is good empirical advice about how to proceed, but it requires several shifts in thinking and practice to achieve.
The United Kingdom is much more interesting in restoring health and happiness than they are in restarting the machine that makes billions for a privileged few and screwing everyone else.
Places that took the possibility of the pandemic seriously and had infrastructure in place to arrest it before it could spread have done very well with containing the novel virus.
If you want a movement for all women, then you have to acknowledge that not everyone is on the same level of having their needs met. Which means finding and advocating against the systems that are supposed to help people but instead give cover to everyday sadists and that insist some people are unworthy of proper care, because of their outward appearance. As usual, it works on multiple intersections, because Asian American and Pacific Islander people are being specifically targeted for misguided racism. Kind of like a thing I saw where a black man asking someone to put their dog on a leash, as the law states, gets someone dialing the police on them because they'd rather abuse institutional power than admit that they were doing something wrong, heaven forfend, to someone they clearly see as an inferior.
Blood clotting complications appearing from SARS-CoV-2 appear to be similar to other blood clotting complications from similar coronaviruses, and influenza, and other such things. Which can lead to things like strokes in people who would otherwise not be at risk for them at all.
Being on a ventilator is a last-ditch effort to survive. Even when successful, there are a lot of lasting changes to the body.
Coming back to closed buildings will require some care and thought to make sure that the pipes are clear and functional, lest one risk an outbreak of something else like Legionnaire's disease. And, for some people, their symptoms are still going on, months after initial infection, which is confusing to all the people who thought this could be a one-and-done sort of situation.
Advice on using one's technology to validate or disprove potential mental health issues, along with other advice on getting through situations that will tax the SAN score. Furthermore, the absolute necessity of resting as long as you need to when you are recovering from having had the virus, even if that rest period means months or years, so as to try and ward off the possibility of the body entering a chronically fatigued state.
One museum is putting more effort into their outreach and education staff, in contrast to all the others that have been quick to let their best staff go or get furloughed. This goes well with the continued need to make museums less about cultural appropriation and exoticization.
Bookshelves and their arrangement are becoming more important in a time where people's books are more and more on video. Which is interesting, because people are turning more and more to comfort reads in these stressful times as a way of not inducing more stress.
Several pictures of masks made and showcased around the world, as, inevitably, people were going to get to the point where if they had to keep wearing the masks, they were going to make damn sure that the masks reflected their personalities and styles. (I have a feeling a lot of style trendsetters in Japan have noted this with the understanding that they were ahead of their time, when they were wearing the masks first.)
Rather than a nice thing to throw excess resources at, centering your work on raising the most affected and afflicted makes everything better for everyone. Because when you target the people that need it the most, then others who also need it, or who will find it far more convenient to use, will follow suit. Which is also the way that you have to approach the idea of reworking industries from the ground up so they stop relying on exploitation all across the process of getting food from where its grown to where it is served.
Finally, although I'm sure he would be entirely unhappy at it if he were to see it, the consequences of having an administrator that says easily laughable things is that people poke fun at him about it. In this case, it's an official arm of the Chinese Communist Party, but I suspect it wouldn't be that hard to research what the Statue of Liberty Lego says and find that it's not exaggeration if they actually said it.
A system that is trying to gather interactions doesn't care about accuracy, only engagement, and if such a system can recruit people who are susceptible to not questioning the veracity of what they engage with, lies and misinformation have circumnavigated the globe several times before the truth can get its trousers on. Which would be easier to condemn if we didn't have an entire industry dedicated to finding and exploiting our cognitive biases and weaknesses, such that fact-checks of a slickly-produced video have to repeatedly point out that it does not say what it wants you to think it does, and to point out that the claims it makes are thinly-sourced and from people who have received condemnation from professional bodies for what they have done.
Blending a specific time period and futuristic things so that they look seamless, the local film posters created for Western films as they arrived in Ghana (and the slow decline of those posters because of the increased availability of the original posters), photographs of cars abandoned to nature (and the nature that has been reclaiming them), creating plant arrangements in the forms of undersea creatures, rat-created artwork, how the books of the Raksura take their cues from the natural world and its concepts, and in so doing, provide a different mirror to look at the human world and its concepts, painting in the open air as a way of doing art while maintaining responsible distance from others, using older clothes to try and recreate the looks of various characters from the past, and Doing ecological preservation work while the virus goes on.
In technology, notes on setting up a singing series, on the technology needed to do all of that work, and the practice involved in the shift from in person to online.
A video on constructing a mount for a high speed camera so that it can be attached to a lawnmower and capture the destructive power of a lawnmower blade at many many frames per second.
naye suggests using Greenshot as an easy tool to capture, upload, and then get code to display screenshots for Dreamwidth (or other) entries.
Legoland California Resort is offering small building challenges, letting you see into how some of the Master Builders would create various objects, like spheres, dogs, pirates, and more. Or, if you get really ambitious, a beehive.
Blogs will disappear just as easily as print material does, and blogs that never had a particular focus hosted on WIRED even more so, because, well, there's a shift that's been going on that will likely be accelerated into a new normal when we pull out of the current pandemic. One suggestion on how to retool everything suggests blockchain, digital tokens, and universal basic income as the way or reworking the economy so that everyone benefits. Which would still require seizing control of the political power as well as the economic power, so that capitalists and corporations can't hoard it all for themselves, but it's an interesting plan. It would also require a lot more infrastructure building and some device distribution along with the digital tokens and wallets, as it's no good to have a digital UBI if the people who need it don't have the connectivity or the computing ability to access what they are being given.
Being an associate of Edward Snowden, even as a journalist, means there are a lot of people who want to spy on you and hack your devices for the information they may contain. Because governments want to know, including the United States government, and they don't necessarily care about what the law says or doesn't say about what they can do.
An nVidia/Bandai Namco collaboration had an AI observe many games of Pacman and then recreate the game from scratch, which it seems to have done at a lower fidelity and also without the specific ghost behaviors programmed into the original.
Last for this entry, some interesting facts about the Ewoks, back from when Star Wars getting re-released was an important and momentous occasion. (And also a source of much derision, once people found out what had happened in the special edition re-releases.)
The coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial helped hasted the cancellation of Gargoyles, the cartoon. Because trial coverage was pre-empting their timeslots. (And Disney wasn't trying to get them to keep going, I guess?)
And the various men of the Lord of the Rings and why they're all terrible boyfriends.
Hello! Let's begin with You Must Not Go Outside, a satirical set of instructions for people in the United Kingdom to do while they are on quarantine. (There are other satirizations on the same concept, because humor is often shared.)
Staying in the realm of satire, an illustration of the collegiate campus as it exists in the mind of the United States conservative, which blends many of the things that conservatives take issue with when it comes to college faculty and organizations they believe are engaging in liberal indoctrination and attempting to silence any dissenting voices.
If you intend to engage in humor, though, it's almost always worth making sure all the people that will be involved are okay with it. Zoom-bombing your partner by wearing costumes is funny, but it's a lot less so if it's unwanted.
Not funny at all, however, is the last laugh from the Roe of Roe v. Wade saying her choice to be a shill for the anti-choice movement had nothing to do with becoming a true believer and all to do with getting enough money from the anti-choice movement to keep on living, with the implications that the anti-choicers knew what they were getting into when they agreed to it. Which says quite a bit about what that movement is willing to do to make it seem like their view is somehow the better one. It was supposedly worth almost one half-million dollars over the remainder of the person's life, which is a pretty good amount, but some part of me wishes she'd soaked them for more.
IKEA in released blanket fort designs, the sort that take their own products but can easily be adapted for whatever furniture you happen to have on hand to make them with.
Imagine what might happen if the government focused its work on raising up the most hard-hit, the most affected, and the people who have been served the least by this capitalist scheme, rather than being at the beck and call of the wealthiest who want to maintain their positions of power and privilege. Despite all the fear-mongering involved (and note how this fear-mongering is not a new thing by any means or measure), actually doing things to make the people who have the least succeed will result in everyone benefiting from those investments. Because many of those investments are things that more privileged people can take advantage of, as well, like better transport networks, a wide pool of possible people to patronize and employ, and an economy where there's more money in it for people to buy your goods and services. It's positives for everyone, if people really believed in the supremacy of the market over all other things or if they believed in equity as a guiding principle for governance.
synecdochic has a long-form explanation of what licenses and rights you are granting sites (like Dreamwidth) so that they can do the things you want them to do, like display your posts and aggregate them for your followers.We must say goodbye to Little Richard, who helped lay the foundations of rock and roll.
Grief support when physical proximity isn't possible is still doable, but it's different.
Without legal recognition or other arrangements, or documentation that gives the power of decision-making over to named persons, young LGBTQAI+ people might find their phobic families in charge of their affairs should they perish. Which is still true even if in sharper relief due to current circumstances. And obtaining the money, seals, and documents for such things is not easy, especially when the person in question is still considered a minor.
Volkswagen went to all the trouble to produce a racist ad, only to pull it when people started pointing out that it was a racist ad.
When schoolchldren wrecked on an island, they swiftly organized themselves into a cooperative and survived for more than a year until they were rescued by someone who saw the signs of people living there. The comparisons made to Lord of the Flies are swift, of course, and in the article, but there's a good point made that the people stuck in this situation were people who already got along with each other and were inclined to cooperate and help.
If you were looking for actual lawless behavior from people who were supposed to be doing better things, look no further than the white police officer harassing the black doctor for no apparent reason other than that he's black and the paper that seems to suggest that him being a doctor is the only reason that this is a scandal and a problem.
Variations on the tuna sandwich to give it different tastes, accompanied by a mayonnaise recipe for something different than what one might find in a grocer's, unless your grocer happens to have the style of mayo mentioned here.
fictional_fans is swiftly becoming the pan-fandom discussion place long sought and despaired that might not happen ever. Solid things available here include a long discussion on the qualifications of a redemption arc and how our fandoms are integral to us and help us make it through our days.Which linked to some useful ideas about how one views redemption is firmly rooted in one's cultural and religious beliefs and contexts such that it becomes worthwhile to discuss whether what you mean and want is atonement rather than redemption and to keep in mind that forgiveness is a thing that other people do to you rather than a thing you can demand from others. (Although in certain contexts, people may insist that you have to forgive someone who has done the appropriate rituals for forgiveness and atonement, regardless of whether they are truly atoning for the wrong.)
Dealing with the virus in the now is giving us perspective and understanding of how we might recognize and deal with other problems where the time horizon is long and the temptation to leave it to our descendants is large.
The current liminal state is not that different than being in a fairly tale, except, for the part where it's more like having fallen out of the fairy tale. Which sounds much like what happens to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hopefully without the being dead at the end. Fans of Calvin and Hobbes may recognize our current situation intimately well, as many of us are under the same strictures that Calvin is, at a much older age than Calvin was, and time has melded and flowed into something very different in this liminal space.
It creates visuals like a priest performing blessings with holy water delivered by a squirt gun.
Many museums will not reopen at all due to the lost funding coming from being closed. Similarly, theaters are going to need more funding soon, Possibly including the Globe Theater in the UK.
Infrastructure that would already deliver students to schools is being repurposed to deliver food and connectivity to students, because one of those things that gets mentioned but doesn't really get thought about a lot is that the mandate for schools to have food available means that the most regular source of food for more than a few children is the food they get (either free or reduced lunch) at school.
The game of whether to reopen is a game of disease-laden hot potato, and the entities that should be holding the potato and being willing to take responsibility are doing their best to avoid it. Which has the problem of leaving the matter to completely uninformed people who are more afraid of the politics than the deaths. So there have to be decisions made by individual practices about whose safety they are going to risk, which gets more complicated when they're being told they have to reopen or else. Given that those places opening don't actually know what they need to know, nor have they managed to reach the guidelines for reopening, we don't actually know whether they'll get lucky, be good, or they'll cause yet another explosion of cases and tax hospital capacities even more. There is good empirical advice about how to proceed, but it requires several shifts in thinking and practice to achieve.
The United Kingdom is much more interesting in restoring health and happiness than they are in restarting the machine that makes billions for a privileged few and screwing everyone else.
Places that took the possibility of the pandemic seriously and had infrastructure in place to arrest it before it could spread have done very well with containing the novel virus.
If you want a movement for all women, then you have to acknowledge that not everyone is on the same level of having their needs met. Which means finding and advocating against the systems that are supposed to help people but instead give cover to everyday sadists and that insist some people are unworthy of proper care, because of their outward appearance. As usual, it works on multiple intersections, because Asian American and Pacific Islander people are being specifically targeted for misguided racism. Kind of like a thing I saw where a black man asking someone to put their dog on a leash, as the law states, gets someone dialing the police on them because they'd rather abuse institutional power than admit that they were doing something wrong, heaven forfend, to someone they clearly see as an inferior.
Blood clotting complications appearing from SARS-CoV-2 appear to be similar to other blood clotting complications from similar coronaviruses, and influenza, and other such things. Which can lead to things like strokes in people who would otherwise not be at risk for them at all.
Being on a ventilator is a last-ditch effort to survive. Even when successful, there are a lot of lasting changes to the body.
Coming back to closed buildings will require some care and thought to make sure that the pipes are clear and functional, lest one risk an outbreak of something else like Legionnaire's disease. And, for some people, their symptoms are still going on, months after initial infection, which is confusing to all the people who thought this could be a one-and-done sort of situation.
Advice on using one's technology to validate or disprove potential mental health issues, along with other advice on getting through situations that will tax the SAN score. Furthermore, the absolute necessity of resting as long as you need to when you are recovering from having had the virus, even if that rest period means months or years, so as to try and ward off the possibility of the body entering a chronically fatigued state.
One museum is putting more effort into their outreach and education staff, in contrast to all the others that have been quick to let their best staff go or get furloughed. This goes well with the continued need to make museums less about cultural appropriation and exoticization.
Bookshelves and their arrangement are becoming more important in a time where people's books are more and more on video. Which is interesting, because people are turning more and more to comfort reads in these stressful times as a way of not inducing more stress.
Several pictures of masks made and showcased around the world, as, inevitably, people were going to get to the point where if they had to keep wearing the masks, they were going to make damn sure that the masks reflected their personalities and styles. (I have a feeling a lot of style trendsetters in Japan have noted this with the understanding that they were ahead of their time, when they were wearing the masks first.)
Rather than a nice thing to throw excess resources at, centering your work on raising the most affected and afflicted makes everything better for everyone. Because when you target the people that need it the most, then others who also need it, or who will find it far more convenient to use, will follow suit. Which is also the way that you have to approach the idea of reworking industries from the ground up so they stop relying on exploitation all across the process of getting food from where its grown to where it is served.
Finally, although I'm sure he would be entirely unhappy at it if he were to see it, the consequences of having an administrator that says easily laughable things is that people poke fun at him about it. In this case, it's an official arm of the Chinese Communist Party, but I suspect it wouldn't be that hard to research what the Statue of Liberty Lego says and find that it's not exaggeration if they actually said it.
A system that is trying to gather interactions doesn't care about accuracy, only engagement, and if such a system can recruit people who are susceptible to not questioning the veracity of what they engage with, lies and misinformation have circumnavigated the globe several times before the truth can get its trousers on. Which would be easier to condemn if we didn't have an entire industry dedicated to finding and exploiting our cognitive biases and weaknesses, such that fact-checks of a slickly-produced video have to repeatedly point out that it does not say what it wants you to think it does, and to point out that the claims it makes are thinly-sourced and from people who have received condemnation from professional bodies for what they have done.
Blending a specific time period and futuristic things so that they look seamless, the local film posters created for Western films as they arrived in Ghana (and the slow decline of those posters because of the increased availability of the original posters), photographs of cars abandoned to nature (and the nature that has been reclaiming them), creating plant arrangements in the forms of undersea creatures, rat-created artwork, how the books of the Raksura take their cues from the natural world and its concepts, and in so doing, provide a different mirror to look at the human world and its concepts, painting in the open air as a way of doing art while maintaining responsible distance from others, using older clothes to try and recreate the looks of various characters from the past, and Doing ecological preservation work while the virus goes on.
In technology, notes on setting up a singing series, on the technology needed to do all of that work, and the practice involved in the shift from in person to online.
A video on constructing a mount for a high speed camera so that it can be attached to a lawnmower and capture the destructive power of a lawnmower blade at many many frames per second.
naye suggests using Greenshot as an easy tool to capture, upload, and then get code to display screenshots for Dreamwidth (or other) entries.Legoland California Resort is offering small building challenges, letting you see into how some of the Master Builders would create various objects, like spheres, dogs, pirates, and more. Or, if you get really ambitious, a beehive.
Blogs will disappear just as easily as print material does, and blogs that never had a particular focus hosted on WIRED even more so, because, well, there's a shift that's been going on that will likely be accelerated into a new normal when we pull out of the current pandemic. One suggestion on how to retool everything suggests blockchain, digital tokens, and universal basic income as the way or reworking the economy so that everyone benefits. Which would still require seizing control of the political power as well as the economic power, so that capitalists and corporations can't hoard it all for themselves, but it's an interesting plan. It would also require a lot more infrastructure building and some device distribution along with the digital tokens and wallets, as it's no good to have a digital UBI if the people who need it don't have the connectivity or the computing ability to access what they are being given.
Being an associate of Edward Snowden, even as a journalist, means there are a lot of people who want to spy on you and hack your devices for the information they may contain. Because governments want to know, including the United States government, and they don't necessarily care about what the law says or doesn't say about what they can do.
An nVidia/Bandai Namco collaboration had an AI observe many games of Pacman and then recreate the game from scratch, which it seems to have done at a lower fidelity and also without the specific ghost behaviors programmed into the original.
Last for this entry, some interesting facts about the Ewoks, back from when Star Wars getting re-released was an important and momentous occasion. (And also a source of much derision, once people found out what had happened in the special edition re-releases.)
The coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial helped hasted the cancellation of Gargoyles, the cartoon. Because trial coverage was pre-empting their timeslots. (And Disney wasn't trying to get them to keep going, I guess?)
And the various men of the Lord of the Rings and why they're all terrible boyfriends.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-27 05:28 pm (UTC)They cleared my account but not the data so the two email addies still on there have been pwned.
I've changed all my passwords this morning!
no subject
Date: 2020-05-27 05:36 pm (UTC)