A couple weeks of making your tabs explode - Later July, 02020

[silveradept]

Greetings. It appears the supply of consumer fireworks was shrinking rapidly as imports from China were not necessarily getting in particularly swiftly. Cue chorus of angels from those of us who do not like boomies going off on several days before and after the "official" day where the boomies go off.

Tor Books is looking for an intern, and there's no need to physically be present in the Tor offices for it.

If you are not enjoying a book, stop reading it. There is no virtue prize for finishing a terrible book. (I much like the Nancy Pearl method of deciding whether a book is worth your time - subtract your age from 100, and that is the minimum of pages to read a book before making a decision about whether to continue.)

The presence of women and BIPOC authors in the halls of publishing is still seen as killing, rather than life-giving, it seems, at least according to a person who longs for a Past That Never Was and those days where one could be comforted in the knowledge that nothing published would change the dominant worldview, or even challenge it seriously.

A retrospective on the part of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom called Bronies, from their origins in irony to their adoption of sincereity, the show reacting to their memetic mimicry, and eventually, the last of the Bronycons, a fitting send-off, to the point around and after the end, the people who might still be around are likely the people who would have been there from the start, the furries. [Video, Youtube, contains a lot of editing cuts, which may or may not detract from your experience.] I don't think I've seen a fandom space become quite as warped as the Friendship Is Magic space did when the Bronies were the most visible and popular parts of the fandom. They made it remarkably difficult for someone who looks like a dude to talk about what they enjoyed about the show, and even now, there's a significant amount of "well, I would like to talk about it, but I don't necessarily want to go through the hassle of being mis-identified and excoriated for it," that surrounds the show, because of that particular phenomenon.

Although I'm generally clueless enough that in a panel about anti-racism in fandom, when talking with someone about an organization that I was part of where there really wasn't any prominent Black women leading, I was thinking about work, and it took me some significant time afterward, and recognizing that I had my commissioned pony artwork "Sibling Rivalry" visible in the Bag of Holding, to realize that I had been mistaken for a brony when I was talking about that organization. I got apologized to by the person I was conversing with, which seemed odd at the ime but now makes a certain amount of sense. "Whoops, I thought you were a brony and talking about that fandom (which absolutely fit what I was describing), but you were talking about something else. Perhaps you are not a brony, and I am sorry for lumping you in with them." was the thought behind the apology, but that says a lot about the collective opinion of bronies that an apology felt necessary.

I kind of wonder how badly out of joint the FNDM is pulling RWBY, but I also don't want to go looking for it, either. I know there are a lot of strong opinions and that various platforms are built not to care about what kind of engagement happens, so long as engagement happens, and I got enough of a taste of that kind of place with the ship wars in Harry Potter, so I mostly curate my space of interaction by hiding my fandom and what I'm watching and writing and interacting with in my own space and shunting all of it to other people's spaces. Not because I don't think you're all happy to interact and to talk about things, but because I've mostly decided that as someone who has relatively few Strong Opinions on Right and Wrong in shipping and a lot more of them about tropes, settings, and storytelling decisions, that (1) I'm going to have to do work to find spaces that have the vibe that I want, and (2) it's mostly easier just not to say what I am or aren't watching (and wow, that's weird phrasing there). Unless whatever it is gives me the idea for a fully-formed "AIGH!". Which reminds me that I should go be cranky, because some of the conclusions being drawn about the manner that people use tags on works makes me want to yell in Librarian.

The myth of the Golden Age Renaissance continues to pay terrible dividends, as it sits on a flawed concept, is primarily the result of PR exercises, and ignores the reality of the period of the Italian city-states. The frame for this is showing the flaws in the idea that the current pandemic might result in a flourishing of art, culture, and freedom like the Black Death produced the Renaissance. I'll happily agree that there's a lot of art being produced in this present time and pandemic, but I think the article is right in that much of it is in a bid for legitimacy and for being seen as valid and connecting to history, rather than because we've somehow transcended into a more enlightened era. We have a better clue of things like, say, the prevalence of STIs in earlier periods of time, which did not have as many useful treatments as the current era might.

Although there are some records that still need work, as archives relating to sex work have a tendency to reflect governmental positions on the legality and criminality of sex work, including using old and outdated terminology in their finding aids and not having much records with sex worker perspectives, instead being mostly police accounts. Which is how we learn about a black woman accused of assaulting a man, where the records are very swift to misgender her. Things are a little better when it comes to dirty books and pictures because many of those same parts of pornography still survive in some form, giving an insight into what kinds of materials may have been available. (Clearly NSFW, yeah?)

We lost Grant Imahara to a sudden brain aneurysm at a mere 49 years of age, and the world is far poorer for it. Not just for his work on White Rabbit Project and Mythbusters, because oh boy did they look like they were having fun with that, but also because of Geoff the Robot Skeleton sidekick, and I suspect a lot many more projects that he was involved in building and using.

Additionally, fans of Fleetwood Mac lost one of the original members of the group, Peter Green, at 73 years of age.

A filmed performance of the musical Hamilton appeared on the House of Mouse's streaming platform, and therefore those who had fallen in love with the show from the soundtrack finally got the opportunity to see a performance of it for less than the cost of going to New York and seeing it. liv has some thoughts on seeing the New York version versus the London West End version, lannamichaels has a review that focuses on the songs, the choreography, and the camera angles. Which also means that when someone says "There's a cast member whose job it is to signal to the audience that someone is about to die", you can go back and look at it to see that they're definitely there and in all the right spots to fulfill that role.

When it comes to the historical accuracy of the story, of course, the decision to get rid of a lot of the slavery talk makes things more hagiographical than historical. There are plenty of people who could receive statuary because they were moral people at that time, so there's a lot of other source material for musicals, too. (And plenty of busts to be removed from various spaces, even if they were high-dollar contributors.) And it certainly wasn't just a thing in the colonies - there's more than enough records of enslaved persons in the UK proper, just through their runaway advertisements, to understand that slavery was a widespread practice. Along with all the connections to slavery that otherwise famous things have, such as whiskies, insurance companies, and, of course, the place in New York that still buys and sells the livelihoods of people, abstracted into stocks and bonds, rather than as those people themselves.

Any profession that sees "neutrality" and both sides-ism as a core value has become afraid of telling the truth when the truth is clear. Which includes entities like the Organization for Transformative Works. naye has been putting together summaries of the ways that OTW has and hasn't been responsive to concerns that the structure of the AO3 and the associated Terms of Service allows for all sorts of racist content and harassment to be posted and allowed to continues. Here's the initial post about the OTW and racism, a roundup of commentary on the issues and a further roundup of commentary on the issues.

The dialogue and community input and the processes involved are things that I should pay attention to, just for the the ability to take a look at it and see where I can expect the discussions to potentially go in my own professional life.

An important thing for white people to do in helping others get on board with ideas like Black Lives Matter is to be the familiar, welcoming, educating face for the newbies, so that someone sticks around long enough to be useful and helpful. (It's not glorious work, but very few things that turn out to be useful really are.) Another thing that's useful is to resist making equivalencies between the experiences of Black people and other groups that have been discriminated against for other reasons. Which can be difficult, because there are some groups that have a history of discrimination and violence as well, but the differences in experience is important.

Black-owned bookstores are experiencing record amounts of sales for operations that haven't traditionally had this much interest. But while the interest is nice, that it took the murder of Black people on repeat and brutality against protests to get that interest says something about the way things were before, and might go back to again. But if you're looking for a shop to purchase some additional anti-racism reads, a Black-owned bookstore is going to be the best place to go.

Class privilege is one of the few reliable ways to make white people realize their position amd how they're being told by the rich to be racist. Because so many white people want to believe they'll be part of the rich someday, when that's not the case. Gen-X and Millenials are a lot faster off the blocks in the understanding of this, since they've been getting battered by the rich all their lives. (Unlike certain columnists who believe that Millenials have been coddled with participation trophies and cancel culture and are therefore utterly unable to face the reality of a pandemic and a recession.) Also, strategies for white people to talk to other white people about anti-Blackness, because sometimes things you learn in one context translate to another.

The land-grant university system that produced more than a few state schools (and more than a little profit for other universities) made their money mostly because the United States government paid little to nothing, if it paid at all, for Indigenous lands that it then distributed for those universities.

Rebecca Solnit poins out whet a student of history learns about movements - they often are already underway and successful at convincing others of their truth by the time they become visibly public. Which I'm sitting next to the concept of progress, the application of progress, and how avoiding teleology is difficult, but there are occasionally elements that really are just better than they were and that looking at history means that you acknowledge Great Forces are present, and that human efforts can shape and direct the Great Forces, even if neither Great Force nor human effort gets everything exactly right. And that it's hard to see history when you're in the middle of living through it.

Insignia-less persons with guns and body armor who refused to identify themselves assaulted persons engaged in peaceful, lawful, and democratic protests. In theory, and by Twitter, those persons were identified as federal agents, even though they continued to refuse to identify themselves, and the people nominally in charge of them refused to have them be identified or to have them leave, claiming a failure of local control of the protesters. As one might point out, the armed response is in very specific parts of the city and is mostly aimed as suppressing and silencing protest, not because there has been a sudden outbreak of widespread violence between citizens.

The city of Barcelona is threatening companies with long-vacant properties to get tenants in them or the city will buy those properties at half the market rate and turn them into units for low-income residents to rent from the city. That sounds like an excellent idea for increasing affordable housing and encouraging developers to either get tenants or let their work go to good use. It would be excellent to have more governmental decisions adopt and enforce such ideas.

An interesting series of comics about a person who can see others inner demons (and his own). It starts with A New Acquaintance, then proceeds to Close and Closer, and then finishes with A Demon's Worth. It's a really nice series and I like it a lot.

An incomplete list of women writing fantasy. A story about what sex and dating is like when you're both able to see each other as you are and at the very least accept that you're sexy just like that, despite what the culture around you says about your size.

Black bisexual becomes Batwoman, which is all sorts of excellent, a photography project that straightens a tree in the shot, warping everything around the tree to achieve this, a series on various Chinese food establishments in Vancouver and weathering the pandemic, the understanding that if fairy tale swans and swan maidens behaved like actual swans, there would be a lot of people getting the snot beaten out of them if they tried half of what happens, an easy way to infuse honey with spicing, and recorded shifts in sparrow song.

In science and technology, a very bright comet passing into being seen from Terra, all the ways that people are different, but that might take some retraining of the eye and the mind to notice if your cultural upbringing only taught you to see variance in people who look mostly like you.

Flash fiction about what happens when all of those things that are statistically unlikely end up happening to one person, making their sickness-induced disability visible in ways that are uncomfortable for abled people. The writer of the fiction also has an essay about how the disabled have been left behind in the corpus of science fiction and an interview about flash fiction and being unforgiving with statistics. Because 95% still means one in twenty end up on the wrong end of the thing. All of this part of Uncanny Magazine's Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction issue. There are several other issues of that type for Uncanny, each focusing on an entire group who's been left out of the conventional science fiction setting.

In a matter that is somewhat humorous, but also related to the virus, several men were fined for outraging public decency by wearing nothing at all (including masks) on an Italian beach. In these times, the not wearing the masks might be the most important of the things that were off about the situation.

Canadian sexologists suggest that mask-wearing and condom-wearing have the same strategies to adoption. along with the problems that not everyone will wear masks (or condoms). And on a similar theme, while there are differences between this pandemic and the HIV crisis, the two are far too similar in the attitudes being taken regarding who is acceptable to die. And, because there's something about being too on the nose, tylik does a review of the literature that suggests SARS-CoV-2 causes damage to the genitals as well, so even though you know it won't convince them, there's a solid argument to say that people who are obsessed with their sexual function should wear masks to protect said sexual function.

Wear a goddamn mask, because even if it isn't a foolproof defense against infection, there's a good chance that you don't get as much virus if you are infected if you are wearing a mask.

Plus, there are some ways to make the mask still protective, but may not necessarily trigger the feeeling of something too close for breathing comfort. Or, conversely, there may be practices a person can develop that will help them not panic in relation to wearing a mask, if the situation is such where the panic brought on by the mask is something that will respond well to thinks like mindfulness and exposure practices.

Elsewhere, even with no visible symptoms, there's a good chance that an infection with SARS-CoV-2 will cause some amount of damage.

The possibility of different symptom sets associated with viral infection might mean there are different types of the virus around, all in the same family, but distinct enough from each other. Along with scientists not really knowing how SARS-CoV-2 and the flu and cold viruses will play with each other, whether that will be good, bad, or terrible.

There are some potential positives regarding a possible protein treatment to arrest the virus and a possible vaccination pathway that has so far triggered an immune response. If you're in the United Kingdom, the NHS is recruiting people who would like to be part of vaccination trials.

The best way of handling pandemics is now one that works both with solutions designed to treat and vaccinate and solutions that allow people to isolate and take sick leave and otherwise do things socially to improve health. Because a person who fears they're going to be fired for taking their available sick leave isn't going to take that leave. And that's assuming they have some of that leave in the first place, as there are plenty of people who don't.

The discovery of an early human ochre mine by divers, how seeing the picture of a Black footballer led to researching the family tree, which also led to seeing the completeness of the picture of the slave trade and the possibility that the person might be both descendant of the footballer and the slavers, the need to redesign cities and culture both so that they stop prioritizing men as the only important gender, the ways in which being disbelieved for their experiences and pain makes women not trust doctors and therefore potentially turn their back on them (which is not a good idea when that distrust starts including distrust in the efficacy of vaccinations), a text block meant to help someone spot oddities in whatever font/typeface they want to use for any given project, or for evaluating what a typeface looks like and what things ideas it gives off, rethinking museums and their collections to make artifacts more active again, and mostly returning artifacts collected by colonizers back to the places they came from, so as to reduce the appeal of marking things as "exotic", which I put next to the museum that invited an indigineous curator to work with their collection who displayed, but also ddeliberately crossed out misconceptions and wrong ideas as well as providing commentary on the descriptions and artifacts that were already on display, using printed parts to make normally-impossible pistons that could add more power along with a hybrid engine that allows each of the cylinders to work independently of the others, with computerized control over intake, exhaust, and the like, so as to make both power and fuel efficiency possible in the engine, the possibility that we are long overdue to remove the one cent coin in the United States, and the possibility of more high-speed passenger rail laying track.

Last for tonight, the science is in, and bisexual men exist, because SCIENCE. Or, y'know, because they said so, but some people wouldn't be convinced of it unless the appropriate deity of choice came down and personally told them to change their minds.

The experiences of coming to the understanding of being non-binary, from some of the younger generation.Additionally, good kaiju parenting when a small kaiju comes out.

And designing trousers that will look fashionable in an office context and that have pockets of sufficient size to hold the things one would put in such trousers. They're not cargo pants, because the size and function of the pockets are different on cargo pants, but the placement of the pockets is where the side pockets on a pair of cargo pants would be, internally rather than externally.