Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2020-09-06 09:23 am
silveradept) wrote2020-09-06 09:23 am
It is Always Too Much To Sum Up - August 02020
Greetings. As one knows, This is Fine. [Original appearance of Fine Dog, also has body horror associated from being in a burning building and not doing anything to stop it]. Which, perhaps because of the memetic status that the Fine Dog rocketed to not that soon after being published, it became evident to KC Green, who created Fine Dog, that This Is Not Fine, where the dog does the thing that you would do when realizing that your house is on fire and you've been leaving it to burn down with you inside.
Chadwick Boseman has died of colon cancer, at 43 years of age, and this is another one of those things where you wish the for-profit medical industry would spend less time boosting their own profits and more time figuring out how to beat the important diseases in our lives, so we stop losing people long before their time.
A queer Black sex worker owned collective is making very good hand sanitizer, and also distributing it to their communities, because there's still a need for it. If you are looking to support such organizations, Hygiene Hustle is the place where you can get good product for inexpensive, or make donations to keep sanitizer in the hands of people who need it. Also, because puritanism is always selectively applied, they've lost their Insta because acknowledging the existence of sex workers always brings out the censors, and also likely because Insta's owned by Facebook, and Facebook doesn't like queer people or Black people much, in addition to how they dislike sex workers. (HuffPo has a more in-depth article about the founding of Hygiene Hustle and their model.) Understand it hasn't been that long for effective contraception to exist in the world, and so having a good set of things that are effective and safe for sex work is important.
Also, some insight into what sex research is like, including the parts about having to design and build your own instruments, how hostile the environment is when you have a well-funded anti-sex brigade determined to make your life hell, and some of the misconceptions people have about sex drives, what's sexy, and the impacts of pornography.
Begin your preparations for voting now. Understand what the requirements are for your state so that you are prepared to exercise your franchise. And vote as early as you can, dammit, so as to spread out the numbers and reduce your infection risk. And also so that anyone attempting to sabotage your electoral infrastructure has the least window of opportunity to succeed in getting rid of your ballot so they can have one of their own supporters' go through uncontested. If you feel the risk is acceptable, consider getting trained and working the polls.
Lawyers for the actor Mel Gibson sent a cease-and-desist letter to a Chilean woman who figured out a clever pun, "Miel Gibson" and used the actor's likeness on the jar. The lawyers are quick to say that they only object to the likeness. which they would have to do, even if Mel thought it was clever and liked it, because IP law, at least according to the lawyers that I listened to at convention last year, is one of those places where if you don't send the C&D for everything, including the small stuff, it's harder to go after the people who are going to do the large-scale stuff. Have I mentioned that law is a deeply distressing and disturbing place sometimes?
The estate of Leonard Cohen is distinctly displeased at the Republican National Convention's decisions to play 'Hallelujah' twice during their event, after having sought permission to do so and were denied. Which is another place where IP law and blanket licensing and the like all come together in a big ugly morass of everything. The estate offers the opinion that had the RNC, instead, sought 'You Want It Darker' they would have been inclined to grant permission for that. Which makes more than enough sense in this timeline why they would do so.
Gloria Steinem and Eleanor Smeal on the miniseries "Mrs. America" and how it portrays Phylis Schlafly as the force behind stopping the Equal Rights Amendment, when Schlafly was an insignificant gnat compared to the moneyed corporate interests and their lobbyists arrayed against passage and recognition of the amendment, given that sufficient numbers of states have now ratified it as a Constitutional amendment, although not in the timeline that the Congress initially set down for it.
Media Matters offers a campaign for subscribers to put pressure on their cable and satellite pat television companies to drop Fox News from their channels carried, a campaign rooted in the understanding that Fox News is a propaganda network that tells provable falsehoods outside of their opinion program, as well as all of the destructive and hateful language coming from those opinion programs. Even if you can't get your cable or satellite provider to drop the channel entirely, since Fox News charges outsize cable subscriber fees, even putting pressure on your provider to tell Fox News to accept something more like the industry standard would be a move in a positive direction toward reducing the amount of money Fox News has at its disposal to continue being a propaganda arm.
Which is essentially one front on the war against the truth. Facebook employees leaving and striving to get change in the company describe a culture that would make the most neutrality-obsessed librarian proud. No, that's not a compliment.
Sometimes an entire story can fit into six words, and spark a conversation.
In the department of "things I had thought were already settled, but weren't," a trans boy had to resort to suing his school for the right to use the bathroom that matched his identity, and won the case.
Raoul Wallenberg, a member of the Swedish diplomatic corps, given the opportunity to save people from the Nazis, did not throw away his shot, using every bit of his diplomatic and other skills to provide protection and extraction for as many as he could.
A complaint about the demise of the secondhand bookshop that has selected its wares carefully for display and had knowledgeable staff, made in comparison to charity shops that the article writer feels have several advantages by dint of donated stock and volunteer curators. Although there's also persons that believe a grumpy bookseller who charges an entry fee is the correct idea toward keeping the used bookshop alive. There's at least a little bit of sensibility about putting the blame where it lies with the distributed network that we can use for sales and shipping, which basically made it possible to buy a book at an extremely inexpensive price from anywhere, but the same things that are causing a certain amount of handwringing about the close of secondhand shops are the same sorts of things that are causing twitteration about the demise of public libraries, and I suspect them misguided on both counts.
Those who wish to construct a canon are making decisions about who to include and who to exclude, and unsurprisingly, that means a lot of people want to erase the history that exists because they're more interested in gatekeeping than history.
The Public Medievalist on the Catholic points system that The Good Place may have modeled its own upon, as well as your regular reminder that the lives of people in the Medium Aevum were quite complex and concerned with doing evil things, even if unintentionally.
One of the unexpected benefits of the virus lockdown is that carbon emissions have dropped sharply as more people stay home and neither drive nor fly. Which may make for something interesting regarding Blue Sky Day on September 7, if we could find a way of keeping the emissions down after getting control of coronavirus, that would be really quite nice.
On the other hand, most people have burnt through their resilience and surge capacity for times of crisis and have to find a sustainable level of operation that will allow them to ride out the pandemic sustainably.
Treating SARS-CoV-2 as a disease that primarily infects through aerosols requires retooling the advice (and many of the buildings and spaces) that would allow for transmission.
The way that San Francisco handled the news of SARS-CoV-2, along with the history it has had with other pandemics put the city in a good place to be able to react quickly and appropriately to the danger. The tech companies helped, and the residents of the city also helped by being generally trusting of their government and curious about everything enough to make sure the policy was good and well-backed.
CusriosityStream, a streaming documentary service. Another place where it would be nice if people would be willing to license to libraries...
A choir of sign language singers for people with disabilities.
Language changes and rolls and adapts to the time it is in, and therefore, leading Beowulf with "Bro!" helps situate the story for what it is. Which is a bigger subset of the act of translation often existing in a tension between fidelity to the original, even if it makes things formal and foreign, and in adapting the work so that it sounds like a native of the language created the work.
Time changes how we look at people, and for that, Frida Kahlo has shifted from Madame Diego Rivera to herself, even to the point where Diego might be known as Mr. Frida Kahlo, and the self-portraits and art similarly shift between ideas about what they might mean. Which I am putting next to Olympus, Ana Martinez and Mario Ville's imagining of the pantheon of Greek deities with Black skin, which nails "impossibly beautiful people dressed fashionably." I'm a little less aesthetically okay with the decision to have flames coming out of their eyes and off their fingernails, but I can see it as an artistic choice about inhumanity. Everything else about that series of portraits is gorgeous, and y'all should go look.
In a very different space, it is apparently controversial for a member of a K-pop girl group to be seen wearing a shirt that promotes feminism, because of prevalent attitudes that feminists are harridans and assertive, clashing with views that want to have women be soft, domestic, and deferential. As if that didn't sound familiar here as well.
elf charts a path of the future of transformative works, where instead of trying to restrict and demand cessations or limited interactions, the creator of a work actively funds the things that they want to see more of in the universe they created. There's now enough of fannish history to recognize that trying to lock everything down is going to get you a lot of expensive legal bills. And unless you're Disney and can buy legislators any time it might look like Mickey Mouse is going to go into the public domain, there's better things to do with the money than try to crush your fans underneath you. The Pratchettian solution is also potentially one worth looking into.
A meditation on noticing the inner critic and seeing it at work, with the suggestion of offering yourself the same affirmations you would offer a friend with tthe same negative self-talk. In the same vein, what the idea of "holding space" might look like in terms of body posture, in addition to the mental state associated with the same.
Pictures of wildlife in the wild, a baby gorilla, and finding a penguin far away from where one would expect it.
In technology, the declassification and dissemination of stories of reports of UFOs in the UK shows some interesting places seeing unexplained phenomena. On the flip side, The United States continues to examine the sky for things they think may be threats to the national security, and that are outside the usual purview of trying to spot conventional threats like missiles and aircraft. Not that you can get the United States government to declassify a lot regarding military matters.
The United States does all right in distribution of 5G cellular service, but the speeds available pale in comparison to many other countries in the world that use higher-frequency spectrum.
A few cities in Indiana are suing major streaming providers, claiming that because the content runs over wires physically situated in such cities, the companies must pay fees associated with being cable operators in those cities. This seems an unlikely lawsuit to succeed, based on how the definition of a cable provider is, but this also exposes the part where the tragedy of the commons is happening digitally as well, and perhaps in recognition of that, the places that continue to make bank building on that infrastructure should contribute back to keeping it maintained and upgraded.
The way public transit is designed, and who is responsible for it, often reflects the deeply racist roots of transit planning, because transit planning goes hand-in-hand with other urban and suburban zoning, redlining, and other practices with racist intents (in the past) and outcomes (in the present). Also, from that article, it looks like transit planners have some of their own problems with vocational awe.
Uber and Lyft are resisting being told their drivers are employees and entitled to those protections, rather than being able to classify their drivers as contractors. This comes on the heels of a California judge's ruleing telling both rideshare companies that according to the law as it is in California, all the Uber and Lyft drivers are employees of the company. This would be the kind of thing that would kill Uber and Lyft entirely in costs, most likely, so they're going to have to figure something workable out. Possibly because the last time someone told them they had to treat their rideshare drivers as something other than independent contractors, both companies left the city that told them so entirely, although they came back when the requirements were repealed, and that may not work so well in California for their business models.
DiceKeys, a way of generating a high-entropy key through the use of rolling random dice and locking them into position on a grid. Paired with a companion open-source application, taking a picture of the DiceKey layout generates a key. So long as the picture is retained, the key can continue to be regenerated. The application is open-source, with the idea that both the dice and the program should outlive the creators, should they cease existing in the future.
Advice about curating your background when doing video programming or instruction. I didn't find much of it helpful, past "properly light yourself, and light yourself from the front" and things like "close the doors in your background". A lot of the other parts seem very interested in trying to reinforce the idea that the instructor is not allowed to be a human being, but must instead always be the image of the academic, carefully curated so as to reinforce the power dynamic between instructor and students and remind them of who is expected to know and who is expected to learn. Even though it also suggests in it that the academic not appear to be too affluent, on the mistaken belief that most lecturers are paid handsomely enough to be able to have real, rather than virtual, backdrops of wealth and ease. "Try not to appear like you're too rich" is in the same article as "make you that you show your students that you are part of the class of intellectuals that they should aspire to" and it causes dissonance for me. It might not for others.
Last for tonight, the National Park Service with graphics about keeping one's distance with humans and about responsible recreation, including keeping a safe distance from the wildlife as well.
Also, The Tree That Set Healthy Boundaries and The Rainbow Fish Keeps His Scales.
Chadwick Boseman has died of colon cancer, at 43 years of age, and this is another one of those things where you wish the for-profit medical industry would spend less time boosting their own profits and more time figuring out how to beat the important diseases in our lives, so we stop losing people long before their time.
A queer Black sex worker owned collective is making very good hand sanitizer, and also distributing it to their communities, because there's still a need for it. If you are looking to support such organizations, Hygiene Hustle is the place where you can get good product for inexpensive, or make donations to keep sanitizer in the hands of people who need it. Also, because puritanism is always selectively applied, they've lost their Insta because acknowledging the existence of sex workers always brings out the censors, and also likely because Insta's owned by Facebook, and Facebook doesn't like queer people or Black people much, in addition to how they dislike sex workers. (HuffPo has a more in-depth article about the founding of Hygiene Hustle and their model.) Understand it hasn't been that long for effective contraception to exist in the world, and so having a good set of things that are effective and safe for sex work is important.
Also, some insight into what sex research is like, including the parts about having to design and build your own instruments, how hostile the environment is when you have a well-funded anti-sex brigade determined to make your life hell, and some of the misconceptions people have about sex drives, what's sexy, and the impacts of pornography.
Begin your preparations for voting now. Understand what the requirements are for your state so that you are prepared to exercise your franchise. And vote as early as you can, dammit, so as to spread out the numbers and reduce your infection risk. And also so that anyone attempting to sabotage your electoral infrastructure has the least window of opportunity to succeed in getting rid of your ballot so they can have one of their own supporters' go through uncontested. If you feel the risk is acceptable, consider getting trained and working the polls.
Lawyers for the actor Mel Gibson sent a cease-and-desist letter to a Chilean woman who figured out a clever pun, "Miel Gibson" and used the actor's likeness on the jar. The lawyers are quick to say that they only object to the likeness. which they would have to do, even if Mel thought it was clever and liked it, because IP law, at least according to the lawyers that I listened to at convention last year, is one of those places where if you don't send the C&D for everything, including the small stuff, it's harder to go after the people who are going to do the large-scale stuff. Have I mentioned that law is a deeply distressing and disturbing place sometimes?
The estate of Leonard Cohen is distinctly displeased at the Republican National Convention's decisions to play 'Hallelujah' twice during their event, after having sought permission to do so and were denied. Which is another place where IP law and blanket licensing and the like all come together in a big ugly morass of everything. The estate offers the opinion that had the RNC, instead, sought 'You Want It Darker' they would have been inclined to grant permission for that. Which makes more than enough sense in this timeline why they would do so.
Gloria Steinem and Eleanor Smeal on the miniseries "Mrs. America" and how it portrays Phylis Schlafly as the force behind stopping the Equal Rights Amendment, when Schlafly was an insignificant gnat compared to the moneyed corporate interests and their lobbyists arrayed against passage and recognition of the amendment, given that sufficient numbers of states have now ratified it as a Constitutional amendment, although not in the timeline that the Congress initially set down for it.
Media Matters offers a campaign for subscribers to put pressure on their cable and satellite pat television companies to drop Fox News from their channels carried, a campaign rooted in the understanding that Fox News is a propaganda network that tells provable falsehoods outside of their opinion program, as well as all of the destructive and hateful language coming from those opinion programs. Even if you can't get your cable or satellite provider to drop the channel entirely, since Fox News charges outsize cable subscriber fees, even putting pressure on your provider to tell Fox News to accept something more like the industry standard would be a move in a positive direction toward reducing the amount of money Fox News has at its disposal to continue being a propaganda arm.
Which is essentially one front on the war against the truth. Facebook employees leaving and striving to get change in the company describe a culture that would make the most neutrality-obsessed librarian proud. No, that's not a compliment.
Sometimes an entire story can fit into six words, and spark a conversation.
In the department of "things I had thought were already settled, but weren't," a trans boy had to resort to suing his school for the right to use the bathroom that matched his identity, and won the case.
Raoul Wallenberg, a member of the Swedish diplomatic corps, given the opportunity to save people from the Nazis, did not throw away his shot, using every bit of his diplomatic and other skills to provide protection and extraction for as many as he could.
A complaint about the demise of the secondhand bookshop that has selected its wares carefully for display and had knowledgeable staff, made in comparison to charity shops that the article writer feels have several advantages by dint of donated stock and volunteer curators. Although there's also persons that believe a grumpy bookseller who charges an entry fee is the correct idea toward keeping the used bookshop alive. There's at least a little bit of sensibility about putting the blame where it lies with the distributed network that we can use for sales and shipping, which basically made it possible to buy a book at an extremely inexpensive price from anywhere, but the same things that are causing a certain amount of handwringing about the close of secondhand shops are the same sorts of things that are causing twitteration about the demise of public libraries, and I suspect them misguided on both counts.
Those who wish to construct a canon are making decisions about who to include and who to exclude, and unsurprisingly, that means a lot of people want to erase the history that exists because they're more interested in gatekeeping than history.
The Public Medievalist on the Catholic points system that The Good Place may have modeled its own upon, as well as your regular reminder that the lives of people in the Medium Aevum were quite complex and concerned with doing evil things, even if unintentionally.
One of the unexpected benefits of the virus lockdown is that carbon emissions have dropped sharply as more people stay home and neither drive nor fly. Which may make for something interesting regarding Blue Sky Day on September 7, if we could find a way of keeping the emissions down after getting control of coronavirus, that would be really quite nice.
On the other hand, most people have burnt through their resilience and surge capacity for times of crisis and have to find a sustainable level of operation that will allow them to ride out the pandemic sustainably.
Treating SARS-CoV-2 as a disease that primarily infects through aerosols requires retooling the advice (and many of the buildings and spaces) that would allow for transmission.
The way that San Francisco handled the news of SARS-CoV-2, along with the history it has had with other pandemics put the city in a good place to be able to react quickly and appropriately to the danger. The tech companies helped, and the residents of the city also helped by being generally trusting of their government and curious about everything enough to make sure the policy was good and well-backed.
CusriosityStream, a streaming documentary service. Another place where it would be nice if people would be willing to license to libraries...
A choir of sign language singers for people with disabilities.
Language changes and rolls and adapts to the time it is in, and therefore, leading Beowulf with "Bro!" helps situate the story for what it is. Which is a bigger subset of the act of translation often existing in a tension between fidelity to the original, even if it makes things formal and foreign, and in adapting the work so that it sounds like a native of the language created the work.
Time changes how we look at people, and for that, Frida Kahlo has shifted from Madame Diego Rivera to herself, even to the point where Diego might be known as Mr. Frida Kahlo, and the self-portraits and art similarly shift between ideas about what they might mean. Which I am putting next to Olympus, Ana Martinez and Mario Ville's imagining of the pantheon of Greek deities with Black skin, which nails "impossibly beautiful people dressed fashionably." I'm a little less aesthetically okay with the decision to have flames coming out of their eyes and off their fingernails, but I can see it as an artistic choice about inhumanity. Everything else about that series of portraits is gorgeous, and y'all should go look.
In a very different space, it is apparently controversial for a member of a K-pop girl group to be seen wearing a shirt that promotes feminism, because of prevalent attitudes that feminists are harridans and assertive, clashing with views that want to have women be soft, domestic, and deferential. As if that didn't sound familiar here as well.
elf charts a path of the future of transformative works, where instead of trying to restrict and demand cessations or limited interactions, the creator of a work actively funds the things that they want to see more of in the universe they created. There's now enough of fannish history to recognize that trying to lock everything down is going to get you a lot of expensive legal bills. And unless you're Disney and can buy legislators any time it might look like Mickey Mouse is going to go into the public domain, there's better things to do with the money than try to crush your fans underneath you. The Pratchettian solution is also potentially one worth looking into. A meditation on noticing the inner critic and seeing it at work, with the suggestion of offering yourself the same affirmations you would offer a friend with tthe same negative self-talk. In the same vein, what the idea of "holding space" might look like in terms of body posture, in addition to the mental state associated with the same.
Pictures of wildlife in the wild, a baby gorilla, and finding a penguin far away from where one would expect it.
In technology, the declassification and dissemination of stories of reports of UFOs in the UK shows some interesting places seeing unexplained phenomena. On the flip side, The United States continues to examine the sky for things they think may be threats to the national security, and that are outside the usual purview of trying to spot conventional threats like missiles and aircraft. Not that you can get the United States government to declassify a lot regarding military matters.
The United States does all right in distribution of 5G cellular service, but the speeds available pale in comparison to many other countries in the world that use higher-frequency spectrum.
A few cities in Indiana are suing major streaming providers, claiming that because the content runs over wires physically situated in such cities, the companies must pay fees associated with being cable operators in those cities. This seems an unlikely lawsuit to succeed, based on how the definition of a cable provider is, but this also exposes the part where the tragedy of the commons is happening digitally as well, and perhaps in recognition of that, the places that continue to make bank building on that infrastructure should contribute back to keeping it maintained and upgraded.
The way public transit is designed, and who is responsible for it, often reflects the deeply racist roots of transit planning, because transit planning goes hand-in-hand with other urban and suburban zoning, redlining, and other practices with racist intents (in the past) and outcomes (in the present). Also, from that article, it looks like transit planners have some of their own problems with vocational awe.
Uber and Lyft are resisting being told their drivers are employees and entitled to those protections, rather than being able to classify their drivers as contractors. This comes on the heels of a California judge's ruleing telling both rideshare companies that according to the law as it is in California, all the Uber and Lyft drivers are employees of the company. This would be the kind of thing that would kill Uber and Lyft entirely in costs, most likely, so they're going to have to figure something workable out. Possibly because the last time someone told them they had to treat their rideshare drivers as something other than independent contractors, both companies left the city that told them so entirely, although they came back when the requirements were repealed, and that may not work so well in California for their business models.
DiceKeys, a way of generating a high-entropy key through the use of rolling random dice and locking them into position on a grid. Paired with a companion open-source application, taking a picture of the DiceKey layout generates a key. So long as the picture is retained, the key can continue to be regenerated. The application is open-source, with the idea that both the dice and the program should outlive the creators, should they cease existing in the future.
Advice about curating your background when doing video programming or instruction. I didn't find much of it helpful, past "properly light yourself, and light yourself from the front" and things like "close the doors in your background". A lot of the other parts seem very interested in trying to reinforce the idea that the instructor is not allowed to be a human being, but must instead always be the image of the academic, carefully curated so as to reinforce the power dynamic between instructor and students and remind them of who is expected to know and who is expected to learn. Even though it also suggests in it that the academic not appear to be too affluent, on the mistaken belief that most lecturers are paid handsomely enough to be able to have real, rather than virtual, backdrops of wealth and ease. "Try not to appear like you're too rich" is in the same article as "make you that you show your students that you are part of the class of intellectuals that they should aspire to" and it causes dissonance for me. It might not for others.
Last for tonight, the National Park Service with graphics about keeping one's distance with humans and about responsible recreation, including keeping a safe distance from the wildlife as well.
Also, The Tree That Set Healthy Boundaries and The Rainbow Fish Keeps His Scales.
no subject
I thought Gavin Grimm's case was the first trans kid vs high school re bathrooms? (he sued them in 2015 and it still ain't settled.) Drew Adams's certainly is not, no matter what BBC says.
no subject
I am not familiar enough with the state of cases to say authoritatively, but I'm pretty sure Drew is neither first nor last in this regard.