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silveradeptGreetings. Let's begin with the recognition that many of the same tactics of disinformation and trying to splinter off groups so as to make it easier to subject us all to four more years of what has already been are at it again. Which is complemented by the understanding that living in authoritarian rule is not the totalitarian fantasy many associate, but instead much like regular life, with the exception that nothing changes or has the ability to do so, and that doesn't even require targeted killing or other such things, either. Just one-party rule that's been engineered into place using legal arguments, apparatuses, and sympathetic jurists.
And those same one-partiers want to have an attempt at making things more to their own liking. The Notorious R.B.G. is with us no longer, having finally lost the battle with pancreatic cancer at 87 years of fire and strong dissents. (The NPR piece here is long and detailed about the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)
If that's a reality you're trying to avoid, and you have some money, some advice on how to make your political donation be the most effective .
The trial began for persons accused of participating and being accomplices for the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks, five years after the attack itself.
The world of the yakuza is shrinking and becoming less attractive as the incentives to be a loyal and good gangster are disappearing.
Unfrotunately, it's still pretty clear that the color of someone's skin matters more to how they will be treated by police than the content of their character, given how someone who has witnesses shouting that he had killed people strolled by while someone who was walking away was shot repeatedly.
Instead, we get reminders of another imperialist war that did nothing but line the pockets of rich people and kill poor people, predicated on deliberate lies that were told and sold, and the continuing reality that while the real world suffers from disaster after disaster, the artificial world represented by the stock market is doing just fine, thank you.
A non-binary vehicle engineer has won their case in the United Kingdom that non-binary persons should be afforded all the protections of the Equality Act. Which goes nicely in line with the British Medical Association affirming the rights of trans and non-binary persons to receive appropriate medical and health care based on their correct identity.
A highly successful book that treats men with the scorn and derision and hatred they have earned for themselves owes some part of its success to a Streisand Effect, when a government minister responsible for gender equality threatened to have the book censored for its unrepentant misandry. Cue the montage of written works that are full of misogyny and yet still on the shelves, as well as the reminder that a common saying (because of its truth) is that men fear women not liking them, while women fear men doing them violence. Men should be able to be tolerant of being hated, since they've pretty well earned it for centuries.
Continuing in the trend of pushing the envelope of what can be seen in The Future, Star Trek: Discovery will have non-binary and trans characters, played, as best I can tell from the announcement, by non-binary and trans actors, which is, y'know, getting over a very low hurdle, but all the same, a welcome thing.
Tips on surviving the smoky air from wildfires, from someone who has experienced them yearly. In addition to that, the idea on what goes into a dosaster preparation kit.
On the Virus:
The simple rules we've learned about distancing to avoid virus infection are, as one might expect, more complicated than that. Depending on the space, the ventilation, the length of time, and other such factors, there may not be such a thing as a safe distance. Even with a mask.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has indicated it prefers the death of students and teachers to spending money to provide them with personal protective equipment to lower their risk of infection. Because there are still plenty of students and teachers that are being compelled to go to a dangerous place and spend a long time there. Even a delay in the starting of the school year only delays things, rather than fixing them.
Dealing with uncertainty and the ambiguous anxiety of the pandemic often means finding concrete anchors to land upon, as well as retreating fully to a baseline of safer and then slowly allowing for more uncertainty as you go. Achieving the flow state is also good, although if you're a person who can get sucked into it and stay there for longer than you want to, courting flow is sometimes not so great. (But I did finally beat Pringer XXX.)
Questions about the virus also mean questions about end of life care and making sure that someone's information is all up to date and in the care of trusted people.
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom believes that the sheer awesomeness of the response in his country is why there are people being told to go to far-away places to get tested and why there are no local tests available. Because there's too much faith in their awesome and that means too many people are trying to get tested because they believe in things so hard. Rather than, say, a whole bunch of people trying to figure out if they need to quarantine themselves or otherwise try to be responsible persons about their own exposure and the exposure of others and a system that can't keep up with them.
Shortages in packaging also mean shortages of product, as shifts in the sizes of demand can be equally as paralyzing as shifts in demand itself.
Even if a vaccine should appear soon, it will have an uphill battle to fight, both with legitimate concerns about whether or not it is actually safe, given how long a proper set of trials and efficacy studies will take, but even after proving safety over time, there's always the possibility that it will be struck by the anti-vaccination movement that effectively got a Lyme disease vaccine pulled from being used over unproven claims that it caused arthritis. Because there's still a significant part of the population that believed untrue things because someone else said so or because they've gotten caught up in conspiracy thinking.
Which we could help defeat if homework and basic research on things like what coronaviruses actually do had been done, like studying colds, even though they're not life-threatening.
A document on aerosol transmission of viruses and effectiveness of the known barrier methods and protocols for trying to make activities COVID-safe.
It is not just you: the pandemic continues to test and strain the mental health of everyone.
And one last thing: the Current Administrator knew what was happening and how dangerous the virus was, but chose not to do anything about it and to lie and downplay it to the citizens of the United States instead. Don't know how much that will change the minds of the people who voted for him because he says things to own the libs, but one hopes that some other part of the population is abandoning him because he is no longer any sort of acceptable. (I know that's not necessarily the case, as, thanks to a documentary produced by KCRW that had people record themselves through this year, there are plenty of people already convinced that anything other than a re-election means fraud had to have happened, and others who believe that so long as he keeps appointing anti-choice judges, they will continue to vote for him because that's the sole reason they voted for him in the first place.)
The surviving cast of the movie of The Princess Bride got back together to do a script read to raise money so that Ted Cruz, who claims the movie as one of his fandoms, will no longer be able to wield Congressional power.
Because, if we want to get better, not only is there a need to get the executive changed, it's very much a case of Get Mitch or Die Trying. (Which, people outside the U.S. can help by encouraging and helping slog through the process of getting someone registered to vote and requesting an appropriate ballot for them. Because in many of the most crucial places, the process has become deliberately obfuscated and full of people who are trying very hard to make sure nobody but their preferrred people get to vote, instead of everyone.) Even devotees of the Great Republican Saint Reagan should be able to recognize they are not better off than they were before if they honestly apply the Reagan Test to this administration.
The art museum's historical purpose may not be appropriate or wanted in a world that is post-2020. I wonder whether the same could apply to a lot of libraries as well, and that library leadership could stand to have some long, difficult conversations with themselves, their staff, and their communities to determine what the library of the future looks like and what it offers to the people that are in its service area. (Preferably without someone deciding the solution is that the library becomes the entirety of the social services safety net. We're supposed to find stuff that's already there, not provide it because it doesn't exist.) At lest some members of the art community are beginning to look at cultural imperialism and whether the museum reinforces colonial ideologies in their collections.
There's also the cry from the workers at the San Francisco Museum of Art that they have to accept across-the-board cuts to their salaries, which might make them unable to pay rent, while the executives of SFMOMA have enjoyed such things as low-or-no interest loans from the corporations to buy houses with, which also tells you about some of the priorities of the museum.
The Guerilla Girls, an anonymous collective of women in gorilla masks protesting the lack of inclusion in art museums and galleries, are going to get themselves a book chronicling their first thirty-five years, written by members of the collective themselves.
The sapeu·r·ses of the Congo, reflecting a philosophy of immaculate (and often expensive) dress and aesthetic, which is almost always set, in this photography gallery, against the backdrop of the relative poverty of the two Congoes where the style and philosophy developed. Elsewhere, the success of a shot of four queer women and snow, part of a series by the same photographer, Mikael Owunna, called Limitless Africans.
Chadwick Boseman, looking stylish.
the entirety of IKEA's catalogs have been uploaded for browsing, so you can see thoughts about fashion and modular furniture over time.
People taking up the cause of reintroducing animals on their own time and terms, a possible detailed observation of great white sharks having sex, the reasons why wasps become such a big problem for humans late in the summer and into the fall - too many workers, not enough jobs, the presence of unexplained phosphine on Venus, which might suggest the presence of microbial life that has adapted to the very harsh conditions, a clutch of eggs from a python that hasn't been near a member of the other sex for decades, the re-cultivation of manna, a sweetener that has come from the sap of trees,
In technology, an hour-long video explaining several lawsuits brought over the question of whether concepts are copyrightable and reminding us all that the DMCA is more often than not a hammer used to get rid of anything a bad-faith actor doesn't like rather than a tool to help balance copyright protections against contributing to the well of material for others to draw from. It also happens to involve the Omegaverse genre, because that's what the DMCA takedowns and subsequent lawsuits were about.
Accessible films and television shows are easier to find and use these days, but they're not ubiquitous enough, and making sure that audio description is as common as captioning is not the easiest thing. Especially in theaters that are supposedly equipped to have such things.
Speculating about a technological solution to a problem framed as a moral quandary in certain jurisdictions does more to illuminate the inadequacy of the underlying arguments than to provide solutions. In this specific case, it's "artificial wombs are not the solution to abortion that speculators think they might be", because when abortion is framed as a moral quandary rather than a medical one, the technology to sustain life outside of the womb does nothing against the attitude that women should be punished with children if they engage in something other than what the farthest-right religion would consider approved sex.
The accolades of history given to the first public toilets for women, which come a lot later after the same for dudes, becaise antiquated ideas about gender and being out in public.
Plans and instructions for generating a self-contained solar charging station, done as part of an Eagle Scout project. The finished product looks kind of like a birdhouse, just with a place for sometone to put their device inside and charge without worrying about it getting wet in the rain. The instructions are probably enough for someone with a working idea of what the components are and who knows how to both use the tools and the items produced, but I feel like I would want to have a more experienced hand looking over my shoulder were I to try and assemble such a thing. Which I would probably also try to make sure it has enough space for a Little Free Library and a LibraryBox or a PirateBox, so that people can charge their device, browse electronic materials available, and possibly take or leave print material. Obviously, such a thing would then require active curation to continue being effective, as all collections do, but it definitely seems like this design could do a lot toward having tiny infrastructure points available in various places. They might be good for an entity that, say, wants to have municipal wireless mesh routing along with device charging, swapping city-infrastructure in for the LibraryBox or PirateBox.
The decision to use contrasting spices and flavors is what makes Indian food delicious. Which sounds like nothing, except that the decision to use contrasting flavors and cook for very long times is different than most other ideas of cuisine. And speaking of cuisine, what name a recipe gets says a lot, actually, about what it is, and what authority it comes from, and who it is intended for.
Bibliographic data for many thousands of historical cookbooks are now available at The Sifter, which will probably provide some very interesting meta-analyses or interesting spots for someone who is interested in seeing ingredients move and shift over time and place.
The plastic recycling programs and symbols that we are used to are much more a result of marketing campaigns by petroleum companies trying to get concern about the environment off their back more than about the actual viability of plastics recycling. Which makes for some very interesting questions about the future of plastics and what containers are best for what things.
Last for tonight, A person who makes a living telling the secrets of the recently deceased that they could not say themselves, or in hiding those secrets they would like to remain hidden.
Also, cats with frightened, startled, or indignant looks to themselves and finalists for the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.
And the announcement for the new Hyperbole and a Half book, Solutions and Other Problems.
Perhaps most importantly, however, is the comfort fic fest being hosted, with prompts and fills requested, bysholio.
And those same one-partiers want to have an attempt at making things more to their own liking. The Notorious R.B.G. is with us no longer, having finally lost the battle with pancreatic cancer at 87 years of fire and strong dissents. (The NPR piece here is long and detailed about the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)
If that's a reality you're trying to avoid, and you have some money, some advice on how to make your political donation be the most effective .
The trial began for persons accused of participating and being accomplices for the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks, five years after the attack itself.
The world of the yakuza is shrinking and becoming less attractive as the incentives to be a loyal and good gangster are disappearing.
Unfrotunately, it's still pretty clear that the color of someone's skin matters more to how they will be treated by police than the content of their character, given how someone who has witnesses shouting that he had killed people strolled by while someone who was walking away was shot repeatedly.
Instead, we get reminders of another imperialist war that did nothing but line the pockets of rich people and kill poor people, predicated on deliberate lies that were told and sold, and the continuing reality that while the real world suffers from disaster after disaster, the artificial world represented by the stock market is doing just fine, thank you.
A non-binary vehicle engineer has won their case in the United Kingdom that non-binary persons should be afforded all the protections of the Equality Act. Which goes nicely in line with the British Medical Association affirming the rights of trans and non-binary persons to receive appropriate medical and health care based on their correct identity.
A highly successful book that treats men with the scorn and derision and hatred they have earned for themselves owes some part of its success to a Streisand Effect, when a government minister responsible for gender equality threatened to have the book censored for its unrepentant misandry. Cue the montage of written works that are full of misogyny and yet still on the shelves, as well as the reminder that a common saying (because of its truth) is that men fear women not liking them, while women fear men doing them violence. Men should be able to be tolerant of being hated, since they've pretty well earned it for centuries.
Continuing in the trend of pushing the envelope of what can be seen in The Future, Star Trek: Discovery will have non-binary and trans characters, played, as best I can tell from the announcement, by non-binary and trans actors, which is, y'know, getting over a very low hurdle, but all the same, a welcome thing.
Tips on surviving the smoky air from wildfires, from someone who has experienced them yearly. In addition to that, the idea on what goes into a dosaster preparation kit.
On the Virus:
The simple rules we've learned about distancing to avoid virus infection are, as one might expect, more complicated than that. Depending on the space, the ventilation, the length of time, and other such factors, there may not be such a thing as a safe distance. Even with a mask.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has indicated it prefers the death of students and teachers to spending money to provide them with personal protective equipment to lower their risk of infection. Because there are still plenty of students and teachers that are being compelled to go to a dangerous place and spend a long time there. Even a delay in the starting of the school year only delays things, rather than fixing them.
Dealing with uncertainty and the ambiguous anxiety of the pandemic often means finding concrete anchors to land upon, as well as retreating fully to a baseline of safer and then slowly allowing for more uncertainty as you go. Achieving the flow state is also good, although if you're a person who can get sucked into it and stay there for longer than you want to, courting flow is sometimes not so great. (But I did finally beat Pringer XXX.)
Questions about the virus also mean questions about end of life care and making sure that someone's information is all up to date and in the care of trusted people.
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom believes that the sheer awesomeness of the response in his country is why there are people being told to go to far-away places to get tested and why there are no local tests available. Because there's too much faith in their awesome and that means too many people are trying to get tested because they believe in things so hard. Rather than, say, a whole bunch of people trying to figure out if they need to quarantine themselves or otherwise try to be responsible persons about their own exposure and the exposure of others and a system that can't keep up with them.
Shortages in packaging also mean shortages of product, as shifts in the sizes of demand can be equally as paralyzing as shifts in demand itself.
Even if a vaccine should appear soon, it will have an uphill battle to fight, both with legitimate concerns about whether or not it is actually safe, given how long a proper set of trials and efficacy studies will take, but even after proving safety over time, there's always the possibility that it will be struck by the anti-vaccination movement that effectively got a Lyme disease vaccine pulled from being used over unproven claims that it caused arthritis. Because there's still a significant part of the population that believed untrue things because someone else said so or because they've gotten caught up in conspiracy thinking.
Which we could help defeat if homework and basic research on things like what coronaviruses actually do had been done, like studying colds, even though they're not life-threatening.
A document on aerosol transmission of viruses and effectiveness of the known barrier methods and protocols for trying to make activities COVID-safe.
It is not just you: the pandemic continues to test and strain the mental health of everyone.
And one last thing: the Current Administrator knew what was happening and how dangerous the virus was, but chose not to do anything about it and to lie and downplay it to the citizens of the United States instead. Don't know how much that will change the minds of the people who voted for him because he says things to own the libs, but one hopes that some other part of the population is abandoning him because he is no longer any sort of acceptable. (I know that's not necessarily the case, as, thanks to a documentary produced by KCRW that had people record themselves through this year, there are plenty of people already convinced that anything other than a re-election means fraud had to have happened, and others who believe that so long as he keeps appointing anti-choice judges, they will continue to vote for him because that's the sole reason they voted for him in the first place.)
The surviving cast of the movie of The Princess Bride got back together to do a script read to raise money so that Ted Cruz, who claims the movie as one of his fandoms, will no longer be able to wield Congressional power.
Because, if we want to get better, not only is there a need to get the executive changed, it's very much a case of Get Mitch or Die Trying. (Which, people outside the U.S. can help by encouraging and helping slog through the process of getting someone registered to vote and requesting an appropriate ballot for them. Because in many of the most crucial places, the process has become deliberately obfuscated and full of people who are trying very hard to make sure nobody but their preferrred people get to vote, instead of everyone.) Even devotees of the Great Republican Saint Reagan should be able to recognize they are not better off than they were before if they honestly apply the Reagan Test to this administration.
The art museum's historical purpose may not be appropriate or wanted in a world that is post-2020. I wonder whether the same could apply to a lot of libraries as well, and that library leadership could stand to have some long, difficult conversations with themselves, their staff, and their communities to determine what the library of the future looks like and what it offers to the people that are in its service area. (Preferably without someone deciding the solution is that the library becomes the entirety of the social services safety net. We're supposed to find stuff that's already there, not provide it because it doesn't exist.) At lest some members of the art community are beginning to look at cultural imperialism and whether the museum reinforces colonial ideologies in their collections.
There's also the cry from the workers at the San Francisco Museum of Art that they have to accept across-the-board cuts to their salaries, which might make them unable to pay rent, while the executives of SFMOMA have enjoyed such things as low-or-no interest loans from the corporations to buy houses with, which also tells you about some of the priorities of the museum.
The Guerilla Girls, an anonymous collective of women in gorilla masks protesting the lack of inclusion in art museums and galleries, are going to get themselves a book chronicling their first thirty-five years, written by members of the collective themselves.
The sapeu·r·ses of the Congo, reflecting a philosophy of immaculate (and often expensive) dress and aesthetic, which is almost always set, in this photography gallery, against the backdrop of the relative poverty of the two Congoes where the style and philosophy developed. Elsewhere, the success of a shot of four queer women and snow, part of a series by the same photographer, Mikael Owunna, called Limitless Africans.
Chadwick Boseman, looking stylish.
the entirety of IKEA's catalogs have been uploaded for browsing, so you can see thoughts about fashion and modular furniture over time.
People taking up the cause of reintroducing animals on their own time and terms, a possible detailed observation of great white sharks having sex, the reasons why wasps become such a big problem for humans late in the summer and into the fall - too many workers, not enough jobs, the presence of unexplained phosphine on Venus, which might suggest the presence of microbial life that has adapted to the very harsh conditions, a clutch of eggs from a python that hasn't been near a member of the other sex for decades, the re-cultivation of manna, a sweetener that has come from the sap of trees,
In technology, an hour-long video explaining several lawsuits brought over the question of whether concepts are copyrightable and reminding us all that the DMCA is more often than not a hammer used to get rid of anything a bad-faith actor doesn't like rather than a tool to help balance copyright protections against contributing to the well of material for others to draw from. It also happens to involve the Omegaverse genre, because that's what the DMCA takedowns and subsequent lawsuits were about.
Accessible films and television shows are easier to find and use these days, but they're not ubiquitous enough, and making sure that audio description is as common as captioning is not the easiest thing. Especially in theaters that are supposedly equipped to have such things.
Speculating about a technological solution to a problem framed as a moral quandary in certain jurisdictions does more to illuminate the inadequacy of the underlying arguments than to provide solutions. In this specific case, it's "artificial wombs are not the solution to abortion that speculators think they might be", because when abortion is framed as a moral quandary rather than a medical one, the technology to sustain life outside of the womb does nothing against the attitude that women should be punished with children if they engage in something other than what the farthest-right religion would consider approved sex.
The accolades of history given to the first public toilets for women, which come a lot later after the same for dudes, becaise antiquated ideas about gender and being out in public.
Plans and instructions for generating a self-contained solar charging station, done as part of an Eagle Scout project. The finished product looks kind of like a birdhouse, just with a place for sometone to put their device inside and charge without worrying about it getting wet in the rain. The instructions are probably enough for someone with a working idea of what the components are and who knows how to both use the tools and the items produced, but I feel like I would want to have a more experienced hand looking over my shoulder were I to try and assemble such a thing. Which I would probably also try to make sure it has enough space for a Little Free Library and a LibraryBox or a PirateBox, so that people can charge their device, browse electronic materials available, and possibly take or leave print material. Obviously, such a thing would then require active curation to continue being effective, as all collections do, but it definitely seems like this design could do a lot toward having tiny infrastructure points available in various places. They might be good for an entity that, say, wants to have municipal wireless mesh routing along with device charging, swapping city-infrastructure in for the LibraryBox or PirateBox.
The decision to use contrasting spices and flavors is what makes Indian food delicious. Which sounds like nothing, except that the decision to use contrasting flavors and cook for very long times is different than most other ideas of cuisine. And speaking of cuisine, what name a recipe gets says a lot, actually, about what it is, and what authority it comes from, and who it is intended for.
Bibliographic data for many thousands of historical cookbooks are now available at The Sifter, which will probably provide some very interesting meta-analyses or interesting spots for someone who is interested in seeing ingredients move and shift over time and place.
The plastic recycling programs and symbols that we are used to are much more a result of marketing campaigns by petroleum companies trying to get concern about the environment off their back more than about the actual viability of plastics recycling. Which makes for some very interesting questions about the future of plastics and what containers are best for what things.
Last for tonight, A person who makes a living telling the secrets of the recently deceased that they could not say themselves, or in hiding those secrets they would like to remain hidden.
Also, cats with frightened, startled, or indignant looks to themselves and finalists for the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.
And the announcement for the new Hyperbole and a Half book, Solutions and Other Problems.
Perhaps most importantly, however, is the comfort fic fest being hosted, with prompts and fills requested, by
sholio.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 06:30 am (UTC)