![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGreetings. Let's begin with something that appeared on my reading page, apropos of Nothing At All: a humble desire to be there when someone gets what they deserve.
Pfizer claims they've developed a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 with 90% efficacy. We are hoping that the claims they're making about this bear out in further tests and trials, so that we can begin moving toward a time where vaccines will be distributed and the fight against the new coronavirus can begin to move toward the end phase.
Answer: This Canadian quiz show presenter has a Guinness World Record, six Daytime Emmys, once was the presenter for three different progams at the same time, accepted a Peabody award for his most famous gig, and has appeared as himself in many other programs through his eighty years of life. (He apparently loved the Saturday Night Live parodies, and from some outtakes that have no surfaced, there's a good chance the Celebrity Jeopardy! sketches were much closer to the truth than we might have otherwise believed.) Question: Who Was Alex Trebek?
If you give people cash, especially a significant amount of cash up front, they generally do smart things with it. Which is why things like COVID relief should have been no-brainers in the United States, both to the party that wants to protect humans and the party that wants the economic engine to chug along smoothly so they don't have to pay attention to the weaknesses in the system. Because people know what their most pressing needs are, and would use the money to satisfy those things and reduce everyone's stresses and issues.
An apt demonstration of the idea that an individual person is brilliant, but that people as a group are not always so. which sounds kind of vocational-awe-y about the people who are doing work that may have great impacts. There's a certain amount of "if you ask a person about the things in their expertise and interest, they'll be brilliant" that I want to say about it, as well as the understanding that there's more than enough evidence to support either the position that there are more people working to make the world better or that most people are out only for themselves and don't care about people other than their most immediate needs.
The Gateways Club that served as quite possibly the only lesbian club in London for a significant amount of time, that was also used as the backdrop for many scenes in the movie version of The Killing of St. George. More generally, Dressing Dykes, a website and accompanying Instagram feed about lesbian fashion throughout history.
For as much as progress seems to be a thing that happens in the queer community, every now and then you have to remember that only now are certain territories getting to outlawing practices meant to try and make gay people straight.
The initial results from the U.S. election are in, and the repudiation that the liberal wing of the country was hoping for did not materialize. Instead, a stressful week of waiting for results occurred. Some tips to relieve election stresses, and we remind everyone that it's not official until everything's certified. However, there are some entities that will want to take advantage of the interregnum to proclaim their own victory or try to prevent all of the ballots cast from being counted. In those cases, it may be less stressful to have a plan in place before deciding that you have to act. Hold The Line has such a plan, with worksheets, to help someone put together a group of trusted persons to engage in nonviolent demonstration action should one of the Red Lines be crossed by a fascist or his lackeys and cronies.
sholio offers constructive language to push back against the narrative that mail-in voting and other absentee methods are fraudulent, mostly by pointing out that the things in place to count and offer mail-in ballots help people in rural areas, older people, and other stronghold demographics of the Republican Party. Barring massive disenfrachisement efforts, which don't have to be mentioned, trying to restrict voting only to in-person voting tends to make cities and dense urban areas have more power, not less, and cities and urban areas tend to vote more Democratic. So it's in the best interests of people who want to see Republicans elected to promote the legitimacy of non-in-person methods. And for those people, however rare that may be, who haven't drunk deeeply of the well of white (cis, male) supremacy, that may be a convincing argument to deploy. It can be backed by news articles indicating how smooth and fraud-free the election was this year, as well as the ways in which the suits being filed have been found wanting of the evidence they would need to go forward.
For those who have drank and bathed in that well, though, perhaps nothing short of cutting them loose will get them to realize that the consequences are of their actions. (And even then, it might not register.) Which may mean that the person who lost refuses to leave. While one expects the current occupant to leave of their own volition, there is a thought that if it were required to remove him, a significant amount of money could be made by making it a pay-per-view style event. Because the available surfaces are being covered with schadenfreude and the people are making their displeasure known where he goes. Or their rejoicing at the projection news, all across the country.
Because Pennsylvania ends up being the place that tips the balance in projections, that also means worldwide audiences have to contend with Gritty, the mascot of the Philadelphia Fliers NHL ice-hockey team, appearing in places and politics. Given how Philadelphians think about Gritty, this is not just a phenomenon for outside the United States.
What seems to be the most important part out of all these projections is that the reason for a projection of Biden is that non-white people, including a significant amount of Native Americans, voted for Biden. Especially in Southwestern states that have traditionally thought of themselves as Republican spaces.
Elsewhere, there are matters not at the Presidential level worthy of comment, with, again, the caveat that nothing is settled until it is certified. Mauree Turner is elected to Oklahoma's state legislature, making her the first Muslim lawmaker for the state and the first non-binary lawmaker at a state level. Raquel Montoya-Lewis is re-elected, so the first Native American woman to sit on the Washington State Supreme Court will continue to sit on the bench.sonia has other excellent news, including the re-election of all the members of The Squad, Hawai'i sending the second Native Hawaiian in history to Congress, having successfully ousted Tulsi Gabbard, repeated victories that result in Black, queer, and especially Black and queer people to state, federal, and local legislatures and offices, many of them the first like them to go, and several other tales of why thinking and working locally can be just as important, or more so, than only trying to pay attention to or work on the federal level.
As it turns out, because nobody in Georgia won sufficient votes to get the majority, there's going to be a runoff election for the government seats there, essentially giving Georgia voters one more shot at deciding who they want as their Senators...and, perhaps, the entire balance of the power in the Senate while they're at it. Because of the small margin of Biden victory, there will be recounting of ballots to ensure that accuracy has been preserved. Additionally, The New Georgia Project, which is registered as a 501(c)3 organization is eligible if you want to send money from outside the United States to give Stacy Abrams more resources to conduct non-partisan activities like voter registration, which, because of the way that voter turnout tends to affect elections, may be functionally donating to a way of getting more Democratic votes in Georgia for this important runoff election. Inside the US, there are calls for all the people who have been talking support to give money and other support toward making Georgia blue.
The projected Biden win will have plenty of international repercussions as well. The UK Brexit deal might be off the table unless the UK can keep promises about not re-creating a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, for example.
Despite the writing on the wall, and a press conference that summed up the entire last four years' of competence, the Administration refuses to ascertain the change in government and allow the new transition to begin and are trying to put their partisans in place as if no election had happened, since while media outlets do the work of making calls, they are unofficial and only the decision of the Electoral College is useful.
Even so, acknowledge the fight that has happened and continues to happen, and that good results may yet be within our grasp. And enjoy when people decide to treat the allegations and hotlines set up to combat nonexistent voter fraud with all the seriousness it deserves.
Terrible advisor and architect of Brexit Dominic Cummings has been sacked after Boris Johnson accused him of disloyalty. This is a person for whom all doors should hit him in the ass on the way out, so it's good he's gone.
New Zealanders are engaged in an election for the Bird of the Year, some of Tumblr's funny posts about animals, purchasing land to create preserves and community space for wildlife, the multitude of uses that wombats put their rears to, finding a spider that hasn't been seen in twenty years, finally learning what dinosaur buttholes (cloacae, actually) are like, a plan to engage in both sustainable development of aquatic foodstuffs and in rebalancing the ecosystem of the oceans, with an intent of making it less about profit and commercialization and more about distributed infrastructure and lots of small things working together to provide food, biofuel, filtration, and more. Which also suggests that more of us should start appreciating the plants and raisable beings of the ocean as foodstuff. A herding raccoon, highland cows, three species of greater glider, rather than one, and the reintroduction of wolves into the public lands of Colorado.
On other matters of The Virus, There are psychological impacts to being in a lockdown, but the people most affected seem to be younger people and people who already have mental distress and/or mental illnesses, so some targeting of assistance with lockdowns could help alleviate this, on top of the necessary part of supporting everyone in lockdown financially. For those who have to go out during such a thing, or for the rest of us, the CDC is telling us that wearing masks helps both others and orselves, too.
In technology, yet another reason that recognition technology should not be allowed anywhere near anything important - it can't tell the different between a football and a bald head.
Bookshop dot org expands itself into the United Kingdom, offering one-stop shopping for people to browse, get reecommendations, and buy from their local independent bookstores, providing a way of trying to get at least enough sales away from the Big Retailer Online to keep said bookshops in business. (Even better in the COVID times to have this to help match people and their bookshops.)
A thing I didn't even know existed, but will likely be helpful all the same: the Accumulated Winter Season Severity Index, in case you were looking for someone to have made an attempt to quantify how bad the winter has been, for this season, a past season, or over time.
Last for tonight, tyopgraphic conventions and rules are region-dependent, even if they all share a common set of glyphs, so take care that you get things correctly when setting for a particular language or region.
Happy Diwali, and a reminder that having a lot of lights and celebration is something we could definitely use at this point.
Pfizer claims they've developed a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 with 90% efficacy. We are hoping that the claims they're making about this bear out in further tests and trials, so that we can begin moving toward a time where vaccines will be distributed and the fight against the new coronavirus can begin to move toward the end phase.
Answer: This Canadian quiz show presenter has a Guinness World Record, six Daytime Emmys, once was the presenter for three different progams at the same time, accepted a Peabody award for his most famous gig, and has appeared as himself in many other programs through his eighty years of life. (He apparently loved the Saturday Night Live parodies, and from some outtakes that have no surfaced, there's a good chance the Celebrity Jeopardy! sketches were much closer to the truth than we might have otherwise believed.) Question: Who Was Alex Trebek?
If you give people cash, especially a significant amount of cash up front, they generally do smart things with it. Which is why things like COVID relief should have been no-brainers in the United States, both to the party that wants to protect humans and the party that wants the economic engine to chug along smoothly so they don't have to pay attention to the weaknesses in the system. Because people know what their most pressing needs are, and would use the money to satisfy those things and reduce everyone's stresses and issues.
An apt demonstration of the idea that an individual person is brilliant, but that people as a group are not always so. which sounds kind of vocational-awe-y about the people who are doing work that may have great impacts. There's a certain amount of "if you ask a person about the things in their expertise and interest, they'll be brilliant" that I want to say about it, as well as the understanding that there's more than enough evidence to support either the position that there are more people working to make the world better or that most people are out only for themselves and don't care about people other than their most immediate needs.
The Gateways Club that served as quite possibly the only lesbian club in London for a significant amount of time, that was also used as the backdrop for many scenes in the movie version of The Killing of St. George. More generally, Dressing Dykes, a website and accompanying Instagram feed about lesbian fashion throughout history.
For as much as progress seems to be a thing that happens in the queer community, every now and then you have to remember that only now are certain territories getting to outlawing practices meant to try and make gay people straight.
The initial results from the U.S. election are in, and the repudiation that the liberal wing of the country was hoping for did not materialize. Instead, a stressful week of waiting for results occurred. Some tips to relieve election stresses, and we remind everyone that it's not official until everything's certified. However, there are some entities that will want to take advantage of the interregnum to proclaim their own victory or try to prevent all of the ballots cast from being counted. In those cases, it may be less stressful to have a plan in place before deciding that you have to act. Hold The Line has such a plan, with worksheets, to help someone put together a group of trusted persons to engage in nonviolent demonstration action should one of the Red Lines be crossed by a fascist or his lackeys and cronies.
sholio offers constructive language to push back against the narrative that mail-in voting and other absentee methods are fraudulent, mostly by pointing out that the things in place to count and offer mail-in ballots help people in rural areas, older people, and other stronghold demographics of the Republican Party. Barring massive disenfrachisement efforts, which don't have to be mentioned, trying to restrict voting only to in-person voting tends to make cities and dense urban areas have more power, not less, and cities and urban areas tend to vote more Democratic. So it's in the best interests of people who want to see Republicans elected to promote the legitimacy of non-in-person methods. And for those people, however rare that may be, who haven't drunk deeeply of the well of white (cis, male) supremacy, that may be a convincing argument to deploy. It can be backed by news articles indicating how smooth and fraud-free the election was this year, as well as the ways in which the suits being filed have been found wanting of the evidence they would need to go forward.For those who have drank and bathed in that well, though, perhaps nothing short of cutting them loose will get them to realize that the consequences are of their actions. (And even then, it might not register.) Which may mean that the person who lost refuses to leave. While one expects the current occupant to leave of their own volition, there is a thought that if it were required to remove him, a significant amount of money could be made by making it a pay-per-view style event. Because the available surfaces are being covered with schadenfreude and the people are making their displeasure known where he goes. Or their rejoicing at the projection news, all across the country.
Because Pennsylvania ends up being the place that tips the balance in projections, that also means worldwide audiences have to contend with Gritty, the mascot of the Philadelphia Fliers NHL ice-hockey team, appearing in places and politics. Given how Philadelphians think about Gritty, this is not just a phenomenon for outside the United States.
What seems to be the most important part out of all these projections is that the reason for a projection of Biden is that non-white people, including a significant amount of Native Americans, voted for Biden. Especially in Southwestern states that have traditionally thought of themselves as Republican spaces.
Elsewhere, there are matters not at the Presidential level worthy of comment, with, again, the caveat that nothing is settled until it is certified. Mauree Turner is elected to Oklahoma's state legislature, making her the first Muslim lawmaker for the state and the first non-binary lawmaker at a state level. Raquel Montoya-Lewis is re-elected, so the first Native American woman to sit on the Washington State Supreme Court will continue to sit on the bench.
sonia has other excellent news, including the re-election of all the members of The Squad, Hawai'i sending the second Native Hawaiian in history to Congress, having successfully ousted Tulsi Gabbard, repeated victories that result in Black, queer, and especially Black and queer people to state, federal, and local legislatures and offices, many of them the first like them to go, and several other tales of why thinking and working locally can be just as important, or more so, than only trying to pay attention to or work on the federal level.As it turns out, because nobody in Georgia won sufficient votes to get the majority, there's going to be a runoff election for the government seats there, essentially giving Georgia voters one more shot at deciding who they want as their Senators...and, perhaps, the entire balance of the power in the Senate while they're at it. Because of the small margin of Biden victory, there will be recounting of ballots to ensure that accuracy has been preserved. Additionally, The New Georgia Project, which is registered as a 501(c)3 organization is eligible if you want to send money from outside the United States to give Stacy Abrams more resources to conduct non-partisan activities like voter registration, which, because of the way that voter turnout tends to affect elections, may be functionally donating to a way of getting more Democratic votes in Georgia for this important runoff election. Inside the US, there are calls for all the people who have been talking support to give money and other support toward making Georgia blue.
The projected Biden win will have plenty of international repercussions as well. The UK Brexit deal might be off the table unless the UK can keep promises about not re-creating a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, for example.
Despite the writing on the wall, and a press conference that summed up the entire last four years' of competence, the Administration refuses to ascertain the change in government and allow the new transition to begin and are trying to put their partisans in place as if no election had happened, since while media outlets do the work of making calls, they are unofficial and only the decision of the Electoral College is useful.
Even so, acknowledge the fight that has happened and continues to happen, and that good results may yet be within our grasp. And enjoy when people decide to treat the allegations and hotlines set up to combat nonexistent voter fraud with all the seriousness it deserves.
Terrible advisor and architect of Brexit Dominic Cummings has been sacked after Boris Johnson accused him of disloyalty. This is a person for whom all doors should hit him in the ass on the way out, so it's good he's gone.
New Zealanders are engaged in an election for the Bird of the Year, some of Tumblr's funny posts about animals, purchasing land to create preserves and community space for wildlife, the multitude of uses that wombats put their rears to, finding a spider that hasn't been seen in twenty years, finally learning what dinosaur buttholes (cloacae, actually) are like, a plan to engage in both sustainable development of aquatic foodstuffs and in rebalancing the ecosystem of the oceans, with an intent of making it less about profit and commercialization and more about distributed infrastructure and lots of small things working together to provide food, biofuel, filtration, and more. Which also suggests that more of us should start appreciating the plants and raisable beings of the ocean as foodstuff. A herding raccoon, highland cows, three species of greater glider, rather than one, and the reintroduction of wolves into the public lands of Colorado.
On other matters of The Virus, There are psychological impacts to being in a lockdown, but the people most affected seem to be younger people and people who already have mental distress and/or mental illnesses, so some targeting of assistance with lockdowns could help alleviate this, on top of the necessary part of supporting everyone in lockdown financially. For those who have to go out during such a thing, or for the rest of us, the CDC is telling us that wearing masks helps both others and orselves, too.
In technology, yet another reason that recognition technology should not be allowed anywhere near anything important - it can't tell the different between a football and a bald head.
Bookshop dot org expands itself into the United Kingdom, offering one-stop shopping for people to browse, get reecommendations, and buy from their local independent bookstores, providing a way of trying to get at least enough sales away from the Big Retailer Online to keep said bookshops in business. (Even better in the COVID times to have this to help match people and their bookshops.)
A thing I didn't even know existed, but will likely be helpful all the same: the Accumulated Winter Season Severity Index, in case you were looking for someone to have made an attempt to quantify how bad the winter has been, for this season, a past season, or over time.
Last for tonight, tyopgraphic conventions and rules are region-dependent, even if they all share a common set of glyphs, so take care that you get things correctly when setting for a particular language or region.
Happy Diwali, and a reminder that having a lot of lights and celebration is something we could definitely use at this point.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-15 07:43 pm (UTC)ooo the typography article
no subject
Date: 2020-11-16 04:22 pm (UTC)And yet, it should not have been this difficult, and it should not have been difficult for the Democratic candidate to have won in 2016, and it feels like there's going to be more effort put into sweeping the whole mess under the rug rather than acknowledging the problems starting us in the face and fixing them. Along with a lot of people who think nothing was wrong with the last four years.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-16 01:56 pm (UTC)Not the same somehow, because they usually share the fun around.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-16 04:01 pm (UTC)