![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptHello! Let us begin with perennially useful advice, read by a man who knows his way around a swear, Samuel L. Jackson, imploring us to Stay the F*ck At Home. (Not that either US or UK governments plan on telling us to do so, with plans in place to ease restrictions around the December holidays in the UK, with the most probable outcome being more cases of the virus, and the US being, well, itself.
The person who was the on-stage actor for Darth Vader, Dave Prowse, as become one with the Force at 85 years. Another iconic role of his was as a public safety person, the Green Cross Man.
Tired of the people who see the name as a joke (because it's a rude word in English), a village chooses to rename itself to Fugging.
Debunking of persistent myths about the Victorian era and sexuality. Which we put in the context of the lack of Literary Bad Sex Award this year, as the organizers felt like 2020 had more than enough bad things by itself (not that they're doing nothing - they're showcasing some of the better bad entries from previous years.
The Senate runoff races in Georgia have taken on national importance. Despite that, the best thing for most people to do is support the organizations that are already in Georgia, are local to Georgia or its counties, and fund their efforts. And perhaps, if they feel mean, to feed an attempt to get GOP voters to boycott or write in an ineligible name for the runoff, which people who have been encouraging such a boycott are now claiming it to be disinformation because they've realized enough people might take it seriously. To the point where there might be enough people who believe in fraud who won't vote to hand the vote to the Democrats...but if they try to court that audience, they risk losing the other Republicans who have been opposed to the Trumpists and their mob. Which would be easily fixable if it were just people farting around, but as best as we can tell about how serious anyone is about these things, people are seriously asking Republicans in Georgia to boycott the Senate runoff. Which the Democrats and their supporters would completely go in for - the less Republican-leaning voters that come out to vote or spoil their ballot instead, the better for their candidates, because the Democrats want as many Democratic voters to participate in the runoffs.
(Not that it stops the people dead set on their views. They'll still encourage the boycott, even as more baseless lawsuits get thrown out and the side they're trying to suck up to starts turning on them as they recognize the consequences of allowing this foolishness to continue.)
One of the candidates in the runoff elections has spent much of his time and time on the pulpit advocating for better treatments and the eradication of HIV/AIDS, especially in administrations that think of HIV/AIDS still as the punishment of the divinity for immoral people. Which is a laudable thing, especially when compared to the possibility of one of the Republican candidates having used their information and position in government to personally enrich themselves through well-timed stock trading, despite officially claiming they had no control at all over when and how their financial trades were done.
The show of alleging fraud without having any sensible claim at all to back it up continues. Having lost properly, and increasingly inevitably, the media and the Democratic Party have returned to a very familiar refrain - despite having been elected to repudiate the increasingly violent and hateful rhetoric of the right, leftists and Democrats everywhere are being told to be conciliatory and try to understand and respect the violent extremists and their rhetoric and Rebecca Solnit, along with many, many others would like that narrative to go away and never return. It won't, because so much of our media relies on manufacturing "both sides" even when one of them is completely divorced from reality, but it would be nice if all of us can call what happened the thing that it was, four years of an abusive relationship, of which the most dangerous time might be now, when we are trying to separate ourselves from the abuser.
The holdout at the General Services Administration has finally ascertained the election's results, allowing for the transition of power to begin and releasing resources for the incoming administration to utilize. While she says that her decision was not influenced by any politics and that she was never pressured by anyone in the current administration about her decision, she does take time in her letter to complain about all the ordinary people that were telling her to do her job and ascertain the election long before this point in time. If she's telling the truth that the administration didn't pressure her, I still can't see her delay and action as anything other than being a sycophant to the administration, since none of their legal challenges or other attempts to delay or steal the election had any sort of merit.
The Philadelphia Inquirer interviews the owner of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, about what would eventually become the latest, and actually fairly funny, were it not for the threats and anger that was directed their way, in a series of memerable things about this entire post-election period.
As we struggle our way through the Virus, women have been primarily affected because of cultural expectations that they will do all of the household work and any additional tasks of child-rearing while the man in their life goes and does paid work outside of the house. For people who believe in the Past That Never Was, the pandemic has helped them toward achieving that unreality more than their own campaigning and formal attempts ever have.
Reviewing the Headley translation of Beowulf sees a lot of potential of what could have been, had the lens of the translator been more intersectional in the intent. Even so, what's done opens the space for more people to provide those kinds of critiques. Because, with language, the things done without intent are often as illuminating as the things done with intent.
A poem that contains significant amount of Scots in it went viral, along with several Scots ways of making sure that an MP or a Government knows what you think of their actions [video, Youtube].
The Tate Modern will have an exhibition of photographs of Black South African LGBTQIA+ people, and many of the photographs themselves are in monochrome, and either it's a deliberate decision to make the Black blacker or it's a feature of the monochrome film, but either way, many of the pictures in the article are quite black. in composition.
Actor Elliot Page, star of 'Juno' and 'The Umbrella Academy', told the wider world of their trans and nonbinary status, while recognizing his privilege and ability to be out and promising to make it easier for others. Who are going to need all the support they can get for themselves, based on bad decisions and worse rulings that come out all the time trying to make it harder for someone who is trans to be out and themselves. I do like the style CNN chooses to indicate Elliot's previous name. I don't know that it has to be mentioned, but in doing so, by stating it as "formerly publicly known as," CNN reminds us that many a person in the acting business is known by a name that is not the one they were born with, or is a name they have taken specifically so that they can do union work under one name that is always in compliance with the union's rules and another that allows them to take projects that will make them money and feed them but could otherwise violate the rules of the union and cause problems. If I have to have such a thing in an article, I personally would like to see a resurgence of the use of né/née/né·e for it, allowing it to expand past the previous idea of being used for the maiden name of a married woman into the space where it would encompass any name that came before the current one in use (or at least make the point that this was the name the person was born with). "Sal, né Sally" might be used right at the point of announcement of a new name, but after that point, the new name should take over seamlessly for the old. And, in a perfect world, every pocket of metadata that had the old name would transfer to the new with a seamless and silent SEE reference, and any works or academic entities that held material under the old name would substitute copies with the new ones and update their own metadata accordingly, so that a person doesn't have to risk losing their entire publication history by taking on a new name. (Many places do not do this, and some are actively hostile to the idea of changing anything, making bad claims about why they couldn't possibly change such things and retain the academic integrity of themselves and the works. *thbbbpth* to that - the same person has done the work, so they should retain the credit and history under whatever name they have chosen for themselves, and publications and papers should update themselves accordingly, at least in the digital forms and repositories where it's extremely easy to make the switches.)
On less pleasant grounds, a high court in the United Kingdom chose to ignore the experts, including the young people themselves, about whether or not they should receive puberty blocking medication, taking a paternalistic, "parents know best" attitude and saying that under-16s are unlikely to be able to give informed consent about physical transition processes, including said puberty blockers. Which is bullshit, as anyone who has been around younglings knows full well that they understand themselves. even if they're not fully sure about what final form they want to take. Bu instead we have a narrative that says young people are pressured or otherwise encouraged to transition before they know what gender they actually are, and should avoid doing things they're going to regret later. Which says precisely nothing about things like puberty blockers that are intended to give someone more time to make that decision, but the winners of the case seem to believe that it's always going to be a throughline of "stopped puberty, then binary transition," and that under-16s can't possibly understand what kind of permanent decision that is. Which is also bullshit, if you took any time to listen to people who have transitioned and the experts they consult and the hoops they have to jump through to be able to access hormonal and physical transition. It's not like someone can go into the clinic, hop into the BodyMod 6500 and pop out with a completely different gender presentation. And even if they could fo such a seamless and swift gender presentation change, what's the difficulty there? If it turns out that was an experiment or being questioning, then another trip through the BodyMod 6500 will allow them to be the gender presentation they choose. This kind of ruling seems to be less about the known science and the lived experiences of the people who seek such treatments and more about catering to people who want to inflict great and unnecessary harm upon younglings because of their own personal, evidence-free beliefs about those younglings and the people trying to help them be the people they are. It's the same idea (and usually religious backing) as conversion therapy to insist that children can't possibly know whether they want to delay puberty (or even go through a different one than their assignment at birth).
And it's also disproven by people who choose to film their own transition as a documentary and show what it's like for them. And by people who make decisions for their health later on in life that (sometimes) don't get all the pearl-clutching that comes from a decision to make a transition. (And also make the cogent point that choosing to do a thing is different than being forced to do a thing.)
Making memorials for cyclists shows places where infrastructure falls down, but also shows places where society falls down as well, as some people die while riding because they have no other choice but to risk themselves on the streets.
Lights in the sky and on the water at the same time, bioluminescent mammals like wombats and platypi, the rediscovery of a plant last seen in the last century, new apple variety and rediscovering old apple varieties, getting giraffes off of shrinking islands, and building infrastructure for the use of wildlife so as to reduce injury and death for both humans and wildlife.
In technology, Parler wasn't hacked, but it was a compelling idea that made it easy to think it was, which is another apt demonstration of how things that aren't true can become viral, because they feel right (which can include delicious, delicious irony).
Part of a group providing DDoS attacks and bomb threats to schools for payment has been given eight years in federal prison in the US for the crimes pleaded guilty to, which included the possession of sexual images involving minors. Which seems light compared to the amount of malice done, but there's always the possibility that information provided allowed for pleading to fewer counts than the charges would have had him for, and this is the lightest sentence he could negotiate. And, as it turns out, the reason the person was identified and arrested was because of a different service being hacked and having its data spread around instead. Which just goes to show how hard it is to maintain good operational security and have anything resembling a life in this connected age.
A directory of clothing bands, rated on how well they do regarding environmental impact, working conditions, and testing or use of animals in their processes.
Microsoft Excel just announced the capability of defining custom functions in the software, which, for me begins to make me think there may be a variation on the joke about emacs that will read "Excel is an excellent operating system, lacking only a decent spreadsheet software."
A journalist takes a tour of the RealDoll factory, and finds many more questions about sexual desire in men than answers, despite thinking that a company where customizable sex dolls are created and sold would be one of the easiest places to get a straight answer about what men want.
Last for tonight, A Gangnam Style parody by the NASA Johnson Space Flight Center, including actual astronauts and scientists doing the dances.
Additionally, the discoverer of pulsars has her portrait hung in the Royal Society's art gallery.
And how a recipe for generating powdered alcohol produced a story of someone making their own, using it, and documenting what it's like to get blitzed on powdered alcohol. It's also quite effective if you need a powder that is highly flammable.
The person who was the on-stage actor for Darth Vader, Dave Prowse, as become one with the Force at 85 years. Another iconic role of his was as a public safety person, the Green Cross Man.
Tired of the people who see the name as a joke (because it's a rude word in English), a village chooses to rename itself to Fugging.
Debunking of persistent myths about the Victorian era and sexuality. Which we put in the context of the lack of Literary Bad Sex Award this year, as the organizers felt like 2020 had more than enough bad things by itself (not that they're doing nothing - they're showcasing some of the better bad entries from previous years.
The Senate runoff races in Georgia have taken on national importance. Despite that, the best thing for most people to do is support the organizations that are already in Georgia, are local to Georgia or its counties, and fund their efforts. And perhaps, if they feel mean, to feed an attempt to get GOP voters to boycott or write in an ineligible name for the runoff, which people who have been encouraging such a boycott are now claiming it to be disinformation because they've realized enough people might take it seriously. To the point where there might be enough people who believe in fraud who won't vote to hand the vote to the Democrats...but if they try to court that audience, they risk losing the other Republicans who have been opposed to the Trumpists and their mob. Which would be easily fixable if it were just people farting around, but as best as we can tell about how serious anyone is about these things, people are seriously asking Republicans in Georgia to boycott the Senate runoff. Which the Democrats and their supporters would completely go in for - the less Republican-leaning voters that come out to vote or spoil their ballot instead, the better for their candidates, because the Democrats want as many Democratic voters to participate in the runoffs.
(Not that it stops the people dead set on their views. They'll still encourage the boycott, even as more baseless lawsuits get thrown out and the side they're trying to suck up to starts turning on them as they recognize the consequences of allowing this foolishness to continue.)
One of the candidates in the runoff elections has spent much of his time and time on the pulpit advocating for better treatments and the eradication of HIV/AIDS, especially in administrations that think of HIV/AIDS still as the punishment of the divinity for immoral people. Which is a laudable thing, especially when compared to the possibility of one of the Republican candidates having used their information and position in government to personally enrich themselves through well-timed stock trading, despite officially claiming they had no control at all over when and how their financial trades were done.
The show of alleging fraud without having any sensible claim at all to back it up continues. Having lost properly, and increasingly inevitably, the media and the Democratic Party have returned to a very familiar refrain - despite having been elected to repudiate the increasingly violent and hateful rhetoric of the right, leftists and Democrats everywhere are being told to be conciliatory and try to understand and respect the violent extremists and their rhetoric and Rebecca Solnit, along with many, many others would like that narrative to go away and never return. It won't, because so much of our media relies on manufacturing "both sides" even when one of them is completely divorced from reality, but it would be nice if all of us can call what happened the thing that it was, four years of an abusive relationship, of which the most dangerous time might be now, when we are trying to separate ourselves from the abuser.
The holdout at the General Services Administration has finally ascertained the election's results, allowing for the transition of power to begin and releasing resources for the incoming administration to utilize. While she says that her decision was not influenced by any politics and that she was never pressured by anyone in the current administration about her decision, she does take time in her letter to complain about all the ordinary people that were telling her to do her job and ascertain the election long before this point in time. If she's telling the truth that the administration didn't pressure her, I still can't see her delay and action as anything other than being a sycophant to the administration, since none of their legal challenges or other attempts to delay or steal the election had any sort of merit.
The Philadelphia Inquirer interviews the owner of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, about what would eventually become the latest, and actually fairly funny, were it not for the threats and anger that was directed their way, in a series of memerable things about this entire post-election period.
As we struggle our way through the Virus, women have been primarily affected because of cultural expectations that they will do all of the household work and any additional tasks of child-rearing while the man in their life goes and does paid work outside of the house. For people who believe in the Past That Never Was, the pandemic has helped them toward achieving that unreality more than their own campaigning and formal attempts ever have.
Reviewing the Headley translation of Beowulf sees a lot of potential of what could have been, had the lens of the translator been more intersectional in the intent. Even so, what's done opens the space for more people to provide those kinds of critiques. Because, with language, the things done without intent are often as illuminating as the things done with intent.
A poem that contains significant amount of Scots in it went viral, along with several Scots ways of making sure that an MP or a Government knows what you think of their actions [video, Youtube].
The Tate Modern will have an exhibition of photographs of Black South African LGBTQIA+ people, and many of the photographs themselves are in monochrome, and either it's a deliberate decision to make the Black blacker or it's a feature of the monochrome film, but either way, many of the pictures in the article are quite black. in composition.
Actor Elliot Page, star of 'Juno' and 'The Umbrella Academy', told the wider world of their trans and nonbinary status, while recognizing his privilege and ability to be out and promising to make it easier for others. Who are going to need all the support they can get for themselves, based on bad decisions and worse rulings that come out all the time trying to make it harder for someone who is trans to be out and themselves. I do like the style CNN chooses to indicate Elliot's previous name. I don't know that it has to be mentioned, but in doing so, by stating it as "formerly publicly known as," CNN reminds us that many a person in the acting business is known by a name that is not the one they were born with, or is a name they have taken specifically so that they can do union work under one name that is always in compliance with the union's rules and another that allows them to take projects that will make them money and feed them but could otherwise violate the rules of the union and cause problems. If I have to have such a thing in an article, I personally would like to see a resurgence of the use of né/née/né·e for it, allowing it to expand past the previous idea of being used for the maiden name of a married woman into the space where it would encompass any name that came before the current one in use (or at least make the point that this was the name the person was born with). "Sal, né Sally" might be used right at the point of announcement of a new name, but after that point, the new name should take over seamlessly for the old. And, in a perfect world, every pocket of metadata that had the old name would transfer to the new with a seamless and silent SEE reference, and any works or academic entities that held material under the old name would substitute copies with the new ones and update their own metadata accordingly, so that a person doesn't have to risk losing their entire publication history by taking on a new name. (Many places do not do this, and some are actively hostile to the idea of changing anything, making bad claims about why they couldn't possibly change such things and retain the academic integrity of themselves and the works. *thbbbpth* to that - the same person has done the work, so they should retain the credit and history under whatever name they have chosen for themselves, and publications and papers should update themselves accordingly, at least in the digital forms and repositories where it's extremely easy to make the switches.)
On less pleasant grounds, a high court in the United Kingdom chose to ignore the experts, including the young people themselves, about whether or not they should receive puberty blocking medication, taking a paternalistic, "parents know best" attitude and saying that under-16s are unlikely to be able to give informed consent about physical transition processes, including said puberty blockers. Which is bullshit, as anyone who has been around younglings knows full well that they understand themselves. even if they're not fully sure about what final form they want to take. Bu instead we have a narrative that says young people are pressured or otherwise encouraged to transition before they know what gender they actually are, and should avoid doing things they're going to regret later. Which says precisely nothing about things like puberty blockers that are intended to give someone more time to make that decision, but the winners of the case seem to believe that it's always going to be a throughline of "stopped puberty, then binary transition," and that under-16s can't possibly understand what kind of permanent decision that is. Which is also bullshit, if you took any time to listen to people who have transitioned and the experts they consult and the hoops they have to jump through to be able to access hormonal and physical transition. It's not like someone can go into the clinic, hop into the BodyMod 6500 and pop out with a completely different gender presentation. And even if they could fo such a seamless and swift gender presentation change, what's the difficulty there? If it turns out that was an experiment or being questioning, then another trip through the BodyMod 6500 will allow them to be the gender presentation they choose. This kind of ruling seems to be less about the known science and the lived experiences of the people who seek such treatments and more about catering to people who want to inflict great and unnecessary harm upon younglings because of their own personal, evidence-free beliefs about those younglings and the people trying to help them be the people they are. It's the same idea (and usually religious backing) as conversion therapy to insist that children can't possibly know whether they want to delay puberty (or even go through a different one than their assignment at birth).
And it's also disproven by people who choose to film their own transition as a documentary and show what it's like for them. And by people who make decisions for their health later on in life that (sometimes) don't get all the pearl-clutching that comes from a decision to make a transition. (And also make the cogent point that choosing to do a thing is different than being forced to do a thing.)
Making memorials for cyclists shows places where infrastructure falls down, but also shows places where society falls down as well, as some people die while riding because they have no other choice but to risk themselves on the streets.
Lights in the sky and on the water at the same time, bioluminescent mammals like wombats and platypi, the rediscovery of a plant last seen in the last century, new apple variety and rediscovering old apple varieties, getting giraffes off of shrinking islands, and building infrastructure for the use of wildlife so as to reduce injury and death for both humans and wildlife.
In technology, Parler wasn't hacked, but it was a compelling idea that made it easy to think it was, which is another apt demonstration of how things that aren't true can become viral, because they feel right (which can include delicious, delicious irony).
Part of a group providing DDoS attacks and bomb threats to schools for payment has been given eight years in federal prison in the US for the crimes pleaded guilty to, which included the possession of sexual images involving minors. Which seems light compared to the amount of malice done, but there's always the possibility that information provided allowed for pleading to fewer counts than the charges would have had him for, and this is the lightest sentence he could negotiate. And, as it turns out, the reason the person was identified and arrested was because of a different service being hacked and having its data spread around instead. Which just goes to show how hard it is to maintain good operational security and have anything resembling a life in this connected age.
A directory of clothing bands, rated on how well they do regarding environmental impact, working conditions, and testing or use of animals in their processes.
Microsoft Excel just announced the capability of defining custom functions in the software, which, for me begins to make me think there may be a variation on the joke about emacs that will read "Excel is an excellent operating system, lacking only a decent spreadsheet software."
A journalist takes a tour of the RealDoll factory, and finds many more questions about sexual desire in men than answers, despite thinking that a company where customizable sex dolls are created and sold would be one of the easiest places to get a straight answer about what men want.
Last for tonight, A Gangnam Style parody by the NASA Johnson Space Flight Center, including actual astronauts and scientists doing the dances.
Additionally, the discoverer of pulsars has her portrait hung in the Royal Society's art gallery.
And how a recipe for generating powdered alcohol produced a story of someone making their own, using it, and documenting what it's like to get blitzed on powdered alcohol. It's also quite effective if you need a powder that is highly flammable.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 03:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 06:46 am (UTC)Great idea!
no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 10:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 06:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-13 06:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-15 01:38 am (UTC)Yeah! It's really interesting stuff, too - a lot of it tends to be boots-on-ground, word-of-mouth type research.