![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGreetings. If we haven't shared this before, In The House of the Seven Librarians is a lovely story about a child submitted as payment for a long-overdue book, and the seven librarians who teach her the ways of their specialties.
If you are looking for a gigantic list of book recommendations, Elizabeth Bird does one every year, split into 31 lists. The first list is board books (sturdy books meant for the youngest), but there are 30 other lists for other audiences of reader, so you'll probably find a list for the books that you very much want to read. And a few more.
And if you are looking for something that has tried to be relatively comprehensive about the "cruelties, collusions, and crimes" of the last administration, McSweeneys has compiled 1,056 of "the worst" of them, and their list only goes back to 02011, starting with the birtherism that began people paying attention to what was happening. The actual count is probably far, far, more, but we don't have the investigations or the people who were affected haven't come forth with their stories. Even if there is a conviction and subsequent exclusion, there still are likely enough actions taken by that administration and their supporters, including persons still currently sitting as members of the legislatures, that a full reckoning will take both time and will have to sweep very wide to catch all of the misdeeds done.
Corporations deciding to take a pause on their political action donations in light of elected officials being responsible or supportive of armed insurrectionists is causing all sorts of worry and promises of revenge or less influence against those places that are pausing their donations. Which, you know, I would more than happily enjoy having my government decide they don't want to be in the pockets of corporations and instead represent and pass legislation that helps people instead.
If police are using handcuffs and pepper spray on a nine year-old child, the police are wrong, regardless of what complaint was filed against the nine year-old. Unsurprisingly, the nine year-old child was black, so she was not seen as a child at all.
On fannish things,mific posted a guide to uploading and getting the metadata right on podfic using the Internet Archive, which works pretty well as a hosting site, not going to lie. Probably works really well for fanvids, too.
Since it is February, that also means the Three Sentence Ficathon is currently running atrthstewart's.
Also, perhaps spend some amount of February talking about the things you love.
Check out an awesome set of Frozone cosplay pics, courtesy of the winter weather. Domr additional pictures at CosPlayNay's Twitter post.
Fourteen minutes of chord and meter analysis as to why the rendition of the US National Anthem by Lady Gaga at the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden, Jr. sounds very different than what an audience would expect out of the song. [Youtube, video] Which I can follow the meter part pretty well, especially with regard to why a singer or melody might enter a beat earlier than their orchestration (and even more so when there is chord resolution and/or consonance following dissonance), but how the chord progressions work is not something that's in my wheelhouse. I do like the idea of the song being sung and played in a musical theater style, given how enraptured the country is by Hamilton and the ground that it broke on what styles of music were acceptable for telling history.
The Oatmeal's eight-part series on creativity and art. It is the Oatmeal, however, so expect to see all sorts of things, like butts, people expelling things forcefully from their mouths and butts, and a lot of talk about creativity and doing art.
When asking editors for editing, there are different forms that can be asked for, each of which will take a different amount of time and examine the work in different amounts of detail. Proofing is done at the laid-out stage, copy and line editing well before then.
A columnist discovers the actual purpose of romance novels, especially the ones that are "trashy". Romance, like other fiction genres, has conventions, and those conventions shape works that want to be part of the genre. And people read those genres for their conventions, and to see ways that those conventions get twisted and shifted and sometimes even stood on their head for a bit, and that's the joy. I might make fun of a Hallmark movie, but that's because I don't enjoy its conventions, not because it's bad at them.
Katherine Whitehorn has looked back and thought about what have been most useful to have known at ages where she might not have been able to appreciate it properly.
A story about life, and all the ways that it starts again when you think you've got it handled. Contains Tom Hanks, bookstores, pancreatic cancer and its treatment, psilocybin experiences, and a lot of arcs in it that don't finish, because they're too busy being taken over by new arcs.
The world one sees as a tourist is different than the world one sees as a resident, as someone who was promoting Bali as a LGBT-friendly place found out. Which I'm putting next to a story about alpaca-raising queer farmers in rural Colorado, both as "nothing you see is quite what it appears," but also because the Tenacious Unicorns work on the principles that so long as you can demonstrate you're a big enough threat to the people around you, they won't try to hurt you because you're different than they are. Which is not always the easiest thing to achieve in other parts of the country, especially when it's not just gun nut militias that you have to demonstrate your ability to, but the apparatus of the State itself, when the State turns hostile.
Vegetarian cooking with meat-like texture and taste is not new, but it would seem like it to an audience that hasn't had thousands of years of cooking that way to make sure that Buddhists weren't breaking any vows about eating meat.
Ray Fisher accuses Joss Whedon of terrible behavior on the set of 'Justice League'. We remind each other that this is the same Joss Whedon who harrassed Charisma Carpenter repeatedly and set up what Amber Benson calls a toxic environment. Sarah Michelle Gellar says she's with the survivors, and Michele Tractenberg details a harrowing rule from the Buffy set about how Joss was not to be allowed alone with Michele again. Long before this point, we knew that Joss wasn't fit, but, as it turns out, he keeps getting work and keeps treating people terribly. Maybe this one will finally be the one that boots him from being able to do work again?
The CDC recommends using techniques to create a much better seal for a standard mask, either by covering a surgical mask with a cloth one to fix the fit, or by twisting and knotting ear loops on a folded surgical mask to make a much tighter fit. It's murder on the ears, absolutely, but the data says that having something that fixes the fit makes the mask more effective.
Occasionally, someone breaks a virus quarantine because they've become smitten with someone else - which is pretty normal for human behavior, and another one of those reasons why nobody gets the comfortable fantasy of believing they would be the ones who survive the apocalypse through superior morals and willpower. Tips on being able to wear masks that all assume, essentially, that the difficulty with mask wearing is all in your head, which may be true for a lot of people. I still want people who are able to do so to wear their masks, and perhaps, now that we don't have a government openly encouraging people to defy any masking requirements, there will be less people deliberately trying to cause problems, which will free up resources to help the people who are requesting reasonable accommodations.
Preliminary data continues to suggest that vaccination, even if it's a single shot, is pretty effective, which is good news when variations and mutations are already starting to appear and spread, which suggests if you can, upgrading your mask's effectiveness is a good idea, but the most important takeaway from this is to keep your safety practices firmly in place and recognize which things are the highest dangers, which are generally about being indoors in ill-ventilated areas with others, or not recognizing how much exposure you might have in a situation that appears safe.
Refining technology used to ship ebola vaccinations so that they can hold SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations at necessary supercool temperatures. As well as COVAX, who aim to procure enough doses to vaccinate low- or no-income places all around the world, and have several billions of doses available already.
The suggestion that coming out of the pandemic is the perfect time to jettison any remaining need you have to avoid weirdness in your conversation, which I can appreciate quite thoroughly, as sometimes the conversations you get up to at convention (or in other spaces that are specifically about being interesting or talking unabashedly about the things you like or have experienced) are fascinating and interesting and perfect for the time, even if afterward, you realize that convention is the only place where that kind of conversation could have happened.
Smartwatches that track the variability of a heart rate may be able to provide advance warning of a SARS-CoV-2 infection before symptoms develop, based on how the variations change in the presence of inflammation.
There already weren't enough mental health professionals before the pandemic began, and now those who are still in the profession are having to deal with both the pandemic and the intense pressure of so many people seeking their services.
And then, a crystalization of why people might not want to re-open if they had the option to stay closed and supported, a person was refused service at a chicken and waffles joint for not wearing his mask, and chose to get their gun and rob the store of the food they demanded, rather than wear the mask.
Cardigans have roots in the desire of women to not be objectified and told they have to have their bodies on permanent display to others. Which is how they play so well into the idea of the sexy librarian stereotype, of someone who chooses to discard their shape-hiding wear once a person is able to show them that they are in fact a sexy beast. What such things rarely get to, because they're interested in the erotic rather than the realistic, would be the pushback that would happen if someone in the library profession started wearing things that showcased the figure, because librarians, like teachers, are supposed to be sexless beings dispensing wisdom and information. (Which is part of why the hot librarian / hot teacher things has cachet, I suspect, once you've accounted for any of the other things, like power gaps, that would make something decidedly unsexy outside of pornographic logic.) Which I'll put next to Nüshu, a language mostly written between women as a way of finding solidarity and talking about their lives in a highly patriarchal and repressive society. And this series of things that explore all the different facets of what being a woman is like - the first out lesbian Member of Parliament for the United Kingdom, a Black bisexual bartender who was a mainstay of the queer community around her, before becoming a celebrated artist, a ritual magic practitioner in a society that was heavily patriarchal and Christian, an elder who is not cowed and therefore gets accused of witchcraft, and a trans woman who lived among TERFs who were in a woman separationist space and who did audio engineering work for a women's music band, and who was eventually run out of that space by those selfsame TERFs who also complained that the audio quality of the group had dropped since the trans woman had joined them. Something about there not being anything new under the sun, perhaps, and that a lot of issues that we think are new have been there for significantly longer than we believe.
A Black man from Michigan reinvented himself as a black man who emigrated from Cuba, and then wrote books and taught creative writing courses under that identity, and did quite well at the teaching and decently well with the books, which makes all the people who got genuine help from him have to reevaluate a lot of things about their life. It's also something significantly different than the usual narrative of someone pretending to a heritage they don't actually have, which makes it even more opaque as to the motivations, at least according to the writer.
A basketball team that wants to be inclusive, and so sorts its teams and players by height, rather than gender, among other things.
The cave that creates bell-shaped rock formations, a cookbook from refugee communities in Canada, an agate's insides that looks suspiciously like a certain Children's Television Workshop character, beetles manipulating microbes so they broadcast information on finding good places to breed and to discourage other beetles from breeding in the same corpse, appropriate shrines for cats to live in, the linguistic variations of naked mole rat, the person trying to smuggle cacti and succulents into New Zealand, extremely smol kittens, and the conflicting interests between dollars for people coming to see hippos and the very real problem of those hippos being an invasive species.
In technology, if you have a system that runs Linux underneath the hood, update your systems to fix an old but exploitable bug in the sudo command, which is generally how modern Linux systems handle tasks that require elevated permissions or superuser status. I think this is also something that should be part of smartphone updates, even though there's a good chance that the phone that needs the update has fallen out of manufacturer support and updates. Yet another reason why phones should be configurable so that someone can switch to a system that is being supported with regular updates even after the manufacturers decide they are no longer interested in them, without penalty, even though that switch is something that is often highly penalized because doing those switches means the system no longer believes itself sufficiently secure to offer certain kinds of applications, because it assumes anything not in its own tight control is insecure. (There are reasons for this. They're probably even good reasons for this, but it would be nice toward adoption, for example, to say that yes, even after someone has adopted an aftermarket operating system, they still can theoretically have access to the Netflix app, rather than it becoming mysteriously unavailable from the app store.) Or, as Cory Doctorow argues at length, bust the trusts in Big Tech and a lot of the ills of Big Tech can be reduced or even defeated, which in of itself might do best with joining forces will all the other anti-monopolists elsewhere to bring pressure on every business trying to be the only player in the market (or one of the only players in the market).
If science has a bias toward men and masculinity, it loses out on the possibility of discovering useful information by not paying attention to women and children and what they may have done.
The thought that, now that companies have been forced to adopt liberal attitudes toward remote work, they will continue to keep going in that direction to capitalize on what gains they have already achieved.
The history of a very important person in the creation of the Durex condom, with a person who was important to the company but spent some time out of the official story because of animus developed between them and the company.
Last for tonight, Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land, which is one of those stories that doesn't do a lot of obvious worldbuilding and yet still tells a story of a place that is easily understood and found, and Come, Water, Be One Of Us which is about what happens when, having given corporations the ability to be people, we also gave bodies of water the same privilege.
Goths Up Trees, which is at least half tongue-in-cheek and three-quarters really well-shot pictures of people in goth dress up trees.
And The Merriam-Webster Time Traveler, showcasing the first known use years of words, such that you might find a particular word is older (or younger) than you believe it is.
If you are looking for a gigantic list of book recommendations, Elizabeth Bird does one every year, split into 31 lists. The first list is board books (sturdy books meant for the youngest), but there are 30 other lists for other audiences of reader, so you'll probably find a list for the books that you very much want to read. And a few more.
And if you are looking for something that has tried to be relatively comprehensive about the "cruelties, collusions, and crimes" of the last administration, McSweeneys has compiled 1,056 of "the worst" of them, and their list only goes back to 02011, starting with the birtherism that began people paying attention to what was happening. The actual count is probably far, far, more, but we don't have the investigations or the people who were affected haven't come forth with their stories. Even if there is a conviction and subsequent exclusion, there still are likely enough actions taken by that administration and their supporters, including persons still currently sitting as members of the legislatures, that a full reckoning will take both time and will have to sweep very wide to catch all of the misdeeds done.
Corporations deciding to take a pause on their political action donations in light of elected officials being responsible or supportive of armed insurrectionists is causing all sorts of worry and promises of revenge or less influence against those places that are pausing their donations. Which, you know, I would more than happily enjoy having my government decide they don't want to be in the pockets of corporations and instead represent and pass legislation that helps people instead.
If police are using handcuffs and pepper spray on a nine year-old child, the police are wrong, regardless of what complaint was filed against the nine year-old. Unsurprisingly, the nine year-old child was black, so she was not seen as a child at all.
On fannish things,
mific posted a guide to uploading and getting the metadata right on podfic using the Internet Archive, which works pretty well as a hosting site, not going to lie. Probably works really well for fanvids, too.Since it is February, that also means the Three Sentence Ficathon is currently running at
rthstewart's.Also, perhaps spend some amount of February talking about the things you love.
Check out an awesome set of Frozone cosplay pics, courtesy of the winter weather. Domr additional pictures at CosPlayNay's Twitter post.
Fourteen minutes of chord and meter analysis as to why the rendition of the US National Anthem by Lady Gaga at the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden, Jr. sounds very different than what an audience would expect out of the song. [Youtube, video] Which I can follow the meter part pretty well, especially with regard to why a singer or melody might enter a beat earlier than their orchestration (and even more so when there is chord resolution and/or consonance following dissonance), but how the chord progressions work is not something that's in my wheelhouse. I do like the idea of the song being sung and played in a musical theater style, given how enraptured the country is by Hamilton and the ground that it broke on what styles of music were acceptable for telling history.
The Oatmeal's eight-part series on creativity and art. It is the Oatmeal, however, so expect to see all sorts of things, like butts, people expelling things forcefully from their mouths and butts, and a lot of talk about creativity and doing art.
When asking editors for editing, there are different forms that can be asked for, each of which will take a different amount of time and examine the work in different amounts of detail. Proofing is done at the laid-out stage, copy and line editing well before then.
A columnist discovers the actual purpose of romance novels, especially the ones that are "trashy". Romance, like other fiction genres, has conventions, and those conventions shape works that want to be part of the genre. And people read those genres for their conventions, and to see ways that those conventions get twisted and shifted and sometimes even stood on their head for a bit, and that's the joy. I might make fun of a Hallmark movie, but that's because I don't enjoy its conventions, not because it's bad at them.
Katherine Whitehorn has looked back and thought about what have been most useful to have known at ages where she might not have been able to appreciate it properly.
A story about life, and all the ways that it starts again when you think you've got it handled. Contains Tom Hanks, bookstores, pancreatic cancer and its treatment, psilocybin experiences, and a lot of arcs in it that don't finish, because they're too busy being taken over by new arcs.
The world one sees as a tourist is different than the world one sees as a resident, as someone who was promoting Bali as a LGBT-friendly place found out. Which I'm putting next to a story about alpaca-raising queer farmers in rural Colorado, both as "nothing you see is quite what it appears," but also because the Tenacious Unicorns work on the principles that so long as you can demonstrate you're a big enough threat to the people around you, they won't try to hurt you because you're different than they are. Which is not always the easiest thing to achieve in other parts of the country, especially when it's not just gun nut militias that you have to demonstrate your ability to, but the apparatus of the State itself, when the State turns hostile.
Vegetarian cooking with meat-like texture and taste is not new, but it would seem like it to an audience that hasn't had thousands of years of cooking that way to make sure that Buddhists weren't breaking any vows about eating meat.
Ray Fisher accuses Joss Whedon of terrible behavior on the set of 'Justice League'. We remind each other that this is the same Joss Whedon who harrassed Charisma Carpenter repeatedly and set up what Amber Benson calls a toxic environment. Sarah Michelle Gellar says she's with the survivors, and Michele Tractenberg details a harrowing rule from the Buffy set about how Joss was not to be allowed alone with Michele again. Long before this point, we knew that Joss wasn't fit, but, as it turns out, he keeps getting work and keeps treating people terribly. Maybe this one will finally be the one that boots him from being able to do work again?
The CDC recommends using techniques to create a much better seal for a standard mask, either by covering a surgical mask with a cloth one to fix the fit, or by twisting and knotting ear loops on a folded surgical mask to make a much tighter fit. It's murder on the ears, absolutely, but the data says that having something that fixes the fit makes the mask more effective.
Occasionally, someone breaks a virus quarantine because they've become smitten with someone else - which is pretty normal for human behavior, and another one of those reasons why nobody gets the comfortable fantasy of believing they would be the ones who survive the apocalypse through superior morals and willpower. Tips on being able to wear masks that all assume, essentially, that the difficulty with mask wearing is all in your head, which may be true for a lot of people. I still want people who are able to do so to wear their masks, and perhaps, now that we don't have a government openly encouraging people to defy any masking requirements, there will be less people deliberately trying to cause problems, which will free up resources to help the people who are requesting reasonable accommodations.
Preliminary data continues to suggest that vaccination, even if it's a single shot, is pretty effective, which is good news when variations and mutations are already starting to appear and spread, which suggests if you can, upgrading your mask's effectiveness is a good idea, but the most important takeaway from this is to keep your safety practices firmly in place and recognize which things are the highest dangers, which are generally about being indoors in ill-ventilated areas with others, or not recognizing how much exposure you might have in a situation that appears safe.
Refining technology used to ship ebola vaccinations so that they can hold SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations at necessary supercool temperatures. As well as COVAX, who aim to procure enough doses to vaccinate low- or no-income places all around the world, and have several billions of doses available already.
The suggestion that coming out of the pandemic is the perfect time to jettison any remaining need you have to avoid weirdness in your conversation, which I can appreciate quite thoroughly, as sometimes the conversations you get up to at convention (or in other spaces that are specifically about being interesting or talking unabashedly about the things you like or have experienced) are fascinating and interesting and perfect for the time, even if afterward, you realize that convention is the only place where that kind of conversation could have happened.
Smartwatches that track the variability of a heart rate may be able to provide advance warning of a SARS-CoV-2 infection before symptoms develop, based on how the variations change in the presence of inflammation.
There already weren't enough mental health professionals before the pandemic began, and now those who are still in the profession are having to deal with both the pandemic and the intense pressure of so many people seeking their services.
And then, a crystalization of why people might not want to re-open if they had the option to stay closed and supported, a person was refused service at a chicken and waffles joint for not wearing his mask, and chose to get their gun and rob the store of the food they demanded, rather than wear the mask.
Cardigans have roots in the desire of women to not be objectified and told they have to have their bodies on permanent display to others. Which is how they play so well into the idea of the sexy librarian stereotype, of someone who chooses to discard their shape-hiding wear once a person is able to show them that they are in fact a sexy beast. What such things rarely get to, because they're interested in the erotic rather than the realistic, would be the pushback that would happen if someone in the library profession started wearing things that showcased the figure, because librarians, like teachers, are supposed to be sexless beings dispensing wisdom and information. (Which is part of why the hot librarian / hot teacher things has cachet, I suspect, once you've accounted for any of the other things, like power gaps, that would make something decidedly unsexy outside of pornographic logic.) Which I'll put next to Nüshu, a language mostly written between women as a way of finding solidarity and talking about their lives in a highly patriarchal and repressive society. And this series of things that explore all the different facets of what being a woman is like - the first out lesbian Member of Parliament for the United Kingdom, a Black bisexual bartender who was a mainstay of the queer community around her, before becoming a celebrated artist, a ritual magic practitioner in a society that was heavily patriarchal and Christian, an elder who is not cowed and therefore gets accused of witchcraft, and a trans woman who lived among TERFs who were in a woman separationist space and who did audio engineering work for a women's music band, and who was eventually run out of that space by those selfsame TERFs who also complained that the audio quality of the group had dropped since the trans woman had joined them. Something about there not being anything new under the sun, perhaps, and that a lot of issues that we think are new have been there for significantly longer than we believe.
A Black man from Michigan reinvented himself as a black man who emigrated from Cuba, and then wrote books and taught creative writing courses under that identity, and did quite well at the teaching and decently well with the books, which makes all the people who got genuine help from him have to reevaluate a lot of things about their life. It's also something significantly different than the usual narrative of someone pretending to a heritage they don't actually have, which makes it even more opaque as to the motivations, at least according to the writer.
A basketball team that wants to be inclusive, and so sorts its teams and players by height, rather than gender, among other things.
The cave that creates bell-shaped rock formations, a cookbook from refugee communities in Canada, an agate's insides that looks suspiciously like a certain Children's Television Workshop character, beetles manipulating microbes so they broadcast information on finding good places to breed and to discourage other beetles from breeding in the same corpse, appropriate shrines for cats to live in, the linguistic variations of naked mole rat, the person trying to smuggle cacti and succulents into New Zealand, extremely smol kittens, and the conflicting interests between dollars for people coming to see hippos and the very real problem of those hippos being an invasive species.
In technology, if you have a system that runs Linux underneath the hood, update your systems to fix an old but exploitable bug in the sudo command, which is generally how modern Linux systems handle tasks that require elevated permissions or superuser status. I think this is also something that should be part of smartphone updates, even though there's a good chance that the phone that needs the update has fallen out of manufacturer support and updates. Yet another reason why phones should be configurable so that someone can switch to a system that is being supported with regular updates even after the manufacturers decide they are no longer interested in them, without penalty, even though that switch is something that is often highly penalized because doing those switches means the system no longer believes itself sufficiently secure to offer certain kinds of applications, because it assumes anything not in its own tight control is insecure. (There are reasons for this. They're probably even good reasons for this, but it would be nice toward adoption, for example, to say that yes, even after someone has adopted an aftermarket operating system, they still can theoretically have access to the Netflix app, rather than it becoming mysteriously unavailable from the app store.) Or, as Cory Doctorow argues at length, bust the trusts in Big Tech and a lot of the ills of Big Tech can be reduced or even defeated, which in of itself might do best with joining forces will all the other anti-monopolists elsewhere to bring pressure on every business trying to be the only player in the market (or one of the only players in the market).
If science has a bias toward men and masculinity, it loses out on the possibility of discovering useful information by not paying attention to women and children and what they may have done.
The thought that, now that companies have been forced to adopt liberal attitudes toward remote work, they will continue to keep going in that direction to capitalize on what gains they have already achieved.
The history of a very important person in the creation of the Durex condom, with a person who was important to the company but spent some time out of the official story because of animus developed between them and the company.
Last for tonight, Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land, which is one of those stories that doesn't do a lot of obvious worldbuilding and yet still tells a story of a place that is easily understood and found, and Come, Water, Be One Of Us which is about what happens when, having given corporations the ability to be people, we also gave bodies of water the same privilege.
Goths Up Trees, which is at least half tongue-in-cheek and three-quarters really well-shot pictures of people in goth dress up trees.
And The Merriam-Webster Time Traveler, showcasing the first known use years of words, such that you might find a particular word is older (or younger) than you believe it is.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-15 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-15 03:18 pm (UTC)