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silveradeptOkay, let's start with a piece of excellent news - I am now on a twenty-eight day countdown before I can receive the second dose of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. I am quite happy to be on this time table, as it is becoming increasingly clear to all that my workplace is moving forward with reopening plans as more vaccinations are available and presumably being taken, and I would like the maximum amount of protection that I can have before having to work with the public and their differing opinions about the efficacy of masks and vaccines.
I have signed up for v-safe, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention adverse events tracker, which will ask me questions about any symptoms I might be experiencing as a result of the jab.
Australia calls for a UK-based neo-Nazi group to be officially designated as a terror group, declaring it illegal to be part of the group or to give them assistance.
Elsewhere in the UK, after presaging what was going to happen with an Untitled Goose Game meme, several advisers to the UK Government have left their posts because they have no confidence in the Government and the equalities ministers to do their job, nor that they will educate themselves so they can do the job properly.
Anderson Cooper interviews Levar Burton about Doctor Seuss and the feigned cancel culture outrage about the decision to remove some of Seuss' most racist works. Also, video of reading Numeroff to his child.
after using the n-word in a meeting with students, the director of a university is being pressured to resign from those students. The director's own statements on the matter, reflected in the article, said he didn't find it offensive and non-apologized by saying that if anyone was offended, he was sorry, and couldn't they stop focusing on this and politicizing it now [since he's made the appropriate motions of apology and is now entitled to forgiveness].
A post that comes with a content that can be summed up as "Assume the worst is happening, and will continue to happen, without relief, and with disasters to help speed it along", The Very Bad News suggests that making preparations so that you can survive when the things that we have come to expect as normal, like functioning government, public utilities, and a natural environment that isn't a long string of one disaster after another, aren't there any more. (And that believing things will get better without a scrap of proof to back it up is dangerous wishful thinking, to boot, just in case it wasn't clear this is not something to read if you need to keep any shred of optimism in your heart or brain to continue functioning.)
Sheela na gigs, Irish representations of women with extremely large labia, are becoming more prominent as a project intends to place them in spots where women have struggled over time.
Authors are not in charge of whether their book is a bestseller. Publishers, and the amount of marketing money they devote to promotion and distribution of a book, are, and they are gaslighting authors into making those authors believe they can affect their own sales by being always-marketing-themselves. And that's before you start talking about who gets all the marketing money and who gets told there just isn't any budget to promote their book to such a small audience.
Elsewhere, a conception of Jewish atheism that is specifically about there being nothing more than the material world, rather than about differing ideas about what's represented by the Tetragrammaton, because differing ideas about what's represented by the Tetragrammaton is well-documented.
The Johnson government is demanding rents of several hundreds of thousands of pounds from intellectual societies currently housed in building around where the Royal Society for the Arts is headquartered, suggesting that the taxpayers should get better value out of the properties and not at all thinking about what it might look like to tell those societies and their treasures that they have to be able to afford London rent or go somewhere more obscure.
The charity regulator in the UK found the National Trust didn't do anything wrong in exploring the colonialist and slavery-related history of its various properties and publishing materials on that history. The States, obviously, has quite the history of trying to erase its own history. A significant amount of viewing racism in both the UK and the US takes the lens that something must be wrong with the people who were enslaved and are discriminated against that they keep talking about it, rather than that it's everyone else around them oppressing them and continuing to do so that is the wrong, and that attitude comes out at very slight provocations, including accurate history.
Academia assumes that a person who is working on an advanced degree is either independently wealthy or has a person that takes care of them, whichliv spins out into a longer form and explains support for the Ph.D candidate from their partner comes in many ways, possibly financially, possibly by handling household things, but almost certainly by becoming someone who reads papers to keep them up on the subject, who proofs their work and helps them flesh it all out into better arguments, and otherwise could rightfully claim having done enough work that their name should appear on the thing as well. Do they get that credit? Almost never, and not even, sometimes, in the acknowledgements. Fast forward some time and there may be the occasional acknowledgment for computation and contribution, but rarely does a woman get to the author status or first author status. And that's before you add on all the toxicity, double-standards, and insistence that women should tend to their families rather than to careers that still persists. (Which, were it not for finding people who were interested in them, might have meant the Boole family and line would not be the known mathematicians and innovators that they are. (That's Boole as in Boolean logic, an underpinning of both mathematics and computing.)
A collection of the personal works of Mary Astell, philosopher, includes annotations and translations of Descartes and notes on other philosophers, has returned to prominence in the Cambridge University libraries from where it had been largely forgotten about. There's also, in study of women, the salon, book club, and gambling space run by Hortense Mancini, mistress of Charles II among other things, but very much interested in men and woman talking (and gambling) as equals and letters that were characterized as love letters between George IV and Mary Hamilton turn out to be much more someone trying to keep the stalker away from her without pissing off the royals.
Women are responsible for vaccinations and for the acceptance of vaccinations for quite a bit of history.
An old court case where a servant poisoned the person she served because she was annoyed with him, and then confessed to surprise when the arsenic she used killed him.
A vigil being held for a woman who turned out to have been kidnapped and murdered by a police officer was treated by the police as if it were an unlawful and dangerous gathering. Which would be entirely expected in the States, but that it happened with the Metropolitan Police of London expands many peoples' realization that this kind of police action happens everywhere.
And, thirty-five years after it was written, Genevieve Valentine still finds far too much that's accurate about How to Suppress Women's Writing. The erasure of women from science fiction isn't new to either Valentine or many of the writers in issue 25 (Volume 10, Number 1) of Aurora, a feminist-oriented fanzine, who reviewed Joanna Russ books and wrote an Open Letter to her about another way or two they think they've discovered about suppression.
To cap this idea, a paper examining the ways in which K-pop girl group fandom uses their fictive space, whether it's writing RPF about idols breaking free of (or suffering from) highly restrictive structures, providing the queer content that is only ever at best hinted at or used as queerbaiting, or AUs where the idols remain themselves buy are transported into different roles and settings. A robust part of fandom, in other words, and one that I think the author correctly points out is really easily facilitated by the stringent restrictions on idols and the manufactured-ness of their public selves, to the point where it's entirely possible that you can treat those public idol personas as fictional characters. There's a lot there that's relatable to the wider transformative works world, including similar motivations about wanting representation that had been denied and in using fic to explore spaces that the canon refuses to get anywhere near.
Tips on surviving the very cold in your house, if you should, say, like Texas, suddenly be caught out for an extended period without power.
Understanding why someone might not rush to get vaccinated is key to helping them come around to wanting to get the vaccination.
The District of Columbia handled the initial death surges of COVID-19 by erecting a temporary facility to process them, so as to avoid embarrassing situations of wrong releases or the dead being treated inhumanely. The details in this story are through the eyes of the people who worked in this disaster morgue, and the job they did, so it will personalize the experience for anyone who hasn't yet had someone they know be affected by the pandemic. Or follow a nurse who sees the worst at work and then has to deal with all the people outside of work that don't believe in the efficacy of masking and protecting others as best they can.
Something of interest and possibly cheering, biodegradeable masks that will, if planted and cared for, sprout flowers. This mask would still likely want some additional protection with it, but it's a nice thought.
Comparing the various vaccination methods is important, as is accurately reporting their efficacies and other data, rather than trying to build hype. Hype leads to disappointment, and that's not what you want when you're trying to get people to take the shot.
COVID Kitchen, which feels almost idyllic and at a remove from the things that have been outside, as someone slows down to match the pace they can go at because of the pandemic. There's something nice in it about reconnecting with one's roots and ancestors, and re-learning skills that would otherwise have not had time for, but it also feels sepia-toned and framed very specifically. Maybe it's something to inhabit if you're feeling stressed by the world outside.
Banksy takes credit for an art piece on the wall of the Reading jail, known most notably for imprisoning Oscar Wilde, and which has been under consideration to become an art center. The art piece itself is someone escaping the jail using a set of sheets weighted down with a typewriter.
An artist who posted a tribute to the late Nipsey Hustle on her social media feed found that artwork being sold in Walmart stores with all but one of their watermarks removed from the piece. And while there may be fingers pointed and blame put on some other entity than Walmart, I hope that whomever does get blamed for it has the pockets to pay out a proper willful infringement penalty for each of those copies done, because there's a good chance that Walmart didn't just have one of those items for sale in one location.
An influential Black sculptor of the 20th century, Augusta Savage, whose works have not survived her very well, because she couldn't afford to cast them in bronze or something more permanent, or because she couldn't afford to have them transported, or because there was racism at every turn to furthering her study, a woman who published in the pulps of science fiction magazine under her own name, Clare Winger Harris, after having won third place in a contest, proving women could write for the serials, although the praise for her is very much "Huh. We didn't know that a woman would score so highly, so she must be exceptional compared to all the other ones (so we don't have to care or search for any more good writers among women)," the writings, newsletters, journals, and pamphlets of those campaigning for the vote for women in the United Kingdom, and have you ever noticed how often Hollywood and USian media makes futures that have the aesthetics of East Asian countries, but don't have East Asians in the cast, or the extras, and that prefer to elevate white bodies instead? (Video, Vimeo, supercut of sci-fi movies that use Asian cultures with a whole lot of white people in main and supporting roles) The National Portrait Gallery in the UK has pledged to have more women represented in their collection, and the Rijksmuseum will place women in its Gallery of Honor. Edmonia Lewis's works in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's collection. Poetry of Amy Levy, who wrote of the plight of women going as far back as Xantippe, Socrates' wife, and composer and music educator Imogen Holst (yes, that Holst) receiving a professional concert of her own works as thanks for her wartime efforts of raising morale by getting people to play music arranged for amateurs.
Advice on how not to disturb your beach-nesting bird neighbors, cats rescued by sailors, and plants growing in Australia that have been around since dinosaurs.
In technology, an intact ceremonial chariot found in relation to an illegal dig in Pompeii.
A new model of the Antikythera Mechanism is complex, intricate, and may be able to account for all of the data that has been observed about it so far. The scientists who have synthesized their findings have published their report explaining their reasoning and conclusions and also created a thirty-minute video to provide visual aids and representations of their data and conclusions on how the Mechanism works.
Perseverance had a short drive to test some systems and make sure they're working appropriately. So far, things seem to be going well for the rover as it goes through systems checks to make sure that it touched down safely. Also, the site of the landing has been officially named after the late Octavia E. Butler. The objects of interest that the Perseverance mission is examining are all named in the Navajo language, as a way of preserving the language on another planet, among other things. (Then again, there's a whole lot on Terra that's been named after the native nations, and there's still a lot of work underway to preserve their languages. Including getting them on-line, into software, and getting the glyphs, phonemes, and other infrastructure in place so they can be rendered correctly and the people who speak and write those languages can get online. Anyone who knows about CJK knows that it's not an easy task at all to get everything right, but for languages like Urdu, which are inherently calligraphic and change parts of their glyphs based on what glyphs precede and follow them, trying to get a machine to render both accurate and aesthetic Urdu is a really difficult task.)
The Internet Archive now has a scholarly division, preserving things that were Open Access but have vanished, or other such elements like author manuscripts, and making them discoverable through search, as well as providing the full text of what they have crawled.
Last for tonight, The Sound of Silence, or rather, specifically, digital sound files of specific lengths that are complete zeros. In various lengths, ready for being burnt to a compact disc or applied to a digital music playlist.
I have signed up for v-safe, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention adverse events tracker, which will ask me questions about any symptoms I might be experiencing as a result of the jab.
Australia calls for a UK-based neo-Nazi group to be officially designated as a terror group, declaring it illegal to be part of the group or to give them assistance.
Elsewhere in the UK, after presaging what was going to happen with an Untitled Goose Game meme, several advisers to the UK Government have left their posts because they have no confidence in the Government and the equalities ministers to do their job, nor that they will educate themselves so they can do the job properly.
Anderson Cooper interviews Levar Burton about Doctor Seuss and the feigned cancel culture outrage about the decision to remove some of Seuss' most racist works. Also, video of reading Numeroff to his child.
after using the n-word in a meeting with students, the director of a university is being pressured to resign from those students. The director's own statements on the matter, reflected in the article, said he didn't find it offensive and non-apologized by saying that if anyone was offended, he was sorry, and couldn't they stop focusing on this and politicizing it now [since he's made the appropriate motions of apology and is now entitled to forgiveness].
A post that comes with a content that can be summed up as "Assume the worst is happening, and will continue to happen, without relief, and with disasters to help speed it along", The Very Bad News suggests that making preparations so that you can survive when the things that we have come to expect as normal, like functioning government, public utilities, and a natural environment that isn't a long string of one disaster after another, aren't there any more. (And that believing things will get better without a scrap of proof to back it up is dangerous wishful thinking, to boot, just in case it wasn't clear this is not something to read if you need to keep any shred of optimism in your heart or brain to continue functioning.)
Sheela na gigs, Irish representations of women with extremely large labia, are becoming more prominent as a project intends to place them in spots where women have struggled over time.
Authors are not in charge of whether their book is a bestseller. Publishers, and the amount of marketing money they devote to promotion and distribution of a book, are, and they are gaslighting authors into making those authors believe they can affect their own sales by being always-marketing-themselves. And that's before you start talking about who gets all the marketing money and who gets told there just isn't any budget to promote their book to such a small audience.
Elsewhere, a conception of Jewish atheism that is specifically about there being nothing more than the material world, rather than about differing ideas about what's represented by the Tetragrammaton, because differing ideas about what's represented by the Tetragrammaton is well-documented.
The Johnson government is demanding rents of several hundreds of thousands of pounds from intellectual societies currently housed in building around where the Royal Society for the Arts is headquartered, suggesting that the taxpayers should get better value out of the properties and not at all thinking about what it might look like to tell those societies and their treasures that they have to be able to afford London rent or go somewhere more obscure.
The charity regulator in the UK found the National Trust didn't do anything wrong in exploring the colonialist and slavery-related history of its various properties and publishing materials on that history. The States, obviously, has quite the history of trying to erase its own history. A significant amount of viewing racism in both the UK and the US takes the lens that something must be wrong with the people who were enslaved and are discriminated against that they keep talking about it, rather than that it's everyone else around them oppressing them and continuing to do so that is the wrong, and that attitude comes out at very slight provocations, including accurate history.
Academia assumes that a person who is working on an advanced degree is either independently wealthy or has a person that takes care of them, which
liv spins out into a longer form and explains support for the Ph.D candidate from their partner comes in many ways, possibly financially, possibly by handling household things, but almost certainly by becoming someone who reads papers to keep them up on the subject, who proofs their work and helps them flesh it all out into better arguments, and otherwise could rightfully claim having done enough work that their name should appear on the thing as well. Do they get that credit? Almost never, and not even, sometimes, in the acknowledgements. Fast forward some time and there may be the occasional acknowledgment for computation and contribution, but rarely does a woman get to the author status or first author status. And that's before you add on all the toxicity, double-standards, and insistence that women should tend to their families rather than to careers that still persists. (Which, were it not for finding people who were interested in them, might have meant the Boole family and line would not be the known mathematicians and innovators that they are. (That's Boole as in Boolean logic, an underpinning of both mathematics and computing.)A collection of the personal works of Mary Astell, philosopher, includes annotations and translations of Descartes and notes on other philosophers, has returned to prominence in the Cambridge University libraries from where it had been largely forgotten about. There's also, in study of women, the salon, book club, and gambling space run by Hortense Mancini, mistress of Charles II among other things, but very much interested in men and woman talking (and gambling) as equals and letters that were characterized as love letters between George IV and Mary Hamilton turn out to be much more someone trying to keep the stalker away from her without pissing off the royals.
Women are responsible for vaccinations and for the acceptance of vaccinations for quite a bit of history.
An old court case where a servant poisoned the person she served because she was annoyed with him, and then confessed to surprise when the arsenic she used killed him.
A vigil being held for a woman who turned out to have been kidnapped and murdered by a police officer was treated by the police as if it were an unlawful and dangerous gathering. Which would be entirely expected in the States, but that it happened with the Metropolitan Police of London expands many peoples' realization that this kind of police action happens everywhere.
And, thirty-five years after it was written, Genevieve Valentine still finds far too much that's accurate about How to Suppress Women's Writing. The erasure of women from science fiction isn't new to either Valentine or many of the writers in issue 25 (Volume 10, Number 1) of Aurora, a feminist-oriented fanzine, who reviewed Joanna Russ books and wrote an Open Letter to her about another way or two they think they've discovered about suppression.
To cap this idea, a paper examining the ways in which K-pop girl group fandom uses their fictive space, whether it's writing RPF about idols breaking free of (or suffering from) highly restrictive structures, providing the queer content that is only ever at best hinted at or used as queerbaiting, or AUs where the idols remain themselves buy are transported into different roles and settings. A robust part of fandom, in other words, and one that I think the author correctly points out is really easily facilitated by the stringent restrictions on idols and the manufactured-ness of their public selves, to the point where it's entirely possible that you can treat those public idol personas as fictional characters. There's a lot there that's relatable to the wider transformative works world, including similar motivations about wanting representation that had been denied and in using fic to explore spaces that the canon refuses to get anywhere near.
Tips on surviving the very cold in your house, if you should, say, like Texas, suddenly be caught out for an extended period without power.
Understanding why someone might not rush to get vaccinated is key to helping them come around to wanting to get the vaccination.
The District of Columbia handled the initial death surges of COVID-19 by erecting a temporary facility to process them, so as to avoid embarrassing situations of wrong releases or the dead being treated inhumanely. The details in this story are through the eyes of the people who worked in this disaster morgue, and the job they did, so it will personalize the experience for anyone who hasn't yet had someone they know be affected by the pandemic. Or follow a nurse who sees the worst at work and then has to deal with all the people outside of work that don't believe in the efficacy of masking and protecting others as best they can.
Something of interest and possibly cheering, biodegradeable masks that will, if planted and cared for, sprout flowers. This mask would still likely want some additional protection with it, but it's a nice thought.
Comparing the various vaccination methods is important, as is accurately reporting their efficacies and other data, rather than trying to build hype. Hype leads to disappointment, and that's not what you want when you're trying to get people to take the shot.
COVID Kitchen, which feels almost idyllic and at a remove from the things that have been outside, as someone slows down to match the pace they can go at because of the pandemic. There's something nice in it about reconnecting with one's roots and ancestors, and re-learning skills that would otherwise have not had time for, but it also feels sepia-toned and framed very specifically. Maybe it's something to inhabit if you're feeling stressed by the world outside.
Banksy takes credit for an art piece on the wall of the Reading jail, known most notably for imprisoning Oscar Wilde, and which has been under consideration to become an art center. The art piece itself is someone escaping the jail using a set of sheets weighted down with a typewriter.
An artist who posted a tribute to the late Nipsey Hustle on her social media feed found that artwork being sold in Walmart stores with all but one of their watermarks removed from the piece. And while there may be fingers pointed and blame put on some other entity than Walmart, I hope that whomever does get blamed for it has the pockets to pay out a proper willful infringement penalty for each of those copies done, because there's a good chance that Walmart didn't just have one of those items for sale in one location.
An influential Black sculptor of the 20th century, Augusta Savage, whose works have not survived her very well, because she couldn't afford to cast them in bronze or something more permanent, or because she couldn't afford to have them transported, or because there was racism at every turn to furthering her study, a woman who published in the pulps of science fiction magazine under her own name, Clare Winger Harris, after having won third place in a contest, proving women could write for the serials, although the praise for her is very much "Huh. We didn't know that a woman would score so highly, so she must be exceptional compared to all the other ones (so we don't have to care or search for any more good writers among women)," the writings, newsletters, journals, and pamphlets of those campaigning for the vote for women in the United Kingdom, and have you ever noticed how often Hollywood and USian media makes futures that have the aesthetics of East Asian countries, but don't have East Asians in the cast, or the extras, and that prefer to elevate white bodies instead? (Video, Vimeo, supercut of sci-fi movies that use Asian cultures with a whole lot of white people in main and supporting roles) The National Portrait Gallery in the UK has pledged to have more women represented in their collection, and the Rijksmuseum will place women in its Gallery of Honor. Edmonia Lewis's works in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's collection. Poetry of Amy Levy, who wrote of the plight of women going as far back as Xantippe, Socrates' wife, and composer and music educator Imogen Holst (yes, that Holst) receiving a professional concert of her own works as thanks for her wartime efforts of raising morale by getting people to play music arranged for amateurs.
Advice on how not to disturb your beach-nesting bird neighbors, cats rescued by sailors, and plants growing in Australia that have been around since dinosaurs.
In technology, an intact ceremonial chariot found in relation to an illegal dig in Pompeii.
A new model of the Antikythera Mechanism is complex, intricate, and may be able to account for all of the data that has been observed about it so far. The scientists who have synthesized their findings have published their report explaining their reasoning and conclusions and also created a thirty-minute video to provide visual aids and representations of their data and conclusions on how the Mechanism works.
Perseverance had a short drive to test some systems and make sure they're working appropriately. So far, things seem to be going well for the rover as it goes through systems checks to make sure that it touched down safely. Also, the site of the landing has been officially named after the late Octavia E. Butler. The objects of interest that the Perseverance mission is examining are all named in the Navajo language, as a way of preserving the language on another planet, among other things. (Then again, there's a whole lot on Terra that's been named after the native nations, and there's still a lot of work underway to preserve their languages. Including getting them on-line, into software, and getting the glyphs, phonemes, and other infrastructure in place so they can be rendered correctly and the people who speak and write those languages can get online. Anyone who knows about CJK knows that it's not an easy task at all to get everything right, but for languages like Urdu, which are inherently calligraphic and change parts of their glyphs based on what glyphs precede and follow them, trying to get a machine to render both accurate and aesthetic Urdu is a really difficult task.)
The Internet Archive now has a scholarly division, preserving things that were Open Access but have vanished, or other such elements like author manuscripts, and making them discoverable through search, as well as providing the full text of what they have crawled.
Last for tonight, The Sound of Silence, or rather, specifically, digital sound files of specific lengths that are complete zeros. In various lengths, ready for being burnt to a compact disc or applied to a digital music playlist.
no subject
Date: 2021-03-21 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-03-22 12:38 am (UTC)