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silveradeptHello again. Let's begin with Muna and Broad, purveyors of patterns for the plus-sized.
The experience of having Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina-smelling candle explode and burn itself out in a frenzy of flame and hot wax. Insert your own joke here, I suppose.
Troy University seeks academics who have papers to present on the subject of cats in literature. All levels of the academy, including undergraduates, are invited to submit proposals and a brief bio.
The Archive of Our Own continues to make progress on implementing features that allow users to curate their experiences by blocking users or muting works that contain content they don't wish to see.
A test that asks people to think about statistics and statistical combinations, which, if you have time to think it through and calculate it, might give you a better score than you would have in a situation where you are under time or other pressures to come up with correct answers. Because I was able, in the relative comfort and safety of my own space, to do the calculations and think about them and then re-read the question to make sure that I had the information that was being asked. A lot of risk assessment situations don't conform to that kind of calm and measured pace. That said, being able to think statistically about things does mean that when you run the numbers for yourself, you often end up realizing that the numbers that were chosen were specifically chosen to have the intended effect of either giving emphasis to a low-probability item or downplaying a high-probability item. (Also, I probably helped my own cause by being able to translate percentages and other similar things into more concrete number calculations and then back into percentages at the end.) And, of course, the real world does not always fall into easily calculatable probabilities that have simple enough conditions.
After several incidents of anti-Asian hate crime, including a mass shooting in Atlanta that was specifically targeting Asian women, the cover of TIME magazine featured art and stories by Asian-American women. The cover itself is a beautiful painting and we hope the intended messages come through clearly to everyone who sees it.
The evolution of color grading use in film, which, as it got easier and more expansive to use color filters, started producing certain color conventions, [movie, Youtube] which have started to become stereotypes that are offensive to the places that are being portrayed and bad decisions about coloration that reinforce already present racial beliefs.
There exists a Twitter account tweeting out the foods that Sylvia Plath ate, and a concurrent Instagram of illustrations of some of those same tweets. Many of which suggest Sylvia Plath was no angsty waif at all.
The Taiwanese government requested their citizens not use the name change offices so that they could take advantage of a restaurant chain promotion offering an all-you-can-eat sushi meal for someone and their five friends to someone whose name contained the correct characters for 'salmon'. I'm both amused at how many people were interested in such a thing and wishful that name changes could be so easy in the United States that there might be concern about abusing it for a restaurant promotion.
Gregg Blachford talks about the marxist gay liberation magazine he helped to produce, Gay Left, and what it's like trying both both make the thing, but also to deal with the people and whether or not the beliefs have changed over time since then. Which, in itself, also touches on the broader issue that Roxane Gay talks about in describing her own experience of coming out and learning how to be herself, that elders in the community are sometimes hard to find and often a lot younger than elders would be in other communities. And that's before we have to think about the generation completely lost to the prejudices in play when HIV first began to be noticed. A podcast named Call Me Mother is about capturing some conversations with queer elders, although I'm sure there are many more stories to be told, recorded, and archived.
A historian pieced together all the clues they had, with the assistance of some good archive work, and was able to reunite two friends who had separated right before the atrocities of the Nazis and each believed the other dead, because in the intervening time, they had changed their names. This, too, is another reason why computers are unlikely to replace humans at any point soon, because they don't do well without explicit references that can be used to cross-link, while humans can put together all sorts of clues that don't appear to be linked with each other at all to come to a correct conclusion.
A child was abandoned in a subway station, then adopted by the person who found him and his boyfriend, eventually husband, and the family appears to be thriving these many years later.
The interest in the boat that was stuck in the Suez Canal seems to be a confluence of something that people can agree on the cause of and the solution to, where the solution is already in action and will only take time, and the solution doesn't require any political effort, or being vulnerable to hostile people, or any other thing that the seemingly intractable problems of our world insist is require.
The artist behind the RWS Tarot deck, Pamela 'Pixie' Colman-Smith, created an iconic set of images, for which she received very little credit until much more recently, well after her death.
A website set up to collect allegations of sexual abuse and assault in UK schools garnered more than 8,000 accounts across all types of schools. And there are a couple of paragraphs in there blaming it on excessive pornography consumption and how that's warping the boys' perception of what a normal relationship looks like, which is a typical excuse given by people who don't want to admit that the underlying culture itself is what's giving the boys the warped ideas about what a proper relationship looks like. Male-gaze porn isn't helping, no, because it's meant to be a fantasy space and sells itself as something other than that, but it's not the root cause. You could cut out all the porn and you would still have just as much for problems, because the culture underlying, religious or no, insists that women are property and objects rather than full humans and should be treated as such.
The final leg of the Olympic torch relay kicked off in Fukushima, Japan, to bring us closer to the now 2021 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, a Games that is now closed to foreign spectators for the events because of coronavirus concerns and that had a discarded idea of using a plus-sized comedian as an 'Olympig' as part of the ceremonies.
The dynamics of abuse and abusers make it incredibly difficult to determine whose stories are correct if all you are using is your gut and your feelings to determine truth. Which is why it is really helpful for people who to have a Team You that is good at both listening and comforting and in validating the truth of things. Because they can help you see what reality is, or at least confirm that your reality is real, rather than someone altering the gaslamps on you. When you have two or more, each convinced that their partner is harming them, it becomes even more important to have a grounding that can help tease out the truth, because relationships that have gone on for some time make it entirely possible for everyone involved to look and sound like they're the ones being harmed. (Which they might be. And that's extra-weird.)
The practice of nerve flossing, stretches meant to relieve compressed nerves in common places.
Tanzania swore in the country's first woman president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, after the death of the previous president due to heart complications.
The party that desperately courts corporations' donations and defends their right to meddle in unlimited ways in politics says "no, not like that" when those corporations say they don't like what the Republicans are doing to the democracy. And then, to show their displeasure at corporations criticizing them, they tried to take away benefits granted when those corporations were in their favor, which, y'know, some of those things could probably stand to disappear anyway. And, as might be expected, to try and get those corporations back in line, the conservatives started talking about the hypocrisy on display about how only some places were being criticized and if they really cared, they'd be consistent in their messaging.
[Insert Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka and his fierce determination to stop children from engaging in self-destructive acts here.] [Video, Youtube.]
Finding a shark fossil where the shark has some rather long wing fins, captive-born cheetah brothers have been successfully returned to the wild, baby manatees getting fed, the platypuses are all right, the long-dormant volcano that decided now was a good time for eruption, but thankfully was relatively minor in the impacts it had on the nearby cities and towns, the almost certainty that if you give someone unsolicited dietary or medical advice, you're going to get caught in backdraft, and rabbits building a warren unearthed some ancient artifacts.,
On matters of the virus, there is a significant group working on trying to figure out effective treatments and causes for the long-term symptoms and ailments of people who got COVID-19, which may have information for those who suffer from other similar situations of long-term symptoms of an infection or other immune response. One of the things that struck me, even though it's not given fuller treatment in the article than it might deserve, is that doctors were treating the idea more seriously in general because it was other doctors who were reporting the symptoms. There's more than enough stories (which are also alluded to) of people who try to convince their doctors that something is wrong, only for their doctors to insist it is something else, and then, only after finally finding someone who believes their patient, is there a useful diagnosis. So maybe, just maybe, there will be good effects for others because long COVID was treated seriously right from the outset.
A large-scale trial of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in the United States appears to have good effectiveness and did not produce any increased risk of blood clots, which will help the vaccine's application for emergency authorization to the Food and Drug Administration, potentially putting a fourth vaccine into the mix to further accelerate the numbers of people who can be vaccinated each day. With a larger data pool to draw from, the risk appears to be approximately four in one million people will develop blood clotting from the vaccine, which is a far lower risk than what getting infected with the virus might do. (Remember that bit above about statistics and risk analysis?) All the same, out of an abundance of caution and having options, since the infections and deaths seemed to happen primarily to younger people, an alternative vaccine is being recommended for those age groups in the UK.
In technology, patents filed and granted to women for devices that are common household things in our current day.
The Chrome browser is being used as a test bed for new ways of serving advertising to people, and the only way to turn it off, if you've been opted in without your consent, is to turn off all third-party cookies. Or to stop using the Chrome browser. Which you can often do on your personal devices, but less so on work machines where there may be restrictions on what browsers can be used.
Continuing to provide evidence that the anti-abortion movement is more interested in…many things than the lives of women, there is a new practice going around the crisis pregnancy center-type circuit that claims to use a high hormone dose to counteract the use of abortion drugs, and is being sold as perfectly safe, when the studies involved with it have said anything but.
The punk aesthetic, alive and well, in the all-women, all-guitar band Mapatazi. And they are in a long line of women doing things that the patriarchal mindset insisted they should never do - the beginnings of television, before it became homogenized, corporatized, and men-only, was about 25% women, including the pioneers of well-known formats like soaps, talk shows, and variety shows.
Cookbooks have undergone quite a bit of evolution at the hands of women from guides on how to run a household to the recipe books that people of this era are used to, which follows an evolution of how food used to not be talked about at all and is now a topic of the dinner table.
LEGO launches a Space Shuttle Discovery Kit, complete with a Hubble Space Telescope to assemble and put in the cargo bay.
An April Fool joke that makes fun of blockchain and non-fungible tokens by selling certificates so that a person can claim to be the exclusive owner of their favorite fandom ships. Proceeds raised by such go to the development of BobaBoard, an idea in development that prioritizes anonymity in interactions, with the idea that users can choose how de-anonymized they want to be to each other over time and further interactions. More information in their Formerly Unasked yet Common Questions, which also gives you a feel for the amount of memery and irreverence that's intended by the project.
Last for tonight, ADHD and other letters, a series of posts about coming to grips with and explaining all of the things that go along with ADHD and the absolute merry hell that they wreak with someone's life when present. Along with a lot more information for people who might find themselves trying to understand what someone who has ADHD experiences and why.
The experience of having Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina-smelling candle explode and burn itself out in a frenzy of flame and hot wax. Insert your own joke here, I suppose.
Troy University seeks academics who have papers to present on the subject of cats in literature. All levels of the academy, including undergraduates, are invited to submit proposals and a brief bio.
The Archive of Our Own continues to make progress on implementing features that allow users to curate their experiences by blocking users or muting works that contain content they don't wish to see.
A test that asks people to think about statistics and statistical combinations, which, if you have time to think it through and calculate it, might give you a better score than you would have in a situation where you are under time or other pressures to come up with correct answers. Because I was able, in the relative comfort and safety of my own space, to do the calculations and think about them and then re-read the question to make sure that I had the information that was being asked. A lot of risk assessment situations don't conform to that kind of calm and measured pace. That said, being able to think statistically about things does mean that when you run the numbers for yourself, you often end up realizing that the numbers that were chosen were specifically chosen to have the intended effect of either giving emphasis to a low-probability item or downplaying a high-probability item. (Also, I probably helped my own cause by being able to translate percentages and other similar things into more concrete number calculations and then back into percentages at the end.) And, of course, the real world does not always fall into easily calculatable probabilities that have simple enough conditions.
After several incidents of anti-Asian hate crime, including a mass shooting in Atlanta that was specifically targeting Asian women, the cover of TIME magazine featured art and stories by Asian-American women. The cover itself is a beautiful painting and we hope the intended messages come through clearly to everyone who sees it.
The evolution of color grading use in film, which, as it got easier and more expansive to use color filters, started producing certain color conventions, [movie, Youtube] which have started to become stereotypes that are offensive to the places that are being portrayed and bad decisions about coloration that reinforce already present racial beliefs.
There exists a Twitter account tweeting out the foods that Sylvia Plath ate, and a concurrent Instagram of illustrations of some of those same tweets. Many of which suggest Sylvia Plath was no angsty waif at all.
The Taiwanese government requested their citizens not use the name change offices so that they could take advantage of a restaurant chain promotion offering an all-you-can-eat sushi meal for someone and their five friends to someone whose name contained the correct characters for 'salmon'. I'm both amused at how many people were interested in such a thing and wishful that name changes could be so easy in the United States that there might be concern about abusing it for a restaurant promotion.
Gregg Blachford talks about the marxist gay liberation magazine he helped to produce, Gay Left, and what it's like trying both both make the thing, but also to deal with the people and whether or not the beliefs have changed over time since then. Which, in itself, also touches on the broader issue that Roxane Gay talks about in describing her own experience of coming out and learning how to be herself, that elders in the community are sometimes hard to find and often a lot younger than elders would be in other communities. And that's before we have to think about the generation completely lost to the prejudices in play when HIV first began to be noticed. A podcast named Call Me Mother is about capturing some conversations with queer elders, although I'm sure there are many more stories to be told, recorded, and archived.
A historian pieced together all the clues they had, with the assistance of some good archive work, and was able to reunite two friends who had separated right before the atrocities of the Nazis and each believed the other dead, because in the intervening time, they had changed their names. This, too, is another reason why computers are unlikely to replace humans at any point soon, because they don't do well without explicit references that can be used to cross-link, while humans can put together all sorts of clues that don't appear to be linked with each other at all to come to a correct conclusion.
A child was abandoned in a subway station, then adopted by the person who found him and his boyfriend, eventually husband, and the family appears to be thriving these many years later.
The interest in the boat that was stuck in the Suez Canal seems to be a confluence of something that people can agree on the cause of and the solution to, where the solution is already in action and will only take time, and the solution doesn't require any political effort, or being vulnerable to hostile people, or any other thing that the seemingly intractable problems of our world insist is require.
The artist behind the RWS Tarot deck, Pamela 'Pixie' Colman-Smith, created an iconic set of images, for which she received very little credit until much more recently, well after her death.
A website set up to collect allegations of sexual abuse and assault in UK schools garnered more than 8,000 accounts across all types of schools. And there are a couple of paragraphs in there blaming it on excessive pornography consumption and how that's warping the boys' perception of what a normal relationship looks like, which is a typical excuse given by people who don't want to admit that the underlying culture itself is what's giving the boys the warped ideas about what a proper relationship looks like. Male-gaze porn isn't helping, no, because it's meant to be a fantasy space and sells itself as something other than that, but it's not the root cause. You could cut out all the porn and you would still have just as much for problems, because the culture underlying, religious or no, insists that women are property and objects rather than full humans and should be treated as such.
The final leg of the Olympic torch relay kicked off in Fukushima, Japan, to bring us closer to the now 2021 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, a Games that is now closed to foreign spectators for the events because of coronavirus concerns and that had a discarded idea of using a plus-sized comedian as an 'Olympig' as part of the ceremonies.
The dynamics of abuse and abusers make it incredibly difficult to determine whose stories are correct if all you are using is your gut and your feelings to determine truth. Which is why it is really helpful for people who to have a Team You that is good at both listening and comforting and in validating the truth of things. Because they can help you see what reality is, or at least confirm that your reality is real, rather than someone altering the gaslamps on you. When you have two or more, each convinced that their partner is harming them, it becomes even more important to have a grounding that can help tease out the truth, because relationships that have gone on for some time make it entirely possible for everyone involved to look and sound like they're the ones being harmed. (Which they might be. And that's extra-weird.)
The practice of nerve flossing, stretches meant to relieve compressed nerves in common places.
Tanzania swore in the country's first woman president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, after the death of the previous president due to heart complications.
The party that desperately courts corporations' donations and defends their right to meddle in unlimited ways in politics says "no, not like that" when those corporations say they don't like what the Republicans are doing to the democracy. And then, to show their displeasure at corporations criticizing them, they tried to take away benefits granted when those corporations were in their favor, which, y'know, some of those things could probably stand to disappear anyway. And, as might be expected, to try and get those corporations back in line, the conservatives started talking about the hypocrisy on display about how only some places were being criticized and if they really cared, they'd be consistent in their messaging.
[Insert Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka and his fierce determination to stop children from engaging in self-destructive acts here.] [Video, Youtube.]
Finding a shark fossil where the shark has some rather long wing fins, captive-born cheetah brothers have been successfully returned to the wild, baby manatees getting fed, the platypuses are all right, the long-dormant volcano that decided now was a good time for eruption, but thankfully was relatively minor in the impacts it had on the nearby cities and towns, the almost certainty that if you give someone unsolicited dietary or medical advice, you're going to get caught in backdraft, and rabbits building a warren unearthed some ancient artifacts.,
On matters of the virus, there is a significant group working on trying to figure out effective treatments and causes for the long-term symptoms and ailments of people who got COVID-19, which may have information for those who suffer from other similar situations of long-term symptoms of an infection or other immune response. One of the things that struck me, even though it's not given fuller treatment in the article than it might deserve, is that doctors were treating the idea more seriously in general because it was other doctors who were reporting the symptoms. There's more than enough stories (which are also alluded to) of people who try to convince their doctors that something is wrong, only for their doctors to insist it is something else, and then, only after finally finding someone who believes their patient, is there a useful diagnosis. So maybe, just maybe, there will be good effects for others because long COVID was treated seriously right from the outset.
A large-scale trial of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in the United States appears to have good effectiveness and did not produce any increased risk of blood clots, which will help the vaccine's application for emergency authorization to the Food and Drug Administration, potentially putting a fourth vaccine into the mix to further accelerate the numbers of people who can be vaccinated each day. With a larger data pool to draw from, the risk appears to be approximately four in one million people will develop blood clotting from the vaccine, which is a far lower risk than what getting infected with the virus might do. (Remember that bit above about statistics and risk analysis?) All the same, out of an abundance of caution and having options, since the infections and deaths seemed to happen primarily to younger people, an alternative vaccine is being recommended for those age groups in the UK.
In technology, patents filed and granted to women for devices that are common household things in our current day.
The Chrome browser is being used as a test bed for new ways of serving advertising to people, and the only way to turn it off, if you've been opted in without your consent, is to turn off all third-party cookies. Or to stop using the Chrome browser. Which you can often do on your personal devices, but less so on work machines where there may be restrictions on what browsers can be used.
Continuing to provide evidence that the anti-abortion movement is more interested in…many things than the lives of women, there is a new practice going around the crisis pregnancy center-type circuit that claims to use a high hormone dose to counteract the use of abortion drugs, and is being sold as perfectly safe, when the studies involved with it have said anything but.
The punk aesthetic, alive and well, in the all-women, all-guitar band Mapatazi. And they are in a long line of women doing things that the patriarchal mindset insisted they should never do - the beginnings of television, before it became homogenized, corporatized, and men-only, was about 25% women, including the pioneers of well-known formats like soaps, talk shows, and variety shows.
Cookbooks have undergone quite a bit of evolution at the hands of women from guides on how to run a household to the recipe books that people of this era are used to, which follows an evolution of how food used to not be talked about at all and is now a topic of the dinner table.
LEGO launches a Space Shuttle Discovery Kit, complete with a Hubble Space Telescope to assemble and put in the cargo bay.
An April Fool joke that makes fun of blockchain and non-fungible tokens by selling certificates so that a person can claim to be the exclusive owner of their favorite fandom ships. Proceeds raised by such go to the development of BobaBoard, an idea in development that prioritizes anonymity in interactions, with the idea that users can choose how de-anonymized they want to be to each other over time and further interactions. More information in their Formerly Unasked yet Common Questions, which also gives you a feel for the amount of memery and irreverence that's intended by the project.
Last for tonight, ADHD and other letters, a series of posts about coming to grips with and explaining all of the things that go along with ADHD and the absolute merry hell that they wreak with someone's life when present. Along with a lot more information for people who might find themselves trying to understand what someone who has ADHD experiences and why.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-09 08:46 am (UTC)The only hope is that the new president seems somewhat saner on the issue.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-09 06:44 pm (UTC)One can always hope the new leader will be more sensible about things than the old one was.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-09 03:20 pm (UTC)She is testing very soon to become a fully qualified captain.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-09 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-09 06:50 pm (UTC)She is certainly very strongly incented to pass it! I wish I could remember where I read it, I believe it was through Apple News, which is an amalgamator, which makes it kind of difficult to cite the original source. IIRC, her family has a long tradition of being Nile-faring and pilots.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-10 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-10 06:18 pm (UTC)