A Mid-June update - June 02021
Jun. 16th, 2021 11:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGreetings. Let's begin with the reality that without the platform of the US government to give him eyeballs, it turns out far fewer people care what the previous Administrator has to say.
The Prime Minister of New Zealand gave criticism to a biography of her that she had initially given an interview to based on the original proposal of the book being about several women political leaders. She has also criticized a movie about the Christchurch attacks, claiming it sidelines the real victims in favor of lionizing her. That is certainly a refreshing perspective compared to the many self-aggrandizing politicians in the world that would quite love if they were the subject of positive movies and media attention.
Writing in the Western tradition has focused its efforts significantly on the idea of the protagonist, the one (or ones) for whom the plot waits, and at some point, people start believing reality mirrors fiction. Which, also, since, at least in the States, we get taught a hero-villain form of history as well, leads to a lot of people thinking of themselves as NPCs in someone else's story, because they sure as hell don't have any agency to do anything, big or small, to change the world. Even if reality is much more about intertwined causes and a whole bunch of little things that then create something big. This is definitely a thing that I struggle with, because I got the cultural narrative that I'm supposed to be a protagonist, even though I wasn't born with all of the privileges I would need to actually do that thing, and there's very little space for someone to unpack that idea and find something better. Instead, there's all sorts of places for me to go and complain about the fact that I'm not a protagonist and then get recruited by people who want me to turn that anger against others, the people, they assure me, who are keeping me from my protagonist destiny, instead of giving me the tools to use what advantages I have to get everyone involved against the people who are really holding us all back. Because there aren't a whole lot of shows on that focus on people living from day to day and still accomplishing great and small things against a society that fundamentally doesn't care about them.
cosmolinguist on the situation of atemporality, not just in the current pandemic-related pause, but in that two, possibly three generations now have been told they have to live by rules that worked for the context of the post-war boomers, in a world that looks nothing like what the Boomers insist is reality. And because the Boomers are flexing their longevity and refusing to give way to anyone until they're sure they've extracted every last bit of wealth, you get both Gen X and Millenials cast adrift without any of the signs of "adulthood" they were told was the key growing up, and Gen Z shoving hard behind them, both eager to change structural problems and expressing a new way of the world that wants to be profoundly more conservative than the two generations in front of them.
In honor of Pride month, a description of a criminal case from less than 100 years ago about the police using their resources to spy on men who gathered together and then were raided and charged with having unacceptable sexual preferences and gender presentations (or the facilitation of such things.) The current situation is still fairly new and fragile, and as people who are paying attention will tell you, still strongly under assault.
Using Pachelbel's Canon and musical instruments to illustrate the experience of gender and its performance. As someone who has played that canon enough to hate it, I appreciate the metaphor involved extremely well. I also really like the idea of gender as a symphony, with each of us playing the instruments that suits us best, even if it wasn't the instrument we were assigned at first. And like any good symphony, it takes some learning to recognize that the other people playing their parts and instruments are doing it right for them, rather than falling back on a default that insists everyone only has one or another parts or instruments. (And this can be really more difficult to achieve consistency on when it's your child who is telling you who they are, as the Blogess points out in that piece.)
The new Science Advisor to the President explains why he chose a fragment of the Mishnah that contains ethical requirements and obligations as the book to swear his oath upon. It's a very nice explanation of deliberate reasoning and being true to one's faith and the ethics demanded by it, which makes for a good contrast with how much of the "New Atheism" movement no longer pretends to be about anything more than far-right authoritarianism.
Divining new approaches to researching objects in a collection that are culturallly sensitive or only supposed to be handled by specific members of the society from where the object comes. With the additional good decisions of trying to find ways of repatriating or otherwise returning those objects to the control of the societies where they were taken from. Also, commissioned portraits of important African figures of history, hung in places of honor, created by Black artists. These are excellent ideas, but all institutions that wish to undertake this work will find conservatives and conservative governments, as they always have done, are claiming that "free speech" needs to be promoted in these and other places, just so long as it is the correct free speech that doesn't challenge their view of the world.
The possibility that the amount of adverse childhood experiences a menstruator had may be indicative of the incidence of depression or the severity of symptoms in menopause.
If gamification of your reading habits becomes more of an obsession with completion rather than an enjoyment of what you're doing, perhaps it is a good idea to get rid of the gamification. As with any other thing that stops being fun, even if I occasionally find it hard to take my own advice on that matter.
Donut tours are available in select cities, if you'd like to have someone give you some history of the city and its donut shops, and also get to try some good donuts. The company is Underground Donut Tours, and they apparently work in Boston, Chicago (2 tours), NYC, Philly, Portland, and Seattle, if you are in or around those spaces and want to go on a pastry walk.
Grapes stored in clay and mud puts, preserving them for months after the harvest, when they can be useful for festivals and for people who are craving them out of season.
Lambs are being stolen from their parents and left in people's gardens, which is not good for the lambs, a rat with a distinguished career of sniffing out land mines and unexploded ordnance is moving on into retirement, a plea to not feed the birds, even if it's the first time you've been out to see them in a while, the lake and pond management practices of the Royal Parks, the itinerant walrus has been spotted in Spain, moving farther south rather than back north.
Axios suggests the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic is contained in the United States, mostly due to vaccinations, although the risk of severe injury or death is still real to the people who are unvaccinated. We are waiting for the vaccination that works on children, and for the rest of the world to be vaccinated against the virus, before we are willing to declare that the epidemic is over anywhere. And we definitely still want to see those numbers continue to go down to zero or very near it.
If you haven't been vaccinated yet, or in case there needs to be a booster of some sort, ensure your vaccinator uses the appropriate length of needle based on how much fat you have in your arm, so that you get the vaccine to the right place.
United States President Biden announced a commitment to purchase 500 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine tto distribute through COVAX to countries that desperately need vaccination doses. Right before the G7 summit, where one might hope that others take the hint and start using their wealth to help make sure the rest of the world is vaccinated. Following on that commitment the UK followed up with a 100 million dose commitment of their own. Which is nice, but 600m doses doesn't cover neary enough people, and so there's still got to be a push for patent exemptions and making sure that other countries have the materials and expertise to manufacture their own doses, as many as they need for themselves, instead of playing by a company's rules that still make them money and let them control the supply.
And speaking of the BioNTech/Pfrizer vaccine, here is a very laity-accessible explanation of what the source code for the vaccination creates and how it works - which we know because that source code has been published and made available to everyone. This pairs well with a general explanation of how various vaccination manufacturers are trying to provoke the correct immune response against the correct kind of protein.
To help with that, it looks like mixing and matching mRNA vaccines is a good idea enough for Canada to give the go-ahead on it.. The U.S. is also running trials of seeing whether giving a booster of a different manufacturer to the initial vaccination will produce better coverage against variants, and the UK is also studying whether mix and match is the best approach to take for obtaining the best spread of protection against the variants.
The clinical trials of Novavax appear to be going very well, with a 90 percent efficacy, according to the manufacturer. Novavax has also had some successful trials of a combination COVID-flu vaccination in animals, which could be a really good idea if there is a need for boosters against variant strains of the virus, to make one shot work well for both of the viral infection.
The Johnson&Johnson method for vaccination seems to produce a fairly robust response against different variants of the virus, which might make it an ideal candidate for those who originally had a different shot.
It's far more likely that SARS-CoV-2 came as a mutation that jumped from animals to humans than that it was created in a lab and then loosed on the population, so the "lab-leak" hypothesis is almost assuredly a conspiracy theory rather than anything serious.
If you can, get your shots. Possibly even contribute to science by being part of a trial. Because the most consistent message has been that all of these vaccinations are supremely effective against severe symptoms, hospitalization, and death, even if they have variations in how effective they are against preventing infection and transmission.
In technology, the US Food and Drug Administration is requiring the recall of an alkaline water after several illnesses and at least one death were linked to the product. This very well may have been a case where the people who made the stuff proclaimed its great benefits and their excellent process, but it didn't actually do anything that made the water safe to drink (and might have done the opposite.)
The eugenics-laden past of sperm banks still lurks in the background and in the marketing, even if having greater control over when, how, and with whom someone reproduces is a large benefit to all the people who can have children.
NASA has commissioned two missions to study Venus, after the planet has spent significant time on the backburner compared to all the Martian missions and landers that have captivated our attention for so long.
Last for tonight - sound and sensible advice given to a man that was ignoring what his partner was saying about his size and technique to focus on whether or not his penis measures up to her past. While there are physical consideration to take into account when it comes to sex, for most people, it's how it gets used, rather than how big or small it is, that's most important. (And even beyond that, it's how you treat your partners with everything else other than a penis that'll often determine whether or not you get to use that penis.)
And a whole bunch of stories that I've been sitting on, meaning to read, and then finally deciding to do so. The Swarm of Giant Gnats I Sent After Kent, My Assistant Manager is all about making sure someone knows they've been cursed for being handsy and inappropriate without incurring the wrath of HR. And finding out the giant gnats make decent roommates.
I'm With Muni, How Can I Help reimagines what support people might be able to receive in a world where the money that had been shoveled into policing instead went to all of the social services teams who could actually help. We Are Not Phoenixes is about providing a spark of joy in the lives of people who may not have much left, while also acknowledging that doing the magic hastens along the reality that soon the magician will be joining those they give happiness to.
Open 27 hours is about finally finding that food you remember from your childhood and realizing that the entire experience was a lot more reality-bending than you initially thought.
Southside Gods is about those who make sure that the elements under their control behave, and those who go to others to help them remember how to fight for their own elements.
Work Ethics is a small flare of resistance against corporatism using technology to make things terrible, where a creative person gets a little help from an AI to make connections that would eventually come to them. Just a little faster. And that makes for some great ad campaigns.
The Prime Minister of New Zealand gave criticism to a biography of her that she had initially given an interview to based on the original proposal of the book being about several women political leaders. She has also criticized a movie about the Christchurch attacks, claiming it sidelines the real victims in favor of lionizing her. That is certainly a refreshing perspective compared to the many self-aggrandizing politicians in the world that would quite love if they were the subject of positive movies and media attention.
Writing in the Western tradition has focused its efforts significantly on the idea of the protagonist, the one (or ones) for whom the plot waits, and at some point, people start believing reality mirrors fiction. Which, also, since, at least in the States, we get taught a hero-villain form of history as well, leads to a lot of people thinking of themselves as NPCs in someone else's story, because they sure as hell don't have any agency to do anything, big or small, to change the world. Even if reality is much more about intertwined causes and a whole bunch of little things that then create something big. This is definitely a thing that I struggle with, because I got the cultural narrative that I'm supposed to be a protagonist, even though I wasn't born with all of the privileges I would need to actually do that thing, and there's very little space for someone to unpack that idea and find something better. Instead, there's all sorts of places for me to go and complain about the fact that I'm not a protagonist and then get recruited by people who want me to turn that anger against others, the people, they assure me, who are keeping me from my protagonist destiny, instead of giving me the tools to use what advantages I have to get everyone involved against the people who are really holding us all back. Because there aren't a whole lot of shows on that focus on people living from day to day and still accomplishing great and small things against a society that fundamentally doesn't care about them.
cosmolinguist on the situation of atemporality, not just in the current pandemic-related pause, but in that two, possibly three generations now have been told they have to live by rules that worked for the context of the post-war boomers, in a world that looks nothing like what the Boomers insist is reality. And because the Boomers are flexing their longevity and refusing to give way to anyone until they're sure they've extracted every last bit of wealth, you get both Gen X and Millenials cast adrift without any of the signs of "adulthood" they were told was the key growing up, and Gen Z shoving hard behind them, both eager to change structural problems and expressing a new way of the world that wants to be profoundly more conservative than the two generations in front of them.In honor of Pride month, a description of a criminal case from less than 100 years ago about the police using their resources to spy on men who gathered together and then were raided and charged with having unacceptable sexual preferences and gender presentations (or the facilitation of such things.) The current situation is still fairly new and fragile, and as people who are paying attention will tell you, still strongly under assault.
Using Pachelbel's Canon and musical instruments to illustrate the experience of gender and its performance. As someone who has played that canon enough to hate it, I appreciate the metaphor involved extremely well. I also really like the idea of gender as a symphony, with each of us playing the instruments that suits us best, even if it wasn't the instrument we were assigned at first. And like any good symphony, it takes some learning to recognize that the other people playing their parts and instruments are doing it right for them, rather than falling back on a default that insists everyone only has one or another parts or instruments. (And this can be really more difficult to achieve consistency on when it's your child who is telling you who they are, as the Blogess points out in that piece.)
The new Science Advisor to the President explains why he chose a fragment of the Mishnah that contains ethical requirements and obligations as the book to swear his oath upon. It's a very nice explanation of deliberate reasoning and being true to one's faith and the ethics demanded by it, which makes for a good contrast with how much of the "New Atheism" movement no longer pretends to be about anything more than far-right authoritarianism.
Divining new approaches to researching objects in a collection that are culturallly sensitive or only supposed to be handled by specific members of the society from where the object comes. With the additional good decisions of trying to find ways of repatriating or otherwise returning those objects to the control of the societies where they were taken from. Also, commissioned portraits of important African figures of history, hung in places of honor, created by Black artists. These are excellent ideas, but all institutions that wish to undertake this work will find conservatives and conservative governments, as they always have done, are claiming that "free speech" needs to be promoted in these and other places, just so long as it is the correct free speech that doesn't challenge their view of the world.
The possibility that the amount of adverse childhood experiences a menstruator had may be indicative of the incidence of depression or the severity of symptoms in menopause.
If gamification of your reading habits becomes more of an obsession with completion rather than an enjoyment of what you're doing, perhaps it is a good idea to get rid of the gamification. As with any other thing that stops being fun, even if I occasionally find it hard to take my own advice on that matter.
Donut tours are available in select cities, if you'd like to have someone give you some history of the city and its donut shops, and also get to try some good donuts. The company is Underground Donut Tours, and they apparently work in Boston, Chicago (2 tours), NYC, Philly, Portland, and Seattle, if you are in or around those spaces and want to go on a pastry walk.
Grapes stored in clay and mud puts, preserving them for months after the harvest, when they can be useful for festivals and for people who are craving them out of season.
Lambs are being stolen from their parents and left in people's gardens, which is not good for the lambs, a rat with a distinguished career of sniffing out land mines and unexploded ordnance is moving on into retirement, a plea to not feed the birds, even if it's the first time you've been out to see them in a while, the lake and pond management practices of the Royal Parks, the itinerant walrus has been spotted in Spain, moving farther south rather than back north.
Axios suggests the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic is contained in the United States, mostly due to vaccinations, although the risk of severe injury or death is still real to the people who are unvaccinated. We are waiting for the vaccination that works on children, and for the rest of the world to be vaccinated against the virus, before we are willing to declare that the epidemic is over anywhere. And we definitely still want to see those numbers continue to go down to zero or very near it.
If you haven't been vaccinated yet, or in case there needs to be a booster of some sort, ensure your vaccinator uses the appropriate length of needle based on how much fat you have in your arm, so that you get the vaccine to the right place.
United States President Biden announced a commitment to purchase 500 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine tto distribute through COVAX to countries that desperately need vaccination doses. Right before the G7 summit, where one might hope that others take the hint and start using their wealth to help make sure the rest of the world is vaccinated. Following on that commitment the UK followed up with a 100 million dose commitment of their own. Which is nice, but 600m doses doesn't cover neary enough people, and so there's still got to be a push for patent exemptions and making sure that other countries have the materials and expertise to manufacture their own doses, as many as they need for themselves, instead of playing by a company's rules that still make them money and let them control the supply.
And speaking of the BioNTech/Pfrizer vaccine, here is a very laity-accessible explanation of what the source code for the vaccination creates and how it works - which we know because that source code has been published and made available to everyone. This pairs well with a general explanation of how various vaccination manufacturers are trying to provoke the correct immune response against the correct kind of protein.
To help with that, it looks like mixing and matching mRNA vaccines is a good idea enough for Canada to give the go-ahead on it.. The U.S. is also running trials of seeing whether giving a booster of a different manufacturer to the initial vaccination will produce better coverage against variants, and the UK is also studying whether mix and match is the best approach to take for obtaining the best spread of protection against the variants.
The clinical trials of Novavax appear to be going very well, with a 90 percent efficacy, according to the manufacturer. Novavax has also had some successful trials of a combination COVID-flu vaccination in animals, which could be a really good idea if there is a need for boosters against variant strains of the virus, to make one shot work well for both of the viral infection.
The Johnson&Johnson method for vaccination seems to produce a fairly robust response against different variants of the virus, which might make it an ideal candidate for those who originally had a different shot.
It's far more likely that SARS-CoV-2 came as a mutation that jumped from animals to humans than that it was created in a lab and then loosed on the population, so the "lab-leak" hypothesis is almost assuredly a conspiracy theory rather than anything serious.
If you can, get your shots. Possibly even contribute to science by being part of a trial. Because the most consistent message has been that all of these vaccinations are supremely effective against severe symptoms, hospitalization, and death, even if they have variations in how effective they are against preventing infection and transmission.
In technology, the US Food and Drug Administration is requiring the recall of an alkaline water after several illnesses and at least one death were linked to the product. This very well may have been a case where the people who made the stuff proclaimed its great benefits and their excellent process, but it didn't actually do anything that made the water safe to drink (and might have done the opposite.)
The eugenics-laden past of sperm banks still lurks in the background and in the marketing, even if having greater control over when, how, and with whom someone reproduces is a large benefit to all the people who can have children.
NASA has commissioned two missions to study Venus, after the planet has spent significant time on the backburner compared to all the Martian missions and landers that have captivated our attention for so long.
Last for tonight - sound and sensible advice given to a man that was ignoring what his partner was saying about his size and technique to focus on whether or not his penis measures up to her past. While there are physical consideration to take into account when it comes to sex, for most people, it's how it gets used, rather than how big or small it is, that's most important. (And even beyond that, it's how you treat your partners with everything else other than a penis that'll often determine whether or not you get to use that penis.)
And a whole bunch of stories that I've been sitting on, meaning to read, and then finally deciding to do so. The Swarm of Giant Gnats I Sent After Kent, My Assistant Manager is all about making sure someone knows they've been cursed for being handsy and inappropriate without incurring the wrath of HR. And finding out the giant gnats make decent roommates.
I'm With Muni, How Can I Help reimagines what support people might be able to receive in a world where the money that had been shoveled into policing instead went to all of the social services teams who could actually help. We Are Not Phoenixes is about providing a spark of joy in the lives of people who may not have much left, while also acknowledging that doing the magic hastens along the reality that soon the magician will be joining those they give happiness to.
Open 27 hours is about finally finding that food you remember from your childhood and realizing that the entire experience was a lot more reality-bending than you initially thought.
Southside Gods is about those who make sure that the elements under their control behave, and those who go to others to help them remember how to fight for their own elements.
Work Ethics is a small flare of resistance against corporatism using technology to make things terrible, where a creative person gets a little help from an AI to make connections that would eventually come to them. Just a little faster. And that makes for some great ad campaigns.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-17 12:26 pm (UTC)This confuses me, because plenty of literature I've read has been from the perspective of protagonists who aren't particularly privileged or powerful (or even good, in some cases.) I mean, literature isn't real life anyway, but like... the protagonist in Catcher in the Rye is a white dude, yes, but he's also an abused teenager in a position of basically no power, and the novel is about his life in that situation. And Kafka's protagonists are more or less by definition people who cannot do the thing. There is no giant bug privilege. The Grossmith brothers' Diary of a Nobody is a 19th-century comic novel about a lower middle class clerk's petty ambitions and his petty rivalries and tyrannies and misadventures, and it's all very small in scale, but he is still the protagonist of that small-scale world.
Jo Walton coined the word protagonismos in 2010 to mean “the kind of person stories happen to,”
Yes, I read the essay she coined it in, I've read the novel she was talking about and the character she meant, and I entirely disagree. That is, as I recall, her position was that the problem a minor character in Among Others had was that he thought he was the protagonist, when in fact he wasn't and couldn't be because he didn't have that special quality that made someone a protagonist. And nope. I agree with Among Others' author that her character Wim thought he was the protagonist... but the problem wasn't that he thought he was the protagonist of his story, it's that he thought he was the protagonist of his girlfriend Mor's story. Of Among Others, in fact. That it was his natural right to have that position.
And he wasn't and couldn't be, because that was Mor's story, she was the correct protagonist for that book, which was all about her and her dead sister and their evil mother and the fairies and the Welsh post-industrial region she grew up in. Wim was barely even there. But that doesn't mean he could never have been a protagonist, just that this was not his book, and probably Jo Walton was not the correct author for his book. I don't think I'd like Wim's book, probably, but that's not the point. Maybe his book is about finding out that he's not the fulcrum of every universe.
(Also, not to be petty myself, but how did Ada Palmer and Jo Walton and Uncanny's editorial team ALL miss that the Strider's name is not "Aragon"? I remember how Walton feels about those books from her LiveJournal days! If she got chosen for jury duty she would probably swear on LOTR!)
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, first line: "Whether I shall be the hero of my own life, or whether that post shall be held by someone else, these pages shall show." (Quoting from memory, haven't reread it since I was 17, so who knows if I got every word right?) Essays have been written on whether or not David was the hero of David Copperfield, but if it wasn't him it was definitely Agnes, his lodger's daughter, whom he later marries, and who more or less only moves the plot by being a moral influence on David.
It leads to the belief that if you personally don’t resemble a protagonist (if you falter, have undramatic setbacks, mundane problems, job hunts, laundry, rent)
Yes indeed. Nobody would ever write a musical about rent.
Anyway, thanks for the link. I wouldn't have seen this article otherwise, and it's definitely something I want to talk about now that I have.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-17 02:24 pm (UTC)Perhaps the problem is, as you describe it, that a lot of people are being sold on the idea that they should be the protagonist of a story not their own, and then when someone tries and fails to be that protagonist, or when the people who are suited to being that protagonist do things and cause harm in a less privileged person's life, there are plenty of people of extremely ill intent waiting to feed their anger and resentment and direct it at other people with the intent of ruining their stories and becoming villains as revenge or compensation for not being protagonists of the bigger story they were told was their destiny.
Because the idea of "be the hero of your own story" is often spun as settling and hanging up any ambition you have for greater change or for getting more power, money, and influence to use on others.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-24 05:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-24 07:17 am (UTC)