I suppose this is summer now? - June 02021
Jul. 3rd, 2021 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGood day. Let us begin with an old idea given new form yet again, this time the part of the cycle where men believe they can retain their life force and power by not ejaculating. This time around, however, they're aiming for being able to have orgasms, just not to ejaculate. Also unsurprisingly, having created their own mythos, they are contemptuous of the places that spawned themselves and consider themselves superior to them.
The Methodist Church in England has voted to allow same-sex marriages, but also gave local clergy the ability not to do them if they have conscience objections.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie took to the Internet to accuse some authors of having ridden her coattails to success and then insulted her. Akwaeke Emezi, one of the authors not mentioned by name, chose to speak up and recontextualize this as being about wanting to distance themselves from Adichie's transphobia, and not about being ungrateful wretches.
Donald Rumsfeld, architect of two disastrous wars, liar profoundus, and owner of a plot of land and buildings where slaves were tortured to try and break their spirit, is dead at 88 years of age. His legacy may live on far after himself, and his name should only be spoken in derision or other negative contexts.
Michael Nava takes a look at the history of lesbian and gay publishing. Part I covers much of the era where there would be nearly no happy endings for the stories, as required by the laws so that the postal inspectors didn't seize it as pornography (and while positive depictions of same-sex love isn't classed as porn any more, you can see how that original designation still has echoes in our current era about how the same content will be rated or perceived to be more adult if it involves two people of the same gender. In Part II, the HIV/AIDS crisis both made gay and lesbian publishing prominent and got some people to work with bigger publishers and also exposed that capitalism is not interested in you, only what money you make for them. As soon as it became clear that the market for gay and lesbian fiction wasn't going to make a lot of people immediately rich, the market disappeared. Which should sound familiar to those who struggle with publishers deciding there's just not a market for authors of color, or that the market is clearly limited and only some amount of people can make it. And, as in these times, there was the high likelihood that being someone famous and published wasn't necessarily going to prevent being killed by something that didn't care who you were, aided by a government that was indifferent-to-hostile to the survival of you and yours. Part III explores the much wider lens of queer that has become part of the fabric of life, the lack of opportunities that queer authors still have past tokenism at the big publisher, and the ways in which books are no longer the sole media enterprise by which someone might see representation in their lives. Even if most media representation is still tokenistic. And much of the work of publishing queer lit is back to being in small presses and self-publishing, instead of big houses. (Which indirectly hurts the chances of those materials making it into libraries, because our buying processes are tooled toward what's available from big publishers that can ship lots of copies from their warehouses.) The further thoughts about how queerness is becoming less of a public political issue (for some people, anyway) is interesting, because it does feel like certain parts of the acronym have passed from "dangerous Other" to "one of Us", although it feels conditional, like the way that some racial groups have become one of Us so long as they are properly antagonistic to whomever is currently Them. While it's most prominent these days on matters of race (and has been for a while), this series also points out that queer people being a Them has been around for a very long time, and what's changed, really, is who is most prominently Them. History may not repeat, but it rhymes.
A new book that tries to find the actual case law and trial accounts involving charges leveled against lesbians in England, which is a lot harder than it might look, since the law and the government both wanted to suppress the existence of lesbians and their sex acts. Which leaves us with precious little everything to find them again.
Trying to fix gender inequality on Wikipedia not only requires doing the work of creating articles, but defending them against others who nominate them for speedy deletion without doing any sort of due diligence or research about the notability claims put forward in new articles. Sometimes those articles are nominated for deletion mere hours after their creation, even during events that are supposed to help try and close the gender gap. But because of the Wikimedia Foundation's unwillingness to moderate the space and their insistence on both notability and neutrality, trolls, haters, and other persons who have no good faith at all are free to attack and try to get articles deleted, simply because they're women. Without defenders and without anyone willing to wade into the toxic environment of the comments suggesting for deletion, each article that should be there has to expend a lot more energy to stay. I certainly could have told them that an institution that has a fanaticism about neutrality and notability is likely to make poor decisions about what to include in their collection. But enough of me complaining about the library as an institution. I have other things to do, like being happy at the idea of people noticing and giving credit to the Mrs. of the otherwise famed Dr. Livingstone, as it turns out she was doing a lot of the leg work and the prep work to make his explorations a lot easier.
Wheels for luggage and many other innovations have run into a formidable force against their widespread adoption - toxic masculinity.
Studying the ways that sex work has been regulated and criminalized in different places and times leads to the conclusion that sex work is safest and best for everyone involved in it if the work is decriminalized. Given the highly moralistic stances toward sex work and how that prejudices police and government agents into creating and enforcing laws that punish sex workers, rather than those that make the sex work dangerous, decriminalization would make things safer.
There may be a significant number of the lucky ten thousand with regard to the newly-created US federal holiday of Juneteenth. The nominal story of Juneteenth is one of a Union general riding into Texas to inform the Black citizens of their freedom, but the day should be thought of as a government finally enforcing the things they had stated with the violence (or threat thereof) of the state against the insurrection. Which sets the tone of the day as being one where reparations should be paid and work done on keeping promises and holding government officials accountable for what they are doing (or not doing) with regard to making sure Black citizens are not being made into second class or having their liberties curtailed or buried under onerous regulations specifically targeted at them because they have the temerity to vote against the White People's Party.celli and sheafrotherdon have produced some lists of materials to read and watch, as well as donate, and more books that will provide context and depth to understanding.
The Supreme Court found that a school district could not punish a cheerleader for a profane opinion involving several elements of school life, but refused to declare that schools had no interests in regulating speech and conduct of their students off-campus.
When a collection of rare manuscripts relating to the literary history of the UK came up for auction, the friends of various national institutions banded together to try and raise sufficient funds for purchasing the entire collection so it could be part of the public, rather than back in the hands of a private collector.
After receiving a threat about not suddenly becoming woke if they wanted to continue receiving government funding, several of the museums sent letters back about their responsibilities to talk about their collections accurately, including the origins of the artifacts and the origins of their acquisition.
Extreme weather events related to the variability of the jet stream are more likely to happen because of climate changes, which means Texas will get more cold snaps and Seattle will get more three-digit high temperatures. And, possibly, more buildings may collapse as the ground shifts underneath them.
A project that takes a look at how the mouth, throat, lips,and vocal cords all work together to produce all of the elements of beatboxing. Might make you a little queasy if you're squeamish about pictures of watching things work, but it's fascinating to watch if you want to see that kind of thing.
The touring walrus Wally has returned and is still trying to climb up on boats. Some of which were able to accommodate him, some of which did not. Pictures of his presence and that he's burst some boats that couldn't handle him trying to clamber on seems not to have deterred him from his desire to find good places to lounge.
A quill was found with records of a very long time ago, and the quill itself also had ink in it (which I'm pretty sure will make a lot of people very happy to have some sort of sample of ink to analyze!) Dinosaur footprints, too.
Data continues to suggest that being unvaccinated against coronavirus is a bad play - while some children don't have an approved vaccine for them, adults who do and choose not to get it, if they're not in a space where most of the people around them are vaccinated, they're at a bigger risk of catching it, spreading it, and possibly being one of the people who is seriously affected. Get your shots if you can, and if you can, consider keeping your masks on even if you're not mandated to do so. Data submitted for review by Johnson and Johnson suggests that their one dose adenovirus vector vaccine is still very effective against serious illness, hospitalization and death with regard to several of the variants of concern, including Delta, and that the immune responses against Delta and many other variants might get better the longer it has been since the vaccine was administered. If that data bears out, that is a big step forward toward being able to extend vaccine infrastructure out to more remote areas, and for people who might not be able to schedule two doses the correct number of weeks apart to get an effective vaccine in a one-and-done.
In technology, If you have a Western Digital My Book Live hard drive, disconnect it from the Internet and any Internet-capable computers immediately, as it looks like the device that was discontinued in 02015 had a 02018 security vulnerability filed against it and now there's an exploit in the wild erasing and factory resetting drives in 02021. And there's a lot of anger swirling around about whether or not Western Digital should have released a patch or other way of making sure that exploit could not be used after it was filed, or whether WD is within their something to say that it's not their problem if people continue to use old devices and drives that are discontinued. I feel like there's a certain amount of "if you built this thing to last this long, you should probably occasionally look at patching things up if there are exploits discovered, or at the very least make it possible for others to provide that patch and make sure that it does what it's supposed to." But I'm also the kind of person who believes that devices should be usable until they physically cannot do the thing (and that they should degrade gracefully enough to be obvious that they need replacing before anything is actually harmed.)
Text adventure games made by a collective that wished to live in the past, and whose identities were as mutable as the ones in the games.
A tour on the sex practices of the previous centuries in Scotland, including early prophylactics, accounts of people finding time where they can, and otherwise how things are both different and the same even after significant time.
A nearly two hour video explaining, first, the discredited and retracted study the first started the "MMR vaccines cause autism", and then very thoroughly showcasing how the principal author of that study, who is not a doctor any more, quite possibly fabricated the entire thing so that he could make a mint getting people to take his own patented alternative vaccine. Which is to say, a quack created a panic for their own profit, another joined him, and the rest of us have to deal with the fallout. So curse the name Andrew Wakefield every since time you run into an anti-vaxxer who believes that vaccines cause, well, anything other than immune responses and the known side effects of those vaccines.
Looking at very far away stars and their planets is both informative and can engender wonder about other life forms in the universe - and whether our system is their wondering space. Because, after all, it's entirely possible that entities on another world have seen us and marked us as interesting for study. Also, it can be comforting to know that rain is rain, even on other worlds, even if what the precipitation is made of is way different than Earth water. And that the weather of Jupiter sometimes looks like the weather of Earth, even if it works on a completely different scale. Because there's a lot of really pretty pictures that the telescopes and the probes are taking for us to see and marvel at. And the terrestrial photographers are doing a great job as well.
Last for tonight, a story of the robots that were made to have short lifespans creating dinosaurs that would last nearly forever in response, and a story of the artificial intelligence that now must grapple with the elements of humanity that seem to be essential to their continued evolution.
The Methodist Church in England has voted to allow same-sex marriages, but also gave local clergy the ability not to do them if they have conscience objections.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie took to the Internet to accuse some authors of having ridden her coattails to success and then insulted her. Akwaeke Emezi, one of the authors not mentioned by name, chose to speak up and recontextualize this as being about wanting to distance themselves from Adichie's transphobia, and not about being ungrateful wretches.
Donald Rumsfeld, architect of two disastrous wars, liar profoundus, and owner of a plot of land and buildings where slaves were tortured to try and break their spirit, is dead at 88 years of age. His legacy may live on far after himself, and his name should only be spoken in derision or other negative contexts.
Michael Nava takes a look at the history of lesbian and gay publishing. Part I covers much of the era where there would be nearly no happy endings for the stories, as required by the laws so that the postal inspectors didn't seize it as pornography (and while positive depictions of same-sex love isn't classed as porn any more, you can see how that original designation still has echoes in our current era about how the same content will be rated or perceived to be more adult if it involves two people of the same gender. In Part II, the HIV/AIDS crisis both made gay and lesbian publishing prominent and got some people to work with bigger publishers and also exposed that capitalism is not interested in you, only what money you make for them. As soon as it became clear that the market for gay and lesbian fiction wasn't going to make a lot of people immediately rich, the market disappeared. Which should sound familiar to those who struggle with publishers deciding there's just not a market for authors of color, or that the market is clearly limited and only some amount of people can make it. And, as in these times, there was the high likelihood that being someone famous and published wasn't necessarily going to prevent being killed by something that didn't care who you were, aided by a government that was indifferent-to-hostile to the survival of you and yours. Part III explores the much wider lens of queer that has become part of the fabric of life, the lack of opportunities that queer authors still have past tokenism at the big publisher, and the ways in which books are no longer the sole media enterprise by which someone might see representation in their lives. Even if most media representation is still tokenistic. And much of the work of publishing queer lit is back to being in small presses and self-publishing, instead of big houses. (Which indirectly hurts the chances of those materials making it into libraries, because our buying processes are tooled toward what's available from big publishers that can ship lots of copies from their warehouses.) The further thoughts about how queerness is becoming less of a public political issue (for some people, anyway) is interesting, because it does feel like certain parts of the acronym have passed from "dangerous Other" to "one of Us", although it feels conditional, like the way that some racial groups have become one of Us so long as they are properly antagonistic to whomever is currently Them. While it's most prominent these days on matters of race (and has been for a while), this series also points out that queer people being a Them has been around for a very long time, and what's changed, really, is who is most prominently Them. History may not repeat, but it rhymes.
A new book that tries to find the actual case law and trial accounts involving charges leveled against lesbians in England, which is a lot harder than it might look, since the law and the government both wanted to suppress the existence of lesbians and their sex acts. Which leaves us with precious little everything to find them again.
Trying to fix gender inequality on Wikipedia not only requires doing the work of creating articles, but defending them against others who nominate them for speedy deletion without doing any sort of due diligence or research about the notability claims put forward in new articles. Sometimes those articles are nominated for deletion mere hours after their creation, even during events that are supposed to help try and close the gender gap. But because of the Wikimedia Foundation's unwillingness to moderate the space and their insistence on both notability and neutrality, trolls, haters, and other persons who have no good faith at all are free to attack and try to get articles deleted, simply because they're women. Without defenders and without anyone willing to wade into the toxic environment of the comments suggesting for deletion, each article that should be there has to expend a lot more energy to stay. I certainly could have told them that an institution that has a fanaticism about neutrality and notability is likely to make poor decisions about what to include in their collection. But enough of me complaining about the library as an institution. I have other things to do, like being happy at the idea of people noticing and giving credit to the Mrs. of the otherwise famed Dr. Livingstone, as it turns out she was doing a lot of the leg work and the prep work to make his explorations a lot easier.
Wheels for luggage and many other innovations have run into a formidable force against their widespread adoption - toxic masculinity.
Studying the ways that sex work has been regulated and criminalized in different places and times leads to the conclusion that sex work is safest and best for everyone involved in it if the work is decriminalized. Given the highly moralistic stances toward sex work and how that prejudices police and government agents into creating and enforcing laws that punish sex workers, rather than those that make the sex work dangerous, decriminalization would make things safer.
There may be a significant number of the lucky ten thousand with regard to the newly-created US federal holiday of Juneteenth. The nominal story of Juneteenth is one of a Union general riding into Texas to inform the Black citizens of their freedom, but the day should be thought of as a government finally enforcing the things they had stated with the violence (or threat thereof) of the state against the insurrection. Which sets the tone of the day as being one where reparations should be paid and work done on keeping promises and holding government officials accountable for what they are doing (or not doing) with regard to making sure Black citizens are not being made into second class or having their liberties curtailed or buried under onerous regulations specifically targeted at them because they have the temerity to vote against the White People's Party.
celli and sheafrotherdon have produced some lists of materials to read and watch, as well as donate, and more books that will provide context and depth to understanding.The Supreme Court found that a school district could not punish a cheerleader for a profane opinion involving several elements of school life, but refused to declare that schools had no interests in regulating speech and conduct of their students off-campus.
When a collection of rare manuscripts relating to the literary history of the UK came up for auction, the friends of various national institutions banded together to try and raise sufficient funds for purchasing the entire collection so it could be part of the public, rather than back in the hands of a private collector.
After receiving a threat about not suddenly becoming woke if they wanted to continue receiving government funding, several of the museums sent letters back about their responsibilities to talk about their collections accurately, including the origins of the artifacts and the origins of their acquisition.
Extreme weather events related to the variability of the jet stream are more likely to happen because of climate changes, which means Texas will get more cold snaps and Seattle will get more three-digit high temperatures. And, possibly, more buildings may collapse as the ground shifts underneath them.
A project that takes a look at how the mouth, throat, lips,and vocal cords all work together to produce all of the elements of beatboxing. Might make you a little queasy if you're squeamish about pictures of watching things work, but it's fascinating to watch if you want to see that kind of thing.
The touring walrus Wally has returned and is still trying to climb up on boats. Some of which were able to accommodate him, some of which did not. Pictures of his presence and that he's burst some boats that couldn't handle him trying to clamber on seems not to have deterred him from his desire to find good places to lounge.
A quill was found with records of a very long time ago, and the quill itself also had ink in it (which I'm pretty sure will make a lot of people very happy to have some sort of sample of ink to analyze!) Dinosaur footprints, too.
Data continues to suggest that being unvaccinated against coronavirus is a bad play - while some children don't have an approved vaccine for them, adults who do and choose not to get it, if they're not in a space where most of the people around them are vaccinated, they're at a bigger risk of catching it, spreading it, and possibly being one of the people who is seriously affected. Get your shots if you can, and if you can, consider keeping your masks on even if you're not mandated to do so. Data submitted for review by Johnson and Johnson suggests that their one dose adenovirus vector vaccine is still very effective against serious illness, hospitalization and death with regard to several of the variants of concern, including Delta, and that the immune responses against Delta and many other variants might get better the longer it has been since the vaccine was administered. If that data bears out, that is a big step forward toward being able to extend vaccine infrastructure out to more remote areas, and for people who might not be able to schedule two doses the correct number of weeks apart to get an effective vaccine in a one-and-done.
In technology, If you have a Western Digital My Book Live hard drive, disconnect it from the Internet and any Internet-capable computers immediately, as it looks like the device that was discontinued in 02015 had a 02018 security vulnerability filed against it and now there's an exploit in the wild erasing and factory resetting drives in 02021. And there's a lot of anger swirling around about whether or not Western Digital should have released a patch or other way of making sure that exploit could not be used after it was filed, or whether WD is within their something to say that it's not their problem if people continue to use old devices and drives that are discontinued. I feel like there's a certain amount of "if you built this thing to last this long, you should probably occasionally look at patching things up if there are exploits discovered, or at the very least make it possible for others to provide that patch and make sure that it does what it's supposed to." But I'm also the kind of person who believes that devices should be usable until they physically cannot do the thing (and that they should degrade gracefully enough to be obvious that they need replacing before anything is actually harmed.)
Text adventure games made by a collective that wished to live in the past, and whose identities were as mutable as the ones in the games.
A tour on the sex practices of the previous centuries in Scotland, including early prophylactics, accounts of people finding time where they can, and otherwise how things are both different and the same even after significant time.
A nearly two hour video explaining, first, the discredited and retracted study the first started the "MMR vaccines cause autism", and then very thoroughly showcasing how the principal author of that study, who is not a doctor any more, quite possibly fabricated the entire thing so that he could make a mint getting people to take his own patented alternative vaccine. Which is to say, a quack created a panic for their own profit, another joined him, and the rest of us have to deal with the fallout. So curse the name Andrew Wakefield every since time you run into an anti-vaxxer who believes that vaccines cause, well, anything other than immune responses and the known side effects of those vaccines.
Looking at very far away stars and their planets is both informative and can engender wonder about other life forms in the universe - and whether our system is their wondering space. Because, after all, it's entirely possible that entities on another world have seen us and marked us as interesting for study. Also, it can be comforting to know that rain is rain, even on other worlds, even if what the precipitation is made of is way different than Earth water. And that the weather of Jupiter sometimes looks like the weather of Earth, even if it works on a completely different scale. Because there's a lot of really pretty pictures that the telescopes and the probes are taking for us to see and marvel at. And the terrestrial photographers are doing a great job as well.
Last for tonight, a story of the robots that were made to have short lifespans creating dinosaurs that would last nearly forever in response, and a story of the artificial intelligence that now must grapple with the elements of humanity that seem to be essential to their continued evolution.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-04 09:15 am (UTC)My lot (the Religious Society of Friends, aka Quakers) have been doing them since they came into being.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-04 02:09 pm (UTC)👀
Has anyone told them that 100-200mg of spironolactone daily will do that for them within ~6-9 months? They will also be sterile until they cease and use clomid to restore function, and could experience gender dysphoria if they are in fact cisgender... 🤷♀️
no subject
Date: 2021-07-04 02:23 pm (UTC)