![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet's begin with Heard, Half-Heard, in the Stillness, a story about lights in the sky and the festival of lights called Diwali. There is also an audio version of the story as well from Escape Pod.
As major holidays of the Western tradition approach, a reminder that you get to choose how, or if, to celebrate, which means you get to select the things you like, or to say no to the people that you don't want to be around.
A paper known for having notably transphobic views in their UK office attempted to make someone who reported on those views retract their reporting on those views. Given that this is not the first time someone has tried to censor the writer, there's a certain amount of the Streisand Effect that should be expected.
And, perhaps, someone putting the Bite-Size Halloween episode called "The New Nanny", about a child that gets bullied for wearing a princess dress and their all-Goth caretaker with a little bit of power to help right next to it. Because the child is getting bullied for apparent gender-nonconformity and the nanny probably knows a thing or two about what getting bullied for being different is like.
Sadly, there are going to be a lot of people taking the wrong idea from such things. The BBC decided it wanted to prioritize the appearance of neutrality over actively helping LGBTQ people, the Minister for Equalities urged people to withdraw their support from a program designed to help LGBTQ+ people get and retain employment, Conservative ministers parroted talking points recycled from when gay men and lesbians were portrayed as the menace to your children. The cycle repeats itself, but with a different target. So we end up fighting the same fight over and over again, as the people who refuse the basic rights of others continue to try and use the state to block their recognition.
On that note, if you live in the UK, here's a handy guide on responding to a government request for guidance on how strongly and widely the practice of conversion therapy should be banned and its practitioners criminalized. Would certainly like to see that disappeared here in the States, as well, for the same adverse health reasons as it should be banned elsewhere. Twenty health, counseling, and psychotherapy organizations have already signed a memorandum of understanding toward ending the practice entirely in the UK.
And while it's tempting to look at other places that physically assault a trans woman because they refuse to acknowledge her, using their interpretation of a religion as justification and believe that it won't happen here, historical precedent says otherwise. In the 365-day period from 1 October 2020 to 30 Setpember 2021, 462 lives lost, many at the hands and actions of others. (That link contains links to detailed accounts of how those lives were lost.)
To Survive On This Shore, a project and accompanying book, ehibition, and portfolio, of photographs and interviews with elder transgender and gender non-conforming persons. Because some people do make it through and live their lives as themselves, and that's worth remembering and celebrating.
It's not just the States where nonwhite people get asked where their country of origin is, even if they've been in the country for four generations at this point.
chestnut_pod trawled some tumblr threads to collect some interesting suggested start points on improving the experience of the AO3, which go in different and interesting directions in the post and in the comments, including a suggestion that the Archive turn off all social functions and exist solely as a repository. Which displaces the burden of moderation off of the Archive, but also raises suggestions that a solely archival space will not be used because it lacks those social functions. (As well as the idea of archives as True Neutral places that don't care about the content they host, which, yeah, not exactly the best look, even if it has been the official position of many libraries and archives for decades.)
The distinction between "feminism" and "equality" or "autonomy" is often more pronounced when you get into more working class spaces, but that doesn't mean that the people who wanted equality weren't advocating for feminism. You can still see that distinction floating around on all sorts of social issues, usually because the media portrayal of a feminist or an anti-racist or a queer activist is often to paint them as extreme as possible for the headlines and the clickbait. That extreme portrayal usually sets up people to say "well, I believe in what I see as a sensible position [which is completely in line with the positions of the "extremists", usually], but not like those extremists that I see in media." (That also works the other way around, unfortunately. There are a lot of people who believe they have sensible centrist positions that are completely in step with what the most virulent -ists say on propaganda networks, church pulpits, and the halls of government.)
The Moomins of Tove Jansson are antifa, and were and are often depicted in anti-fascist messaging. Once that becomes wider-known, I'm sure there will be elements calling for the censoring of Moomins, because they're indoctrination of children that those elements don't like.
A child, driven across state lines to protest, took a gun to a protest, and then used that gun to kill people. But because of the great gulf between what is legal and what is moral, the gun became legal, the jury was of the peers of the defendant, the dead were not allowed to be humanized, the defense lawyer made arguments that appealed to prejudice, the judge appeared partisan, and, ultimately, Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty of the charges leveled against him, apparently successfully claiming self-defense, despite his decision to be a white child with a weapon in a demonstration against police and other violence by white people against black people. The fact still remains that this trial happened because of the privilege Mr. Rittenhouse had, when children much younger than him have been killed by police when their weapons were only toys. Or because someone believed they were a threat, Or any other number of reasons that only apply to non-white people. And for as much as someone says this is a failure of the system, it happens too often to be anything other than the system as it is designed to work. These things cannot be walked away from, or looked away from, much as it would certainly be easier to do so, to continue displacing the burdens and the pain on others. And there's plenty of people with the expertise and the lived experience to give direction to your and your organizations on how they can better work to making it less painful, less single perspective, less ignorant of the consequences of the decisions. The work is long, the work is hard, the stumbles and the failures will be many, but nobody is exempted from doing the work. Because there will always be people who look at what you've done so far and think it is perfectly suited to their own aims, which, you know, should probably give you pause when those people are the people you're trying to fight.
Dictionaries are not prescriptivist, they are descriptivist, and so dictionaries will always change as new words appear and older ones fade. Because you use a dictionary to look up the meaning of a word or phrase that exists already, not to prove that a word shouldn't exist because it's not in the dictionary.
The article title is How Memphis Created The Nation's Most Innovative Public Library, but I fear my cynicism is showing through in that for each of the things being lauded as important and innovative things, my professional self says, "the only innovation here is that someone managed to convince a city to fund their library properly and their community to actively participate in the spaces the library was building and offering." Which, to be clear, is very, very impressive! But the kind of things that Memphis has done, other libraries and library systems could also do with sufficient funding and community buy-in.
Propaganda posters expressing friendship between the People's Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that give a definitely homoromantic idea to the countries' allyship. Although, many of them could also be read as bros doing bro things together without it having to be gay, so I think the title is probably a bit overblown. It's not like they're trying to emulate Tom of Finland here.
The Victorians made limericks and poems about menstruation. Which, admittedly, were in the collection that also contained most of the pornography, according to the researcher writing about it in this article.
One should not be surprised that soldiers in war were also customers of prostitution, whether in licensed houses or otherwise, but it also means that we know a little bit more about how certain soldiers were going about trying to get out of the fighting by trying to get themselves infected. What we don't know much more about arre the people who worked in those places during that time.
There's probably no secret language among those who are transient and use the rails to move from place to place, but they do engage in tagging and communication.
The idea that background noise carries cognitive load with it and that a potential way of getting people to have better attention and lowered states of alarm is to remove the constant hum of sound around them. I presume they mean this for neurotypical people, as I suspect some neurotypes need to bleed off some excess attention and focus blocking out something so they can bring their attention onto the thing they want to concentrate on.
An additional question to ask in addition to "Who benefits?" is "Who is impeded?", so that an organization making a decision has a clearer picture of all of its impacts, instead of only the beneficial ones. Because the world was already set up, despite utopian promises, to require extraordianary effort on the part of those in the minority, and the pandemic only made those distinctions clearer and more pronounced as people and governments showed that when it became a matter of life and death, the people in power choose the people who are most like them. And continue to do so, given how much the aid that disabled people give each other, and have given each other, and continue to give each other, since the pandemic is not over for the disabled (or anyone else), is different than the aid that abled people think disabled people need.
Yet more artifacts stolen from the kingdoms of Africa have been repatriated, this time several from Ethopia. Which is an excellent way of starting to return things back to the places they went.
On slightly less international stakes, the problem of having your own story of a curse work too well such that people both still take and then return the items they took, which takes the objects out of their context so that nobody can continue to study them properly.
The 1970s as a decade was a much better place than its pastiches would suggest, but we don't know that because our schools and our conservatives wants us to believe that the 70s were bad and the 80s, with Reaganomics and Thatcherism, were the truly moral paths and led to the prosperity we all enjoy. Even though when they say "we all," they mean, mostly, "the ultra rich." And with that grown wealth they were able to purchase government and court alike so that no entity could curb their excesses again, leading to the current hellscape many of us currently live in.
Pictures of the aurorae as captured in Cumbria in England, a moose that crashed its way through a school classroom window, a walrus named Freya that hitched a ride on a Dutch Walrus-class submarine and who may have made a stop in Northumberland for a short while before moving on to a new destination, A rose named in honor of a black UK horticultralist of the 18th century, and sharks returning to the Thames River (that's a good thing).
On matters of the Virus, now that his age cohort is able to receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccination, Big Bird got his and tweeted about it, as birds are wont to do. Cue backlash from people who have failed to understand what both the vaccination and Sesame Street are for.
In technology, using current levels of technology to capture prosody and intonation in trying to document language, now that there are good shotgun microphones that can capture people in their environments and programs that can filter out the things that would be in the background. Or, how much easier that would be if there weren't a pandemic that would expose the people who are most valuable (elders) to the most risk. Which might make for more dormant languages in the near term.
Poisonous candy from the past, when someone chose the wrong powder to give to a person who was buying for a candymaker, and poisoning people with sweets that have been dusted with inedible powders to give them interesting visuals, which in both cases were due to inadequate and possibly misleading labeling about how dangerous it was.
Restoring the waffle garden tradition in the Zuni Pubelo region, which is Indigenous knowledge that doesn't require large amounts of water to grow some amount of food.
the ways in which romance novels are often well-researched and cover many more subjects than the stereotypes that someone has been given.
A couple of persons alleged to be involved in the REvil ransomware services have been arrested and their assets seized, on the reality that actually sustaining a criminal action and keeping it secret is a lot harder than it looks, and that lazy acts of re-use, or a cybercrime forum getting hacked, or other such things, might be responsible for the apprehension. (The FBI is offering large bounties for more information that leads to the arrest of other REvil people, which might mean paying out some good money is others are equally shoddy in their OPSEC.)
A Twitter thread about MUNI bus driving (and MUNI buses) based on a scene from Marvel's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
Last for tonight, an advertisement for a voting rights and protection bill in the United States Senate, in the style of an erectile dysfunction medication advertisement. [YouTube] Starring people you might recognize from television and movies. It's a very well done advertisement, even if there's a certain amount of despair about how USPol is rapidly devolving into "one party rules, the other party can't because they're too invested in playing by rules that are being used to deliberately prevent them from ruling." and soon enough, the one party that chooses to play by authoritarian tactics and ideas will engineer a way of giving themselves a permanent majority, even if they maintain the fiction of there being two viable parties.
(Materials viacmcmck, cosmolinguist, jadelennox, lilysea, oursin, owlmoose, rydra_wong, sonia, thewayne, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
As major holidays of the Western tradition approach, a reminder that you get to choose how, or if, to celebrate, which means you get to select the things you like, or to say no to the people that you don't want to be around.
A paper known for having notably transphobic views in their UK office attempted to make someone who reported on those views retract their reporting on those views. Given that this is not the first time someone has tried to censor the writer, there's a certain amount of the Streisand Effect that should be expected.
And, perhaps, someone putting the Bite-Size Halloween episode called "The New Nanny", about a child that gets bullied for wearing a princess dress and their all-Goth caretaker with a little bit of power to help right next to it. Because the child is getting bullied for apparent gender-nonconformity and the nanny probably knows a thing or two about what getting bullied for being different is like.
Sadly, there are going to be a lot of people taking the wrong idea from such things. The BBC decided it wanted to prioritize the appearance of neutrality over actively helping LGBTQ people, the Minister for Equalities urged people to withdraw their support from a program designed to help LGBTQ+ people get and retain employment, Conservative ministers parroted talking points recycled from when gay men and lesbians were portrayed as the menace to your children. The cycle repeats itself, but with a different target. So we end up fighting the same fight over and over again, as the people who refuse the basic rights of others continue to try and use the state to block their recognition.
On that note, if you live in the UK, here's a handy guide on responding to a government request for guidance on how strongly and widely the practice of conversion therapy should be banned and its practitioners criminalized. Would certainly like to see that disappeared here in the States, as well, for the same adverse health reasons as it should be banned elsewhere. Twenty health, counseling, and psychotherapy organizations have already signed a memorandum of understanding toward ending the practice entirely in the UK.
And while it's tempting to look at other places that physically assault a trans woman because they refuse to acknowledge her, using their interpretation of a religion as justification and believe that it won't happen here, historical precedent says otherwise. In the 365-day period from 1 October 2020 to 30 Setpember 2021, 462 lives lost, many at the hands and actions of others. (That link contains links to detailed accounts of how those lives were lost.)
To Survive On This Shore, a project and accompanying book, ehibition, and portfolio, of photographs and interviews with elder transgender and gender non-conforming persons. Because some people do make it through and live their lives as themselves, and that's worth remembering and celebrating.
It's not just the States where nonwhite people get asked where their country of origin is, even if they've been in the country for four generations at this point.
chestnut_pod trawled some tumblr threads to collect some interesting suggested start points on improving the experience of the AO3, which go in different and interesting directions in the post and in the comments, including a suggestion that the Archive turn off all social functions and exist solely as a repository. Which displaces the burden of moderation off of the Archive, but also raises suggestions that a solely archival space will not be used because it lacks those social functions. (As well as the idea of archives as True Neutral places that don't care about the content they host, which, yeah, not exactly the best look, even if it has been the official position of many libraries and archives for decades.)The distinction between "feminism" and "equality" or "autonomy" is often more pronounced when you get into more working class spaces, but that doesn't mean that the people who wanted equality weren't advocating for feminism. You can still see that distinction floating around on all sorts of social issues, usually because the media portrayal of a feminist or an anti-racist or a queer activist is often to paint them as extreme as possible for the headlines and the clickbait. That extreme portrayal usually sets up people to say "well, I believe in what I see as a sensible position [which is completely in line with the positions of the "extremists", usually], but not like those extremists that I see in media." (That also works the other way around, unfortunately. There are a lot of people who believe they have sensible centrist positions that are completely in step with what the most virulent -ists say on propaganda networks, church pulpits, and the halls of government.)
The Moomins of Tove Jansson are antifa, and were and are often depicted in anti-fascist messaging. Once that becomes wider-known, I'm sure there will be elements calling for the censoring of Moomins, because they're indoctrination of children that those elements don't like.
A child, driven across state lines to protest, took a gun to a protest, and then used that gun to kill people. But because of the great gulf between what is legal and what is moral, the gun became legal, the jury was of the peers of the defendant, the dead were not allowed to be humanized, the defense lawyer made arguments that appealed to prejudice, the judge appeared partisan, and, ultimately, Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty of the charges leveled against him, apparently successfully claiming self-defense, despite his decision to be a white child with a weapon in a demonstration against police and other violence by white people against black people. The fact still remains that this trial happened because of the privilege Mr. Rittenhouse had, when children much younger than him have been killed by police when their weapons were only toys. Or because someone believed they were a threat, Or any other number of reasons that only apply to non-white people. And for as much as someone says this is a failure of the system, it happens too often to be anything other than the system as it is designed to work. These things cannot be walked away from, or looked away from, much as it would certainly be easier to do so, to continue displacing the burdens and the pain on others. And there's plenty of people with the expertise and the lived experience to give direction to your and your organizations on how they can better work to making it less painful, less single perspective, less ignorant of the consequences of the decisions. The work is long, the work is hard, the stumbles and the failures will be many, but nobody is exempted from doing the work. Because there will always be people who look at what you've done so far and think it is perfectly suited to their own aims, which, you know, should probably give you pause when those people are the people you're trying to fight.
Dictionaries are not prescriptivist, they are descriptivist, and so dictionaries will always change as new words appear and older ones fade. Because you use a dictionary to look up the meaning of a word or phrase that exists already, not to prove that a word shouldn't exist because it's not in the dictionary.
The article title is How Memphis Created The Nation's Most Innovative Public Library, but I fear my cynicism is showing through in that for each of the things being lauded as important and innovative things, my professional self says, "the only innovation here is that someone managed to convince a city to fund their library properly and their community to actively participate in the spaces the library was building and offering." Which, to be clear, is very, very impressive! But the kind of things that Memphis has done, other libraries and library systems could also do with sufficient funding and community buy-in.
Propaganda posters expressing friendship between the People's Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that give a definitely homoromantic idea to the countries' allyship. Although, many of them could also be read as bros doing bro things together without it having to be gay, so I think the title is probably a bit overblown. It's not like they're trying to emulate Tom of Finland here.
The Victorians made limericks and poems about menstruation. Which, admittedly, were in the collection that also contained most of the pornography, according to the researcher writing about it in this article.
One should not be surprised that soldiers in war were also customers of prostitution, whether in licensed houses or otherwise, but it also means that we know a little bit more about how certain soldiers were going about trying to get out of the fighting by trying to get themselves infected. What we don't know much more about arre the people who worked in those places during that time.
There's probably no secret language among those who are transient and use the rails to move from place to place, but they do engage in tagging and communication.
The idea that background noise carries cognitive load with it and that a potential way of getting people to have better attention and lowered states of alarm is to remove the constant hum of sound around them. I presume they mean this for neurotypical people, as I suspect some neurotypes need to bleed off some excess attention and focus blocking out something so they can bring their attention onto the thing they want to concentrate on.
An additional question to ask in addition to "Who benefits?" is "Who is impeded?", so that an organization making a decision has a clearer picture of all of its impacts, instead of only the beneficial ones. Because the world was already set up, despite utopian promises, to require extraordianary effort on the part of those in the minority, and the pandemic only made those distinctions clearer and more pronounced as people and governments showed that when it became a matter of life and death, the people in power choose the people who are most like them. And continue to do so, given how much the aid that disabled people give each other, and have given each other, and continue to give each other, since the pandemic is not over for the disabled (or anyone else), is different than the aid that abled people think disabled people need.
Yet more artifacts stolen from the kingdoms of Africa have been repatriated, this time several from Ethopia. Which is an excellent way of starting to return things back to the places they went.
On slightly less international stakes, the problem of having your own story of a curse work too well such that people both still take and then return the items they took, which takes the objects out of their context so that nobody can continue to study them properly.
The 1970s as a decade was a much better place than its pastiches would suggest, but we don't know that because our schools and our conservatives wants us to believe that the 70s were bad and the 80s, with Reaganomics and Thatcherism, were the truly moral paths and led to the prosperity we all enjoy. Even though when they say "we all," they mean, mostly, "the ultra rich." And with that grown wealth they were able to purchase government and court alike so that no entity could curb their excesses again, leading to the current hellscape many of us currently live in.
Pictures of the aurorae as captured in Cumbria in England, a moose that crashed its way through a school classroom window, a walrus named Freya that hitched a ride on a Dutch Walrus-class submarine and who may have made a stop in Northumberland for a short while before moving on to a new destination, A rose named in honor of a black UK horticultralist of the 18th century, and sharks returning to the Thames River (that's a good thing).
On matters of the Virus, now that his age cohort is able to receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccination, Big Bird got his and tweeted about it, as birds are wont to do. Cue backlash from people who have failed to understand what both the vaccination and Sesame Street are for.
In technology, using current levels of technology to capture prosody and intonation in trying to document language, now that there are good shotgun microphones that can capture people in their environments and programs that can filter out the things that would be in the background. Or, how much easier that would be if there weren't a pandemic that would expose the people who are most valuable (elders) to the most risk. Which might make for more dormant languages in the near term.
Poisonous candy from the past, when someone chose the wrong powder to give to a person who was buying for a candymaker, and poisoning people with sweets that have been dusted with inedible powders to give them interesting visuals, which in both cases were due to inadequate and possibly misleading labeling about how dangerous it was.
Restoring the waffle garden tradition in the Zuni Pubelo region, which is Indigenous knowledge that doesn't require large amounts of water to grow some amount of food.
the ways in which romance novels are often well-researched and cover many more subjects than the stereotypes that someone has been given.
A couple of persons alleged to be involved in the REvil ransomware services have been arrested and their assets seized, on the reality that actually sustaining a criminal action and keeping it secret is a lot harder than it looks, and that lazy acts of re-use, or a cybercrime forum getting hacked, or other such things, might be responsible for the apprehension. (The FBI is offering large bounties for more information that leads to the arrest of other REvil people, which might mean paying out some good money is others are equally shoddy in their OPSEC.)
A Twitter thread about MUNI bus driving (and MUNI buses) based on a scene from Marvel's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
Last for tonight, an advertisement for a voting rights and protection bill in the United States Senate, in the style of an erectile dysfunction medication advertisement. [YouTube] Starring people you might recognize from television and movies. It's a very well done advertisement, even if there's a certain amount of despair about how USPol is rapidly devolving into "one party rules, the other party can't because they're too invested in playing by rules that are being used to deliberately prevent them from ruling." and soon enough, the one party that chooses to play by authoritarian tactics and ideas will engineer a way of giving themselves a permanent majority, even if they maintain the fiction of there being two viable parties.
(Materials via
cmcmck, cosmolinguist, jadelennox, lilysea, oursin, owlmoose, rydra_wong, sonia, thewayne, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
no subject
Date: 2021-11-22 10:04 am (UTC)Yes, they are uncomfortable and no, after fifty years, I still won't stop pointing them out!
I'm one of the ones who has survived it all (so far).
no subject
Date: 2021-11-22 03:43 pm (UTC)