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silveradeptLet's start with some color (or lack thereof) in Fictional characters arranged by their primary colors, so you would see, for example, all of the characters with blue skin tones or primarily blue-colored armor together in a group portrait.
Ninety-nine global good news stories from 2021, and one bit about pasta. Many of those stories have targets still in the future, but it's one of those situations where things may look bad now, but it could be an extinction burst rather than actual sustainable pushback. An optimistic look at how things went politically in the U.S. in 2021, many of the predictions I would like to see happen in 2022.
Betty White, known for variety, for hosting, for being a comedic old woman, and so, so many other things, died just short of her one hundredth birthday. Sidney Poitier, the first black man to win an Academy Award, died at 94 years of age.
Two first-timers went to DisCon III, one as an attendee and one as part of a finalist team for a Hugo award. One of them had a great time at the convention and saw it as a warm and welcoming place, even if the person they traveled with was a complete asshole. The other person found themselves Othered and subjected to the same kind of micro and macroaggressions that are present throughout the science fiction and fantasy fandoms. It's probably not a surprise that the one who had a good time was light-skinned and the one who didn't was dark-skinned. (And if that wasn't a surprise, you'd probably get accused of being Extremely Online by members of the fandom that were behaving badly toward the other attendees.) Worldcon is an old con, and some part of it being old is that it hasn't managed to communicate clarly to the attendees and fans that the way things were in the early days is no longer acceptable, and that there should be more energy, more paneling, and more everything to indicate that SF/F is not a place where gatekeepers and those holding on to the belief that white men (and, grudgingly, women) are the only people of note in the history of the fandom are welcome to be.elf has suggestions on how to make WorldCon less welcoming to racists that involve not just saying that they don't tolerate it, but doing things to prove the point and creating an environment where someone who is uncomfortable with all the not-white people around knows to keep that attitude to themselves (or decide not to come), knowing that if they say such a thing, they'll be summarily ejected without refund.
Calvinist thinking suits bosses instead of workers, but when your culture is built on Calvinism and capitalism, burnout is not a strange or unexpected result. What is dangled in front of a worker for more 'productivity' rarely materializes, and yet, because capitalism is extremely good at punishing the powerless, we end up with demands that we all have vocational awe for our minimum wage, maximum soul-suck work and even more of that awe if we want to do anything more than entry-level. If we treat the job as a job, even if it's enjoyable, there's always the danger that we'll be let go from the job for not having enough pieces of flair. Or because the CEO wants another yacht.
Despite one hundred years between them, two statements about how the carceral state views women accused of sexual immorality are remarkably similar in their views, which are usually of the idea that a woman who is so accused should be "rehabilitated" to standards of generally white and Christian morality around sex and punished if she doesn't conform to those morals. Those same kinds of morals also tend to not act particularly swiftly when people decide to take photographs or film someone breastfeeding, because "it's the public space" and the assumption is that someone who would breastfeed in public is compmletely okay with that act being used as fap material for others or even to simply become part of someone's collection of explicit images, shared around as commodities instead of the violations of consent they are. Even so, the admonishments I would be most likely to see and hear would be against women for doing something that others are sexualizing, rather than against the people who are doing the sexualization. Even in a public space, it should certainly be possible to engage in breastfeeding without being harrassed, and that includes the harrassment that comes from someone deciding to take some snaps or a video because it's bared breasts.
The United States needs better measures to control the spread of guns and access to guns. Any time a three year-old dies by shooting themself, it is an indication that there are too many unsecured guns around.
A transit system that refuses to stop for people who are absolutely there to ride it and happen to be disabled needs to be made better. Much better.
The Streisand Effect often has some beneficial effects when it's a charity doing good work that gets targeted by reactionaries. A charitable operation to provide lifeboats for those crossing the Channel in small boats get a lot of support when targeted by xenophobes, and the National Trust has done well after it was accused of being woke and revisionist as it began to integrate more of the history of its properties into those places.
Four persons arrested and charged for toppling and dumping a statue of a prominent English slaver were found not to have acted criminally by a jury, which follows other decisions where protestors intended to commit damage or did so and successfully argued that they were taking lawful actions or actions intended to prevent greater damage.
On the other side of the coin, the men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery were sentenced to life in prison, two of the three without the possibility of parole, one who would be required to serve thirty years in prison before being eligible for parole. They willfully took a life, they do not appear to have shown remorse for it, and they appear to have done it for reasons that have much more to do with the skin colors of the people involved than anything else. It is an appropriate punishment in this regard, for it will take a lifetime to attempt repentance for this act.
Almost all things sold as yams in the United States are actually sweet potatoes and not true yams, a woman grabbing a distressed swan and chucking it back into the river where it wanted to be,
The market for goods that can be passed off as 'authentically biblical' often has serious repercussions with regard to looting at archaeological sites, and pseudoscience about the supposed sites of biblical places often exacerbates this problems.
A Princess who risked her royalty to fight for suffrage gets a childrens' book.
A booster vaccination purporting to be "variant-proof" of SARS-CoV-2 is being trialed in Manchester, UK, which means if it holds up, there might be a vaccination that can be given just once more and get extremely broad-spectrum protection. In addition to the vaccination being developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in trials that wants to be effective against all variations of this particular S.O.B.
The government of India approved a new vaccine developed in Texas, that will not require the special technology and refrigeration the mRNA vaccines currently require. If it's just as effective in human usage as it has been in trials, then that'll be one that can be manufactured im mass quantities extremely cheaply and with current technologies all around the world.
There are also vaccine development lines working to be used as a nasal spray and possibly as a powdered form that can be applied with a stick-on patch, so that someone could receive their immunization through the mail, stick it on, keep it there for a half-hour, peel it off, and have good protection. I hope these options also work really well, so that there are as many possible ways of prevention as can be put into practice (the spray and the patch would be perfect for the productivity-obsessed United States so that someone would spend as little time away from work and still get their vaccination. Especially if the side effects were minimized from those delivery methods.)
There's a flurry of data coming through at the moment about using masks again, since we're still in the cycle of new variants making everyone scramble again. Suggestions on what types of masks (and accessories) might help produce the best seal, along with a general suggestion to get a higher class of mask than you currently are using, if you're not already top of the class. If you're a person who is long-bearded, the use of an elastic exercise band may make it possible to get an acceptable fit on high-filtration masks, which is welcome news for anyone whose beard is an important part of their identity (or who is not supposed to shave their hair based on the requirements of their faith). This is not simply a matter of anecdata - studies suggest the exercise band is pretty good for beard-wearing people, and there's an entire paper on the matter as well.
I might personally hope that some of those super-vaccines prove good and can work their way through their trials, because I'm mostly siding with Chuck Wendig that the collective we seems to have run out of patience to keep fighting in the corners that were fighting. Some places, of course, never wanted to actually fight it, but even the places that used to be stringently advocating for stopping the spread seem to have knuckled under to the demands of capitalism that people be in jobs and kids be in schools, because The Economy, rather than using their powers to try and stop the public health crisis first and then enjoy the economic benefits of a healthy workplace, rather than a sick one. What might be their saving grace is if omicron turns out to be a sprint, rather than a marathon, there's a good chance someone might make it through the burst relatively unscathed if they keep doing the protective things they have been and are boosted. Which, again, speaks to the need to get the entire world vaccinated and boosted, rather than saying "we've got ours, fuck you". There is good news, but it's hard to see the good news when there's still a mountain of bad news to work through.
In technology, NFTs are hustlers looking for suckers, according to Brian Eno, and I really would like others to follow that mentality instead of believing they're at the top of the pyramid. Norton 360, the anti-malware software suite, installs malware in the form of a cryptocurrency miner, and then offers the user the ability to turn it on, with Norton taking a 15% cut of anything done. Additionally, Avira, now owned by the same company, is also including a cryptominer. Neither Norton nor Avira is a brand to use any more, then. And it looks like Radio Shack, that venerable institution of parts, is also planning on going crypto. Like Kickstarter. And a whole bunch of other entities that think they can beat the odds or at least makee their money and leave you holding the bag.
The Russian Federal Secrity Bureau conducted a raid on persons who were charged as being part of the REvil Randomware gang, which will hopefully put the lights out for one of those entities, even as several more flourish (and they occasionally apologize for having leaked the data of the rulers of countries of the Arabian penninsula, since those rulers are probably not all that bothered by the prospect of retalitation against those leakers.
The English language doesn't have quite as many neat positive words as it has easy-to-mind depictions of various negativities, but it could change. Or, being English, we might steal some other language's words for our own use as well.Here's some useful holiday-related vocabulary from the past to use in the present.
Studying the brain makes it more likely that we should anthropomorphize it less, which is one of those "well, shit, we as humans think of ourselves as unique, but it's entirely possible our own brains are just really good computers that can call on the assistance of a lot of different functions."
A tool that says it will take your goals and your schedules and do its best to get you a plan for achieving that goal on your schedule, and that can adjust with progress made or not made.
Films and television are tending toward desaturation and not letting their colors out, and it's well, boring sludge when they do. The piece offers some explanations as to why this might be happening (a lot of it revolves around trying to imitate others or to avoid being seen as frivlous), but I would like some color back, please. Let me notice the motifs of how certain characters always seem to have certain colors associated with them, rather than condemning me to seeing all the same kinds of browns, blacks, and grays everywhere. Similarly, can we please take the time and effort needed to get quality sound for as many of the possible experiences a person might have with a piece of media? I use subttiles often because it's easier to see that a line was said or something happened than have to ride the volume on a given work between the nearly unintelligible dialogue and the over-bearing explosion sequences. Which may be the fault of some of the technology I'm using, but I still want to be able to find a setting that I can just leave things on and have 99% of experiences come through audibly
Canon, facing a chip shortage for its printer tanks, reveals that its printers will do just fine without the DRM chips and that consumers can acknowledge the warning and go on as usual. Which, y'know, is good that they decided not to lock out the functionality of a printer because it doesn't have the most expensive first party ink in it instead of cheaper ink that does the job just as well. In a perfect world, these transparently anti-competitive measures that rely on the DMCA as their engorcement mechanism would be squashed very, very firmly, but U.S. lawmakers can't find their own asses with two hands and a map in the middle of a public health crisis, so I'm not holding out any hope that the Senators from HP and Canon will act in the interest of the consumer instead of their corporate donors.
Last for this entry, a solid take on how JRR Tolkein might have reacted to CS Lewis describing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Also, the many works entering the public domain in the United States, finally, that were originally published in the early 1920s. Additionally, other entities are entering the public domain in other countries, which includes a massive, more than 400,000 song collection of recordings entering the public domain. Here's a highlight reel from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections.
(Materials viacmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, firecat, jadelennox, jjhunter, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, vass, 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.)
Ninety-nine global good news stories from 2021, and one bit about pasta. Many of those stories have targets still in the future, but it's one of those situations where things may look bad now, but it could be an extinction burst rather than actual sustainable pushback. An optimistic look at how things went politically in the U.S. in 2021, many of the predictions I would like to see happen in 2022.
Betty White, known for variety, for hosting, for being a comedic old woman, and so, so many other things, died just short of her one hundredth birthday. Sidney Poitier, the first black man to win an Academy Award, died at 94 years of age.
Two first-timers went to DisCon III, one as an attendee and one as part of a finalist team for a Hugo award. One of them had a great time at the convention and saw it as a warm and welcoming place, even if the person they traveled with was a complete asshole. The other person found themselves Othered and subjected to the same kind of micro and macroaggressions that are present throughout the science fiction and fantasy fandoms. It's probably not a surprise that the one who had a good time was light-skinned and the one who didn't was dark-skinned. (And if that wasn't a surprise, you'd probably get accused of being Extremely Online by members of the fandom that were behaving badly toward the other attendees.) Worldcon is an old con, and some part of it being old is that it hasn't managed to communicate clarly to the attendees and fans that the way things were in the early days is no longer acceptable, and that there should be more energy, more paneling, and more everything to indicate that SF/F is not a place where gatekeepers and those holding on to the belief that white men (and, grudgingly, women) are the only people of note in the history of the fandom are welcome to be.
elf has suggestions on how to make WorldCon less welcoming to racists that involve not just saying that they don't tolerate it, but doing things to prove the point and creating an environment where someone who is uncomfortable with all the not-white people around knows to keep that attitude to themselves (or decide not to come), knowing that if they say such a thing, they'll be summarily ejected without refund.Calvinist thinking suits bosses instead of workers, but when your culture is built on Calvinism and capitalism, burnout is not a strange or unexpected result. What is dangled in front of a worker for more 'productivity' rarely materializes, and yet, because capitalism is extremely good at punishing the powerless, we end up with demands that we all have vocational awe for our minimum wage, maximum soul-suck work and even more of that awe if we want to do anything more than entry-level. If we treat the job as a job, even if it's enjoyable, there's always the danger that we'll be let go from the job for not having enough pieces of flair. Or because the CEO wants another yacht.
Despite one hundred years between them, two statements about how the carceral state views women accused of sexual immorality are remarkably similar in their views, which are usually of the idea that a woman who is so accused should be "rehabilitated" to standards of generally white and Christian morality around sex and punished if she doesn't conform to those morals. Those same kinds of morals also tend to not act particularly swiftly when people decide to take photographs or film someone breastfeeding, because "it's the public space" and the assumption is that someone who would breastfeed in public is compmletely okay with that act being used as fap material for others or even to simply become part of someone's collection of explicit images, shared around as commodities instead of the violations of consent they are. Even so, the admonishments I would be most likely to see and hear would be against women for doing something that others are sexualizing, rather than against the people who are doing the sexualization. Even in a public space, it should certainly be possible to engage in breastfeeding without being harrassed, and that includes the harrassment that comes from someone deciding to take some snaps or a video because it's bared breasts.
The United States needs better measures to control the spread of guns and access to guns. Any time a three year-old dies by shooting themself, it is an indication that there are too many unsecured guns around.
A transit system that refuses to stop for people who are absolutely there to ride it and happen to be disabled needs to be made better. Much better.
The Streisand Effect often has some beneficial effects when it's a charity doing good work that gets targeted by reactionaries. A charitable operation to provide lifeboats for those crossing the Channel in small boats get a lot of support when targeted by xenophobes, and the National Trust has done well after it was accused of being woke and revisionist as it began to integrate more of the history of its properties into those places.
Four persons arrested and charged for toppling and dumping a statue of a prominent English slaver were found not to have acted criminally by a jury, which follows other decisions where protestors intended to commit damage or did so and successfully argued that they were taking lawful actions or actions intended to prevent greater damage.
On the other side of the coin, the men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery were sentenced to life in prison, two of the three without the possibility of parole, one who would be required to serve thirty years in prison before being eligible for parole. They willfully took a life, they do not appear to have shown remorse for it, and they appear to have done it for reasons that have much more to do with the skin colors of the people involved than anything else. It is an appropriate punishment in this regard, for it will take a lifetime to attempt repentance for this act.
Almost all things sold as yams in the United States are actually sweet potatoes and not true yams, a woman grabbing a distressed swan and chucking it back into the river where it wanted to be,
The market for goods that can be passed off as 'authentically biblical' often has serious repercussions with regard to looting at archaeological sites, and pseudoscience about the supposed sites of biblical places often exacerbates this problems.
A Princess who risked her royalty to fight for suffrage gets a childrens' book.
A booster vaccination purporting to be "variant-proof" of SARS-CoV-2 is being trialed in Manchester, UK, which means if it holds up, there might be a vaccination that can be given just once more and get extremely broad-spectrum protection. In addition to the vaccination being developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in trials that wants to be effective against all variations of this particular S.O.B.
The government of India approved a new vaccine developed in Texas, that will not require the special technology and refrigeration the mRNA vaccines currently require. If it's just as effective in human usage as it has been in trials, then that'll be one that can be manufactured im mass quantities extremely cheaply and with current technologies all around the world.
There are also vaccine development lines working to be used as a nasal spray and possibly as a powdered form that can be applied with a stick-on patch, so that someone could receive their immunization through the mail, stick it on, keep it there for a half-hour, peel it off, and have good protection. I hope these options also work really well, so that there are as many possible ways of prevention as can be put into practice (the spray and the patch would be perfect for the productivity-obsessed United States so that someone would spend as little time away from work and still get their vaccination. Especially if the side effects were minimized from those delivery methods.)
There's a flurry of data coming through at the moment about using masks again, since we're still in the cycle of new variants making everyone scramble again. Suggestions on what types of masks (and accessories) might help produce the best seal, along with a general suggestion to get a higher class of mask than you currently are using, if you're not already top of the class. If you're a person who is long-bearded, the use of an elastic exercise band may make it possible to get an acceptable fit on high-filtration masks, which is welcome news for anyone whose beard is an important part of their identity (or who is not supposed to shave their hair based on the requirements of their faith). This is not simply a matter of anecdata - studies suggest the exercise band is pretty good for beard-wearing people, and there's an entire paper on the matter as well.
I might personally hope that some of those super-vaccines prove good and can work their way through their trials, because I'm mostly siding with Chuck Wendig that the collective we seems to have run out of patience to keep fighting in the corners that were fighting. Some places, of course, never wanted to actually fight it, but even the places that used to be stringently advocating for stopping the spread seem to have knuckled under to the demands of capitalism that people be in jobs and kids be in schools, because The Economy, rather than using their powers to try and stop the public health crisis first and then enjoy the economic benefits of a healthy workplace, rather than a sick one. What might be their saving grace is if omicron turns out to be a sprint, rather than a marathon, there's a good chance someone might make it through the burst relatively unscathed if they keep doing the protective things they have been and are boosted. Which, again, speaks to the need to get the entire world vaccinated and boosted, rather than saying "we've got ours, fuck you". There is good news, but it's hard to see the good news when there's still a mountain of bad news to work through.
In technology, NFTs are hustlers looking for suckers, according to Brian Eno, and I really would like others to follow that mentality instead of believing they're at the top of the pyramid. Norton 360, the anti-malware software suite, installs malware in the form of a cryptocurrency miner, and then offers the user the ability to turn it on, with Norton taking a 15% cut of anything done. Additionally, Avira, now owned by the same company, is also including a cryptominer. Neither Norton nor Avira is a brand to use any more, then. And it looks like Radio Shack, that venerable institution of parts, is also planning on going crypto. Like Kickstarter. And a whole bunch of other entities that think they can beat the odds or at least makee their money and leave you holding the bag.
The Russian Federal Secrity Bureau conducted a raid on persons who were charged as being part of the REvil Randomware gang, which will hopefully put the lights out for one of those entities, even as several more flourish (and they occasionally apologize for having leaked the data of the rulers of countries of the Arabian penninsula, since those rulers are probably not all that bothered by the prospect of retalitation against those leakers.
The English language doesn't have quite as many neat positive words as it has easy-to-mind depictions of various negativities, but it could change. Or, being English, we might steal some other language's words for our own use as well.Here's some useful holiday-related vocabulary from the past to use in the present.
Studying the brain makes it more likely that we should anthropomorphize it less, which is one of those "well, shit, we as humans think of ourselves as unique, but it's entirely possible our own brains are just really good computers that can call on the assistance of a lot of different functions."
A tool that says it will take your goals and your schedules and do its best to get you a plan for achieving that goal on your schedule, and that can adjust with progress made or not made.
Films and television are tending toward desaturation and not letting their colors out, and it's well, boring sludge when they do. The piece offers some explanations as to why this might be happening (a lot of it revolves around trying to imitate others or to avoid being seen as frivlous), but I would like some color back, please. Let me notice the motifs of how certain characters always seem to have certain colors associated with them, rather than condemning me to seeing all the same kinds of browns, blacks, and grays everywhere. Similarly, can we please take the time and effort needed to get quality sound for as many of the possible experiences a person might have with a piece of media? I use subttiles often because it's easier to see that a line was said or something happened than have to ride the volume on a given work between the nearly unintelligible dialogue and the over-bearing explosion sequences. Which may be the fault of some of the technology I'm using, but I still want to be able to find a setting that I can just leave things on and have 99% of experiences come through audibly
Canon, facing a chip shortage for its printer tanks, reveals that its printers will do just fine without the DRM chips and that consumers can acknowledge the warning and go on as usual. Which, y'know, is good that they decided not to lock out the functionality of a printer because it doesn't have the most expensive first party ink in it instead of cheaper ink that does the job just as well. In a perfect world, these transparently anti-competitive measures that rely on the DMCA as their engorcement mechanism would be squashed very, very firmly, but U.S. lawmakers can't find their own asses with two hands and a map in the middle of a public health crisis, so I'm not holding out any hope that the Senators from HP and Canon will act in the interest of the consumer instead of their corporate donors.
Last for this entry, a solid take on how JRR Tolkein might have reacted to CS Lewis describing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Also, the many works entering the public domain in the United States, finally, that were originally published in the early 1920s. Additionally, other entities are entering the public domain in other countries, which includes a massive, more than 400,000 song collection of recordings entering the public domain. Here's a highlight reel from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections.
(Materials via
cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, firecat, jadelennox, jjhunter, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, vass, 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.)
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Date: 2022-01-16 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-16 07:31 pm (UTC)