Data dump, end of January 02022.
Jan. 30th, 2022 12:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGreetings! Let's start with a list of playing with tropes, started by resonant, with the test ideas being "sex pollen," "telepathy," and "fake marriage."
On matters where stuff gets lost in translation, the French president had strong words to say about the unvaccinated in his country, but how he said it doesn't translate perfectly. (This piece is about the linguistics, not the people being spoken to.)
Meat Loaf, who saw a career happen, a career tank, and then a resurgence, before eventually fading out, gets to watch all the stage shows of the RHPS now, at 74 years of age. Along with him, Louie Anderson, funny man and one-time game show host, from complications of cancer (fuck cancer forever), at 68 years of age.
A bunch of cryptobros raised money to buy a copy of a never-produced adaptation of Dune, and thought that would give them the rights to make such an adaptation. Cue large amounts of mockery about the ability to raise large sums of money on pretenses that would never hold up in court. Wait, where have I heard that before…
If you would like more clowning on NFT bros, a tampermonkey script to overlay a ribbon on top of any NFT-linked avatar, along with third-party tools to detect and automatically or manually block those using NFTs as their avatars or that associate their Twitter accounts with crypto wallets. And also, after creating much hype about the idea of "Picasso NFTs", it turns out they have nothing to do with Pablo Picasso at all, but Florian Picasso.
The Pratchett estate has endorsed the use of Vimes' name for a poverty index showcasing the insidious way in which the rising costs of basic staples takes more away from low earners that high earners can absorb without blinking.
Allegations that Boris Johnson held a large unmasked birthday party right in the middle of stringent lockdown requirements in the UK, the biggest and most hypocritical of the parties that his government has been holding in defiance of their own requirements for others. Like all proper scandals, of course, the attempts to cover up what has happened have only made it worse, with even more information coming out and even more rule-breaking confessed to in trying to avoid accepting responsibility for the original rule-breaking. And then intimidation, bribery, and hypocraisy starts coming out in spades as son as it becomes clear that Boris Johnson doesn't actually have enough power to keep anything out of the press or from going to the investigators. Including, apparently, how staffers had to use ever more stringent methods to keep Boris Johnson from being infectious around his coworkers when he had COVID, because he kept wanting to get too close to them and circumvent the rules that were put in place for him. Which makes sense, given how much the government apparently wants us to believe that they considered themselves a household bubble that didn't need to distance from each other.
A Tennessee school board decided that the word damn and naked mice meant they couldn't possibly allow Maus, the graphic novel about the Holocaust that recasts Nazis as cats and Jews as mice, to be available for the childrens to peruse. Because, of course, if they said the real reason why they wanted to ban the book, because it lays plain their own failings to recognize how their own beliefs have become authoritarian [YouTube], then they would have the self-awareness to realize why they should not ban the book.
brithistorian had a set of several authors giving writing tips. Margaret Atwood was both brutal and practical, Neil Gaiman insists on continuing on the journey and keeping up with the practice, Vonnegut wants us to be ourselves, when advocating for as little artifice as possible.
Vonnegut also suggested that story arcs could be drawn out on graph paper, which is the kind of observation that people assume has to be too simple to be a real observation. But then you can see how the simple idea of the story arcs can be expanded upon and linked with all sorts of other ideas.
Twine, the tool, means a lot of interactive fiction made ready for the Web, so there will be best-of lists for Twine-type games, and, because writing a visual novel or an interactive fiction is an exercise in writing, all the same, there will be material about common storytelling structures in IF or choice games, various types of choices that will show up in those games or novels, advice on writing any kind of project, along with many links of resources, and, of course, making sure that your project stays within the scope that it has, especially if you need to make a project within 48 hours. That last one is especially important when your team are the kinds of people who will have all sorts of ideas but then will need help pruning them and then transforming them from ideas into actual finished products.
The legacy of Vonda N. McIntyre, writer and funder of Clarion West and Writing The Other. The article is extremely poorly formatted, with the inserts for buying the books after the paragraphs they're mentioned in, but crocheted sea creatures and a lot of support of writers who need all the advantages they can gain to get their works published.
Ephemera, including tickets, often says quite a bit about the society of the people who held them, whether for events, life situations, or because they wanted to make fun of someone else.
Captain Awkward reminds us that the pursuit of perfect understanding is often a trap to get out of having to actually do anything, whether you're the person that's tried to explain it in just the right way, or the person who's resisting doing things that will be beneficial to others because of worries about screwing it up or being imperfect. Understanding comes with experience, and experience comes, more often than not, with things that you look back on and say "Classic Jorts."
Romantic relationships between cis and trans people are possible, without things tipping over into hatred, shame, or fetishization. They may not always be the norm yet, but this seems to be one of those things that's gaining ground and acceptance through the increased amount of visibility and acceptance of trans people.
Some of the UK's first sexual health clinics managed to defeat the opposition to disseminating contraceptive information by framing it as providing young and unmarried people with the information and advice they would need to be responsible family planners. Because if you orient the discussion toward making sure that you don't create unwanted pregnancies and families that will fall apart, rather than as a woman's right to have pleasurable sex without unintended consequences, you can often sneak something past the prudes. But also, I think it would be really nice if, especially here in the States, where the thought of talking about any part of sex that isn't "get married and fimly lifetimely entangled and then figure it out for yourself" cause apoplexy among politicians and parents alike, useful information could very well be framed as responsible family planning rather than any other thing. Mind you, the people shrieking about obscenity in materials meant for audiences that can handle a single mention of masturbation or a single panel with nudity aren't interested in responsible family planning, they're interested in punishment and control, but it would be nice if the sensible position could exist and push back on the fringe position so as to make them look silly to both liberals and conservatives.
William Dorsey Swann, one of the first documented drag queens, who was apparently pretty out for his time, given the kind of court charges (and convictions) he racked up and the pardons submitted on his behalf (he was not pardoned for being noticeably queer).
History, as a discipline, often finds itself with competing aims of accurately documenting things versus replicating hagiographies in the hopes of getting as much of the truth as possible out. Which can mean inquiring more into a limited scope, limited inquiry report about "mother and baby homes" in Ireland that wants to call itself definitive. Sometimes that means pointing out that someone's rags-to-riches stories are based on patronage, rather than industry or the way in which boyhood became put on a pedestal after imperialism fought two wars where many of the men lost any pretense of innocence they might have had.
The kinds of people who make prayer requests for themselves and others have taken to apps, and the people who have invested in those apps are probably more interested in the data they get from those prayerful people than their connection or community. Because I'm fairly certain they think of the religious folk looking for prayers as the kinds of marks that would be very good to obtain data on so they can sell them not just the properity gospel, but the kinds of things that will make the gospel-preachers prosperous.
Finding the mythic crocodile buried under the boards of the school, building the boxes for swifts and other animals to nest in, dangling tasty sausages by drone to get a frightened dog off mud flats in danger of flooding, a robot vaccuum making a break for the great wilderness, but, much like a housecat who finds themselves suddenly Outside, no matter what they believe, the robot was found close to home, hiding in the tall grass, interesting creatures found in the very deep sea in 2021, an interactive scroll from the surface of the water to the very deepest point in the oceans, cataloging many of the life forms found at various depths beneath the surface, which peters out a lot as you get deeper, but never actually goes away, and cats using the warmest satellite dish as an outdoor bed.
Photographs of architecture from all sorts of angles, pictures of snowfall in the desert, along with the definite need to stop fetishizing old houses and outlawing the construction of new, denser units (or even new, more modern units).
The people living and drawing cartoons in the 01918 influenza outbreak had many of the same opinions of the people living in the 02019 SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, inlcuding at least a few cantankerous folk willing to give a thump to those who scoff at the effectiveness of masking.
The world as it was before the pandemic is not a utopia to return to, it is a stark nightmare to be avoided, but there doesn't appear to be any will in the halls of government for the party that might try to improve things to improve things. The other party has already declared their intent is to establish a country where they and their rich friends are unfettered by any constraints and are given control over the rest of us to do with whatever they wish, and there are still too many people who believe that by fawning at their feet, they will be spared from being cast into slavery and serfdom with the people those same autocrats want to frame as The Enemy.
It looks like there's much more increased risk for erectile dysfunction after a COVID-19 infection, which makes for the much punchier short form of "Yep, COVID Dick can happen." Now we get to find out whether it really would be true that dudes will get a simple free medical treatment becuse the alternative threatens their testicles. (Given that sometimes people forget that it's not just HIV that's an STI, well, we'll see…)
Because the way we get out of this is to behave as though we all depend on each other, because we do, rather than assuming the disabled can be sacrificed and those who become disabled can also be sacrificed. And, perhaps, if we can start practicing it on this phase, we can learn that it's better and apply it to the other systemic changes that need to be handled in our lifetimes. Because solidarity in these cases is being the least possible infection risk that you can be. So maintain your protective measures, rather than believing this one is the one you should get infected with, because your infection will probably jump to many more people, including people who can handle it less well than you. And maintain them because the hospital system is still overwhelmed and stretched to the breaking point because of all the people who do need their help with COVID infections.
And if none of those things work for you, wearing a high quality, well-fit mask for yourself can still provide a good amount of protection along with being up to date on your vaccinations. Even if you are surrounded by dinguses who don't believe they should, or are in places where the government has forbidden anyone from mandating that you wear a mask in their space. Or are slow about telling you that you have better options.
The things that we have watched and done that were supposed to get us through the pandemic are becoming reminders of how terrible things are and have been. Which, yeah, listening to Starship Therapise and having the leads talk about parasocial relationships in comparison to the social relationships, and how sometimes we have less healthy parasocial relationships with celebrities and others that we don't know as well, I can see how those parasocial relationships get soured by the fact that we begin to feel like we're spending too much time in the parasocial relationship rather than social ones, and then begin to resent that the only relationships we seem to be able to create are parasocial ones.
If you can mask, the KF94 seems to hit the sweet spot between aesthetically pleasing and high-grade filtration. As someone whose ears have begun to get annoyed at wearing KF94s at work for weeks upon end, having N95s to swap in so that my nose can take the brunt of mask-wearing for workdays will be good for me so as to give rest to the appropriate organ that hates me the most at that moment. The CDC wants you to wear as good a grade of mask as you can get. That means that the ones you might get at a store or a library will not be the most effective mask you can wear. Still better than none, though. Ones that fit your face better are better for you, but even ones that aren't fit-tested to you are better than the lower-grade ones. But, really, upgrade your mask game, please. Have some guidance on how to spot real masks from fakers. And when you do get a good upgrade, a handy guide about how to make them last as long as they can.
a Twitter list of places that sell the N95-type mask for less than $1.50 / mask in the United States.
One last piece of what we hope is good news. Clinical trials are underway for an mRNA-based vaccination for HIV-1, which, if successful, could mean victory against a pandemic that has plagued us for far longer than it should have been able to.
In technology, a package tracker that can interpret all sorts of different carriers' tracking numbers, so you can check on all of your packages at once.
The safety and security of e-mail as private and requiring a warrant to search happened thanks to Smilin' Bob and the 'natural' male enhancement pills he was selling in late night ads and online. The warrant requirement for e-mail didn't help the fraud case against the makers of Enzyte, but it did establish taht the government is supposed to obtain warrants to tap communications or access private spaces. Not that always do so, and it's not always the case that the court they decide to use is a public one where that information eventually comes out.
The US 5G C Band rollout appears to run interference up into the band used by aviation altimeters, creating a conflict where planes may not report their accurate altitude at the very stressful point of landing the plane. Something something all those FCC 15 part B warnings, but also this problem is only going to get worse as higher and higher spectrum is demanded to deliver more bandwidth to mobile devices. If there isn't a guard around specific frequencies, there's going to be spillover and interference, and nobody wants their pilot to suddenly be bereft of their instruments at crucial times.
There are lessons to be learned from the delays and deployments of the James Webb Space Telescope, most of them in learning how to be realistic with cost estimates and the complexity of the design of such an instrument.
Drones equipped with automatic external defibrilators are deployed in Sweden as a faster-moving assistance unit while the ambulances are on their way. For situations in which an AED is useful, speed in getting the AED to someone is crucial to its effectiveness. And since they are in places where the public is expected to need to use them, most AEDs will walk a person through their requirements and processes for effective use (and if you have an emergency dispatcher on hand, they can probably help the rest of the process.
Candy Crush Saga works on the same principles of "endless scroll" kinds of social media, where the content that's on the platform is secondary to the advertising and the attempts to get someone to spend money on a short-term premium or to boost their chances of succeeding. Worlde, on the other hand, offers content without advertising and without any attempts to keep someone there after they've encountered the single word for the day, which often reflects other, slower, less endless social media sites. Like Dreamwidth. And, for people who want to manage their time, something that's offering bigger bites in discrete entities, that can be put in their own tab and thought about is often more useful than an endless scroll of memes, status updates, and shitposts where the idea is to click a button to register your reaction and go forward with it, because while you were considering what button to click, ten more posts have already arrived.
The crypto bubble wobbles a touch, but whether this is the beginning of the crash or merely the signal for more to join the scheme is not yet known. We can hope it will be a crash in time, so that all the mining rigs and their considerable power draw can be taken off the grid.
All of the snow being used in the upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Beijing will be artificial, which has not very good implications for the snow for further Winter Olympic Games hosts if climate change isn't taken care of, such that there could be a place somewhere with enough snow and good conditions to avoid needing to create artificial snowfall to host the games.
Last for tonight, an interview with Joss Whedon about the strong shift in opinion about him from being a feminist god to the demon of feminism. It does a really good job of letting Joss speak for himself, which for someone who wants to lionize him, will give them room to do so, and for those who believe that he never deserved to be lionized, it will confirm for them what they understand about him. The last line of the piece, delivered by Joss, says much about him and the media landscape, regardless of whether you read it as a genuine statement or as self-serving bullshit.
And something much lighter-fare, why context is important in describing a film you have seen and enjoyed to others.
(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.)
resonant, with the test ideas being "sex pollen," "telepathy," and "fake marriage." On matters where stuff gets lost in translation, the French president had strong words to say about the unvaccinated in his country, but how he said it doesn't translate perfectly. (This piece is about the linguistics, not the people being spoken to.)
Meat Loaf, who saw a career happen, a career tank, and then a resurgence, before eventually fading out, gets to watch all the stage shows of the RHPS now, at 74 years of age. Along with him, Louie Anderson, funny man and one-time game show host, from complications of cancer (fuck cancer forever), at 68 years of age.
A bunch of cryptobros raised money to buy a copy of a never-produced adaptation of Dune, and thought that would give them the rights to make such an adaptation. Cue large amounts of mockery about the ability to raise large sums of money on pretenses that would never hold up in court. Wait, where have I heard that before…
If you would like more clowning on NFT bros, a tampermonkey script to overlay a ribbon on top of any NFT-linked avatar, along with third-party tools to detect and automatically or manually block those using NFTs as their avatars or that associate their Twitter accounts with crypto wallets. And also, after creating much hype about the idea of "Picasso NFTs", it turns out they have nothing to do with Pablo Picasso at all, but Florian Picasso.
The Pratchett estate has endorsed the use of Vimes' name for a poverty index showcasing the insidious way in which the rising costs of basic staples takes more away from low earners that high earners can absorb without blinking.
Allegations that Boris Johnson held a large unmasked birthday party right in the middle of stringent lockdown requirements in the UK, the biggest and most hypocritical of the parties that his government has been holding in defiance of their own requirements for others. Like all proper scandals, of course, the attempts to cover up what has happened have only made it worse, with even more information coming out and even more rule-breaking confessed to in trying to avoid accepting responsibility for the original rule-breaking. And then intimidation, bribery, and hypocraisy starts coming out in spades as son as it becomes clear that Boris Johnson doesn't actually have enough power to keep anything out of the press or from going to the investigators. Including, apparently, how staffers had to use ever more stringent methods to keep Boris Johnson from being infectious around his coworkers when he had COVID, because he kept wanting to get too close to them and circumvent the rules that were put in place for him. Which makes sense, given how much the government apparently wants us to believe that they considered themselves a household bubble that didn't need to distance from each other.
A Tennessee school board decided that the word damn and naked mice meant they couldn't possibly allow Maus, the graphic novel about the Holocaust that recasts Nazis as cats and Jews as mice, to be available for the childrens to peruse. Because, of course, if they said the real reason why they wanted to ban the book, because it lays plain their own failings to recognize how their own beliefs have become authoritarian [YouTube], then they would have the self-awareness to realize why they should not ban the book.
brithistorian had a set of several authors giving writing tips. Margaret Atwood was both brutal and practical, Neil Gaiman insists on continuing on the journey and keeping up with the practice, Vonnegut wants us to be ourselves, when advocating for as little artifice as possible.Vonnegut also suggested that story arcs could be drawn out on graph paper, which is the kind of observation that people assume has to be too simple to be a real observation. But then you can see how the simple idea of the story arcs can be expanded upon and linked with all sorts of other ideas.
Twine, the tool, means a lot of interactive fiction made ready for the Web, so there will be best-of lists for Twine-type games, and, because writing a visual novel or an interactive fiction is an exercise in writing, all the same, there will be material about common storytelling structures in IF or choice games, various types of choices that will show up in those games or novels, advice on writing any kind of project, along with many links of resources, and, of course, making sure that your project stays within the scope that it has, especially if you need to make a project within 48 hours. That last one is especially important when your team are the kinds of people who will have all sorts of ideas but then will need help pruning them and then transforming them from ideas into actual finished products.
The legacy of Vonda N. McIntyre, writer and funder of Clarion West and Writing The Other. The article is extremely poorly formatted, with the inserts for buying the books after the paragraphs they're mentioned in, but crocheted sea creatures and a lot of support of writers who need all the advantages they can gain to get their works published.
Ephemera, including tickets, often says quite a bit about the society of the people who held them, whether for events, life situations, or because they wanted to make fun of someone else.
Captain Awkward reminds us that the pursuit of perfect understanding is often a trap to get out of having to actually do anything, whether you're the person that's tried to explain it in just the right way, or the person who's resisting doing things that will be beneficial to others because of worries about screwing it up or being imperfect. Understanding comes with experience, and experience comes, more often than not, with things that you look back on and say "Classic Jorts."
Romantic relationships between cis and trans people are possible, without things tipping over into hatred, shame, or fetishization. They may not always be the norm yet, but this seems to be one of those things that's gaining ground and acceptance through the increased amount of visibility and acceptance of trans people.
Some of the UK's first sexual health clinics managed to defeat the opposition to disseminating contraceptive information by framing it as providing young and unmarried people with the information and advice they would need to be responsible family planners. Because if you orient the discussion toward making sure that you don't create unwanted pregnancies and families that will fall apart, rather than as a woman's right to have pleasurable sex without unintended consequences, you can often sneak something past the prudes. But also, I think it would be really nice if, especially here in the States, where the thought of talking about any part of sex that isn't "get married and fimly lifetimely entangled and then figure it out for yourself" cause apoplexy among politicians and parents alike, useful information could very well be framed as responsible family planning rather than any other thing. Mind you, the people shrieking about obscenity in materials meant for audiences that can handle a single mention of masturbation or a single panel with nudity aren't interested in responsible family planning, they're interested in punishment and control, but it would be nice if the sensible position could exist and push back on the fringe position so as to make them look silly to both liberals and conservatives.
William Dorsey Swann, one of the first documented drag queens, who was apparently pretty out for his time, given the kind of court charges (and convictions) he racked up and the pardons submitted on his behalf (he was not pardoned for being noticeably queer).
History, as a discipline, often finds itself with competing aims of accurately documenting things versus replicating hagiographies in the hopes of getting as much of the truth as possible out. Which can mean inquiring more into a limited scope, limited inquiry report about "mother and baby homes" in Ireland that wants to call itself definitive. Sometimes that means pointing out that someone's rags-to-riches stories are based on patronage, rather than industry or the way in which boyhood became put on a pedestal after imperialism fought two wars where many of the men lost any pretense of innocence they might have had.
The kinds of people who make prayer requests for themselves and others have taken to apps, and the people who have invested in those apps are probably more interested in the data they get from those prayerful people than their connection or community. Because I'm fairly certain they think of the religious folk looking for prayers as the kinds of marks that would be very good to obtain data on so they can sell them not just the properity gospel, but the kinds of things that will make the gospel-preachers prosperous.
Finding the mythic crocodile buried under the boards of the school, building the boxes for swifts and other animals to nest in, dangling tasty sausages by drone to get a frightened dog off mud flats in danger of flooding, a robot vaccuum making a break for the great wilderness, but, much like a housecat who finds themselves suddenly Outside, no matter what they believe, the robot was found close to home, hiding in the tall grass, interesting creatures found in the very deep sea in 2021, an interactive scroll from the surface of the water to the very deepest point in the oceans, cataloging many of the life forms found at various depths beneath the surface, which peters out a lot as you get deeper, but never actually goes away, and cats using the warmest satellite dish as an outdoor bed.
Photographs of architecture from all sorts of angles, pictures of snowfall in the desert, along with the definite need to stop fetishizing old houses and outlawing the construction of new, denser units (or even new, more modern units).
The people living and drawing cartoons in the 01918 influenza outbreak had many of the same opinions of the people living in the 02019 SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, inlcuding at least a few cantankerous folk willing to give a thump to those who scoff at the effectiveness of masking.
The world as it was before the pandemic is not a utopia to return to, it is a stark nightmare to be avoided, but there doesn't appear to be any will in the halls of government for the party that might try to improve things to improve things. The other party has already declared their intent is to establish a country where they and their rich friends are unfettered by any constraints and are given control over the rest of us to do with whatever they wish, and there are still too many people who believe that by fawning at their feet, they will be spared from being cast into slavery and serfdom with the people those same autocrats want to frame as The Enemy.
It looks like there's much more increased risk for erectile dysfunction after a COVID-19 infection, which makes for the much punchier short form of "Yep, COVID Dick can happen." Now we get to find out whether it really would be true that dudes will get a simple free medical treatment becuse the alternative threatens their testicles. (Given that sometimes people forget that it's not just HIV that's an STI, well, we'll see…)
Because the way we get out of this is to behave as though we all depend on each other, because we do, rather than assuming the disabled can be sacrificed and those who become disabled can also be sacrificed. And, perhaps, if we can start practicing it on this phase, we can learn that it's better and apply it to the other systemic changes that need to be handled in our lifetimes. Because solidarity in these cases is being the least possible infection risk that you can be. So maintain your protective measures, rather than believing this one is the one you should get infected with, because your infection will probably jump to many more people, including people who can handle it less well than you. And maintain them because the hospital system is still overwhelmed and stretched to the breaking point because of all the people who do need their help with COVID infections.
And if none of those things work for you, wearing a high quality, well-fit mask for yourself can still provide a good amount of protection along with being up to date on your vaccinations. Even if you are surrounded by dinguses who don't believe they should, or are in places where the government has forbidden anyone from mandating that you wear a mask in their space. Or are slow about telling you that you have better options.
The things that we have watched and done that were supposed to get us through the pandemic are becoming reminders of how terrible things are and have been. Which, yeah, listening to Starship Therapise and having the leads talk about parasocial relationships in comparison to the social relationships, and how sometimes we have less healthy parasocial relationships with celebrities and others that we don't know as well, I can see how those parasocial relationships get soured by the fact that we begin to feel like we're spending too much time in the parasocial relationship rather than social ones, and then begin to resent that the only relationships we seem to be able to create are parasocial ones.
If you can mask, the KF94 seems to hit the sweet spot between aesthetically pleasing and high-grade filtration. As someone whose ears have begun to get annoyed at wearing KF94s at work for weeks upon end, having N95s to swap in so that my nose can take the brunt of mask-wearing for workdays will be good for me so as to give rest to the appropriate organ that hates me the most at that moment. The CDC wants you to wear as good a grade of mask as you can get. That means that the ones you might get at a store or a library will not be the most effective mask you can wear. Still better than none, though. Ones that fit your face better are better for you, but even ones that aren't fit-tested to you are better than the lower-grade ones. But, really, upgrade your mask game, please. Have some guidance on how to spot real masks from fakers. And when you do get a good upgrade, a handy guide about how to make them last as long as they can.
a Twitter list of places that sell the N95-type mask for less than $1.50 / mask in the United States.
One last piece of what we hope is good news. Clinical trials are underway for an mRNA-based vaccination for HIV-1, which, if successful, could mean victory against a pandemic that has plagued us for far longer than it should have been able to.
In technology, a package tracker that can interpret all sorts of different carriers' tracking numbers, so you can check on all of your packages at once.
The safety and security of e-mail as private and requiring a warrant to search happened thanks to Smilin' Bob and the 'natural' male enhancement pills he was selling in late night ads and online. The warrant requirement for e-mail didn't help the fraud case against the makers of Enzyte, but it did establish taht the government is supposed to obtain warrants to tap communications or access private spaces. Not that always do so, and it's not always the case that the court they decide to use is a public one where that information eventually comes out.
The US 5G C Band rollout appears to run interference up into the band used by aviation altimeters, creating a conflict where planes may not report their accurate altitude at the very stressful point of landing the plane. Something something all those FCC 15 part B warnings, but also this problem is only going to get worse as higher and higher spectrum is demanded to deliver more bandwidth to mobile devices. If there isn't a guard around specific frequencies, there's going to be spillover and interference, and nobody wants their pilot to suddenly be bereft of their instruments at crucial times.
There are lessons to be learned from the delays and deployments of the James Webb Space Telescope, most of them in learning how to be realistic with cost estimates and the complexity of the design of such an instrument.
Drones equipped with automatic external defibrilators are deployed in Sweden as a faster-moving assistance unit while the ambulances are on their way. For situations in which an AED is useful, speed in getting the AED to someone is crucial to its effectiveness. And since they are in places where the public is expected to need to use them, most AEDs will walk a person through their requirements and processes for effective use (and if you have an emergency dispatcher on hand, they can probably help the rest of the process.
Candy Crush Saga works on the same principles of "endless scroll" kinds of social media, where the content that's on the platform is secondary to the advertising and the attempts to get someone to spend money on a short-term premium or to boost their chances of succeeding. Worlde, on the other hand, offers content without advertising and without any attempts to keep someone there after they've encountered the single word for the day, which often reflects other, slower, less endless social media sites. Like Dreamwidth. And, for people who want to manage their time, something that's offering bigger bites in discrete entities, that can be put in their own tab and thought about is often more useful than an endless scroll of memes, status updates, and shitposts where the idea is to click a button to register your reaction and go forward with it, because while you were considering what button to click, ten more posts have already arrived.
The crypto bubble wobbles a touch, but whether this is the beginning of the crash or merely the signal for more to join the scheme is not yet known. We can hope it will be a crash in time, so that all the mining rigs and their considerable power draw can be taken off the grid.
All of the snow being used in the upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Beijing will be artificial, which has not very good implications for the snow for further Winter Olympic Games hosts if climate change isn't taken care of, such that there could be a place somewhere with enough snow and good conditions to avoid needing to create artificial snowfall to host the games.
Last for tonight, an interview with Joss Whedon about the strong shift in opinion about him from being a feminist god to the demon of feminism. It does a really good job of letting Joss speak for himself, which for someone who wants to lionize him, will give them room to do so, and for those who believe that he never deserved to be lionized, it will confirm for them what they understand about him. The last line of the piece, delivered by Joss, says much about him and the media landscape, regardless of whether you read it as a genuine statement or as self-serving bullshit.
And something much lighter-fare, why context is important in describing a film you have seen and enjoyed to others.
(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: 2022-01-30 10:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-30 10:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-30 11:28 am (UTC)Re: Joss Whedon, I think people who lionised him as a feminist enabled his worst tendencies. Not that I believe him an innocent being led astray by fandom, or something, but when you get put up on a pedestal, it's easy to not hear the people trying to shout up critiques to you. I wish we didn't do that to creators. I think some of them wouldn't be such dicks in the first place.
Joss Whedon might well be, this is really a more general point.
(I always thought he created compelling stories marked by his own flaws, and consumed them knowing that. He wasn't the only person to create those worlds; I enjoy the dignity that Morena Baccarin brought to Inara Serra, despite the contempt in which Whedon held the character's profession, for example. The Firefly cast in particular gave a lot to their characters and the bond between them, and it shows.)
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Date: 2022-01-30 06:57 pm (UTC)Not lionizing and putting people on pedestals is definitely a thing at could do better, but it sometimes feels like the entire society is oriented such that the more money you make for yourself or Uther's, the less you have to care about what you're doing to others and how you treat them.
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Date: 2022-01-30 11:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-30 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-30 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-30 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-30 11:00 pm (UTC)OTOH, it doesn't track shipping containers or some of the other more esoteric options that the one you linked does....
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Date: 2022-01-30 11:45 pm (UTC)