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silveradeptGood morning! Let's begin with letting the AI out to construct some convention panel names, many of which on that list are panels that either have happened or desperately should.
Bloom County, the comic strip, is going to become Bloom County, the animation, which, well, we'll see whether it's able to do as much as Bloom County did in newspaper strips.
For people who have decided that the single Wordle is not enough for them to handle, there now exists Dordle, which gives the player an additional two guesses to find two words, where each guess is for both words until one is found, and Quordle, which ups the guesses to nine but has four words to find in that set of nine. (And some of those Quordle words use a lot of unique letters not present in the other words, so you're going to spend a lot of guesses hoping you get lucky enough to get information from your other guesses to succeed. Expect word 4 to arrive on guess 8 or 9.) There's also Semantle, which asks you to find the target word, and the clues involve telling you how semantically close (in the target wordset) the guessed word is to the target word and Worldle, which instead gives you the silhouette of a country and then hints about how far away you are from the correct country, and what general cardinal direction you'll have to travel that distance to get to the correct country.
A star from the Russian Olympic Committee returned a positive test for a banned substance, reigniting the cloud of suspicion and anger around the ROC and doping scandals that have already resulted in "Russia", the entity, not bing allowed to compete in the Games. While there are columnists who want to claim that Valieva's performance by itself is proof she's not doping, because it's too pure and innocent to have been, I feel they'd have a more convincing argument with the other thing mentioned in this column linked, which is "Be skeptical of the World Anti-Doping Agency's ability to find their own ass with two hands and a map, much less competently be able to determine if someone is taking performance-enchancers." In favor of that position is the 45-day delay between a the submitted sample and the results being available, which was well after the point that the skater was competing and had won a gold medal. And had landed the first women's quadruple jump in Olympic competition. Even if the scandal comes clear, though, the training regimen and the other possible use of the drug in question as something to help with disordered eating should also produce investigations to see whether the people involved should be barred for gross negligence of and active harm to their athletes. Because the women's free skate final had three different athletes from the same coach, including Valieva, and there was a lot of negative emotion on display, from performers and coach, which is a bigger indictment of the coack and training methods than the skaters. At a certain point, with how much and how often the training seems to do great damage to the young bodies involved, raising the minimum age of participation in the Olympics (and other senior-level competitions) seems much wiser for the long-term health of any sport currently consumed by the need for youth.
The IOC's fidelity to their sponsors and the money they bring had them reverse a previous approval of a snowboard, and so, rather than potentially compromise the ability of the board to do its job, the snowboarder who was so informed withdrew from their next scheduled competition.
The concept of the Depth Year, where a person, instead of looking for a new thing, looks to improve the things they already have learned, or takes on the TBR pile instead of reading it, or similar. Having proposed it, the largest takeaway from shifting to a depth-focused mindset is that you run into the possibility that you have to confront your own feelings about competence and excellence. And you might have to confront the fantasy self that believes you can be fully satisfied through material, commercial, capitalist forms of being.
Historians are not the crafters of narrative, they are the keepers of what happened, which often means they are more useful to counternarrative or the destruction of historiography and myth than to those who want to maintain the fiction that the emperor has clothing. So they need to document and keep the times when non-Natives tried to ban Native dances as being too sexual in nature,
Pristine shade being thrown by a freed slave to the man who enslaved him, making an eminently reasonable demand that if the old master wants to prove he is a virtuous and righteous man, he will send the balance due of the wages owed to the freed slave and his sister. Frederick Douglass also sent a blistering letter to his previous master about the good Christian conduct that never happened to him or the other slaves and the kind of reputation the former master has in Douglass's new company.
No matter where you are, there's probably queer history, some of it having existed openly, with the knowledge of the community, and without any sort of moral outrage.
Beware falling into the trap of thinking as a character as Representation first, with the attendant demand that they avoid any and all negative image of their subgroup, before evaluating them as a character in the story being told. As I have been reading around (most recently in Black Nerd Problems, the book), we have to be willing to afford non-dominant creators the ability to have works that are less than perfect, and even some of them being bad, without it reflecting on their entire group(s) as a whole. When we can take our pick of six movies, and know that there will be six more, and so it doesn't matter if four of them are bombs, then we'll be making progress.
The scandal around Boris Johnson's parties and other terrible behavior continues to explode around him, with yet more evidence that not only did he participate in things that were illegal by his own rules, he's also resorted to increasingly more desperate measures to try and keep his coalition from no-confidencing him out of office. Although, the ideal result for most people would be for the Tories to get sent away from the halls of government for a very long while.
A changed word in the ritual has twenty years' of a Roman Catholic priest's baptisms ruled invalid by the Bishop of Rome and the Inquisition. The priest has resigned and apologized for the problem, although there are probably some loopholes that someone could exploit if they were in the correct situation and desired to do so. That said, for those who are not Roman Catholic, the problem is most analagous to summoning and magics that have to be performed exactly correctly in word and gesture, or Bad Things Happen. Jack Chick would probably have had a field day with this, were he stil alive and producing his tracts, about how it's obvious now that the Roman Catholics aren't Real True Christians if they have to worry about their words. (Yet another reminder that for as much as the Bishop of Rome is trying to be a liberal on many social issues, the Pope's still a Roman Catholic and Roman Catholics are just as good as any fundamentalist denomination about the amount of control they desire to exercise over their adherents.)
If and when the Roe decision is overturned, it should be replaced with better and more comprehensive protections for women, both in law and in requiring the medical profession to be trained on how to perform abortions. There's also a lot of very preventable public health issues that need to be addressed, because a one-hundred percent preventable problem, babies with syphilis infections, isn't 100 percent prevented, often because public health infrastructure isn't robust enough or the other parts of infrastructure aren't robust enough, so people with the least means and the greatest need often can't get what they needed.
A hen taken into custody for wandering around a Pentagon security checkpoint, a kea that snagged a filming camera for a short flight, a cat who has stolen shoes, brassieres, and now panties, drug paraphenalia, and possibly drugs themselves, the winners of an Underwater Photographer of the Year competition, an international Garden Photographer winner, more award-winning wildlife photography, and the oldest tortoise still having a good time at 190 years.
A zine made for a neighbor that keeps stealing packages, that, so far, has not actually been stolen in the decoy package left, and the entirely manufactured scandal of a woman showing her true opinion of someone and their running of the country (we need more people, women and men both, scowling at politicians they think are doing a terrible job).
Novavax clears the regulatory requirements for the United Kingdom for use in over-18s, which adds another one into the mix of possibilities. (Get your shots and wear your masks if you can, and hopefully everyone can get both vaccinations and PPE for themselves very soon.)
We're entering the third year of a pandemic, but instead of pulling together and providing support to those who need it, things seem to be worse off than when we started, because the drumbeat has aleays been that we need to go back to the way things were, or that things would be okay when the vaccines arrived, or any one of a humdred other things to signify the return of normality, rather than acknowledging that things never were normal, and they're only getting less so. And for the people who never had a normal to get back to, the re-abandonment of the social contract has left people who need to shield without support and with a society around them that seems to assume they should accept the risk of dying if they want to do anything.
The Johnson government intends to roll back several measures to help keep the population safer from COVID-19 infection. As best I can tell, not even Queen Elizabeth getting a positive test is going to stop him from getting rid of the restrictions in a desperate bid to stay in power.
Protesters in New Zealand who want more open borders and less mandates were met with Barry Manilow and the sprinkler systems in a effort to get them to disperse. The article then goes on to point out with numbers and statistics that the NZ government is probably one of the most competent ones with regard to virus response.
Many of the stories we want to hear have the shapes of stories that Vonnegut talk about, but many of the events of our lives, including the current pandemic, do not follow the shapes of our stories. Which, y'know, when you're waiting for a happy ending, or a reward for the sacrifices made, or the justice that is so long denied, can be a real source of stress and anxiety.
After Joe Rogan spread COVID misinformation on his show hosted exclusively on Spotify, musician Neil Young demanded Spotify remove his music for their platform. Which they did, and that began the firestorm against Rogan (and the misaimed claims that there was censorship demanded or afoot). Joni Mitchell also pulled her music from the platform. Given that we know that dollars drive decisions more than people, Rogan went on the apaology tour and thanked Spotify for their support, but if the dollars continue to drop, then Spotify is way more likely to yank Rogan for that. Which would cue another firestorm about "censorship" that would be wildly inapplicable, since private companies in the United States have very few First Amendment obligations about speech and who gets to be platformed.
More than just cryptobros are trying to set up small enclaves in other parts of the world where they can try to shut out the world and live life according to their own, disease-denying principles. And, as you might expect, they've also got an entire raft of other beliefs coming with them.
In science and technology, there may not be a solid core at the center of Terra, but a situation where there's the possibility of something that has some of the qualities of a solid and some of the qualities of a liquid instead.
The possiblity that the sapiens version of Homo came into existence much much earlier than previously thought, allowing for potentially several thousand years of peaceful coexistence and possible interbreeding to produce what moves forward in history.
Zuckerberg's VR Folly is likely to have the same problems that Zuckerberg's Original Folly does with regard to moderation of content. Admittedly, not all that many people are ready to jump on the Oculus train and go into the virtual envionment, but it's still likely that unless something draws attention to itself in some way, there's a lot of content that will slide right on by, and probably a lot of harrassing behavior that goes unremarked upon as well.
I shouldn't really be surprised that there's a thriving and mostly unregulated market claiming to help women either recover their "virginity" by reconstructing a hymen or "tightening" their vulvas, because of the outsize influence that "virginity" has on culture around the world, but sometimes I forget that what I think about things is not what everyone else thinks. (Seriously, though, can we stop with the control of bodies and the prioritization of ignorance and never letting a girl/woman ever explore and learn what they actually want and would help them have a fulfilling sex life?)
Last for tonight, the studio that did the animation for The Last Unicorn would end up becoming Studio Ghibli, because of financial matters with the studio that did the work leading to its acquisition and transformation.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jjhunter, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, umadoshi, 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.)
Bloom County, the comic strip, is going to become Bloom County, the animation, which, well, we'll see whether it's able to do as much as Bloom County did in newspaper strips.
For people who have decided that the single Wordle is not enough for them to handle, there now exists Dordle, which gives the player an additional two guesses to find two words, where each guess is for both words until one is found, and Quordle, which ups the guesses to nine but has four words to find in that set of nine. (And some of those Quordle words use a lot of unique letters not present in the other words, so you're going to spend a lot of guesses hoping you get lucky enough to get information from your other guesses to succeed. Expect word 4 to arrive on guess 8 or 9.) There's also Semantle, which asks you to find the target word, and the clues involve telling you how semantically close (in the target wordset) the guessed word is to the target word and Worldle, which instead gives you the silhouette of a country and then hints about how far away you are from the correct country, and what general cardinal direction you'll have to travel that distance to get to the correct country.
A star from the Russian Olympic Committee returned a positive test for a banned substance, reigniting the cloud of suspicion and anger around the ROC and doping scandals that have already resulted in "Russia", the entity, not bing allowed to compete in the Games. While there are columnists who want to claim that Valieva's performance by itself is proof she's not doping, because it's too pure and innocent to have been, I feel they'd have a more convincing argument with the other thing mentioned in this column linked, which is "Be skeptical of the World Anti-Doping Agency's ability to find their own ass with two hands and a map, much less competently be able to determine if someone is taking performance-enchancers." In favor of that position is the 45-day delay between a the submitted sample and the results being available, which was well after the point that the skater was competing and had won a gold medal. And had landed the first women's quadruple jump in Olympic competition. Even if the scandal comes clear, though, the training regimen and the other possible use of the drug in question as something to help with disordered eating should also produce investigations to see whether the people involved should be barred for gross negligence of and active harm to their athletes. Because the women's free skate final had three different athletes from the same coach, including Valieva, and there was a lot of negative emotion on display, from performers and coach, which is a bigger indictment of the coack and training methods than the skaters. At a certain point, with how much and how often the training seems to do great damage to the young bodies involved, raising the minimum age of participation in the Olympics (and other senior-level competitions) seems much wiser for the long-term health of any sport currently consumed by the need for youth.
The IOC's fidelity to their sponsors and the money they bring had them reverse a previous approval of a snowboard, and so, rather than potentially compromise the ability of the board to do its job, the snowboarder who was so informed withdrew from their next scheduled competition.
The concept of the Depth Year, where a person, instead of looking for a new thing, looks to improve the things they already have learned, or takes on the TBR pile instead of reading it, or similar. Having proposed it, the largest takeaway from shifting to a depth-focused mindset is that you run into the possibility that you have to confront your own feelings about competence and excellence. And you might have to confront the fantasy self that believes you can be fully satisfied through material, commercial, capitalist forms of being.
Historians are not the crafters of narrative, they are the keepers of what happened, which often means they are more useful to counternarrative or the destruction of historiography and myth than to those who want to maintain the fiction that the emperor has clothing. So they need to document and keep the times when non-Natives tried to ban Native dances as being too sexual in nature,
Pristine shade being thrown by a freed slave to the man who enslaved him, making an eminently reasonable demand that if the old master wants to prove he is a virtuous and righteous man, he will send the balance due of the wages owed to the freed slave and his sister. Frederick Douglass also sent a blistering letter to his previous master about the good Christian conduct that never happened to him or the other slaves and the kind of reputation the former master has in Douglass's new company.
No matter where you are, there's probably queer history, some of it having existed openly, with the knowledge of the community, and without any sort of moral outrage.
Beware falling into the trap of thinking as a character as Representation first, with the attendant demand that they avoid any and all negative image of their subgroup, before evaluating them as a character in the story being told. As I have been reading around (most recently in Black Nerd Problems, the book), we have to be willing to afford non-dominant creators the ability to have works that are less than perfect, and even some of them being bad, without it reflecting on their entire group(s) as a whole. When we can take our pick of six movies, and know that there will be six more, and so it doesn't matter if four of them are bombs, then we'll be making progress.
The scandal around Boris Johnson's parties and other terrible behavior continues to explode around him, with yet more evidence that not only did he participate in things that were illegal by his own rules, he's also resorted to increasingly more desperate measures to try and keep his coalition from no-confidencing him out of office. Although, the ideal result for most people would be for the Tories to get sent away from the halls of government for a very long while.
A changed word in the ritual has twenty years' of a Roman Catholic priest's baptisms ruled invalid by the Bishop of Rome and the Inquisition. The priest has resigned and apologized for the problem, although there are probably some loopholes that someone could exploit if they were in the correct situation and desired to do so. That said, for those who are not Roman Catholic, the problem is most analagous to summoning and magics that have to be performed exactly correctly in word and gesture, or Bad Things Happen. Jack Chick would probably have had a field day with this, were he stil alive and producing his tracts, about how it's obvious now that the Roman Catholics aren't Real True Christians if they have to worry about their words. (Yet another reminder that for as much as the Bishop of Rome is trying to be a liberal on many social issues, the Pope's still a Roman Catholic and Roman Catholics are just as good as any fundamentalist denomination about the amount of control they desire to exercise over their adherents.)
If and when the Roe decision is overturned, it should be replaced with better and more comprehensive protections for women, both in law and in requiring the medical profession to be trained on how to perform abortions. There's also a lot of very preventable public health issues that need to be addressed, because a one-hundred percent preventable problem, babies with syphilis infections, isn't 100 percent prevented, often because public health infrastructure isn't robust enough or the other parts of infrastructure aren't robust enough, so people with the least means and the greatest need often can't get what they needed.
A hen taken into custody for wandering around a Pentagon security checkpoint, a kea that snagged a filming camera for a short flight, a cat who has stolen shoes, brassieres, and now panties, drug paraphenalia, and possibly drugs themselves, the winners of an Underwater Photographer of the Year competition, an international Garden Photographer winner, more award-winning wildlife photography, and the oldest tortoise still having a good time at 190 years.
A zine made for a neighbor that keeps stealing packages, that, so far, has not actually been stolen in the decoy package left, and the entirely manufactured scandal of a woman showing her true opinion of someone and their running of the country (we need more people, women and men both, scowling at politicians they think are doing a terrible job).
Novavax clears the regulatory requirements for the United Kingdom for use in over-18s, which adds another one into the mix of possibilities. (Get your shots and wear your masks if you can, and hopefully everyone can get both vaccinations and PPE for themselves very soon.)
We're entering the third year of a pandemic, but instead of pulling together and providing support to those who need it, things seem to be worse off than when we started, because the drumbeat has aleays been that we need to go back to the way things were, or that things would be okay when the vaccines arrived, or any one of a humdred other things to signify the return of normality, rather than acknowledging that things never were normal, and they're only getting less so. And for the people who never had a normal to get back to, the re-abandonment of the social contract has left people who need to shield without support and with a society around them that seems to assume they should accept the risk of dying if they want to do anything.
The Johnson government intends to roll back several measures to help keep the population safer from COVID-19 infection. As best I can tell, not even Queen Elizabeth getting a positive test is going to stop him from getting rid of the restrictions in a desperate bid to stay in power.
Protesters in New Zealand who want more open borders and less mandates were met with Barry Manilow and the sprinkler systems in a effort to get them to disperse. The article then goes on to point out with numbers and statistics that the NZ government is probably one of the most competent ones with regard to virus response.
Many of the stories we want to hear have the shapes of stories that Vonnegut talk about, but many of the events of our lives, including the current pandemic, do not follow the shapes of our stories. Which, y'know, when you're waiting for a happy ending, or a reward for the sacrifices made, or the justice that is so long denied, can be a real source of stress and anxiety.
After Joe Rogan spread COVID misinformation on his show hosted exclusively on Spotify, musician Neil Young demanded Spotify remove his music for their platform. Which they did, and that began the firestorm against Rogan (and the misaimed claims that there was censorship demanded or afoot). Joni Mitchell also pulled her music from the platform. Given that we know that dollars drive decisions more than people, Rogan went on the apaology tour and thanked Spotify for their support, but if the dollars continue to drop, then Spotify is way more likely to yank Rogan for that. Which would cue another firestorm about "censorship" that would be wildly inapplicable, since private companies in the United States have very few First Amendment obligations about speech and who gets to be platformed.
More than just cryptobros are trying to set up small enclaves in other parts of the world where they can try to shut out the world and live life according to their own, disease-denying principles. And, as you might expect, they've also got an entire raft of other beliefs coming with them.
In science and technology, there may not be a solid core at the center of Terra, but a situation where there's the possibility of something that has some of the qualities of a solid and some of the qualities of a liquid instead.
The possiblity that the sapiens version of Homo came into existence much much earlier than previously thought, allowing for potentially several thousand years of peaceful coexistence and possible interbreeding to produce what moves forward in history.
Zuckerberg's VR Folly is likely to have the same problems that Zuckerberg's Original Folly does with regard to moderation of content. Admittedly, not all that many people are ready to jump on the Oculus train and go into the virtual envionment, but it's still likely that unless something draws attention to itself in some way, there's a lot of content that will slide right on by, and probably a lot of harrassing behavior that goes unremarked upon as well.
I shouldn't really be surprised that there's a thriving and mostly unregulated market claiming to help women either recover their "virginity" by reconstructing a hymen or "tightening" their vulvas, because of the outsize influence that "virginity" has on culture around the world, but sometimes I forget that what I think about things is not what everyone else thinks. (Seriously, though, can we stop with the control of bodies and the prioritization of ignorance and never letting a girl/woman ever explore and learn what they actually want and would help them have a fulfilling sex life?)
Last for tonight, the studio that did the animation for The Last Unicorn would end up becoming Studio Ghibli, because of financial matters with the studio that did the work leading to its acquisition and transformation.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jjhunter, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, umadoshi, 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.)
