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silveradeptGreetings and have a recommendation, specifically, for River Algood, the small god of the Gender Fluid, which has excellent art and story associated with it. The rest of the Small Gods project is worth checking out as well, but this one specifically is well-crafted and will probably tug at the heart of someone who has either found or desperately needs to find the people who will accept them exactly as they are.
If you are the kind of person who stays perpetually logged into the Archive of Our Own, you can create a specific site skin that will hide the presence of works or users that you don't want to see in results. Since it's CSS, it's still loaded, but not displayed, rather than being excluded from loading, but if there's someone or something you want to never see the existence of, the CSS snippet at the link can be used to mute.
Talking with the person who is doing Dracula Daily, sending out pieces of Bram Stoker's novel on the appropriate calendar days for the narrative. Where we find out this is the second go-round for Dracula Daily, and also, while nobody talks about it in the interview, this is a stellar example of why you want to have a robust public domain, so that when someone decides they want to send the novel in a chonological fashion, they can just do it.
A Black student wearing natural hair in Texas was told he needed to make his hair white-acceptable or he couldn't participate in sports or school. The dress code for the students similarly insists that "extreme" hairstyles are not acceptable, including several common forms of wearing natural hair.
Something that may be heartening, should it turn out that a later president has the same desire to crush the white-supremacist insurgency flourishing in his or her own country that President Grant did - the story of K Troop and its commander versus the KKK. The army wins, eventually, even if not all of the ringleaders are fully brought to justice.
Gatekeepers around comics seem to believe that the world of comics must stay static and never adapt to new audiences or new social attitudes. Which pairs nicely with Jim Crow and Science Fiction, yet more evidence that the SF/F fandom was never a bastion of progressivism, but that it is capable of change when there is dedicated effort to make change happen.
Madison Cawthorn, scandal-ridden Republican, lost his primary by sufficient margin that there will not be a runoff, to a person who is likely his carbon copy, but more likely to stay on the party line. Cawthorn has said things about drugs and orgies that attracted the ire of his Republican colleagues, so they likely began letting out material intended to destroy his reputation with the voters. There are other scandals and issues involved as well, but with the general makeup of the Republican Party in the U.S., odds are good that the thing that actually got him tossed out was the implication that the holier-than-thou party was mixing it up with things they supposedly condemned.
The fourteenth Doctor will be Ncuti Gatwa, a black man of Rwandan birth, which means that we are once again in the department of things that haven't happened before. It's good to see the long-runners do these things, and we can hope that the new old showrunner will exercise all of the possibilities available to this Doctor.
We mourn the loss of Naomi Judd to the complications of mental illness at 76 years of age, and also Vangelis, pioneering musical artist known for synthesizer virtuosity, at 79 years of age.
Using self-description for speakers and attendees is another access point that doesn't take long and that helps people who can't see someone build a picture of how the people around them see themselves.
A paper about "social mindfulness," involving the small things that people do for each other that don't always require large costs or zero-sum games to achieve, and where the doing of the kind thing is probably more important than the material outcome of the kind thing.
Tracing the linguistic origins of vowel breaking in songs, or why "It's Gonna Be May" is more than just a meme.
Observe the creation of a moral panic, as an object that had been reserved solely for the elites to produce an aesthetic, tanning beds, became an object to talk about "tanorexia" and the behavior of low-class women. In a different way, but along the same axis, witness the ways in which women made museums more accessible to the public and children, but often doing so at wages that were less than men's, and with the corresponding devaluation of their work and knowledge by the men who believed themselves sole arbiters of serious scientific work.
On the war between Ukraine and the Russian Federation, the chief of Ukraine's military intelligence believes they have the upper hand in the conflict, and that the victory will accelerate a change in leadership in the Russian Federation. Since this is military intelligence from one of the combatants, salt is a necessary component of digestion of this information, especially the claims that the President of the Russian Federation is ill. That said, confidence in battlefield victories could also be bolstered by the new artillery units being shipped into Ukraine that allow for NATO standard ammunition, including several guided munitions that would improve the accuracy of each round fired.
To brace for the upcoming likelihood of the Roe v. Wade decision falling, a useful thread linking to resources about how one could receive the correct medications to perform an abortion, even in the situation where someone might not be able to consult with a medical professional to receive those medications by prescription. Even though, in several states, either already or because their legislatures are rushing to fill the void as soon as possible, medication abortion may be outlawed or medical professionals may be outlawed from providing such to patients. While the scientific part of it may be safe if the medication is taken according to instructions, there may be legal repercussions for anyone who does so if their locality or province declares all abortions to be illegal, or if a malicious actor reports someone to the police for having done an abortion, regardless of the truth value of such.
Given how invested any given malicious actor might be in finding and reporting abortions, information-seeking may have to be done at places like libraries. For our part, libraries may have to up our information security game to include using Tor or other anonymization materials, including hosting exit nodes, so as to make it more difficult for intruders to trace traffic.
That, and the information seeking will come from people who might not fit the societal expectation of who is looking. Remember, it's possible that up to ten percent of teens (and possibly adults, too, if the teens information holds to a more general audience) identify with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth.
And while if there are shortages, they are likely to be induced by legislation rather than rationing, it is an interesting look to see a conducted survey from the UK Ministry of Information about the use and supply of sanitary towels during the second Great War.
There's also another itch bundle out, this one being tabletop RPGs raising money for reproductive rights organizations.
In addition to the women who are likely to have their rights restricted, there's also having to deal with fertility doctors who substituted their own sperm for any selected donor, and thus fathered potentially hundreds of children.
Surviving the apocalypse will require re-learning several things that are currently achieved more effectively by machines and distribution networks. Which then makes people think about what crops might work best to survive with and what techniques are likely best to use in non-petroleum, non-electricity environments to feed yourself and possibly some others.
The breezy belief of discarding recipes and using intuition to cook based on what is available in your larder, which elides entirely the immense amount of privilege needed to acquire the skills and devices that allow you to do just that.
The untapped space for fitness and exercise that isn't about getting swole or trying to meet an impossible aesthetic standard, because many people who were never good at gym or team sport or who don't want to go hardcore still could use exercise programs they will find fun and doable. There's some gestures in that direction with various things like fannish fun runs or the Zombies, Run! or other things, but there's still not a whole lot of people and places local to a person that are about just getting some exercise in, regardless of the skill level, body type, or specific necessary accommodations of the person who wants to do the exercise.
A celebration of the third gender of Samoa with art and some specific rules about venues and appropriate accommodations, an interview with someone who is collecting and researching home-sculpted, altered objects, or amateur drawings of pornographic nature, and the parents taking their son to court because they paid to make their son marriageable and gave him a lavish wedding, and how he's married, but unemployed and there are no grandchildren. They made an investment, and unless it starts paying dividends, they want their money back, apparently.
Wario and Waluigi aren't going to have princess/girlfriend counterparts, which makes them a place where queerness can flourish in the Mushroom Kingdom.
Pictures of the work done on Tutankhamun's tomb and the items discovered therein, many of which feature the staff and local assistants hired to complete the work. The youngest of the Brontë sisters turns out to be a very competent geologist.
In technology, the generation that has been raised on strict adherence to proper spelling and grammar is doing pretty good at avoiding scams that are terribly spelled and otherwise don't take themselves sufficiently seriously.
Elon Musk may be trying to renegotiate the price of his Twitter deal by claiming there are many more spam and robot accounts on the service than previously sold to him. Even though my professional self has been on the service, I wouldn't be crushed much if the service and Elon both crashed and burned together. Twitter, for their part, seems to be encouraging this crash and burn, saying they're not going to renegotiate the terms of the deal, waiting to see whether they'll get $1 billion USD from Musk if he backs out (or is forced to back out).
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that Texas's clearly First Amendment-infringing law demanding that private companies moderate the way they demand was not a complete mockery of the law and reinstated it. Presumably, when this gets to a higher court, or possibly even an en banc ruling, it will get squashed on the specifics, but until then, the people in charge in Texas seem very determined to remove restrict, or otherwise indicate how much they want the rest of us to have to play by nonsensical rules and laws that only benefit capitalists and the very wealthy.
A typo sent crypto tokens to an unrecoverable wallet address. With the way that crypto is set up, that kind of transaction isn't supposed to be reversible or recoverable. If that's what gets decided, then millions of fiat money disappears. Then again, given what crypto is based on, a demonstration of its inherent unreality might be a healthy thing. As well as the fact that they have to point out that in the case of a bankruptcy, there's a good chance that all the assets in a crypto wallet would be lost to the secured creditors and the user base would be left with nothing.
More electricity is being used in the Republic of Ireland by data centers than by rural houses, a situation brought into existence due to Ireland's courting of business and centers of that nature through regulation and policy.
The Apple Corporation has decided to discontinue the iPod line of standalone music players, preferring to focus on iPhones, iPads, and other devices that also access the Apple store ecosystem. iPod touches, the latest variations, had been basically iPhone type objects, but without the cellular connectivity, so it makes sense that Apple would decide to get rid of them, even though those of us who would like a standalone device are unhappy about this decision.
Last for tonight, baking the recipes that have been carved into grave markers, many of which are comfort foods and sweets, and that have turned out quite okay. Also, you're much more likely to get usable energy out of rotting bananas than the radioactivity in bananas.
That, and trying to figure out what to do when a person wrote about their own plagiarism of someone else and plagiarized you in the process of doing so.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
If you are the kind of person who stays perpetually logged into the Archive of Our Own, you can create a specific site skin that will hide the presence of works or users that you don't want to see in results. Since it's CSS, it's still loaded, but not displayed, rather than being excluded from loading, but if there's someone or something you want to never see the existence of, the CSS snippet at the link can be used to mute.
Talking with the person who is doing Dracula Daily, sending out pieces of Bram Stoker's novel on the appropriate calendar days for the narrative. Where we find out this is the second go-round for Dracula Daily, and also, while nobody talks about it in the interview, this is a stellar example of why you want to have a robust public domain, so that when someone decides they want to send the novel in a chonological fashion, they can just do it.
A Black student wearing natural hair in Texas was told he needed to make his hair white-acceptable or he couldn't participate in sports or school. The dress code for the students similarly insists that "extreme" hairstyles are not acceptable, including several common forms of wearing natural hair.
Something that may be heartening, should it turn out that a later president has the same desire to crush the white-supremacist insurgency flourishing in his or her own country that President Grant did - the story of K Troop and its commander versus the KKK. The army wins, eventually, even if not all of the ringleaders are fully brought to justice.
Gatekeepers around comics seem to believe that the world of comics must stay static and never adapt to new audiences or new social attitudes. Which pairs nicely with Jim Crow and Science Fiction, yet more evidence that the SF/F fandom was never a bastion of progressivism, but that it is capable of change when there is dedicated effort to make change happen.
Madison Cawthorn, scandal-ridden Republican, lost his primary by sufficient margin that there will not be a runoff, to a person who is likely his carbon copy, but more likely to stay on the party line. Cawthorn has said things about drugs and orgies that attracted the ire of his Republican colleagues, so they likely began letting out material intended to destroy his reputation with the voters. There are other scandals and issues involved as well, but with the general makeup of the Republican Party in the U.S., odds are good that the thing that actually got him tossed out was the implication that the holier-than-thou party was mixing it up with things they supposedly condemned.
The fourteenth Doctor will be Ncuti Gatwa, a black man of Rwandan birth, which means that we are once again in the department of things that haven't happened before. It's good to see the long-runners do these things, and we can hope that the new old showrunner will exercise all of the possibilities available to this Doctor.
We mourn the loss of Naomi Judd to the complications of mental illness at 76 years of age, and also Vangelis, pioneering musical artist known for synthesizer virtuosity, at 79 years of age.
Using self-description for speakers and attendees is another access point that doesn't take long and that helps people who can't see someone build a picture of how the people around them see themselves.
A paper about "social mindfulness," involving the small things that people do for each other that don't always require large costs or zero-sum games to achieve, and where the doing of the kind thing is probably more important than the material outcome of the kind thing.
Tracing the linguistic origins of vowel breaking in songs, or why "It's Gonna Be May" is more than just a meme.
Observe the creation of a moral panic, as an object that had been reserved solely for the elites to produce an aesthetic, tanning beds, became an object to talk about "tanorexia" and the behavior of low-class women. In a different way, but along the same axis, witness the ways in which women made museums more accessible to the public and children, but often doing so at wages that were less than men's, and with the corresponding devaluation of their work and knowledge by the men who believed themselves sole arbiters of serious scientific work.
On the war between Ukraine and the Russian Federation, the chief of Ukraine's military intelligence believes they have the upper hand in the conflict, and that the victory will accelerate a change in leadership in the Russian Federation. Since this is military intelligence from one of the combatants, salt is a necessary component of digestion of this information, especially the claims that the President of the Russian Federation is ill. That said, confidence in battlefield victories could also be bolstered by the new artillery units being shipped into Ukraine that allow for NATO standard ammunition, including several guided munitions that would improve the accuracy of each round fired.
To brace for the upcoming likelihood of the Roe v. Wade decision falling, a useful thread linking to resources about how one could receive the correct medications to perform an abortion, even in the situation where someone might not be able to consult with a medical professional to receive those medications by prescription. Even though, in several states, either already or because their legislatures are rushing to fill the void as soon as possible, medication abortion may be outlawed or medical professionals may be outlawed from providing such to patients. While the scientific part of it may be safe if the medication is taken according to instructions, there may be legal repercussions for anyone who does so if their locality or province declares all abortions to be illegal, or if a malicious actor reports someone to the police for having done an abortion, regardless of the truth value of such.
Given how invested any given malicious actor might be in finding and reporting abortions, information-seeking may have to be done at places like libraries. For our part, libraries may have to up our information security game to include using Tor or other anonymization materials, including hosting exit nodes, so as to make it more difficult for intruders to trace traffic.
That, and the information seeking will come from people who might not fit the societal expectation of who is looking. Remember, it's possible that up to ten percent of teens (and possibly adults, too, if the teens information holds to a more general audience) identify with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth.
And while if there are shortages, they are likely to be induced by legislation rather than rationing, it is an interesting look to see a conducted survey from the UK Ministry of Information about the use and supply of sanitary towels during the second Great War.
There's also another itch bundle out, this one being tabletop RPGs raising money for reproductive rights organizations.
In addition to the women who are likely to have their rights restricted, there's also having to deal with fertility doctors who substituted their own sperm for any selected donor, and thus fathered potentially hundreds of children.
Surviving the apocalypse will require re-learning several things that are currently achieved more effectively by machines and distribution networks. Which then makes people think about what crops might work best to survive with and what techniques are likely best to use in non-petroleum, non-electricity environments to feed yourself and possibly some others.
The breezy belief of discarding recipes and using intuition to cook based on what is available in your larder, which elides entirely the immense amount of privilege needed to acquire the skills and devices that allow you to do just that.
The untapped space for fitness and exercise that isn't about getting swole or trying to meet an impossible aesthetic standard, because many people who were never good at gym or team sport or who don't want to go hardcore still could use exercise programs they will find fun and doable. There's some gestures in that direction with various things like fannish fun runs or the Zombies, Run! or other things, but there's still not a whole lot of people and places local to a person that are about just getting some exercise in, regardless of the skill level, body type, or specific necessary accommodations of the person who wants to do the exercise.
A celebration of the third gender of Samoa with art and some specific rules about venues and appropriate accommodations, an interview with someone who is collecting and researching home-sculpted, altered objects, or amateur drawings of pornographic nature, and the parents taking their son to court because they paid to make their son marriageable and gave him a lavish wedding, and how he's married, but unemployed and there are no grandchildren. They made an investment, and unless it starts paying dividends, they want their money back, apparently.
Wario and Waluigi aren't going to have princess/girlfriend counterparts, which makes them a place where queerness can flourish in the Mushroom Kingdom.
Pictures of the work done on Tutankhamun's tomb and the items discovered therein, many of which feature the staff and local assistants hired to complete the work. The youngest of the Brontë sisters turns out to be a very competent geologist.
In technology, the generation that has been raised on strict adherence to proper spelling and grammar is doing pretty good at avoiding scams that are terribly spelled and otherwise don't take themselves sufficiently seriously.
Elon Musk may be trying to renegotiate the price of his Twitter deal by claiming there are many more spam and robot accounts on the service than previously sold to him. Even though my professional self has been on the service, I wouldn't be crushed much if the service and Elon both crashed and burned together. Twitter, for their part, seems to be encouraging this crash and burn, saying they're not going to renegotiate the terms of the deal, waiting to see whether they'll get $1 billion USD from Musk if he backs out (or is forced to back out).
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that Texas's clearly First Amendment-infringing law demanding that private companies moderate the way they demand was not a complete mockery of the law and reinstated it. Presumably, when this gets to a higher court, or possibly even an en banc ruling, it will get squashed on the specifics, but until then, the people in charge in Texas seem very determined to remove restrict, or otherwise indicate how much they want the rest of us to have to play by nonsensical rules and laws that only benefit capitalists and the very wealthy.
A typo sent crypto tokens to an unrecoverable wallet address. With the way that crypto is set up, that kind of transaction isn't supposed to be reversible or recoverable. If that's what gets decided, then millions of fiat money disappears. Then again, given what crypto is based on, a demonstration of its inherent unreality might be a healthy thing. As well as the fact that they have to point out that in the case of a bankruptcy, there's a good chance that all the assets in a crypto wallet would be lost to the secured creditors and the user base would be left with nothing.
More electricity is being used in the Republic of Ireland by data centers than by rural houses, a situation brought into existence due to Ireland's courting of business and centers of that nature through regulation and policy.
The Apple Corporation has decided to discontinue the iPod line of standalone music players, preferring to focus on iPhones, iPads, and other devices that also access the Apple store ecosystem. iPod touches, the latest variations, had been basically iPhone type objects, but without the cellular connectivity, so it makes sense that Apple would decide to get rid of them, even though those of us who would like a standalone device are unhappy about this decision.
Last for tonight, baking the recipes that have been carved into grave markers, many of which are comfort foods and sweets, and that have turned out quite okay. Also, you're much more likely to get usable energy out of rotting bananas than the radioactivity in bananas.
That, and trying to figure out what to do when a person wrote about their own plagiarism of someone else and plagiarized you in the process of doing so.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
no subject
Date: 2022-05-27 07:05 pm (UTC)