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silveradeptHello once again, and a reminder that I have to keep in mind as well: the popular conception of a thing or a character is often not what that thing or character is. And while it's easy to spot when there's obvious lying going on that leads to accusations like queer books or critical race theory being "forced" upon children in school settings, we have to be equally aware of the more subtle things that want to make Captain Kirk into Zap Brannigan.
A character that was supposed to appear once in Deep Space Nine ended up becoming a regular because the actor cast to play him came prepared and was very well-liked by everyone. Kind of like how Roman Torchwick stuck around in RWBY, or Axel became something more than just one of the Thirteen, and so forth. Sometimes bringing yourself into any role you get turns out really well for you.
The Archive of Our Own will be implementing methods for blocking user interactions. This is good, and looks like it's tied to an account primary key, so that simple renames and pseuds won't be able to evade it. (Presumably, a person creating an entirely new Archive account would be able to evade the ban, at which point someone flags them up to Policy and Abuse for a ToS violation.) The news post also has a refresher on how someone can create sutom work skins for browsing the Archive that will mute the presence of a user, a work, a tag, etc. so that it will be silently screened out of search results. Which, looking at the CSS, means that the option in the list is still loaded from the database search, but is simply "none"'d out of visual existence. (I wonder if that also works on screenreaders.)
For as much as someone's favorite demagogue wants to bemoan the "cancel culture" at the direction of a "woke mob" going after people for not being sufficiently aligned with their extremist beliefs, if you actually listen to people who have removed creators and properties from their lives, it's much more a matter of grief than anything else. In the transformative works world, it becomes a question of whether or not to continue to do things in the fandom as a specific "fuck you" to the creator that has turned out to be terrible, or whether to give up the fandom because there's no way of separating or reclaiming something for yourself.
And sometimes, the fans do far better for parts of the canon than the original and the official deuterocanon does.
More attempts to make moral panics, this time by trying to paint the furry fandom, or rather, trying to raise the spectre that children might identify as furries, and therefore proceed to zoophilia or the use of litter boxes or other such things. Because, of course, when there's already a moral panic on, it's not all that difficult to make that moral panic expand to include other people who can be targets, in addition to the original ones.
The Sweetweird Manifesto, in favor and praise of stories that take the rulebook and throw it away in favor of building a world that's much better on a lot of things than our current reality is, even if it's not all sunshine and rainbows in that world itself. It's interesting to see the sweetweird idea is way more likely to be an explicitly queer-friendly or queer-affirming world, often to the point where there's never any entity that disapproves or otherwise tries to raise an objection to the queerness happening. Sometimes it's because they have bigger problems to deal with, and sometimes it's because there's an explicit and Doylist decision that the sweetweird just never had any of the things that would have developed an anti-queerness attitude. It says something about how messed up our current world is that it's easier simply to magic out of existence the obstacles that would get in the way than to have weird worlds that resemble our own but don't have queer-unfriendly people in them. Or to have a narrative that is firmly set in our world that's queer-affirming and just doesn't have any conflict over the matter.
Comments on stories and fanfic are really helpful for developing metacognitive skills in authors (and commenters). The more specific, the better, because it provides very specific feedback about what's working and what isn't about the work. So, y'know, help develop author skills by leaving them detailed feedback.
A quick primer on the difference between Watsonian views of events in a canon and Doylist views of events in a canon.
Kamala Khan's Ms. Marvel as emblematic of being a teenager at the intersection of many different worlds, from the perspective of someone who took a leap of faith and transitioned to the person she has always been. Which I put next to the complaint that the body of the superhero, in both comics and in films made of superheroes, looks nothing like actual bodies, by way of why so many people are thirsty over Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus. The reasons why you want to be able to work the magical girl genre with people of any and all gender identities. (because, in the right hands, you can tell some fucking rad stories with excellent representation of all the ways that people are.)
Reprinting old girls comics in the UK that were seen as disposable and unlikely to be kept.
Theoretical casting for a Muppet Dracula, all of which are on target. And speaking of Dracula, a closer reading of even the first few chapters showcases how much Jonathan Harker brings his cultural baggage with him, because the idea of Eastern Europe in general was supposedly scary territory all bit itself. And speculation on how the characters in Dracula and The Modern Prometheus might interact with each other, possibly to the benefit of both of their narratives.
Of course, because Dracula, even in the new Dracula Daily form, is still a work of previous times, it comes with some content warnings, like the use of slurs regarding the Romani and other traveler cultures. It's very unlikely that the Romani would actually help a known vampire.
The idea that the shipping lenses may be getting in the way of the horror that comes with the tension of someone putting on an act they know the other person doesn't believe and directing him to write letters that will postpone the investigation into his death. And the response that says that tension is exactly what makes things really hot. Which then comes with an argument advanced that Dracula the novel is Bram Stoker writing about the trial of Oscar Wilde, with links to further sources on that possibility.
Sympathy for Anton Ego, which is a manifesto about the necessity and value of criticism in fandom, and working toward a position where people who engage in fandom by yalking about what they don't like about things should be valued and cherished. This reminded me, mostly, that I have distinctions in my head between people who engage in criticism, people who have communities to talk about what they dislike, and people who make sweeping moral judgments about the fiction preferences of others and engage in harrassing behaviors to anyone that they see as not in complete lockstep with them. When I think about "antis," as the term has evolved to, I think of the last of those categories rather than the first two, even if those first two might also consider themselves anti-fans. By the way this manifesto works, given all of the time that I spent criticizing the shortcomings of Pern, I think that makes me an anti-fan of it, even though a large amount of my criticism is hopefully in the same neighborhood as Anton Ego's high standards for food. And, as I have found out, taking a deep dive into this space and picking apart a lot of its failures allows me to build a very firm picture of what kind of place I want Pern to be. Which comes in handy when you end up writing fic for that particular fandom as well.
Family Network, a story about the ways that advertising sometimes makes things worse. And sometimes allows people to live on for longer than they might otherwise have done.
Satirical Newspaper The Onion redid their front page, each piece linking to one of the tens of times they have produced the article " No Way To Stop This From Happening', Says Only Nation Where This Happens Regularly," which appears every time there is a mass shooting in the United States. Of course, it's obviously possible to stop the situation, but it would require either the party of guns to stop being the party of guns or the opposition party to decide that they are not going to let rules deliberately designed to allow superminority positions to prevent the majority from exercising sensible rules stop them from the business of governance.
People who want to commit mass shootings and violence on racial grounds are looking for whatever scientific research they can twist to further their goals. Because they believe that they have allies everywhere, even if most of the people who believe as they do won't do the same things they're willing to do to further their goals.
The use of the ballet 'Swan Lake' to indicate political attitudes from the Russian government, both in Soviet and non-Soviet iterations.
The possibility that a dentist in Berlin and an associate were involved in defrauding the Russian Federation by using allegedly forged documents to sell properties belonging to the embassy in Berlin.
More pictures emerge of the UK's Prime Minister not only being at a party during a lockdown that he claimed to not know about, but was raising a glass to the guest of honor as well. One can only hope that at some point, this drags him down. (Of course, if it also happens to drag a lot of other terrible people with him in its weight, all the better.) These were, after all, long-lasting, sometimes all-night parties where everyone was neither observing distancing protocols nor masking protocols. We can't be sure these new materials are the reason for the confidence vote called on Mr. Johsnon, but it certainly contributed to it!
Published men talking about books by women that they think other men should read, coupled with authors that nobody ever needs to read if they've gone on enough dates with men.
Nostalgia for the time where media interaction was limited to a smaller number of channels and often mediated by people who proclaimed to be experts or who might know most of the available media space, because I'm pretty sure that the dude who is looking for albums where there's some polish that happens in between will have plenty of space to look on Bandcamp or other services. What this person seems to be missing is the way that discovery as mediated by titans of culture has mostly been abandoned for algorithms trying to replicate a knowledgeable record clerk (or, for that matter, a librarian). These days, the options seem to be to ride the wave of the new and get exposed to a whole lot of things you never thought you would find interesting, or you limit yourself to a deep dive of a very specific segment and don't move all that much outside of it until you want to move on to something else.
Something that may be easier to do in the technology and software world than the one I have as a library worker, but is still useful all the same for me to try and understand: Changing the model of using privilege from offering mentorship to offering sponsorship, where the more senior people who are likely to be listened to recommend people who are not usuallly thought of, but who have the expertise and competence to take on high-value projects and do well with them.
Giant flightless birds laying large eggs in early Australia that might have been from "ducks of doom".
Your Local Epidemiologist on the monkeypox outbreaks, risk assessment, and next steps toward trying to keep it contained and defeated.
Pfizer says it will make its medicines available at much cheaper rates for the parts of the world that don't have the money to subsidize or be properly price-gouged.
What works for one culture doesn't always work for others, and when it comes to making sure that menstruators have what they need, there needs to be infrastructure and buy-in behind any chosen solution.
In technology, Mitsubishi has developed an extrusion method that works in the vaccuum so that it can carry material for things like antenna dishes in a compact form on a satellite and build them when properly deployed.
A very basic understanding of the use of Unicode and why you should always declare what kind of encoding your text has.
The story of a bug in a computing machine as the inspiration for bugs and debugging ignores earlier etymology involving bugs as problems with phonographs and other technological devices. And then JSTOR Daily twists the knife by talking about the difference between the popular conception of a bug and the taxonomic classifications of bugs, since the moth is more properly a lepidopteran rather than a true bug.
Increasing use of automation in Singapore to try and help deal with people shortages for various jobs.
The reality that link shorteners are almost always trackers, as well, and therefore should properly be blocked be ad-tracker plugins.
Last for this entry, the virtue of archiving and keeping the record of your culture and fandom, because the people who are going to study your culture and fandom are going to learn a lot from the stuff that you think is ephemeral, or not of the best quality, or something silly and indulgent. And because not everyone keeps their material online forever, so the more copies of a thing there are, the more likely it is to survive to a point where it will become an important cultural artifact. For as much as that post about studying My Immortal as a serious work of literature is a shitpost, there's a grain of truth - it very well could be the lucky thing that survives long enough to be considered an example of serious literature, much like how we study Shakespeare, dick jokes and all, like it's a serious corpus. (And don't have record of many of the contemporaries that would let us judge Shakespeare in his context.)
A series of new gender possibilities, according to various drop-down menus found on the Internet.
And getting to have some fun with your fellow Senators about a visit of BTS (the K-Pop group) to the White House and who should be going to meet them. Because yes, there's still the need for some levity in between the seriousness.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, 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.)
A character that was supposed to appear once in Deep Space Nine ended up becoming a regular because the actor cast to play him came prepared and was very well-liked by everyone. Kind of like how Roman Torchwick stuck around in RWBY, or Axel became something more than just one of the Thirteen, and so forth. Sometimes bringing yourself into any role you get turns out really well for you.
The Archive of Our Own will be implementing methods for blocking user interactions. This is good, and looks like it's tied to an account primary key, so that simple renames and pseuds won't be able to evade it. (Presumably, a person creating an entirely new Archive account would be able to evade the ban, at which point someone flags them up to Policy and Abuse for a ToS violation.) The news post also has a refresher on how someone can create sutom work skins for browsing the Archive that will mute the presence of a user, a work, a tag, etc. so that it will be silently screened out of search results. Which, looking at the CSS, means that the option in the list is still loaded from the database search, but is simply "none"'d out of visual existence. (I wonder if that also works on screenreaders.)
For as much as someone's favorite demagogue wants to bemoan the "cancel culture" at the direction of a "woke mob" going after people for not being sufficiently aligned with their extremist beliefs, if you actually listen to people who have removed creators and properties from their lives, it's much more a matter of grief than anything else. In the transformative works world, it becomes a question of whether or not to continue to do things in the fandom as a specific "fuck you" to the creator that has turned out to be terrible, or whether to give up the fandom because there's no way of separating or reclaiming something for yourself.
And sometimes, the fans do far better for parts of the canon than the original and the official deuterocanon does.
More attempts to make moral panics, this time by trying to paint the furry fandom, or rather, trying to raise the spectre that children might identify as furries, and therefore proceed to zoophilia or the use of litter boxes or other such things. Because, of course, when there's already a moral panic on, it's not all that difficult to make that moral panic expand to include other people who can be targets, in addition to the original ones.
The Sweetweird Manifesto, in favor and praise of stories that take the rulebook and throw it away in favor of building a world that's much better on a lot of things than our current reality is, even if it's not all sunshine and rainbows in that world itself. It's interesting to see the sweetweird idea is way more likely to be an explicitly queer-friendly or queer-affirming world, often to the point where there's never any entity that disapproves or otherwise tries to raise an objection to the queerness happening. Sometimes it's because they have bigger problems to deal with, and sometimes it's because there's an explicit and Doylist decision that the sweetweird just never had any of the things that would have developed an anti-queerness attitude. It says something about how messed up our current world is that it's easier simply to magic out of existence the obstacles that would get in the way than to have weird worlds that resemble our own but don't have queer-unfriendly people in them. Or to have a narrative that is firmly set in our world that's queer-affirming and just doesn't have any conflict over the matter.
Comments on stories and fanfic are really helpful for developing metacognitive skills in authors (and commenters). The more specific, the better, because it provides very specific feedback about what's working and what isn't about the work. So, y'know, help develop author skills by leaving them detailed feedback.
A quick primer on the difference between Watsonian views of events in a canon and Doylist views of events in a canon.
Kamala Khan's Ms. Marvel as emblematic of being a teenager at the intersection of many different worlds, from the perspective of someone who took a leap of faith and transitioned to the person she has always been. Which I put next to the complaint that the body of the superhero, in both comics and in films made of superheroes, looks nothing like actual bodies, by way of why so many people are thirsty over Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus. The reasons why you want to be able to work the magical girl genre with people of any and all gender identities. (because, in the right hands, you can tell some fucking rad stories with excellent representation of all the ways that people are.)
Reprinting old girls comics in the UK that were seen as disposable and unlikely to be kept.
Theoretical casting for a Muppet Dracula, all of which are on target. And speaking of Dracula, a closer reading of even the first few chapters showcases how much Jonathan Harker brings his cultural baggage with him, because the idea of Eastern Europe in general was supposedly scary territory all bit itself. And speculation on how the characters in Dracula and The Modern Prometheus might interact with each other, possibly to the benefit of both of their narratives.
Of course, because Dracula, even in the new Dracula Daily form, is still a work of previous times, it comes with some content warnings, like the use of slurs regarding the Romani and other traveler cultures. It's very unlikely that the Romani would actually help a known vampire.
The idea that the shipping lenses may be getting in the way of the horror that comes with the tension of someone putting on an act they know the other person doesn't believe and directing him to write letters that will postpone the investigation into his death. And the response that says that tension is exactly what makes things really hot. Which then comes with an argument advanced that Dracula the novel is Bram Stoker writing about the trial of Oscar Wilde, with links to further sources on that possibility.
Sympathy for Anton Ego, which is a manifesto about the necessity and value of criticism in fandom, and working toward a position where people who engage in fandom by yalking about what they don't like about things should be valued and cherished. This reminded me, mostly, that I have distinctions in my head between people who engage in criticism, people who have communities to talk about what they dislike, and people who make sweeping moral judgments about the fiction preferences of others and engage in harrassing behaviors to anyone that they see as not in complete lockstep with them. When I think about "antis," as the term has evolved to, I think of the last of those categories rather than the first two, even if those first two might also consider themselves anti-fans. By the way this manifesto works, given all of the time that I spent criticizing the shortcomings of Pern, I think that makes me an anti-fan of it, even though a large amount of my criticism is hopefully in the same neighborhood as Anton Ego's high standards for food. And, as I have found out, taking a deep dive into this space and picking apart a lot of its failures allows me to build a very firm picture of what kind of place I want Pern to be. Which comes in handy when you end up writing fic for that particular fandom as well.
Family Network, a story about the ways that advertising sometimes makes things worse. And sometimes allows people to live on for longer than they might otherwise have done.
Satirical Newspaper The Onion redid their front page, each piece linking to one of the tens of times they have produced the article " No Way To Stop This From Happening', Says Only Nation Where This Happens Regularly," which appears every time there is a mass shooting in the United States. Of course, it's obviously possible to stop the situation, but it would require either the party of guns to stop being the party of guns or the opposition party to decide that they are not going to let rules deliberately designed to allow superminority positions to prevent the majority from exercising sensible rules stop them from the business of governance.
People who want to commit mass shootings and violence on racial grounds are looking for whatever scientific research they can twist to further their goals. Because they believe that they have allies everywhere, even if most of the people who believe as they do won't do the same things they're willing to do to further their goals.
The use of the ballet 'Swan Lake' to indicate political attitudes from the Russian government, both in Soviet and non-Soviet iterations.
The possibility that a dentist in Berlin and an associate were involved in defrauding the Russian Federation by using allegedly forged documents to sell properties belonging to the embassy in Berlin.
More pictures emerge of the UK's Prime Minister not only being at a party during a lockdown that he claimed to not know about, but was raising a glass to the guest of honor as well. One can only hope that at some point, this drags him down. (Of course, if it also happens to drag a lot of other terrible people with him in its weight, all the better.) These were, after all, long-lasting, sometimes all-night parties where everyone was neither observing distancing protocols nor masking protocols. We can't be sure these new materials are the reason for the confidence vote called on Mr. Johsnon, but it certainly contributed to it!
Published men talking about books by women that they think other men should read, coupled with authors that nobody ever needs to read if they've gone on enough dates with men.
Nostalgia for the time where media interaction was limited to a smaller number of channels and often mediated by people who proclaimed to be experts or who might know most of the available media space, because I'm pretty sure that the dude who is looking for albums where there's some polish that happens in between will have plenty of space to look on Bandcamp or other services. What this person seems to be missing is the way that discovery as mediated by titans of culture has mostly been abandoned for algorithms trying to replicate a knowledgeable record clerk (or, for that matter, a librarian). These days, the options seem to be to ride the wave of the new and get exposed to a whole lot of things you never thought you would find interesting, or you limit yourself to a deep dive of a very specific segment and don't move all that much outside of it until you want to move on to something else.
Something that may be easier to do in the technology and software world than the one I have as a library worker, but is still useful all the same for me to try and understand: Changing the model of using privilege from offering mentorship to offering sponsorship, where the more senior people who are likely to be listened to recommend people who are not usuallly thought of, but who have the expertise and competence to take on high-value projects and do well with them.
Giant flightless birds laying large eggs in early Australia that might have been from "ducks of doom".
Your Local Epidemiologist on the monkeypox outbreaks, risk assessment, and next steps toward trying to keep it contained and defeated.
Pfizer says it will make its medicines available at much cheaper rates for the parts of the world that don't have the money to subsidize or be properly price-gouged.
What works for one culture doesn't always work for others, and when it comes to making sure that menstruators have what they need, there needs to be infrastructure and buy-in behind any chosen solution.
In technology, Mitsubishi has developed an extrusion method that works in the vaccuum so that it can carry material for things like antenna dishes in a compact form on a satellite and build them when properly deployed.
A very basic understanding of the use of Unicode and why you should always declare what kind of encoding your text has.
The story of a bug in a computing machine as the inspiration for bugs and debugging ignores earlier etymology involving bugs as problems with phonographs and other technological devices. And then JSTOR Daily twists the knife by talking about the difference between the popular conception of a bug and the taxonomic classifications of bugs, since the moth is more properly a lepidopteran rather than a true bug.
Increasing use of automation in Singapore to try and help deal with people shortages for various jobs.
The reality that link shorteners are almost always trackers, as well, and therefore should properly be blocked be ad-tracker plugins.
Last for this entry, the virtue of archiving and keeping the record of your culture and fandom, because the people who are going to study your culture and fandom are going to learn a lot from the stuff that you think is ephemeral, or not of the best quality, or something silly and indulgent. And because not everyone keeps their material online forever, so the more copies of a thing there are, the more likely it is to survive to a point where it will become an important cultural artifact. For as much as that post about studying My Immortal as a serious work of literature is a shitpost, there's a grain of truth - it very well could be the lucky thing that survives long enough to be considered an example of serious literature, much like how we study Shakespeare, dick jokes and all, like it's a serious corpus. (And don't have record of many of the contemporaries that would let us judge Shakespeare in his context.)
A series of new gender possibilities, according to various drop-down menus found on the Internet.
And getting to have some fun with your fellow Senators about a visit of BTS (the K-Pop group) to the White House and who should be going to meet them. Because yes, there's still the need for some levity in between the seriousness.
(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, the meta_warehouse community, 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.)
Popular art'n culture, especially in the realm of feminine fancy
Date: 2022-06-16 12:49 pm (UTC)Re: Popular art'n culture, especially in the realm of feminine fancy
Date: 2022-06-16 02:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-16 03:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-16 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-16 06:20 pm (UTC)I've since read it, quite interesting and make a lot of sense. I didn't know about the Dracula A Day, or whatever it's called, until SuchASnack popped onto my page. I should check that out. It's been a very long time since I read Dracula, this information would cast quite a different light on it.
no subject
Date: 2022-06-17 11:57 am (UTC)Depends on the screenreader, but most-if-not-all of the ones in major use do not announce anything in a block that's got display:none applied to it. (The major ones each had a few exceptions, mostly having to do with forms/buttons/labels/ARIA roles inside a display:none block, the last time I looked, but it's been a hot minute and they may have changed that.)
no subject
Date: 2022-06-17 02:06 pm (UTC)Thoughts
Date: 2022-06-18 07:52 am (UTC)I don't think dropping things, or even boycotting things, is a problem. None of that is new. It's the cancel culture that is a problem. Social media makes it worse. Mobbing attacks on individuals, or hounding people out of jobs for things they said/did off duty, undermine the cohesion of a functional society. If people feel watched and judged all the time, it makes them unhealthy.
>> if you actually listen to people who have removed creators and properties from their lives, it's much more a matter of grief than anything else. In the transformative works world, it becomes a question of whether or not to continue to do things in the fandom as a specific "fuck you" to the creator that has turned out to be terrible, or whether to give up the fandom because there's no way of separating or reclaiming something for yourself.<<
Largely true, whether canon or fanon. There are things I've given up. Usually it's because the content puts me in a lasting bad mood, which I can't afford. But Marvel just plain pissed me off to the point that I went, "They don't get to treat me like that," and I quit consuming their material. Fanfic of it? No problem.