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silveradeptHello again. We should begin with the understanding that fandom, especially teen girl fans, is always more complex than airheads screaming for their idols.
senmut is compiling a sticky post of all the Archive Of Our Own feeds that have Dreamwidth Feed accounts, which, if a particular work or pairing is something you can't get enough of, will allow you to be notified of new works/chapters to your DW reading page (or so that you can construct a Reading Page with all of the AO3 feeds you want on one, and one without that, depending on whether you want to be social or immersed in new fic possibilities.
Good criticism often comes from a place of investment in the thing, with the example of a site called Your Webcomic Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad as an example where there mostly wasn't investment in the material itself, and as such, relied on punching down about the prejudices of the reviewer. As someone who's written more than a half-million words about a series that I still think has a fantastic premise and a terrible execution, this rings pretty true to me. The people who are often the most invested in something are the ones who can provide the most thoughtful critiques of it, because it's a lot easier to see where things fall down when you've been looking at the things that have gone well.
Advice on writing characters: Their strengths are also their weaknesses, because the traits are either well-suited or ill-suited to the situation at hand, and make the background characters pop by making it obvious they're more than just whatever their primary role in the story is.
Advice on writing characters: choosing a name for a character that's Chinese involves a lot of thinking about the concepts you want to express in the name and what characters go with that, plus a whole bunch of things to both consider and do and consider and avoid. (This goes well with romanizations of ways of refering to family members and their relationships and titles and prefixes or suffixes to indicate certain kinds of people characers may meet, also romanized.)
Two perspectives on the toxicity of fandom engagement, one that focuses on a lack of people taking up the cause of keeping their fandoms alive, and the other lamenting the lack of places where people can be unabashedly fandomish and not find themselves sieged by either corporations/moderators trying to keep the place advertiser-friendly or fans who aren't interested in anything that might be not safe for the youngest fans. A different commenter suggests taking a third option and positing that fandom and their platforms aren't actually dead, but there's certainly a difference in what gets done on a platform when the content bans come out to play, and trying to get a large group of people to behave without giving moderators or users (or both) effective curation tools is a fool's errand. The comments on the Pillowfort post also discuss about the lack of definitions of what constitutes a fandom and what constitutes a dead fandom, as well as their bafflement about NSFW being such a hinge spot for the life or death of a fandom. This very well might be one of those things where people living in an era where characters are allowed to strongly imply NSFW (or get closer to it, depending on how far up the explicit ladder the source material gets to go) redices the idea of NSFW as a critique and reaction to overly-sanitized media materials, even those aimed at adults and teenagers who have a working knowledge of the fact that people fuck, get horny on main, and do all sorts of other things that certain media properties and places would never actually show. Given that we're also in an era of increased numbers, frequency, and vituperance of book and media bans, most of them centered around erasing black, brown, and queer people from existence, we might see a small resurgence of NSFW content being the protest against sanitization and writing the stories that were forbidden to be told in any other kind of medium.
As for the question of deadness or not of a fandom, if there's still one person who's a fan, it's a live fandom. May not be an active one, but it's there. That, and both people who create and people who consume fandom and source materials need robust tools to be able to control and curate their experience, especially on platforms that have become so large that the moderators can't effectively moderate everything and have to focus their attention on the most egregious material. The Pillowfort post about the difference of scale between 50-100 people on a fan's self-run forum and Twitter, Tumblr, or even Dreamwidth is very accurate. I think people would be a lot happier with their Internet experience if the places they visited to do fannish interactions were scoped to cozy and small groups, even if they archived their material elsewhere, like AO3. The hardest part about that scoping is the technical infrastructure needed to do it, and the money that it costs to run a server with software, both in time to keep the technical materials updated and running, and in the cost of people and time that it takes to moderate your space. Not everyone is going to be cut out to run their own server, and not everyone is going to be cut out to moderate their own server, but right now, we seem to be trusting that there are enough unicorns who have or will learn both the technical and administrative skills and the people skills to keep a server going, and will either fund the costs out of their own pocket (or hardware) or be able to convince the people who use their space to chip in some money to keep it going because they love the space and want it to continue. (The talk that I haven't submitted yet for my local GNU/Linux conference is essentially "Look, the place that's best suited to host social instances — public institutions like libraries — don't have either the budget or the expertise to stand up and keep social going, so what you need is a system that's as close to a one-click deploy as possible, that has good and robust moderation tools and user control tools that are easy to explain and implement. If the community provides the tools and the technical packages, the libraries could provide the hosting space, and then what we can offer people is the ability to run their own limited-scope social network where all they have to do is focus on the content and people moderation part, subject to the local laws and restrictions." The nostalgia that a lot of people pine for in the early days of the Internet is for the tools that made it possible for someone to stand up a website of their own with little to no technical knowledge and then find a free hosting spot for it where it can exist while they eventually develop the skills that might be needed to move the whole thing to a different platform and hosting. Or to scale up if it gets popular and they want to go in that direction. If your fandom is only ever going to be fifty people big, then why not have the ability to stand up a webpage to announce yourselves, make a social instance to talk with each other, and then maybe archive any works at AO3, without having to subject yourself to the firehose or the algorithms? And if there's someone out there who you can tap to go "Hey, we'd like to do this," who can offer it to you for free to get it stood up, then it can just be. Or it can get enough people galcanized to want to take on the technical responsibilities and then it can move off of the free space it started in and exist independently. It's a big, pie-in-the-sky idea, especially with the constant cutting of public goods and services to feed the maw of tax breaks and cops, but I think it would be cool to see come into existence.
On relating to others and their pronouns as care work, done out of love, rather than out of shame or fear. I really like this piece, and especially because it's explicitly positioning using someone's correct pronouns, or using one of someone's possible pronouns, as an act of solidarity, love, and care for that person, to give them the things that the society around them is either trying to withhold from them or to insist that they aren't part of. And that the person receiving the pronoun usage appreciates because they can tell you're doing it out of love rather than out of fear.
The Terrence Higgins Trust, one of the first charities for HIV/AIDS in the UK, has existed for longer than its namesake did, and so we get some information about the person from those that knew him well and have lived to keep his memory alive. As well as pictures from the past from HIV/AIDS campaigns that Scottish organizations and government ran.
The International Swimming Association (FINA) has set rules about when trans athletes have to already be transitioning to compete in the women's divisions that will make it impossible for any trans woman to comply with. Specifically, they have to not have gone through much of "male puberty" or reached the age of twelve without already being in transition. Given how difficult it is to get a puberty blocker, even with parental permission and support and a doctor that's willing to prescribe them, getting them before twelve is asking for the impossible. But now that one organization has set some standards, I expect others to follow suit with similar impossibilities. All because they're afraid that trans athletes will somehow dominate all sports, despite the current data that shows they're not doing that.
A lot of the current conceptions of transgender identity are rooted in very recent terminology, sometimes created by opponents of trans people, and sometimes by people who wanted to prioritize and get the LG part of the acronym respectability while excluding the rest. Reality is always more complicated than neaty boxes.
That which is old is new again, as we see more and more calls to prevent "promoting homosexuality," although the term has expanded to encompass promoting queerness of any sort at all. The US certainliy seems more than willing to join that cavalcade, and with the current composition of the Supreme Court, we may be seeing plenty of such phrases justified and given the weight of legal interpretation. And then we, too, will have to once again reconstruct what the lives of queer people might have been by examining the records of government and policing designed to paint them in the worst possible light.
The mere fact that Prime Minister Johnson had a confidence vote in him means he's sunk, even though he https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-politics-60289386">won the confidence vote, with 148 of his own party's MPs voting against him. At this point, there's probably betting and shaping going on hoping that his fall causes the most damage that it possibly can on the way down.
44 percent of the party of authoritarianism believe that mass casualties are acceptable casualties so that any white man can own any gun he desires and use it with impunity on anyone else. Which does leave 56 percent of the party of authoritarianism believing there's some reform that could be done on mass shootings and the weapons used to perpetuate them, but the party of authoritarianism is busily working to ensure that they either stay in locketep or are dismissed from the party.
The power of stories to tell ideas, as exemplified by Discworld and Sir Pterry GNU, the idea that Steve Rogers is patterned on King David, a review of Ms. Marvel so far that points out how richly invested in Muslim culture it is, while also separately noting the paucity of explicit Judaism in the MCU in all of its incarnations. (Which is prety terrible, given how much of comics, including the comics the make up the MCU, we owe to explicitly Jewish people creating the kinds of heroes they needed to punch Nazis and other oppressors in their lives.) The fundamental differences of Star Wars (dystopic) and Star Trek (utopic) that make comparing the two apples and oranges, except in the one spot where they both pretty well hate on authoritarians and ultra-conservatives (even though there are still Star Wars fans who miss that point pretty hard or demand that Star Wars not bring politics into a universe that's pretty explicit with the Nazi comparisons), and Varney, a vampire story with some of the elements of vampires that readers of the 21st century would recognize.
A documentary about a lesbian club in London that had a solid clientele and the people who founded and ran it. The article also talks about how Mick Jagger wanted to stop by, said that he'd even wear a dress for the privilege if he could get in.
A written story about how being able to get an abortion, without waiting, without having to drive to another state, without having to take off work, without all of the impediments that are being thrown in the way, saved the life of both a mother and her daughter, because that allowed them both to escape an abusive man, divorce him, and then build a life for themselves. The mother lived a lot longer and got care for something that turned out to be cancer. But, of course, the life of the already alive is not to be prized at all to the theocrats, only the possibility of more babies to feed their political aims who will believe as thy do.
Seeking joy as a way of defying and overcoming oppression. Of the three things mentioned in the post, the first and the third (division and information control) are the easiest to accept for me as forces that work against me, but also as forces that can be managed and opposed - building breadth as well as depth in associations and sources of input is somewhat easier to do when you've been trained on how to do it, and also you've built up a network of people and input feeds that provide you with a representative sample of the reality you want to inhabit. (It is an active curation process borne of experience and expertise, not the passive "accept all sides" mentality that my current profession is cursed with.)
The second, however, exhaustion, the feeling that "it is always impossible until it is done" and that "done" will not happen in the short time that my existence is, especially not when compared to the arc of history, that there may never be a payoff that I get to see on things, that is much harder. My brain tends toward "these are solutions, they have benefits, surely that means other people see them as things to try, even if they will not be a perfect solution" and it has a certain amount of trouble with the idea that some people genuinely believe things whose most prominent pushers are, at least to my perspective, cynics and grifters looking to profit and to try and inspire stocastic violence rather than people who genuinely believe the things and try to fight the injustices that result from that in ways that will actually work toward resolving those injustices, instead of perpetuating them. It is difficult to see that there are problems, there are potential solutions, and that there are people standing in the way for reasons that appear to boil down to "because we don't want our opponents to score positive points" and "because we fundamentally believe that these are not people, but something subhuman." Exhaustion demands that if I'm not advancing the cause at all moments and all times, then the cause will fail because I didn't do my part. And it's difficult to take time for yourself when there's a societal and cultural expectation that to do so is selfish and that worth is measured in what you're doing for someone else, rather than yourself. (Even if the wages for doing so are almost always less than the value of what you did for someone else.)
I don't really have a reference for what "putting myself first" would look like. Or even, perhaps, "treating myself with the same importance as I treat others." (This is the part where people recommend therapy. Which is on my to-do list, as soon as I feel financially secure enough to start. Because capitalist hellscape.) Just another interesting way of being broken, same same yet different.
The obvious ableism in a cooking culture that insists the only correct and moral way of cooking is the way that requires the biggst investment of time and access to fresh ingredients. The article-writer ends up coming to this conclusion because she developed a disability that made it difficult and sometimes impossible to do it the fresh-ingredients way. Blest are those of us who do not need a disability to understand the ableism and work against it.
It's also a microcosm of a more general trend, where a thing starts out being difficult, time-intensive, and expensive, then technology appears to make the thing less difficult, less time-intensive, and less expensive, and therefore promotes wider-spread adoption and use, and then, at some point in the local maximum, it becomes fashionable to do the thing according to the difficult, time-intensive, and expensive manner, as a signal of having enough spare time and money to do it the hard way and imparting moral authority and inherent superiority to the thing created the hard way. Mass culture becomes crass culture, and therefore only the artisan can be allowed to take any pride in their work.
Food, we might note, is the process of how we obtain necessary nutrients that we can't manufactgure ourselves, and keep the energy reserves topped up. Therefore, the goal is to get those nutrients into the system in a way that we like enough to keep doing it. Food should, therefore, be fucking delicious as a primary goal, just slightly less important than "food should not be poisonous." If you made food that you want to eat again, congratularions, you've succeeded, regardless of whether everything that you used to get there is as moral as the artisans want it to be. (There is a discussion on how to make food more ethical, but many of those things are not about what tools you use, or whether your ingredients are bought fresh, or whether you used a quick mix to create something instead of leaving it out for three proves and several hours in the oven. Those are things like humane treatment of livestock, of crop workers, of factory processors, of soil, and other systemic issues that all reasonably fall under the directive of "food should not be poisonous." The kind of thing that starts from the premise that nobody should be required to starve, and nobody should be required to make do with inadequate amounts of food, and no person who works with food should be seen as anything other than respected, instead of an entity to be squeezed so that others can make profit.)
Finding Saxon-era burial sites in the pathway of a high-speed rail line, a suggestion as to where the bubonic plague epidemic of the medium aevum may have began, the reality that women run an empire where most of the men go off for fighting campaigns, and that's true for Mongols as well, technology and engineering weaving a pair of 3000 year-old pants that's strong in some spots and stretchy in others, so that the mounted warrior wearing them can move and ride in them comfortably, all without any cuts or seams in the pants, the shortcomings of a diorama in sufficient detail that the thing itself doesn't need to be shown, although I suspect a close-in image of a part of it is the background to the page, what TVTropes might call the Colbert Bump, but instead it's RM from BTS and the various art galleries and locations that he's visited that the ARMYs also take an interest in, and also Cheech Marin, perhaps most famously known for stoner comedies with Tommy Chong, opening a gallery of Chicano art with his name and much of his collection attached.
In technology, revisiting the idea of the helium dirigible for certain transport needs and distances, currently focusing on regional travel rather than long-distance.
Last for tonight, several vegetables of Japan, with substitutions and recipes that use those vegetables.
Also, a proper guild for those who work at the Medieval Times themes restaurant and entertainment vernues. We hope their election succeeds and they gain the power of collective bargaining.
(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.)
senmut is compiling a sticky post of all the Archive Of Our Own feeds that have Dreamwidth Feed accounts, which, if a particular work or pairing is something you can't get enough of, will allow you to be notified of new works/chapters to your DW reading page (or so that you can construct a Reading Page with all of the AO3 feeds you want on one, and one without that, depending on whether you want to be social or immersed in new fic possibilities.Good criticism often comes from a place of investment in the thing, with the example of a site called Your Webcomic Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad as an example where there mostly wasn't investment in the material itself, and as such, relied on punching down about the prejudices of the reviewer. As someone who's written more than a half-million words about a series that I still think has a fantastic premise and a terrible execution, this rings pretty true to me. The people who are often the most invested in something are the ones who can provide the most thoughtful critiques of it, because it's a lot easier to see where things fall down when you've been looking at the things that have gone well.
Advice on writing characters: Their strengths are also their weaknesses, because the traits are either well-suited or ill-suited to the situation at hand, and make the background characters pop by making it obvious they're more than just whatever their primary role in the story is.
Advice on writing characters: choosing a name for a character that's Chinese involves a lot of thinking about the concepts you want to express in the name and what characters go with that, plus a whole bunch of things to both consider and do and consider and avoid. (This goes well with romanizations of ways of refering to family members and their relationships and titles and prefixes or suffixes to indicate certain kinds of people characers may meet, also romanized.)
Two perspectives on the toxicity of fandom engagement, one that focuses on a lack of people taking up the cause of keeping their fandoms alive, and the other lamenting the lack of places where people can be unabashedly fandomish and not find themselves sieged by either corporations/moderators trying to keep the place advertiser-friendly or fans who aren't interested in anything that might be not safe for the youngest fans. A different commenter suggests taking a third option and positing that fandom and their platforms aren't actually dead, but there's certainly a difference in what gets done on a platform when the content bans come out to play, and trying to get a large group of people to behave without giving moderators or users (or both) effective curation tools is a fool's errand. The comments on the Pillowfort post also discuss about the lack of definitions of what constitutes a fandom and what constitutes a dead fandom, as well as their bafflement about NSFW being such a hinge spot for the life or death of a fandom. This very well might be one of those things where people living in an era where characters are allowed to strongly imply NSFW (or get closer to it, depending on how far up the explicit ladder the source material gets to go) redices the idea of NSFW as a critique and reaction to overly-sanitized media materials, even those aimed at adults and teenagers who have a working knowledge of the fact that people fuck, get horny on main, and do all sorts of other things that certain media properties and places would never actually show. Given that we're also in an era of increased numbers, frequency, and vituperance of book and media bans, most of them centered around erasing black, brown, and queer people from existence, we might see a small resurgence of NSFW content being the protest against sanitization and writing the stories that were forbidden to be told in any other kind of medium.
As for the question of deadness or not of a fandom, if there's still one person who's a fan, it's a live fandom. May not be an active one, but it's there. That, and both people who create and people who consume fandom and source materials need robust tools to be able to control and curate their experience, especially on platforms that have become so large that the moderators can't effectively moderate everything and have to focus their attention on the most egregious material. The Pillowfort post about the difference of scale between 50-100 people on a fan's self-run forum and Twitter, Tumblr, or even Dreamwidth is very accurate. I think people would be a lot happier with their Internet experience if the places they visited to do fannish interactions were scoped to cozy and small groups, even if they archived their material elsewhere, like AO3. The hardest part about that scoping is the technical infrastructure needed to do it, and the money that it costs to run a server with software, both in time to keep the technical materials updated and running, and in the cost of people and time that it takes to moderate your space. Not everyone is going to be cut out to run their own server, and not everyone is going to be cut out to moderate their own server, but right now, we seem to be trusting that there are enough unicorns who have or will learn both the technical and administrative skills and the people skills to keep a server going, and will either fund the costs out of their own pocket (or hardware) or be able to convince the people who use their space to chip in some money to keep it going because they love the space and want it to continue. (The talk that I haven't submitted yet for my local GNU/Linux conference is essentially "Look, the place that's best suited to host social instances — public institutions like libraries — don't have either the budget or the expertise to stand up and keep social going, so what you need is a system that's as close to a one-click deploy as possible, that has good and robust moderation tools and user control tools that are easy to explain and implement. If the community provides the tools and the technical packages, the libraries could provide the hosting space, and then what we can offer people is the ability to run their own limited-scope social network where all they have to do is focus on the content and people moderation part, subject to the local laws and restrictions." The nostalgia that a lot of people pine for in the early days of the Internet is for the tools that made it possible for someone to stand up a website of their own with little to no technical knowledge and then find a free hosting spot for it where it can exist while they eventually develop the skills that might be needed to move the whole thing to a different platform and hosting. Or to scale up if it gets popular and they want to go in that direction. If your fandom is only ever going to be fifty people big, then why not have the ability to stand up a webpage to announce yourselves, make a social instance to talk with each other, and then maybe archive any works at AO3, without having to subject yourself to the firehose or the algorithms? And if there's someone out there who you can tap to go "Hey, we'd like to do this," who can offer it to you for free to get it stood up, then it can just be. Or it can get enough people galcanized to want to take on the technical responsibilities and then it can move off of the free space it started in and exist independently. It's a big, pie-in-the-sky idea, especially with the constant cutting of public goods and services to feed the maw of tax breaks and cops, but I think it would be cool to see come into existence.
On relating to others and their pronouns as care work, done out of love, rather than out of shame or fear. I really like this piece, and especially because it's explicitly positioning using someone's correct pronouns, or using one of someone's possible pronouns, as an act of solidarity, love, and care for that person, to give them the things that the society around them is either trying to withhold from them or to insist that they aren't part of. And that the person receiving the pronoun usage appreciates because they can tell you're doing it out of love rather than out of fear.
The Terrence Higgins Trust, one of the first charities for HIV/AIDS in the UK, has existed for longer than its namesake did, and so we get some information about the person from those that knew him well and have lived to keep his memory alive. As well as pictures from the past from HIV/AIDS campaigns that Scottish organizations and government ran.
The International Swimming Association (FINA) has set rules about when trans athletes have to already be transitioning to compete in the women's divisions that will make it impossible for any trans woman to comply with. Specifically, they have to not have gone through much of "male puberty" or reached the age of twelve without already being in transition. Given how difficult it is to get a puberty blocker, even with parental permission and support and a doctor that's willing to prescribe them, getting them before twelve is asking for the impossible. But now that one organization has set some standards, I expect others to follow suit with similar impossibilities. All because they're afraid that trans athletes will somehow dominate all sports, despite the current data that shows they're not doing that.
A lot of the current conceptions of transgender identity are rooted in very recent terminology, sometimes created by opponents of trans people, and sometimes by people who wanted to prioritize and get the LG part of the acronym respectability while excluding the rest. Reality is always more complicated than neaty boxes.
That which is old is new again, as we see more and more calls to prevent "promoting homosexuality," although the term has expanded to encompass promoting queerness of any sort at all. The US certainliy seems more than willing to join that cavalcade, and with the current composition of the Supreme Court, we may be seeing plenty of such phrases justified and given the weight of legal interpretation. And then we, too, will have to once again reconstruct what the lives of queer people might have been by examining the records of government and policing designed to paint them in the worst possible light.
The mere fact that Prime Minister Johnson had a confidence vote in him means he's sunk, even though he https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-politics-60289386">won the confidence vote, with 148 of his own party's MPs voting against him. At this point, there's probably betting and shaping going on hoping that his fall causes the most damage that it possibly can on the way down.
44 percent of the party of authoritarianism believe that mass casualties are acceptable casualties so that any white man can own any gun he desires and use it with impunity on anyone else. Which does leave 56 percent of the party of authoritarianism believing there's some reform that could be done on mass shootings and the weapons used to perpetuate them, but the party of authoritarianism is busily working to ensure that they either stay in locketep or are dismissed from the party.
The power of stories to tell ideas, as exemplified by Discworld and Sir Pterry GNU, the idea that Steve Rogers is patterned on King David, a review of Ms. Marvel so far that points out how richly invested in Muslim culture it is, while also separately noting the paucity of explicit Judaism in the MCU in all of its incarnations. (Which is prety terrible, given how much of comics, including the comics the make up the MCU, we owe to explicitly Jewish people creating the kinds of heroes they needed to punch Nazis and other oppressors in their lives.) The fundamental differences of Star Wars (dystopic) and Star Trek (utopic) that make comparing the two apples and oranges, except in the one spot where they both pretty well hate on authoritarians and ultra-conservatives (even though there are still Star Wars fans who miss that point pretty hard or demand that Star Wars not bring politics into a universe that's pretty explicit with the Nazi comparisons), and Varney, a vampire story with some of the elements of vampires that readers of the 21st century would recognize.
A documentary about a lesbian club in London that had a solid clientele and the people who founded and ran it. The article also talks about how Mick Jagger wanted to stop by, said that he'd even wear a dress for the privilege if he could get in.
A written story about how being able to get an abortion, without waiting, without having to drive to another state, without having to take off work, without all of the impediments that are being thrown in the way, saved the life of both a mother and her daughter, because that allowed them both to escape an abusive man, divorce him, and then build a life for themselves. The mother lived a lot longer and got care for something that turned out to be cancer. But, of course, the life of the already alive is not to be prized at all to the theocrats, only the possibility of more babies to feed their political aims who will believe as thy do.
Seeking joy as a way of defying and overcoming oppression. Of the three things mentioned in the post, the first and the third (division and information control) are the easiest to accept for me as forces that work against me, but also as forces that can be managed and opposed - building breadth as well as depth in associations and sources of input is somewhat easier to do when you've been trained on how to do it, and also you've built up a network of people and input feeds that provide you with a representative sample of the reality you want to inhabit. (It is an active curation process borne of experience and expertise, not the passive "accept all sides" mentality that my current profession is cursed with.)
The second, however, exhaustion, the feeling that "it is always impossible until it is done" and that "done" will not happen in the short time that my existence is, especially not when compared to the arc of history, that there may never be a payoff that I get to see on things, that is much harder. My brain tends toward "these are solutions, they have benefits, surely that means other people see them as things to try, even if they will not be a perfect solution" and it has a certain amount of trouble with the idea that some people genuinely believe things whose most prominent pushers are, at least to my perspective, cynics and grifters looking to profit and to try and inspire stocastic violence rather than people who genuinely believe the things and try to fight the injustices that result from that in ways that will actually work toward resolving those injustices, instead of perpetuating them. It is difficult to see that there are problems, there are potential solutions, and that there are people standing in the way for reasons that appear to boil down to "because we don't want our opponents to score positive points" and "because we fundamentally believe that these are not people, but something subhuman." Exhaustion demands that if I'm not advancing the cause at all moments and all times, then the cause will fail because I didn't do my part. And it's difficult to take time for yourself when there's a societal and cultural expectation that to do so is selfish and that worth is measured in what you're doing for someone else, rather than yourself. (Even if the wages for doing so are almost always less than the value of what you did for someone else.)
I don't really have a reference for what "putting myself first" would look like. Or even, perhaps, "treating myself with the same importance as I treat others." (This is the part where people recommend therapy. Which is on my to-do list, as soon as I feel financially secure enough to start. Because capitalist hellscape.) Just another interesting way of being broken, same same yet different.
The obvious ableism in a cooking culture that insists the only correct and moral way of cooking is the way that requires the biggst investment of time and access to fresh ingredients. The article-writer ends up coming to this conclusion because she developed a disability that made it difficult and sometimes impossible to do it the fresh-ingredients way. Blest are those of us who do not need a disability to understand the ableism and work against it.
It's also a microcosm of a more general trend, where a thing starts out being difficult, time-intensive, and expensive, then technology appears to make the thing less difficult, less time-intensive, and less expensive, and therefore promotes wider-spread adoption and use, and then, at some point in the local maximum, it becomes fashionable to do the thing according to the difficult, time-intensive, and expensive manner, as a signal of having enough spare time and money to do it the hard way and imparting moral authority and inherent superiority to the thing created the hard way. Mass culture becomes crass culture, and therefore only the artisan can be allowed to take any pride in their work.
Food, we might note, is the process of how we obtain necessary nutrients that we can't manufactgure ourselves, and keep the energy reserves topped up. Therefore, the goal is to get those nutrients into the system in a way that we like enough to keep doing it. Food should, therefore, be fucking delicious as a primary goal, just slightly less important than "food should not be poisonous." If you made food that you want to eat again, congratularions, you've succeeded, regardless of whether everything that you used to get there is as moral as the artisans want it to be. (There is a discussion on how to make food more ethical, but many of those things are not about what tools you use, or whether your ingredients are bought fresh, or whether you used a quick mix to create something instead of leaving it out for three proves and several hours in the oven. Those are things like humane treatment of livestock, of crop workers, of factory processors, of soil, and other systemic issues that all reasonably fall under the directive of "food should not be poisonous." The kind of thing that starts from the premise that nobody should be required to starve, and nobody should be required to make do with inadequate amounts of food, and no person who works with food should be seen as anything other than respected, instead of an entity to be squeezed so that others can make profit.)
Finding Saxon-era burial sites in the pathway of a high-speed rail line, a suggestion as to where the bubonic plague epidemic of the medium aevum may have began, the reality that women run an empire where most of the men go off for fighting campaigns, and that's true for Mongols as well, technology and engineering weaving a pair of 3000 year-old pants that's strong in some spots and stretchy in others, so that the mounted warrior wearing them can move and ride in them comfortably, all without any cuts or seams in the pants, the shortcomings of a diorama in sufficient detail that the thing itself doesn't need to be shown, although I suspect a close-in image of a part of it is the background to the page, what TVTropes might call the Colbert Bump, but instead it's RM from BTS and the various art galleries and locations that he's visited that the ARMYs also take an interest in, and also Cheech Marin, perhaps most famously known for stoner comedies with Tommy Chong, opening a gallery of Chicano art with his name and much of his collection attached.
In technology, revisiting the idea of the helium dirigible for certain transport needs and distances, currently focusing on regional travel rather than long-distance.
Last for tonight, several vegetables of Japan, with substitutions and recipes that use those vegetables.
Also, a proper guild for those who work at the Medieval Times themes restaurant and entertainment vernues. We hope their election succeeds and they gain the power of collective bargaining.
(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.)
