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silveradeptGreetings! Let's begin with something serious. If you are United States-based and oppose the continual attacks on treandgender men and women participating in sport under very flimsy pretenses based in pseudoscience at best, then it may be worth knowing that the federal government has proposed regulations to make sure that Title IX continues to address and prevent discrimination on protected statuses and characteristics (including gender identity), and like all proposed regulations, there is a public comment period. Because anything that looks trans-affirming is targeted, there's a fair amount of copypasta in the commentary about things that the regulations don't actually do or imagined harms that come from making sure that the government has the correct authority and regulatory power to execute Title IX. We'd really appreciate it if you left a thoughtful comment of your own about the proposed regulations. Such that the people who are reading them for information will go "this one's a real human, rather than someone who copypasted their response from a form somewhere." If you're at a loss on where to start, there's some starter language to build on in a ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thisfinecrew post by watersword. One of the things that's already starting to come to pass is the way that the "you're not really a woman" is being weaponized against athletes, and especially non-white athletes, by people who want an easy way of forcing someone to undergo an invasive test or risk not being able to compete, and hoping that those test results somehow disqualify that competitor for being outside some arbitrary range of hormone or some other such thing. The updated regulations, once put into effect, would certainly help the federal government give a baleful eye to such laws and policies as unacceptable to Title IX.
A field guide to how resistance to transition looks in people who aren't going to deliberately say they resist your transition, because doing so would mean you have an excuse to tell them to get lost.
A new documentary about the rough waves that women had to surf before they were taken seriously as competitors. A record label devoted to publishing and making available compositions by women. Working toward closing the gap in wealth generated by selling art by men and art by women.
As a bit of a follow-on to something in the last link ball, The Cophenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, which uses some of that Effective Altruism philosophy toward some more real-life situations. The complaint, that trying to make an effort toward improving a situation can bring oppobrium and blame where leaving it alone does not, is a legitimate one, but the examples used are almost exclusively about corporations doing things, and most critically, the examples only talk about the potential benefits of the actions, and not, for example, about how Uber's business practices are intentionally anticompetive and their long game is to become a monopoly, how paying someone $20 a day plus tips is not even what a waitserver makes as a daily wage, and PETA's demands that people change their lifestyle significantly in exchange for being able to get access to water. The kinds of things that won't figure into an ethical calculus if you're only looking at it on one dimension, something like "did this person have more money / less debts than they did before the help was provided?" but will figure into your ethical calculus if you're looking at it from more than one dimension, like "is that basket of vegan food PETA provides enough to feed a family for 30 days, or will they have to spend money they already have proven they don't have on more expensive vegan food, such that they might still end up in a bad situation even after their utility bill is no longer in arrears?"
These examples and the other possible critiques applied to them remind me of the way that whiteness gets critiqued. The critique itself often explicitly acknowledges that someone's trying to fix a problem, and that they're making real effort toward trying to fix the problem, but the way they're going about it isn't actually helpful because of things that the person trying to help either didn't know or didn't care enough about to anticipate or put into their plan. But when that's pointed out, there's usually a "you're not sufficiently grateful to me for making an effort where nobody else is" as the counterargument. Which is usually wrong (there's probably a mutual aid group that's been part of that place for decades who would more than happily take your money and do good with it) and also reveals what the purpose of the purported generosity was - not to improve lives, but for public relations and the feel-goods of the person involved. Which is the argument put forth, although phrased negatively, in the last example about how spending $300 on a bender is choosing not to spend $300 on life-saving treatments for others in the world. Since the you of this argument chose to selfishly prioritize yourself over others for a very limited burst of happiness, you should feel ethically and morally bad for not being sufficiently utilitarian about it, and furthermore feel bad because you are now personally responsible for not helping other people in the world. If you were really concerned about your happiness, you'd be putting your money toward helping other people in the world, instead of thinking about yourself.
Which should sound familiar to most people who have been raised in a culturally Christian environment, since the praise goes not to the poeple who give from their excesses and who still have yet more left over, but the people who give from their necessary supply and trust that the deity and the community will provide for them what they need. Which usually results in the rich sitting on their wealth until they can use it for power or PR and the poor passing the same $20 between each other for whichever crisis that $20 is most urgently needed for. (Many practitioners have their priests, pastors, and preachers forget to mention the parts that say "don't harvest your fields to the edges so that the poor among you can have something to eat, forgive the debts that you have over other people regularly and liberally, free your slaves, and treat people who are new or foreign in your lands as if they had been there for generations." Many others have preachers who have swallowed the damnable idea of the prosperity gospel, where your material riches and rewards are a reflection of your spiritual virtue, despite the statement that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the heavenly kingdom. And the whole bit with the whipping of the moneychangers and the merchants in the spiritual space. And the thing usually translated about not being able to serve both God and mammon.) In so many situations, the maximally utilitarian thing (and the Christian thing) to do regarding so many social problems would be "use your vast wealth and distribute it through aid organizations and fair wages that can make a difference in someone's life by stabilizing them and getting them the materials they need to thrive." Which mostly isn't happening. The next best thing to do, then, is "make the bargain that the fantastically rich, because they are rich, will have most of their wealth taxed and redistributed by government to aid organizations that will help people, since they are not doing that aid themselves." Which isn't happening because government has routinely been the rich making the rules to make themselves richer, not the rich trying to produce a functional society. (As it turns out, the effective altruists are sitting on a lot of assets, and at least some of them are shifting from doing maximum short-term good toward maximum super-long-term potential benefit for the generations not yet to come. Which is the utilitarian thing to do for humanity as a whole, but risks missing the fire destroying the trees by focusing on the health of the forest. Even some of the people most swayed by effective altruism are of two minds about the shifting from concrete immediate wins to long-term speculation. And that still doesn't remove the critiques of the situation, and the way that it tries to cultivate people who make maximal amounts of money into giving most of it away, which does little to deal with the structural problems of how they got the money in the first place. And whatever critiques there are of the reasoning being flawed in where the money gets allocated.)
Anyway, the actual point is that complaining that trying to do something about something catching backlash is a legitimate complaint - we'd like to have our altruism be both effective and ethical, and preferably without people calling into question our ethics based on our choices, but the examples about that need to be better thought-out if they don't want to end up looking like apologia for greed and very unethical behavior hiding behind a fig leaf of "we're trying to fix this problem" or sounding like we only undertook altruistic behaviors for the benefits to ourselves.
This is a little brainweasel for me at times, because I'm the one with the stable well-paying job in my household, so I'm the one who theoretically should be giving away more of my money to mutual aid requests. Except for the complication where it's not just me in my household, so I have a responsibility to be able to provide for the other people, which takes a bigger share of the money that I have, and so am I discharging my ethical duties by taking care of the people in front of me, even though it's "selfish" to want to try and keep enough money to achieve that before thinking about turning outward to others? I had the hardest time with this weasel with my ex, because my ex was adamant that without my support, she'd be homeless and destitute, because of the amount of money she'd put into our relationship already, expecting that I would reciprocate in kind by supporting her and dismissing any arguments I had about the need to stay within the amount of money that I actually had. I am better now for not having her in my life, but she demanded as a condition of leaving that I essentially pay her back for the investments she made in the relationship, and because I wanted her gone, I took on that debt. I hope the pets she took with her are healthy and living their fullest happy lives.
(In relation to a significant amount of Discourse that happened when someone became a main character on Twitter by having doxx released and used as "proof" of being a morally bankrupt hypocrite, you might understand why I thought we had already settled, as a society, the question of how we judge other people's workplaces and jobs with regard to moral culpability in corporate actions. For an audience looking for any excuse to brigade, anything that looked like it might be enough to pull someone off a pedestal, real or imagined, was going to be enough to send the hordes. How much more complicated the ethics calculations should be (and aren't, because complexity makes people stop and think, rather than charge forward at the urging of the agitator) when someone is trying to flee a hostile government, is trying to take care of multiple people, is trying to take care of multiple people with disabilities, must work with an extremely reduced set of possible professions that will provide enough salary, benefits, and flexibility/accommodation to be able to work at all, much less provide for others, and so forth. That kind of context collapse makes my brain panic slightly, because it knows full well that someone who has decided to ignore context and new information in pursuit of their goal is dangerous and the only way to make the model make sense is to write them off as evil and treat them as unredeemably permanently hostile. Y'know, like a boss that chose to see an employee who was struggling as a problem that needed to be removed, rather than to take the time to try and develop them or help them learn their shortcomings and build effective systems to combat them. I recognize that everyone else will have different opinions of that boss and different experiences, but for me, that boss will always be incompetent.)
With the new information and release of unsealed court documents from the Depp-Heard defamation trial that showcased the reprehensible tactics that didn't make it to the trial, it seems prudent to point out just how much the playbook for the defamation trial was about mustering as much misogyny as could be packed into the courtroom (and letting it flow freely online from the people who stood to benefit the most from calling Amber Heard a liar and all sorts of other names.)
A retrospective on the times where women's and feminist bookstores were one of the primary places for people who were outside of the mainstream to hang out. There's also a certain amount of second-wave feminism about all of it, which the article acknowledges without dismissing it as unimportant or unenlightened. It's very much bookstores picking up a role that nobody else was interested in doing, and that places like libraries would have had active policies against collecting or encouraging, at least for the most part. And that might have to do so again, based on how the legislation and the demands that old white men make about the lives of everyone not them. Demands which other white men are already following, as in the case of Facebook turning over data about a planned abortion in response to a court order from an anti-choice state demanding they do so. Which is a sterling example of how private is not really private if it's being stored somewhere that can be accessed by a court order. (Which, unfortunately, because humans are not usually great at remembering and at information security, menas nothing that's had a record made of itself is really private to a determined enough actor.)
We mourn the passing of Nichelle Nichols, most famously known for portraying Lieutenant Uhura in the original Star Trek, at 89 years of age.
The Korean Intellectual Property Protection Agency has ruled that a company cannot exclusively claim a trademark name "G-Friend" because it is far too close to the specific K-Pop group called GFRIEND that people would recognize and be confused about if it were something other than the group themselves. That's a good thing, and we can hope that other rulings will follow in other courts to prevent corporations from trying to poach the trademarks of others (or simply claim those marks were theirs all along.)
Conspiracy-peddler and reality-denier Alex Jones found out his lawyers had shared the contents of his phone with the opposing counsel, which, in addition to perjury claims, will make it much harder for Jones to lie to anyone else in his remaining trials or any other actions about what he does and does not know. With his lawyers having shared the information, and not made the correct requests to have that information deleted or otherwise suppressed, the data sent to the opposing lawyer is now confirmed that it will be shared with various agencies, including the January 6 investigation committee.
An accusation of witchcraft, and some documents vouching for the character of the accused, and a generally more interested-in-evidence portrayal than most people who invoke the idea of the witch-hunt believe is true.
The addition of plant-based protein sausages to the Cracker Barrel menu has some of the supporters of the chain decrying it as unacceptable wokeness, which would seem like an odd thing if you don't know that Cracker Barrel's entire aesthetic is "throwback to the time of penny candy general stores and white men as the only people allowed to have opinions about anything" and therefore the slightest hint that something of our era is appearing means the fantasy of that world will always be just slightly distorted enough to be noticeable.
The Anglican bishops met and the first among equals suggested the compromise of not reforming the teaching on queer people (so they're still considered sinful) and also not sanctioning churches that decide they want to be welcoming and accepting (and even marrying) queer people. Which is likely to make nobody happy and has already drawn criticism from several luminaries, including Sandi Toksvig, for leaving in place something that discriminates.
A history project looking at postpartum mental illnesses and how they were treated in the 20th century, in the UK. And a different research book showcasing the varied experiences of Black persons in and around London throughout time, as mediated through the records of the criminal court.
Expanding the definition of who counts as an extremist in vague terms, as Mr. Sunak wants to do, seems like the sort of thing where you have a broad sweep to declare anyone you don't like to be extremist. Given how well that's gone over here in the States, where there is regular concerns about people who are painted as somehow extreme by their existence by people who propose extremist policies and actions to force them out of the public sphere, I'd say not to make the same mistake that's already been made here and instead decide to be morally smug and superior about it.
In the same vein and general willingness to poke at what the regs do and do not say regarding things as a person names Skippy, using different typefaces to make name tapes what aren't explicitly forbidden by the regulations.
A poke at potential reasons for various shortages of supply - oligopolists inserting themselves in the market so as to make themselves lots of money and lock out competition from getting their market share. Which pairs well with a plea to make ethical goods become cheap and price-competitive, rather than occupying the niche where people with additional monies can be conspicuously ethical, so that ethical goods can remain in the market even when the market tanks. (To do so would require the demands for profit over all things to be reworked, which will be a difficult task indeed.)
synecdochic has a writeup about how mast cells can sometimes be dressing room-trashing assholes, and how someone might spot that this is the thing and use various things to try and counteract the histamine fits that can happen when the mast cells decide to flip the table. Well worth it, especially for people who have Ehlers-Danlos or other not-very-explicable and not-very-consistent things happening where antihistamines seem to be able to make things go better.
After escaping an enclosure, a turtle was struck by a train and survived, giant gooseberry growing competitions, video of Freya the Walrus interacting with the world, because watching walruses not give a fork about human society is almost always entertaining, using an inexpensive food container to create a cat enrichment toy, snails that grow iron armor as a byproduct of shuttling waste away from their soft tissues, groups looking to reintroduce more bison in more Native American Nations, which could also produce additional scrutiny from the United States Department of Agriculture, and a new rhino calf.
Bachelorette party cakes, many of which are three-dimensional, and several of which can be constructed so as to fire whipped cream out of the appropriate aperture. Unless you work in this kind of field, probably best to open it when you're on the home network. Other oddities of this universe include the possibility that exposure to UVB rays may result in increased sexual behavior in humans, based on what it does in mice, right and proper giant chicken eggs as a prank, adventures in naming things and in catrography, appropriate protocols to prevent dolls and other toys from becoming hosts to various spirits, many of which are malign, an extremely accurate summation of the Phantom of the Opera, and games that are definitely in the spirit of the Discordian, even if they're not the official game, Sink.
In technology, the ways in which being a person who wants to take a principled stand and not encumber works with DRM leads to ripoff artists filling the gap, because the DRM platform is also a near-monopoly, which means two wrongs that hurt people's rights.
A short thought on the difference between social networks, which require complexity and contextualization to move messages from person to person, and mass media, which relies far more on unmodified messages being blasted out at high volume to as wide a distribution network as is possible.
Unconventional and, as it turned out, unseaworthy ship design. And then, designing a ship for a fop so that the comedy comes through both in the acting and the set.
Floppotron 3.0, a device that uses motors on various technologies to play music. Which probably took quite a bit of power to run, given that there are more than 500 devices being run to produce the sound.
Last for tonight, a short document-and-comments story about wanting someone to stay around and what lengths a person might go to in the attempt to make it happen. And the consequences of permanent actions, on the geological and the human scales (CW for nuclear energy and for at least one suicide attempt.)
But also delighting the visiting scholar of the tea ceremony by having just about everything that could go wrong with it go wrong with it, and doing later Star Trek incarnations in the style and animation of the first Star Trek animated series.
And perhaps, for the end of this, it's the story of a bull named Civilón, who provided the inspiration for the story of Ferdinand. Both bulls did not fight in the arena, but instead demonstrated a peaceful nature that had their crowds calling for them to be released and returned to the life they had. (Which did happen. Unlike Ferdinand, however, Civilón was killed and eaten by fascists.)
(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 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.)
thisfinecrew post by watersword. One of the things that's already starting to come to pass is the way that the "you're not really a woman" is being weaponized against athletes, and especially non-white athletes, by people who want an easy way of forcing someone to undergo an invasive test or risk not being able to compete, and hoping that those test results somehow disqualify that competitor for being outside some arbitrary range of hormone or some other such thing. The updated regulations, once put into effect, would certainly help the federal government give a baleful eye to such laws and policies as unacceptable to Title IX.A field guide to how resistance to transition looks in people who aren't going to deliberately say they resist your transition, because doing so would mean you have an excuse to tell them to get lost.
A new documentary about the rough waves that women had to surf before they were taken seriously as competitors. A record label devoted to publishing and making available compositions by women. Working toward closing the gap in wealth generated by selling art by men and art by women.
As a bit of a follow-on to something in the last link ball, The Cophenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, which uses some of that Effective Altruism philosophy toward some more real-life situations. The complaint, that trying to make an effort toward improving a situation can bring oppobrium and blame where leaving it alone does not, is a legitimate one, but the examples used are almost exclusively about corporations doing things, and most critically, the examples only talk about the potential benefits of the actions, and not, for example, about how Uber's business practices are intentionally anticompetive and their long game is to become a monopoly, how paying someone $20 a day plus tips is not even what a waitserver makes as a daily wage, and PETA's demands that people change their lifestyle significantly in exchange for being able to get access to water. The kinds of things that won't figure into an ethical calculus if you're only looking at it on one dimension, something like "did this person have more money / less debts than they did before the help was provided?" but will figure into your ethical calculus if you're looking at it from more than one dimension, like "is that basket of vegan food PETA provides enough to feed a family for 30 days, or will they have to spend money they already have proven they don't have on more expensive vegan food, such that they might still end up in a bad situation even after their utility bill is no longer in arrears?"
These examples and the other possible critiques applied to them remind me of the way that whiteness gets critiqued. The critique itself often explicitly acknowledges that someone's trying to fix a problem, and that they're making real effort toward trying to fix the problem, but the way they're going about it isn't actually helpful because of things that the person trying to help either didn't know or didn't care enough about to anticipate or put into their plan. But when that's pointed out, there's usually a "you're not sufficiently grateful to me for making an effort where nobody else is" as the counterargument. Which is usually wrong (there's probably a mutual aid group that's been part of that place for decades who would more than happily take your money and do good with it) and also reveals what the purpose of the purported generosity was - not to improve lives, but for public relations and the feel-goods of the person involved. Which is the argument put forth, although phrased negatively, in the last example about how spending $300 on a bender is choosing not to spend $300 on life-saving treatments for others in the world. Since the you of this argument chose to selfishly prioritize yourself over others for a very limited burst of happiness, you should feel ethically and morally bad for not being sufficiently utilitarian about it, and furthermore feel bad because you are now personally responsible for not helping other people in the world. If you were really concerned about your happiness, you'd be putting your money toward helping other people in the world, instead of thinking about yourself.
Which should sound familiar to most people who have been raised in a culturally Christian environment, since the praise goes not to the poeple who give from their excesses and who still have yet more left over, but the people who give from their necessary supply and trust that the deity and the community will provide for them what they need. Which usually results in the rich sitting on their wealth until they can use it for power or PR and the poor passing the same $20 between each other for whichever crisis that $20 is most urgently needed for. (Many practitioners have their priests, pastors, and preachers forget to mention the parts that say "don't harvest your fields to the edges so that the poor among you can have something to eat, forgive the debts that you have over other people regularly and liberally, free your slaves, and treat people who are new or foreign in your lands as if they had been there for generations." Many others have preachers who have swallowed the damnable idea of the prosperity gospel, where your material riches and rewards are a reflection of your spiritual virtue, despite the statement that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the heavenly kingdom. And the whole bit with the whipping of the moneychangers and the merchants in the spiritual space. And the thing usually translated about not being able to serve both God and mammon.) In so many situations, the maximally utilitarian thing (and the Christian thing) to do regarding so many social problems would be "use your vast wealth and distribute it through aid organizations and fair wages that can make a difference in someone's life by stabilizing them and getting them the materials they need to thrive." Which mostly isn't happening. The next best thing to do, then, is "make the bargain that the fantastically rich, because they are rich, will have most of their wealth taxed and redistributed by government to aid organizations that will help people, since they are not doing that aid themselves." Which isn't happening because government has routinely been the rich making the rules to make themselves richer, not the rich trying to produce a functional society. (As it turns out, the effective altruists are sitting on a lot of assets, and at least some of them are shifting from doing maximum short-term good toward maximum super-long-term potential benefit for the generations not yet to come. Which is the utilitarian thing to do for humanity as a whole, but risks missing the fire destroying the trees by focusing on the health of the forest. Even some of the people most swayed by effective altruism are of two minds about the shifting from concrete immediate wins to long-term speculation. And that still doesn't remove the critiques of the situation, and the way that it tries to cultivate people who make maximal amounts of money into giving most of it away, which does little to deal with the structural problems of how they got the money in the first place. And whatever critiques there are of the reasoning being flawed in where the money gets allocated.)
Anyway, the actual point is that complaining that trying to do something about something catching backlash is a legitimate complaint - we'd like to have our altruism be both effective and ethical, and preferably without people calling into question our ethics based on our choices, but the examples about that need to be better thought-out if they don't want to end up looking like apologia for greed and very unethical behavior hiding behind a fig leaf of "we're trying to fix this problem" or sounding like we only undertook altruistic behaviors for the benefits to ourselves.
This is a little brainweasel for me at times, because I'm the one with the stable well-paying job in my household, so I'm the one who theoretically should be giving away more of my money to mutual aid requests. Except for the complication where it's not just me in my household, so I have a responsibility to be able to provide for the other people, which takes a bigger share of the money that I have, and so am I discharging my ethical duties by taking care of the people in front of me, even though it's "selfish" to want to try and keep enough money to achieve that before thinking about turning outward to others? I had the hardest time with this weasel with my ex, because my ex was adamant that without my support, she'd be homeless and destitute, because of the amount of money she'd put into our relationship already, expecting that I would reciprocate in kind by supporting her and dismissing any arguments I had about the need to stay within the amount of money that I actually had. I am better now for not having her in my life, but she demanded as a condition of leaving that I essentially pay her back for the investments she made in the relationship, and because I wanted her gone, I took on that debt. I hope the pets she took with her are healthy and living their fullest happy lives.
(In relation to a significant amount of Discourse that happened when someone became a main character on Twitter by having doxx released and used as "proof" of being a morally bankrupt hypocrite, you might understand why I thought we had already settled, as a society, the question of how we judge other people's workplaces and jobs with regard to moral culpability in corporate actions. For an audience looking for any excuse to brigade, anything that looked like it might be enough to pull someone off a pedestal, real or imagined, was going to be enough to send the hordes. How much more complicated the ethics calculations should be (and aren't, because complexity makes people stop and think, rather than charge forward at the urging of the agitator) when someone is trying to flee a hostile government, is trying to take care of multiple people, is trying to take care of multiple people with disabilities, must work with an extremely reduced set of possible professions that will provide enough salary, benefits, and flexibility/accommodation to be able to work at all, much less provide for others, and so forth. That kind of context collapse makes my brain panic slightly, because it knows full well that someone who has decided to ignore context and new information in pursuit of their goal is dangerous and the only way to make the model make sense is to write them off as evil and treat them as unredeemably permanently hostile. Y'know, like a boss that chose to see an employee who was struggling as a problem that needed to be removed, rather than to take the time to try and develop them or help them learn their shortcomings and build effective systems to combat them. I recognize that everyone else will have different opinions of that boss and different experiences, but for me, that boss will always be incompetent.)
With the new information and release of unsealed court documents from the Depp-Heard defamation trial that showcased the reprehensible tactics that didn't make it to the trial, it seems prudent to point out just how much the playbook for the defamation trial was about mustering as much misogyny as could be packed into the courtroom (and letting it flow freely online from the people who stood to benefit the most from calling Amber Heard a liar and all sorts of other names.)
A retrospective on the times where women's and feminist bookstores were one of the primary places for people who were outside of the mainstream to hang out. There's also a certain amount of second-wave feminism about all of it, which the article acknowledges without dismissing it as unimportant or unenlightened. It's very much bookstores picking up a role that nobody else was interested in doing, and that places like libraries would have had active policies against collecting or encouraging, at least for the most part. And that might have to do so again, based on how the legislation and the demands that old white men make about the lives of everyone not them. Demands which other white men are already following, as in the case of Facebook turning over data about a planned abortion in response to a court order from an anti-choice state demanding they do so. Which is a sterling example of how private is not really private if it's being stored somewhere that can be accessed by a court order. (Which, unfortunately, because humans are not usually great at remembering and at information security, menas nothing that's had a record made of itself is really private to a determined enough actor.)
We mourn the passing of Nichelle Nichols, most famously known for portraying Lieutenant Uhura in the original Star Trek, at 89 years of age.
The Korean Intellectual Property Protection Agency has ruled that a company cannot exclusively claim a trademark name "G-Friend" because it is far too close to the specific K-Pop group called GFRIEND that people would recognize and be confused about if it were something other than the group themselves. That's a good thing, and we can hope that other rulings will follow in other courts to prevent corporations from trying to poach the trademarks of others (or simply claim those marks were theirs all along.)
Conspiracy-peddler and reality-denier Alex Jones found out his lawyers had shared the contents of his phone with the opposing counsel, which, in addition to perjury claims, will make it much harder for Jones to lie to anyone else in his remaining trials or any other actions about what he does and does not know. With his lawyers having shared the information, and not made the correct requests to have that information deleted or otherwise suppressed, the data sent to the opposing lawyer is now confirmed that it will be shared with various agencies, including the January 6 investigation committee.
An accusation of witchcraft, and some documents vouching for the character of the accused, and a generally more interested-in-evidence portrayal than most people who invoke the idea of the witch-hunt believe is true.
The addition of plant-based protein sausages to the Cracker Barrel menu has some of the supporters of the chain decrying it as unacceptable wokeness, which would seem like an odd thing if you don't know that Cracker Barrel's entire aesthetic is "throwback to the time of penny candy general stores and white men as the only people allowed to have opinions about anything" and therefore the slightest hint that something of our era is appearing means the fantasy of that world will always be just slightly distorted enough to be noticeable.
The Anglican bishops met and the first among equals suggested the compromise of not reforming the teaching on queer people (so they're still considered sinful) and also not sanctioning churches that decide they want to be welcoming and accepting (and even marrying) queer people. Which is likely to make nobody happy and has already drawn criticism from several luminaries, including Sandi Toksvig, for leaving in place something that discriminates.
A history project looking at postpartum mental illnesses and how they were treated in the 20th century, in the UK. And a different research book showcasing the varied experiences of Black persons in and around London throughout time, as mediated through the records of the criminal court.
Expanding the definition of who counts as an extremist in vague terms, as Mr. Sunak wants to do, seems like the sort of thing where you have a broad sweep to declare anyone you don't like to be extremist. Given how well that's gone over here in the States, where there is regular concerns about people who are painted as somehow extreme by their existence by people who propose extremist policies and actions to force them out of the public sphere, I'd say not to make the same mistake that's already been made here and instead decide to be morally smug and superior about it.
In the same vein and general willingness to poke at what the regs do and do not say regarding things as a person names Skippy, using different typefaces to make name tapes what aren't explicitly forbidden by the regulations.
A poke at potential reasons for various shortages of supply - oligopolists inserting themselves in the market so as to make themselves lots of money and lock out competition from getting their market share. Which pairs well with a plea to make ethical goods become cheap and price-competitive, rather than occupying the niche where people with additional monies can be conspicuously ethical, so that ethical goods can remain in the market even when the market tanks. (To do so would require the demands for profit over all things to be reworked, which will be a difficult task indeed.)
synecdochic has a writeup about how mast cells can sometimes be dressing room-trashing assholes, and how someone might spot that this is the thing and use various things to try and counteract the histamine fits that can happen when the mast cells decide to flip the table. Well worth it, especially for people who have Ehlers-Danlos or other not-very-explicable and not-very-consistent things happening where antihistamines seem to be able to make things go better.After escaping an enclosure, a turtle was struck by a train and survived, giant gooseberry growing competitions, video of Freya the Walrus interacting with the world, because watching walruses not give a fork about human society is almost always entertaining, using an inexpensive food container to create a cat enrichment toy, snails that grow iron armor as a byproduct of shuttling waste away from their soft tissues, groups looking to reintroduce more bison in more Native American Nations, which could also produce additional scrutiny from the United States Department of Agriculture, and a new rhino calf.
Bachelorette party cakes, many of which are three-dimensional, and several of which can be constructed so as to fire whipped cream out of the appropriate aperture. Unless you work in this kind of field, probably best to open it when you're on the home network. Other oddities of this universe include the possibility that exposure to UVB rays may result in increased sexual behavior in humans, based on what it does in mice, right and proper giant chicken eggs as a prank, adventures in naming things and in catrography, appropriate protocols to prevent dolls and other toys from becoming hosts to various spirits, many of which are malign, an extremely accurate summation of the Phantom of the Opera, and games that are definitely in the spirit of the Discordian, even if they're not the official game, Sink.
In technology, the ways in which being a person who wants to take a principled stand and not encumber works with DRM leads to ripoff artists filling the gap, because the DRM platform is also a near-monopoly, which means two wrongs that hurt people's rights.
A short thought on the difference between social networks, which require complexity and contextualization to move messages from person to person, and mass media, which relies far more on unmodified messages being blasted out at high volume to as wide a distribution network as is possible.
Unconventional and, as it turned out, unseaworthy ship design. And then, designing a ship for a fop so that the comedy comes through both in the acting and the set.
Floppotron 3.0, a device that uses motors on various technologies to play music. Which probably took quite a bit of power to run, given that there are more than 500 devices being run to produce the sound.
Last for tonight, a short document-and-comments story about wanting someone to stay around and what lengths a person might go to in the attempt to make it happen. And the consequences of permanent actions, on the geological and the human scales (CW for nuclear energy and for at least one suicide attempt.)
But also delighting the visiting scholar of the tea ceremony by having just about everything that could go wrong with it go wrong with it, and doing later Star Trek incarnations in the style and animation of the first Star Trek animated series.
And perhaps, for the end of this, it's the story of a bull named Civilón, who provided the inspiration for the story of Ferdinand. Both bulls did not fight in the arena, but instead demonstrated a peaceful nature that had their crowds calling for them to be released and returned to the life they had. (Which did happen. Unlike Ferdinand, however, Civilón was killed and eaten by fascists.)
(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.)
no subject
Date: 2022-08-15 02:33 pm (UTC)