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silveradeptLet's get out of the gate with the difficulty and surreality of having to consume or distribute the entirety of one's head sculpted in butter, as well as the parts that didn't make it to the final sculpture. Those who win the Princess Kay of the Milky Way (or are finalists) all have to determine how to deliciously dispose of all of that butter.
Elizabeth the Second has died at 96 years of age, Charles becomes Charles the Third, and now is the time where the republicans and the royalists have debates with each other and many a country tries to determine whether this is the opportunity to fully divest themselves from Empire.
Mary Peltola, a Yup'ik Alaska Native, proved the winner in a special election for a House of Representatives seat, which also worked as a run for the state's Ranked Choice Voting system.
In other consequences, a county commissioner in New Mexico was barred from ever holding public office again by a court because of his participation in the insurrection of January 6, 2021.
Documents recovered from the raid on Mar-a-Lago included a document that assessed the nuclear capabilities of a foreign power, which is one of the most closely guarded secrets of the country, and therefore probably has to be considered viewed by many people who are unauthorized to see such information (in addition to all of the other classified documents.) On that, by itself, it seems like there should be enough evidence to start slinging charges, but the judicial process is slow and the people in charge of this are probably trying to make absolutely sure there's no way that the people involved can wriggle out or create a reasonable doubt.
flowersforgraves offers some suggestions on how to make your podfic request and what you might have opinions on that you can tell a podficcer about.
Fen having problems with how villains sometimes are never acknowledged as fighting the correct thing, or how the plot armor of other characters often has them doing things that are expressly forbidden by the Evil Overlord List, and other situations of "how media often has to bend a character in ways that are terrible just to make sure they don't accidentally let the villain win or inspire sympathy for them such that someone might take up their cause and methods."
The -punk suffix as a signifier of aesthetic and not of specifically progressive politics and Fighting The Man, to which I am both reminded of the De La Soul edit of Thou Shalt Always Kill ("Thou shalt be aware that there are no longer any musical genres. They're all just different dress codes and different fashion styles.") and also to wonder what what the O.G. punks would think about that, since -punk is not simply a linguistic thing that came into being to describe a particular group of literary similarities. Punk music was very much into the DIY scene and wanted to get rid of what they saw as unnecessary gatekeeping, thus the "here's three chords, now go write and perform a song" as well as eschewing a significant amount of the production process because that was making sound that a studio liked, rather than a song that you, the performer, liked and that your audience would enjoy. So fighting the power is at least very close to punkness, as well as the lo-fi DIY aesthetic and not caring quite as much about respectability or conformity. Which puts many of the -punks that are about fighting the power or that are trying to prevent, recover from, or survive in the middle of apocalypses (as well as an aesthetic) closer in line to the punk music origins than the ones that focus primarily on the aesthetics and leave out the politics.
In response to a story about others finding your past self and others knowing you better than you know yourself, although the whole thing is peppered through with the kind of narration and terminology choices that tell me that it's someone who, intentionally or no, is replicating the conservative caricature of the progressive mind instead of someone who has more direct experience on the matter<, we have an essay about being found on the Internet, about the transformative power of a story, and about the privacy norms of communities, including solutions that exist in our times, like the ability to orphan a work so that the author is no longer associated without the work itself having to disappear. And that researchers need to consider things like the privacy of the people involved when they do research into sensitive subjects and things posted.
A lawsuit claiming that Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer and Sarah J. Mass's A Court of Mist and Fury met the definition of obscenity in Virginia and should be banned from sale and removed everywhere from the state has been dismissed by a judge who actually applied the law and its tests to the works. Which is to say that there's a good chance many of these queerphobic challenges will fall apart if they actually go before a magistrate who knows and will apply the law. The problem in many places is that the state legislatures are adding penalties and jeopardy to the point where the people who would otherwise line up to challenge such overreach are instead chilled from participation because to lose would be the entire destruction of their livelihood and swift financial ruin from there. And, in some places where the legislature hasn't decided to attack libraries and bookstores, the community around them sometimes takes up the mantle themselves, as in Kalispell, Montana, where books were returned to the library after having been shot. The article, of course, doesn't say which books had been shot up, but the local law enforcement seems to believe that there's no cause for alarm, despite books coming back with bullets in them, as if that were some normal part of rhetoric. Or, possibly, because they believe that it's spectacle and rhetoric instead of an indirect threat.
On the difficulties of pledging oneself to another when the apparatus of the State will not (yet?) recognize you as the people you already are.
On reformulating gender and gender identity as more about action than perception, such that nobody has to accept anything more as their gender identity than what they wish to practice. Which means being able to pick from whichever frameworks are accurate without having to accept the entirety of that framework. To have "dad" as a gender based on action and aesthetic rather than strictly because you have a biological child. Yes, it'll mess with the meanings of words, but we've been messing with the meanings of words for millennia at this point to make them work for whatever the needs of the current time are, so, *shrug*. It's a construction based on "yes, this, at least for now" rather than "not this, not that," which might make it easier for people to find harmony between things like "I am a person who enjoys power tools and preparing for incoming disasters" without having to also accept "I believe that in the disaster to come, my rugged individualism will carry the day, either apart from social connections or because it will allow me to amass power and leadership in whatever society will follow this one." as part of the package. It's an interesting thought to conceive of gender as something much more like your social media bio rather than as a single word with an entire framework of assumptions and traditions behind it.
With regard to the part of prepping that's in the previous piece, the piece itself talks about the difference between community solidarity and preparing alliances and friends, in the way that many of the women (and members) of the Black Panther Party engaged in and using one's vast sums of profit to purchase and outfit shrines to individualism, the kind that might yet still let the Red Death in to their masque all the same.
Describing Effective Altruism and its longtermism offshoot in the same way that one might describe L. Ron Hubbard's notoriously-litigious and secretive attempt at religion. Or other such related organizations.
The suggestion that the measurement of intelligence, whether general or artificial, only encompasses the space of well-defined problems, which in this case means "problems where people agree on the parameters of the problem and that there is a defined solution to it." Things can shift from not-well defined to well-defined (the example being the question of "How do I get someone to the moon safely?" starting as not well-defined, because you don't travel to the abodes of the gods in scientific ways, usually, and becoming progressively better-defined as we learned more about the universe around us until we answered the question by putting someone on the moon and letting them come back) but the most persistently stubborn questions, like "How do I live a happy life?" remain in the not well-defined category, which is how you get the phenomenon of "how come people who have higher intelligence scores and do better on general intelligence tests don't have a corresponding increase in happiness in their lives?" (There's also the entire legacy of the design and use of intelligence tests and their purposes that have to be contended with, because those things still influence us as a society today and often give rise to complaints about how the "best and brightest" aren't doing a great job with societal problems. Which, again, tend to not be well-defined, or even agreed-upon what the actual problem is.) This split in the types of problems can also lead to "smart people problems," where someone relies a little too much on their reasoning and intelligence skills to get themselves far further into the wickets of a problem where someone who was less reliant on those things would give up. (Or who tries to use their reasoning and well-defined-problems skills on problems that are almost inherently not well-defined, like social cues and the entire unspoken dance of manners and proper behavior.)
Well-defined problems sometimes have some far-reaching possibilities, where pattern and keyword-matchers like Midjourney can create variations on a futurism where the natural world and human living spaces are merged together or do the heavy lifting on an art submission that ended up winning a prize for digital art. (There was work for the finished product done after the prompt generation, which certainly makes a better argument toward enough human involvement to qualify it for contest entry.) Ursula Vernon used some computer art matching tools to create a hopeful post-apocalypse story. And then did clean-up work and layering and still drawing on top of that, so once again, we're in the situation where the tools might have provided a base image, but there was still a lot of art work being done on top of that.
For as much as the United States wants to portray itself as the destination for everyone in the rest of the world, there's more than enough reasons for people to want to avoid it. One of those might be that working on the railroad all the live-long day is less a folksy song of any sort and much more a reality (and the song it's based on is probably extremely racist anyway), such that there are possible strikes incoming. Which, you know, could make a lot of supply chains already more unstable. But if you look at the coverage, you'll notice, asbrithistorian did, that the article talks about possible wage increases in percentages compared to previous wages, in such a way that's trying to get people to believe that the increases are outrageous and huge, but they're also less than what the union has been asking for, so they're probably going from pittance to pittance if the recommendation gets adopted. If what you want is for people to side against the union, this kind of framing is perfect for that, because it manages to avoid a lot of actual numbers.
A quick guide on how to get practiced on someone's new pronouns, with a follow-up for people who are trying hard to get it right, but still are having more misses than hits.
A statue that wants to be allegorical and celebratory that potentially manages neither by including the subject as nude and anatomically detailed. The origin grounds for the fetishizaition of the lesbian and the idea that lesbianism could be "corrected" by sex with a sufficiently masculine man, the whole thing itself as a power fantasy for men who realized that they weren't actually in control of anything.
The Manhattan District Attorney's Office seized artifacts from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art using warrants with the intent of having those illegally seized and sold artifacts repatriated to their countries of origin,
Birds in sufficient density that they show up in a ring on a radar, locomotive sharks that can both walk on land and survive significant periods of time without oxygen, which might be an adaptation that helps due to climate change, which is hitting Pakistan especially hard right now, with greater-than usual rainfall in the monsoon season and associated flooding from far more water in liquid form, the process of creating an environment and reintroducing a threatened fish species to give it the best chance to survive in the wild, a tiny deer and a tiny deer baby (d'awwwww).
Methods of decluttering that aren't the KonMari method, in addition to a very short guide to the KonMari method, all of which may be easier when you're the only person who makes decisions and has stuff to declutter with. Once there's another person involved, then people have to agree on what's expendable and what's important. And you have to be sure that the other people don't have traumas around decluttering because a person in their life used the method of "when I'm upset about the clutter, anything I lay my hands on is considered clutter to be sent away or destroyed."
In technology, having mandated that the current crop of space technology use the same technology from the last era, is it any surprise that there were leaks and issues with fueling the Space Launch System, since leaks and issues were endemic to its predecessors in rocketry and the Space Shuttle system?
In cost per crew person, NASA is paying Boeing a little more than twice what it's paying SpaceX for commercial flights up to the International Space Station, although the piece points out that without Boeing's involvement as a competitor and bidder, it's entirely possible NASA wouldn't have done anything at all about commercial crew flights, which would have been even worse of an outcome. Seems like we could probably divert some of that Pentagon budget toward stabilizing and making better systems to put people in space to do science, instead of building more war weapons.
Criminals are branching out from hacking and attacking people to violence-for-hire services coordinated through various channels, with proof demanded for payment. Which seems like it will be in the toolkit along with SWATting for people to harass others, although it's certainly monetarily cheaper to try and get the police to do your dirty work for you.
Starbucks (the coffee company) thinks that we're all so enraptured by NFTs that we'll want them as rewards for continuing to buy their coffee. *beat* No thank you, I already have enough techbros trying to tell me that I'm missing out by not participating in someone else's belief that the blockchain is the solution to everyone.
Methods of using panels, bookcases, rugs, and other such items to prevent sound from leaking in or out of a room. Additionally, adding some technology to a non-IoT thermostat to make it addressable and controllable by a home automation system, like Home Assistant.
Last for the post, a single general practitioner doctor should not be the linchipin and coordinator of good care for anyone, and the fact that it can be is an indictment of the systems that bring it into existence.
That, and a mining and crafting game constructed and played in a Minecraft world, essentially first building the computer around the game, then programming the memory, building the graphics driver, an input controller, and a screen, and then demonstrating the playing of the game. [3 minutes, YouTube, big time time lapse.]
(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.)
Elizabeth the Second has died at 96 years of age, Charles becomes Charles the Third, and now is the time where the republicans and the royalists have debates with each other and many a country tries to determine whether this is the opportunity to fully divest themselves from Empire.
Mary Peltola, a Yup'ik Alaska Native, proved the winner in a special election for a House of Representatives seat, which also worked as a run for the state's Ranked Choice Voting system.
In other consequences, a county commissioner in New Mexico was barred from ever holding public office again by a court because of his participation in the insurrection of January 6, 2021.
Documents recovered from the raid on Mar-a-Lago included a document that assessed the nuclear capabilities of a foreign power, which is one of the most closely guarded secrets of the country, and therefore probably has to be considered viewed by many people who are unauthorized to see such information (in addition to all of the other classified documents.) On that, by itself, it seems like there should be enough evidence to start slinging charges, but the judicial process is slow and the people in charge of this are probably trying to make absolutely sure there's no way that the people involved can wriggle out or create a reasonable doubt.
flowersforgraves offers some suggestions on how to make your podfic request and what you might have opinions on that you can tell a podficcer about.Fen having problems with how villains sometimes are never acknowledged as fighting the correct thing, or how the plot armor of other characters often has them doing things that are expressly forbidden by the Evil Overlord List, and other situations of "how media often has to bend a character in ways that are terrible just to make sure they don't accidentally let the villain win or inspire sympathy for them such that someone might take up their cause and methods."
The -punk suffix as a signifier of aesthetic and not of specifically progressive politics and Fighting The Man, to which I am both reminded of the De La Soul edit of Thou Shalt Always Kill ("Thou shalt be aware that there are no longer any musical genres. They're all just different dress codes and different fashion styles.") and also to wonder what what the O.G. punks would think about that, since -punk is not simply a linguistic thing that came into being to describe a particular group of literary similarities. Punk music was very much into the DIY scene and wanted to get rid of what they saw as unnecessary gatekeeping, thus the "here's three chords, now go write and perform a song" as well as eschewing a significant amount of the production process because that was making sound that a studio liked, rather than a song that you, the performer, liked and that your audience would enjoy. So fighting the power is at least very close to punkness, as well as the lo-fi DIY aesthetic and not caring quite as much about respectability or conformity. Which puts many of the -punks that are about fighting the power or that are trying to prevent, recover from, or survive in the middle of apocalypses (as well as an aesthetic) closer in line to the punk music origins than the ones that focus primarily on the aesthetics and leave out the politics.
In response to a story about others finding your past self and others knowing you better than you know yourself, although the whole thing is peppered through with the kind of narration and terminology choices that tell me that it's someone who, intentionally or no, is replicating the conservative caricature of the progressive mind instead of someone who has more direct experience on the matter<, we have an essay about being found on the Internet, about the transformative power of a story, and about the privacy norms of communities, including solutions that exist in our times, like the ability to orphan a work so that the author is no longer associated without the work itself having to disappear. And that researchers need to consider things like the privacy of the people involved when they do research into sensitive subjects and things posted.
A lawsuit claiming that Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer and Sarah J. Mass's A Court of Mist and Fury met the definition of obscenity in Virginia and should be banned from sale and removed everywhere from the state has been dismissed by a judge who actually applied the law and its tests to the works. Which is to say that there's a good chance many of these queerphobic challenges will fall apart if they actually go before a magistrate who knows and will apply the law. The problem in many places is that the state legislatures are adding penalties and jeopardy to the point where the people who would otherwise line up to challenge such overreach are instead chilled from participation because to lose would be the entire destruction of their livelihood and swift financial ruin from there. And, in some places where the legislature hasn't decided to attack libraries and bookstores, the community around them sometimes takes up the mantle themselves, as in Kalispell, Montana, where books were returned to the library after having been shot. The article, of course, doesn't say which books had been shot up, but the local law enforcement seems to believe that there's no cause for alarm, despite books coming back with bullets in them, as if that were some normal part of rhetoric. Or, possibly, because they believe that it's spectacle and rhetoric instead of an indirect threat.
On the difficulties of pledging oneself to another when the apparatus of the State will not (yet?) recognize you as the people you already are.
On reformulating gender and gender identity as more about action than perception, such that nobody has to accept anything more as their gender identity than what they wish to practice. Which means being able to pick from whichever frameworks are accurate without having to accept the entirety of that framework. To have "dad" as a gender based on action and aesthetic rather than strictly because you have a biological child. Yes, it'll mess with the meanings of words, but we've been messing with the meanings of words for millennia at this point to make them work for whatever the needs of the current time are, so, *shrug*. It's a construction based on "yes, this, at least for now" rather than "not this, not that," which might make it easier for people to find harmony between things like "I am a person who enjoys power tools and preparing for incoming disasters" without having to also accept "I believe that in the disaster to come, my rugged individualism will carry the day, either apart from social connections or because it will allow me to amass power and leadership in whatever society will follow this one." as part of the package. It's an interesting thought to conceive of gender as something much more like your social media bio rather than as a single word with an entire framework of assumptions and traditions behind it.
With regard to the part of prepping that's in the previous piece, the piece itself talks about the difference between community solidarity and preparing alliances and friends, in the way that many of the women (and members) of the Black Panther Party engaged in and using one's vast sums of profit to purchase and outfit shrines to individualism, the kind that might yet still let the Red Death in to their masque all the same.
Describing Effective Altruism and its longtermism offshoot in the same way that one might describe L. Ron Hubbard's notoriously-litigious and secretive attempt at religion. Or other such related organizations.
The suggestion that the measurement of intelligence, whether general or artificial, only encompasses the space of well-defined problems, which in this case means "problems where people agree on the parameters of the problem and that there is a defined solution to it." Things can shift from not-well defined to well-defined (the example being the question of "How do I get someone to the moon safely?" starting as not well-defined, because you don't travel to the abodes of the gods in scientific ways, usually, and becoming progressively better-defined as we learned more about the universe around us until we answered the question by putting someone on the moon and letting them come back) but the most persistently stubborn questions, like "How do I live a happy life?" remain in the not well-defined category, which is how you get the phenomenon of "how come people who have higher intelligence scores and do better on general intelligence tests don't have a corresponding increase in happiness in their lives?" (There's also the entire legacy of the design and use of intelligence tests and their purposes that have to be contended with, because those things still influence us as a society today and often give rise to complaints about how the "best and brightest" aren't doing a great job with societal problems. Which, again, tend to not be well-defined, or even agreed-upon what the actual problem is.) This split in the types of problems can also lead to "smart people problems," where someone relies a little too much on their reasoning and intelligence skills to get themselves far further into the wickets of a problem where someone who was less reliant on those things would give up. (Or who tries to use their reasoning and well-defined-problems skills on problems that are almost inherently not well-defined, like social cues and the entire unspoken dance of manners and proper behavior.)
Well-defined problems sometimes have some far-reaching possibilities, where pattern and keyword-matchers like Midjourney can create variations on a futurism where the natural world and human living spaces are merged together or do the heavy lifting on an art submission that ended up winning a prize for digital art. (There was work for the finished product done after the prompt generation, which certainly makes a better argument toward enough human involvement to qualify it for contest entry.) Ursula Vernon used some computer art matching tools to create a hopeful post-apocalypse story. And then did clean-up work and layering and still drawing on top of that, so once again, we're in the situation where the tools might have provided a base image, but there was still a lot of art work being done on top of that.
For as much as the United States wants to portray itself as the destination for everyone in the rest of the world, there's more than enough reasons for people to want to avoid it. One of those might be that working on the railroad all the live-long day is less a folksy song of any sort and much more a reality (and the song it's based on is probably extremely racist anyway), such that there are possible strikes incoming. Which, you know, could make a lot of supply chains already more unstable. But if you look at the coverage, you'll notice, as
brithistorian did, that the article talks about possible wage increases in percentages compared to previous wages, in such a way that's trying to get people to believe that the increases are outrageous and huge, but they're also less than what the union has been asking for, so they're probably going from pittance to pittance if the recommendation gets adopted. If what you want is for people to side against the union, this kind of framing is perfect for that, because it manages to avoid a lot of actual numbers.A quick guide on how to get practiced on someone's new pronouns, with a follow-up for people who are trying hard to get it right, but still are having more misses than hits.
A statue that wants to be allegorical and celebratory that potentially manages neither by including the subject as nude and anatomically detailed. The origin grounds for the fetishizaition of the lesbian and the idea that lesbianism could be "corrected" by sex with a sufficiently masculine man, the whole thing itself as a power fantasy for men who realized that they weren't actually in control of anything.
The Manhattan District Attorney's Office seized artifacts from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art using warrants with the intent of having those illegally seized and sold artifacts repatriated to their countries of origin,
Birds in sufficient density that they show up in a ring on a radar, locomotive sharks that can both walk on land and survive significant periods of time without oxygen, which might be an adaptation that helps due to climate change, which is hitting Pakistan especially hard right now, with greater-than usual rainfall in the monsoon season and associated flooding from far more water in liquid form, the process of creating an environment and reintroducing a threatened fish species to give it the best chance to survive in the wild, a tiny deer and a tiny deer baby (d'awwwww).
Methods of decluttering that aren't the KonMari method, in addition to a very short guide to the KonMari method, all of which may be easier when you're the only person who makes decisions and has stuff to declutter with. Once there's another person involved, then people have to agree on what's expendable and what's important. And you have to be sure that the other people don't have traumas around decluttering because a person in their life used the method of "when I'm upset about the clutter, anything I lay my hands on is considered clutter to be sent away or destroyed."
In technology, having mandated that the current crop of space technology use the same technology from the last era, is it any surprise that there were leaks and issues with fueling the Space Launch System, since leaks and issues were endemic to its predecessors in rocketry and the Space Shuttle system?
In cost per crew person, NASA is paying Boeing a little more than twice what it's paying SpaceX for commercial flights up to the International Space Station, although the piece points out that without Boeing's involvement as a competitor and bidder, it's entirely possible NASA wouldn't have done anything at all about commercial crew flights, which would have been even worse of an outcome. Seems like we could probably divert some of that Pentagon budget toward stabilizing and making better systems to put people in space to do science, instead of building more war weapons.
Criminals are branching out from hacking and attacking people to violence-for-hire services coordinated through various channels, with proof demanded for payment. Which seems like it will be in the toolkit along with SWATting for people to harass others, although it's certainly monetarily cheaper to try and get the police to do your dirty work for you.
Starbucks (the coffee company) thinks that we're all so enraptured by NFTs that we'll want them as rewards for continuing to buy their coffee. *beat* No thank you, I already have enough techbros trying to tell me that I'm missing out by not participating in someone else's belief that the blockchain is the solution to everyone.
Methods of using panels, bookcases, rugs, and other such items to prevent sound from leaking in or out of a room. Additionally, adding some technology to a non-IoT thermostat to make it addressable and controllable by a home automation system, like Home Assistant.
Last for the post, a single general practitioner doctor should not be the linchipin and coordinator of good care for anyone, and the fact that it can be is an indictment of the systems that bring it into existence.
That, and a mining and crafting game constructed and played in a Minecraft world, essentially first building the computer around the game, then programming the memory, building the graphics driver, an input controller, and a screen, and then demonstrating the playing of the game. [3 minutes, YouTube, big time time lapse.]
(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.)
