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silveradeptGreetings. Let's begin with a lawsuit from a person arrested because he chose to engage in satire and parody against his local police department. Charges were dismissed, and the lawsuit is to hold the police department that arrested him liable for violating his constitutional rights. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the lawsuit through the doctrine that cops don't have to be held accountable if they claim they were doing their jobs, and now the quetsion is whether the Supreme Court will take up the case and rule on such a dismissal. In favor of maintaining the right to parody and its protections from overzealous police departments and those that would give them cover, The Onion, through its Counsel of Record, filed an amicus curiae brief asking for writ to be granted and demonstrating in the brief the value of keeping parody alive.
Wired has a multi-part series on how Black Twitter came to be visible by the white people around them. Part I is about how Twitter was a neighborhood front porch where there was clowning, clapbacks, going faster than the news, and livetweeting shows, but then, as Black kids and adults got killed by white racists, whether or not they were wearing police uniforms, it became a place to hold the receipts and to document what was always known, but had never been able to reach as far as it could now. Most of it was still people who know talking to people who know, but because Twitter had shifted from being the front porch to the town forum, a whole lot of non-Black people got to see what was happening. Some of them lurked and learned, some of then stepped in it and got called out or called in for it. But even in the midst of the nearly-constant litany of traumas, the outside got to see the good things too and how Black communities build each other up and support each other and celebrate with each other, rather than the mostly-white narrative picking and choosing which stereotypes to use to fit the already-formed narrative. In Part III, the hits keeps coming, but so do the jokes, because the only way you're going to get through a country that wants you dead is by making fun of them. But also, because the porch became the forum, there came people sniffing around to make money or to build their audience by either appropriating the success of Black Twitter or by positioning themselves as scolds and authorities. And, much like the rest of the world outside, being Black doesn't mean you're immune to having misogynists, homophobes, and transphobes in your space, either. On balance, though, the people talking about Black Twitter think that it's been a net benefit, and that you can clearly see all the ways that Black Twitter has influenced the culture and the conversations. The Gadget Lab podcast has an episode talking about all the decisions that went into creating the series and how its structured and the impossibility of trying to write a definitive history of something, especially something that grows and evolves and changes on a daily basis.
The Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department offers a cautionary tale of drawing a biased conclusion from a set of data, with links to other interpretations of the same data to get to different conclusions. Which I put with someone pointing out that the unconscious biases in both creators and players alike means that things get read in specific ways, or come across in specific ways, even if there was no conscious intent to do such.
Lois Lane's getting a reimagining as an Asian-American in a young adult-focused story from DC. Which is cool. (You can say you prefer one version of the character over another, but anyone who tries to say there's only one version of the character can direct themselves to /dev/null.
Mythbusters taking on the question of whether a lit cigarette could ignite a pool of gasoline, along with evidence gathered that a detective beat a suspect he suspected of lying, led to the exoneration of persons accused of an arson.
The inherent horror of dimensional travel stories, because you're specifically the uncanny valley or the thing that's changed in relation to the perfectly normal universe around you. That should be terrifying to both the traveler and the people around them.
Some musing on how a traffic control system that works in three dimensions must work, and the spots that have to exist that either don't work or don't work well and are actively exploited for their speed in a tradeoff with their danger.
The practical arguments against the use of art prompt generators are more likely to be ones you can get people to agree to, rather than the philosophical or metaphysical ones. Because asking "what is art?" is a question that very few people have the same answer to, much less the same definition to use.
A review of the movie Blonde that accuses the movie of perpetuating and making worse the misunderstanding of how an artist such as Marilyn Monroe is popularly perceived and adding on additional misogyny and dismissal of mental illness and trauma.
The city created by Africans called Great Zimbabwe was denied to be of African origin throughout the colonial period, because it would have run counter to the narrative that Africans were a "primitive" people who deserved colonization by "enlightened" white people. The same kind of people who routinely would execute people in public and display them in public places as an attempt to deter crime.
The daughters of Bilitis, a social and eventually rights organization for lesbians, who still had to disguise themselves as a social club for women, using a name that would be clear for those who understood Sappho and obscure for those who did not.
The intentional decision to make Elementary (the CBS show) a story about two people who are aromantic (in different ways) who form a strong partnership all the same because they are well-suited for each other. I did not finish out Elementary, having lost in somewhere in the time where I was breaking away from the Evil Ex, but I recall there were other things that were getting in the way of my enjoyment of it that were part of the show, rather than my own personal situations. That it stands as several seasons of making an aromantic partnership work, however, is something wroth noting.
Learning more about the pterosaur ancestral tree, winners of a wildlife photography contest (contains ball of bees and the last moments of a gorilla), a man accused of smuggling snakes over a border crossing, in his pants, naturally, and the official mouser of the Prime Minister's residence getting caught on film pushing a larger fox out of the territory.
In technology, a robotic fry basket operator for fast food operations looking to save money and have a worker that is unaffected by working near hot oil for and entire day shift. Which, of course, could be something where the saving is used to benefit the workers in some way, but we all know that, at least in the U.S., those savings implemented by robots will go to shareholders and executives who already have more money than they could possibly use rather than to help the workers continue to live their lives or to retrain them when their jobs are taken over by those robots.
Microsoft is aiming to use large amounts of computing resources to upscale low-resolution images to higher-resolution ones so that the experience of the browser in Edge doesn't suddenly get grainy.
Upcoming limitations on the number of rules that extensions may set in Chromium-based browsers may make current ad-block extensions significantly less effective, considering how many domains they have to block or otherwise say no to so that there isn't tracking and advertisements everywhere. Some of that burden might be relieved, for people who either have spare computers (or computing) around or who are willing to use advanced firmware settings and/or custom firmware on their routers so they can install Pi-Hole, which will block advertising at the Domain Name System level (it's an all-or-nothing kind of situation, unfortunately.) A Pi-Hole or similar situation might be able to work in tandem with a more focused adblock extension that targets the people who serve their content and their ads from the same servers and inspects the contents to deny or allow and still keep the adblocking parts working well.
The animated GIF's cycling between a hot and popular thing and a thing for people who aren't tuned in to Internet culture. (The best argument made in this piece is the tendency to use Black people and their reactions as reaction GIFs, even from people who haven't experienced the context of the thing. The rest of it is mostly "the meme lords and the young people have decided it's not cool any more." There are some technical reasons not to use GIFs any more, as well, but it seems that a form born in the era of CompuServe and popularized first on Geocities might disappear, except for those who want to wield them in their retro glory intentionally.
Last out, it's official now - Velma, of the Mysteries Incorporated team, is canonically a lesbian, even though that's been true, at least in the writing, for much longer than this. But, you know, cartoons and the incessant demand that they remain something for children and never have anything to do with something that might seem like it's relevant to the lives of children. Even if a whole lot of children will be able to see themselves in Velma and reap the benefits thereof. (And in Adora and Catra, and Korra and Asami, and Juleka and Rose, and, and, and.) No doubt there will now be calls to get rid of this new, "woke" interpretation and go back to the classic stories of unsupervised college-age people investigating dangerous situations with characters who, while they never actually admit to it, are probably doing a lot more than just solving mysteries on their van tour. (Also, the slug for this article reads a lot like a young adolescent's first keyword string as they venture into the realm of the age-restricted and the NSFW.)
And, just to get you thinking and debating,melannen threw a big question into ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fictional_fans: What is fanfic? But rather than duck and run, melannen provided several requirements that prevent a lot of common definitions from working, because many of those common definitions want to exclude things that very clearly are fanfic, even if they're not the kind of thing that some ficcers want to admit is part of the family. (Which goes nicely with this idea of the fact that stories can be appreciated on different layers, so a story that's equally fun for people who don't know the fandom at all and for someone who will know what all of those offhand references are for does its job exceedingly well.
(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.)
Wired has a multi-part series on how Black Twitter came to be visible by the white people around them. Part I is about how Twitter was a neighborhood front porch where there was clowning, clapbacks, going faster than the news, and livetweeting shows, but then, as Black kids and adults got killed by white racists, whether or not they were wearing police uniforms, it became a place to hold the receipts and to document what was always known, but had never been able to reach as far as it could now. Most of it was still people who know talking to people who know, but because Twitter had shifted from being the front porch to the town forum, a whole lot of non-Black people got to see what was happening. Some of them lurked and learned, some of then stepped in it and got called out or called in for it. But even in the midst of the nearly-constant litany of traumas, the outside got to see the good things too and how Black communities build each other up and support each other and celebrate with each other, rather than the mostly-white narrative picking and choosing which stereotypes to use to fit the already-formed narrative. In Part III, the hits keeps coming, but so do the jokes, because the only way you're going to get through a country that wants you dead is by making fun of them. But also, because the porch became the forum, there came people sniffing around to make money or to build their audience by either appropriating the success of Black Twitter or by positioning themselves as scolds and authorities. And, much like the rest of the world outside, being Black doesn't mean you're immune to having misogynists, homophobes, and transphobes in your space, either. On balance, though, the people talking about Black Twitter think that it's been a net benefit, and that you can clearly see all the ways that Black Twitter has influenced the culture and the conversations. The Gadget Lab podcast has an episode talking about all the decisions that went into creating the series and how its structured and the impossibility of trying to write a definitive history of something, especially something that grows and evolves and changes on a daily basis.
The Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department offers a cautionary tale of drawing a biased conclusion from a set of data, with links to other interpretations of the same data to get to different conclusions. Which I put with someone pointing out that the unconscious biases in both creators and players alike means that things get read in specific ways, or come across in specific ways, even if there was no conscious intent to do such.
Lois Lane's getting a reimagining as an Asian-American in a young adult-focused story from DC. Which is cool. (You can say you prefer one version of the character over another, but anyone who tries to say there's only one version of the character can direct themselves to /dev/null.
Mythbusters taking on the question of whether a lit cigarette could ignite a pool of gasoline, along with evidence gathered that a detective beat a suspect he suspected of lying, led to the exoneration of persons accused of an arson.
The inherent horror of dimensional travel stories, because you're specifically the uncanny valley or the thing that's changed in relation to the perfectly normal universe around you. That should be terrifying to both the traveler and the people around them.
Some musing on how a traffic control system that works in three dimensions must work, and the spots that have to exist that either don't work or don't work well and are actively exploited for their speed in a tradeoff with their danger.
The practical arguments against the use of art prompt generators are more likely to be ones you can get people to agree to, rather than the philosophical or metaphysical ones. Because asking "what is art?" is a question that very few people have the same answer to, much less the same definition to use.
A review of the movie Blonde that accuses the movie of perpetuating and making worse the misunderstanding of how an artist such as Marilyn Monroe is popularly perceived and adding on additional misogyny and dismissal of mental illness and trauma.
The city created by Africans called Great Zimbabwe was denied to be of African origin throughout the colonial period, because it would have run counter to the narrative that Africans were a "primitive" people who deserved colonization by "enlightened" white people. The same kind of people who routinely would execute people in public and display them in public places as an attempt to deter crime.
The daughters of Bilitis, a social and eventually rights organization for lesbians, who still had to disguise themselves as a social club for women, using a name that would be clear for those who understood Sappho and obscure for those who did not.
The intentional decision to make Elementary (the CBS show) a story about two people who are aromantic (in different ways) who form a strong partnership all the same because they are well-suited for each other. I did not finish out Elementary, having lost in somewhere in the time where I was breaking away from the Evil Ex, but I recall there were other things that were getting in the way of my enjoyment of it that were part of the show, rather than my own personal situations. That it stands as several seasons of making an aromantic partnership work, however, is something wroth noting.
Learning more about the pterosaur ancestral tree, winners of a wildlife photography contest (contains ball of bees and the last moments of a gorilla), a man accused of smuggling snakes over a border crossing, in his pants, naturally, and the official mouser of the Prime Minister's residence getting caught on film pushing a larger fox out of the territory.
In technology, a robotic fry basket operator for fast food operations looking to save money and have a worker that is unaffected by working near hot oil for and entire day shift. Which, of course, could be something where the saving is used to benefit the workers in some way, but we all know that, at least in the U.S., those savings implemented by robots will go to shareholders and executives who already have more money than they could possibly use rather than to help the workers continue to live their lives or to retrain them when their jobs are taken over by those robots.
Microsoft is aiming to use large amounts of computing resources to upscale low-resolution images to higher-resolution ones so that the experience of the browser in Edge doesn't suddenly get grainy.
Upcoming limitations on the number of rules that extensions may set in Chromium-based browsers may make current ad-block extensions significantly less effective, considering how many domains they have to block or otherwise say no to so that there isn't tracking and advertisements everywhere. Some of that burden might be relieved, for people who either have spare computers (or computing) around or who are willing to use advanced firmware settings and/or custom firmware on their routers so they can install Pi-Hole, which will block advertising at the Domain Name System level (it's an all-or-nothing kind of situation, unfortunately.) A Pi-Hole or similar situation might be able to work in tandem with a more focused adblock extension that targets the people who serve their content and their ads from the same servers and inspects the contents to deny or allow and still keep the adblocking parts working well.
The animated GIF's cycling between a hot and popular thing and a thing for people who aren't tuned in to Internet culture. (The best argument made in this piece is the tendency to use Black people and their reactions as reaction GIFs, even from people who haven't experienced the context of the thing. The rest of it is mostly "the meme lords and the young people have decided it's not cool any more." There are some technical reasons not to use GIFs any more, as well, but it seems that a form born in the era of CompuServe and popularized first on Geocities might disappear, except for those who want to wield them in their retro glory intentionally.
Last out, it's official now - Velma, of the Mysteries Incorporated team, is canonically a lesbian, even though that's been true, at least in the writing, for much longer than this. But, you know, cartoons and the incessant demand that they remain something for children and never have anything to do with something that might seem like it's relevant to the lives of children. Even if a whole lot of children will be able to see themselves in Velma and reap the benefits thereof. (And in Adora and Catra, and Korra and Asami, and Juleka and Rose, and, and, and.) No doubt there will now be calls to get rid of this new, "woke" interpretation and go back to the classic stories of unsupervised college-age people investigating dangerous situations with characters who, while they never actually admit to it, are probably doing a lot more than just solving mysteries on their van tour. (Also, the slug for this article reads a lot like a young adolescent's first keyword string as they venture into the realm of the age-restricted and the NSFW.)
And, just to get you thinking and debating,
melannen threw a big question into fictional_fans: What is fanfic? But rather than duck and run, melannen provided several requirements that prevent a lot of common definitions from working, because many of those common definitions want to exclude things that very clearly are fanfic, even if they're not the kind of thing that some ficcers want to admit is part of the family. (Which goes nicely with this idea of the fact that stories can be appreciated on different layers, so a story that's equally fun for people who don't know the fandom at all and for someone who will know what all of those offhand references are for does its job exceedingly well.(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.)
