From the tail end of October 02022
Nov. 4th, 2022 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptHello. Let's start with the swiftness in which societal attitudes about the poor turn into complaints about how the poor spend their monies. Because, of course, if you're poor, you're not supposed to have anything that might be considered a luxury or to spend your money on anything except the very basics of your existence until your hustle has been rewarded with enough jobs so that you can barely afford what you are trying to do.
The likelihood that an adjective someone uses to describe themselves is not what they turn out to be, in actuality. Which is also brainweasel fodder for people who aren't sure what their good assets are, or who are potentially worried that the things they believe they are (or aspire to be) are little more than self-delusion. And also, there's the thing that's…the thing where people who are actually pretty good at something but also have trauma/neurodivergence often end up disclaiming against that thing, because they've been conditioned to believe that if they took ownership of it in an positive way, there's someone waiting in the wings looking to deliberately cut them down or present them with something that's several degrees of difficulty harder as the standard of what the True Scotsman really is, with the intent of gatekeeping them out of the space for reasons that have nothing to do with actual skill.
Finding at least some part of a legendary archive is exciting. And then comes the questions of what you do with all of the material. Even more so when the archive found is of erotic and sexual materials. Sometimes even with the help of a graduate student, only a small fraction of materials ever gets fully recorded and digitized.
History gets ever more complicated as we remember the people who were already there, like Una Marson's time with the BBC as a black woman from the Carribean. Or the sisters who were publishing historical novels before more famous men pushed them out and then mocked them when they asked to be acknowledged as the inspiration for the men.
Rishi Sunak is the first Prime Minster of color the United Kingdom has had, appointed by the Conservative party after Liz Truss's implosion, which is one of those things where you realize that an historic event has happened, but because of the circumstances for the thing, it's probably going to be a trivia answer for The Chase or Family Fortunes more than something right and properly historic. (The link text, fromjames_davis_nicoll, was "Sunak finds temporary housing at the Number 10 cat shelter," which should say something about the situation that this event happens in.)
Staying in the United Kingdom, a 2019 poll (before it all exploded) of UK persons showcased that people often hold views they consider to be part of the opposite wing of politics, but also that people generally can't agree on where on the left-right spectrum any given policy should go, with the strongest categorizations of something as left- or right-wing garnering only a little over 50% of those surveyed agreeing that's where it should go. In the states, we talk greatly about the purple-ness of everything, but I also think that the boundaries of what the left and the right are have become extremely permeable, because of the ways that ads and attacks are slung and the way that the media landscape often works to do things like "attribute to the opponent the thing we ourselves are doing and intend to keep doing," and that the media narrative in certain spaces is sufficiently relentless in that regard that people end up believing that "the left" intends to engage in state-sanctioned murder while "the right" continues to pass policies about capital punishment, restriction of access to abortion services, making the already-wealthy wealthier by extracting more profit from the labor of the poor, increasing the prison-industrial complex, and so forth, and to promote those policies as right and good.
There is often agreement between Democrats and Republicans about imperialism, empire, and militarism in other parts of the world, and the continual updating and manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, which would be "left" and "right" agreement on something that's very much supposed to be the "right," but at that point, the argument usually comes out that the Democrats aren't really so much "the left" as "more to the left than the Republicans." Which is both true and accurate, and I suspect it might also apply in other places that the actual "left" is not represented by major party candidates or by parties that have the possibility of gaining sufficient parliamentary authority to enact a true "left" agenda.
Since book club started a new work about affecting the timeline, Desmond Warzel's story "Wikihistory" was linked, and it captures so much about the difficulties of time travel, the ever-present "wrong forum" argument of online spaces, and also takes a pretty solid jab at the Eurocentric ways of viewing historical events.
The Owl House is coming to a close with three specials, despite the clear evidence that it was doing quite well as a series. Officially, it's that the executives are clueless, but there's also the possibility that the executives were looking for an excuse to cancel it, since the main character is bisexual and we all know that Disney always gets pressure from extremely conservative groups about how they, as the arbiter of our childhoods, should never do anything that might be representative of the realities of children.
Fictional Foresight and Autism Advocacy: The Role of Science Fictional Narratives in Unearthing Eugenic Motivations by Ryan Collins takes a look at how the ways science fiction narratives around genetic manipulation and eugenic motivations contributed to suspicion about a project that wanted to collect genetic samples from autistic people and analyze them to see if there were genetic markers that might indicated a disposition to autism. It didn't help, certainly, that the project was headed by someone who has a reputation for bad takes and "science" that's not replicable or backed up by evidence with regard to the autistic community, and that it was the kind of thing that was being conducted without the input of the community or responses to the concerns of what the data would be put to in the future.
It's a good piece, although it walks around the idea that science fiction, as a genre, is generally about the current time of the writing of the work, even when it extrapolates into a future, near or far, or a different world/society (and that the changes made are specifically so that the reader doesn't realize immediately what's being talked about in the story and bring their preconceptions about it.) Good SF is a massive sleight of hand operation that helps the reader gain a new lens for looking at their own world. There are examples about how Data, Spock, or the T-800 might be relatable to how the neurotypical perceive autistic people, or how they use those characters as shorthand to describe the differences between autistic people and the neurotypical, and there's reference to the idea about how a lot of SF stories about genetics and eugenics are positioned with scientists as villains who are too obsessed with "can" to consider "should," but the piece doesn't have a stated opinion about whether these things are ultimately beneficial, because they provide easy lenses to check current research, or harmful, because they impede potentially good research by assuming that scientists will use those results for eugenetic programs rather than believing that things will go well. It sits in the pocket of "here's the influence I detect from SF on this research project" and doesn't go any farther than that.
The unique tradition of fireworks display around Halloween for the residents of British Columbia, Canada, and its possible origins in Lunar New Year and Guy Fawkes Night traditions.
In technology, criminals have stolen more than $3 billion USD of cryptocurrency in various hacks and schemes in this year so far, surpassing last year's record easily. And that's without the 85-minute hiccup in Bitcoin's transaction cycle, which may become more and more frequent as time goes on.
Kanye West is buying Parler, a social media site that likes to pride itself on how free its speech is, after his own antisemitism got him blocked from Twitter and Instagram. Can't say this is an imporvement for either side of the deal. And it certainly didn't help that Parler outed who their VIP members were in their excitement to announce the deal.
If you are a country trying to sustain an invasion against your neighbor, a 40 percent failure rate of gray market semiconductors is not going to help you.
Last out, the winners of a poll for the very worst science stock photos and some insight into what a hockey goaltender's thought process and monologues are during games.
(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.)
The likelihood that an adjective someone uses to describe themselves is not what they turn out to be, in actuality. Which is also brainweasel fodder for people who aren't sure what their good assets are, or who are potentially worried that the things they believe they are (or aspire to be) are little more than self-delusion. And also, there's the thing that's…the thing where people who are actually pretty good at something but also have trauma/neurodivergence often end up disclaiming against that thing, because they've been conditioned to believe that if they took ownership of it in an positive way, there's someone waiting in the wings looking to deliberately cut them down or present them with something that's several degrees of difficulty harder as the standard of what the True Scotsman really is, with the intent of gatekeeping them out of the space for reasons that have nothing to do with actual skill.
Finding at least some part of a legendary archive is exciting. And then comes the questions of what you do with all of the material. Even more so when the archive found is of erotic and sexual materials. Sometimes even with the help of a graduate student, only a small fraction of materials ever gets fully recorded and digitized.
History gets ever more complicated as we remember the people who were already there, like Una Marson's time with the BBC as a black woman from the Carribean. Or the sisters who were publishing historical novels before more famous men pushed them out and then mocked them when they asked to be acknowledged as the inspiration for the men.
Rishi Sunak is the first Prime Minster of color the United Kingdom has had, appointed by the Conservative party after Liz Truss's implosion, which is one of those things where you realize that an historic event has happened, but because of the circumstances for the thing, it's probably going to be a trivia answer for The Chase or Family Fortunes more than something right and properly historic. (The link text, from
james_davis_nicoll, was "Sunak finds temporary housing at the Number 10 cat shelter," which should say something about the situation that this event happens in.)Staying in the United Kingdom, a 2019 poll (before it all exploded) of UK persons showcased that people often hold views they consider to be part of the opposite wing of politics, but also that people generally can't agree on where on the left-right spectrum any given policy should go, with the strongest categorizations of something as left- or right-wing garnering only a little over 50% of those surveyed agreeing that's where it should go. In the states, we talk greatly about the purple-ness of everything, but I also think that the boundaries of what the left and the right are have become extremely permeable, because of the ways that ads and attacks are slung and the way that the media landscape often works to do things like "attribute to the opponent the thing we ourselves are doing and intend to keep doing," and that the media narrative in certain spaces is sufficiently relentless in that regard that people end up believing that "the left" intends to engage in state-sanctioned murder while "the right" continues to pass policies about capital punishment, restriction of access to abortion services, making the already-wealthy wealthier by extracting more profit from the labor of the poor, increasing the prison-industrial complex, and so forth, and to promote those policies as right and good.
There is often agreement between Democrats and Republicans about imperialism, empire, and militarism in other parts of the world, and the continual updating and manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, which would be "left" and "right" agreement on something that's very much supposed to be the "right," but at that point, the argument usually comes out that the Democrats aren't really so much "the left" as "more to the left than the Republicans." Which is both true and accurate, and I suspect it might also apply in other places that the actual "left" is not represented by major party candidates or by parties that have the possibility of gaining sufficient parliamentary authority to enact a true "left" agenda.
Since book club started a new work about affecting the timeline, Desmond Warzel's story "Wikihistory" was linked, and it captures so much about the difficulties of time travel, the ever-present "wrong forum" argument of online spaces, and also takes a pretty solid jab at the Eurocentric ways of viewing historical events.
The Owl House is coming to a close with three specials, despite the clear evidence that it was doing quite well as a series. Officially, it's that the executives are clueless, but there's also the possibility that the executives were looking for an excuse to cancel it, since the main character is bisexual and we all know that Disney always gets pressure from extremely conservative groups about how they, as the arbiter of our childhoods, should never do anything that might be representative of the realities of children.
Fictional Foresight and Autism Advocacy: The Role of Science Fictional Narratives in Unearthing Eugenic Motivations by Ryan Collins takes a look at how the ways science fiction narratives around genetic manipulation and eugenic motivations contributed to suspicion about a project that wanted to collect genetic samples from autistic people and analyze them to see if there were genetic markers that might indicated a disposition to autism. It didn't help, certainly, that the project was headed by someone who has a reputation for bad takes and "science" that's not replicable or backed up by evidence with regard to the autistic community, and that it was the kind of thing that was being conducted without the input of the community or responses to the concerns of what the data would be put to in the future.
It's a good piece, although it walks around the idea that science fiction, as a genre, is generally about the current time of the writing of the work, even when it extrapolates into a future, near or far, or a different world/society (and that the changes made are specifically so that the reader doesn't realize immediately what's being talked about in the story and bring their preconceptions about it.) Good SF is a massive sleight of hand operation that helps the reader gain a new lens for looking at their own world. There are examples about how Data, Spock, or the T-800 might be relatable to how the neurotypical perceive autistic people, or how they use those characters as shorthand to describe the differences between autistic people and the neurotypical, and there's reference to the idea about how a lot of SF stories about genetics and eugenics are positioned with scientists as villains who are too obsessed with "can" to consider "should," but the piece doesn't have a stated opinion about whether these things are ultimately beneficial, because they provide easy lenses to check current research, or harmful, because they impede potentially good research by assuming that scientists will use those results for eugenetic programs rather than believing that things will go well. It sits in the pocket of "here's the influence I detect from SF on this research project" and doesn't go any farther than that.
The unique tradition of fireworks display around Halloween for the residents of British Columbia, Canada, and its possible origins in Lunar New Year and Guy Fawkes Night traditions.
In technology, criminals have stolen more than $3 billion USD of cryptocurrency in various hacks and schemes in this year so far, surpassing last year's record easily. And that's without the 85-minute hiccup in Bitcoin's transaction cycle, which may become more and more frequent as time goes on.
Kanye West is buying Parler, a social media site that likes to pride itself on how free its speech is, after his own antisemitism got him blocked from Twitter and Instagram. Can't say this is an imporvement for either side of the deal. And it certainly didn't help that Parler outed who their VIP members were in their excitement to announce the deal.
If you are a country trying to sustain an invasion against your neighbor, a 40 percent failure rate of gray market semiconductors is not going to help you.
Last out, the winners of a poll for the very worst science stock photos and some insight into what a hockey goaltender's thought process and monologues are during games.
(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.)
