silveradept | A quick mid-month blurb out

Greetings. Let's begin with the ways that language shapes the space and conversations people can have about gender. And the ways that language shapes the space and conversations people can have about gender.

There are historical examples of cis lesbians acting in solidarity with trans women, so those people who want you to think that trans women are a threat to women are wrong both philosophically and historically.

On the importance of records and archives and the destruction that can be wrought when they are not preserved, using a quest in the Elder Scrolls Online as a frame. Also, How the library and archives of the Apple Computer Corporation ended up at Stanford University when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, which is mostly the librarians and archivists being told they were not with the company after a certain date, and so all of their things would have to go with them. And so they did.

Despite the inaccessibility of materials, a Black blind woman successfully passed the courses and examinations to become a barrister in the United Kingdom. A significant amount of time spent outside her studies was spent on making materials accessible and receiving one-on-one assistance for the same, rather than the timely delivery of or already having accessible materials present, which seems like one of those problems that could be solved quickly with our computers, especially if the texts in question have a digital version already in existence.

Tension ratcheted up significantly after a missile crossed into Poland and killed two people, on the possibility that NATO Articles might be invoked if the missile was found to be of Russian origin. The current working theory is the missile was part of Ukranian anti-air defense and went off-course, which is good for international relations, if not for the people who were killed by the missile.

Ash Ketchum successfully becomes the best Pokemon Trainer in the world in a new episode, which makes me wonder what the next thing will be for Ash's journey, as he has, in fact, become The Best.

Discussion of Big Moments in the Discworld series, many of which are about how Sir Pterry, GNU, manages to get across a big concept in only a few words spoken by the character properly primed for it.

The thought of Lurch as the happy ending for the creature of Victor Frankenstein, where the creature gets what he has always desired from the beginning - acceptance and family.

A meditation on the opinion of the Toy Story franchise's first two movies about what is acceptable and what is unacceptable play. From this particular vantage, you can see where Sid might be playing with toys in acceptable ways, but the expression of his play may not be acceptable. Strapping a spaceman to an actual rocket has a lot of ways it can go wrong, but imaginative play with the spaceman probably will involve a rocket somewhere, if only in cardboard or imagination.

The vacation house with the whales in the front yard's water space, and the woman scientist drawing mushrooms in the 19th century.

In technology, The state of New Hampshire debuted some tabulation machines for vote counting that run on open-source software, with the idea that a person who has concerns or worries about the counting and attribution of the ballot will be able to inspect the code or hire a security person to do the same and see whether there's anything hinky about it.

It turns out that the purchase of Twitter has had significant detrimental effects for Twitter and its users. How do we know this? Well, we can see what's been happening to the staff. Remote work was summarily dismissed shortly after the buying, despite the company not really needing to have anyone work in the office for a Web-based product. Right after that, about half of the workforce was laid off abruptly, and possibly not in compliance with relevant statutes. Those people laid off worked in departments like compliance and communications, which potentially puts the company at risk for liability and fines from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, even if the boss of the company says he's not afraid of those fines and penalties. Which has led to some of the laid off being asked to come back to the company.

All of those moves made advertisers skittish and they're not investing in the company with their ad dollars. So what's the plan to make up the lost revenue? Blue Checks for Everyone, only $8 / month, which won't remove all the ads, just cut down on them. Of course, when you do something like that and make the "Verified" symbol available to anyone who wants to pay for it, you get a lot of people verifying themselves and impersonating other people. Which is unhelpful, of course, so quickly, in addition to demanding that all impersonators identify themselves clearly as parody accounts, there's now a second system waiting to roll out that will tell you whether a Twitter account is the official one or not. Like what having a blue checkmark used to do.

So it might be wise and prudent, if there's something you definitely need to keep from your Twitter experience, to download your data archive. And if it seems a bit quieter around there, it seems that many of the people who were most heavily using the site are going to other places.(Mind, "heaviest users" seem to be people who log in at least once a day and might post something 3 times a week, according to the research.)

A meditation on the problems that developed when what were supposed to be tools that facilitated networking and connections between people were rapidly turned into broadband, indiscriminate broadcast media. The suggestion is, of course, that we go back to the facilitating connections part, as if, y'know, that part still hasn't been there quietly humming away without being noticed because of all the people who were trying to broadcast themselves into some kind of fame and fortune, because capitalism.

Because of the instability of Twitter, other possible social media sites looked to step in and lure some of Twitter's people over to them. Apparently one of the top contenders for a Twitter alternative is a site called Cohost. Whose terms of Service make someone who looks at and has had to develop a Terms of Service go "Yikes!". Of the pushback happening in good faith on that matter, the most salient one is the question of whether it matters if you're never planning on being in a situation where you have to challenge the ToS or try and get it enforced, which is a reasonable question, but the conclusions developed seem to be "the lack of care put into the Terms of Service are reflective about what the rest of the site experience might be like." (Much of the bad faith criticisms assume that

rahaeli is trying to make "a competitor" look bad or point out that there are similar-looking clauses in the Dreamwidth Terms of Service. But "similar-looking" means that one of them might be done correctly and the other isn't.) A thread of responses to many of the counterarguments made, both the ones in good faith and the ones not in good faith, as well as some possible origins for some of the things in the initial Terms of Service. Cohost is working on updating their Terms of Service, possibly to something that makes more sense rather than something that was cobbled together. As someone who doesn't name-squat nor join every available service that appears, I'm not as worried about it, but also, I'm not exactly a person who has to worry about being famous enough to need to name-squat on everything that comes into existence.

The possibility that social bookmarking site Pinboard may not be a stable service to use in the forseeable future. Which probably means a need to backup data there as well, and that you might need to back up in multiple formats to be sure you get all the metadata, as

kimboo_york suggests.

midnightchills has offered up some code to use in Dreamwidth entries that produce Tumblr-style photosets, including the relative dimensions of each of the pictures in question.

[Bad username or site: osteophage @ pillowfort] offers suggestions on how to encourage a community, fandom or otherwise, to change platforms, or at least to spend some of their time on your new site as well as the older one. Which also had a thread linked to in the comments from academics publishing their research on how to migrate communities best, which is, y'know, relevant right now.

Using the pattern-matching abilities of computers to try and identify the people in photographs held in archives to reunite them with these pictures and to put names to the faces. And, possibly if the survivors are still alive, to have them identify still others in those photographs and give more data to continue the chain of identification.

Last out for tonight, an extremely fiendish puzzle game from the vaults, now brought into our world and playable on the web: Chroma.

kaberett introduced me to it, and I can say that I've successfully managed to get through the first two introductory levels. The difficulty with that is that there's still more to go, and also, many of these puzzles are the kinds of things where you stare at it for a while, thinking it's not possible, and then a solution eventually happens, but also it's the kind of game where you have to think about the consequences of all the actions that will happen, as it's very easy to think you have a solution to a puzzle, only for it to trap you from moving on, or for the realization to strike that you actually have to do a different puzzle room first before you clear the current one. Or that you might have to partially solve the current room so you can totally solve the one next door.

The site itself gives you minimal instructions on how to play and what the pieces themselves will do, encouraging you fail a lot before you learn the mechanics of the pieces and their mechanics. Here are some hints from my limited playing time so far:

Things that move do so in a Newtonian fashion in the direction they are pointing.

All of the objects in a puzzle room are important to solving it. Including the stars.

Stars are solid and will support weight, regardless of how that weight is applied.

The stack will always collapse in a way that will skewer the dot or block the exit.

Remembering what will hold weight if it's pushed onto it versus what will hold weight when something is dropped on it is the key to solving some puzzles.

Have fun and try not to get too sucked in.

If that doesn't seem like a fun time, maybe the entries submitted in the Interactive Fiction Competition for 2022 would be more to your tastes.

And if not that, then perhaps Fill In The Blanks, which starts with a five-letter word, removes one letter, and then progressively removes one more letter at specified intervals until there is only one left. All you have to do is fill in the blanks with five-letter words. (More points for getting words in the more restricted spaces.)

(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.)