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silveradeptLet's begin with something important: It's vital and essential for feminist men to talk about their feelings and setbacks and especially how much toxic masculinity has hurt them and feminism has helped. Because the people who most need to understand that feminism isn't their opponent aren't going to listen to women or women's opinions on the matter, they're going to listen to men. So it's on men to both demonstrate and explain to other men that feminism is the way to getting many of the things that anti-feminists say they want, like companionship, relationships, and that all-important sex.
France will provide free condoms for those between the ages of 18-25, building on a scheme to provide free hormonal contraception, and all on the idea of curbing unwanted pregnancies in young people by making cost not a barrier to safer sex practices. It would be nice to have that happen in the United States, but we'd have to actually become the secular government the Constitution says we're supposed to have.
Additionally, an article in the Lancet describes a study of young people in the Netherlands where 98% of those who came to a clinic for gender dysphoria and were started on puberty blockers went on to having gender-affirming hormone treatments. Which, I suppose, is good if what you're trying to fight is misinformation that suggests people who go on puberty blockers are going to regret it. It's also possible to have that conclusion twisted into the idea that puberty blockers are the gateway drug to gender-affirming hormones (and that both are being "pushed" on young people, never mind the studies that show how much children and teens already have had genderfeels by the time they go on puberty blockers.) There's also the potential weakness that this study was about people who already had gender dysphoria, rather than looking more generally about all the people who receive puberty blockers and then go on to be happy in their gender, whether cis or trans. (Because puberty blockers are also prescribed for cis kids who are experiencing an early puberty, despite what you have heard about them. But a lot of people against puberty blockers don't like the logical conclusion that their opposition means that they are in favor of a grade-schooler having to handle menstruation and the male gaze. At least, I hope that's true. Some of them might be all for it and think it's a good thing.)
More importantly, though, giving someone the fundamental respect that they know who they are and if they want to delay a puberty, that's a reasonable thing to do, is the important part. There are still plenty of parenting styles and commands that say children are there to obey grownups, full stop, and that whatever the grownup says is the complete and inarguable Truth. That kind of thinking leads to terrible results.
rushthatspeaks on seeing pornography as a set of tools and an example of a work where the tools of high fantasy (and numinous chivalric) and the tools of pornography (including visually explicit sex) work together to create a story. And only sometimes is the story on the screen while there is sex going on.
One of the books of queer history, The Well of Loneliness, that was suppressed and banned for lesbianism, that might be better situated as a trans narrative, although it certainly wouldn't fir with modern sensibilities on so many of its other aspects.
View tolerance as the price of a peaceful existence wth your neighbors, rather than as an absolute moral precept, and many of the paradoxes of tolerance go away, because we know how to handle those who are uninterested in peaceful existence with others, and how to respond to breaches of the peace treaty that try to bring back the peace and strongly discourage it being broken again. (Seems like a useful refutation of the idea that all points of view, no matter how harmful, deserve representation in a public library collection.)
A highly curated look into the roles that women play in the Secret Intelligence Service, the foreign-looking spy branch of the Government of the United Kingdom. Which talks a lot about spycraft, absolutely, but mostly focuses on the unique challenges of what it's like to be a woman in SIS and have all the men around.
Rather than following the official NHS guidance about medical procedures, some women find themselves denied ultrasounds because the practitioners believe their virginity is more important than determining if there are medical problems. Which, I'm sure, will sound familiar for any person who has tried to get medics to get over their biases and do their jobs.
Etsy appears to be trying to squeeze even more money from the sellers who use the service by charging them a percentage of the sale price of an object if the buyer clicked on an Etsy ad at any point during the process, even if the ad was from some other seller than the one the purchase was eventually made from. Which suggests the best way to get someone to make goods and still be able to maintain their shop or business is to buy from them as directly as possible.
A story, in screenshots and commentary, of how the volunteer moderators of Habitica went on strike and the staff of Habitica, rather than negotiate or acknowledge anything, dismissed the moderation team and took that role to the staff instead.
The possibility that giving a space for collaboration and discussion about climate change is helping make changes with regard to climate change. And possibly the option to show up some people. Plus, amazing what happens to make progress when you have a Senate that's willing to bring things to the floor and vote on them, and to be able to break the obstructionist tactics of the opposition, as there was a new climate protocol passed in September that got basically no fanfare at all.
A relatively intact find of a necklace from the early post-Roman period. The understanding that a significant amount of money funding the Fortune theater, competitor to the Globe theater, came from women. Slowly, but surely, the return of looted materials to their rightful owners and the return of remains to the countries they were stolen from.
190 years to the oldest recorded living tortoise. Congratulations, and that's the kind of lifespan that seems almost incomprehensible to humans. Another visiting walrus.A baby tapir!
The role of parasites is more than just terror and harm, as some parasites provide mutual benefit, and some of them don't harm their hosts. We just know about many of the less helpful types because they are less helpful to the way that humans want to be.
Previously covered water is being uncovered and reincorporated into the cities that had built over them in the past. With that comes the return of things thought long gone or dead, like oysters and whales to New York City and a new way of looking at nature, rivers, and the ecosystem that tries to strike a better balance with letting nature run its course.
A lot of good news that went under-reported in the United States, even though some of it is about the States.
Blunting the next waves of COVID is possible, but it requires significant uptick in those who can get vaccinated, getting vaccinated, and that means all the boosters, as well as those who are able to mask and everyone having swift access to treatments in case of infections. Without political will and funding, of course, there won't be the necessary uptick, so the challenge of defeating the thing often relies on bouncing any and all politicians who believe that it's over or that it's over-rated and replacing them with people who will take this seriously until we either have something to beat it with or the numbers really are looking good enough that it's contained.
To help with that, even if it's a little bit, Home tests for coronavirus will be once again available to U.S. residents by mail, using funds from the U.S. government. https://www.covid.gov/tests is the website to use for getting these tests.
In technology, the benefit of centralization when the thing you are looking for is to bring together a group of people who are always going to be scattered across the country or the world. They talk about it as a benefit of that specific service, but it isn't just that specific service. Any time there's one place for someone to go that has a whole bunch of people who are interesting or in the same boat, you get the benefit of having a much bigger support group than you would ever get if you were the only person in your locality who thinks this way or how has this particular condition, or anything like that. It's a thing that most centralized social media and networking services have, but a large VC-funded or billionaire-backed space has so much greater potential reach than, say, Dreamwidth does. Or LiveJournal did. What people miss about the "old" web was finding that group of people. Or groups. Thy don't miss the technical parts of the site (except for things like ease of moderation,) they miss that every time a site shuts down, a group gets scattered to different places around, because not everyone migrates the same way. People won't miss all the boors and assholes showing up in their mentions and comments when places go dark. They miss their people, the group they build and enjoyed and had a lot of fun with in a space that they could at least pretend was separated from the rest of everywhere, even if it never was, and even if those places were looking to mine their data so as to introduce bomb-throwers and ads to them to make things seem less like a safe space and more like a combat zone.
siderea posted why Elon Musk might be hoping for a miracle from the Virgin Mary, no, wait, why he's hoping to avoid her wrath. It makes sense if you read the piece, trust me.
And speaking of troubles with Elon, like all the other people who claim they are interested in the promotion of free speech, Elon has apparently directed the censorship of people reporting on public data (like his jet) or supporting people who are reporting on such things. It's not just the Streisand Effect, it's also the obvious hypocrisy that seems to be the hallmark of the right wing: silence your critics while claiming that you have a more open platform and more diverse viewpoints. Which might be true, but isn't good, because most of that openness and diversity tends to come from people who were excluded from democratic society or social media platforms for good reasons. In Elon's case, banning the ElonJet account and declaring that sharing someone else's real-time location is no longer permitted is a reversal of a previous statement involving his commitment to free speech. The further banning of the reporters who were reporting on his hypocrisy just makes it clear how woefully underprepared Elon is for running a social media company of any size, much less one with the complexities and user base size as Twitter.
Also, Twitter now apparently no longer accepts links to popular instances of the Fediverse, because of course Elon is so convinced that his product will win in an open market that he bans linking to what's currently the most popular alternative to Twitter.
A destructive malware masquerading as ransomware has begun attacking courts and offices in the Russian Federation, a cousin to malware that attacked Ukraine (because, after all, no physical war would be complete without a cyberwarfare component).
Last for tonight, an example of collective storytelling - the movie Goncharov, a Scorsese flick starring de Niro that doesn't actually exist, but has more than enough meta around it to make someone believe it did. Unlike the movie that doesn't exist starring Sinbad as a genie (it's Shaq who's the genie in the similar-sounding movie), Goncharov is a deliberate creation and collective story around a source material that doesn't exist, and that sometimes makes things much cooler than remembering something that you swear existed but doesn't actually exist.
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swannee has a Fannish Fifty challenge - fifty posts in the calendar year on fannish topics. They can be themed if desired. Or not. The average is a little less than one a week, and if you are looking for more people to talk fandom stuff with, there's already a fair number of people who have pledged to take the challenge.
Much less light-heartedly, Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness, a fiction about the good and ill that a learning program does, simultaneously, and the questions that arise about who is ultimately responsible for the actions of a program, regardless of whether those actions are intended. It is very good science fiction, in that, really, the only fictional part of the story is Sylvie, the learning program at the heart of the piece, and who Sylvie has been trained to destroy and who Sylvie has been trained to preserve. Everything else, including the tactics of the botnet, the psychological toll (and physical consequences) of being ratioed and harassed off the Internet, the reality that guilty humans often need very little prompting to reveal their guilt to everyone, the early chatbots and the fact that we've long since passed the point where bots can pass the Turing test, all of that is extremely real and relevant to our own times, where we talk about AI art bots and have decisions made for us by programs whose code, training sets, and implicit and explicit biases are never made available to us to examine or contest. And about harassment and how only certain voices ever seem to get piled upon, even as the ones directing the piling proclaim themselves the victims of countless cruel attacks.
Musician Tom Lehrer has released all of his material into the public domain. If you like the songs, or you want to be able to play them on your own, get them while the getting is good.
Also, December is an excellent month to purchase a paid account or renew one, and get access to new features and larger amounts of space.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, 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.)
France will provide free condoms for those between the ages of 18-25, building on a scheme to provide free hormonal contraception, and all on the idea of curbing unwanted pregnancies in young people by making cost not a barrier to safer sex practices. It would be nice to have that happen in the United States, but we'd have to actually become the secular government the Constitution says we're supposed to have.
Additionally, an article in the Lancet describes a study of young people in the Netherlands where 98% of those who came to a clinic for gender dysphoria and were started on puberty blockers went on to having gender-affirming hormone treatments. Which, I suppose, is good if what you're trying to fight is misinformation that suggests people who go on puberty blockers are going to regret it. It's also possible to have that conclusion twisted into the idea that puberty blockers are the gateway drug to gender-affirming hormones (and that both are being "pushed" on young people, never mind the studies that show how much children and teens already have had genderfeels by the time they go on puberty blockers.) There's also the potential weakness that this study was about people who already had gender dysphoria, rather than looking more generally about all the people who receive puberty blockers and then go on to be happy in their gender, whether cis or trans. (Because puberty blockers are also prescribed for cis kids who are experiencing an early puberty, despite what you have heard about them. But a lot of people against puberty blockers don't like the logical conclusion that their opposition means that they are in favor of a grade-schooler having to handle menstruation and the male gaze. At least, I hope that's true. Some of them might be all for it and think it's a good thing.)
More importantly, though, giving someone the fundamental respect that they know who they are and if they want to delay a puberty, that's a reasonable thing to do, is the important part. There are still plenty of parenting styles and commands that say children are there to obey grownups, full stop, and that whatever the grownup says is the complete and inarguable Truth. That kind of thinking leads to terrible results.
rushthatspeaks on seeing pornography as a set of tools and an example of a work where the tools of high fantasy (and numinous chivalric) and the tools of pornography (including visually explicit sex) work together to create a story. And only sometimes is the story on the screen while there is sex going on.One of the books of queer history, The Well of Loneliness, that was suppressed and banned for lesbianism, that might be better situated as a trans narrative, although it certainly wouldn't fir with modern sensibilities on so many of its other aspects.
View tolerance as the price of a peaceful existence wth your neighbors, rather than as an absolute moral precept, and many of the paradoxes of tolerance go away, because we know how to handle those who are uninterested in peaceful existence with others, and how to respond to breaches of the peace treaty that try to bring back the peace and strongly discourage it being broken again. (Seems like a useful refutation of the idea that all points of view, no matter how harmful, deserve representation in a public library collection.)
A highly curated look into the roles that women play in the Secret Intelligence Service, the foreign-looking spy branch of the Government of the United Kingdom. Which talks a lot about spycraft, absolutely, but mostly focuses on the unique challenges of what it's like to be a woman in SIS and have all the men around.
Rather than following the official NHS guidance about medical procedures, some women find themselves denied ultrasounds because the practitioners believe their virginity is more important than determining if there are medical problems. Which, I'm sure, will sound familiar for any person who has tried to get medics to get over their biases and do their jobs.
Etsy appears to be trying to squeeze even more money from the sellers who use the service by charging them a percentage of the sale price of an object if the buyer clicked on an Etsy ad at any point during the process, even if the ad was from some other seller than the one the purchase was eventually made from. Which suggests the best way to get someone to make goods and still be able to maintain their shop or business is to buy from them as directly as possible.
A story, in screenshots and commentary, of how the volunteer moderators of Habitica went on strike and the staff of Habitica, rather than negotiate or acknowledge anything, dismissed the moderation team and took that role to the staff instead.
The possibility that giving a space for collaboration and discussion about climate change is helping make changes with regard to climate change. And possibly the option to show up some people. Plus, amazing what happens to make progress when you have a Senate that's willing to bring things to the floor and vote on them, and to be able to break the obstructionist tactics of the opposition, as there was a new climate protocol passed in September that got basically no fanfare at all.
A relatively intact find of a necklace from the early post-Roman period. The understanding that a significant amount of money funding the Fortune theater, competitor to the Globe theater, came from women. Slowly, but surely, the return of looted materials to their rightful owners and the return of remains to the countries they were stolen from.
190 years to the oldest recorded living tortoise. Congratulations, and that's the kind of lifespan that seems almost incomprehensible to humans. Another visiting walrus.A baby tapir!
The role of parasites is more than just terror and harm, as some parasites provide mutual benefit, and some of them don't harm their hosts. We just know about many of the less helpful types because they are less helpful to the way that humans want to be.
Previously covered water is being uncovered and reincorporated into the cities that had built over them in the past. With that comes the return of things thought long gone or dead, like oysters and whales to New York City and a new way of looking at nature, rivers, and the ecosystem that tries to strike a better balance with letting nature run its course.
A lot of good news that went under-reported in the United States, even though some of it is about the States.
Blunting the next waves of COVID is possible, but it requires significant uptick in those who can get vaccinated, getting vaccinated, and that means all the boosters, as well as those who are able to mask and everyone having swift access to treatments in case of infections. Without political will and funding, of course, there won't be the necessary uptick, so the challenge of defeating the thing often relies on bouncing any and all politicians who believe that it's over or that it's over-rated and replacing them with people who will take this seriously until we either have something to beat it with or the numbers really are looking good enough that it's contained.
To help with that, even if it's a little bit, Home tests for coronavirus will be once again available to U.S. residents by mail, using funds from the U.S. government. https://www.covid.gov/tests is the website to use for getting these tests.
In technology, the benefit of centralization when the thing you are looking for is to bring together a group of people who are always going to be scattered across the country or the world. They talk about it as a benefit of that specific service, but it isn't just that specific service. Any time there's one place for someone to go that has a whole bunch of people who are interesting or in the same boat, you get the benefit of having a much bigger support group than you would ever get if you were the only person in your locality who thinks this way or how has this particular condition, or anything like that. It's a thing that most centralized social media and networking services have, but a large VC-funded or billionaire-backed space has so much greater potential reach than, say, Dreamwidth does. Or LiveJournal did. What people miss about the "old" web was finding that group of people. Or groups. Thy don't miss the technical parts of the site (except for things like ease of moderation,) they miss that every time a site shuts down, a group gets scattered to different places around, because not everyone migrates the same way. People won't miss all the boors and assholes showing up in their mentions and comments when places go dark. They miss their people, the group they build and enjoyed and had a lot of fun with in a space that they could at least pretend was separated from the rest of everywhere, even if it never was, and even if those places were looking to mine their data so as to introduce bomb-throwers and ads to them to make things seem less like a safe space and more like a combat zone.
siderea posted why Elon Musk might be hoping for a miracle from the Virgin Mary, no, wait, why he's hoping to avoid her wrath. It makes sense if you read the piece, trust me.And speaking of troubles with Elon, like all the other people who claim they are interested in the promotion of free speech, Elon has apparently directed the censorship of people reporting on public data (like his jet) or supporting people who are reporting on such things. It's not just the Streisand Effect, it's also the obvious hypocrisy that seems to be the hallmark of the right wing: silence your critics while claiming that you have a more open platform and more diverse viewpoints. Which might be true, but isn't good, because most of that openness and diversity tends to come from people who were excluded from democratic society or social media platforms for good reasons. In Elon's case, banning the ElonJet account and declaring that sharing someone else's real-time location is no longer permitted is a reversal of a previous statement involving his commitment to free speech. The further banning of the reporters who were reporting on his hypocrisy just makes it clear how woefully underprepared Elon is for running a social media company of any size, much less one with the complexities and user base size as Twitter.
Also, Twitter now apparently no longer accepts links to popular instances of the Fediverse, because of course Elon is so convinced that his product will win in an open market that he bans linking to what's currently the most popular alternative to Twitter.
A destructive malware masquerading as ransomware has begun attacking courts and offices in the Russian Federation, a cousin to malware that attacked Ukraine (because, after all, no physical war would be complete without a cyberwarfare component).
Last for tonight, an example of collective storytelling - the movie Goncharov, a Scorsese flick starring de Niro that doesn't actually exist, but has more than enough meta around it to make someone believe it did. Unlike the movie that doesn't exist starring Sinbad as a genie (it's Shaq who's the genie in the similar-sounding movie), Goncharov is a deliberate creation and collective story around a source material that doesn't exist, and that sometimes makes things much cooler than remembering something that you swear existed but doesn't actually exist.
swannee has a Fannish Fifty challenge - fifty posts in the calendar year on fannish topics. They can be themed if desired. Or not. The average is a little less than one a week, and if you are looking for more people to talk fandom stuff with, there's already a fair number of people who have pledged to take the challenge.Much less light-heartedly, Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness, a fiction about the good and ill that a learning program does, simultaneously, and the questions that arise about who is ultimately responsible for the actions of a program, regardless of whether those actions are intended. It is very good science fiction, in that, really, the only fictional part of the story is Sylvie, the learning program at the heart of the piece, and who Sylvie has been trained to destroy and who Sylvie has been trained to preserve. Everything else, including the tactics of the botnet, the psychological toll (and physical consequences) of being ratioed and harassed off the Internet, the reality that guilty humans often need very little prompting to reveal their guilt to everyone, the early chatbots and the fact that we've long since passed the point where bots can pass the Turing test, all of that is extremely real and relevant to our own times, where we talk about AI art bots and have decisions made for us by programs whose code, training sets, and implicit and explicit biases are never made available to us to examine or contest. And about harassment and how only certain voices ever seem to get piled upon, even as the ones directing the piling proclaim themselves the victims of countless cruel attacks.
Musician Tom Lehrer has released all of his material into the public domain. If you like the songs, or you want to be able to play them on your own, get them while the getting is good.
Also, December is an excellent month to purchase a paid account or renew one, and get access to new features and larger amounts of space.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, 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.)
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