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silveradeptCheers! Let us begin with an example account of how the fervor over trying to control books and learning is having physical and mental tolls on those targeted.
The Government of the United Kingdom has signaled an intention to stop recognizing the gender recognition certificates of other nations, in addition to opposition to Scotland implementing proper gender recognition. Someone in the Tories must think there's more votes to be had by being transphobic. Hopefully, they're wrong and they get sacked at earliest possibility.
Insurrectionists attempted to overthrow the newly elected government of Brazil, were thwarted, and arrested, and the government has promised swift action in figuring out how it happened and why there was so little attempt to stop the attack. In that regard, Brazil is doing much better than the United States did against its own insurrectionists.
The new year turned over and that means a large swath of material officially entered the public domain in the United States! Which is good, but also, a significant amount of things that are now in the public domain have no complete, or even extant, copies in existence, because having to wait nearly 100 years to begin copying and preservation means so many things get destroyed long before they can be preserved.
One of the good things that happens with those works that are preserved and in the public domain is that you can then transform them in really neat ways, like bringing Moby Dick forward into tiresome modern idiom and then having someone read aloud this same tiresome modern idiom, which provides even more hilarity.
As with many things, the most important audience for books is often the one that marketers and sellers assume will read anything.
Trope language is being used for its intended purpose, including in making recommendations for books and other media. As TVTropes itself will tell you, Tropes Are Not Good, Tropes Are Not Bad, Tropes Are Tools, but there's always someone who is going to claim that describing works in trope language is reductive and trying to shoehorn material into categories it doesn't fit into. Like genres.
The Music world lost Lisa Marie Presley, child of Elvis, at 54 years of age, and Jeff Beck at 78 years of age, whose name I actually only know because of a Frank Zappa song. We also lost the founder of Creative Technologies, Sim Wong Hoo, whose Sound Blaster card you may remember setting environment variables for in DOS if you are of a certain age, at 67 years of age.
A thread on how a holy day celebrating light and outlasting those who wish to see you dead is still very important, even if it's a minor holy day. Which I put next to global gains for the queer community in 2022, including, for once, the U.S. with some wins. And speaking of queerness, the presence of the spell checker's squiggle as it relates to queerness in language and other things. As well as flexing against the nature of gender with regard to folk dancing roles.
Constructing images of being queer and Roma, creating pictures of interesectionality, along with commentary about what the images are meant to portray and the stereotypes they're meant to fight. [PDF]
The U.S. President continues to ask that people appplying for asylum somehow do it from the places they seek asylum from, as if it were easy enough to do all of the required things from an embassy or other space while in a place that you are tyrying to get out of for fear of persecution.
Unionization efforts are taking advantage of hot moments and momentum shifts as much as they are dogged trench warfare. (And often, union campaigns are self-organizing from the workers, who have done much of the work before they reach out to a union to represent them.)
South Carolina's supreme court invalidated the state's ban on terminating a pregnancy after six weeks of impregnation, claiming the statute violated the right to privacy enshrined in the state's constitution. It's always nice to see the boys get told no when they want to enforce banning a woman's right to choose whether or not she wants to get pregnant. Further along that line, The U.S. Food and Drug Administration removed requirements that had made it difficult for retail pharmacies to stock mifepristone, and both the Walgreen's and CVS chains announced their intent to stock the drug, one of a pair that produces a medication abortion. For those who are not able to acquire the medications at their local pharmacies, The United States Department of Justice believes that both medications can be delivered through postal mail, and neither is considered a violation of the Comstock Act.
A story about being whisked away to Fairyland, but luckily for the protagonist, the rules are provided beforehand. And a story about how immensely frustrating it is to not have a perfect solution to a problem and how it is even more frustrating to be a literal in a world of metaphor. (Contains references to cancer and illness, fuck cancer forever.)
Examining the advice given in agony aunt columns as an indication of what kind of practicalities were possible over time, even if some of the underlying morality of the responses didn't change nearly as much over the same time. Which I whistle and put next to the concept of the Missing Stair and the response technique of the Necessary Bastard. It's always fun when, after some significant time, you realize your evil ex was a missing stair all on her own.
A funeral home owner sentenced to twenty years in prison for fraudulently charging for cremations that never happened and then selling the body parts of the deceased.
A man placed a hardware store Buddha in a spot that had been a dumping ground for trash and a place of anti-social behavior in the hopes of stopping both of those things. It worked, and now there is a community that takes care of the shrines in that same spot.
Another walrus, this one named Thor, who is being treated better than previous ones, The Portland, Oregon division of the Army Corps of Engineers producing a calendar with adorable cats and various civil engineering projects, a seal trapped in a reservoir that is pretty okay with this, since the reservoir has a good stock of fish in it, and the ozone layer is on track to return to 1980 levels by 2066.
The New Yorker profiles a group called The People's C.D.C., who object to the current methods the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention use for determining how widespread the pandemic is and how bad the problem is. The People's C.D.C. maintains a website and produces reports about their assessment of the pandemic and what mitiggations and recommendations they have for surviving it.
On the use of masks for masking, both for the virus and for preventing others from getting access to someone's full facial expressions.
In technology, The problems of identity, impersonation, verification, prevention of abuse, and how most techbros have no idea how to handle any of those things. Quotes from![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise, very smart commentary about how wallet names policies are meant to discourage participation from specific groups, how paying for verification doesn't do much, and the real way to build a community and safety is to moderate your content consistently and vigorously with humans. Which is crucial and also soul-crushing and draining. Which is also an answer to why rolling your own isn't always the solution, even if it's supposed to be easier. The benefits of fragmenting the Internet's communities back into places that don't talk to each other, rather than a single community that gets thrown at each other are coming back into consciousness, though.
Having lost the thing that would make them popular and having failed to be bought by an anti-semite, the platform Parler has reportedly made significant staffing cuts, the kind that might be in anticipation of the service shuttering itself entirely. Turns out that trying to run your own social and pander to the dregs of the Internet at scale is harder than it looks.
People who bought into the get-rich-quick schemes of cryptocurrency are finding out how little they actually can get back from them, as come contracts claim that the digital assets remain with the company, rather than with the account holders.
The Lack Rack, or how the dimensions of an inexpensive IKEA table are exactly right for rack-mount servers. And with a lamplight on top that works as an indicator light about server health, you could know what was happening in your home space at a glance.
In the department of "working as intended, but in different context," it turns out that Apple Watches and Apple Phones programmed to automatically call 911 in the case of a vehicle collision are also being triggered by skiiers coming to a sudden stop or taking a spill. Works as intended, but wrong context. Before hitting the slopes, then, someone may have to suspend their automatic emergency call.
In the department of "working as intended, but we lie about its true purpose," a woman on a trip with a Girl Scout troop was told she was banned from all Madison Square Garden properties because a facial recognition system had identified her as someone who works with a firm that was suing the company. Not that she herself was involved in such a suit, but that she worked at the firm with someone who was. MSG is a private company who gets to make their own rules, absurd and arbitrary as they are, but one wonders how many other people will find themselves on a banned list for even less defensible reasons than that. Or, say, jailed for a crime he did not commit, even looking nothing like the description of the suspect, because a facial recognition software flagged him, presumably because he was black and the suspect was also black. And this kind of misuse of the technology is everywhere and the police involved generally deny they're doing privacy-violating things with it all the time and without proper oversight.
A micrometeroid is blamed for a hole in a Soyuz capsule docked to the International Space Station that will require a replacement Soyuz to be sent up so that in case of emergency, all the persons on the station can be evacuated.
Continued concerns about the ability of machine learning models to produce endless remixes and the copyright and employment concerns of doing so.
The genius of John Conway, mathematician, and the contibutions he made to mathematics of all sorts of disciplines.
Experimentation in traffic management to get fatalities down to zero that mostly work on redesigning the spaces to prevent lots of high-speed transit and dense traffic patterns. As well as some additional services like a last- or first-mile service to transit stops.
A request for the Apache Software Foundation to change their name, as many other entities who named themselves after the indigenous peoples of the United States without care or thought about what those people thought have been asked to do.
Last out, yet another annual review of the things that got stuck in various orifices over the last calendar year.
Less terribly, Escher's Relativity and Escher's Ascending and Descending rendered in LEGO bricks.
And less terribly than that, would you like to see someone split logs with a sword?
Perhaps most profoundly, on the virtues of goal-setting and the ways that goals can help you grow into the person that you want to be.
(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 ![[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 Government of the United Kingdom has signaled an intention to stop recognizing the gender recognition certificates of other nations, in addition to opposition to Scotland implementing proper gender recognition. Someone in the Tories must think there's more votes to be had by being transphobic. Hopefully, they're wrong and they get sacked at earliest possibility.
Insurrectionists attempted to overthrow the newly elected government of Brazil, were thwarted, and arrested, and the government has promised swift action in figuring out how it happened and why there was so little attempt to stop the attack. In that regard, Brazil is doing much better than the United States did against its own insurrectionists.
The new year turned over and that means a large swath of material officially entered the public domain in the United States! Which is good, but also, a significant amount of things that are now in the public domain have no complete, or even extant, copies in existence, because having to wait nearly 100 years to begin copying and preservation means so many things get destroyed long before they can be preserved.
One of the good things that happens with those works that are preserved and in the public domain is that you can then transform them in really neat ways, like bringing Moby Dick forward into tiresome modern idiom and then having someone read aloud this same tiresome modern idiom, which provides even more hilarity.
As with many things, the most important audience for books is often the one that marketers and sellers assume will read anything.
Trope language is being used for its intended purpose, including in making recommendations for books and other media. As TVTropes itself will tell you, Tropes Are Not Good, Tropes Are Not Bad, Tropes Are Tools, but there's always someone who is going to claim that describing works in trope language is reductive and trying to shoehorn material into categories it doesn't fit into. Like genres.
The Music world lost Lisa Marie Presley, child of Elvis, at 54 years of age, and Jeff Beck at 78 years of age, whose name I actually only know because of a Frank Zappa song. We also lost the founder of Creative Technologies, Sim Wong Hoo, whose Sound Blaster card you may remember setting environment variables for in DOS if you are of a certain age, at 67 years of age.
A thread on how a holy day celebrating light and outlasting those who wish to see you dead is still very important, even if it's a minor holy day. Which I put next to global gains for the queer community in 2022, including, for once, the U.S. with some wins. And speaking of queerness, the presence of the spell checker's squiggle as it relates to queerness in language and other things. As well as flexing against the nature of gender with regard to folk dancing roles.
Constructing images of being queer and Roma, creating pictures of interesectionality, along with commentary about what the images are meant to portray and the stereotypes they're meant to fight. [PDF]
The U.S. President continues to ask that people appplying for asylum somehow do it from the places they seek asylum from, as if it were easy enough to do all of the required things from an embassy or other space while in a place that you are tyrying to get out of for fear of persecution.
Unionization efforts are taking advantage of hot moments and momentum shifts as much as they are dogged trench warfare. (And often, union campaigns are self-organizing from the workers, who have done much of the work before they reach out to a union to represent them.)
South Carolina's supreme court invalidated the state's ban on terminating a pregnancy after six weeks of impregnation, claiming the statute violated the right to privacy enshrined in the state's constitution. It's always nice to see the boys get told no when they want to enforce banning a woman's right to choose whether or not she wants to get pregnant. Further along that line, The U.S. Food and Drug Administration removed requirements that had made it difficult for retail pharmacies to stock mifepristone, and both the Walgreen's and CVS chains announced their intent to stock the drug, one of a pair that produces a medication abortion. For those who are not able to acquire the medications at their local pharmacies, The United States Department of Justice believes that both medications can be delivered through postal mail, and neither is considered a violation of the Comstock Act.
A story about being whisked away to Fairyland, but luckily for the protagonist, the rules are provided beforehand. And a story about how immensely frustrating it is to not have a perfect solution to a problem and how it is even more frustrating to be a literal in a world of metaphor. (Contains references to cancer and illness, fuck cancer forever.)
Examining the advice given in agony aunt columns as an indication of what kind of practicalities were possible over time, even if some of the underlying morality of the responses didn't change nearly as much over the same time. Which I whistle and put next to the concept of the Missing Stair and the response technique of the Necessary Bastard. It's always fun when, after some significant time, you realize your evil ex was a missing stair all on her own.
A funeral home owner sentenced to twenty years in prison for fraudulently charging for cremations that never happened and then selling the body parts of the deceased.
A man placed a hardware store Buddha in a spot that had been a dumping ground for trash and a place of anti-social behavior in the hopes of stopping both of those things. It worked, and now there is a community that takes care of the shrines in that same spot.
Another walrus, this one named Thor, who is being treated better than previous ones, The Portland, Oregon division of the Army Corps of Engineers producing a calendar with adorable cats and various civil engineering projects, a seal trapped in a reservoir that is pretty okay with this, since the reservoir has a good stock of fish in it, and the ozone layer is on track to return to 1980 levels by 2066.
The New Yorker profiles a group called The People's C.D.C., who object to the current methods the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention use for determining how widespread the pandemic is and how bad the problem is. The People's C.D.C. maintains a website and produces reports about their assessment of the pandemic and what mitiggations and recommendations they have for surviving it.
On the use of masks for masking, both for the virus and for preventing others from getting access to someone's full facial expressions.
In technology, The problems of identity, impersonation, verification, prevention of abuse, and how most techbros have no idea how to handle any of those things. Quotes from
denise, very smart commentary about how wallet names policies are meant to discourage participation from specific groups, how paying for verification doesn't do much, and the real way to build a community and safety is to moderate your content consistently and vigorously with humans. Which is crucial and also soul-crushing and draining. Which is also an answer to why rolling your own isn't always the solution, even if it's supposed to be easier. The benefits of fragmenting the Internet's communities back into places that don't talk to each other, rather than a single community that gets thrown at each other are coming back into consciousness, though.Having lost the thing that would make them popular and having failed to be bought by an anti-semite, the platform Parler has reportedly made significant staffing cuts, the kind that might be in anticipation of the service shuttering itself entirely. Turns out that trying to run your own social and pander to the dregs of the Internet at scale is harder than it looks.
People who bought into the get-rich-quick schemes of cryptocurrency are finding out how little they actually can get back from them, as come contracts claim that the digital assets remain with the company, rather than with the account holders.
The Lack Rack, or how the dimensions of an inexpensive IKEA table are exactly right for rack-mount servers. And with a lamplight on top that works as an indicator light about server health, you could know what was happening in your home space at a glance.
In the department of "working as intended, but in different context," it turns out that Apple Watches and Apple Phones programmed to automatically call 911 in the case of a vehicle collision are also being triggered by skiiers coming to a sudden stop or taking a spill. Works as intended, but wrong context. Before hitting the slopes, then, someone may have to suspend their automatic emergency call.
In the department of "working as intended, but we lie about its true purpose," a woman on a trip with a Girl Scout troop was told she was banned from all Madison Square Garden properties because a facial recognition system had identified her as someone who works with a firm that was suing the company. Not that she herself was involved in such a suit, but that she worked at the firm with someone who was. MSG is a private company who gets to make their own rules, absurd and arbitrary as they are, but one wonders how many other people will find themselves on a banned list for even less defensible reasons than that. Or, say, jailed for a crime he did not commit, even looking nothing like the description of the suspect, because a facial recognition software flagged him, presumably because he was black and the suspect was also black. And this kind of misuse of the technology is everywhere and the police involved generally deny they're doing privacy-violating things with it all the time and without proper oversight.
A micrometeroid is blamed for a hole in a Soyuz capsule docked to the International Space Station that will require a replacement Soyuz to be sent up so that in case of emergency, all the persons on the station can be evacuated.
Continued concerns about the ability of machine learning models to produce endless remixes and the copyright and employment concerns of doing so.
The genius of John Conway, mathematician, and the contibutions he made to mathematics of all sorts of disciplines.
Experimentation in traffic management to get fatalities down to zero that mostly work on redesigning the spaces to prevent lots of high-speed transit and dense traffic patterns. As well as some additional services like a last- or first-mile service to transit stops.
A request for the Apache Software Foundation to change their name, as many other entities who named themselves after the indigenous peoples of the United States without care or thought about what those people thought have been asked to do.
Last out, yet another annual review of the things that got stuck in various orifices over the last calendar year.
Less terribly, Escher's Relativity and Escher's Ascending and Descending rendered in LEGO bricks.
And less terribly than that, would you like to see someone split logs with a sword?
Perhaps most profoundly, on the virtues of goal-setting and the ways that goals can help you grow into the person that you want to be.
(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.)
no subject
Date: 2023-01-18 09:00 am (UTC)In addition to an appalling human rights abuse, there will be consequences that may be economic or symbolic: but the former (sanctions, say, or vetoing a trade treaty) might actually be less damaging than an official warning not to travel (tourists and business travellers are uninsured).
As an extreme case of 'symbolic' retaliation, I can foresee something like political asylum and refugee status being offered to transgender people fleeing the regime in Brexitstan; and I suspect that some of the affected citizens' governments will get 'creative'.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-18 10:07 am (UTC)ZOMG! A trans woman got MARRIED to a straight, cis guy? Can't you just see our Tory friends freaking at the mere thought?
no subject
Date: 2023-01-18 04:26 pm (UTC)I think England needs to have a lie-down. There's also the matter of the English court deciding that Scotland cannot hold another referendum to leave the UK. Personally I think Scotland, Wales, and Ireland should hold a referendum and kick England out of the UK and then they could all join the EU and let England rot.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-18 05:16 pm (UTC)Westminster and the Tory government are exhibiting all the signs of flailing about that a drowning person does, and as much as it would be prudent to let them, there's probably enough damage they can do in the process to make you think twice about it. But having everyone but England in the EU would be a way of potentially cushioning the blow.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-20 07:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-20 07:49 pm (UTC)