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silveradeptLet's start this post with twelve things you can do instead of involving the police. Most of which are things that work on the principle that things that don't have direct victims don't need cops. The others tend to be "cops are terrible at crisis resolution, whether medical, mental, or vehicular," and "most problems can be resolved by knowing your neighbors and asking them to do or not do things." The police are the violence arm of the State and almost always of white supremacy, and should only be invoked as such.
Attempting to frame religion as separated from culture, as most Christians (and culturally Christian atheists) do, is a framing that tries to invisibilize Christian culture. Because culture is not modular, as the post title points out, and beliefs and practices about the world and our place in it cannot be easily separated out into things that involve solely the divine, the numinous, and the liminal and things that solely involve humans, other beings, and the material.
Please continue to treat any password you used with LiveJournal as irrevocably compromised, even if LiveJournal refuses to admit any security breaches, and change it on any site where you are still using a password that has been used on LiveJournal.
The government in Westminster decided they didn't want to let Scotland make it easier for trans people to get Gender Recognition Certificates. In response, protests happened all throughout England in favor of trans rights.
Most people questioning whether trans people should be allowed to live as they are want to ask a question about what is, when they really are asking a question about what ought. Because what is is right in front of someone, what ought means they get to impose their judgment on others.
The experience of a medic encountering structural ableism with regard to their own Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and related disabilities, which didn't make them any less good of a medic, just one that couldn't do specific functions.
The United States government eventually made reparations for all the Japanese-Americans it incarcerated during the Second World War. It can also make reparations for slavery and anti-Blackness. And people in countries that have done the most climate pollution can not only advocate for direct payments to those affected by that pollution, but also to take energy generation and distribution out of the hands of for-profit companies and put them into the hands of unionized workforces with goals of repairing and reducing the climate change. (And, possibly, those who profited the most off of making the climate disaster worse can be required to give up the most toward making energy generation and climate disaster mitigation less destructive.)
A thread of questions for the board of the Organization for Transformative Works about their progress on anti-racism work and processes, which all sound drearily familiar about the anti-racism work that my own organization has supposedly been undertaking, but they're at least far enough along where they've already had the consultant hired to help them check boxes. (If you'd like to see the thread of questions without engaging with the bird site,runpunkrun replicated the text and threading of the the questions.)
liriaen brings our attention to the fact that German censors put the Archive of Our Own on an index that forbids it from showing up in search results without due process nor contacting the OTW about the supposedly harmful-to-youth content on AO3. And hasn't really been forthcoming about who asked for it, what decisions were made, the justifications for the same, and we still haven't heard anything officially from the OTW about this indexing. So there was a temporary recission of the decision because procedure was not properly followed, but that still means the "protect the youth from fiction!" brigade is still out there agitating for a re-indexing.
A surface primer about the Satanic Panic of earlier times, which should look and sound familiar to those who are subjected to this decade's panics.
Minnesota codified protections for reproductive freedom into their statutes on what eventually was a party-line vote after many failed rounds of attempting to attach poison pills to the bill by its opponents. You can see the both-sides-ism in the coverage, though, by the barely-critical quoting of several people who say that it will make Minnesota "extreme" and the statistics of how little the third-trimester abortion actually happens getting shoved to the very bottom of the piece.
A demand to remove outdated terminology and call an extra-small speculum by that name, rather than referring to it as a 'virgin' speculum.
David Crosby, of Crosby, Stills, Nash (and sometimes Young), has passed on at 81 years of age.
A new-to-me word game for those so inclined - Wordiply, run by the folk who run The Guardian, where the goal is to provide words of at least 16 letters in length that contain a specific three-letter combination (in that order) five times over.
How requiring things to be approved by the royal censor also created an archive of early Black theater works. On a similar topic of people being right there, but sometimes overlooked, Some Black men of the UK qualified as voting men, even while the slave trade was going on. Additionally, the return of and addition to some of the first statuary depicting black residents of the UK
More stochastic terrorism from fascism suppporters: after losing an election by 47 percentage points, the candidate orchestrated and may have participated in shooting up the houses of elected officials. And you can expect more of that in the future, as
the current darling of the fascists gets himself reinstated on Facebook. At least DirecTV and Verizon FiOS decided to get rid of one of the worst fascism-promoting networks and not renew their carriage contract.
The New York Attorney General has asked MSG Entertainment to explain to them why their policy of using facial recognition to identify and exclude specific employees of law firms from their properties doesn't violate civil rights laws and won't be used for discrimination. I'd also be curious to know whether the ability to purchase a ticket and then be bared from the venue has issues, if it was already going to be clear that the person would be barred and should not be sold a ticket.
The royal family of the United Kingdom continues to want their activities shrouded in secrecy and not available for scrutiny.
Turning to tiny houses and the land of friends to live upon because rents are too expensive, in the idea of making houses that are sized and constructed so they can be moved easily, even if the people making them would prefer not to.
The use of the game Among Us and its gameplay loop in the movie Glass Onion, where a person who was very familiar with the game could predict the outcome of the movie.
An attempt to write a scientific abstract in a language with no writing conventions, which often means trying to get something as close to familiar and accurate-sounding as possible.
Trying to blame people who bring in sweets to the office for people eating sweets in the office. Which we put next to people trying to restrict what the poor can have to so they understand being poor is a moral failure and will try to avoid it and the person winning a case to not have to participate in mandatory fun. And the interview with the people who do the Maintenance Phase podcast, on the things they do to try and help people understand how much of weight loss and "wellness" is built on decidedly unhealthy things like profit and grift. Also, a review of a book that suggests being an Epicurean and aiming for a state of lack of anxiety is the way to go if you're into Greek philosophy as a way of modern life.
Murderbot and gender identity and being able to define your own gender and what it means. The different between having yourself defined by others and defined by you is always extremely important, and Murderbot showcases defining yourself in nonhuman terms that make it happy. A painting with specific opinions about a supposed father of gynecology and the people he did his experiments on. Those who search for old copies of books to read them and decide whether they should be brought back into print, and some of the wrangling that accompanies such things.
A proposal to put in green space by repurposing an abandoned rail viaduct, a potential terrifying reality for Californians who have been flooded and then find they do not have flood insurance to help with their losses, another call for increased biodiversity in crops and livestock, spotting seal pups inland, a consequence of the greatly increased populations of grey seals, and asking humans to identify the meaning of ape and chimpanzee gestures as a way of trying to discover whether the understanding of those meanings is still within human consciousness.
The current coronavirus issues may be reminiscent of another possible coronavirus infection of the early 1900s, and all of its long-term consequences
It is still relevant and worthwhile to maintain safety precautions in the face of everything else telling you it's not normal.
A quick writeup of the research and progress on nasal sprays as treatment and/or prophylaxis against SARS-CoV-2, most of which seems to be "there's some promise in some of them." Fromceb.
A very depressing one-page RPG about healthcare staffing during a COVID crisis. Also contains a much happier version about training a unicorn puppy.
In technology, creating a virtual fashion show of African older people and their fashion, using a machine learning algorithm to create the people in the pictures. Which also produces the question of why there aren't actual person fashion shows for this audience such that they have to resort to compositions like this.
Repurposing some Blu-ray player components, along with some printed components, to create a scanning microscope.
Describing the use of adversarial watermarks (changes to a corpus that make it obvious that the corpus was used as part of a model's training data, like trap streets) as a stegeanographic technique. Not a very good one, admittedly, because it takes a lot of characters to encode a message in the watermarks, but potentially useful if short messages are hidden in large corpuses of data.
The importance of reading and reading widely outside your specific discipline, from someone who studied computer science and got the message that the humanities and their books were unimportant and then was unceremoniously yanked back into having to consider the importance of the humanities by joining an iSchool, where the librarians and the technologists try to develop something that uses the best of both of their disciplines.
Turns out hominins (the family that contains humans and our closest relatives) have been at the business of standardized tool-making for about twice as long as previously thought, thanks to the discovery of obsidian hand-axes dated to about 1.2 million years ago in Ethiopia. Cooooooool.
The Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics department presents, for your amusement, the AO3 Ship Stats for 2022, compiled in August, which work off of the publicly available data set as well as ranking popularity by works that include pairings, andmelannen producing a different list of the top 100 fics of 2022, using the OTP: true flag to try and discard counts of background pairings and including fics that are locked to those with Archive accounts. And it shuffles the numbers around considerably. Just goes to show why showcasing your methodology and trying to make your experiment replicable is important to helping people understand how you end up with such different numbers and lists.
Last out, reasons why archive digitize materials, and what is most likely to be digitized, and how what's digitized always is and is almost always likely to be a tiny fraction of the available material.
It's the tenth anniversary of the Finkbeiner Test, where a work passes if they can write about a woman prominent in her field without making it seem like she's a woman first and prominent in her field second.
And a tour of place names that have evolved from their original selves into filthy-sounding places. Includes vandals (obviously), memento-seekers (ditto), and the people who are trying to make sure those place names stay exactly as they are, despite all the nonsense.
Truly finally, The Sad Bastard Cookbook, once again, as a reminder that there exist materials specifically for people who have low spoons, no spoons, or who would like to do anything other than put food in their facehole and realize that they still need to do it anyway.
(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.)
Attempting to frame religion as separated from culture, as most Christians (and culturally Christian atheists) do, is a framing that tries to invisibilize Christian culture. Because culture is not modular, as the post title points out, and beliefs and practices about the world and our place in it cannot be easily separated out into things that involve solely the divine, the numinous, and the liminal and things that solely involve humans, other beings, and the material.
Please continue to treat any password you used with LiveJournal as irrevocably compromised, even if LiveJournal refuses to admit any security breaches, and change it on any site where you are still using a password that has been used on LiveJournal.
The government in Westminster decided they didn't want to let Scotland make it easier for trans people to get Gender Recognition Certificates. In response, protests happened all throughout England in favor of trans rights.
Most people questioning whether trans people should be allowed to live as they are want to ask a question about what is, when they really are asking a question about what ought. Because what is is right in front of someone, what ought means they get to impose their judgment on others.
The experience of a medic encountering structural ableism with regard to their own Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and related disabilities, which didn't make them any less good of a medic, just one that couldn't do specific functions.
The United States government eventually made reparations for all the Japanese-Americans it incarcerated during the Second World War. It can also make reparations for slavery and anti-Blackness. And people in countries that have done the most climate pollution can not only advocate for direct payments to those affected by that pollution, but also to take energy generation and distribution out of the hands of for-profit companies and put them into the hands of unionized workforces with goals of repairing and reducing the climate change. (And, possibly, those who profited the most off of making the climate disaster worse can be required to give up the most toward making energy generation and climate disaster mitigation less destructive.)
A thread of questions for the board of the Organization for Transformative Works about their progress on anti-racism work and processes, which all sound drearily familiar about the anti-racism work that my own organization has supposedly been undertaking, but they're at least far enough along where they've already had the consultant hired to help them check boxes. (If you'd like to see the thread of questions without engaging with the bird site,
runpunkrun replicated the text and threading of the the questions.)liriaen brings our attention to the fact that German censors put the Archive of Our Own on an index that forbids it from showing up in search results without due process nor contacting the OTW about the supposedly harmful-to-youth content on AO3. And hasn't really been forthcoming about who asked for it, what decisions were made, the justifications for the same, and we still haven't heard anything officially from the OTW about this indexing. So there was a temporary recission of the decision because procedure was not properly followed, but that still means the "protect the youth from fiction!" brigade is still out there agitating for a re-indexing.A surface primer about the Satanic Panic of earlier times, which should look and sound familiar to those who are subjected to this decade's panics.
Minnesota codified protections for reproductive freedom into their statutes on what eventually was a party-line vote after many failed rounds of attempting to attach poison pills to the bill by its opponents. You can see the both-sides-ism in the coverage, though, by the barely-critical quoting of several people who say that it will make Minnesota "extreme" and the statistics of how little the third-trimester abortion actually happens getting shoved to the very bottom of the piece.
A demand to remove outdated terminology and call an extra-small speculum by that name, rather than referring to it as a 'virgin' speculum.
David Crosby, of Crosby, Stills, Nash (and sometimes Young), has passed on at 81 years of age.
A new-to-me word game for those so inclined - Wordiply, run by the folk who run The Guardian, where the goal is to provide words of at least 16 letters in length that contain a specific three-letter combination (in that order) five times over.
How requiring things to be approved by the royal censor also created an archive of early Black theater works. On a similar topic of people being right there, but sometimes overlooked, Some Black men of the UK qualified as voting men, even while the slave trade was going on. Additionally, the return of and addition to some of the first statuary depicting black residents of the UK
More stochastic terrorism from fascism suppporters: after losing an election by 47 percentage points, the candidate orchestrated and may have participated in shooting up the houses of elected officials. And you can expect more of that in the future, as
the current darling of the fascists gets himself reinstated on Facebook. At least DirecTV and Verizon FiOS decided to get rid of one of the worst fascism-promoting networks and not renew their carriage contract.
The New York Attorney General has asked MSG Entertainment to explain to them why their policy of using facial recognition to identify and exclude specific employees of law firms from their properties doesn't violate civil rights laws and won't be used for discrimination. I'd also be curious to know whether the ability to purchase a ticket and then be bared from the venue has issues, if it was already going to be clear that the person would be barred and should not be sold a ticket.
The royal family of the United Kingdom continues to want their activities shrouded in secrecy and not available for scrutiny.
Turning to tiny houses and the land of friends to live upon because rents are too expensive, in the idea of making houses that are sized and constructed so they can be moved easily, even if the people making them would prefer not to.
The use of the game Among Us and its gameplay loop in the movie Glass Onion, where a person who was very familiar with the game could predict the outcome of the movie.
An attempt to write a scientific abstract in a language with no writing conventions, which often means trying to get something as close to familiar and accurate-sounding as possible.
Trying to blame people who bring in sweets to the office for people eating sweets in the office. Which we put next to people trying to restrict what the poor can have to so they understand being poor is a moral failure and will try to avoid it and the person winning a case to not have to participate in mandatory fun. And the interview with the people who do the Maintenance Phase podcast, on the things they do to try and help people understand how much of weight loss and "wellness" is built on decidedly unhealthy things like profit and grift. Also, a review of a book that suggests being an Epicurean and aiming for a state of lack of anxiety is the way to go if you're into Greek philosophy as a way of modern life.
Murderbot and gender identity and being able to define your own gender and what it means. The different between having yourself defined by others and defined by you is always extremely important, and Murderbot showcases defining yourself in nonhuman terms that make it happy. A painting with specific opinions about a supposed father of gynecology and the people he did his experiments on. Those who search for old copies of books to read them and decide whether they should be brought back into print, and some of the wrangling that accompanies such things.
A proposal to put in green space by repurposing an abandoned rail viaduct, a potential terrifying reality for Californians who have been flooded and then find they do not have flood insurance to help with their losses, another call for increased biodiversity in crops and livestock, spotting seal pups inland, a consequence of the greatly increased populations of grey seals, and asking humans to identify the meaning of ape and chimpanzee gestures as a way of trying to discover whether the understanding of those meanings is still within human consciousness.
The current coronavirus issues may be reminiscent of another possible coronavirus infection of the early 1900s, and all of its long-term consequences
It is still relevant and worthwhile to maintain safety precautions in the face of everything else telling you it's not normal.
A quick writeup of the research and progress on nasal sprays as treatment and/or prophylaxis against SARS-CoV-2, most of which seems to be "there's some promise in some of them." From
ceb.A very depressing one-page RPG about healthcare staffing during a COVID crisis. Also contains a much happier version about training a unicorn puppy.
In technology, creating a virtual fashion show of African older people and their fashion, using a machine learning algorithm to create the people in the pictures. Which also produces the question of why there aren't actual person fashion shows for this audience such that they have to resort to compositions like this.
Repurposing some Blu-ray player components, along with some printed components, to create a scanning microscope.
Describing the use of adversarial watermarks (changes to a corpus that make it obvious that the corpus was used as part of a model's training data, like trap streets) as a stegeanographic technique. Not a very good one, admittedly, because it takes a lot of characters to encode a message in the watermarks, but potentially useful if short messages are hidden in large corpuses of data.
The importance of reading and reading widely outside your specific discipline, from someone who studied computer science and got the message that the humanities and their books were unimportant and then was unceremoniously yanked back into having to consider the importance of the humanities by joining an iSchool, where the librarians and the technologists try to develop something that uses the best of both of their disciplines.
Turns out hominins (the family that contains humans and our closest relatives) have been at the business of standardized tool-making for about twice as long as previously thought, thanks to the discovery of obsidian hand-axes dated to about 1.2 million years ago in Ethiopia. Cooooooool.
The Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics department presents, for your amusement, the AO3 Ship Stats for 2022, compiled in August, which work off of the publicly available data set as well as ranking popularity by works that include pairings, and
melannen producing a different list of the top 100 fics of 2022, using the OTP: true flag to try and discard counts of background pairings and including fics that are locked to those with Archive accounts. And it shuffles the numbers around considerably. Just goes to show why showcasing your methodology and trying to make your experiment replicable is important to helping people understand how you end up with such different numbers and lists.Last out, reasons why archive digitize materials, and what is most likely to be digitized, and how what's digitized always is and is almost always likely to be a tiny fraction of the available material.
It's the tenth anniversary of the Finkbeiner Test, where a work passes if they can write about a woman prominent in her field without making it seem like she's a woman first and prominent in her field second.
And a tour of place names that have evolved from their original selves into filthy-sounding places. Includes vandals (obviously), memento-seekers (ditto), and the people who are trying to make sure those place names stay exactly as they are, despite all the nonsense.
Truly finally, The Sad Bastard Cookbook, once again, as a reminder that there exist materials specifically for people who have low spoons, no spoons, or who would like to do anything other than put food in their facehole and realize that they still need to do it anyway.
(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: 2023-02-01 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-01 05:56 pm (UTC)(Because yes. I eat to live, not the other way around)
no subject
Date: 2023-02-01 07:53 pm (UTC)