A Big Link Ball - Early April 02023
Apr. 17th, 2023 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet us begin with the way in which Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day does not provide a moral, a lesson, or any other situation where the author or illustrator instructs the reader on how to feel about a bad day, and in fact, may be subtly undercutting the narration of Alexander and whether or not his day is exactly as bad as he says it is.
It's Autism Acceptance Month, and so it's worth checking to see whether you're contributing to the distress and unhappiness of an autistic person, or whether the people around you are ticking the boxes on the checklist of doom.
The Onion disguises their entirely warranted attack on mainstream journalists' coverage of trans people as a satire piece about the sacred duty of journalism is to endanger trans people and create as large a trans panic as they can.
If you identify somewhere outside the gender binary, the Gender Census would like to hear from you. There's also some good news, a poll saying that most trans adults who have done some transitioning are satisfied with that decision. The bad news is that and a fair number of them are doing so without the support of trusted adults or their families, and many of them are being dscriminated against or attacked for being trans. And that's without the institutional attacks that are going on.
Two Black lawmakers were expelled from the Tennessee state legislature for standing with kids against the death lobby, and were then reinstated to their own vacant seats by the bodies granted the authority to elect their replacements. A third legislator, a white woman, survived her explusion vote by a single person, unlike the two Black men.
Wil Wheaton talks about his childhood, and the time where he found an adult who was genuinely interested in him, instead of trying to make him a marionette who did and said exactly what the adults in his life wanted. That it turns out to be a librarian is important for the story that Wil is tellling and for the activisim he wants people to engage in against book banning and other anti-library actions, but I don't want to go with Wil's characterization of "The library is a safe place," because it often isn't, and hasn't been, for specific people and groups. Admittedly, librarians can be really good about taking care of the feral children in their stacks, and for helping those kids that are clearly orthogonal find works that reflect them, find people that treat them well and properly, and otherwise assure those kids of their normality, but none of that necessarily makes a library safe for everyone. Or even for a majority of people. People thinking libraries are "safe" is what's driving most of the efforts to ban things from libraries and restrict the domains that libraries can operate in, because the Unqualified believe that libraries should be "safe" and they have a very specific, mostly incompatible with the realities of libraries, definition of "safety" they want to impose.
A book commissioned by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, The Day The Librarians Disappeared, posits a world where all of the librarians have simply vanished and the rest of society and parents and educators have to pick up the pieces, realize that they still need libraries, and then come to appreciate all of the hats and tasks a trained librarian juggles. It's mostly set in a school environment, rather than a public one, mostly to make sure the scope stays contained, but there's a fair amount of this disappeared librarians tale that believes that the world without librarians will, in fact, come to appreciate them and what they did in a world that still contains the Internet and still assigns research projects and encourages reading and otherwise tries to reconstruct the world that was there before all the librarians disappeared. My headcanon is that all the librarians quit en masse, left their resignation letters in all of the correct places, and the administration either hasn't discovered them yet or is hiding this fact because they don't want to admit they created a work environment where coordinated mass resignation was seen as the only viable alternative. Or that there was some sweeping federal legislation or decision that outlawed the provision of public and school libraries and criminalized all of the librarians who had been doing so, so the profession as a whole had to disappear or be prosecuted. (The main character's surprise at this happening is probably because they never paid attention to the right places, or their administration suppressed the news of the dissolution of the library profession.)
Truthfully, I suspect that our world, should all the librarians disappear, would not consider this to be any kind of crisis, and would instead shift the burdens of the school librarian onto the teachers and rejoice at not having to pay for a library in their tax revenues and budgets, assuming that the private sector will more than happily fill the gap for people who need access to books, computers, the Internet, and the like. And the private sector, and religious organizations, will be able to have their own libraries, carefully curated to make sure only acceptable material gets in, rather than having to carry all kinds of things in a public space. Libraries might come back into existence, but they'll do so in their most original forms, as private organizations with membership fees and private locations, rather than as public goods.
Maggie Tokuda-Hall was offered a spot in a collection curated by Scholastic for her book about her parents meeting in the concentration camps set up for Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, but the offer was contingent on removing the explicit reference to anti-Japanese racism in the Author's Note. She declined. And then had the courage to name names about who was asking her to remove the explicit condemnation of racism so that the book could be included in a classroom collection. To their credit, whether because they realized how much they've screwed up, or because they wanted to do something about the virality of Maggie's posts, Scholastic, through the President and CEO, apologized for asking for that edit and for what allowed that ask to happen in the first place. Whether it is a sincere apology or trying to make the bad press go away, we will see. Because Scholastic has such reach and clout in the school market, there will always be temptation to try and sanitize works to whatever the most reactionary right-wing position demands as acceptable for students. In this case, they failed to stand up for an author and to recognize what they were doing. I have a feeling that there are plenty of other authors who were asked for similar things and went along with it, because Scholastic. For as much as we talk about not self-censoring nor obeying in advance, bargains like the one that Maggie has highlighted are the norm for most people who find themselves on the harp end of censorship. You can either go along with it and get rewarded for it, or fight it and find out how unified the front against you, that will want you to go away or get buried, really is.
Bringing back the morality in anti-trust, so that one is not stuck arguing that a company provides poorer-quallity experiences when their lackeys and partners are accused of a significant amount of child abuse and underage exploitation.
For those who thought Ginni Thomas was an unacceptable influence on her husband, the Supreme Court Justice, and engaged in several acts of corruption, Clarence Thomas proves he's no slouch at all in and accepting gifts from someone who wants access to him, and about not disclosing any of that at all to anyone, despite the clear ethics and law violations involved. The justice says that he didn't think he needed to disclose it because it was personal hospitality, but trips on jets definitely don't fall into the exemptions, and there's plenty of other actions that haven't been disclosed and really should have been. There are amendments now, of course, because he got caught, but it will only be a matter of time before someone uncovers something else.
Stories of theater productions where things go wrong, but the cast turns it into humor or otherwise just keeps going.
Malicious compliance with laws that should have been struck down on constitutionality, or "In God We Trust" in Arabic. And summoning the hordes to punish the racist-ass HOA-Karen with the cop husband, who include lawyers, after your day started by helping someone recover from a vehicle breakdown from two states away. Also, a corgi. And it's way weirder than this summary suggests. Satire from Popehat about how freedoms are really only for the super-geniuses among us and not for the plebes who should ideally always shut up and support their betters rather than believe they have any valid popint ever.
jesse_the_k explains the unfriendliness of saying something is "disability friendly".
The significance of anti-Semitism and anti-Blackness in the adoption and promotion of square dance as an appropriate form of American musical culture, featuring noted Nazi sympathizer, anti-Semite, and cultural appropriator Henry Ford.
A longitudnal study of pornography usage in men, women, and couples, with findings that suggest more porn usage is detrimental to men and beneficial to women on certain metrics of satisfaction and confidence.
The amount of information disclosed in the indictment and statement of facts regarding the arraignment of the previous administrator is not all that much, so we'll have to wait for more information to see how the State intends to prove its case.
Fifty years of a peace studies program.
Remember the complexity of the legend when it comes to Arthur returning, and you can see different ways that Merlin might react to the way monarchy has become a laughingstock of our current era. And that he still stans for Arthur, even if he wouldn't for any other king.
Humanity at its best is when we go back and leave no one behind, and the Murderbot Diaries understands this, even when it extends to non-human sentients. Also, The Hunger Games wasn't subtle about the messages about the bread and circuses, but because it was marketed as Young Adult, everyone paid attention to the love triangle instead of all the rest.
The legacy of Klaus Teuber, Catan, and the way that it made social board games fun and playable again, as opposed to many of the more competitive and less-exciting games like the monopolists-rules versions of Monopoly.
The thought of Kermit/Piggy/Gonzo as a triad, which mostly seems to work from the concept that Kermit/Piggy is a usually open relationship, and a very communicative and forgiving one, although the way that it's usually portrayed,Piggy's the one with the greater need for multiple lovers and Kermit might be somewhat ace/aro (or just completely stressed). Which makes Gonzo (and Camilla, honestly) a good match for Kermit, and possibly someone who can absorb some of Piggy's wilder or kinkier desires. It certainly could" work. Although it would be nice to know what interview for Muppet Treasure Island is being referenced here.
The legacy of Klaus Teuber, Catan, and the way that it made social board games fun and playable again, as opposed to many of the more competitive and less-exciting games like the monopolists-rules versions of Monopoly.
Enkidu heads for feminism at warp speed, once he's had the Realization that he is also part of humans, a tumblr essay in a few bullet points, and that ends with Enkidu's intention to wreck the person who takes advantage of young women for his own pleasure.
The theater audience in some venues are once again comfortable with behaving poorly, although there's also a spot in the article about theaters that are making good decisions regarding accessibility and allowing the neurodivergent and the disabled to enjoy theater productions as themselves rather than enforcing artificial behavior on them, as if boors behaving poorly and ND people being themselves were somehow equivalent.
Speculation that hobbits are not just good burglars, but tiny forces of chaos and anarchy who will cause the world to get shaken any time they're let loose outside of the Shire. Which makes me think that someone should make Untitled Hobbit Game.
Using a trained object detection model to recognize chickens near a garden and alert someone to deter the chickens, an aurora substorm caught on camera, (oooh, pretttty,) capitalism ruins everything, including compost, a showcase of contemporary First Nations artists, although it also does this thing where it wants to talk about the fashion they're wearing and such in addition to the art they're creating, a request in art for the people who don't train their senses to super sharpness as a way of navigating while blind, but instead rely on friends or other ways that the blind and visually impaired community have already developed to navigate the world around them, the ways the picture book has been used as a tool for education and as an object of art meant to draw a child into wanting to read for themselves,
A profile of a man who kept an entire structure full of snakes, many of them extremely venomous, and let people see them from behind class, and who died in mysterious circumstances some time ago. Ursula Vernon visited the Serpentarium and was charmed by it, while also realizing it's the kind of place that probably shouldn't be open to anyone, much less the public. A cat participating in the evening prayers for Ramadan,
Just about all of the mainstream media messaging and government messaging is trying to convince you that SARS-CoV-2 is not as big a threat as it is. Rather than explaining well what transmission rates are, what the dangers of infection and long COVID might be, the messaging is "yes, you'll get it, but if you're vaccinated and neither disabled or elderly, it won't be an issue." Assuming, of course, that the person getting it has sick time to take to recover, and isn't going to be passing it back and forth among their people, or getting it from other vectors like a child in school, and so on.
In technology, providing fiber to many underserved and last-mile rural connections, thanks to recovery funds from Wasthenaw County in Michigan by running your own ISP.
Microsoft's headlong rush into integrating OpenAI technology into Bing means many of its teams trying to urge restraint and thought about the use of LLM and other such technologies are no longer operating with as much clout or personnel as they might have had before.
Mostly-dead conservative social platform Parler has been acquired and shuttered by the current owner, who plans to integrate the user base and technology into their own products, so it may relaunch again at some point. Parler's biggest disadvantage at this point is that the messianic figures of conservatism are coalescing on Truth Social, so they have to figure out some way of appealing to their target demographic without the highly-visible entities, and to avoid being walloped with punishments for being so free-speech that they get deplatformed for obvious unprotected speech. I don't expect Parler to come back, honestly, in the current environment. Once the bubble pops and everyone wants to distance themselves from the current messianic figure, then they might have a chance, but that could take a while.
A list of tips for successfully cooking and baking when you're beset by brain fog.
Fog of a different sort, The FogCam, one of the oldest and now currently the longest-running camera posting pictures to the Web.
A fictional story about an intlligent assistant meant to help give nudges to those who had trouble making decisions, who ends up giving some pretty significant nudges toward the decisions that the assistant has made for themself and would like human help with.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has launched a beta version of an online code editor. It currently only works with Python, but there are further plans in the works for it, and it looks like it might slot into that niche that is just past the point of block-based programming but hasn't gone fully into having one's own customized IDE or other local deck ready and available all the time. (Plus it's cloud-based project saving so that you can work on something regardless of where your internet access is coming from.)
A glitch in Apple's "Find My" services keeps sending people to a specific Texas house, falsely claiming the lost device is present there. Which has meant confrontations with the homeowner, who does not have the lost devices, of course, but the system is blithely telling unhappy and upset people that their lost or stolen devices are absolutely at this person's house. For the safety of the person and their family, I really hope that glitch gets resolved and Apple offers apology and compensation for having painted a target on the person with the technology.
The traditional tea preparation method of Russia, zavarka, is brilliant in allowing each person to make their tea as concentrated or dilute as their tastes would like, by providing tea in concentrate and lots of boiling water to create the perfect cup.
The 02022 Nobel physics prize successfully demonstrated reality is not locally real. And continues to suggest that quantum mechanics, as outlandish as it sounds at times, is still a correct description of the universe at the quantum level. Speaking of knowledge at the quantum level, the theory behind superconductivity of certain materials, and what temperatures they begin to superconduct at, might finally have been experimentally verified through scanning microscope techniques and technologies.
Eastman Kodak is seeing a lot more demand for color film and development of such things.
Hacking an old sewing machine into an embroidery machine, which then also means you can take advantage of open source embroidery software that can help design and instruct a machine to create neat things.
Resurrecting the Street Fighter 1 arcade cabinet, including the pneumatic controls present in the original version, successfully, which makes the gameplay experience much less about twitch skills and more about having enough strength to press the button controls.
Thieves using physical access to the Controller Area Network (CAN) to convince a vehicle to unlock itself and start up so it can be stolen, which normally requires physical access to the CAN and an appropriate device to send the commands with. With the increasing amount of things like in-car Wi-Fi or other streaming / entertainment access, car manufacturers have to be extra careful about segregating the networks and making sure there isn't any way to jump from one to the other or gain write privileges. The attack described here, however, was about phyiscally removing a headlamp or other component and using its wire connections to access the CAN and deliver commands, with the thought that breaking a headlamp produces less obvious signs that someone is trying to steal a car than, say, breaking a window.
As a lieutenant in the naval services, later-President Jimmy Carter assisted in the safe shurdown of a nuclear reactor in Canda. (The former President has entered hispice care, and therefore many of the stories of his life are going to start coming out.)
Arkansas believes that it can enforce a law requiring teenagers to obtain parental consent and provide a picture of their ID before they can get on social media. Laugh at them. Lots. Then again, since these are the kinds of people who fundamentally fail to understand that kids have been misrepesenting their age online for decades at this point, we should not be surprised to see a plethora of convincing-enough pictures in the database, but with fake names or other interesting payloads attached. If, say, in the late 1990s, there were a hypothetical novelty identity card shop that had the templates and seals of various states' driver licenses, meant so you could put your picture next to names like "Clark Kent" or "Bruce Wayne" and say whatever age you were, and it would probably fool a government functionary or a casual bouncer, then it seems ludicrous to assume that such novelty companies have gone completely out of business and haven't updated their templates for new identity card and driver license designs. Or that a sufficiently savvy graphic designer couldn't produce something that might not stand up if it were printed off, but will do just fine for a database of images. And as for the parental permission letter, well, I'm sure it would be no trouble at all to lift a signature, if it's needed, and apply it to a document accompanying a picture.
And that's before we start getting into questions of whether or not it's even possible to enforce this, because I'm pretty sure it's easier to just say you're not from Arkansas and avoid the verification step altogether.
Last out, you may try out any pronouns you like, and keep the ones that fit and you want. You do not have to be trans to use different pronouns. Offer opportunities for others to share and model the behavior you like yourself, but don't force anyone to out themselves or feel like they have only one opportunity.
And a seies of shorts about a romance writer and the character they want to have all sorts of trope-y fun with who is mostly refusing to go along with the tropes and would like to do something else, thank you. Which we think might work well with Stiffed, a podcast detailing the existence of Viva magazine, which was supposed to be a feminist answer to publications like Penthouse and Playboy, but despite the all-star cast, often ended up with the men trying (and succeeding) to control the content so that it wasn't as feminist as it aimed 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 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.)
It's Autism Acceptance Month, and so it's worth checking to see whether you're contributing to the distress and unhappiness of an autistic person, or whether the people around you are ticking the boxes on the checklist of doom.
The Onion disguises their entirely warranted attack on mainstream journalists' coverage of trans people as a satire piece about the sacred duty of journalism is to endanger trans people and create as large a trans panic as they can.
If you identify somewhere outside the gender binary, the Gender Census would like to hear from you. There's also some good news, a poll saying that most trans adults who have done some transitioning are satisfied with that decision. The bad news is that and a fair number of them are doing so without the support of trusted adults or their families, and many of them are being dscriminated against or attacked for being trans. And that's without the institutional attacks that are going on.
Two Black lawmakers were expelled from the Tennessee state legislature for standing with kids against the death lobby, and were then reinstated to their own vacant seats by the bodies granted the authority to elect their replacements. A third legislator, a white woman, survived her explusion vote by a single person, unlike the two Black men.
Wil Wheaton talks about his childhood, and the time where he found an adult who was genuinely interested in him, instead of trying to make him a marionette who did and said exactly what the adults in his life wanted. That it turns out to be a librarian is important for the story that Wil is tellling and for the activisim he wants people to engage in against book banning and other anti-library actions, but I don't want to go with Wil's characterization of "The library is a safe place," because it often isn't, and hasn't been, for specific people and groups. Admittedly, librarians can be really good about taking care of the feral children in their stacks, and for helping those kids that are clearly orthogonal find works that reflect them, find people that treat them well and properly, and otherwise assure those kids of their normality, but none of that necessarily makes a library safe for everyone. Or even for a majority of people. People thinking libraries are "safe" is what's driving most of the efforts to ban things from libraries and restrict the domains that libraries can operate in, because the Unqualified believe that libraries should be "safe" and they have a very specific, mostly incompatible with the realities of libraries, definition of "safety" they want to impose.
A book commissioned by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, The Day The Librarians Disappeared, posits a world where all of the librarians have simply vanished and the rest of society and parents and educators have to pick up the pieces, realize that they still need libraries, and then come to appreciate all of the hats and tasks a trained librarian juggles. It's mostly set in a school environment, rather than a public one, mostly to make sure the scope stays contained, but there's a fair amount of this disappeared librarians tale that believes that the world without librarians will, in fact, come to appreciate them and what they did in a world that still contains the Internet and still assigns research projects and encourages reading and otherwise tries to reconstruct the world that was there before all the librarians disappeared. My headcanon is that all the librarians quit en masse, left their resignation letters in all of the correct places, and the administration either hasn't discovered them yet or is hiding this fact because they don't want to admit they created a work environment where coordinated mass resignation was seen as the only viable alternative. Or that there was some sweeping federal legislation or decision that outlawed the provision of public and school libraries and criminalized all of the librarians who had been doing so, so the profession as a whole had to disappear or be prosecuted. (The main character's surprise at this happening is probably because they never paid attention to the right places, or their administration suppressed the news of the dissolution of the library profession.)
Truthfully, I suspect that our world, should all the librarians disappear, would not consider this to be any kind of crisis, and would instead shift the burdens of the school librarian onto the teachers and rejoice at not having to pay for a library in their tax revenues and budgets, assuming that the private sector will more than happily fill the gap for people who need access to books, computers, the Internet, and the like. And the private sector, and religious organizations, will be able to have their own libraries, carefully curated to make sure only acceptable material gets in, rather than having to carry all kinds of things in a public space. Libraries might come back into existence, but they'll do so in their most original forms, as private organizations with membership fees and private locations, rather than as public goods.
Maggie Tokuda-Hall was offered a spot in a collection curated by Scholastic for her book about her parents meeting in the concentration camps set up for Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, but the offer was contingent on removing the explicit reference to anti-Japanese racism in the Author's Note. She declined. And then had the courage to name names about who was asking her to remove the explicit condemnation of racism so that the book could be included in a classroom collection. To their credit, whether because they realized how much they've screwed up, or because they wanted to do something about the virality of Maggie's posts, Scholastic, through the President and CEO, apologized for asking for that edit and for what allowed that ask to happen in the first place. Whether it is a sincere apology or trying to make the bad press go away, we will see. Because Scholastic has such reach and clout in the school market, there will always be temptation to try and sanitize works to whatever the most reactionary right-wing position demands as acceptable for students. In this case, they failed to stand up for an author and to recognize what they were doing. I have a feeling that there are plenty of other authors who were asked for similar things and went along with it, because Scholastic. For as much as we talk about not self-censoring nor obeying in advance, bargains like the one that Maggie has highlighted are the norm for most people who find themselves on the harp end of censorship. You can either go along with it and get rewarded for it, or fight it and find out how unified the front against you, that will want you to go away or get buried, really is.
Bringing back the morality in anti-trust, so that one is not stuck arguing that a company provides poorer-quallity experiences when their lackeys and partners are accused of a significant amount of child abuse and underage exploitation.
For those who thought Ginni Thomas was an unacceptable influence on her husband, the Supreme Court Justice, and engaged in several acts of corruption, Clarence Thomas proves he's no slouch at all in and accepting gifts from someone who wants access to him, and about not disclosing any of that at all to anyone, despite the clear ethics and law violations involved. The justice says that he didn't think he needed to disclose it because it was personal hospitality, but trips on jets definitely don't fall into the exemptions, and there's plenty of other actions that haven't been disclosed and really should have been. There are amendments now, of course, because he got caught, but it will only be a matter of time before someone uncovers something else.
Stories of theater productions where things go wrong, but the cast turns it into humor or otherwise just keeps going.
Malicious compliance with laws that should have been struck down on constitutionality, or "In God We Trust" in Arabic. And summoning the hordes to punish the racist-ass HOA-Karen with the cop husband, who include lawyers, after your day started by helping someone recover from a vehicle breakdown from two states away. Also, a corgi. And it's way weirder than this summary suggests. Satire from Popehat about how freedoms are really only for the super-geniuses among us and not for the plebes who should ideally always shut up and support their betters rather than believe they have any valid popint ever.
jesse_the_k explains the unfriendliness of saying something is "disability friendly".The significance of anti-Semitism and anti-Blackness in the adoption and promotion of square dance as an appropriate form of American musical culture, featuring noted Nazi sympathizer, anti-Semite, and cultural appropriator Henry Ford.
A longitudnal study of pornography usage in men, women, and couples, with findings that suggest more porn usage is detrimental to men and beneficial to women on certain metrics of satisfaction and confidence.
The amount of information disclosed in the indictment and statement of facts regarding the arraignment of the previous administrator is not all that much, so we'll have to wait for more information to see how the State intends to prove its case.
Fifty years of a peace studies program.
Remember the complexity of the legend when it comes to Arthur returning, and you can see different ways that Merlin might react to the way monarchy has become a laughingstock of our current era. And that he still stans for Arthur, even if he wouldn't for any other king.
Humanity at its best is when we go back and leave no one behind, and the Murderbot Diaries understands this, even when it extends to non-human sentients. Also, The Hunger Games wasn't subtle about the messages about the bread and circuses, but because it was marketed as Young Adult, everyone paid attention to the love triangle instead of all the rest.
The legacy of Klaus Teuber, Catan, and the way that it made social board games fun and playable again, as opposed to many of the more competitive and less-exciting games like the monopolists-rules versions of Monopoly.
The thought of Kermit/Piggy/Gonzo as a triad, which mostly seems to work from the concept that Kermit/Piggy is a usually open relationship, and a very communicative and forgiving one, although the way that it's usually portrayed,Piggy's the one with the greater need for multiple lovers and Kermit might be somewhat ace/aro (or just completely stressed). Which makes Gonzo (and Camilla, honestly) a good match for Kermit, and possibly someone who can absorb some of Piggy's wilder or kinkier desires. It certainly could" work. Although it would be nice to know what interview for Muppet Treasure Island is being referenced here.
The legacy of Klaus Teuber, Catan, and the way that it made social board games fun and playable again, as opposed to many of the more competitive and less-exciting games like the monopolists-rules versions of Monopoly.
Enkidu heads for feminism at warp speed, once he's had the Realization that he is also part of humans, a tumblr essay in a few bullet points, and that ends with Enkidu's intention to wreck the person who takes advantage of young women for his own pleasure.
The theater audience in some venues are once again comfortable with behaving poorly, although there's also a spot in the article about theaters that are making good decisions regarding accessibility and allowing the neurodivergent and the disabled to enjoy theater productions as themselves rather than enforcing artificial behavior on them, as if boors behaving poorly and ND people being themselves were somehow equivalent.
Speculation that hobbits are not just good burglars, but tiny forces of chaos and anarchy who will cause the world to get shaken any time they're let loose outside of the Shire. Which makes me think that someone should make Untitled Hobbit Game.
Using a trained object detection model to recognize chickens near a garden and alert someone to deter the chickens, an aurora substorm caught on camera, (oooh, pretttty,) capitalism ruins everything, including compost, a showcase of contemporary First Nations artists, although it also does this thing where it wants to talk about the fashion they're wearing and such in addition to the art they're creating, a request in art for the people who don't train their senses to super sharpness as a way of navigating while blind, but instead rely on friends or other ways that the blind and visually impaired community have already developed to navigate the world around them, the ways the picture book has been used as a tool for education and as an object of art meant to draw a child into wanting to read for themselves,
A profile of a man who kept an entire structure full of snakes, many of them extremely venomous, and let people see them from behind class, and who died in mysterious circumstances some time ago. Ursula Vernon visited the Serpentarium and was charmed by it, while also realizing it's the kind of place that probably shouldn't be open to anyone, much less the public. A cat participating in the evening prayers for Ramadan,
Just about all of the mainstream media messaging and government messaging is trying to convince you that SARS-CoV-2 is not as big a threat as it is. Rather than explaining well what transmission rates are, what the dangers of infection and long COVID might be, the messaging is "yes, you'll get it, but if you're vaccinated and neither disabled or elderly, it won't be an issue." Assuming, of course, that the person getting it has sick time to take to recover, and isn't going to be passing it back and forth among their people, or getting it from other vectors like a child in school, and so on.
In technology, providing fiber to many underserved and last-mile rural connections, thanks to recovery funds from Wasthenaw County in Michigan by running your own ISP.
Microsoft's headlong rush into integrating OpenAI technology into Bing means many of its teams trying to urge restraint and thought about the use of LLM and other such technologies are no longer operating with as much clout or personnel as they might have had before.
Mostly-dead conservative social platform Parler has been acquired and shuttered by the current owner, who plans to integrate the user base and technology into their own products, so it may relaunch again at some point. Parler's biggest disadvantage at this point is that the messianic figures of conservatism are coalescing on Truth Social, so they have to figure out some way of appealing to their target demographic without the highly-visible entities, and to avoid being walloped with punishments for being so free-speech that they get deplatformed for obvious unprotected speech. I don't expect Parler to come back, honestly, in the current environment. Once the bubble pops and everyone wants to distance themselves from the current messianic figure, then they might have a chance, but that could take a while.
A list of tips for successfully cooking and baking when you're beset by brain fog.
Fog of a different sort, The FogCam, one of the oldest and now currently the longest-running camera posting pictures to the Web.
A fictional story about an intlligent assistant meant to help give nudges to those who had trouble making decisions, who ends up giving some pretty significant nudges toward the decisions that the assistant has made for themself and would like human help with.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has launched a beta version of an online code editor. It currently only works with Python, but there are further plans in the works for it, and it looks like it might slot into that niche that is just past the point of block-based programming but hasn't gone fully into having one's own customized IDE or other local deck ready and available all the time. (Plus it's cloud-based project saving so that you can work on something regardless of where your internet access is coming from.)
A glitch in Apple's "Find My" services keeps sending people to a specific Texas house, falsely claiming the lost device is present there. Which has meant confrontations with the homeowner, who does not have the lost devices, of course, but the system is blithely telling unhappy and upset people that their lost or stolen devices are absolutely at this person's house. For the safety of the person and their family, I really hope that glitch gets resolved and Apple offers apology and compensation for having painted a target on the person with the technology.
The traditional tea preparation method of Russia, zavarka, is brilliant in allowing each person to make their tea as concentrated or dilute as their tastes would like, by providing tea in concentrate and lots of boiling water to create the perfect cup.
The 02022 Nobel physics prize successfully demonstrated reality is not locally real. And continues to suggest that quantum mechanics, as outlandish as it sounds at times, is still a correct description of the universe at the quantum level. Speaking of knowledge at the quantum level, the theory behind superconductivity of certain materials, and what temperatures they begin to superconduct at, might finally have been experimentally verified through scanning microscope techniques and technologies.
Eastman Kodak is seeing a lot more demand for color film and development of such things.
Hacking an old sewing machine into an embroidery machine, which then also means you can take advantage of open source embroidery software that can help design and instruct a machine to create neat things.
Resurrecting the Street Fighter 1 arcade cabinet, including the pneumatic controls present in the original version, successfully, which makes the gameplay experience much less about twitch skills and more about having enough strength to press the button controls.
Thieves using physical access to the Controller Area Network (CAN) to convince a vehicle to unlock itself and start up so it can be stolen, which normally requires physical access to the CAN and an appropriate device to send the commands with. With the increasing amount of things like in-car Wi-Fi or other streaming / entertainment access, car manufacturers have to be extra careful about segregating the networks and making sure there isn't any way to jump from one to the other or gain write privileges. The attack described here, however, was about phyiscally removing a headlamp or other component and using its wire connections to access the CAN and deliver commands, with the thought that breaking a headlamp produces less obvious signs that someone is trying to steal a car than, say, breaking a window.
As a lieutenant in the naval services, later-President Jimmy Carter assisted in the safe shurdown of a nuclear reactor in Canda. (The former President has entered hispice care, and therefore many of the stories of his life are going to start coming out.)
Arkansas believes that it can enforce a law requiring teenagers to obtain parental consent and provide a picture of their ID before they can get on social media. Laugh at them. Lots. Then again, since these are the kinds of people who fundamentally fail to understand that kids have been misrepesenting their age online for decades at this point, we should not be surprised to see a plethora of convincing-enough pictures in the database, but with fake names or other interesting payloads attached. If, say, in the late 1990s, there were a hypothetical novelty identity card shop that had the templates and seals of various states' driver licenses, meant so you could put your picture next to names like "Clark Kent" or "Bruce Wayne" and say whatever age you were, and it would probably fool a government functionary or a casual bouncer, then it seems ludicrous to assume that such novelty companies have gone completely out of business and haven't updated their templates for new identity card and driver license designs. Or that a sufficiently savvy graphic designer couldn't produce something that might not stand up if it were printed off, but will do just fine for a database of images. And as for the parental permission letter, well, I'm sure it would be no trouble at all to lift a signature, if it's needed, and apply it to a document accompanying a picture.
And that's before we start getting into questions of whether or not it's even possible to enforce this, because I'm pretty sure it's easier to just say you're not from Arkansas and avoid the verification step altogether.
Last out, you may try out any pronouns you like, and keep the ones that fit and you want. You do not have to be trans to use different pronouns. Offer opportunities for others to share and model the behavior you like yourself, but don't force anyone to out themselves or feel like they have only one opportunity.
And a seies of shorts about a romance writer and the character they want to have all sorts of trope-y fun with who is mostly refusing to go along with the tropes and would like to do something else, thank you. Which we think might work well with Stiffed, a podcast detailing the existence of Viva magazine, which was supposed to be a feminist answer to publications like Penthouse and Playboy, but despite the all-star cast, often ended up with the men trying (and succeeding) to control the content so that it wasn't as feminist as it aimed 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 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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Date: 2023-04-17 05:26 pm (UTC)Apparently it's gone viral in the community! :o)
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Date: 2023-04-17 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-17 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-17 10:40 pm (UTC)(If you had ever wondered at my facility for roughly reproducing a font in freehand lettering, that's one of the places it came from, the personal handwriting bit. I don't think I ever forged a parent's signature. At least, not one of my own... I did, however, forge the handwriting of a schoolmate when doing their homework for them, because I was aware that teachers are aware of student handwriting, and I could at least make it plausible.)
(I was also the TA who accepted 10-question math sheets for a math teacher at one point. When I got an unnamed sheet, I would record the scores of everyone with their name on the paper, then go through the rest of the list and look at older sheets from the students, and play handwriting match. Only occasionally did I have to hang a sheet on the board to request that the owner claim it and resubmit it.)
(The teacher was delighted that so much of the routine work of grading was being handled. It was only somewhat after that that we both learned that technically I was supposed to only be doing copying and such, not interacting with homework or his gradebook. Though I think I only interacted with his electronic grade spreadsheet, not the actual paper gradebook that was the official record.)
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Date: 2023-04-18 01:44 am (UTC)I will be entirely unsurprised if enterprising persons suddenly start learning how to do creative handwriting and inspired attempts at parental calligraphy.
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Date: 2023-04-18 02:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-19 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-19 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-19 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-18 02:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-18 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-20 02:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-04-20 04:18 am (UTC)