Felicitations to those that wish them - Early May 02023

[silveradept]

Let us begin with a moment of true Internet virality - A Trigun stan recommends This Is How You Lose The Time War, and the Internet decides to buy it. A lot. One of the authors of the book tried to explain how something like this happened, which mostly came out as incoherent confusion. And, for the most part, a whole lot of enjoyment and wholesome feelings about being the target of a viral tweet that's resulted in a whole lot more copies sold. The Internet loves making something cool happen, (especially if we can get to keep using the name "Bigolas Dickloas Wolfwood") and the producer of the current Trigun reboot bought the book, and it rose all the way up to a #3 ranking on Amazon, because so many people trust the word of Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood. As the author points out, the tweet has been better marketing and selling than winning a Pulitzer prize was. (There's also, y'know, fanart and the like.)

And also, a recommendation for the Silt Verses from Bigolas Dickolas.

There was a Eurovision Song Contest, visited by a well-known antifascist punk band with a penchant for making fun of all the toxic aspects of masculinity and militarism that they can. After reading this primer, I understand better what the "if they win, they promise to do their reprise in the nude" comment was and why it would have been exactly correct for them. (Even if it would never have been allowed to be broadcast.) It was a good performance and I feel like I understand it better with this primer.

(The Russian Federation appears to have attacked the hometown of the Ukraine act shortly before they were scheduled to go on the stage, which is certainly a reminder of why the contest was held in the United Kingdom, rather than in Ukraine.)

Academic freedom continues to be under siege in various states of the United States thanks to vague yet menacing legislation. In Florida, for example, laws require all books in classrooms and libraries to be examined and approved by librarians according to vague rubrics and provide felony charges and penalties for any books that are deemed inappropriate that children have access to. This specific attitude encourages teachers and librarians to engage in self-censorship and to give anything that has even the possible whiff of controversy a wide berth, because no school has the resources to fight this over-reach into their professional capacities, and no librarian wants to be the target of the media for being charged and definitely not the target of the mob that will descend upon them for being someone who is charged with the felony of providing "inappropriate" materials to children. The "Parents' Rights" campaigns are founded in the idea that children are property and that a parent should have absolute control over how to handle that property, both their own and everyone else's. Which leads to decisions like guidance saying teachers have to out children behaving in a gender-non-conforming way to their parents without the consent of the child (UK version), passing laws forbidding the acknowledgement of queer people and requiring the outing of anyone behaving in a gender-non-conforming-way or exhibiting any signs of gender non-compliance (Indiana), and, of course, those who want these kinds of cruel rules and obligations to become legal requirements all throughout the United States (Assholes).

Texas has decided to forbid young people from getting engaged with government, because for some inexplicable reason, when young people get involved in government, it tends to be about things the electeds consider left-leaning, and Texas doesn't like that. Teachers can't do civics assignments about contacting legislators or elected representatives about issues that are important to the kids, because those kids tend to talk about liberal issues, like bullying, drug use, and movie nights.

A folder left public on Google Drive has exposed the names and internal information for the organization calling itself the American College of Pediatricians, who are currently most famous for trying to deprive same-sex couples of parental rights and insisting that any queer child can't be queer, they must have a mental illness. I'm sure there will be quite a fun time had with the information that's been obtained and finding out who among physicians and pediatricians has violated their oath to do no harm by belonging to or endorsing this organization and its goals and positions.

Adults, of course, are not exempted from cruelty and assholery, either. In their zeal to insist that only cisgender women can use spaces designated for women, Kansas has declared that any woman or girl who isn't currently producing eggs to not be a woman. Which is saying the quiet part out loud, absolutely, even though the ostensible reason for the bill is to prevent girls from being exposed to men in the women's bathroom. It's a very forced-birth kind of bill, saying that womanhood hinges on the ability to get pregnant. And it's really there so that someone can harass another person they believe is not feminine enough, or not womanly enough, and bring to bear the power of the State against them, or feel secure in their harassment, because it's legal to do so at that point.

The state of Florida has decided that anyone in the medical industry in Florida is allowed to kill or harm you if they object to your existence. There is a fig leaf in the bill that says certain characteristics can't be used to refuse to treat or deal with someone, but there's more than sufficient ground elsewhere that only the truly stupid will admit that they discriminated based on one of the protected categories.

Your regular reminder that the states that have restricted and banned abortion in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision are also the states that tend toward having the worst maternal outcomes, the most uninsured persons, and the most child poverty, because they have routinely proven themselves to be zealots more interested in forced birth as a way of reinforcing patriarchy than actual policies that would result from a position that treasured and valued the lives of the people around them. And on a day when people are supposed to acknowledge how difficult, exhausting, and resource-intensive being a parent is, we must also acknowledge all of the people who would have exercised their ability to choose, had they had the option to do so, and are now being told that Mother's Day is for them and they should feel appreciated, even though they will not receive any support in that matter from any of the people who are shouting the loudest about how they should be grateful to be mothers (or how they should have kept their legs closed if they didn't want to become pregnant, as if they had that choice, as well, in the face of further restrictions on their independence, or their ability to divorce, or other such actions intended to make them powerless without a man in their lives.)

The Republican Party's belief in the supremacy of guns (and of white people wielding guns) is the obstacle in the way of sensible reforms and societal changes in the direction of making less people die by guns.

The behavior of the audience in the CNN Town Hall letting the previous administrator spew lies and defamation is the thing to be concerned about, because it demonstrated just how much there is still an appetite for those lies and defamation. Although at least one person claims CNN told the audience they could react positively but they could not react negatively, which would cast the audience in a different light. That said, CNN should still be rightly castigated for agreeing to the program in the first place, and even more so for trotting out Anderson Cooper to scold the critics and accuse them of staying in media silos instead of giving platforms to twice-impeached fascists at the head of a party more than willing to put him in charge again and demanding one of their few critics inside the organization stop being so "emotional" in his criticism, which should sound completely familiar to any person who has ever been accused of not being logical (read: male) enough to ever put together an argument someone should listen to. (Or any librarian who has been told they have to find another reason than "this person is reprehensible and their positions are harmful to our communities.")

It's not all bad, though. Washington State passed a law saying that while there has to be good faith efforts to reunite kids and families when they appear in shelters, the requirement is for a shelter or host house to contact the Department of Children, Youth, and Families when they get a minor, rather than the parents directly, which could allow trans kids who end up in shelters or host houses to not have to go back to a family situation that's actively harmful to them.

The ballroom scene (the one about the QTPOC, not the white one) in Wales is having a ball, and the people in the article are all dressed in fashion created from recycled Welsh flags, so a lot of dragon imagery comes naturally. (And they all look really good in that fashion.) In other fashionable places, Harvey Guillén at the Met Gala, in clothing specifically designed as a pair of middle fingers to the designer whose legacy was the theme. And he looked really good in it.

A LibGuide of resources about transgender rights and the wrongs done to trans people, finally up after spending a time in limbo because the administration behind it was throwing up objections.

The Writers Guild of America is officially on strike, which is unsurprising, given how little of the money that's being made from his shows, and especially from hit shows on streaming platforms, is coming back to the writers who come up with and write the scripts for those shows. Teachers in Oakland are also on strike, asking for better pay and for improvements for the common good of the students, two causes that would improve student outcomes significantly. I'm sure there's a police budget that could be raided to provide appropriate additional compensation and improvements for the teachers. And, quite neatly, if those school outcomes improve, there will be less need for additional policing and police budgets as the school-to-prison pipeline becomes less full of young students.

It's becoming more and more apparent that the current Supreme Court of the United States is a mess of conflicts of interests and undisclosed influence and gifts. Clarence Thomas, for example, not disclosing the luxury trips and gifts he received from a very wealthy donor, or the private school tuition that the same donor provided for someone the Justice was raising as the legal guardian of, or the same person purchasing the house that the Justice's mother lives, as well as renovations to the house. From there, there's also whomever paid off Brett Kavanaugh's substantial debts and the fact that Neil Gorsuch hid that he made substantial profit off of a property sale and then decided cases where the person who bought the property from him stood to benefit or was a party to the case. When invited to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee and testify about the ethics standards (or lack thereof) present on the Supreme Court, and similar matters, Chief Justice John Roberts declined and sent a note of what he believes all of the Justices will hold to in terms of ethical principles, because he would much prefer to believe and act as though the Supreme Court is above any other branch of government and not subject to the same checks and balances as any other branch is.

A request on Tumblr for the fans that use the Archive of their Own to pressure the Organization for Transformative Works to be more comprehensive and transparent in their policy changes and tool availability for fans to prevent and effectively get rid of racist works from the Archive. And for the Organization to be more active in combating racism on the platform. Which is good, and we hope they can get the OTW to do more and move their needle. However, given that in a post on what they're doing about trying to avoid having the Archive's works scraped as training data for language learning models, the OTW says

Our goals as an organization include maximum inclusivity of fanworks. This means not only the best fanworks, or the most popular fanworks, but all the fanworks that we can preserve.

and repeats that

this is a complicated situation, and we're doing our best to address it in a way that doesn't compromise AO3's principles of maximum fanwork inclusivity or legitimate uses of the site.

we should probably understand that the OTW, like public libraries, will be very reluctant to make any changes that will make the place less welcoming to bigots and other -ists, because doing so would potentially prevent their works from being archived and preserved for the future. (It's a noble goal to try and preserve even the material that is hateful and harmful because you think scholars will want to examine it in the future, but preservation does not mean that you have to display it to everyone who wants to see it and comment on it. Nor do you have to necessarily preserve everything. And even if you do preserve something, that doesn't absolve the person that created it from the consequences of having done it.) So, by all means, try to get the OTW (and your local library) to stop giving so much cover to terrible people and their works, but understand that they will resist you all the way there out of a misplaced belief in maximalism of viewpoints and creators.

Maggie Tokuda-Hall declined Scholastic's revised offer to include her work in their collection, without any demands of censorship of the Author's Note, because Scholastic did not demonstrate they understood what they had done and commit enough resources and policy toward making sure it didn't happen again, instead pointing at the token amounts of work individual staffers were doing as if it was enough to absolve them of systematic failures. I don't find any fault with that decision, even though it closes a very lucrative door, because Scholastic pretty well controls a lot of the school and school-age markets.

The headlines on this next pair of stories are misleading, because while what they say is true, they do not recognize the full implications of what is happening. The state of Illinois will demand that libraries in their state "adopt the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights" or “develop a written statement prohibiting the practice of banning books or other materials within the library or library system,“ according to new legislation. And while the legislators are doing this for the right kinds of reasons, to combat the rising tide of book banning and ideological controls being exerted by fascists seeking to remove the existence of queer people and people of color from society, the text they have adopted, and the examples they are modeling the requirements after, are modeled in library "neutrality" and the idea that all points of view should be in a library, rather than working to pass legislation that says "you are not allowed to demand that queer people and Black people and brown people and the existence of sex be erased from library collections and banned in classrooms," which would do a lot more toward banning book bans than legislation that says "you are not allowed to ban materials because of their contents." The latter will be weaponized as soon as conservatives get into power to demand that their points of view, no matter how detached from reality, must be present in all schools and collections or it is "book banning" that has been forbidden by this legislation. (It took someone else pointing out on socials that this legislation was not what it was being covered as before I could see it, but as soon as I read closely, I recognized what was being said and what was not.)

Canadian folk singer and musician Gordon Lightfoot has left the world at 84 years of age. Most famously known for "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," Lightfoot nonetheless had a prominent career outside of that single song.

We would really appreciate it if entities claiming to be news outlets don't immediately jump to the defense of people who claim they're being canceled because they tried to publish a paper saying that science is ideologically arrayed against them, instead of objectively neutral. If for no other reason than that the people who authored the paper found somewhere else to publish it, even if it was somewhere where a couple of the authors were also editors for the journal. This is a thing that libraries often fall prey to. We believe we have to carry certain points of view because we're supposed to be objectively neutral on viewpoints, and that often seems to cause a confusion where we are allowed and encouraged to select material based on the quality of the material more than whether or not it carries a particular viewpoint that we might not have enough of. (But, if you look on your shelves and in your collections, you'll almost always discover that you have more than enough of that viewpoint in your collection, and you don't need to add anything shitty to it for the appearance of balance. Seriously.)

The desire to have a shelf that suggests you are far more well-read than you actually are, which means stuffing the shelves full of covers wrapped around boxes. And this is for impressing others, rather than, say, using fake book panels to disguise a secret door or other passage useful for all sorts of quick house-travel or murder mystery games. Or, y'know, to hide the passageway to the sex room.

Germany unveils an unlimited transit ticket that works on nearly all public transit in the country for 49 EUR / month. Which is a good option, honestly, and if the US or other larger land countries could build out their public transit infrastructure to make, say, a regional deal this effective, that would be really good for people looking to avoid using their cars for everything. (The hardest parts in the States are both in-city transit and inter-city, regional transit. But Amtrak just got a reasonably good chunk of funding and a tentative speed limit increase on the run between Chicago and St. Louis, so maybe there will be at least a nominally better situation for some parts of Amtrak and other regional rails.)

In anticipation of the coronation of King Charles of the United Kingdom, someone drew a penis and testicles in a space of lawn to express an opinion about the monarchy and its new head. The picture is reasonably accurate. It's not the Nazca lines, nor would you want it to be, but to showcase how much you might think the current King is a dick, well done.

The difficulties of being trans and Muslim in Indonesia, and of finding a community that will allow you to practice the religion you wish as they person you are.

The removal of dams and barriers in places where they are no longer needed or are actively hindering nature.

The way the world has fractured on what to believe about SARS-CoV-2 and whether the pandemic is actually "over" is creating a lot of desire for community among those who aren't going along with the "return to normal". And what's described for this in the case of COVID probably also applies to the fracturing over the growing rise of fascism around the world and those who prefer it not do that.

Inclusion in this era is still about figuring out how to make your gatherings work for someone who is still masking, still would only be able to attend virtually, still behaving like infection could harm them a lot or exacerbate what's already happening even more. Even in a world that would rather believe there's no reason at all not to meet in person without precautions.

The practice of convalescence and the idea of restorative rest as a way of not exacerbating the complications of long COVID or other diseases with long-term consequences. Which works well in a world that believes in rest and not trying to push past the boundaries of what the body and mind can do at that moment. (Which is to say, it's absolutely not what our current world believes in or wants, and especially not what our corporate overlords demand.)

In technology, thirty years of the World Wide Web's release to the public. It's been a hoot since, even though there's been a lot about what has happened to the Web since that release that we'd rather not have happened.

A Finnish newspaper has hidden assets inside a Counter-Strike map that provide outside information about how the war between Russia and Ukraine is going, in Cyrillic and with Russian language audio broadcasts. This is one of those situations where so long as everyone understands that you don't frag on the war map, you could get all kinds of information past official media censors. Something about how networks perceive censorship as damage and route around them probably applies here, too.

Mozilla is standing up a Fediverse instance, with moderation policies that will err on the side of dismissing even questionable content, as well as other things they hope to bring to the Fediverse. We'll have to see how well in practice their moderation goes, and what tools they use to help themselves out in this endeavor. But if they succeed, and it becomes a place where people feel safe to be, that could set out a model for other instances to be able to follow and keep track of in their own space.

A reminder that if you can, getting away from Adobe's ecosystem might be a good idea, as Adobe is more than happy to send out notices saying that customers of old versions of its Creative Cloud Suite have to upgrade or they'll be sued for unauthorized use of software, and the courts will uphold the suit, assuming it doesn't go to binding arbitration instead, because you have to agree to whatever ridiculous terms Adobe wants to impose on you to use their software. And with how many things that were discrete products are now Software-as-a-Service and entirely hosted in the cloud, it means that Adobe can both update their license agreements and pull ridiculous stunts like these to make people pay more to re-buy the things they already own.

Using generative video tools to make a beer commercial results in surrealism at best, which might make all those people shooting cases of Bud Light and destroying similar products happy. (Then again, they're probably fine now that Anheiser-Busch has apologized for daring to insinuate that trans people can be beer influencers.) For other bits of surrealism involving generative tools, a facsimile of Will Smith eating spaghetti, which only sometimes has spaghetti getting close to the mouth at all, and a an advertisement for a pizza shop called Pepperoni Hug Spot that wouldn't be out of the ordinary as having been created by the company behind Fazbear Entertainment.

Large language model output is being added to Wikipedia and other places, increasing the amount of human oversight required to avoid turning the resource into a complete pile of inaccurate but plausible material. But, of course, because everyone is enamored with the large language model at this point, Microsoft 365 subscribers can look forward to having a copilot that will use ChatGPT-4 in some way to help people write their documents, presentations, and Excel tables.

Anthropic hopes to give a LLM some decision principles so that it can't be gamed so easily into giving hostile or terrible responses, which is admirable, but still obscures the part that the underlying model is still much more about finding out which word goes next than trying to answer questions correctly, accurately, or safely. So we shouldn't be surprised when these models routinely trip over negation and take no information from it. Because what's easy for humans is often very hard for computers.

At the very end, a generator to create your very own version of the lo-fi beats person.

(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.)

Comments

[flo_nelja]

OMG I had seen the Bigolas Dickolas thing with great pleasure but I hadn't seen the fanart, thank you!

[silveradept]

Excellent. There's also been at least one cosplay, which is essentially Wolfwood, but with a copy of Time War and reading.

[hairyears]

I guess Twitter is still relevant, then!

[silveradept]

Twitter has always been relevant, but this is the first time in a while that it's been relevant because something good happened.

[thewayne]

I bought a complete suite of the last version of Adobe before the Cloud model became their standard. It no longer runs on MacOS - the new versions - as it's 32 bit software. While I've used CC versions at work as we have a site license, and can install it on my home equipment for personal use because of the license, I haven't. I've installed other software that does some pretty amazing stuff, even if it doesn't support the layers aspect of the PSD files. But I don't expect I'll be giving Adobe a single dime in the future.

[silveradept]

As time passes, it feels more and more that letting software companies get away with "you buy a license, not the product" was a fundamental error and it needs to be corrected, sooner rather than later.

[thewayne]

What Adobe is doing makes absolutely no sense, but they are the ones sitting on a few billion dollars worth of money, and we're not.

[silveradept]

It does make sense if you remember that the company's goal is maximum profit, and it's much easier to get more profit by forcing someone to pay rent on their software, rather than be able to purchase it once and use it as long as they can.