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silveradeptHello. Let's begin with David Tennant continuing to be vocal (with a T-shirt, anyway) about his support for trans kids. And the victory of Rikkie Valerie Kolle as Miss Netherlands, making her the second openly transgender competitor in the Miss Universe pageant. And, predictably, she's had to work her way through all of the haters, whom she thanks for giving her a much bigger platform to promote herself and her message.
The first person to have been formally diagnosed with autism, Donald Triplett, has passed on at 89 years of age, after having lived a long and full life with friends and great activities.
On the necessity of studying people in their contexts, especially when doing studies of people who studied sexuality and gender, rather than either dismissing them for not being modern or venerating them as models to emulate. Which makes for complicated legacies when the people are still alive and contributing to their own legacies. Witness all the topics covered in this profile of Samuel R. Delany and his works, even though Delany wants things to mostly not be about his works, but about his life and the changing landscape that he's lived it in.
Archivists, librarians, and collection maintainers like Paul Fasana keep the archives not only in existence, but make the things that are part of the archives findable, and for that, they should forever be praised.
The United States Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of an over-the-counter, non-prescription birth control pill, which will open up more access to contraceptives without having to invoke insurance company rules or data sharing requests that certain conservative governments are already demanding to see to make sure people who see medical professionals don't do anything the government disapproves of.
A plan in the UK to close most ticket offices at railway stations comes from governmental pressure to reduce costs of rail transport, and, unsurprisingly, they're saying that it's because very few tickets are actually bought at rail station offices. Mentioned in thr article is that the reduction in staff that would accompany such closures would also negatively impact passengers with disabilities who need the assistance of railway staff to arrive at their platforms and get on their trains on time and with minimal disruptions.
Bringing to wider recognition the story of a batallion of Black and Hispanic women who helped the UK sort through their postal mail backlog during the second Great War, for which they received very little fanfare or accolades when they returned back home, despite having done an impressive job with the backlog and finishing the task in about half of the alloted time.
The state of Minnesota is giving free college to families that make less than $80,000 per year, so long as the student attends a qualifying public university in Minnesota. That's a really cool deal, and it's likely going to make college and university actually affordable for many Minnesotans. So much so that some university people in North Dakota are wondering where they're going to get their football players from, if they can stay in Minnesota and go to college there, which says something about the relative importance of the football program versus the academic scholarship. *glares*
A recently-arrested woman has finally agreed to a treatment plan and monitoring so that she can get rid of the case of tuberculosis that's been in her for years. Not noted in the article is whether necessities will be provided to her while she's in isolation and taking the treatments to get rid of the TB. Because if she has to do things like work to avoid eviction, well, those spot checks are probably going to end up with another warrant issued for her arrest. And then we'll have the same situations regardless, where someone ends up being fed and housed while they're being treated, so they can get treated. So we're hoping that the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department will be able to assist in the procurement of those necessities as part of her treatment plan.
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled in favor of Caster Semenya's appeal that the Swiss government did not do enough to protect her from discrimination when it upheld rules that require her to take hormone suppressing drugs to compete in women's sport categories. We can hope that the rules that say she can't compete because she too much testosterone will also be rescinded, since they are about attempting to arbitrarily define a woman with an eye toward excluding anyone they think is too masculine (with the same kind of results that make people believe they can demand to see gender confirmaion of a nine year-old child during their competition.)
A first grade teacher has been fired from her position for expresing an off-hours opinion about her employer, on her personal social media account. Specifically, the opinion was about how her administration had decided to block having the first graders sing "Rainbowland," by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton. The administration said the song might be considered "controversial": for invoking rainbow imagery and the possibility of LGBTQ Pride. This decision comes after a significant amount of pressure from this same administration to make all the teachers remove anything ranbow-y or that might express an opinion about the validity of Black Lives. (They also said the fascist Blue Line flags had to go, just so they could deny the attacks were solely and specifically about queerness and Blackness.) And a demand that teachers must use the names and pronouns on the official paperwork of their students, regardless of what the student says their name and pronouns are. But because the criticism went viral and garnered lots of unwanted attention to the discrimination being done by the administration of Heyer Elementary in Waukesha School District, the administration has retaliated against the teacher's protected speech by firing her. It very much is one of those situations where the school district has decided it is allowed to control the speech and actions of the teachers wherever they may be (and probably extends that same attitude toward the students as well), and they probably would justify it by saying that a teacher is always a teacher, whether or not she's in the school at the time, and therefore the district has the authority to contol her private behavior.
And speaking of ignorant and likely discriminatory decisions, The Montana State Library Commission decided to withdraw their membership in the American Library Association because Emily Drabinksi is now the president of the organization. The official justification for the withdrawal is because the Commissioners believe they can't be part of an organization with a self-described Marxist as the President, but given what Montana's like at the moment, it's entirely possible their real objection was because Drabinski described herself as a lesbian as well as a Marxist in the now-deleted tweet cited as the justification. The American Library Association released a press release about the decision that did not name Drabinski, nor make any statement of support for her, but instead tried to highlight how much Montana benefited from membership in the organization. The Montana Library Association followed suit with a similar press release. Neither organization decided they wanted to mention anything to do with Drabinski or the identity politics reasons cited for the withdrawal, so it falls to the rest of us to make the noise and explain why the Commission's decision is Joe McCarthy's spirit exhumed from the grave, rather than anything in the constitutions cited as the underlying justification for the withdrawal. If you're part of the GLAM sector, especially in the US, whether you're a member of ALA or not, you can sign your name in support of Emily Drabinski and do at least a little to push back against the idea that she is somehow antithetical to libraries.
Seriously, though, there's so many better reasons to decide you're not interested in being part of the ALA than who the membership elected as president. That press release the ALA put out is a perfect example: it's all about the organization, and about how Montana has benefitted from all of the funding ALA has secured for them, and it has basically nothing in there that says "They decided they wanted to leave because they couldn't handle the possibility that librarianship and libraries can include people with different ideas." Like, it would be perfect fodder for the ALA's regular fetishization of neutrality and avoidance of having any actual opinions about anything. They could have even said "we don't have any official opinion about Emily and her identities and philosophies, but she's the elected President of the ALA and she deserves to be respected as that by everyone." But the ALA continues to do a lot of things that are about collecting data and donations, and leaves the actual advocacy work and trying to make conditions better for libraries, their users, and library workers to other, outside groups and those library workers themselves. They're very happy to highlight successes and spread them when they happen, but the ALA is not the organization you rely on to get up-to-date information about what's going on in library-land, especially about the censorship and the attacks. Emily deserves a better defense that the ALA saying "don't go, we want your money! Look at all the services we provide!" Because if they're not willing to put up a useful defense for the President of the organization, they're certainly not going to defend all the other people who are further down the line and those who are in the libraries trying to make their places better and less welcoming to terrible people.
Catching sight of a pink grasshopper, and observation of birds building nests using anti-bird material [PDF].
It has become clear that those who are still trying to avoid COVID-19 are now seen as pitiable and out-of-step with reality, even as the virus continues to kill and disable thousands on a weekly basis.
In technology, Propublica investigates the world of surgical penile implants, and the complications thereof, and how hard it can be for people who have had bad experiences or are dissastisfied to get their implants out or to fix the complications from broken or otherwise improperly-working ones.
If you have medicines or products issued by Akorn Operating Company, LLC, there is a voluntary recall on them due to the company's bankruptcy and subsequent dismissal of the quality control team before the ceasing of production.
Alphabet subsidiary Google asserts the right to scrape and use anything posted publicly on the Internet to train their AI language models and other products, regardless of whether the material is created on a Google site or using a Google product. Which is a pretty bold assertion of the right to violate the copyright and licensing agreements on a whole lot of websites. I certainly would love to know what an IP lawyer, and espcially one endowed with the ability to generate class action suits, would think of this assertion.
Regular rebooting of a smarthpone and other devices may help thwart threats intended for them, mostly because the turning it off and on again can clear threats and background processes from running that could be used maliciously or were inserted maliciously.
Several artists and groups are boycotting venues and concerts that use facial recognition technology on the peopel attending, citing privacy concerns for their fans. That, and all of the times where facial recognition pretty well screws things up in trying to identify people
Having required its employees to use arbitration rather than the courts to settle disputes, Twitter is trying to say that it won't permit arbitration to proceed, because the rules of the arbitration would make Twitter pay the costs, in addition to any awards or other matters involved. And they're probably hoping they can keep those arbitration claims suspended indefinitely by refusing to pay what they agreed to.
Even though NFTs were always going to be a flash in the pan, this might be the first time that the celebrities that were hyping NFTs like the Bored Apes actually lost significant amounts of money on the investments themselves. Assuming they actually invested in them any of their own money. Still, score one more point for the people who recognized the scam and never put any money in it.
Last for tonight, The Archive Of Our Own suffered a Distributed Denial of Service attack from a group that hoped to foment hateful rhetoric from fans against the kind of people they claimed 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.)
The first person to have been formally diagnosed with autism, Donald Triplett, has passed on at 89 years of age, after having lived a long and full life with friends and great activities.
On the necessity of studying people in their contexts, especially when doing studies of people who studied sexuality and gender, rather than either dismissing them for not being modern or venerating them as models to emulate. Which makes for complicated legacies when the people are still alive and contributing to their own legacies. Witness all the topics covered in this profile of Samuel R. Delany and his works, even though Delany wants things to mostly not be about his works, but about his life and the changing landscape that he's lived it in.
Archivists, librarians, and collection maintainers like Paul Fasana keep the archives not only in existence, but make the things that are part of the archives findable, and for that, they should forever be praised.
The United States Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of an over-the-counter, non-prescription birth control pill, which will open up more access to contraceptives without having to invoke insurance company rules or data sharing requests that certain conservative governments are already demanding to see to make sure people who see medical professionals don't do anything the government disapproves of.
A plan in the UK to close most ticket offices at railway stations comes from governmental pressure to reduce costs of rail transport, and, unsurprisingly, they're saying that it's because very few tickets are actually bought at rail station offices. Mentioned in thr article is that the reduction in staff that would accompany such closures would also negatively impact passengers with disabilities who need the assistance of railway staff to arrive at their platforms and get on their trains on time and with minimal disruptions.
Bringing to wider recognition the story of a batallion of Black and Hispanic women who helped the UK sort through their postal mail backlog during the second Great War, for which they received very little fanfare or accolades when they returned back home, despite having done an impressive job with the backlog and finishing the task in about half of the alloted time.
The state of Minnesota is giving free college to families that make less than $80,000 per year, so long as the student attends a qualifying public university in Minnesota. That's a really cool deal, and it's likely going to make college and university actually affordable for many Minnesotans. So much so that some university people in North Dakota are wondering where they're going to get their football players from, if they can stay in Minnesota and go to college there, which says something about the relative importance of the football program versus the academic scholarship. *glares*
A recently-arrested woman has finally agreed to a treatment plan and monitoring so that she can get rid of the case of tuberculosis that's been in her for years. Not noted in the article is whether necessities will be provided to her while she's in isolation and taking the treatments to get rid of the TB. Because if she has to do things like work to avoid eviction, well, those spot checks are probably going to end up with another warrant issued for her arrest. And then we'll have the same situations regardless, where someone ends up being fed and housed while they're being treated, so they can get treated. So we're hoping that the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department will be able to assist in the procurement of those necessities as part of her treatment plan.
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled in favor of Caster Semenya's appeal that the Swiss government did not do enough to protect her from discrimination when it upheld rules that require her to take hormone suppressing drugs to compete in women's sport categories. We can hope that the rules that say she can't compete because she too much testosterone will also be rescinded, since they are about attempting to arbitrarily define a woman with an eye toward excluding anyone they think is too masculine (with the same kind of results that make people believe they can demand to see gender confirmaion of a nine year-old child during their competition.)
A first grade teacher has been fired from her position for expresing an off-hours opinion about her employer, on her personal social media account. Specifically, the opinion was about how her administration had decided to block having the first graders sing "Rainbowland," by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton. The administration said the song might be considered "controversial": for invoking rainbow imagery and the possibility of LGBTQ Pride. This decision comes after a significant amount of pressure from this same administration to make all the teachers remove anything ranbow-y or that might express an opinion about the validity of Black Lives. (They also said the fascist Blue Line flags had to go, just so they could deny the attacks were solely and specifically about queerness and Blackness.) And a demand that teachers must use the names and pronouns on the official paperwork of their students, regardless of what the student says their name and pronouns are. But because the criticism went viral and garnered lots of unwanted attention to the discrimination being done by the administration of Heyer Elementary in Waukesha School District, the administration has retaliated against the teacher's protected speech by firing her. It very much is one of those situations where the school district has decided it is allowed to control the speech and actions of the teachers wherever they may be (and probably extends that same attitude toward the students as well), and they probably would justify it by saying that a teacher is always a teacher, whether or not she's in the school at the time, and therefore the district has the authority to contol her private behavior.
And speaking of ignorant and likely discriminatory decisions, The Montana State Library Commission decided to withdraw their membership in the American Library Association because Emily Drabinksi is now the president of the organization. The official justification for the withdrawal is because the Commissioners believe they can't be part of an organization with a self-described Marxist as the President, but given what Montana's like at the moment, it's entirely possible their real objection was because Drabinski described herself as a lesbian as well as a Marxist in the now-deleted tweet cited as the justification. The American Library Association released a press release about the decision that did not name Drabinski, nor make any statement of support for her, but instead tried to highlight how much Montana benefited from membership in the organization. The Montana Library Association followed suit with a similar press release. Neither organization decided they wanted to mention anything to do with Drabinski or the identity politics reasons cited for the withdrawal, so it falls to the rest of us to make the noise and explain why the Commission's decision is Joe McCarthy's spirit exhumed from the grave, rather than anything in the constitutions cited as the underlying justification for the withdrawal. If you're part of the GLAM sector, especially in the US, whether you're a member of ALA or not, you can sign your name in support of Emily Drabinski and do at least a little to push back against the idea that she is somehow antithetical to libraries.
Seriously, though, there's so many better reasons to decide you're not interested in being part of the ALA than who the membership elected as president. That press release the ALA put out is a perfect example: it's all about the organization, and about how Montana has benefitted from all of the funding ALA has secured for them, and it has basically nothing in there that says "They decided they wanted to leave because they couldn't handle the possibility that librarianship and libraries can include people with different ideas." Like, it would be perfect fodder for the ALA's regular fetishization of neutrality and avoidance of having any actual opinions about anything. They could have even said "we don't have any official opinion about Emily and her identities and philosophies, but she's the elected President of the ALA and she deserves to be respected as that by everyone." But the ALA continues to do a lot of things that are about collecting data and donations, and leaves the actual advocacy work and trying to make conditions better for libraries, their users, and library workers to other, outside groups and those library workers themselves. They're very happy to highlight successes and spread them when they happen, but the ALA is not the organization you rely on to get up-to-date information about what's going on in library-land, especially about the censorship and the attacks. Emily deserves a better defense that the ALA saying "don't go, we want your money! Look at all the services we provide!" Because if they're not willing to put up a useful defense for the President of the organization, they're certainly not going to defend all the other people who are further down the line and those who are in the libraries trying to make their places better and less welcoming to terrible people.
Catching sight of a pink grasshopper, and observation of birds building nests using anti-bird material [PDF].
It has become clear that those who are still trying to avoid COVID-19 are now seen as pitiable and out-of-step with reality, even as the virus continues to kill and disable thousands on a weekly basis.
In technology, Propublica investigates the world of surgical penile implants, and the complications thereof, and how hard it can be for people who have had bad experiences or are dissastisfied to get their implants out or to fix the complications from broken or otherwise improperly-working ones.
If you have medicines or products issued by Akorn Operating Company, LLC, there is a voluntary recall on them due to the company's bankruptcy and subsequent dismissal of the quality control team before the ceasing of production.
Alphabet subsidiary Google asserts the right to scrape and use anything posted publicly on the Internet to train their AI language models and other products, regardless of whether the material is created on a Google site or using a Google product. Which is a pretty bold assertion of the right to violate the copyright and licensing agreements on a whole lot of websites. I certainly would love to know what an IP lawyer, and espcially one endowed with the ability to generate class action suits, would think of this assertion.
Regular rebooting of a smarthpone and other devices may help thwart threats intended for them, mostly because the turning it off and on again can clear threats and background processes from running that could be used maliciously or were inserted maliciously.
Several artists and groups are boycotting venues and concerts that use facial recognition technology on the peopel attending, citing privacy concerns for their fans. That, and all of the times where facial recognition pretty well screws things up in trying to identify people
Having required its employees to use arbitration rather than the courts to settle disputes, Twitter is trying to say that it won't permit arbitration to proceed, because the rules of the arbitration would make Twitter pay the costs, in addition to any awards or other matters involved. And they're probably hoping they can keep those arbitration claims suspended indefinitely by refusing to pay what they agreed to.
Even though NFTs were always going to be a flash in the pan, this might be the first time that the celebrities that were hyping NFTs like the Bored Apes actually lost significant amounts of money on the investments themselves. Assuming they actually invested in them any of their own money. Still, score one more point for the people who recognized the scam and never put any money in it.
Last for tonight, The Archive Of Our Own suffered a Distributed Denial of Service attack from a group that hoped to foment hateful rhetoric from fans against the kind of people they claimed 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.)
no subject
Date: 2023-07-18 04:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-18 04:28 pm (UTC)Yeah, Montana pulling out of the ALA is quite a head-scratcher. But considering that the last thing Republicans want is more equality for the masses, not surprising.
The AO3 DDoS is a curious thing. It makes me think that the perpetrators were more in it for the lulz than anything else. It definitely screwed up my wife's use of the site while OTW was reconfiguring things to work with Cloudflare and captchas and stuff. It was little more than an inconvenience, she was able to survive during the disruption.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-18 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-18 08:37 pm (UTC)It's no longer being couched in language like "welfare queens" any more, because the base of the Republican Party wants them to say it aloud and how much they want to hurt others.
The thing I'm taking away from it, gleaned off-site, is that the OTW at least has an idea that they need those kinds of protections now, rather than trusting the Internet not to be jerks.