![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet us begin with synecdochic giving us helpful advice from the Trust and Safety teams of many places: ways of avoiding traumatizing imagery and video, and of minimizing the potential terrible effects if you must view them. Starting from the premise that nobody is required to view traumatizing material to be considered a good and moral person, there are several tricks outlined to minimize the likelihood of surprises, to trick the brain and visual processing systems to see images and video as "pixels" rather than "people," and practices to engage in that can help scramble long-term storage of the traumatic material and to create clearly-defined boundaries between the time where you are ready to potentially be exposed to traumatic material and the time where you are not exposing yourself to traumatic material.
Sidney Powell pleads out in her Fulton County case, which carries requirements to testify truthfully against other defendants in the case, in addition to fines and formal apologies. And that only resolves the case in Georgia. Should the Special Counsel decide to bring charges against her for federal matters, she'll have to handle those charges as well. And I am not a lawyer, but I suspect all the material that she testifies with or provides in the Georgia case is also likely to be useful in the federal cases.
President Biden of the United States tried to warn Israel against the same kind of tactics that led to the unwinnable war in Afghanistan that the United States embarked upon after the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York, while also continuing to state his support for Israel, support that will likely include military arms and aid.
The City of Seattle intends to destroy a community garden planted as a memorial to the lives of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that has been successfully growing food and herbs for the community for three years now. "Turf renovation" is the stated reason for the destruction of the garden, which is an interesting excuse - "we must destroy productive space to plant grass." For those who recognize that Seattle's liberal reputation is more PR than actual work, and who recognize that Seattle, Tacoma, and other cities are trying to overturn rulings that restrict the times and situations in which they can destroy the camps of the unhoused, rather than trying to make affordable housing available for everyone, the destruction of the garden is less shocking than it appears to those who still believe that Seattle is some kind of radical space.
Tags are for taxonomy/folksonomy purposes, not for building a moderated community. This seems obvious, but it isn't, because we live in a world where the only way that communities form and communicate with each other on certain social media platforms is by using and following the tags, rather than forming spaces with moderators and using the tag stream as the firehose of potentially everything that it is. (On Dreamwidth, individual users come together to form communities, which have administrators and moderators, in a "personal space/community space" kind of paradigm. On social media spaces that have more than one instance and speak compatible protocols, the tags link instances, but the instances themselves have moderators and norms and tools to be able to enforce the boundaries of their space against other instances. On social media sites where there is only one corporate instance, there are moderators, but they're looking out for the corporation's interests, rather than the user's. The tags are still about discovery and linkages, but lacking the tools to effectively control their spaces, the tags become the thing that the users believe they should be able to control. Tags are for taxonomy and folksonomy, even if they sometimes get used to different purposes than that because the platform fails to accord users a space to properly leave comments, or to leave comments, replies, and reblogs in ways that can't be seen by the original poster, for good or ill.
Israel Hands, in his Our Flag Means Death incarnation, is antagonistic because he approaches piracy from a different angle than everyone else, and also because he wants to protect what he sees as a safe space against the intrusion of others who don't take protecting the safe space that seriously.
Your regular reminder that for some people, the menstrual cycle may be something trying to induce them to harm themselves, because of the way that hormones are reacted to in the body and brain.
Data analysis of compound curse words, as analyzed from a data set comprising of Reddit posts, which by itself is "good job, person, for finding the place that is most likely to have many, many of these compound pejoratives, and then goes into some thoughts and analysis as to why certain affixes are much more flexible in usage than others are.
When not searching for a physical Sodom, there are still plenty of religious people looking for the spiritual Sodom so they can oppose it, whether they see it as a thing that other religions (or denominations) do, or whether they see it as being insufficiently prudish and intolerant of sex that is not procreative in the context of a heterosexual marriage.
The defacement of books about bisexual women as the framing story for the ways in which bisexual women continue to be erased, either from those claiming stridently that bisexual women are actually heterosexual and doing sex with women to appeal to their men, or those claiming that bisexual women are definitively lesbians through rejection of the idea that any woman who would have sex with other women couldn't possibly be interested in having sex with men as well.
The dangers of respectability politics and framing, and the possible ramifications of what accepting the frame that lets you be a legally married gay couple does to the queerness and the ways in which the sexuality underneath doesn't and won't fit the respectable, monogamous, married frame. Because respectability demands sanitizing the complexity. And this was published in 2013, so someone had a pretty good idea that "Not gay as in happy, queer as in 'fuck you' " was going to be a thing that would develop. And lo, here we are, with people who got the thing they wanted, to be able to be married legally and otherwise live their privileged lives pushing back against the rest of the space that includes queerness, transness, kink, and non-monogamy. And straights trying to get those respectable queers to go along with their view of things, with the threat of revoking the conditional acceptance if they don't throw the other parts under the bus.
Disco Elysium as an anti-cop story, using the trappings and delusions of the police characters to relentlessly skewer the idea that police officers and characters manage to do good at all. It's not as over-the-top parody as Demolition Man, the Stallone/Snipes comedy about a crapsaccharine future, the killer thawed out to cause problems, and the cop also thawed out to bring him to justice (now thirty years old and probably subjected to Poe's Law.)
The local horror host, a person who introduces (and sometimes comments on) low-budget or otherwise cheesy and/or terrible horror movies, as a uniquely interesting character and piece of Americana.
Which we put next to the possibility that humans are hardwired to respond to cute, and that cute and helpful with raising children may have been the preference of many an early human.
The possibility that Leonardo da Vinci used a technique that would become common several centuries later that helped to dry the initial layer of paint for several of his works.
On the ascension of Banksy to a brand, a collective, and the lengths to which the brand goes to protect itself while trying to maintain the idea of Banksy as a provocative street artist with countercultural desires. It's also about the part where the identity of a "Banksy" might be revealed because of lawsuits.
congratulations to 128 Grazer, the winner of at Bear Week. The Wildlife Photography of the year.
tapping extremely hot water in Croatia for geothermal power, the continual coolant leakage problems from Russian hardware connected to or part of the International Space Station, the apparent exit of Best Buy from physical media sales in their entirety, ceding more ground to the Big River Online and other such giants,
The ways in which having won a Nobel Prize opens doors that might have otherwise been inaccessible and permits a certain amount of being able to choose what you research and publish (along with the ways in which people who seek power misunderstand how it works and is granted, and the ways in which power is less of an absolute situation and more of a social situation,) Which works in well with the tradeoffs between having been in one place long enough to have deep roots and having experienced the cosmopolitan and the richness that comes from having more of the world in your neighborhood. And sometimes how that can warp into the idea that some places are more backward or problematic than others, and how difficult it can be to describe to someone a thing that no longer is, but is a deeply shared memory of the people who experienced it (in a non-creepypasta kind of way).
Realizing that Unity's choice to change the fees that would be charged for use of the engine was a major mistake, the President and General Manager of the company tried to apologize for the screwup and say he would work to restore developer trust in the company and the engine. Unfortunately for him, because some of the most egregious changes are still going to continue moving forward, he shook look forward to seeing Unity groups, including the oldest known one in existence, choosing to break up and stop using the engine. And also the CEO of the company stepping down, possibly as a way of trying to apologize for the massive screwup. With indie developers choosing not to engage with Unity because of the pricing structure and the now-broken trust, there's a good chance the engine might live on, but the company responsible for it might not.
Bandcamp got sold again, which also has the strategic effect of potentially putting the union negotiations back to their very beginning, in addition to all of the layoffs that have happened and the site itself being in a stasis mode where no new commits or changes can be made to the site during the transition. There's really a lot of those decisions that look specifically like they're intended to screw over the workers, and possibly the artists, probably in the name of being a more profitable enterprise. It's amazing how thoroughly capitalism and its perpetual profit pursuit manage to ruin the nice things that come along.
The sale of Bandcamp to Songtradr was structured as an asset sale, so that there was no legal obligation to retain any employee, so it should come as no surprise that those who were negotiating for recognition and union contracts for the employees, as well as those who had joined the union, were disproportionately laid off from the company.
The end of a time broadcast on CBC Radio One, after eighty-four years, due to concerns about the actual accuracy of the time broadcast, and the prevalence of more accurate timekeeping methods, especially for electronic devices.
The CEO of Best Buy blames Taylor Swift and young people chasing experiences like concerts as to why they're not buying big-ticket electronics, to the intense cynical laughter from those same young people, who would love to ask the CEO where they are supposed to put all of those big-ticket electronics items that are increasing riddled with ads, "apps," and other unwanted experiences as part of the experience. After all, if you don't have enough space for that 80" television, and there aren't any physical media you own that would take advantage of the high-resolution present in it, and you can get the same kind of pixel density on a tablet, laptop screen, or phone so that you can watch where you are, then tell me again why that big screen is needed in the first place?
Last for tonight, the idea that men were hunters and women were childcare and gatherers in ancient societies is fairly firmly debunked by the evidence we have now (and had then) about the differences between males and females.
(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, little_details, 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.)
synecdochic giving us helpful advice from the Trust and Safety teams of many places: ways of avoiding traumatizing imagery and video, and of minimizing the potential terrible effects if you must view them. Starting from the premise that nobody is required to view traumatizing material to be considered a good and moral person, there are several tricks outlined to minimize the likelihood of surprises, to trick the brain and visual processing systems to see images and video as "pixels" rather than "people," and practices to engage in that can help scramble long-term storage of the traumatic material and to create clearly-defined boundaries between the time where you are ready to potentially be exposed to traumatic material and the time where you are not exposing yourself to traumatic material.Sidney Powell pleads out in her Fulton County case, which carries requirements to testify truthfully against other defendants in the case, in addition to fines and formal apologies. And that only resolves the case in Georgia. Should the Special Counsel decide to bring charges against her for federal matters, she'll have to handle those charges as well. And I am not a lawyer, but I suspect all the material that she testifies with or provides in the Georgia case is also likely to be useful in the federal cases.
President Biden of the United States tried to warn Israel against the same kind of tactics that led to the unwinnable war in Afghanistan that the United States embarked upon after the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York, while also continuing to state his support for Israel, support that will likely include military arms and aid.
The City of Seattle intends to destroy a community garden planted as a memorial to the lives of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that has been successfully growing food and herbs for the community for three years now. "Turf renovation" is the stated reason for the destruction of the garden, which is an interesting excuse - "we must destroy productive space to plant grass." For those who recognize that Seattle's liberal reputation is more PR than actual work, and who recognize that Seattle, Tacoma, and other cities are trying to overturn rulings that restrict the times and situations in which they can destroy the camps of the unhoused, rather than trying to make affordable housing available for everyone, the destruction of the garden is less shocking than it appears to those who still believe that Seattle is some kind of radical space.
Tags are for taxonomy/folksonomy purposes, not for building a moderated community. This seems obvious, but it isn't, because we live in a world where the only way that communities form and communicate with each other on certain social media platforms is by using and following the tags, rather than forming spaces with moderators and using the tag stream as the firehose of potentially everything that it is. (On Dreamwidth, individual users come together to form communities, which have administrators and moderators, in a "personal space/community space" kind of paradigm. On social media spaces that have more than one instance and speak compatible protocols, the tags link instances, but the instances themselves have moderators and norms and tools to be able to enforce the boundaries of their space against other instances. On social media sites where there is only one corporate instance, there are moderators, but they're looking out for the corporation's interests, rather than the user's. The tags are still about discovery and linkages, but lacking the tools to effectively control their spaces, the tags become the thing that the users believe they should be able to control. Tags are for taxonomy and folksonomy, even if they sometimes get used to different purposes than that because the platform fails to accord users a space to properly leave comments, or to leave comments, replies, and reblogs in ways that can't be seen by the original poster, for good or ill.
Israel Hands, in his Our Flag Means Death incarnation, is antagonistic because he approaches piracy from a different angle than everyone else, and also because he wants to protect what he sees as a safe space against the intrusion of others who don't take protecting the safe space that seriously.
Your regular reminder that for some people, the menstrual cycle may be something trying to induce them to harm themselves, because of the way that hormones are reacted to in the body and brain.
Data analysis of compound curse words, as analyzed from a data set comprising of Reddit posts, which by itself is "good job, person, for finding the place that is most likely to have many, many of these compound pejoratives, and then goes into some thoughts and analysis as to why certain affixes are much more flexible in usage than others are.
When not searching for a physical Sodom, there are still plenty of religious people looking for the spiritual Sodom so they can oppose it, whether they see it as a thing that other religions (or denominations) do, or whether they see it as being insufficiently prudish and intolerant of sex that is not procreative in the context of a heterosexual marriage.
The defacement of books about bisexual women as the framing story for the ways in which bisexual women continue to be erased, either from those claiming stridently that bisexual women are actually heterosexual and doing sex with women to appeal to their men, or those claiming that bisexual women are definitively lesbians through rejection of the idea that any woman who would have sex with other women couldn't possibly be interested in having sex with men as well.
The dangers of respectability politics and framing, and the possible ramifications of what accepting the frame that lets you be a legally married gay couple does to the queerness and the ways in which the sexuality underneath doesn't and won't fit the respectable, monogamous, married frame. Because respectability demands sanitizing the complexity. And this was published in 2013, so someone had a pretty good idea that "Not gay as in happy, queer as in 'fuck you' " was going to be a thing that would develop. And lo, here we are, with people who got the thing they wanted, to be able to be married legally and otherwise live their privileged lives pushing back against the rest of the space that includes queerness, transness, kink, and non-monogamy. And straights trying to get those respectable queers to go along with their view of things, with the threat of revoking the conditional acceptance if they don't throw the other parts under the bus.
Disco Elysium as an anti-cop story, using the trappings and delusions of the police characters to relentlessly skewer the idea that police officers and characters manage to do good at all. It's not as over-the-top parody as Demolition Man, the Stallone/Snipes comedy about a crapsaccharine future, the killer thawed out to cause problems, and the cop also thawed out to bring him to justice (now thirty years old and probably subjected to Poe's Law.)
The local horror host, a person who introduces (and sometimes comments on) low-budget or otherwise cheesy and/or terrible horror movies, as a uniquely interesting character and piece of Americana.
Which we put next to the possibility that humans are hardwired to respond to cute, and that cute and helpful with raising children may have been the preference of many an early human.
The possibility that Leonardo da Vinci used a technique that would become common several centuries later that helped to dry the initial layer of paint for several of his works.
On the ascension of Banksy to a brand, a collective, and the lengths to which the brand goes to protect itself while trying to maintain the idea of Banksy as a provocative street artist with countercultural desires. It's also about the part where the identity of a "Banksy" might be revealed because of lawsuits.
congratulations to 128 Grazer, the winner of at Bear Week. The Wildlife Photography of the year.
tapping extremely hot water in Croatia for geothermal power, the continual coolant leakage problems from Russian hardware connected to or part of the International Space Station, the apparent exit of Best Buy from physical media sales in their entirety, ceding more ground to the Big River Online and other such giants,
The ways in which having won a Nobel Prize opens doors that might have otherwise been inaccessible and permits a certain amount of being able to choose what you research and publish (along with the ways in which people who seek power misunderstand how it works and is granted, and the ways in which power is less of an absolute situation and more of a social situation,) Which works in well with the tradeoffs between having been in one place long enough to have deep roots and having experienced the cosmopolitan and the richness that comes from having more of the world in your neighborhood. And sometimes how that can warp into the idea that some places are more backward or problematic than others, and how difficult it can be to describe to someone a thing that no longer is, but is a deeply shared memory of the people who experienced it (in a non-creepypasta kind of way).
Realizing that Unity's choice to change the fees that would be charged for use of the engine was a major mistake, the President and General Manager of the company tried to apologize for the screwup and say he would work to restore developer trust in the company and the engine. Unfortunately for him, because some of the most egregious changes are still going to continue moving forward, he shook look forward to seeing Unity groups, including the oldest known one in existence, choosing to break up and stop using the engine. And also the CEO of the company stepping down, possibly as a way of trying to apologize for the massive screwup. With indie developers choosing not to engage with Unity because of the pricing structure and the now-broken trust, there's a good chance the engine might live on, but the company responsible for it might not.
Bandcamp got sold again, which also has the strategic effect of potentially putting the union negotiations back to their very beginning, in addition to all of the layoffs that have happened and the site itself being in a stasis mode where no new commits or changes can be made to the site during the transition. There's really a lot of those decisions that look specifically like they're intended to screw over the workers, and possibly the artists, probably in the name of being a more profitable enterprise. It's amazing how thoroughly capitalism and its perpetual profit pursuit manage to ruin the nice things that come along.
The sale of Bandcamp to Songtradr was structured as an asset sale, so that there was no legal obligation to retain any employee, so it should come as no surprise that those who were negotiating for recognition and union contracts for the employees, as well as those who had joined the union, were disproportionately laid off from the company.
The end of a time broadcast on CBC Radio One, after eighty-four years, due to concerns about the actual accuracy of the time broadcast, and the prevalence of more accurate timekeeping methods, especially for electronic devices.
The CEO of Best Buy blames Taylor Swift and young people chasing experiences like concerts as to why they're not buying big-ticket electronics, to the intense cynical laughter from those same young people, who would love to ask the CEO where they are supposed to put all of those big-ticket electronics items that are increasing riddled with ads, "apps," and other unwanted experiences as part of the experience. After all, if you don't have enough space for that 80" television, and there aren't any physical media you own that would take advantage of the high-resolution present in it, and you can get the same kind of pixel density on a tablet, laptop screen, or phone so that you can watch where you are, then tell me again why that big screen is needed in the first place?
Last for tonight, the idea that men were hunters and women were childcare and gatherers in ancient societies is fairly firmly debunked by the evidence we have now (and had then) about the differences between males and females.
(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, little_details, 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: 2023-10-21 07:10 pm (UTC)I'm kind of hoping this necessarily involves her saying stuff that results in her being disbarred.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-22 01:34 pm (UTC)