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silveradeptA useful announcement to start: For those of you who are not yet on the beta channels of inbox and post creation and so forth, you may want to turn them on now, because at a point rapidly approaching in the future, they will stop being beta and will instead be the site default. Turning on the beta features now also gives you the opportunity to spot and give the opportunity to squash any of the bugs remaining that might exist. And many of the comments to the news post talk about some of the common spots where things might get tripped up - the new set allows you to arrange your workflow in some ways, and if you're running one of the Tropospherical site skins, the sizing may look odd (but that's because you've been looking at the site with 75% of your browser's default), and other situations that may be easily fixed with cache clears or allowing an adblocker exception for Dreamwidth. (Since ther are no ads on Dreamwidth, this isn't the worrisome situation it could be.)
Plans to close rail ticket offices and lay off the persons who staffed them were scrapped in the face of large public outcry about the process and the accessibility failures that would happen from removing the staff.
Race walking results from the Pan American Games, including a new potential world record, were invalidated when the course was found to not have been set at the correct 20 kilometer distance. And it's not a small mistake, it was about three km off.
A person who had been repeatedly banned from Ubisoft's Rainbow Six servers was convicted of SWATting the Montreal offices of Ubisoft, the company that makes the game. Several years of community service and mandatory evaluation and treatment for mental issues are part of the sentence.
The Defendant seems to be engaging with a courtroom strategy (strategies) designed to provoke the presiding judge into doing something that can have the case reversed on appeal, milking the privileged status he has to engage in behavior that would have been cut off from any other defendant long before this point.
SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP have reached a tentative deal, allowing for the end of the actors' strike that has been going on for several months. The actors' gains include protection against being replaced by digital doubles, getting revenue from streaming operations, and increases in wages and other compensation, and I'll still bet that the companies make exorbitant profits all the same.
The United Auto Workers' strategy of coordinated industrial action is producing benefits for both unionized plants and for those who have seen what gains the union was able to get and are attempting to stave off their own unionization by matching them. The UAW is ready to expand themselves to other automobile manufacturers, as well, and possibly to take advantage of some new rules that provide harsher punishments for those who interfere with the process of campaigning and balloting.
On the issues of trying to prosecute someone for their forgery and counterfeiting skills when the defendant claims their skills comes through sorcery and witchcraft, which is equally as forbidden.
Despite a lack of actual situations where a child was poisoned by a stranger using Halloween candy as the medium, the worry persists. Possibly because being worried about such things allows someone to take the big worries and compress them down into something that can be managed and then set aside for another day.
On how the preparation of bounty has devolved to specific genders, and thus the gifts of the earth are sometimes the chains that bind people to doing things over and over again, because they're expected to do all of this and not let anyone else starve.
On the idea that for people of a certain age who have been chasing a particular ideal and achieved it, their goals shift to chase something that's a better fir for themselves. It's a little bit like the idea of the mid-life crisis, but contingent on having climbed to the top of the hill of the thing sought and them going "wait, this isn't actually what I want" and setting off toward that from a more stable base. And much of the portal talk seems to think that it's being entered from one side, of stability to chaos, and not so much about the people who are entering it form chaos and trying to find the stability. Perhaps because we think of people like that as selling out or otherwise not achieving their stated goals by choosing to trade some of their chaos for stability.
In response to all of the accusations that the supposedly above-it-all justices of the United States Supreme Court have been extensively gifted from persons who might be charitably described as people trying to buy votes on the Court, the Supremes rolled out a code of ethics they expect themselves to follow, with themselves as the enforcers and arbiters of whether that code has been followed. So rest assured that justices like Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh are aware of how much more they need to hide their associations and undisclosed gifts to maintain the appearance of impropriety. Any entity that thinks such a code could be enforced on the justices will be looked at and tut-tutted, because the justices have long since decided they are above the law because they get to decide its interpretations. (The entity most expected to do something, Congress, is, well, until it's staffed by people who are interested in the business of governance, not much will get done in that regard.)
Surprising very few people, Elon Musk continues to promote, boost, and otherwise give a large platform to racists and conspiracy theorists, especially those past the antisemitic conspiracy line.
The state of Iowa finally released rules on how to implement the law they passed banning books and other materials in Iowa schools, giving teachers and librarians only a few weeks to review their collections and curricula to get in compliance or decide to flout the rules. Although it's probably more likely that their administrators will be the people demanding compliance upon the pain of losing their jobs, rather than pushing back against a law where an inappropriately "sexually explicit" book is defined as a book where a sex act exists in it, even with the clarification that if it does "not describe or visually depict a sex act," it's supposed to be okay to have. Because they also have to put out a list of all the books in the library, so that when someone decides to get pearl-clutchy about a book, they have an easy path to get it removed from a school library. The law also considers any book that has a not-straight or not-cis character in it to contain a sex act, essentially, even though it claims that observations that "stops short of being a promotion" are allowable. And finally, the law requires teachers to out students to parents by demanding they seek permission from those parents to refer to a child with a set of pronouns different than the ones assigned to their birth sex or to use a nickname for them that someone thinks might be trying to "affirm a student's gender identity" if and only if that gender identity isn't cis. I suspect a lot of students in Iowa are going to get very good at finding nicknames that are plausible for their assigned name at birth but also are correct for the names and identities they have chosen for themselves.
The most telling thing about it, though, is this all came about because some parents complained about "the complexity of challenging materials and the fact that the challenges rarely resulted in the learning materials being removed." Yes, because Iowa legislators agreed it was a bad thing that it was too difficult to ban books, we have this trampling of student rights and freedoms. That's what they do out in the open when they think they can get away with it. Much like Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who believe that a city ordinance banning "indecent behavior" including "sexual conduct" means they can ban books in the library that have queer characters in them by referencing a city code where sexual conduct includes gay sex as well as straight sex. Because, much like Iowa, this place believes that anything not cishet is automatically sexual and therefore inappropriate for the public. They also decided they wanted to restrict access to library materials by tiering the works and preventing childrens' and teens' library cards from checking out anything outside of their age levels. (Presumably, teens can check out kids' books, just not adult ones.)
In Florida, where the Unqualified are particularly emboldened, school librarians were reported to the Sherrif's Office in Santa Rosa County because the people reporting insisted baselessly that the librarians were giving "pornography" to minors. It's a YA novel, of course, not anything age-restricted, but these Florida accusers were using the same standard as Iowa, where any book with a sex scene in it is automatically inappropriate for anyone, Miller Test be damned. (And the report might also be because the reporters have a petty personal vendetta against the librarian, who has public affiliations with groups trying to stop the Unqualified from being given any power.)
Florida also has the Florida Department of State annoucing they won't work with the American Library Association with anything because they think Emily Drabinski represents a corrupting influence they have to fight. *eyeroll*
The most visible of the Unqualified at this moment, Moms for Liberty, had most of their endorsed political candidates get beaten or overturned in the November elections, including the ones I noticed in the Dragon Conspiracy Territory. Mostly because the thing that makes them appealing, being a united and organized group, is what made them and their retrograde views both visible and opposable. After even a small amount of media scrutiny and focus, their appearance of being concerned mothers fell apart and their astroturf nature came out quickly.
Several librarians who were dismissed from their posts because they upheld their ethics and refused to be intimidated into going along with the dictates of a banning-friendly board have filed claims with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging workplace discrimination. The claim rests on the idea that workplaces are not allowed to discriminate against their employees for association with certain classes of people. If those claims go through and succeed, it would set an interesting precedent about library-sponsored programming.
The anti-trans platforms didn't fare particularly well in elections, either, not least because they were most charitably described as "misleading" for what they said candidates and issues would do with regard to transitioning and appropriate care.
In more cheering situations, an accidentally unlocked door at a Gothenburg, Sweden library meant the regulars were there, and books were checked out and returned, as if it were a normal library day. What makes this cheering is many of the spaces in the United States where an accidentally unlocked door would be assumed to let in thieves, vandals, and those intent on destroying the space and its contents, rather than the possiblity that it might be the regulars and the regulars would do things as normal, because they wouldn't want to trash a place and then have it be closed for some time while it was being repaired.
Access to green spaces is important for the city dweller, according to the National Trust in the United Kingdom.
A rare white platypus spotted in New South Wales, a terrier playing foster mother to a litter of kittens, and having to take a day off of work because there's a six hundred kilogram seal blocking your vehicle.
In technology, the owner of the trademark to Threads in the United Kingdom has sent a cease and desist to the parent company of Facebook, telling the to stop using the trademarked name for their own product. The parent company has offered repeatedly to purchase their domain and otherwise get said trademark, but the current owner has refused to sell.
A malicious link-shortening service and seceral other bad actors appear to be operating under the top-level domain .us, likely a result of certain politicians deciding that the government didn't need to oversee its own country TLD and that the private sector could do infinitely better and more cheaply.
A piece about how those who came online early on and congregated in various places like Twitter have found most if not all of the places they used to be have become terrible. Which, well, those places all chased money and tried to become the place for everyone, rather than the place that worked the best for their audience. In doing so, they thought they were chasing success, but instead, they were sealing their own doom. Places that thrive are places that know their audience and don't try to annex too much more space than what that audience wants. (Thus, Dreamwidth is able to keep the lights on, where Tumblr and Twitter likely both...won't.)
Tumblr is likely going into maintenance mode, as most of the staff working on it will be reassigned to other products of the parent company. Unless an infusion of cash happens to make it profitable, it's probably the right time to be thinking about any backing up that someone might want to do of their Tumblr stuff, and to do their best to get the iconic parts enshrined in some other place. Much like Twitter, though, it's unlikely that Tumblr will die suddenly, but that enough things will happen to send more users out into other places and the whole thing will eventually not have what someone wants on the site.
Persons attending an event regarding bored apes found themselves on the receiving end of UV-C lights that had been installed by accident/negligence, giving them burns on their skin and their eyes. Even if you want to make fun of someone for believing the hype about NFTs, getting injured because a venue person didn't do due diligence is no fun at all.
In case you were wondering whether you want to take part in anything that Elon Musk touches, have an examination of the dismal safety record at SpaceX, alongside what are apparently fines for the safety incident, but that were not nearly serious enough to make the company decide to take safety seriously. Now that I think about it, one of the people who I was friends with in college went to work for SpaceX and then suffered a serious injury, so I guess it wasn't just a fluke there.
Like so many other ventures that the Defendant has embarked upon, "Truth Social" finds itself not having been infused with cash from anywhere and suffering expenses that are likely to bankrupt it if it isn't successfully merged with another company.
Thhe possibility that the original, three foot long model of the Enterprise in the first Star Trek series turned up as an eBay auction and the quest now underway to try and get the model back to the Roddenberry Estate.
Steve Wozniak, the somewhat lesser-known Steve of Apple Computer, suffered a minor stroke while in Mexico City, Mexico, while he was on a schedule for speaking at events. Wozniak, along with Steve Jobs, the man who would be the face of Apple Computer until his death, helped put Apple on the map with two personal computers, the Apple I and the Apple II, that were intensely popular. The Apple II series was extremely popular in school, although they were eventually phasaed out and replaced with Windows and DOS machines by the time I left. There were definitely some useful and interesting pieces of software written for those computers.
Last for this entry, Transforming many unwanted copies of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code into George Orwell's 1984. Which might seem to be taking one unwanted book and turning it into another, but at least the volume of copies has been reduced. (And the selling-it-for-nearly-500-pounds is hedged on the "there's an artwork in this" part, in case the text of 1984 isn't worth that much to you.
(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.)
Plans to close rail ticket offices and lay off the persons who staffed them were scrapped in the face of large public outcry about the process and the accessibility failures that would happen from removing the staff.
Race walking results from the Pan American Games, including a new potential world record, were invalidated when the course was found to not have been set at the correct 20 kilometer distance. And it's not a small mistake, it was about three km off.
A person who had been repeatedly banned from Ubisoft's Rainbow Six servers was convicted of SWATting the Montreal offices of Ubisoft, the company that makes the game. Several years of community service and mandatory evaluation and treatment for mental issues are part of the sentence.
The Defendant seems to be engaging with a courtroom strategy (strategies) designed to provoke the presiding judge into doing something that can have the case reversed on appeal, milking the privileged status he has to engage in behavior that would have been cut off from any other defendant long before this point.
SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP have reached a tentative deal, allowing for the end of the actors' strike that has been going on for several months. The actors' gains include protection against being replaced by digital doubles, getting revenue from streaming operations, and increases in wages and other compensation, and I'll still bet that the companies make exorbitant profits all the same.
The United Auto Workers' strategy of coordinated industrial action is producing benefits for both unionized plants and for those who have seen what gains the union was able to get and are attempting to stave off their own unionization by matching them. The UAW is ready to expand themselves to other automobile manufacturers, as well, and possibly to take advantage of some new rules that provide harsher punishments for those who interfere with the process of campaigning and balloting.
On the issues of trying to prosecute someone for their forgery and counterfeiting skills when the defendant claims their skills comes through sorcery and witchcraft, which is equally as forbidden.
Despite a lack of actual situations where a child was poisoned by a stranger using Halloween candy as the medium, the worry persists. Possibly because being worried about such things allows someone to take the big worries and compress them down into something that can be managed and then set aside for another day.
On how the preparation of bounty has devolved to specific genders, and thus the gifts of the earth are sometimes the chains that bind people to doing things over and over again, because they're expected to do all of this and not let anyone else starve.
On the idea that for people of a certain age who have been chasing a particular ideal and achieved it, their goals shift to chase something that's a better fir for themselves. It's a little bit like the idea of the mid-life crisis, but contingent on having climbed to the top of the hill of the thing sought and them going "wait, this isn't actually what I want" and setting off toward that from a more stable base. And much of the portal talk seems to think that it's being entered from one side, of stability to chaos, and not so much about the people who are entering it form chaos and trying to find the stability. Perhaps because we think of people like that as selling out or otherwise not achieving their stated goals by choosing to trade some of their chaos for stability.
In response to all of the accusations that the supposedly above-it-all justices of the United States Supreme Court have been extensively gifted from persons who might be charitably described as people trying to buy votes on the Court, the Supremes rolled out a code of ethics they expect themselves to follow, with themselves as the enforcers and arbiters of whether that code has been followed. So rest assured that justices like Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh are aware of how much more they need to hide their associations and undisclosed gifts to maintain the appearance of impropriety. Any entity that thinks such a code could be enforced on the justices will be looked at and tut-tutted, because the justices have long since decided they are above the law because they get to decide its interpretations. (The entity most expected to do something, Congress, is, well, until it's staffed by people who are interested in the business of governance, not much will get done in that regard.)
Surprising very few people, Elon Musk continues to promote, boost, and otherwise give a large platform to racists and conspiracy theorists, especially those past the antisemitic conspiracy line.
The state of Iowa finally released rules on how to implement the law they passed banning books and other materials in Iowa schools, giving teachers and librarians only a few weeks to review their collections and curricula to get in compliance or decide to flout the rules. Although it's probably more likely that their administrators will be the people demanding compliance upon the pain of losing their jobs, rather than pushing back against a law where an inappropriately "sexually explicit" book is defined as a book where a sex act exists in it, even with the clarification that if it does "not describe or visually depict a sex act," it's supposed to be okay to have. Because they also have to put out a list of all the books in the library, so that when someone decides to get pearl-clutchy about a book, they have an easy path to get it removed from a school library. The law also considers any book that has a not-straight or not-cis character in it to contain a sex act, essentially, even though it claims that observations that "stops short of being a promotion" are allowable. And finally, the law requires teachers to out students to parents by demanding they seek permission from those parents to refer to a child with a set of pronouns different than the ones assigned to their birth sex or to use a nickname for them that someone thinks might be trying to "affirm a student's gender identity" if and only if that gender identity isn't cis. I suspect a lot of students in Iowa are going to get very good at finding nicknames that are plausible for their assigned name at birth but also are correct for the names and identities they have chosen for themselves.
The most telling thing about it, though, is this all came about because some parents complained about "the complexity of challenging materials and the fact that the challenges rarely resulted in the learning materials being removed." Yes, because Iowa legislators agreed it was a bad thing that it was too difficult to ban books, we have this trampling of student rights and freedoms. That's what they do out in the open when they think they can get away with it. Much like Murfreesboro, Tennessee, who believe that a city ordinance banning "indecent behavior" including "sexual conduct" means they can ban books in the library that have queer characters in them by referencing a city code where sexual conduct includes gay sex as well as straight sex. Because, much like Iowa, this place believes that anything not cishet is automatically sexual and therefore inappropriate for the public. They also decided they wanted to restrict access to library materials by tiering the works and preventing childrens' and teens' library cards from checking out anything outside of their age levels. (Presumably, teens can check out kids' books, just not adult ones.)
In Florida, where the Unqualified are particularly emboldened, school librarians were reported to the Sherrif's Office in Santa Rosa County because the people reporting insisted baselessly that the librarians were giving "pornography" to minors. It's a YA novel, of course, not anything age-restricted, but these Florida accusers were using the same standard as Iowa, where any book with a sex scene in it is automatically inappropriate for anyone, Miller Test be damned. (And the report might also be because the reporters have a petty personal vendetta against the librarian, who has public affiliations with groups trying to stop the Unqualified from being given any power.)
Florida also has the Florida Department of State annoucing they won't work with the American Library Association with anything because they think Emily Drabinski represents a corrupting influence they have to fight. *eyeroll*
The most visible of the Unqualified at this moment, Moms for Liberty, had most of their endorsed political candidates get beaten or overturned in the November elections, including the ones I noticed in the Dragon Conspiracy Territory. Mostly because the thing that makes them appealing, being a united and organized group, is what made them and their retrograde views both visible and opposable. After even a small amount of media scrutiny and focus, their appearance of being concerned mothers fell apart and their astroturf nature came out quickly.
Several librarians who were dismissed from their posts because they upheld their ethics and refused to be intimidated into going along with the dictates of a banning-friendly board have filed claims with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging workplace discrimination. The claim rests on the idea that workplaces are not allowed to discriminate against their employees for association with certain classes of people. If those claims go through and succeed, it would set an interesting precedent about library-sponsored programming.
The anti-trans platforms didn't fare particularly well in elections, either, not least because they were most charitably described as "misleading" for what they said candidates and issues would do with regard to transitioning and appropriate care.
In more cheering situations, an accidentally unlocked door at a Gothenburg, Sweden library meant the regulars were there, and books were checked out and returned, as if it were a normal library day. What makes this cheering is many of the spaces in the United States where an accidentally unlocked door would be assumed to let in thieves, vandals, and those intent on destroying the space and its contents, rather than the possiblity that it might be the regulars and the regulars would do things as normal, because they wouldn't want to trash a place and then have it be closed for some time while it was being repaired.
Access to green spaces is important for the city dweller, according to the National Trust in the United Kingdom.
A rare white platypus spotted in New South Wales, a terrier playing foster mother to a litter of kittens, and having to take a day off of work because there's a six hundred kilogram seal blocking your vehicle.
In technology, the owner of the trademark to Threads in the United Kingdom has sent a cease and desist to the parent company of Facebook, telling the to stop using the trademarked name for their own product. The parent company has offered repeatedly to purchase their domain and otherwise get said trademark, but the current owner has refused to sell.
A malicious link-shortening service and seceral other bad actors appear to be operating under the top-level domain .us, likely a result of certain politicians deciding that the government didn't need to oversee its own country TLD and that the private sector could do infinitely better and more cheaply.
A piece about how those who came online early on and congregated in various places like Twitter have found most if not all of the places they used to be have become terrible. Which, well, those places all chased money and tried to become the place for everyone, rather than the place that worked the best for their audience. In doing so, they thought they were chasing success, but instead, they were sealing their own doom. Places that thrive are places that know their audience and don't try to annex too much more space than what that audience wants. (Thus, Dreamwidth is able to keep the lights on, where Tumblr and Twitter likely both...won't.)
Tumblr is likely going into maintenance mode, as most of the staff working on it will be reassigned to other products of the parent company. Unless an infusion of cash happens to make it profitable, it's probably the right time to be thinking about any backing up that someone might want to do of their Tumblr stuff, and to do their best to get the iconic parts enshrined in some other place. Much like Twitter, though, it's unlikely that Tumblr will die suddenly, but that enough things will happen to send more users out into other places and the whole thing will eventually not have what someone wants on the site.
Persons attending an event regarding bored apes found themselves on the receiving end of UV-C lights that had been installed by accident/negligence, giving them burns on their skin and their eyes. Even if you want to make fun of someone for believing the hype about NFTs, getting injured because a venue person didn't do due diligence is no fun at all.
In case you were wondering whether you want to take part in anything that Elon Musk touches, have an examination of the dismal safety record at SpaceX, alongside what are apparently fines for the safety incident, but that were not nearly serious enough to make the company decide to take safety seriously. Now that I think about it, one of the people who I was friends with in college went to work for SpaceX and then suffered a serious injury, so I guess it wasn't just a fluke there.
Like so many other ventures that the Defendant has embarked upon, "Truth Social" finds itself not having been infused with cash from anywhere and suffering expenses that are likely to bankrupt it if it isn't successfully merged with another company.
Thhe possibility that the original, three foot long model of the Enterprise in the first Star Trek series turned up as an eBay auction and the quest now underway to try and get the model back to the Roddenberry Estate.
Steve Wozniak, the somewhat lesser-known Steve of Apple Computer, suffered a minor stroke while in Mexico City, Mexico, while he was on a schedule for speaking at events. Wozniak, along with Steve Jobs, the man who would be the face of Apple Computer until his death, helped put Apple on the map with two personal computers, the Apple I and the Apple II, that were intensely popular. The Apple II series was extremely popular in school, although they were eventually phasaed out and replaced with Windows and DOS machines by the time I left. There were definitely some useful and interesting pieces of software written for those computers.
Last for this entry, Transforming many unwanted copies of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code into George Orwell's 1984. Which might seem to be taking one unwanted book and turning it into another, but at least the volume of copies has been reduced. (And the selling-it-for-nearly-500-pounds is hedged on the "there's an artwork in this" part, in case the text of 1984 isn't worth that much to you.
(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.)
