Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2024-01-17 11:50 pm
silveradept) wrote2024-01-17 11:50 pm
Stuff from the new year - early January 02024
Let's begin with material that finally made it into the public domain in the United States in the year 2024. While much attention has been given to Steamboat Willie, as the thought of finally getting something from the Disney juggernaut, there's plenty of other material that is now freely usable as well. If you're interested in using Mickey, there's a handy primer on how to use Mickey successfully and avoid getting walloped with trademark issues. There are still some Mickeys that are under copyright (like the Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey), but Mickey Mouse, in at least some form, is now finally making it to the public domain. (As are some more Winnie-the-Pooh characters, like Tigger.)
The "Golden Rod" illustration used for C-3PO that made the robot look he'd been designed by a species with a baculum. And pair that with an oral history of a Folgers holiday ad where the shipping goggles suggested a brother and sister were going to engage in incest even if no such thing were ever intended.
Queer ships were very popular on AO3 during 2023, which should be no surprise to anyone who knows that AO3 is very much a place where the queer ships go (FFN, I think, is where many of the het ships go?) The BBC got 144 complaints and 7.6 million viewers for an episode of Doctor Who that has an openly trans character, and both the Beeb and the showrunner said "tough shit" as their response to the complaints.
The Texas Library Association invited Dr. Chuck Tingle, World's Greatest Author and Two-Time Hugo Award Finalist, to one of their conferences, and then disinvited Dr. Tingle, supposedly because the part where Chuck Tingle wears a mask in the form of a pink bag was potentially disturbing to others and Chuck wasn't taking off the bag. It's unlikely this is the real reason, since the people who are going to the panel hopefully know Dr. Tingle, or if they don't, they probably have dealt with stranger people in their libraries. Having been caught doing something really not good, the Texas Library Association non-apologized for the issue and invited Dr. Tingle to speak at a different event than the original one. Appropriately, Dr. Tingle turned them down, because the Texas Library Association had already demonstrated they weren't safe to be around. Or, possibly, that they coudn't or didn't want to stand up to the bigots in their organization or the Texas legislature that had demanded the removal of Dr. Tingle from the program. We love Chuck, we love his message of love being real, and we like the Tinglers, too, so good for Chuck to have told the people who weren't going to treat him well that he isn't interested in coming to their event.
A review of a book about someone who opened their marraige that finds what is on the page to be more a product of the social and economic class of the writer, rather than being much about the practice of polyamory, which, fair, it's a lot easier to conduct multiple relationships when you all have the means to do so. But it also suggests that rather than being something about recognizing the potential for people to get their needs and wants met by multiple people, it's much more about potentially staving off the divorce, which can be expensive, sometimes prohibitively so, for people who married.
And, of course, some of the things that come with time, and possibly having gone through with either opening the relationship or getting the divorce is older women deciding they're more interested in exploring their own fantasy lives, rather than having had their sexuality dictated to them by men who were uninterested in learning what worked for the women they were married to (or promised to).
An Alaska Airlines-operated Boeing 737 Max plane suffered an exit plug blowout, necessitating an emergency landing of the plane and an immediate grounding of the entire fleet of those planes. The sought-after door plug has been found and is being analyzed, while inspections of other 737 Max planes have found loose bolts and other hardware issues. The good news is that the emergency happened while the passengers and flight crew were still seated and buckled in, so while some technology and other items were lost out the hole, no passenger or crew lives were lost. The bad news is that the emergency happened in the first place, and that we are seeing signs that other planes could have had the same issues. I doubt, somehow, that the Federal Aviation Administration will be in any way pleased with these revelations.
The logo of Transport for London was nearly a rabbit, and would have been a much different familiar design for all of us. An investigation into the reason why a particular footbridge exists in Minneapolis, which does have a satisfactory result, as well as a small lesson that involving the experts early on in the search is sometimes the fastest way to get to a result. But what gets found out along the way is also pretty cool. (And some of the pictures required FAA approval to get.)
The city of Seattle, acting under the cover of darkness to ensure they would not be stymied or interrupted on their latest attempt, destroyed a community garden in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, started as part of the Movement for Black Lives protests in 2020. The City said they offered assistance to relocate the garden, which is not in dispute, but the city had made their decision about whether such a thing should be allowed to continue in the location it had been started in, and tied it into the idea that such a green space was a regular place for the unhoused and the drug-using community to visit, therefore it had to go. Even if the city will still help build another garden, their interest in shutting this one down seems to have been related to a lot of things they're less interested in helping with or that would move toward helping the problems they want to curtail, without having to destroy a community garden in the process.
The Republican Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly threatened the University of Wisconsin regents to withhold funding already appropriated to them if they didn't also get rid of many positions intended to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and starve the DEI programs of funding. The Regents knuckled under to the threat, and in doing so, got their money. Remember, friends don't let friends elect Republicans. And then do their best to get districts that can't do anything but elect Republicans redrawn to be fair. (Having signaled they can be bullied, I'm sure we'll find the Regents being told they have to do even more cutting away of any programs intended to help the campus be something more than white men if they want next year's funding.)
How Papua New Guinea was able to retain archives pertaining to it during colonial periods, rather than having their records spirited away as happened to many other colonial territories before they achieved full self-governance as independent countries.
The story of a play written and performed in the backyard of a woman, intended to bring shame upon her neighbor for an allegation that was not proven out in the courts.
The Feline Grimace Scale, a method for determining the likely amount of pain or discomfort a cat is in by examining their facial expression and head line compared to the rest of the body. Given that cats are not very vocal about their pain, and are also the kinds of entities that tend to hide when they are in pain or suffering until it has become too much for them to hide, being able to read a cat's facial expression might be useful toward knowing when it is time for pain relief for kitty.
Don't pet the fluffy cows, a message from the U.S. National Park Service, a paper about the behavior of wild animals turning running wheels, even without any reward to do so, women naturalists and their illustrations of moths and plants, which sometimes meant raising the insects so they could be painted, as well as raising children and managing households as well, and a research project conducted by a Year 3 student, with LEGO visualizations and a conclusion about what kind of person an Australian magpie is most likely to swoop upon that went intensely viral and produced a data set that with a likely 1 percent margin of error and a professional scientist combing the results to see what else might be gathered from it.
The consequences of infection from SARS-CoV-2 are the kind of thing where other infectious agents might have greater success. In the same way that HIV makes it possible for other infectious agents to have greater success against a body infected with it. Not getting it is still the best option, but making sure that you get it the least is the other better option.
In technology, the training data sets scraped from the Internet for image generators contain(ed) actual images of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), with LAION-5B, the targeted set, having potentially more than three thousand such images in its data set. That'll tell you something about how the scrapers were indiscriminate and that the humans supposedly overseeing the data set creation did not do it. And this is only the child sexual abuse material - it doesn't count any adult images that are there, or revenge porn, or illegally-obtained nudes, or anything else in the data set that probably shouldn't be there or whose presence would indicate security breaches or other such acts.
3500 persons were arrested and about $300 million USD seized in an operation designed to combat cybercrime. While several of the persons arrested were in connection with more "traditional" cybercrime like ransomware or trying to use generated materials and/or voice cloning as a way to attack their targets, several of the persons were arrested for schemes involving cryptocurrency startups where the entire operation was fly-by-night and folded up with the creators taking the investor cash once the levels of investment reached sufficient heights to make the operation profitable. Unregulated spaces will do that to you, and that it's dressed up in a lot of technobabble makes it harder for a layperson to spot the scam.
Microsoft admits their Copilot AI is doomed and will go the way of the dustbin by requiring OEM PC manufacturers running Windows 11 to include a dedicated key to launch it. If it were something that were useful and widespread in adoption, they wouldn't need to mandate a key dedicated to its use, but instead enjoy having a good product that people choose to use. So, yet another reason to delay upgrading to Windows 11 until it's forced upon me in the next year. Maybe by that point, Proton and Linux gaming will have gotten good enough that I won't have to maintain a Windows install for Steam?
A theater chain had to temporarily close because their projectors didn't work with the DRM and decryption needed to screen the digital movies, but it looks like a fix was applied pretty quickly and the outage was temporary. Even so, it seems like there's a lot of paranoia involved even in getting movies to theaters. And, as usual, it's probably the DRM at fault for the problem.
Finding ways of using decommissioned wind turbine blades to create functional spaces or as feed for makig other materials. Because having a good recycling program for things made of fiberglass is a good thing.
The flourishing of repair cafes, where people can bring their broken items and with the assistance of volunteers, bring them back into working order. Which would be a great thing to have as a partnership with a Tool Library, or other spaces that are interested in keeping things going and repairing them rather than having them end up in the waste, or having a beloved family artifact be unable to go on to the next generation.
Tracking the ways in which things that were advantages in earlier times to fight older pathogens and things trying to jump from animal to human now produce situations like autoimmune disorders, and trying to find a balance between allowing the immune system to do its job while preventing it from attacking its own.
The methods by which humans poisoned themselves are numerous and many, and arsenic was a popular one in many a product, until it was finally outlawed from all the things, including the wallpaper.
Last for tonight, a map of the Indigenous Nations of North America, approximately the 16th century CE, and where possible, the name of the nation in the language of its residents.
(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.)
The "Golden Rod" illustration used for C-3PO that made the robot look he'd been designed by a species with a baculum. And pair that with an oral history of a Folgers holiday ad where the shipping goggles suggested a brother and sister were going to engage in incest even if no such thing were ever intended.
Queer ships were very popular on AO3 during 2023, which should be no surprise to anyone who knows that AO3 is very much a place where the queer ships go (FFN, I think, is where many of the het ships go?) The BBC got 144 complaints and 7.6 million viewers for an episode of Doctor Who that has an openly trans character, and both the Beeb and the showrunner said "tough shit" as their response to the complaints.
The Texas Library Association invited Dr. Chuck Tingle, World's Greatest Author and Two-Time Hugo Award Finalist, to one of their conferences, and then disinvited Dr. Tingle, supposedly because the part where Chuck Tingle wears a mask in the form of a pink bag was potentially disturbing to others and Chuck wasn't taking off the bag. It's unlikely this is the real reason, since the people who are going to the panel hopefully know Dr. Tingle, or if they don't, they probably have dealt with stranger people in their libraries. Having been caught doing something really not good, the Texas Library Association non-apologized for the issue and invited Dr. Tingle to speak at a different event than the original one. Appropriately, Dr. Tingle turned them down, because the Texas Library Association had already demonstrated they weren't safe to be around. Or, possibly, that they coudn't or didn't want to stand up to the bigots in their organization or the Texas legislature that had demanded the removal of Dr. Tingle from the program. We love Chuck, we love his message of love being real, and we like the Tinglers, too, so good for Chuck to have told the people who weren't going to treat him well that he isn't interested in coming to their event.
A review of a book about someone who opened their marraige that finds what is on the page to be more a product of the social and economic class of the writer, rather than being much about the practice of polyamory, which, fair, it's a lot easier to conduct multiple relationships when you all have the means to do so. But it also suggests that rather than being something about recognizing the potential for people to get their needs and wants met by multiple people, it's much more about potentially staving off the divorce, which can be expensive, sometimes prohibitively so, for people who married.
And, of course, some of the things that come with time, and possibly having gone through with either opening the relationship or getting the divorce is older women deciding they're more interested in exploring their own fantasy lives, rather than having had their sexuality dictated to them by men who were uninterested in learning what worked for the women they were married to (or promised to).
An Alaska Airlines-operated Boeing 737 Max plane suffered an exit plug blowout, necessitating an emergency landing of the plane and an immediate grounding of the entire fleet of those planes. The sought-after door plug has been found and is being analyzed, while inspections of other 737 Max planes have found loose bolts and other hardware issues. The good news is that the emergency happened while the passengers and flight crew were still seated and buckled in, so while some technology and other items were lost out the hole, no passenger or crew lives were lost. The bad news is that the emergency happened in the first place, and that we are seeing signs that other planes could have had the same issues. I doubt, somehow, that the Federal Aviation Administration will be in any way pleased with these revelations.
The logo of Transport for London was nearly a rabbit, and would have been a much different familiar design for all of us. An investigation into the reason why a particular footbridge exists in Minneapolis, which does have a satisfactory result, as well as a small lesson that involving the experts early on in the search is sometimes the fastest way to get to a result. But what gets found out along the way is also pretty cool. (And some of the pictures required FAA approval to get.)
The city of Seattle, acting under the cover of darkness to ensure they would not be stymied or interrupted on their latest attempt, destroyed a community garden in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, started as part of the Movement for Black Lives protests in 2020. The City said they offered assistance to relocate the garden, which is not in dispute, but the city had made their decision about whether such a thing should be allowed to continue in the location it had been started in, and tied it into the idea that such a green space was a regular place for the unhoused and the drug-using community to visit, therefore it had to go. Even if the city will still help build another garden, their interest in shutting this one down seems to have been related to a lot of things they're less interested in helping with or that would move toward helping the problems they want to curtail, without having to destroy a community garden in the process.
The Republican Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly threatened the University of Wisconsin regents to withhold funding already appropriated to them if they didn't also get rid of many positions intended to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and starve the DEI programs of funding. The Regents knuckled under to the threat, and in doing so, got their money. Remember, friends don't let friends elect Republicans. And then do their best to get districts that can't do anything but elect Republicans redrawn to be fair. (Having signaled they can be bullied, I'm sure we'll find the Regents being told they have to do even more cutting away of any programs intended to help the campus be something more than white men if they want next year's funding.)
How Papua New Guinea was able to retain archives pertaining to it during colonial periods, rather than having their records spirited away as happened to many other colonial territories before they achieved full self-governance as independent countries.
The story of a play written and performed in the backyard of a woman, intended to bring shame upon her neighbor for an allegation that was not proven out in the courts.
The Feline Grimace Scale, a method for determining the likely amount of pain or discomfort a cat is in by examining their facial expression and head line compared to the rest of the body. Given that cats are not very vocal about their pain, and are also the kinds of entities that tend to hide when they are in pain or suffering until it has become too much for them to hide, being able to read a cat's facial expression might be useful toward knowing when it is time for pain relief for kitty.
Don't pet the fluffy cows, a message from the U.S. National Park Service, a paper about the behavior of wild animals turning running wheels, even without any reward to do so, women naturalists and their illustrations of moths and plants, which sometimes meant raising the insects so they could be painted, as well as raising children and managing households as well, and a research project conducted by a Year 3 student, with LEGO visualizations and a conclusion about what kind of person an Australian magpie is most likely to swoop upon that went intensely viral and produced a data set that with a likely 1 percent margin of error and a professional scientist combing the results to see what else might be gathered from it.
The consequences of infection from SARS-CoV-2 are the kind of thing where other infectious agents might have greater success. In the same way that HIV makes it possible for other infectious agents to have greater success against a body infected with it. Not getting it is still the best option, but making sure that you get it the least is the other better option.
In technology, the training data sets scraped from the Internet for image generators contain(ed) actual images of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), with LAION-5B, the targeted set, having potentially more than three thousand such images in its data set. That'll tell you something about how the scrapers were indiscriminate and that the humans supposedly overseeing the data set creation did not do it. And this is only the child sexual abuse material - it doesn't count any adult images that are there, or revenge porn, or illegally-obtained nudes, or anything else in the data set that probably shouldn't be there or whose presence would indicate security breaches or other such acts.
3500 persons were arrested and about $300 million USD seized in an operation designed to combat cybercrime. While several of the persons arrested were in connection with more "traditional" cybercrime like ransomware or trying to use generated materials and/or voice cloning as a way to attack their targets, several of the persons were arrested for schemes involving cryptocurrency startups where the entire operation was fly-by-night and folded up with the creators taking the investor cash once the levels of investment reached sufficient heights to make the operation profitable. Unregulated spaces will do that to you, and that it's dressed up in a lot of technobabble makes it harder for a layperson to spot the scam.
Microsoft admits their Copilot AI is doomed and will go the way of the dustbin by requiring OEM PC manufacturers running Windows 11 to include a dedicated key to launch it. If it were something that were useful and widespread in adoption, they wouldn't need to mandate a key dedicated to its use, but instead enjoy having a good product that people choose to use. So, yet another reason to delay upgrading to Windows 11 until it's forced upon me in the next year. Maybe by that point, Proton and Linux gaming will have gotten good enough that I won't have to maintain a Windows install for Steam?
A theater chain had to temporarily close because their projectors didn't work with the DRM and decryption needed to screen the digital movies, but it looks like a fix was applied pretty quickly and the outage was temporary. Even so, it seems like there's a lot of paranoia involved even in getting movies to theaters. And, as usual, it's probably the DRM at fault for the problem.
Finding ways of using decommissioned wind turbine blades to create functional spaces or as feed for makig other materials. Because having a good recycling program for things made of fiberglass is a good thing.
The flourishing of repair cafes, where people can bring their broken items and with the assistance of volunteers, bring them back into working order. Which would be a great thing to have as a partnership with a Tool Library, or other spaces that are interested in keeping things going and repairing them rather than having them end up in the waste, or having a beloved family artifact be unable to go on to the next generation.
Tracking the ways in which things that were advantages in earlier times to fight older pathogens and things trying to jump from animal to human now produce situations like autoimmune disorders, and trying to find a balance between allowing the immune system to do its job while preventing it from attacking its own.
The methods by which humans poisoned themselves are numerous and many, and arsenic was a popular one in many a product, until it was finally outlawed from all the things, including the wallpaper.
Last for tonight, a map of the Indigenous Nations of North America, approximately the 16th century CE, and where possible, the name of the nation in the language of its residents.
(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.)