Congratulations, Another Month Finished - Late August 02024

[silveradept]

Let us begin with The late Mel Chua on trying to build systems of integrity rather than systems of reliability, because all of the things about how ADHD gives you a wonky time sense, and especially the parts there about getting something done Now so that it never slides into the depths of not-now is basically how I worked my way through school and is how I generally try to approach work as well. Even if things aren't due until later, I want them done so that when the reminder fires for turning it in, it's already done and ready.

The author Celia Lake on disability history, and how knowing more and understanding better about disability and the people who have them shapes and changes the ways we interact with disability and the people who have them.

The possibility that several persons who were deeply embedded in accessibility and games, offering advice and perspective on how to make those games better, may not have existed as independent entities in their own right.

Your local library has things in it that will be life-changing. Which is absolutely true, and the hardest part of all of this is finding them, or having an inkling of what you want to look for so that the staff can help you find them.

A piece from some time ago that has aged perfectly well in the interim, unfortunately, about how having white privilege means that you can bend and break many rules and suffer no consequences for it. Which was put together (by sonia) with Irene Y. Zhang's post about the moral dimensions of being a moderately successful computer programmer while also being a woman, which are mostly about how the men in the profession feel it is their moral duty to drive away women through disrespect and misogyny, and if they can't do that, to treat women as their mothers, wives, girlfriends, or daughters first and as professionals a distant second, trying to turn them into emotional support women for themselves. This is not just a phenomenon for computer science, but plenty of other professions that were started by sexist men, even if some of them have since come to be primarily women. Which certainly joins up with the ways that the "tradwife" fad also desires to remove women from the public or working sphere by insisting that a mother must do all the child-rearing herself, without the assistance of staff or the possibility of using child care facilities and other means of ensuring a child is being minded well so that a mother can do something other than child-rearing.

It also doesn't help when sex researchers keep asking questions that prioritize men and penis-in-vagina sex when it comes to asking about whether there were orgasms in sex. It says a fair amount about how little there has been research that asks women about themselves, which produces great results (as in the 1920s) as compared to testing what people, usually men, think about women.

The state of Texas has decided they will not accept court orders regarding gender marker changes for the purposes of updating state-issued documentation, because they believe only they can make the determination and judge the evidence correctly to determine whether to allow a gender marker change, and some other entity, like a court, issuing such an order might mean that someone could change their gender marker without being properly attacked by the state for daring to disagree with them.

A Canadian family decided there was too much queerness in Canada and decided to go to the Russian Federation, based on their propaganda of being a place that has strong Christian values. The reality was not nearly as good as the advertisement. In similar such things, a defected United States National Guard member happily espoused the virtues of Russian culture compared to the United States, and some United States families are also trying to go to the Russian Federation on the same propaganda. Some people are willing to be single-issue people, and want to go somewhere that at least claims to be strong on their issue. And they are. It's just everything else that gets in the way of enjoying moral superiority.

Which is oddly well-connected to the story of how Tucker Carlson went from Fox darling to doing promo pieces for the Russian Federation because it involves the same kinds of attitudes about being the most ideological and most morally better-than-thou.

Expelled from the Congress, and facing a significant amount of evidence against him, George Santos entered a guilty plea in the case against him for wire fraud and identity theft. Significant jail time and fines may come from the plea deal, depending on what the sentence that is handed out actually ends up being. The schedule for sentencing is February of next year, so it will be several months before we know what the final disposition of Santos is.

There is significant fear that the Republican candidate for the Presidency is not putting forth the best campaign he could be, with several possible speculations about why that might be, ranging from post-traumatic stress from the gunshots at his rally and the injury he suffered from it to the possibility that he is unable to adapt to having a new opponent, and especially one that seems resistant to his usual playbook. Also potentially rattling him might be the re-filed charges against the Republican nominee in matters that are now about campaign actions and actions he took as a candidate, rather than actions that have been shielded by a Court very invested in shielding their own exposures, liabilities, and legitimacy.

It's also not helping that the Republican vice-presidential candidate is still a lot stiff in attempting to do interactions with the "common person," usually set up in US ways by having candidates visit fast food or other places where they are likely to encounter minimum wage workers and try to be personable and give them the campaign pitch while appearing to be interested in the plight of the commoners.

The Republican candidate posted faked photos implying the endorsement of Taylor Swift for him, reposting a satire account's photos as if they were real. That produced the ire of the Swifties, who took to socials to condemn such a possibility and to suggest that Taylor Swift sue him for the use of her likeness in unauthorized ways. (There is a bit of truth, that there are Taylor Swift fans who want people to vote for Trump, but there has been no endorsement in the 2024 campaign from Taylor Swift herself.)

Palm Beach, Florida, is also trying to figure out whether or not to declare the Mar-a-Lago closed because, in theory, the road to the club is closed by the Secret Service in the wake of the gunfire incident. If the club itself closed, a major source of income for the Republican candidate would dry up. Which might explain why he and his family are attempting to get into the cryptocurrency scam with their own branded version.

During a Harris-Walz promo, Tim Walz made a joke about white fear of spicy foods, and a whole bunch of white men claimed Tim Walz was a race traitor because of it. Which is all forms of hilarity to watch the tryhards attempting to make a scandal out of it, and claiming that Walz was racist against other white people.

It's possible that both supporters and detractors of Walz will focus on the fact that he has a neurodivergent child, which will be a contrast to the way that Walz talks about his child as a child, rather than as a prop or as a burden. Although, as is noted, the "disability as superpower" construction of neurodiversity is unhelpful in getting people the accommodations they need for when they run face-first into the ways that society is either indifferent or actively hostile to them.

Continuing on their theme of being absolute creeps about women, some of the fanboys of the Republican candidates have done their best to suggest that Kamala Harris's stepdaughter is somehow a complete failure because she has a career, tattoos, and is not dutifully pumping out babies and taking care of them and her husband to the exclusion of all else.

Elsewhere, legitimate efforts to get voters registered and set in time for November's election came across clumsily and looking more like a phishing scam. One of the things I do not like, and will start liking even less, is the way that formal business communication is starting to look more like spammers, and I'll bet the adoption of LLMs only hastens this situation and makes it worse.

Anti-racism scholar Robin DiAngelo, best known for the book White Fragility, has been accused of plagiarism of Asian-American scholars in her doctoral thesis. Given that Robin DiAngelo seemed to be in the niche of "the white person people could say they're listening to about anti-racism and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts so they don't have to read or listen to people of color on these issues," this accusation of plagiarism certainly follows in the story we would expect to have happen here. White person gets popular by being white and talking about things that people of color have been talking about for a long time, white person turns out to have appropriated from scholars of color in the process. The supposed sections are fairly small, the kind of thing that could be reasonably attributed to a slip up of not citing because of not realizing that it was something that needed citation. It should be a reasonably swift correction if it was such an error. I think we're hearing about it mostly because it fits so well into the story arc. (Admittedly, many of the scholars and presenters of color that I follow have panned diAngelo over time for being the white lady getting famous and either not going much past the surface or for not then directing all the people who have glommed onto her as the person they want to listen to over to the scholars of color whose work she builds upon.)

This is one of those situations that's a grumble, because having archives disappear into the hands of private collectors who want to pay greatly for it impoverishes those scholars who would like to study those archives, and those organizations that would preserve and take good care of those archives, but that they cannot raise the funds to purchase them out of private hands.

After failed contract negotiations, and with accusations of unfair labor practices, Communications Workers of America members struck against American Telephone and Telegraph.

Attempting to find useful training for those musicians whose muscles have refused to go along with what their brain wants them to do, a situation known as a dystonia.

The reality of rural population migration in times before current high-speed transportation and industrial migration. And, of similar mythologies, a relatively small large family size in the eras where one expects every mouth that needs feeding to contribute two hands to the household's income.

Photographs of a snake consuming another of its kind alive.

In technology, those looking into the possibility of extending menstruation such that the menopause and subsequent period do not happen, in the belief that it will make for a happier, healthier woman, or that someone will want to preserve their fertility until a period where they can actually afford to have and raise children. (One wonders how much those who have to deal with bleeding would want it, and all of its possible complications and additional symptoms, to be extended any further than it already is.)

Having had it explained to them in very small words why it was a very bad idea to do it and subsequently promised to do better about it, Microsoft intends to roll out a revised version of the Recall software in October. Which is not what we wanted them to do, which was to abandon it entirely or restrict it to a very narrow domain of operation, but it is at least now an "opt-in" decision to have it scrape and put your data in a nice attractive target rather than an "opt-out."

Staying with Microsoft, while the grand majority of settings are moving to the Settings app, the old Control Panel(s) are still hanging on, at least for a little while longer.

If you are working on small, personal, fannish or non-fannish projects such as websites, smallweb is hosting Small Web September, a 30 day sprint to help you work more on your smallweb project. Which is good, and helps enliven those parts of the World Wide Web that aren't controlled by large corporations with marketing and technology budgets.

The malfunctioning Starliner capsule will return from the International Space Station on autopilot, leaving two crew up there for significantly longer than their original intended stay. The next mission up will have to have its crew reduced by two and haul extra equipment up so that the astronauts can come down safely. Official changes have been made to the crew to accommodate this and announced. Not that soon after this decision was made, the Starliner began to emit an unexplained noise. Which could be a spacecraft pouting that it's fine, thank you, and all of this precaution is clearly too much. Whether it's also holding itself and in obvious pain is yet to be determined, I guess.

The person who created One Million Checkboxes talks about what happened when some skilled and dedicated teenagers decided they wanted to do very fun things with the one million bits they had to work with. None of this is malice, all of it is understanding that a million checkboxes is a million bits, and you can do a lot with a million bits in specific kinds of ways. Which made the person who made the checkboxes have a minor freakout to discover what was being done, but rather than try to shut it down, he worked with the people who were doing interesting things so they could do stuff while also allowing other people to play with the checkboxes.

Last out, I was again reminded of NestFlix, a repository of shows-within-shows that have appeared in various media properties over time.

And something that's been getting some circulation in my circles: people attempting to solve a crossword where all the clues consist of regular expression syntax. While most of the things have commented on the fiendishness of the puzzle itself, it should be noted that this is one of the puzzles offered in a Mystery Hunt, an annual tradition of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, teams of puzzle-solvers, at least some of whom must be able to be on the MIT campus for the weekend, race to solve entire series of fiendish puzzles to find the mystery object (a "coin," even when it isn't actually a coin) that has been hidden on the campus. Once the year's Mystery Hunt is over, the puzzles and, if someone's feeling generous, their solutions, are usually posted for others to attempt to make heads or tails of. Possibly including any and all necessary supplementary material that might have been distributed to the teams during the course of the Mystery Hunt.

(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.)

Comments

[thewayne]

I read about One Million Checkboxes yesterday, quite an interesting read.

[silveradept]

Yep. Brilliance all around for that regard.

[jadelennox]

Oh, I remember solving Regular Crossword! I adored it; it was one of the first mystery hunt puzzles I thought was a good one to share with non-puzzlers. So many Hunt logic puzzles are just absolute bears to get through, and Regular Crossword was delightful in that you could just... work it out.

2013 was a good hunt in puzzle quality, but it was too damn long. (Like about half of hunts for the last decade, to be fair.) They had to cut, as I recall. But I liked the puzzles and the story.

[silveradept]

A lot of the story elements to the hunts sound delightful and whimsical, but I can't imagine being someone with the necessary skills to solve any of those puzzles in the requested time, even with a team of puzzle solvers to help. Perhaps it gets easier with time and experience.