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silveradeptHello! We started this year with a large chunk of material entering the public domain from that very recent year of 1929. And always, the hope that copyright gets reformed at some point so that significant amounts of the materials created in my lifetime can be used for building blocks for the next great things.
A thoughtful reflection on the ways that the somewhat closed grouping of fanworks in relation to fandom has now become The Next Big Thing for all kinds of people who see lots of unmonetized content instead of the activities of a fandom. And the ways they either poach authors to publish works or steal the works to sell themselves to an audience mostly outside the fandom that's looking for content and is willing to pay for someone else's shoddy work. It's also got an interesting undercurrent of the understanding that trope language has supplanted fandom language in how people look for things and describe them, and that this shift is also helping people think of fanworks not as things that are bound in specific contexts, but as "content" that no longer has any attachments to it.
A program for men in prison that works on reconnecting them with the emotions and skills they have long since closed off from themselves, and teaches them ways of avoiding escalation or acting like men with stunted emotional development. It also creates a very small recidivism rate among those who are released, but the actual point is that if these men, in prison, can get the skills they need to become vulnerable, caring, understanding, then presumably, we can do this for men outside of prison, before they enter the system, before they take lives or lose them to the inside. Men can find common ground in admitting to all the things that people who are perceived as men are failing at masculinity over, which is a perfectly good starting point toward the second stage of "well, if men are all failing at masculinity because of things like having emotions, or body issues, or behaviors that are deemed insufficiently masculine by their peers, what's exactly stopping men from rewriting the definition of masculinity to better suit all of the people who are failing at it, rather than trying to live up to an impossible ideal?" (For most people perceived as men, as is noted in the post, the answer is "other men," but surely, somewhere, you can trace the line back to someone who has either seized or been ceded the definition of masculinity by enough people that getting them to change would make a fair amount of progress. I suspect, somehow, though, that the people who have that kind of power are the kind of people who are the most invested in propping up, disseminating, and reinforcing the impossible standard, whether for their own ego or because they're making money off the rubes.
The idea of a man being the sole breadwinner of a nuclear family is both anthropologically and historically weird, as women, grandparents, and children have all "traditionally" been involved in the generation of food or the generation of resources that can be converted into needs.
A long piece about allegations against the author Neil Gaiman, that does not skimp on the details of the allegations nor the contexts for those allegations. This is a piece that is a content warning from beginning to end, with specifics about allegations of sexual assault and rape, non-negotiated one-sided kink, the presence of minors during these events, the abuse of non-disclosure agreements, the potential complicity of other people around Neil, and more. You don't have to read it. If you do, take what breaks and care you need, both in reading the accounts and in potentially having to rearrange your opinion of someone who has commanded a certain amount of respect and admiration as someone who could have been thought separate from all the other men who abused their power and money.
And speaking of people who abused their power and money, Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Department of Justice released the report on the investigation into the 2020 election subversion case and the January 6, 2021 riot, concluding that, in their professional opinion, there was enough evidence that would have sustained a conviction at trial for the charges that were brought. The special counsel also denied and refuted the idea that the incoming administrator is in any way exonerated or not guilty of the charges brought against him. Unfortunately, because the Counsel was fighting a Supreme Court majority determined not to let him prosecute the case or bring it to trial, we won't be able to say with certainty whether a jury would have voted to convict. We do get some insight into why certain charges were brought and others were not.
The other volume of the report, the one on the classified documents kept outside of a secure facility, is currently enjoined by the federal judge that has been running the greatest amount of interference for the incoming administrator, although there will be a hearing about whether that judge has exceeded her authority or otherwise is not in accordance with law in enjoining others outside the Justice Department from seeing the other volume of the report.
In the department of public entities that have decided they are all-in for the destruction of their public entities, The Board of Commissioners for Josephine County have decided they no longer have to support a library in any way at all and have also terminated the Grants Pass library's lease for their space. The library now has thirty days to find somewhere else to be, despite the Commissioners having in their charter a requirement to support and maintain libraries in the county. The Commissioners have also appropriated library levy funding to themselves and did not then use most of that money to support a library in the county, so it's fairly clear that they intend to destroy the Grants Pass location. As I have noted and mentioned in other places, the way that libraries are set up in many places makes them vulnerable to local politics, and if that local political entity decides they don't want a library any more, for whatever reason they choose, it will be difficult for a library to sustain its own existence.
The state of Arizona implemented a statewide school voucher program, and then basically decided there was to be no oversight or standards required for any entity that wanted to call itself a school and accept those tax dollars, so there's no really good way of finding out whether any charter or private school is actually going to educate children, or is mostly just going to pocket the money of those they convinced to buy into their "school" and leave the kids with nothing.
The Attorney General of the State of Louisiana has laid out guidelines on how she believes schools can display Christian text in classrooms without it being a complete and total violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The guidance is mostly "school funds can't be used to purchase or display the posters, and don't put the posters anywhere where it might look like the individual teacher endorses these words." There's also a suggestion to put it next to other informative material that is about law and the traditions of law that undergird the United States traditions. The law that brings these posters into being is still an Establishment Clause violation, but even if it weren't, the supposedly approved posters have basically nil educational value, as they are not about the traditions of law that influence the United States, but instead are about how this specific religious text was permitted in public schooling for significant amounts of time, including in the presence of textbooks and instructional material, and a small selection of the court cases about the display of religious texts or practices in public school spaces. They are very much about putting religious text in the public school, with perhaps a fig leaf's worth of an attempt to make it "educational."
Also, it has twelve commandments on it, because the use of the full stop is the end of one commandment and the beginning of the next. If they wanted to have ten commandments on it, they would need to do the usual joining of the first two to become "I am the Lord your God, you shall not have other gods before me" and the joining of the last two so that all of the covetous sins are all in one "thou shalt not." Which is petty, sure, but even the religious educators that I had for my childhood made sure that the Ten Commandments were actually, y'know, ten.
A cybertruck full of explosives detonated itself in front of a hotel in Las Vegas. Which once again reminded us of how much modern cars are surveillance devices with no oversight of what happens with their footage. What was less noted was how this was also a politically motivated entity - no, not against the person whose hotel the car exploded in front of, but against the Democratic Party and the person who he derided as an unqualified candidate. That's been downplayed because of the understanding that the perpetrator suffered from significant mental health issues, but to say that only the mentally ill have such kinds of plans and ideas is to stick your head in the sand and ignore the reality around you. Regrettably, we have too many instances of this, most recently including a person who committed mass violence with his vehicle in New Orleans, defeating the police blockade by driving on the sidewalk, and who seemed ready to commit more mass violence with guns and explosives after exiting his vehicle. Being killed by police stopped the further violence, but not the initial bout. These things are not easy to predict, nor are they easy to stop once they are underway. And, as we see, it doesn't take much for one person to commit mass violence any more.
In their rush to curry favor with the incoming administration, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp has decided that it's now okay to engage in gendered insults, to take shots at trans people, and otherwise to promote the attitudes and environment that the incoming administration hopes to codify in law or remove protections for any contrary opinion. Why would they do that? Well, when you stop innovating or providing things that people actually want, you often then turn to making it so the law or the government prevents anyone from being a real competitor to you. And therefore, the platform must change to match the prejudices of the incoming administration if it wants to stay on the inside and keep the privileges it has.
Several neighborhoods in Los Angeles are ablaze, and neither nature nor the capacity of the firefighting reservoirs are being cooperative in trying to bring the fires under control. And as much as there is a lot of blame going around about insufficient resources, there's also climate change making the fires worse, and if there's a city organization to blame for insufficient resources, you could probably look at the outsizeness of the Los Angeles Police Department budget compared to every other city service and possibly do the radical thing of shifting money away from the cops to other services, instead of to cops from services.
A camp in Northern Minnesota that was for children with HIV/AIDS, but had also branched out into being a camp with homeless and queer camps is closing.. Which is bittersweet for the children whose ashes are buried there, and also a loss for the kids who were using the camp. The framing of the first story did mention the other uses, but set the closure as a good thing, that there weren't enough children with HIV/AIDS to sustain funding. (Thanks,shanaqui, for the clarification.)
The childhood HIV rate is a cause for joy because the transmission of HIV from mother to baby is no longer very prevalent at all. And a triumph of the science that has made HIV much less of the death sentence it used to be, allowing people who are infected to have normal life expectancies and that has also developed things like PrEP that can stop the transmission of the virus from one person to another.
The United Kingdom is reluctant to apologize to all of the lesbian mothers whose children they removed from custody, because they were lesbians.
Pregnancy and childbirth is a potentially dangerous activity, but many of the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth can be handled, assuming someone wants to go see medics about them, or have checkups. As we have been re-learning for several years to this point, just because something is natural does not necessarily mean it is superior for anyone, much less everyone.
On living as a queer person, outside the systems that are meant to force conformity and identity on everyone, and about claiming your queerness and yourself.
Ponds that have been brought back to themselves after they had been dried up or otherwise transformed by the needs of farming equipment and farmland,
In technology, Netflix has produced and distributed all kinds of content that nobody cares about, even if they are theoretically watching it, and this is the reason why they are successful. So if you've thought that Netflix has been terrible for a very long time, you're right, it has. And they're probably at least partially responsible for all the other streaming services sucking and being expensive, as well. Because we were sold the idea that streaming would be superior to cable, and instead, what we got was cable with some other stuff, because Netflix only cares whether you're paying the subscription fee or not.
The industrialization period of England is before what is commonly referred to as the Industrial Revolution, brought on by increased yields in agriculture allowing more people to engage themselves in different kinds of work.
Last for tonight, the latest installation of an annual series about what people got stuck in genitals and rectums over the course of the last year.
And a reworking of the first DOOM level so that it is instead an art gallery experience, complete with drinks and hors d'oeuvres. Which gets paired with an implementation of DOOM in a single PDF, showing just what kind of nonsense you can achieve in the Portable Document Format.
(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.)
A thoughtful reflection on the ways that the somewhat closed grouping of fanworks in relation to fandom has now become The Next Big Thing for all kinds of people who see lots of unmonetized content instead of the activities of a fandom. And the ways they either poach authors to publish works or steal the works to sell themselves to an audience mostly outside the fandom that's looking for content and is willing to pay for someone else's shoddy work. It's also got an interesting undercurrent of the understanding that trope language has supplanted fandom language in how people look for things and describe them, and that this shift is also helping people think of fanworks not as things that are bound in specific contexts, but as "content" that no longer has any attachments to it.
A program for men in prison that works on reconnecting them with the emotions and skills they have long since closed off from themselves, and teaches them ways of avoiding escalation or acting like men with stunted emotional development. It also creates a very small recidivism rate among those who are released, but the actual point is that if these men, in prison, can get the skills they need to become vulnerable, caring, understanding, then presumably, we can do this for men outside of prison, before they enter the system, before they take lives or lose them to the inside. Men can find common ground in admitting to all the things that people who are perceived as men are failing at masculinity over, which is a perfectly good starting point toward the second stage of "well, if men are all failing at masculinity because of things like having emotions, or body issues, or behaviors that are deemed insufficiently masculine by their peers, what's exactly stopping men from rewriting the definition of masculinity to better suit all of the people who are failing at it, rather than trying to live up to an impossible ideal?" (For most people perceived as men, as is noted in the post, the answer is "other men," but surely, somewhere, you can trace the line back to someone who has either seized or been ceded the definition of masculinity by enough people that getting them to change would make a fair amount of progress. I suspect, somehow, though, that the people who have that kind of power are the kind of people who are the most invested in propping up, disseminating, and reinforcing the impossible standard, whether for their own ego or because they're making money off the rubes.
The idea of a man being the sole breadwinner of a nuclear family is both anthropologically and historically weird, as women, grandparents, and children have all "traditionally" been involved in the generation of food or the generation of resources that can be converted into needs.
A long piece about allegations against the author Neil Gaiman, that does not skimp on the details of the allegations nor the contexts for those allegations. This is a piece that is a content warning from beginning to end, with specifics about allegations of sexual assault and rape, non-negotiated one-sided kink, the presence of minors during these events, the abuse of non-disclosure agreements, the potential complicity of other people around Neil, and more. You don't have to read it. If you do, take what breaks and care you need, both in reading the accounts and in potentially having to rearrange your opinion of someone who has commanded a certain amount of respect and admiration as someone who could have been thought separate from all the other men who abused their power and money.
And speaking of people who abused their power and money, Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Department of Justice released the report on the investigation into the 2020 election subversion case and the January 6, 2021 riot, concluding that, in their professional opinion, there was enough evidence that would have sustained a conviction at trial for the charges that were brought. The special counsel also denied and refuted the idea that the incoming administrator is in any way exonerated or not guilty of the charges brought against him. Unfortunately, because the Counsel was fighting a Supreme Court majority determined not to let him prosecute the case or bring it to trial, we won't be able to say with certainty whether a jury would have voted to convict. We do get some insight into why certain charges were brought and others were not.
The other volume of the report, the one on the classified documents kept outside of a secure facility, is currently enjoined by the federal judge that has been running the greatest amount of interference for the incoming administrator, although there will be a hearing about whether that judge has exceeded her authority or otherwise is not in accordance with law in enjoining others outside the Justice Department from seeing the other volume of the report.
In the department of public entities that have decided they are all-in for the destruction of their public entities, The Board of Commissioners for Josephine County have decided they no longer have to support a library in any way at all and have also terminated the Grants Pass library's lease for their space. The library now has thirty days to find somewhere else to be, despite the Commissioners having in their charter a requirement to support and maintain libraries in the county. The Commissioners have also appropriated library levy funding to themselves and did not then use most of that money to support a library in the county, so it's fairly clear that they intend to destroy the Grants Pass location. As I have noted and mentioned in other places, the way that libraries are set up in many places makes them vulnerable to local politics, and if that local political entity decides they don't want a library any more, for whatever reason they choose, it will be difficult for a library to sustain its own existence.
The state of Arizona implemented a statewide school voucher program, and then basically decided there was to be no oversight or standards required for any entity that wanted to call itself a school and accept those tax dollars, so there's no really good way of finding out whether any charter or private school is actually going to educate children, or is mostly just going to pocket the money of those they convinced to buy into their "school" and leave the kids with nothing.
The Attorney General of the State of Louisiana has laid out guidelines on how she believes schools can display Christian text in classrooms without it being a complete and total violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The guidance is mostly "school funds can't be used to purchase or display the posters, and don't put the posters anywhere where it might look like the individual teacher endorses these words." There's also a suggestion to put it next to other informative material that is about law and the traditions of law that undergird the United States traditions. The law that brings these posters into being is still an Establishment Clause violation, but even if it weren't, the supposedly approved posters have basically nil educational value, as they are not about the traditions of law that influence the United States, but instead are about how this specific religious text was permitted in public schooling for significant amounts of time, including in the presence of textbooks and instructional material, and a small selection of the court cases about the display of religious texts or practices in public school spaces. They are very much about putting religious text in the public school, with perhaps a fig leaf's worth of an attempt to make it "educational."
Also, it has twelve commandments on it, because the use of the full stop is the end of one commandment and the beginning of the next. If they wanted to have ten commandments on it, they would need to do the usual joining of the first two to become "I am the Lord your God, you shall not have other gods before me" and the joining of the last two so that all of the covetous sins are all in one "thou shalt not." Which is petty, sure, but even the religious educators that I had for my childhood made sure that the Ten Commandments were actually, y'know, ten.
A cybertruck full of explosives detonated itself in front of a hotel in Las Vegas. Which once again reminded us of how much modern cars are surveillance devices with no oversight of what happens with their footage. What was less noted was how this was also a politically motivated entity - no, not against the person whose hotel the car exploded in front of, but against the Democratic Party and the person who he derided as an unqualified candidate. That's been downplayed because of the understanding that the perpetrator suffered from significant mental health issues, but to say that only the mentally ill have such kinds of plans and ideas is to stick your head in the sand and ignore the reality around you. Regrettably, we have too many instances of this, most recently including a person who committed mass violence with his vehicle in New Orleans, defeating the police blockade by driving on the sidewalk, and who seemed ready to commit more mass violence with guns and explosives after exiting his vehicle. Being killed by police stopped the further violence, but not the initial bout. These things are not easy to predict, nor are they easy to stop once they are underway. And, as we see, it doesn't take much for one person to commit mass violence any more.
In their rush to curry favor with the incoming administration, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp has decided that it's now okay to engage in gendered insults, to take shots at trans people, and otherwise to promote the attitudes and environment that the incoming administration hopes to codify in law or remove protections for any contrary opinion. Why would they do that? Well, when you stop innovating or providing things that people actually want, you often then turn to making it so the law or the government prevents anyone from being a real competitor to you. And therefore, the platform must change to match the prejudices of the incoming administration if it wants to stay on the inside and keep the privileges it has.
Several neighborhoods in Los Angeles are ablaze, and neither nature nor the capacity of the firefighting reservoirs are being cooperative in trying to bring the fires under control. And as much as there is a lot of blame going around about insufficient resources, there's also climate change making the fires worse, and if there's a city organization to blame for insufficient resources, you could probably look at the outsizeness of the Los Angeles Police Department budget compared to every other city service and possibly do the radical thing of shifting money away from the cops to other services, instead of to cops from services.
A camp in Northern Minnesota that was for children with HIV/AIDS, but had also branched out into being a camp with homeless and queer camps is closing.. Which is bittersweet for the children whose ashes are buried there, and also a loss for the kids who were using the camp. The framing of the first story did mention the other uses, but set the closure as a good thing, that there weren't enough children with HIV/AIDS to sustain funding. (Thanks,
shanaqui, for the clarification.)The childhood HIV rate is a cause for joy because the transmission of HIV from mother to baby is no longer very prevalent at all. And a triumph of the science that has made HIV much less of the death sentence it used to be, allowing people who are infected to have normal life expectancies and that has also developed things like PrEP that can stop the transmission of the virus from one person to another.
The United Kingdom is reluctant to apologize to all of the lesbian mothers whose children they removed from custody, because they were lesbians.
Pregnancy and childbirth is a potentially dangerous activity, but many of the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth can be handled, assuming someone wants to go see medics about them, or have checkups. As we have been re-learning for several years to this point, just because something is natural does not necessarily mean it is superior for anyone, much less everyone.
On living as a queer person, outside the systems that are meant to force conformity and identity on everyone, and about claiming your queerness and yourself.
Ponds that have been brought back to themselves after they had been dried up or otherwise transformed by the needs of farming equipment and farmland,
In technology, Netflix has produced and distributed all kinds of content that nobody cares about, even if they are theoretically watching it, and this is the reason why they are successful. So if you've thought that Netflix has been terrible for a very long time, you're right, it has. And they're probably at least partially responsible for all the other streaming services sucking and being expensive, as well. Because we were sold the idea that streaming would be superior to cable, and instead, what we got was cable with some other stuff, because Netflix only cares whether you're paying the subscription fee or not.
The industrialization period of England is before what is commonly referred to as the Industrial Revolution, brought on by increased yields in agriculture allowing more people to engage themselves in different kinds of work.
Last for tonight, the latest installation of an annual series about what people got stuck in genitals and rectums over the course of the last year.
And a reworking of the first DOOM level so that it is instead an art gallery experience, complete with drinks and hors d'oeuvres. Which gets paired with an implementation of DOOM in a single PDF, showing just what kind of nonsense you can achieve in the Portable Document Format.
(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: 2025-01-16 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 08:28 pm (UTC)Potential correction re: the closure of the HIV/AIDs camp, according to someone who says they were one of the medical directors of the camp, they closed for lack of funding, and had still been operating serving queer kids. That person asked people to stop spreading the erroneous story.
(The article link is also dead for me, which suggests the article may have been removed?)
no subject
Date: 2025-01-16 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-17 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-17 03:44 am (UTC)