Let us begin with continuations in the war against the public receiving accurate, unbiased information. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was told it would receive zero support from the U.S. government, in the same veins of executive orders that proclaim that the executive has the real power of the purse and Congressional appropriations and their amounts mean nothing to his whims. Like other such orders, the actual validity and power of the executive to do this is suspect at best and nonexistent in reality. And, of course, there's always a group of ghouls ready to step in and take over - A spokesmodel for the administration said the conservative propaganda network OAN would take over providing content for Voice of America broadcasts. Swift backlash about the degraded quality and obvious partisan slant of OAN followed from those who actually understand and know what Voice of America broadcasts were supposed to do.

A federal judge granted an injunction against the current administration's intent to zero out the funding of the Institute for Museum and Library Services. With the news, coming just a little after the person currently in charge of IMLS indicated he wanted libraries to be an essential part of propaganda efforts, and strongly suggesting that the people suing would win their case on the merits, there is now flux on funding, but also, a need to have Congresscritters continue to insist upon a budget that contains funds for IMLS in fiscal year 2026.

The administrator dismissed the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, by e-mail after the injunctions were announced, because of pressure against her by people who think that a Black woman is completely unqualified to do anything that might have white people subordinate to her, and possibly in petty revenge for being told no that he couldn't simply zero out the IMLS budget. When questioned on the matter, a spokesmodel for the executive proclaimed that Dr. Hayden was involved in unacceptable DEI and in promoting harmful materials to children, proving that the spokesmodel and her bosses have zero idea of what the Library of Congress actually does.

The Copyright Office dropped a pre-print of a report that excoriated LLMs and is poised to rule that the widespread copyright violation and stealing of copyrighted works involved in creating datasets for LLMs are, in fact, widespread copyright violations and not simply the cost of doing business. Almost immediately after, the administration dismissed the Register of Copyrights, which could be merely convenient timing or could also be a revenge firing for the Copyright Office telling all the techbros that they do have to respect the copyright law and the copyrights of the people they're stealing from.

Persons appointed by the Executive who claim to be the new Librarian of Congress and Register of Copyrights were turned away by the actual interim Librarian of Congress and Register of Copyrights and the staff of the Library of Congress. Because those people who were supposedly appointed are very likely not to be the people in the job according to statute.

All of these actions, however, are things that the Congress could possibly assert that it, nor the Executive, have exclusive or primary control over, and therefore tell the Executive to pound sand. This, however, requires a Congress that actually wants to maintain its independence, rather than functioning as the Duma of the United States.

( As usual, plenty of US Politics, but many other objects as well )

Going out for this post, the legacy of Dave Brubeck is in good music, yes, but also in a staunch refusal to allow segregation to break up his groups or to prevent Black people from enjoying jazz wherever in the venue they wanted to. (Older piece, but also, lots of people say May 4th, or 5/4 in the US nomenclature, is Dave Brubeck day, based on his iconic Take Five.)

A takedown of the Tesla Cybertruck that focuses entirely on how much it fails at being a truck, doing truck tasks, and fostering a healthy truck culture.

And Studio Ghibli releasing hundreds of images form their films for people to use within the boundaries of common sense and for individuals to further enjoy the films. Which is lovely, because of the lushness of the images in the films, but also because this is a continual shot against people using plagiarism machines to replicate their style (poorly.) and others who do not find these films worthwhile on their own

(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.)

Let us begin with the formal dissolution of NaNoWriMo, after several bad decisions, scandals, and questionable alliances had many of the participants moving away from the official forums or having official affiliations with the group.

musesfool gives us a poem from Barbara Jane Reyes that is a prayer to the Goddess of Lost Things, but the things that are lost are not merely the things that are physical, and several of the lost things are misplaced at a time where they are needed.

Social media influencers and thrill-seekers are still attempting to make contact with isolated peoples that have expressed a wish to stay isolated. Because the clicks and the potential revenue are worth more than the violation of international treaty, right? Or the possibility of bringing a disease with you that the isolated people have no defense against.

Obscenely wealthy person plans on going to another country because she's no longer getting a tax-preferred status, tries to soften the headline by claiming she'd be happy to pay more tax to maintain her preferred status.

There are burgeoning services for Catholic parishes, dioceses, and schools, to help make sure there isn't financial malfeasance and to give transparency and communication between clergy and laity to make those places work better for everyone. A far cry, indeed, from the Church that expected the laity to attend, say the appropriate prayers at the appropriate time, and otherwise just trust that the men who were priests and administrators were going to do well with it, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

There are a lot of people out there who want the "right" people to have more children, and to have designer babies, and while many of them are also allegiants of eugenetics, people who decry the presence of women in the workplace (or doing anything other than popping out babies and raising them), and ideologies that praise white culture over any and all others, most of them also don't have a thought in their heads about what it would take to actually successfully raise all those kids. They've gotten to "Well, women should do it, because the only women we want are women who will enjoy having and raising children," and they think that will be sufficient as a national policy. Unfortunately for them, history did not begin in the 1950s, and therefore what they believe is timeless and traditional is actually quite newfangled and not very good for a lot of the population.

The National Health Service of the UK has announced that emergency contraception will be available at all community pharmacies for no charge, so as to try and alleviate some of the effects of variations in access and cost. This goes with plenty of other contraception available for no charge through the NHS.

Microsoft employees who protested the company's involvement in allowing Israel to prosecute its war against Gaza received retaliation for their act, either being ordered to retire a few days earlier or fired from their position.

( Your semi-monthly dose of U.S. politics, technology hacks, and people behaving poorly inside )

Last out for tonight, the trend of staying and living at your parents house for longer has been happening for quite some time, admittedly because there's less pressure for someone to leave and get an education, or to leave and put themselves into service in some other household. The people who are gung-ho about repealing child labor laws are probably hoping they can point to this kind of research and call it natural for children to go to work, never mind all the laws that are in place to prevent the exploitation of children and to make sure that they get enough sleep to go to their required schooling the next day.

And something to make you smile - a project to connect children to elders in Saidosho by turning the elders into trading card characters has worked extraordinarily well, with an entire TCG developing of these various community members and their skills.

(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.)

Let's begin with a useful guide by bladespark, The Hopless Autist's Guide To Aproaching People In Public, which focuses less on the conversation topics and how to talk to others, and more on the more potentially terrifying part of how to find someone who might be interested in making small talk or conversation. Handy, of course, for more than just autists trying to find people to talk to.

A game about trust and variations on the Prisoner's Dilemma, to show us how the environment and the rules of the situation we are in influence what kind of behavior will be optimal, as a way of explaining why truces break out among people who are nominally completely at war with each other, and why people who are supposedly at peace sometimes break out in vicious fighting.

A site looking to collect and recommend alternatives to those companies and persons that have aligned themselves with retrograde forces.

Mr. James Harrison, who made a habit of donating plasma every two weeks from age 18 to age 81, and whose plasma was used to create treatments to prevent a mother's immune system from attacking their developing fetus, saving the lives of more than 2.4 million babies.

The Moms for Liberty-affiliated entity called BookLooks is shutting down, for reasons that are not yet unclear, so it is possible that the cherry-picking, proof-texting site whose purpose was to get as many books banned as possible will reappear in some new or more horrible context, but for the moment, it's worth celebrating that those who were dedicated to hateful ends will no longer be doing that particular piece of work. Now is also a good time to save the receipts of what the site did and what it was responsible for.

Eric Carle drew a book that had simplified drawings of naked people in it, and therefore several people have, over time, tried to get the book banned because it contained nudity. Much like other books that also do the same, even though the nudity is very clearly nonsexual.

( An awful lot of the usual U.S. politics inside )

Last for tonight, the fish doorbell is in season again. There's a camera at a particular point in time where spawning fish will be stopped on their journey. If you spot a fish, click the doorbell, and the keeper will open a channel for the fish to get through.

Additionally, take the shoulds out of your reading. And quite possibly also your listening, watching, playing, and other things. That which is supposed to be enjoyable often gets plagued by these shoulds, and that an make the enjoyable un-enjoyed.

(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.)

Let us begin with a ruling that the paramilitary group the Proud Boys have forfeited their name and logos to the church their leader attacked while he was in Washington, D.C. in December of 2020. Since the group refused to pay a judgment against them for several million dollars from the attack, a judge has ruled that the group has to forfeit something of value to make up for the money, and has thus awarded the church the rights to the name and associated logos of the group.

A history of braille systems, from the Perkins School for the Blind, which has some fascinating parts about how many different codes and forms for getting the blind to be able to read text before the dot systems, and that there were more than a few dot systems involved before a certain amount of standardization, and then compression, was adopted for use. I have seen braille dots and felt them, and I even have a bookmark somewhere from our State Library that offers services to the blind and those who have difficulty reading standard print that has the alphabet on it (so it would probably only be useful for Grade 1), but it would definitely take time and extra sensitivity in my fingers to get used to reading the dots, like any other thing.

After here, there's still yet more of the next few weeks of an administration that seems determined to destroy everything it touches, through malice, even if that malice turns out to be incompetence as well. There will be other things, I promise, by the end, but there's going to be a lot of politics in between.

( An awful lot of politics )

Last out for tonight, a library of craft patterns and craft pattern publications in the public domain.

And Soemone finally pushing back against the idea that technology and screens are all causing our brains to rot and become mush. Convenient scapegoats are convenient, but there's at least some research out there that's not taking the idea as a given and trying to fit their data to it.

Which I pair with the suggestion made in the 1950s that philosophy as it is studied in most Western nations relies on the bachelorhood of many of its greats, and that reliance is a weakness woven into the structure of those philosophical traditions.

(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.)

The final challenge for 2025 encourages us to go forward into the year looking for moments of joy.

Today, I invite you to pause for a little and…

Challenge #15

Talk about an unexpected joyous moment you experienced last year.

[hellip;]

Joy comes in lots of forms. Did something make you giggle or crack a smile when you didn’t expect to? Or feel surprisingly content, satisfied, pleased, glad, or warm?

The moment can be quiet, loud, brief, big — maybe it lasted a second, maybe it spanned months. Maybe it was something you saw or heard or read, or something you or somebody did.

There’s no right or wrong answer; only your answer! ;D

( Why I have to work hard to remember the good things, and good things that I remember )

So yeah, there are those moments of joy and happiness that happen all throughout the year, and I try to pay at least some attention to them. (And some of them end up reappearing on performance evaluations for the year, or I dip back into them when I want to reassure myself that people do enjoy the works that I do for them in exchanges and other.) I highly recommend that if you don't already, that you start keeping a folder of the good things people say about you, your fanworks, or your excellence at your work, hobby, or otherwise. They can be really helpful for bludgeoning brainweasels trying to convince you that you have had no impact nor worth to anyone else.

Challenge #13 asks us to expand our circle of people we've made contact with.

For me, one of the best parts of fandom is the opportunity to interact with people who share my passions. Whether that's directly through comments or fanwork exchanges, or more indirectly by moderating communities, or reccing new work to people we already know -- talking to each other is one way I show fandom love.

Challenge #13

Interact with someone in fandom you haven't talked with before.

[…]

We all have different levels of comfort in putting ourselves out there. And while we here at Fandom Snowflake love to challenge people to go out of their comfort zone, we also want you to feel safe. You don't have to strike up a conversation with a total stranger (unless you want to). You could try any number of things! Comment on someone else's journal, or comment on a fanwork. Speak up in a Discord conversation. Leave kudos on a work at AO3. Reblog a fanwork on Tumblr. Fill a prompt at a community. Chat up the random person who posted about your favorite fandom here in our challenges. Find someone to wave to in tags. Really, anything that has you communicating with someone else counts.

Here's some suggestions if you want them:

- Challenge #8 asked people to post a promo or manifesto for one of their beloved fandoms. Look at the comments for someone who shares your interests, and leave them a comment!

- Challenge #9 asked people to create a fanwork. It's a great place to find new people!

- Go to AO3 and sort the fics in your favorite fandom by comments, and leave a comment or kudos on one you've never read before.

- If you would like to find a community that suits your interests, try ysabetwordsmith's Follow Friday tag. The communities are sorted by topic. Maybe comment on a recent post there, or post something relevant yourself.

One of the things that helps build community is having shared things to talk about, and so when Snowflake rolls around, I try to make a concerted effort to comment on various challenge posts and the like. Of course, because so many people participate, I inevitably fall behind on taking care of such things, but I do try to give comments where I have something to talk about with someone else. And most of the time, the people that I'm talking to are usernames that I haven't seen before on Dreamwidth.

( On the matter of talking to people you've never met before )

In any case, this post, like all the others, is a perfect place to jump in and say hello! Ask questions, drop factoids, show links, all of those things. Just remember that it's more of a salon in my living room (as jenett says) than the public square, and comport yourselves accordingly.

Challenge #11 asks us to examine the building blocks and units of storytelling.

In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. […]

What is that one (or several!) trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme that grips your attention whenever it pops up in fandom or fanworks? What is it about it that works for you or appeals to you? If you have any recs or examples, feel free to include them!

I don't have a bulletproof trope or other such unit of storytelling that draws me to a story or guarantees that it will be enjoyable. (Sometimes I think these challenges, and a fair amount of my fannish life, would be easier if I did have an OTP or something that was guaranteed to make it good for me.) The skill of someone using tropes and their storytelling elements can make a story better or worse for me, but it's not going to make or break the story itself.

( What do I like (and dislike) though? )

Challenge #10 asks us to find the very first of something.

Challenge #10

In your own space, talk about one of your fandom firsts. This could be your first fandom, your first fandom friend, the first fanwork you created, the first fanwork you interacted with... The options are endless! […]

Sometimes firsts are forgotten, but sometimes they stand out in your mind even years later. (Or days later, there's no time limit on firsts!) Hopefully this challenge can bring back some good memories from your fandom life.

( A few of my firsts )

Anyway, as it is, I've got a lot of firsts, and plenty of things that have gone on from there, and the lovely comments and kudos that I've received have been wonderful for continuing things along.

Hello! 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.

( Plenty more inside, including serious allegations and Establishment Clause violations )

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.)

As requested by azurelunatic, who has people interested in how I can use my voice commands to make sure that if I need to go do something else, I don't miss out on anything that's happened on the TV or the movie in the interim.

This is a thing that requires four components to work in sequence - the voice assistant, the smart home brain, a programmable IR blaster, and an IR receiver attached to the device that's driving the video stream. So our workflow goes: Rhasspy → Home Assistant → Broadlink IR blaster → FLIRC receiver.

Rhasspy has featured from the very beginning of this series, and the intent scripts involved in getting voice input paired up with actions. The key insight into making this work was getting Rhasspy to understand numeric input and pass those parameters to Home Assistant, such that I can develop a sentence to train Rhasspy on that will collect the correct parameters, and an intent script and supplemental script on the Home Assistant side to format those parameters in a way that Home Assistant is expecting to run a timer with, running the appropriately-named timer with those parameters, and then repeating back what function it heard me invoke and any parameters that were passed to it. The time-out script accepts parameters, or, if none are provided, uses the default value that I've set for it (two minutes, which is the approximate length of a commercial break in the United States.) The time-out timer runs in the same way as any other timer helper or arbitrary timer, and there is an automation listening in Home Assistant for when that timer runs out that will run appropriate actions for the expiry of that timer.

What happens when that timer runs out is, essentially, the IR blaster fires a specific code to the FLIRC receiver interprets as having had the "pause" key pressed on a remote. Which sounds like it's easy, but it's not, because that IR blaster has no database of codes to look up to know what to send, and instead has to be taught what various IR codes are by having them beamed at it from a convenient remote. The FLIRC is just an IR receiver and interpreter. It can't transmit anything to the IR blaster to teach it anything. And while we have wireless keyboards for the convenience of the ten-foot interface, those keyboards don't transmit IR signals to a receiver. (nor do we want them to.)

What I do have, and have had, are programmable remotes, like a Logitech Harmony (no longer manufactured) or the Skip1s remote from the FLIRC folks. They do have databases of IR codes that can be downloaded into their remote, and therefore, that gives our IR blaster something to learn from. (Digression: The FLIRC can be used as a receiver to learn codes from an OEM remote and then teach those codes to the Skip1s, if the device isn't in the Skip database, but that's very much advanced fooling-about with both of those devices, and if you have the OEM remote, you can just teach the Broadcom device directly, rather than going through a Skip or other universal remote. I use programmable universal remotes because I want one remote to control all the things, rather than having to deal with multiple remotes to adjust things. And because while using the voice assistant is great, I don't want to have to use it (or a smartphone app) to do all the sound and picture-related remote control stuff.)

Actually getting IR codes into the IR blaster is actually an adventure in building another callable script that sets the remote into learning mode, and then goes through a sequence of "waiting for command" inputs, where in the script, I tell it what device it's learning how to control, and what the name of the command its learning is. Thankfully, the process on how to get a remote to learn, and then how to get it to send commands, is very well-documented in Home Assistant, far better than the underlying Python library that the integration is based on. It's a very manual process, but when set up right, I only have to do it once, and the IR blaster remembers what it's been taught and can then turn around and transmit the same thing. That's remote → IR blaster → FLIRC receiver, and then I can use both the remote or the IR blaster as needed.

Since Home Assistant can use the IR blaster to transmit to the receiver, the actual automation listening for the end of the time-out timer has one command associated with it - use the IR blaster to transmit a press of the "pause" key to the receiver. So long as the receiver is within range to receive, it will receive the keypress and do the associated action. Thus, the whole chain completes, voice command to script to timer to automation to IR transmission to keypress. It doesn't feel like a complex operation, because when it works, it works, and it doesn't invite contemplation of all the parts that have to work with each other to achieve the equivalent of pressing a key on a remote at the right time.

There are drawbacks to this setup. The biggest and most obvious one is that the pause key will only work on whatever item currently has focus on the receiving computer. If you tend to use picture-in-picture to watch multiple streams and/or listen to multiple sounds, the time-out keypress will only hit the one that the underlying operating system believes is currently in focus. As far as I know, there's no "pause all/resume all" that can be transmitted and interpreted from the things I have available. (After all, even though computers are very good at doing multiple tasks in sequence, humans are thought to be the kind of beings that only want to concentrate on one thing at a time, so why would you need something that pauses and/or resumes everything at once?) If that does actually exist, then I'll do my best to figure out how to incorporate it into scripting and see if I can teach it properly to the IR blaster / receiver that this is what I want.

Second, what the operating system believes is in focus and what the human believes is in focus are not always the same, so sometimes when I'm trying to get one thing to pause, it turns out the operating system has focus on something else. That requires manual intervention to get the focus where it should be, and at that point, you're already on the machine that needs to be stopped, so you may as well just click the right pause button yourself.

And third, not all programs, sites, streams, and the like respond correctly to a pause key, so there are occasions where I could push all the pause keys I wanted to, in whatever way I wanted to, and nothing would happen, because the site or program doesn't recognize it or has locked out that particular input from going through until some other thing is cleared, acknowledged, or otherwise managed. Thankfully, the number of situations where this has happened to me is pretty small, and there are sometimes some efficient and effective workarounds to this problem like the aforementioned picture-in-picture pop-out, which is usually pretty properly responsive when it's the thing that has focus, regardless of what it going on with the underlying website and its playback controls.

This idea is also very scalable and configurable - so long as you can get the remote to learn the appropriate command from another remote, or you have the appropriate base64 encodings that will work for the remote available so that you can drop it directly into the learned codes file, and the receiver on the other end knows what to do with the codes that it receives, you can basically scale this idea to anything that you might want to do with a remote control. I'd suggest using it only for things where you can either have a gap for execution in between commands, or if you have a workflow that can immediately begin recording a new input from the voice assistant after the last command has finished executing. Your own set-up will likely depend on what applications you want to control and their potential quirks, but it is rather nice to have that option in place where you can either let the commercials play and then pause before the action resumes, or give yourself until a breaking point and then have the media pause automatically so that you can task switch without FOMO or so that you can get your brain in gear to do the actual switching instead of just continuing to binge whatever it is that you're doing. (Kickstarting executive function with computers can be really helpful, if for no other reason than that they will do exactly what you tell them to do, on time.)