Elliott Dunstan

Let us begin with something that I think encapsulates the idea of "ha, ha, only serious": an explanation as to why so much of United States right-wing political discourse sounds the way it does: they're all enthusiasts of a specific form of inter-racial pornography that casts white men into the role of having their white women possessions have sex with black men, cuckolding them, and/or having themselves forcibly gender-transitioned into women and from there turned into caricatures of women such that they can also become the sexual targets of black men. Which sounds very weird, until you realize that enthusiasm leads them into believing in conspiracy theories and in throwing specific kinds of labels at their opponents to cast them as the white men of insufficient virility and manliness that they will be the ones cuckolded and gender-transitioned by black men, instead of properly conservative white men.

As children continue to be used as human shields for the forces of censorship to attack public libraries, and governments find less obviously-unconstitutional avenues to force censorship on public libraries, youth and teenagers are being routinely denied age-appropriate books on topics censors assert are categorically inappropriate for them. Queer people and sex are obviously atop the list, but so are books accurately describing the experiences of not-white people, either contemporarily or historically. There's one quibble I have, and that it's the 404 article devotes any space at all to not immediately dismissing the idea that books these days are more like social media posts and dumbed-down comparatively. The rest is solid, about the dangers of governments agreeing that children are the property of their parents, rather than independent beings with rights of their own toward access to information, and the high likelihood that items removed to age-inappropriate places will not circulate and be weeded and not bought. Age-appropriate treatments of material make conversations easier, not harder, unless your idea of "when to have the conversation" is "never," and if that's the case, then good luck, sucker. Children and teenagers are infinitely resourceful and treat censorship as something to be routed around wherever possible.

Of course, it doesn't help when the touted paper of record completely changed the way it covered trans people after ownership changes and pressure from governments, making it a much more hostile paper than it had been.

Daveigh Chase, known to most people in the United States as the English voice of Ogino Chihiro in Spirited Away or Lilo Pelekai in the animated movie Lilo & Stitch, died from complications of meningitis and sepsis, at 35 years of age. Which is a tragedy all by itself, because it breaks the great sage's blessing.

The composer of the soundtrack for the original DOOM game, Bobby Price, has died at 81 years of age, and there are probably a lot of people who played E1M1 in his honor. Prince was also responsible for the soundtracks to games like Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad, Duke Nukem 3D, and the Commander Keen games, so I have definitely heard a lot of his work and enjoyed it greatly.

( And More… )

Last out, The quest for the franchise for women started early and strong in the history of the United Kingdom. Organizations to destigmatize and otherwise try to get the constitutional rights for people we now think of as LGBTQ+ have been around since the 1920s in the United States, if not earlier. (And were treated as one might expect them to be in a repressed and homophobic society that still intended to enforce the Comstock Act.)

And the time-defying tricks of typing, the educated guesses needed for clicking and dragging, and the ways that interfaces can be smartly defined to make the process of computing typing, clicking, and dragging work in ways that feel natural, easy, and most importantly, that don't crunch when the user is trying to do something the computer hasn't completely caught up to yet, which pairs extremely well with a history, with examples, of how browsers and programs need to be able to render language that uses Arabic letters correctly, the programs, engines, and specifications built to do exactly that, and two outstanding problems with solutions and specifications drawn up that have yet to be implemented. Because, at its core, Arabic is both calligraphic and justified when written, and a computer needs to make decisions that scribes and calligraphers would be able to make through long practice and by knowing the shape of what they were writing.

(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.)