And on that downer, let’s move onto the projects as quickly as we can.
While I haven’t seen any evidence either way, I suspect that I may not get any use out of my Post.News or Spoutible accounts for much longer. Both sites have stopped sending out behind-the-scenes newsletters, and both seem to have absurd technical problems. Post takes forever to…well, post, these days. Spoutible usually won’t show the main feed, and sometimes won’t open the box to post, either. Issues like that, especially combined with the silence, don’t bode particularly well…not that I spend much time on either site, after posting my blog announcements.
Oh, and meanwhile, Cohost announced that they could run out of money as early as next month , though they have no plans to shut down, yet. But given that they see an acquisition as a viable and realistic alternative to shutting down, it may go down a bad road, soon, too. Update: Over a few days, an outpouring of subscribers has put off their crisis for a few months, which should remind each of us to pay for the independent work that we want to keep around. As the Hillel paraphrase goes, if not you, then who?
You’ll notice that I still don’t list Threads or Bluesky as places to contact me. Both require mobile apps to sign up, and I absolutely will not do that until I have no other options for communication…
Anyway, we could soon see a scenario where I only post to Mastodon and Diaspora, which feels on-brand for me, but also saddens me that the “alternative social media” space may not last much longer, reconsolidating under precisely the two billionaires who controlled it a couple of years back, though with a stronger Fediverse stalking them.
As a side-note on this situation, I do need to point out how much I appreciate the Cohost team’s transparency, here. I’ve watched companies try to hide their financial dangers as long as possible, even missing payroll cycles and hoping that their employees wouldn’t notice, before needing to shut the doors. While announcements like this attract a lot of garbage people who want to see things fail, it also gives users enough insight to make reasonable decisions.
Anyway, in happier and more relevant-to-the-blog news, I’ll have more about this in Wednesday’s post, but over the weekend, I connected the blog to a small service—Bridgy—that connects certain social media sites to the Indie Web. In short, from now on, if you engage with my blog announcement posts on Mastodon, you should see the results on the blog post that the announcement refers to, slightly above the comment box on the page.
I haven’t had the time to clean up the code to commit it. However, if you read my first post on Indie Web technologies, then you know that I put a lot of work into making the blog more “social,” last week, as I saw the proprietary-but-independent social networks dry up, discussed above.
I’ll roll the changes out “officially” in the coming days, and so you’ll see some repetition in next week’s post, but so far, pages now identify me as the author and owner with a social profile—if you look for the h-card
microformat, you’ll find it—and should display any Webmentions that people send based on my posts.
Alas, it does have a pretty serious downside: It now takes an astonishingly long time to publish blog posts, long enough that I stopped the deployment twice for Thursday’s post, thinking that it broke down, especially when my Internet connection also had problems. I can see this becoming frustrating, if I can’t speed this up or if no Webmentions actually come in for all the work.
Even so, as mentioned on Wednesday, I intend to keep pursuing the various Indie Web protocols. While I realize that not everybody has the capacity to casually get involved on this sort of level—domain names cost money, even if cost nothing else did and took no time to set up—it would also please me greatly if conventional “social media” mostly went away entirely, replaced by personal websites with enough features for people to connect. I’d also happily accept a scenario where a network like the Fediverse integrates the Indie Web protocols, but I realize that feels like more of a stretch.
I needed to bump library versions for Bicker, Fýlakas Onomáton, Generic Board Game, the Little Scuttlers, the Renewal Database, Roku Wake, and Slackup.
I still have a couple of library updates left to clear out. Then, I need to—as mentioned—clean up and commit the various changes to the blog, then deal with some of the nagging problems that the last few days have caused, and I should probably style the inbound Webmentions. And I also need to get back to Notoboto, because I have some interesting ideas to play with, there.
Oh, and relevant to the Indie Web work, I may start a new (small) project, on top of everything else. We’ll have to see if I have time for that.
Credits: The header image is Barricade 18 March 1871 by an unknown photographer, long in the public domain due to an expired copyright.
]]>I based this post on Is the feminist movement ruining chivalry?, which I originally answered on Sunday, November 4th, 2018. As you can guess, I have edited and extended it substantially to better fit the tone and format of Entropy Arbitrage.
I specifically wanted to post something useful for Women’s History Month, especially since I started the month complaining about people trying to stop AI.
In some ways, this post feels out of date, not in terms of anything that I say, but because I don’t really see people talking about chivalry or feminism, anymore, which I see as a shame. The problems haven’t gone away, nor has the movement, but discussion has become balkanized around issues.
We should start this discussion by working out exactly what we mean by chivalry. Looking at Wikipedia’s article on chivalry, we see that it describes a medieval code of conduct for knights in good standing. Scanning down the page, we can find Léon Gautier’s Ten Commandments of Chivalry, which he compiled from a variety of sources.
On that list, I don’t know about you, but I see religion, defending the weak, patriotism, fearlessness, violent xenophobia, military action, honesty, and generosity. By the way, grab that third item. We might need it, later.
You might balk at that list. It has nothing to do with women, after all, and Gautier wrote in the late nineteenth century, and about literary history. But if you dig around enough, you’ll find something even less comfortable: Since the word “chivalry” comes from the chevalier—French for horse-guy, more or less, or knight in particular—what written chivalric codes that we have…talk a lot about caring for your horse.
Now, this makes sense. Outside fiction, knights didn’t have any impressive role in society; they served as soldiers on horseback. Most of what we teach modern soldiers involves maintaining their equipment, so you would expect old-timey soldiers to spend a lot of their time maintaining what they might need for battle, rather than deep philosophical theories about how to treat random civilians back home.
And now we get to our main problem with tying this to feminism. If feminism affects your relationship with your horse, I’ll try not to judge, but…y’know, maybe take some time and figure out what you actually want out of your life.
I should mention that we’ve always known that chivalry didn’t really exist.
Don Quixote, published more than four hundred years ago, exists purely to satirize everything about how people viewed chivalry. The title character can’t afford a horse, though, so he rides around on an old donkey.
If it makes you feel better, though, Quixote’s version of chivalry does involve pressuring women into acting like some dainty paragons of virtue so that he can see himself as a grander protagonist, so the idea definitely comes from somewhere.
Really, though, chivalry as we think about it today comes from the not-so-ancient world of the nineteenth century. Most prominently, it draws on outgrowths of Romanticist art. And you’ll find its epicenter somewhere in the American South.
I’ve written about Romanticism before, right? Yes, I wrote a post on how the tension between the Enlightenment and Romanticism informs a lot of today’s political strife.
To refresh your memory, the Romantics didn’t like the rational, cooperative, or egalitarian nature of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment movement quickly grew from a couple dozen coffee shop customers writing to each other about “the consent of the governed” to the Atlantic Revolutions and then more revolutions, overthrowing monarchies and empires in favor of democracies.
The Romantics wanted “the magic” back, disliking the idea of a shared, empirical reality, where a monarch or a bishop might have an obligation to treat some impoverished person as an equal. They didn’t see “freedom” as equality under the law or protection from institutional abuse, but rather as unrestricted autonomy and permission to ignore other people’s needs. They wanted rugged individualism, a return to (often invented) tradition, and a world of emotional, rather than factual, truths.
The Confederate States embraced Romanticism fairly thoroughly. Romanticism, after all, works well with wanting to own people. It excuses your “emotional truths” about white supremacy overriding the reality of cruel bigotry. The “rugged individualism” provides cover for people wanting laws that insist on not treating people like property. And you can make up any bogus pseudo-medieval “tradition” and insist on it as the One True Way of living.
In that context, you see a mutated form of “chivalry” come up that, for example, rejected the legal system—a system that intends to apply the law equally to everyone to enforce the peace—in favor of personal dueling to defend honor. (Yes, duels happened elsewhere, but had a more ad hoc nature and, in the United States, generally took its cues from the South, which had a fair amount of influence…thanks to the sizeable enslaved population and the money that comes from the resulting mass-scale wage theft.)
Personal honor forms an important part of this, I should point out. Personal honor invariably finds itself bound in and with an upper-class identity. After all, nobody talks about the “honor” of poor people. And that personal honor dovetails with the obsession over tradition, because it becomes the responsibility of these upper-crust dolts to preserve and protect traditional-of-various-vintages social structures, like patriarchal power and slavery.
You might, understandably, think that I exaggerated, there. I won’t link to them, but you might want to seek out and skim the charter of the Ku Klux Klan. They call themselves out as dedicated to chivalry.
I realize that they caused and still cause a lot of harm, but can we talk about the absolute half-asleep goofiness of white supremacists for a bit?
First, their name comes from the Greek κύκλος (key-close, more or less), meaning circle. They named themselves the (poorly spelled) circle-family. They did that on purpose. But don’t worry, because they didn’t last long. The Enforcement Acts wiped them out.
How do we still have them around, then? The Birth of a Nation had such a strong positive response in theaters that the producers sold robes and hoods to fans. That makes the modern Klan the era’s version of (extremely racist) Trekkies.
Wait, though. We almost destroyed them a second time during World War II. Or, rather “we” didn’t. Superman did. Journalist Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the KKK and, to undermine their power, handed off their rituals, code-words, and other distinguishing features to the writers for The Adventures of Superman on the radio. The resulting story arc, Clan of the Fiery Cross, made the terrorists look about as valuable as…well, a lazy movie fan club, and membership cratered.
Also, remember when someone listed defending the weak as a central tenet of chivalry? Someone should tell the folks who like to commit violence against disadvantaged populations who claim to commit to chivalry.
OK, maybe you don’t like the idea of taking the KKK’s definition of chivalry. They also claim to embrace justice and humanity, after all, and…ha.
Do you know who also often throws “chivalry” around, though? Abortion clinic bombers. You know who I mean, the breed of impotent slime that would rather murder women from a cowardly safe distance than allow them to control their own bodies. They serve as the true face of chivalry.
If you had trouble keeping score, the path of chivalry cuts through a couple of ideas.
When you worry about the state of chivalry, you want to defend that charming list. Getting back to the question that spurred this walk down memory lane, can you really “ruin” a philosophy that started out as war plans and horse maintenance, came back as a “thought technology” to help control women and Black people, and sees most of its use in domestic terrorism? And honestly, even the original version seemed pretty racist, when it comes to dealing with infidels and such.
Personally, if you worry about the fate of chivalry, I’d recommend moving on.
A philosophy that I always hope catches on better than chivalry, we can summarize as “act like a good and kind person,” rather than insisting on dividing the world into people you ignore and people you think you can trick into linking you. Everybody’ll feel happier for it and you won’t get lumped in with the racist Trekkies of the 1910s or domestic terrorists nearly as often, nor will anyone write Spanish novels or American musicals written to make fun of your way of life.
You’ve all seen the musical, right? The movie doesn’t have the highest production values or best talent, but you can at least find it on streaming, if you can’t find a decent stage production. It’ll let you note the interplay of the “knight of the woeful countenance” pressuring a random woman to conform to his literal delusion of her as a dainty lady to pursue.
If you want to blame feminism for women not wanting men to control them, that seems maybe-reasonable, but don’t pretend that the rest of us ever considered that control acceptable behavior, because you didn’t personally hear the complaints…
Credits: The header image is untitled by an uncredited PxHere photographer, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
]]>To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context.
This should go without saying—even though I plan to repeat it with every Book Club installment—but Content Advisories do not suggest any sort of judgment on my part, only topics that come up in the work that I noticed and might benefit from a particular mood or head space for certain audiences. I provide it to help you make a decision, rather than a decision in and of itself.
The album has the following, rather extensive, blurb.
Hello dearest magnificent wonders!!! Your attention is a precious diamond!!! And with this feeling I bring this new work called Harmonique - Cauac Ox!!! Hey please let me know your impressions ok!!!
At first I want to thank these wonderful beings:
- Robbie J. from Q.L.D.- Austrália
- Rosalie from Gold Coast, Q.L.D. - Austrália
- Anthea from Burnaby, BC - Canadá
- Ruth Filbe from Great Britain
- Ines Fuchs from Germany
- Comtesse Francine from Nancy - France
- Amanda Starkid of Brightness from U.S.A.
- Jennifer Ladydream Wolf from Louisiana - U.S.A.
- Brittney Jai Pleiadian Rainbow from New York City - U.S.A.
- Anna Bisda from Ontario - Canadá
- Anika Neubauer & Surtur Houston from Germany
- Violet Raven of Light
Thank youuuuuuuuuuu for all my family and for all the wonderful co-creators who believe, truth, and help me to build this work.The cover artwork was developed by Ray - ( http://indiecover.net/ ), one great Art & Creative Director and Graphic Designer. Thank youuu soo much broo!!!
Cauac Ox describes a cycle between 2008-2009. The songs bring the information about the soul’s Lightworkers Transformations around the planet. Each music is a piece of the earth voice manifested naturally during this cycle.
We celebrate the friendship and the trust through the connection of the heart!!!
Hope everyone have a wonderful time listen!!!
Your attention is a precious diamond!!!
Thank you!!!!
I admit that this doesn’t provide us with much information about what to expect, but I can’t fault them for enthusiasm…
By the way, I should note that Jamendo has become something of a sore spot in the Free Culture community. It once served almost exclusively as a way to discover Creative Commons-licensed music, with search features even geared towards helping that sort of search. On the side, it helped those artists commercially license their work. Over the years, it seems to have shifted away from the former and focused much more heavily on the latter. Then, earlier this year, they signed all artists up with a shady reseller without notice.
As such, while I recommend the album, tread lightly around the site that—fifteen years ago, before any of these problems started appearing—the artists chose to distribute it on.
Oh, I should also note that—unless I fouled up my notes—I discovered the album, because clong clong moo posted a link to one of the tracks on their blog. You need to do some work to filter for the licenses that you want, on their site, but they do good work of sifting through the various music distribution sites, such as Jamendo and Bandcamp, to pull out interesting pieces released under Creative Commons licenses.
I appreciate the sparseness of the work. We have a guitar and a strong voice, and nothing else to dress up the music.
Despite several lyricists and multiple languages, I can’t help note how consistent this album feels, where you can almost believe that they meant the songs to tell a story together. Personally, I also happen to like the music, even though I probably wouldn’t generally consider it “my thing.” In fact, I think that I like it enough that I have trouble finding things to say about it; I’d rather listen…
I might argue that many of the songs run significantly longer than they need to, with lyrics containing a couple of short verses turning into seven-minute pieces. I won’t necessarily call that bad, but I will say that it feels jarring to have read through and take notes on most of the lyrics, only to realize that the album has only hit the fourth or fifth song on the album.
This also stretches things, and may reflect on me more than it does the music, but parts of the album at least struck me as confusing. For example, Reach for the Star seems to also have the title One Wish, depending on where you look—making me think that I overlooked a track in my research—and I honestly couldn’t make heads or tails out of Send Your Angels.
I assume that you won’t find any opportunities, at this point. They released this album fifteen years ago, and apparently only the completed tracks. But if you dig up anyone who worked on this, please pass along my compliments…
As mentioned, this album often feels like it wants to tell a continuous story, from song to song, with a stargazer torn between reality and dreams, and often torn between friendship/love and loneliness. Many of the dreamier aspects have a mystical feel to them, with people able to harness fire and storms, or manipulate the nature of humanity through the perception of the color of celestial bodies.
I also appreciate the thoroughly weird metaphor of all of us sharing a connection, as if someone sliced each of us from the same cosmic pie.
Coming up next week, we’ll read Airlock Bound, a serialized short story. We’ll split it across two weeks, starting with the first five chapters of prose.
As mentioned previously, by the way, the list of potential works to discuss has run low, so I need to ask for help, again. If you know of any works—or want to create them—that fit these posts (fictional, narrative, Free Culture, available to the public, and not by creators who we’ve already discussed), please tell me about them. Every person who points me to at least one appropriate work with an explanation will receive a free membership on my ☕ Buy Me a Coffee page.
Anyway, while we wait for that, what did everybody else think about the music?
Credits: The header image is the album’s cover, seemingly released under the same terms as the music.
]]>Also, I don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.
Hispanic health disparities in the US trace back to the Spanish Inquisition from The Conversation
Accusations of sorcery and witchcraft along with sexualities outside heterosexual norms often collided with practices of health and medicine.
Hashtags: #Health #Gender #LatinAmerica #History
File this away under another block of world history that I’ve never heard about before now.
The condition of human beings, reduced to the extremest states of degradation and misery, cannot be exhibited in softened language, or adorn a polished page.
Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory
Image Not Shown: Musa Mustafa and four TikToks advertised by Crayo.ai
Inside the World of TikTok Spammers and the AI Tools That Enable Them from 404 Media
All of these get-rich-quick with low-effort AI video influencers are actually just advertising their own Discord channels, where they sell courses, resources, and coaching sessions on how to go viral.
Hashtags: #SocialMedia #AI #Scams
I should note that I didn’t decide to share this article to dump on TikTok. The scammers go there because people go there. When other networks gain traction, similar systems will show up there, too. And this goes back forever, too. Back in the early 2000s, when “content marketing” started to become an actual phrase that serious people used, almost every product in the space gave a few personal anecdotes about how the author rakes in money, followed by ways to up-sell yourself on more of their products.
When someone insisted that I watch the adaptation of The Secret with them, I laughed throughout most of it. I couldn’t tell you anything about the book, but the filmed version included a constant stream of ponderous testimonials from those exact content marketing “experts”—infamous names on the Internet—talking about how they wished for some high-priced item, but didn’t have the money. As a result, they carefully vision-boarded their desires, to “attract” the money that they wanted.
…And then they sent off an e-mail to their mailing list of tens of thousands of gullible suckers followers advertising a new remix of their existing e-books. And sure enough, the money showed up like magic.
Peace is possible the moment that each side would accept what the other would grant, but from the international or human point of view a satisfactory peace is possible only when these claims and concessions are such as to forward and not to hinder human progress.
Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory
Content Warning: US Politics, Terrible Former President
Image Not Shown: Donald Trump speaking
Trump’s tax cut came up very short of promised benefits from Daily Kos
Republicans behind the bill were forced to admit that it might never pay off, and Ryan was left bragging about a school secretary who was “pleasantly surprised” by a $1.50 weekly raise.
Hashtags: #USPol #GOP #Taxes #TaxCutAndJobsAct
You might almost feel left to think that legislating based on discredited economic theories, which have failed every time that someone has acted on them except to the extent that it helped the wealthy to become wealthier, but Republicans will continue to push the idea. The “except” part of the previous sentence explains why.
For workers to go back with a class-conscious spirit, with an organized and a determined attitude toward society means that even if they have made no economic gain they have the possibility of gaining in the future. In other words, a labor victory must be economic must be revolutionizing. Otherwise, it is not complete.
Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory
Content Warning: Sexual Assault
Image Not Shown: A Liberty University sign near a facility entrance
Liberty University to Pay Record Fine for Failing to Report Campus Crimes from Voice of America
Liberty’s investigator “unfounded this case based on a claim that the ‘victim indicates that she consented to the sexual act,’ the agreement stated. “In point of fact, the victim’s own statement merely indicated that she ‘gave in’ in an attempt to get away from the perpetrator.”
Hashtags: #LibertyUniversity
Honestly, I can’t imagine the Falwell family operating their institution any other way. Whenever bigoted people like that use the term “liberty,” especially in connection with religion, they mean the liberty of people like them to ignore consequences for their actions.
The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.
Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory
Image Not Shown: An adult hugging a child, both wearing surgical masks
Life Happens. That’s Why We Need a Safety Net from OtherWords
To meet our basic needs, a household with two adults and two children needs to earn over $23 an hour. But Georgia’s minimum wage is just $7.25.
Hashtags: #SNAP #SocialSafetyNet
When I think about the stagnant minimum wage, I contextualize it by remembering that my college paid me $7.25 or so for peer tutoring in the mid-1990s. At the time, I didn’t really have expenses, since I took out a student loan (after a full scholarship covering classes) to pay for on-campus housing, including a meal plan with the cafeteria. Expecting adults with expenses to survive on that kind of money doesn’t make any sense.
We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion what is and what is not their ‘proper sphere’. The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to.
Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory
Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didn’t fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.
Bats may shed light on human speech evolution from Futurity
To identify the areas of the bat brain associated with vocal learning, study co-first authors Julie E. Elie and Tobias Schmid, working in Yartsev’s Neurobat Lab at UC Berkeley, used wireless recording devices to “listen in” on the brains of a group of Egyptian fruit bats as they freely vocalized.
I don’t know about you, but I find this interesting…
If you appreciate this sort of content, then you should probably follow me on Mastodon to get it as early as possible…and feel free to reply, at least to the good stuff.
Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.
]]>In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names are trademarks of the owners, and so forth, and everything here relies on sitting squarely within the bounds of Fair Use, as criticism that uses tiny parts of each show to extrapolate the world that the characters live in.
I initially outlined the project in this post, for those falling into this from somewhere else. In short, we attempt to use the details presented in Star Trek to assemble a view of what life looks like in the Federation. This “phase” of the project changes from previous posts, however. The Next Generation takes place long after the original series, so we shouldn’t expect similar politics and socialization. Maybe more importantly, I enjoy the series less.
Put simply, you shouldn’t read this expecting a recap or review of an episode. Many people have done both to death over nearly sixty years. You will find a catalog of information that we learn from each episode, though, so expect everything to be a potential “spoiler,” if you happen to have that irrational fear.
Rather than list every post in the series here, you can quickly find them all on the startrek tag page.
This episode mostly focuses on its plot, but it does have some interesting moments for us.
CRUSHER: You were like a brother to me. Do you remember? We used played in the park near the lake.
They’ve decided that we need to watch a presentation of Edmond Rostand 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, apparently so that we can watch the rest of the cast roll their eyes at it.
Oh, and you’ll also presumably remember Barclay from Hollow Pursuits.
DATA: Lieutenant Barclay’s performance was adequate, but clearly not rooted in The Method approach. I do not understand why—
Oh, look, Data has found the One True Way of learning to act, which he discovered in Devil’s Due.
By the way, I forgot to mention it with that episode in expressing my distaste for how the media portrays Method Acting, but would it surprise you to find out that Stanislavsky presents most of his extreme exercises as parodies of terrible actors, rather than a proper way to conduct yourself as a performer? Bradley Cooper, Cillian Murphy and the myths of Method acting recently covered this in detail, saving me the trouble of actually reading An Actor Prepares…
RIKER: Data, because it’s polite.
That kind of enthusiasm seems far more than polite. Also, why did they not tell him this beforehand?
BARCLAY: I’m picking up visual wavelengths only. Between forty-five hundred and seven thousand ångströms.
This line strikes me as utterly bizarre. First, I can’t imagine anybody using ångströms to measure visible light, because you only get a factor of ten larger than using International Standard (SI) hundreds of nanometers, which doesn’t really gain you anything, especially when the numbers end in zeroes. Second, that range runs through almost the entire visible spectrum, from blue-on-the-border-of-violet through the more-orange parts of red, so why specify the range of visible-to-human wavelengths at all?
LAFORGE: Don’t mention it. You’re one of my top engineers. It’s about time you got in on some of the interesting stuff. This…this is why I’m in Starfleet.
That doesn’t really make sense, does it? LaForge started out as a kind of pilot, and moved into an engineering role. Neither of those jobs generally gets sent to investigate mysterious alien weirdness like this.
LAFORGE: Don’t mention it.
Does he…not bother with discipline? Does he prefer to mutter under his breath passive-aggressively like this?
BARCLAY: No, it’s true. I can’t explain it. In the last few days I’ve found confidence I never knew was there.
TROI: I’m proud of you, Reg. I’m glad for you, too. Well, I’d better be going.
She doesn’t see any red flag, here, that his entire personality has changed in days, if not hours?
TROI: Reg, as your former counselor, I don’t think it would be appropriate.
Former? He may not regularly meet her in her office anymore, but she still serves as the counselor for the entire ship, as far as I can tell.
More than that, for an unbounded mission, does it make sense to have ethical boundaries around the social activities of one member of the crew?
BARCLAY: What, because I’m beginning to behave like the rest of the crew? With confidence in what I’m doing?
He makes a reasonable point, here. Barclay has become exactly as snotty and self-entitled as the rest of the crew, but they only see it as a problem for him. And I really have to appreciate the writers making the point, instead of leaving the “maybe we shouldn’t look up to these characters” bits entirely to me.
TROI: Well, he did make a pass at me last night…a good one.
LAFORGE: I’d hardly consider that a threat.
Two things, here.
First, Riker and LaForge both stare at Troi, as if they deserve details on this story. And Riker will, repulsively, follow up.
Second, though, Troi raises this as an issue, and LaForge shoots her down immediately. Her vision of a threat doesn’t matter, especially if it only threatens her.
RIKER: Exactly what does that mean?
I hate this trope. None of what Barclay said had any complexity to it…
PICARD: This is an intolerable situation. I have no wish to harm him, but I cannot allow Mister Barclay to continue to act as the computer. I don’t care how smart he is.
…Why not?
I mean, it seems like a silly situation, but Picard absolutely could allow this, as far as I can tell. Barclay still doesn’t pose any risk.
Sure, eventually, Barclay will refuse to follow orders to pursue his own projects, but Picard doesn’t know that, unless he has a copy of the script under his chair.
BARCLAY: We have always perceived the maximum speed of the Enterprise as a function of warp, but I know now there are no limits. We will explore new worlds that we could never before have reached in our lifetime. I will take us to them.
LaForge and the script look at this as a bizarre and implausible threat, but Barclay largely summarized the plot of Where No One Has Gone Before, which the rest of them already lived through.
PICARD: Lieutenant, take a security team to holodeck three. Disconnect Mister Barclay from the computer.
For an organization that claims to want to explore and learn, they jumped awfully quickly to “kill the dude” for wanting to explore and learn. He certainly could have gone about it better, but the reaction seems extreme, given that they don’t seem to have anything else to worry about.
BARCLAY: Yes, sir. The Cytherians are exploring the galaxy just as we are. The only difference is that they never leave their home. They bring others here. Their only wish, an exchange of knowledge. They want to know us.
OK, so they went from appreciating Barclay’s new confidence and intelligence, to trying to murder him for inconveniencing them, to ignoring him and smiling about the value that his inconvenience has dropped into his lap.
TROI: Excuse me, Commander, but I believe Mister Barclay and I had a date scheduled, for a walk in the Arboretum?
Excuse me, but when did this become appropriate? Something like fifteen minutes ago, she couldn’t socialize with former patients, but now she can put romance on the table. Or maybe she lied, because she socializes with Picard, Data, Crusher, and others, despite having them as patients. But that seems not only cruel but risky, since anybody can expose the lie by looking up the regulations.
We get some (vague) insight into why people join Starfleet. And we see that the crew has a drama club.
Data has shifted from pedantry to criticizing people for nothing more than not doing things in their personal lives in his preferred way. It seems like the crew has also stopped trying to coach Data in acting supportive towards his colleagues, falling back into the pattern of setting him up to fail, in order to criticize him.
We see that Starfleet apparently enforces discipline among the crew by…mumbling about problems behind people’s backs.
Similarly, we continue to see the ship’s counselor not care about the people under her care. She praises a complete and almost instantaneous change in personality, and seems to lie about the ethical standards of her position. And likewise, when she raises sexual harassment as a possible sign of threat, they quickly dismiss her opinion, though they do take a prurient interest in hearing more details.
The crew continues to show massive double-standards, where they consistently criticize lower-ranking officers for behavior that they praise in the senior staff. This includes planning to murder the officer, on the hypothesis that he might, at some point, disobey orders, at least until disobeying those orders gives them something valuable.
The anti-intellectual thread of things has returned, as Riker objects to a clear explanation, seemingly because a couple of larger words make him uncomfortable.
The Federation apparently still measures light wavelengths in ångströms.
Coming up in a week, we’ll try our darnedest to avoid identifying Worf as a merry man, in Qpid.
Credits: The header image is James Webb Space Telescope NIRCam Image of the “Cosmic Cliffs” in Carina Nebula by NASA ESA CSA STScI, in the public domain by NASA policy.
]]>If you follow me anywhere on social media, you have probably noticed a lack of posts other than blog announcements and my semi-automated Mastodon shares. A big part of this (admittedly mild) shift comes from the fact that I have a blog, where I should publish what I have to say.
I like the idea of social media, where some random person can show up to have an interesting conversation when you say something, or making it convenient to find someone with a particular interest or experience. But I don’t love that we need to choose from one or more of three unpleasant experiences.
I’ve hinted at the three major social media experiences in my post about why federation makes sense for most social media, but I’ll make it explicit, here.
At one extreme, you have one centralized website, which needs money to continue operating. This money can come from any combination of investors, users, and “side hustles” like selling ad space or user data. No matter their founding principles, these sites will inevitably either compromise on their principles—directly or through somebody buying it to enact their own agenda—or shut down. Worse, the choice grows more important as more people agree with those principles, because it costs more to operate a popular site, in terms of required hardware, programming talent, and moderation.
At the other extreme, you have totally decentralized systems, such as Scuttlebutt. Those don’t require money, because each user manages their own experience, but requires that each user manage their own experience, at a minimum requiring that they store and maintain a lot of information. The system can’t have any significant moderation or guidance, creating a multi-tiered group of users, with “old hands” talking to each other and filtering out the noise, a deluge of noise from people acting in bad faith, and newcomers who mostly see the people acting in bad faith, because the better users (as mentioned) won’t engage with anybody who they don’t already know. Worse, because the experienced people shield themselves from the behavior that bothers them, by definition, they don’t see it, and so don’t have the context to make the network better for newcomers.
Alternatively, you end up with a system like twtxt, where it inherently protects you from the noise, but interacting with people requires that you constantly scrape the entire network, on the off-chance that somebody wants your input on something…which then exposes you directly to everything that the structure protected you from.
Finally, somewhere in between, you have the federated systems, with the Fediverse serving as the primary example, at the moment. While you get a resilient system—one that you can reasonably moderate and keep safe from the pursuit of profit—you also get some of the problems of both extremes. You end up with uneven moderation, which might isolate groups of servers from each other without anybody explaining why. And you still end up with a need for money and other resources, because these websites don’t run themselves, and the more popular servers need more support.
My tolerances lead me to federated systems, because I have certain priorities and understand the tradeoffs. Many people want a centralized website, because they haven’t really seen anything else, and only grasp the idea that “one site means everybody in one place.” And a handful of people like the post-apocalyptic idea of the decentralized systems and, as long as they can find their community, will also do fine.
The middle group often posts incomprehensible items like the following, which we’ve probably all seen and many people have mocked.
It frustrates me to see social media constantly destroyed by capitalism. Anyway, come follow me at ██████@bsky.social!1
I see and understand those perspectives. But I also want something different.
The Indie Web website describes its purpose as follows.
The IndieWeb is a community of independent & personal websites connected by simple standards, based on the principles of: owning your domain & using it as your primary identity, publishing on your own site (optionally syndicating elsewhere), and owning your data.
It goes on to describe five major pieces—IndieAuth, Webmention, Micropub, WebSub, and Microsub—not all of which will probably apply to every website.
This series of posts will dig through the process of making my website, particularly this blog, as “social” as possible. If I can get through it without too much trouble, and assuming that I understand the overall premise, then this should give me a platform where I can find out if people pick up my thoughts, but will also give me a better basis for re-posting blog ideas to social media, when it seems relevant.
What can I set up before this post goes out on the morning of the thirteenth? I’ll start with their getting started self-hosting instructions, since I do host this blog myself.
Conveniently, I already have a personal domain, using a subdomain (john.*
) on the original domain that I use for my company. I also host the pages on my VPS, so I don’t need their advice on hosting.
Starting at Indie Webify Me, I’ll now walk through their steps on my homepage, and propagate what I need to the blog, later.
Look, the tool calls them “levels,” not me. I’d give them names.
In any case, this “level” involves identifying myself on other networks, using the rel=me
microformat. It picked up the reference back to the same page and my Mastodon validation. I could probably stand to add others.
This “level” wants me to add an h-card microformat, identifying myself. My first pass looks like this, inserted at the bottom of the page code. Yes, we finally get to look at some code.
<a
href="https://john.colagioia.net/"
class="h-card"
rel="me"
style="display:none;"
>
John Colagioia
</a>
The style prevents the card from cluttering the page.
It called that a success, but wants me to add a photograph and a short biography. I suppose that I can do that, using whatever I use for Mastodon…
<img class="u-photo" src="/images/d29181b871b001b0.png" />
<p class="p-note">Hi, I'm John, and I work on various odd things.</p>
That now suggests that I make it a representative h-card by adding a class…but that seems to require a bit of reorganization. I present the final version.
<span
class="h-card"
rel="me"
style="display:none;"
>
<a href="https://john.colagioia.net/" class="u-url u-uid">
John Colagioia
<img class="u-photo" src="/images/d29181b871b001b0.png" />
<p class="p-note">Hi, I'm John, and I work on various odd things.</p>
</a>
</span>
The card now lives in a span
element, with the URL an element inside it. I still keep it hidden, so that it doesn’t clutter the page.
Next up, we look at the posts, looking for the h-entry
class. And whether I did it or Jekyll handles that out of the box, that already seems done.
However, it suggests adding an author, any categories, and links to any syndicated copies. I no longer use categories—it never really made sense for this structure, especially once I created tags—and don’t currently syndicate, but I can probably add empty values to the page templates, then fill them in later if I ever need them. And every post does have an author, though you can always guess that the author looks a lot like me, so I can plug that in, too.
<a
class="p-author h-card"
href="https://john.colagioia.net"
rel="author"
style="display: none;"
>
</a>
<a
class="h-syndication"
href="."
rel="syndication"
style="display: none"
>None</a>
<a
class="p-category"
href="."
style="display: none"
></a>
That all goes in my post layout template.
The analysis results wanted me to add the image to the author h-card
, so I did that. It didn’t like my empty syndication list, however, but since—as mentioned—I don’t currently syndicate, I probably don’t care.
Finally, it also mentions that every post (or whatever you call them on your site) should have the following.
e-content
— the main content of the postp-name
— if your post is an article with a name, use this class name.dt-published
— the date/time the post was published at, in ISO8601 format, with a timezoneu-url
— the canonical URL of the post, especially important on pages listing multiple postsI have each of those, conveniently, suggesting that Jekyll added them to the template by default.
Now we start digging into the “real” work. The authors describe Webmentions as follows.
Webmention is a simple way to automatically notify any URL when you link to it on your site. From the receivers’ perspective, it’s a way to request notification when other sites link to it.
It’s a modern alternative to Pingback and other forms of Linkback.
And it outlines the expected behavior like the following.
Alice posts some interesting content on her site (which is set up to receive webmentions).
Bob sees this content and comments about it on his site, linking back to Alice’s original post.
Using webmentions, Bob’s publishing software automatically notifies Alice’s server that her post has been linked to along with the URL to Bob’s post.
Alice’s publishing software verifies that Bob’s post actually contains a link to her post and then includes this information on her site.
That sounds like a big piece of what I want, so we’ll make that the target for now. Unfortunately, the Indie Webify Me tool stops validating, at this point, and only provides a form to send Webmentions. Coincidentally, it also has no more steps, so I’ll need to go elsewhere.
Since, as I’ve mentioned a couple of times in this post, the blog runs via Jekyll, I can’t deal with Webmentions directly. That presumes a server running, taking proper requests. Jekyll generates a static site, which doesn’t have that extra server.
However, people have already thought about that, creating webmention.io and, critical for my purposes, the Webmentions for Jekyll gem. With any luck, I can ride on their work.
It looks like I need to claim my URL, in some way, on the Webmention service, so I give it my URL, and…this will take some effort.
None of the rel=me URLs found on your page were recognized as a supported provider.
That sends me to setting up IndieAuth, which you might remember mentioned earlier in the post as a core part of this Indie Web package. Digging through the IndieAuth page on Indie Web makes it seem like the least-effort path involves running Selfauth , since I have PHP running for some other services, and I don’t think that I need any of that token nonsense.
Putting that into place, I visit it, which tells me to visit this ugly page.
Doing that tells me to create a config.php
file in the same folder, and…honestly, it looks broken, when I try to interact with the service. However, I don’t need to interact with the service, the other service does, and…yes, I can now log into webmention.io.
Note that I could have used some other providers, such as GitHub and an e-mail address. This felt like a reasonable approach, though.
Now, I install the Webmentions for Jekyll gem as the directions instruct, and…it relies on the OpenSSL gem, which it can’t build, claiming that the “OpenSSL library could not be found.” On Ubuntu and similar systems, that usually means installing something like openssl-dev
.
That moves me forward.
I added a minimal configuration to Jekyll’s _config.yml
file.
webmentions:
username: john.colagioia.net
And then add the Liquid tags to the layout templates, and…
Liquid Exception: Liquid syntax error (line 103): Unknown tag ‘webmentions’ in …
Hm. That seems unfortunate…
In fact, Jekyll can’t find any of the three tags listed in the directions. It turns out that I added the gem to the general list, rather than to the Jekyll-specific group. The Gemfile
should look like this.
group :jekyll_plugins do
# Other gems, for example, I have...
# gem "jekyll-feed", "~> 0.12"
gem 'jekyll-webmention_io'
end
And now it builds.
The good news? Everything seems to build correctly, though my build process has grown a bit slower. I don’t see any definite problems.
However, I have no idea what this will actually do when I publish it. The local Jekyll server doesn’t interact with any of the outside infrastructure. Even if everything works as expected, I don’t know if anybody has Webmention-ed any posts. I don’t have any styles attached to any Webmentions that I happen to find.
In other words, I won’t have any idea of what any of this actually looks like until I have already published this post. As such, you could see a complete disaster when I push this out, and then watch me scramble for a few days deciding what to do…
As I said, I’ll try to make this process an irregular feature of the blog, if for no other reason than I haven’t published as much technical work as I’d like, recently. If tomorrow fails, I’ll follow up next Wednesday with whatever I did to fix it. If it succeeds, I’ll continue reading up on these Indie Web formats and processes, to see what I can integrate.
For example, assuming that this all works, then I’ll need to figure out how to send Webmentions, and probably build Jekyll plugins to insert the various types. And I also have three major features of Indie Web’s five—Micropub, WebSub, and Microsub—to investigate, since this post dealt with IndieAuth and Webmention. And services apparently exist to simplify syndication to certain destinations, which might simplify my publication process. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, if you have had any experience with these Indie Web processes, I’d love to hear from you and compare notes.
Credits: The header image is Web by Martyn Wright, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Yes, sure, the AT Protocol can federate, at least in theory. Right now, though, they don’t exactly have any serious peers on their network other than experimenters downloading all posts, not even in-house to reduce server load, so we need to treat them as centralized for now. ↩
I know. March has the worst holidays, and only barely usable anniversaries. At this rate, by the end of the month, I’ll need to talk about somebody’s birthday…
Anyway, let’s get to the week’s projects.
I noticed that, somehow in my haste, I didn’t add the Material Design regular expression icon to the repository. Therefore, this week, I broke with my only-going-to-update-libraries plan to fix that oversight.
As an unfortunate side effect, I now have a pile of tiny images floating around the application directory with no organization. I’ll need to think about fixing that, at some point.
As mentioned recently, I needed to bump library versions for Bicker, Fýlakas Onomáton, Generic Board Game, Ham Newsletter, Renewal Database, Scan Data, Slackup, and Zoea.
I’ll almost certainly continue clearing out the backlog of library version updates.
Credits: The header image is Roxy Theater NY Weekly Review March 10, 1928, long in the public domain due to an expired copyright.
]]>To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context.
This should go without saying—even though I plan to repeat it with every Book Club installment—but Content Advisories do not suggest any sort of judgment on my part, only topics that come up in the work that I noticed and might benefit from a particular mood or head space for certain audiences. I provide it to help you make a decision, rather than a decision in and of itself.
The blurb for the repository.
The WNV universe is a free culture story world featuring Woethief Nyla Valora as the main character.
This repository contains stories and outlines for future stories. Stories can be any genre as long as they take place in the WNV Universe.
I should note that the project has another seventy-five-or-so thousand words in stories marked as in-progress. I opted not to look at those, at least for now, given that the repository has some recent activity.
While the story has some unpleasant problems that I’ll talk about in the next section, I do want to note that True Love’s Kiss has the best writing in this series, by far. The story has actual themes that it takes seriously, and generally doesn’t repeat itself or describe things that don’t need a description.
I have no idea how these stories relate to each other or The Woethief. As quoted above, the Codeberg repository claims that they exist as part of “a free culture story world featuring Woethief Nyla Valora as the main character,” but I don’t see any evidence of that in most of the stories, except in the sense that universes tend to have a lot of space for unconnected things to happen.
Despite my mild praise for True Love’s Kiss above, I do want to note its specific problems, which seem far larger than the other stories. The gender politics, in particular, feels repulsive, with everybody obsessing over the ownership and sexual purity of a young woman, and even worrying about how much of her body other people might see. And it has the nerve to try to contrast this sharply with selling women into slavery without even a hint of irony that their freedom also involves a shocking amount of controlling behavior and obsession with their genitals. Maybe related, the story also makes me a liar in last week’s post, in that it has apparently decided that it really does portray a generic fantasy universe where the non-human characters act exactly like human ethnicities with more prosthetics.
Likewise, the other story with recognizable connections to the main world, An Old Enemy, tries to atone for genocide with eugenics, which…I don’t know, maybe don’t go there? It seems problematic, at the absolute least…
The project has the Codeberg repository mentioned above, which seems at least somewhat active, though only Patterson appears to have contributed, so far.
Lealynn’s knife probably wins the day, in all these stories, though we get hints of airships, other powerful weapons, and meet Crystal Comfort with her ill-defined powers.
Coming up next week, we’ll listen to another music album, Cauac Ox.
As mentioned previously, by the way, the list of potential works to discuss has run low, so I need to ask for help, again. If you know of any works—or want to create them—that fit these posts (fictional, narrative, Free Culture, available to the public, and not by creators who we’ve already discussed), please tell me about them. Every person who points me to at least one appropriate work with an explanation will receive a free membership on my ☕ Buy Me a Coffee page.
Anyway, while we wait for that, what did everybody else think about these stories?
Credits: The header image is the book’s cover, by Autumn Patterson, released under the same terms as the book.
]]>Also, I don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.
Image Not Shown: Freelance woman working on the go
More green spaces tied to better city dweller mental health from Futurity
The trend for various mental health encounters decreased as the NatureScore of a neighborhood increased, and the rates of mental health encounters were about 50% lower in neighborhoods with NatureScores over 60.
Hashtags: #GreenSpace #WellBeing
I don’t think that you need me to say anything about this. I like green spaces. You like green spaces. Brains like green spaces…
Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.
Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory
Content Warning: US Politics
Image Not Shown: A person holding up a sign stating that "School Is for Everyone" with hearts colored in LGBT and transgender pride flag tones
Tennessee GOP votes to keep Confederate flags in classrooms but ban pride flags from Daily Kos
If there’s one time the Tennessee legislature feels strongly about protecting free speech rights, it’s when those rights involve a symbol promoting racism and treason against the United States.
Hashtags: #TNPol #USPol #Confederacy #PrideFlag
I have to hand it to them: They definitely understand their brand. Whenever any Republican complains about patriotism, I hope that someone makes sure to ask them what country they support, because I don’t think that they mean the United States…
The Settlement … is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other.
Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory
Image Not Shown: The Monopoly Man dancing down a flow of blood through a hospital ward
When private equity destroys your hospital from Pluralistic
Steward has stiffed the companies that supply “heart valves, urology lasers, Impella catheters, cardiac catheterization balloons, slings for lifting heavier patients, blood and urine test reagents, and most recently, prescription paper.”
Hashtags: #PrivateEquity #HealthCare
You’d almost think that necessities don’t actually work as for-profit enterprises…
To those who say women do not desire their rights, or think they have them already, I would say, converse with any intelligent woman on the subject, and you will not find them indifferent. Woman feels deeply, keenly, her degradation, but is bound by the iron hand of custom which so long has exercised tyrant rule over her.
Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory
Image Not Shown: Birds fly in a circle at a broken length of barbed wire
We Can Break The Cycle of Poverty, Mental Illness, and Prison from OtherWords
A whopping 64 percent of all people in U.S. jails, 54 percent of those in state prisons, and 45 percent of people in federal prisons have reported mental health illnesses, the American Psychological Association details.
Hashtags: #Prisons #Poverty #MentalHealth
It would also probably help if we had a stronger abolition movement, since that would also break that cycle. Retributive justice doesn’t work, except as a way for all of us to ignore people who we don’t want to deal with.
Today the question presented to us is one of abstract right and wrong. The Republican Party must proclaim as its watchword universal liberty if it ever hopes to win, and if it ever repudiates that watchword it must die.
Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory
Image Not Shown: Conceptual illustration of brain fog with a brain surrounded by four SARS-CoV-2 viral particles.
Mounting research shows that COVID-19 leaves its mark on the brain, including with significant drops in IQ scores from The Conversation
Severe COVID-19 that requires hospitalization or intensive care may result in cognitive deficits and other brain damage that are equivalent to 20 years of aging.
Hashtags: #Brain #Covid19 #BrainFog
This will only compound, unfortunately, as we continue to “normalize” COVID-19 as a seasonal illness “like the flu”…not that we don’t also completely ignore the damage done by the flu.
It is a fact, that numbers even of moral and religious people have permitted themselves to accept and condone in man what is fiercely condemned in woman.
Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory
Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didn’t fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.
Image Not Shown: Screenshot from a video by Ognie Foundation Bangladesh
The untold stories of transgender people in Bangladesh as they navigate misconceptions from Global Voices
Neelima, a transwoman, visibly lives the life of a typical married man but, deep down, yearns to be validated as a woman.
In case you imagine gender and sexual minorities only exist in the West, they do not. Intersectionality still works…
Content Warning: Abuse
Image Not Shown: A Fediverse and Content Nation logo in flames
Content Nation Backlash Highlights Mastodon’s Toxicity from We Distribute
Many of these things are almost completely undocumented, and can only be developed by lengthy conversations with people who already built those things. Even Mastodon’s own specs say very little. The majority of people dismissed Content Nation as simply being a malicious attempt to slurp up their public and private content for profit. Even when Sascha tried to defend himself, he was ridiculed and mocked.
I get that people attack federated servers so often, that it makes some sense to assume that every problem stems from an attack. But yeah, I can’t imagine trying to build a working server or testing it on the Internet, because they treat everything as an ad hoc process that everybody should intuit. And then add the almost complete lack of safety features, and you set the system up for disaster.
That all said, it also seems like setting a project up to offend people by not getting involved in a community before writing code that treats it as a resource. Nobody likes feeling treated like a resource.
If you appreciate this sort of content, then you should probably follow me on Mastodon to get it as early as possible…and feel free to reply, at least to the good stuff.
Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.
]]>In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names are trademarks of the owners, and so forth, and everything here relies on sitting squarely within the bounds of Fair Use, as criticism that uses tiny parts of each show to extrapolate the world that the characters live in.
I initially outlined the project in this post, for those falling into this from somewhere else. In short, we attempt to use the details presented in Star Trek to assemble a view of what life looks like in the Federation. This “phase” of the project changes from previous posts, however. The Next Generation takes place long after the original series, so we shouldn’t expect similar politics and socialization. Maybe more importantly, I enjoy the series less.
Put simply, you shouldn’t read this expecting a recap or review of an episode. Many people have done both to death over nearly sixty years. You will find a catalog of information that we learn from each episode, though, so expect everything to be a potential “spoiler,” if you happen to have that irrational fear.
Rather than list every post in the series here, you can quickly find them all on the startrek tag page.
It doesn’t look like we’ll get much out of this episode.
LAFORGE: I enjoy the bachelor’s life too much.
Yeah, those grapes were probably sour, anyway.
I don’t oppose LaForge getting out of the dating game, given how creepily he has acted towards every woman who interested him, but somehow, I don’t think that he will, unfortunately…
LEIJTEN: That doesn’t sound like my little brother who always wanted advice on women.
That sounds so much healthier than his current approach of trying to “put the moves” on colleagues or playing with fictionalized versions of them on the holodeck.
LEIJTEN: It’s the shuttlepod Mendez stole from the Aries.
You briefly see that the pod has the name Cousteau, presumably a reference to Jacques, the French polymath who brought oceanography to the masses for decades.
DATA: I am an android. It is not possible—
CRUSHER: —for you to feel anxiety.
DATA: Starfleet personnel have vanished. Others may be at risk. We must do the best we can to find out why. However, I am strongly motivated to solve this mystery.
This routine exhausts me. How many times will they subject us to “I can’t feel X; I only display the characteristics of X, as a result of the causes that most people would feel X.”
CRUSHER: Her blood pressure’s still falling. Apply the T-cell stimulator. We have got to stabilize her immune system.
She doesn’t get a line in the episode quite yet, but you might recognize the nurse as Ogawa, who we last saw in Clues.
DATA: Have you attempted an audio analysis?
I find it highly unlikely that Data didn’t hear LaForge ask for the audio analysis, given the timing.
COMPUTER: Commander La Forge is not on board the Enterprise.
Didn’t he have them program the computer to monitor his location? Did they forget the part that reports back to anybody?
DATA: I cannot, sir. The transporter cycle has already begun.
Likewise, why didn’t they disable the transporters to prevent exactly this eventuality?
HEDRICK: I’ve been able to determine La Forge’s transport coordinates. He beamed down next to the Aries shuttle.
Wait, he determined the coordinates, as opposed to looking them up? Did LaForge retain all his engineering knowledge or did they not log what the system does?
PICARD: Is there no hope for Brevelle or Mendez?
LEIJTEN: None.
She seems awfully confident, for someone without medical training or much actual knowledge of the situation. And they trust that, I guess.
PICARD: Then we will leave them be. I’ll order warning beacons placed in orbit and on the surface. Hopefully, no one else will have to go through what you did.
Assuming that Leijten assessed the situation correctly, “going through what you did” propagates their species, meaning that Picard has decided to endorse genocide…again, I mean.
As mentioned, this episode doesn’t have much to it, for us.
At least in the recent past, some men saw women as actual friends, and discussed romantic plans with them to avoid pushing away potential partners.
Data still tries to semantically dodge out of admitting that he has emotions, even as he admits to experiencing the same effects from the same causes.
The crew’s data security continues to perform no purpose. The computers lose track of people they want to monitor, without alerting anybody. They don’t bother to lock down systems that would allow those people to escape. And they don’t log the use of that system.
The ending shows a fairly callous disregard for life. A person with no training and no hard information assures everyone that they can never save the remaining humans, and Picard nonchalantly condemns a species to extinction because they inconvenienced him.
Make time to come back next week, when Barclay returns to transform from an annoying nerd to a slightly more annoying nerd, in The Nth Degree.
Credits: The header image is Chameleon by Alexander Bolotnov, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
]]>We the People…do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America
The people—not directly, sadly not everyone, and at the remove of representatives, but not a hereditary elite allegedly chosen by mystical powers, military powers, or the wealthiest—take almost religious authority to define the nature of the country in explicit terms for everybody to see.
Anyway, on to the week’s projects.
I should mention that the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter will go out tomorrow (Tuesday), for those subscribed on Buy Me a Coffee. You’ll get an inside scoop into what might become an important part of The Light’s Edge, along with a rundown on the collapse of what I imagined would become a fun Free Culture property, along the lines of my irregular Let’s Fix… posts.
Otherwise, while I never intended to do it, the news that Framework now sells their factory seconds laptop bases for about five hundred dollars—more, after adding memory, storage, network, and so forth—convinced me that I could use a spare or travel laptop. As such, I’ve started setting that up. I’ll give the full story in the newsletter for March.
The application can now handle menu-based cut-and-paste (as opposed to strictly copy-and-paste), through both the context menu and the top menu. I didn’t care about this all that much, since the difference between “cut” and “copy and delete” doesn’t strike me as significant, but for the sake of consistency, it seemed worthwhile.
In addition, I’d call it an early stages feature, but the program can also handle find-and-replace. For now, it only works on a single instance of the text per run, so the user will need to repeatedly click Replace to change an entire note. However, that lays out the broad logic, like so.
searchText $widget $searchTerm
if {[$widget tag ranges sel] != ""} {
$widget delete sel.first {sel.last + 1 char}
$widget insert [$widget index insert] $replaceTerm
}
This uses the already-present search feature. If the search found a match, then it replaces the selected text. At some point, I can loop this for the entire file.
Finally, I don’t know when I’ll get to the feature, but I have added one Material Design icon for searching across notes, and another to slot in to represent the replacement action.
I have neglected this little project for a long while, but I recently noticed—or maybe I already knew and noticed it anew—that pages after the first don’t have any margins. I needed to undertake a bit of research to fix that, but the @page
CSS rule does allow margin-top
and margin-bottom
.
Unfortunately, this took me longer to make work than I expected, because I also tried to add a page number with @top-right
. Unfortunately, whatever JSON Resume uses to generate the output doesn’t seem to recognize the rule, silently counts it as an error, and fouls up the margins in the same @page
rule.
I see them building up again, so I’ll probably handle the outdated libraries that GitHub has tried to warn me about recently.
Credits: The header image is Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States by Howard Chandler Christy, long in the public domain due to an expired copyright and/or as a work of the United States government.
]]>Over the last year or so, I’ve started to groan at the drum-beat of social media posts that feel like such a waste of effort, especially since they all seem to read as if the various users copied-and-pasted them from some original post with some tweaks. In other words, you could replace them all with the same post.
When will [either Creative Commons or the Free Software Foundation] publish a license that disallows everybody from stealing my ultra-valuable work 🦚 and using it to train Large Language Models?
Either this, or they ask what license they can use to prevent the Internet from using their work in training sets. At first, I tried to reply coherently, but soon realized that the people posting didn’t really have any interest in the answers. And more to the point, I don’t have the time to respond to everybody out there with a bad idea.
As such, I’ll write this post once, and either consider my piece said or point people to the page. You readers can also feel free to use it how you please, as you presumably already understand by the license posted at the bottom of the page.
In any case, I have a handful of reasons—even though I similarly dislike the direction of the AI market—why I reject the idea of an anti-AI licensing regime.
Let’s get the core idea out of the way, first. “You can use this code for anything you want as long as you don’t work in a field that I don’t like” pretty much expresses the opposite of the spirit of any public license.
I contend that this disconnect explains why the so-called ethical licenses haven’t really gone anywhere, despite a solid effort trying to push them. Those, similarly, try to share with “everyone” except those who the author doesn’t approve of, and such a license leads directly into a messy analysis of whether you would qualify to use that bit of software, because none of us knows everything that we support.
Seriously, you might want to oppose slavery, child labor, open-pit mining, and the mining of conflict minerals, but manufacturers turn an indifferent eye to their supply chains, meaning that buying the computer in front of you right now might have violated human rights treaties. Do you really qualify to use that code, then…?
More broadly, though, if they change the technology or the terms used for the specific technology, does the hypothetical anti-AI license still apply? Or could an organization point an AI to their servers, then use your code or art for something completely unrelated, and then claim that they didn’t actually feed your work into the training set? Bad actors delight in finding loopholes in contracts and licenses, after all.
You’ll note that I have a similar objection to non-commercial licenses, that large media companies routinely structure themselves to deny the profitability of something, so they don’t have a huge leap to structuring a single project—that earns them a ton of money—as a non-commercial endeavor. In the same way, it doesn’t seem difficult to structure a project so that it only doesn’t shovel your work into an AI while you look at it, but a different project indirectly does so by coasting through vague wording…
In addition to the problems with the premise, the idea that you’ll share the code with anybody, provided that they don’t use it in training data also misses the point, by substituting a field of research for problematic behavior. If you find yourself supporting a license with an anti-AI clause, you’d probably feel guilty if a young person asked you why they can’t use your work for their science fair project or personal explorations.
In other words, I don’t think that “you”—the hypothetical person agitating for license updates—actually care about the field about artificial intelligence in general or large language models in particular. Instead, you care that billion-dollar companies want to turn a profit on your work without compensating you.
Making “AI” an issue instead of “big-corporate abuse” means that academics and hobbyists can’t legally train a language model on your code or art, even if they would otherwise happily comply with the license. If you slap on a license that forbids usage in AI experiments, you’ll harm the curious kids, who might want to avoid offending an artist who they respect, but not the enormous corporations. Why? Well, we need another heading for that…
If you take nothing else from this post, make sure to understand this: The enormous companies slurping up all content available on the Internet do not care about copyright.
The GPL and Creative Commons Share-Alike licenses already require licensing derivative works under the same terms, as compensation for using the work. All Creative Commons licenses (except for CC0) already require attributing the creator of an underlying work. The companies in question already don’t do those things.
In fact, OpenAI refuses to follow copyright law at all, even arguing in court that they need to indiscriminately slurp up copyrighted works. Likewise, Apartheid Clyde himself says that the Singularity will solve the problem by outgrowing our petty human problems.
In other words, they believe something between that they don’t need to care about copyright, because everything they do falls under Fair Use doctrine, and that their religion demands that they violate copyright in order to manifest their libertarian god. And because of that position, adding a clause to your license that says, “hey, if you train AIs, leave me out of it,” has no meaning to them.
Let me repeat: They already violate Free Culture licenses. They don’t attribute the use of Creative Commons works. They don’t require that their users share the bits of code from copyleft-licensed sources under the same license, or even warn users that they may need to do so. The specifics of the license don’t matter to them at all.
By the way, I should point out that licenses don’t ever prevent anything. A public license tells the public what you will let them do with your work, without requiring a private license. CC BY-NC-SA or whatever doesn’t exactly erect a force field around your work that gives a little zap to anybody who tries to make money off it.
No, you prevent people from using your work by taking them to court to enforce your copyright, or at least threatening to do so.
Do you plan to sue OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and whoever else has a popular model? Can you prove that you have standing? Do you have compelling evidence that they have financially harmed you? If not, then your license won’t help you anyway, no matter what it says.
I’ve already talked about this sort of thing on the blog, but licenses tend to inherently lag behind the times.
For example, the FSF has never cared about anything unless Stallman personally cared about it on his personal computer, and they’ve recently proven that he matters to them more than their community. That behavior prevents the organization from keeping up with the times. As a key example, consider the AGPL, which they have kept isolated from the “real” GPL for seventeen years, as if “the web fad” will blow over any day, now. Likewise, Creative Commons refuses to engage with the problems and confusion caused by their continued support of the noncommerical licenses.
Meanwhile, as opposed to the web, the AI field—with its Frosty the Snowman ethos, aforementioned religious fervor, almost total lack of a single viable product, and promises that haven’t changed in nearly seventy years—looks a lot like an economic bubble. By the time these organizations release their shiny new licenses that will forbid hobbyists from playing with their works while not impacting the big companies at all, big companies may have already fled the AI market, precisely as everyone fled Web3 when nobody cared, then the NFT market when it collapsed, and as they may need to flee the quantum computing market .
If you don’t believe that we have a market bubble, consider OpenAI’s assertion (mentioned above) that they can’t survive if people enforce copyright. Or maybe consider their insistence that “emergence” will give them real products, rather than any process that they have in mind. If you don’t like those, then try the claim that they can’t survive without nuclear fusion breakthroughs. When someone tells you that, before they pay you back as an investor or debtor, they only need widespread changes or exceptions to the law, an amazing product to fall into their lap, and different laws of physics, they…don’t actually plan to give you your money back. And when someone says that to many investors, you have a bubble. You probably also have fraud, but I probably don’t get to judge those things.
Look, I get it. The language-model people feel constantly exhausting, pretending that their systems produce valuable art. And their disinterest in copyright law will make a mess of a lot of things. But asking organizations that don’t care to add restrictions to a license that the companies already don’t read won’t solve the problem.
What might solve the problems, then? Well, I don’t have a comprehensive plan, but I have some vague thoughts that might help the next person point to something better.
Consider waiting for the AI-bubble to burst. As mentioned, without a constant supply of investor money, they can’t afford to pay the power bills without somebody inventing a working fusion reactor for them. They can’t operate unless courts consistently allow them to ignore copyright. And even if they get cheap electricity and free rein over copyright law, then they still need investors (and you) to believe that their language games will accidentally become actual intelligences, at some point, worth more than twenty bucks per month to access.
…Or consider hastening the bursting, by making it clear that we don’t see a serious future in these technologies. We don’t fear them or see them as saviors. We see the Markov process that makes the neural network look like it can do work.
Hastening might involve walking away from products and services as companies force their AI products into them, so that they can’t claim that everybody uses the product. That will take actual work.
Some people have started thinking about this. Matthew Butterick and many open source authors have lawsuits against GitHub ongoing for Copilots clear use of GPL-licensed code without proper marking. Several high-profile media outlets have sued OpenAI for violating their rights under the DMCA.
Individual authors also tried to sue as a group, but apparently misunderstood copyright so grossly that the judge threw out most claims. I imagine that they assumed that the big names involved would gather enough media attention to shame OpenAI into making some concession, but their utter ineptitude—and their inability to keep the story in the news—makes it more sad than anything else.
Despite the authors, though, I do see a legitimate path to forcing the purveyors of AI products to at least credit the work that they use. As I mentioned in my rundown of GitHub Copilot, all these systems can reproduce the text of any public license, if you request it. And that can only happen if its training data includes plenty of examples of those licenses, as you’d find packaged along with works under those licenses, meaning that anything that it produces adapts those works without following—or warning the users to follow—the terms of the license(s).
I should point out that taking this route consistently could cause more problems than it solves. By normalizing copyright lawsuits, we strengthen the precedents for other copyright lawsuits, including undermining Fair Use doctrine, by corporations wanting to suppress expression of various sorts. I don’t believe that anybody reading this wants that.
This seems shakier, maybe, but as I mentioned at the top, it doesn’t feel like a serious position to object specifically to training neural networks, when the problems seem to actually come from large corporations insisting that they can do whatever they please. And in all honesty, at this time, we really only have one company of significance in this market, OpenAI. Sure, Google has a system that so few people care about that it secretly pays media outlets to use it . And Facebook fell on its face when someone leaked Llama, and now wants to build an even bigger language model. Behind closed doors, assume that Apple and Amazon also waste money on this, too.
For most people, though, you only have OpenAI, someone (like Microsoft) who sits on top of OpenAI, or a much smaller model that you run on commodity hardware for yourself. And that seems like a monopoly, and maybe something that we should do something about, to increase competition in the space. Let the companies fight it out—burning investment money in the process, to call back to the issue of waiting things out—rather than giving them opportunity after opportunity to present a united front.
Note that this route would require the cooperation of consumer-protection bureaus, but many of them do seem receptive, these days, to actually trying to protect consumers, so we shouldn’t dismiss it as impossible.
Finally, and this seems like the most approachable solution that touches the rest, we could stop taking people seriously when they use AI-generated content. I’ve mentioned before that AI can produce decent placeholder work, but you need to hand that off to someone with enough context and interest to get something that makes sense. If you don’t pass it through someone who cares, then you publish the equivalent of lorem ipsum or a test image.
And I feel like we need to start treating the purveyors of AI-generated “work” as if they did exactly that. Too often, people focus on correctable details. It feels tempting to react to the flaw, rather than the process. Currently, we often take offense if ChatGPT provides false information. We complain when someone shows a hand with the wrong number of fingers. Or we laugh that someone used a French translation of soy protein that declares je suis une protéine.
When we do that, though, we have it wrong. The technical details don’t matter. In theory, chatbots could fact-check their output. With enough training, image generators could get anatomical features straight. And given enough context, automated translation could distinguish the legume that we call soy from the first-person singular, present-tense form of ser. Complaining about those errors plays into the narrative of the people who want you to invest in AI. It suggests that they only need more investment to finally replace those pesky employees.
Rather than complain about the technical errors or laugh at the corporation that didn’t bother to double-check their product, we should instead think twice about interacting with the people behind it. After all, if they didn’t care enough to have a person do the work, if they didn’t bother to have a person check the work, and if they didn’t think that their product needed art suited for it, then do you really think that they treated the rest of their work differently? Their use of AI serves as a signal of their view of the relationship, not a distinct moral failing. They believe that nobody cares about quality, and so producing garbage cheaply will serve them well.
And it will serve them well, until people start shunning them for not doing the work to produce things that make sense, that show a care for the end result. I don’t mean shunning them by expressing outrage at the “creepy AI images on food-delivery websites” stories that show up every few months. I mean refusing to engage with the entire AI economy, from the providers down to the articles about bad uses.
Despite my not seeing a use in new licenses that will ban the use of code or art in training neural networks, I’ve said since almost the start of this blog that we need a better licensing regime. I don’t know if the copyleft license that I fantasized about four years ago would fix any of these problems, but I do know that a license that carried clear instructions for compliance and a comfortable path for enforcement would certainly make the situation less fractious.
For example, I think a lot of how the aforementioned AGPL tries to handle this. Section 13 says that, if you have users accessing the software across a network, and if you modified the software, then (and only then) you must offer those users an opportunity to receive the modified source code. And—returning to the short-sightedness of these agencies—we could probably all think of a dozen ways that you could grossly violate the spirit of the license while complying with its letter.
And…it doesn’t need to do it that way. It could think about code as data, or the ability to reconstruct the code, or any number of ideas that would make this less prone to abuse.
I could go on, but I’ve already probably hammered the point into the ground, by now: Fighting AI projects with copyright won’t actually stop any of these companies, and while failing, it distracts from far more important problems with the overall movement.
Credits: The header image is Symposium Cisco Ecole Polytechnique 9-10 April 2018 Artificial Intelligence & Cybersecurity by Ecole polytechnique, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 Generic license.
]]>To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context.
This should go without saying—even though I plan to repeat it with every Book Club installment—but Content Advisories do not suggest any sort of judgment on my part, only topics that come up in the work that I noticed and might benefit from a particular mood or head space for certain audiences. I provide it to help you make a decision, rather than a decision in and of itself.
The blurb for the repository.
The WNV universe is a free culture story world featuring. Woethief Nyla Valora as the main character.
This repository contains stories and outlines for future stories. Stories can be any genre as long as they take place in the WNV Universe.
I should note that the project has another seventy-five-or-so thousand words in stories marked as in-progress. I opted not to look at those, at least for now, given that the repository has some recent activity.
I had a lot of trouble finding something to like in this last stretch of the book, but I suppose that I should credit it for not shying away from its bleak ending. I have to at least respect that commitment.
And while I haven’t brought it up before, I don’t find it particularly interesting, but I should give the book some praise for creating a fantasy world that avoids the routine of “races” that all look like humans with mild prosthetics. Did I ever figure out the difference between bat-spiders and spider-bats that the first chapters assured us that we would care about? No. But I see maybe more potential, there, than giving us yet another kind of elf.
Oh, maybe similarly, while I find it one of the blandest aspects of the story, I do have to at least respect that, in centering Christianity, the book at least gestures at an authentic version of the religion. If it must preach about a nameless Jesus, it at least does the right thing by talking about helping people and forgiving wrongs, rather than wasting time with the hateful, paranoid version of the religion that we’ve seen featured in works like The Fellowship of Heroes.
These chapters could use a serious editing. While I don’t see any horrible typos, the story often contradicts itself from paragraph to paragraph. A character cringes in terror, but also haughtily confronts their opponent. Other characters reconcile, but they lie. They come to agreements, but then do something completely unrelated, as if that conversation never happened. Similarly, consequences fall on characters for actions that I don’t believe that anyone has told us about.
Also, should I care about any of these people? Nyla now talks about her religious conversion—which, by the way, either happened between chapters or in a single paragraph in Chapter 16 where she asks for a little help forgiving Gemma—so much that you’d almost think that the book had nothing else going on, or that she gets paid if she convinces anybody else to convert; I also continue to not see a difference between the Nyla and Woethief personalities, to the point where it almost always surprises me who says what. Gemma doesn’t even seem to have a role in the plot, other than to shriek angrily at Nyla for seemingly imaginary issues. Nobody else really has a personality, beyond each having a single narrow agenda, the overwhelming majority of which sound something like “hurt Nyla.” Denrick and Theila might have something interesting going on, but the book makes sure to keep them off to the margins as often as possible.
Speaking of the book often feeling like the characters don’t care about the rest of the plot, the final act introduces charges of forgery and espionage. This seems like something that should have come up far earlier, so that we could have some details, like what happened and why we would care. Instead, the charges seem to appear spontaneously to get us from wherever we had the characters to an execution. Similarly, the last scene dumps some random assertion about the execution process on us, that I feel like should have come up early in the book.
Oh, and in the final paragraphs, we inexplicably get another unnecessary name-abbreviation. I don’t get it.
Also, for a book that takes such delight in people either causing each other pain or making futile decisions with clear consequences to magnify such pain, it seems far out of line to end the book with a “discussion guide,” as if we expect elementary school students to make up most of the audience.
The project has the Codeberg repository mentioned above, which seems at least somewhat active, though only Patterson appears to have contributed, so far.
While the story itself doesn’t really introduce anything new—except for plot points that we apparently forgot to include earlier—this final stretch of the book ends with appendices, including a glossary, a character list, a location list, and groups of intelligent creatures.
Coming up next week, we’ll read the remaining to-date completed stories from the WNV Universe, since they seem short.
As mentioned previously, by the way, the list of potential works to discuss has run low, so I need to ask for help, again. If you know of any works—or want to create them—that fit these posts (fictional, narrative, Free Culture, available to the public, and not by creators who we’ve already discussed), please tell me about them. Every person who points me to at least one appropriate work with an explanation will receive a free membership on my ☕ Buy Me a Coffee page.
Anyway, while we wait for that, what did everybody else think about the book?
Credits: The header image is the book’s cover, by Autumn Patterson, released under the same terms as the book.
]]>Also, I don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.
Content Warning: Racism
Image Not Shown: A Black boy uses a fountain marked ‘colored’ at a North Carolina county courthouse in 1938
Separate water fountains for Black people still stand in the South – thinly veiled monuments to the long, strange, dehumanizing history of segregation from The Conversation
Over the years, those words were covered up by different ceremonial plaques. But for some Black Ellisville residents, the fountains still stir up painful memories of second-class citizenship.
Hashtags: #Racism #History #JimCrow
When the headline said “thinly veiled,” I didn’t expect that to literally mean that they hung a sign over the previous signs. Horrible.
It is a fact that slavery flourished in the United States and constituted an immoral and inhumane deprivation of African slaves’ lives, liberty and cultural heritage. As a result, millions of African Americans today continue to suffer great injustices. But reparation is a national and a global issue, which should be addressed in America and in the world.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Content Warning: US Politics
Image Not Shown: Ron DeSantis at a podium labeled Moms for Liberty
Turns out the GOP does have a few ideas—and they’re all terrible from Daily Kos
If they can’t win on woke, Republicans can always go back to their sure winners, like the 14 states that refused money to feed hungry school children, the 26 states that refused additional federal unemployment benefits during the pandemic, a push to raise drug prices, and the brilliant idea to eliminate not student loan debt, but student loans.
Hashtags: #USPol #GOP
It took me more than eight years, but I finally agree with the people who said that they like Trump in politics, on the basis that “white people” (they meant fans of Republicans) no longer felt an urge to stay quiet. I say that I agree now, because I see that the entire party has exposed itself as purely destructive. And when you trace back their sentiments, you can quickly see that we didn’t lose the “good” Republican Party over the last few years. We lost them decades ago, but they had the sense to stay quiet, so that we would treat their often-literally medieval ideas as legitimate topics of discussion.
They now openly support mass poverty and death, though, so we no longer need to pretend that they might have valid points. And for that, I thank Donald Trump…
We are passing through times that will secure for us a higher and nobler celebration. American gold will never secure freedom equal rights and justice to our race. No! Before these can come American slavery must be crushed, and its foul stain wiped from the Nation’s escutcheon.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Image Not Shown: Singra Mro with students. He has started the Rengmitca Language Learning Program to save the endangered language
One man is trying to save a language in Bangladesh with only six native speakers from Global Voices
In 2015, linguist Peterson announced in a press conference in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, that there are only 30 people remaining who can speak the Rengmitca language. All of them were over the age of 50, and he feared that the language could face extinction with their passing if younger generations failed to learn it.
Hashtags: #Bangladesh #Language #Culture
I wish them the best of luck, here, because I don’t know that a community of only six can build back to a living language.
Land monopoly—in the hands of individuals, corporations or syndicates—is at bottom the prime cause of the inequalities which obtain; which desolate fertile acres turned over to vast ranches and into bonanza farms of a thousand acres, where not one family finds a habitation, where muscle and brain are supplanted by machinery, and the small farmer is swallowed up and turned into a tenant or slave.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Image Not Shown: Transgender woman drinking tea looking through the window at home
Community connections can ease stigma exposure for trans people from Futurity
The researchers demonstrated a link between higher exposure to gender-related stigma and a pattern of cortisol variation that was blunted, sluggish, and flattened, indicating a lowered ability to regulate the body’s stress response.
Hashtags: #Gender #LGBTQ #Stress
In plainer language, we have a responsibility to provide emotional support to transgender people when they come out, end of story.
Whose starward eye / Saw chariot “swing low”? And who was he / That breathed that comforting, melodic sigh, / “Nobody knows de trouble I see”?
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Content Warning: US Tax Season
Image Not Shown: A person prepares taxes at a computer
Free Tax Filing: A Crucial Step Toward Unrigging Our Economy from OtherWords
Buoyed by funding the IRS received though the Inflation Reduction Act, the Direct File pilot is another example of the Biden administration’s commitment to tackle junk fees that chip away at people’s economic wellbeing and to foster a government that better serves the American people.
Hashtags: #USPol #Taxes #Economy
I did my taxes last weekend, as it turns out, using TurboTax, since my situation gets a bit too complicated for the IRS system. It “only” took about two nightmarish hours, as one website decided to make me play shell-games to find my W-2 (salary), Intuit wouldn’t connect to my credit union, the software kept asking me to “review” empty documents that—if I touched anything—would create a new document, leaving the empty still flagged as needing review, and more.
All this, to produce a twenty-page document that they send to the IRS, so that the IRS can compare it with their analysis—since everybody involved already sends the information to them—and tell me if I got it right. It reminds me of the story that, in the 1920s, food manufacturers originally produced boxed cake mixes that included powdered eggs or substitutes, and only needed water to reconstitute the batter. Market research showed that the people who would buy the mixes felt turned off, because they wanted to participate in the process, thereby condemning us all to lousy cake mixes that also require us to have fresh eggs and milk to stir in…except that nobody gets a satisfying feeling from transferring data from one form to another.
In short, I want the IRS funded properly, so that they can expand this program massively—then obsolete it, so that those of us with less-strenuous taxes can take their word for the bill or refund—and to see Intuit and its cohort driven out of business.
The people closest to the pain should be the closest to the power.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didn’t fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.
Image Not Shown: Avast Software. Collage by 404 Media
FTC Fines Avast $16.5 Million For Selling Browsing Data Harvested by Antivirus from 404 Media
Jumpshot then packaged this data and sold various products based on it, including the company’s so-called “All Click Feed.” That product allows a client to buy information on all of the clicks Jumpshot has observed on a particular site, such as Amazon.com, Walmart.com, Target.com, BestBuy.com, or eBay.com. Internal documents mentioned companies such as Expedia, IBM, Intuit, which makes TurboTax, L’Oréal, and Home Depot, and employees are told to not speak publicly about relationships with these companies. The idea, Jumpshot said in a previous press release, was to “provide marketers with deeper visibility into the entire online customer journey.”
Before moving to Linux, I briefly tried Avast when then-competitor AVG, before the scandals and acquisition by Avast, seemed to have a few problems running on my computer at the time. Avast didn’t last long, because even then, it felt too invasive.
That said, I hope that the Clam AV team pays attention to this, because Windows now needs a no-cost virus scanning utility—Clam AV only has an on-access solution for Linux, right now—and having a Free Software solution to recommend, where someone can inspect the code to know that the team doesn’t do anything troubling with data, would benefit a lot of people.
Image Not Shown: Stacks of magazines with the VICE logo, showing avoidable industrial accidents
Vice surrenders from Pluralistic
And yet, at every turn, through a succession of increasingly incompetent owners who bought the stumbling, declining Vice at fire-sale prices and then proceeded to hack away at the wages and tools its journalists depended on while paying executives salaries so high that they beggared the imagination, Vice’s reporters continued to turn out stellar material.
Long-time readers presumably know that VICE used to make up a significant part of my news diet, as evidenced by my tweeting (at the time) around a hundred-seventy of their articles in the format that became these social media roundup posts. 404 Media begins to fill that void, and it pleases me to hear that they feel financially stable. And I look forward to listening to the unauthorized tell-all soon.
If you appreciate this sort of content, then you should probably follow me on Mastodon to get it as early as possible…and feel free to reply, at least to the good stuff.
Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.
]]>In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names are trademarks of the owners, and so forth, and everything here relies on sitting squarely within the bounds of Fair Use, as criticism that uses tiny parts of each show to extrapolate the world that the characters live in.
I initially outlined the project in this post, for those falling into this from somewhere else. In short, we attempt to use the details presented in Star Trek to assemble a view of what life looks like in the Federation. This “phase” of the project changes from previous posts, however. The Next Generation takes place long after the original series, so we shouldn’t expect similar politics and socialization. Maybe more importantly, I enjoy the series less.
Put simply, you shouldn’t read this expecting a recap or review of an episode. Many people have done both to death over nearly sixty years. You will find a catalog of information that we learn from each episode, though, so expect everything to be a potential “spoiler,” if you happen to have that irrational fear.
Rather than list every post in the series here, you can quickly find them all on the startrek tag page.
This episode focuses heavily on its plot, so we probably won’t get much out of it.
Captain’s log, Stardate 44631.2. We are proceeding through the rim of an uncharted binary star system, where we may have located the USS Brittain. The missing science vessel failed to arrive at its destination and has not been heard from since a distress call twenty-nine days ago.
Consider this for a moment: They heard a distress call from this ship a month ago, and only decided to follow up on that after the crew failed to show up for a meeting. We’ll later learn that it would take weeks for that message to arrive, meaning that Starfleet ignored them for something like six to seven weeks.
PICARD: What could have caused such an event? Drugs? A virus? Poison?
You may remember the Federation’s moral panic about drugs introduced in Encounter at Farpoint. It hasn’t ended, I guess.
LAFORGE: Don’t worry about it. There were thirty-four people were found dead on this ship. That’s enough to make anybody uneasy.
Apparently, they stopped giving the speech about pushing your feelings down until after the mission, or LaForge doesn’t subscribe to those unhealthy theories.
O’BRIEN: Is that why you’re late?
I realize that the episode has O’Brien acting like this for plot reasons, but…this doesn’t feel remotely inconsistent with how he treated Keiko in Data’s Day.
PICARD: It appears that I am not immune to the strange forces that are at work on this ship.
I find it telling that, despite the number of times that he has quickly succumbed to alien influences, including Lonely Among Us and The Best of Both Worlds, Picard assumed that he’d do well under these conditions. And in a lot of ways, this reflects Picard’s elitism, thinking that everyone around him might fall in the face of sleeplessness, but he has so much more inner strength than the rest of his crew.
CRUSHER: Maybe it’s because she’s Betazoid. I don’t know why. All I know is there’s more going on here than being caught in a Tyken’s rift, and I don’t know how or why it’s happening. But I do know this. There is an inevitable conclusion to this pattern, and if I can’t find a way to stop it, we will all go insane.
I don’t love the ableist language, there. “We might all need psychiatric treatment” probably doesn’t rate highly on everybody’s list of fun possibilities, but it hardly deprives them of a future.
TROI: Except me. And all I have is nightmares. I can hardly sleep at all anymore. In the end, I’ll be like him. Just like him.
Thank goodness she figured out how to make this about her…
DATA: There is no technology to block telepathic transmissions, Doctor.
…Why not? I realize that this doesn’t matter to our project, but presumably if they accept that telepathy exists, then it must have some physical presence to block. Or do they treat psychic activity as some sort of magic that they can’t detect.
GUINAN: Relax, Gillespie. Everybody, relax. Ten Forward is a designated shelter area. Relax.
I like that they all got up to find their shelter, apparently not knowing the ship’s safety rules…
DATA: Thank you, Doctor. Activating Bussard collectors.
Two things to note, here.
First, “Bussard collectors” come from the theoretical Bussard ramscoop design, where a spacecraft might collect hydrogen while in flight, using it to fuel a fusion reactor for propulsion. Physicist Robert Bussard proposed the idea in 1960, and they have appeared widely in science fiction since then.
Second, you do not activate the “collectors” to emit stuff, pretty much by definition.
As mentioned, we don’t get a lot out of this episode.
LaForge, at least, appears believe in consoling his workers and helping them get past trauma, as opposed to previous episodes where leaders have insisted that everyone push down their trauma and deal with it in private.
We seem to have returned to a time when nobody expects a ship to return from distant missions, taking over a month for anybody to respond to a distress call.
The Federation still appears to embrace the War on Drugs.
Jealousy persists in romantic relationships, leading to angry outbursts.
People don’t see value in sleep or dreaming, seeing those who can’t do without them as weaker. They also see psychological problems as something to fear and dismiss, rather than something to treat.
The crew doesn’t seem to know the protected shelter areas on the ship.
Come back next week, when someone else may have subverted Starfleet, in Identity Crisis.
Credits: The header image is untitled by an uncredited PxHere photographer, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication.
]]>Not that it makes a difference for the projects, but every time I taught a January 27th class, I’d make mention of Beach somewhere, because even with worthless technology, it still makes a fun alternate history to imagine the five boroughs combed with pneumatic tubes.
For those of you interested in such things, I’ll have the next issue of the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter ready to go on Saturday the second.
If you have signed up on Mailchimp, I still don’t quite trust the company, then you’ll get the e-mail on Saturday. If you have subscribed on Buy Me a Coffee—at the link in the previous paragraph, click the Follow button to the upper-right of the page; no money will change hands—you’ll get it on Tuesday morning, the fifth of March, because I never publish blog posts on Tuesdays, making that a nicer match than Saturdays.
What will you find inside? As always, you’ll find links to all the articles that I found interesting in my RSS feed or bookmarked, plus some analysis of blog traffic. For February, I wrote a piece on the surprising lack of overlap between certain 1980s subcultures, discussed media consumption skewed towards celebrating Black History Month, have some early stage looks at an upcoming project, and the postmortem of an abandoned project that would have gone out next weekend. If you’ve become a member on Buy Me a Coffee, then you can already see previews for some of that.
Unless I’ve forgotten something, all of this week’s time went to cleaning up the application’s user interface. In particular, I made two major changes.
First, I have replaced all the emoji indicators—irritating, in how inconsistent they appear, apparently undecided whether to show at all, find some ASCII-like representation, or appear as rendered in an emoji font—with Material Symbols and Icons. While the designs won’t win any artistic prizes, they do have value in presenting a comprehensive and consistent appearance. Alas, Tcl will not work with the SVG versions of the icons, so I instead have tiny rasterized PNG files of everything. Google has also licensed them under the terms of the Apache License, version 2.0.
Second, with help from the Material icons, the Search window now looks much cleaner.
I’d like to finally code up Notoboto’s search-and-replace code.
It might also make sense to finally add a Cut command, to go with Copy and Paste in the menus. I’ve ignored it, so far, because copy-then-delete seems less risky than having the application modify text in the document while the user works. But if I already need to make that commitment in replacing text, I might as well do it here, too.
Credits: The header image is Illustrated description of the Broadway underground railway by the New York Parcel Dispatch Company, long in the public domain due to an expired copyright.
]]>As a quick note, I’ll use terms like “artificial intelligence” and “AI” extremely broadly, in this post, to save you the frustration of constantly reading clunky phrases like “large language model” or “chatbot based on an artificial neural network trained by scraping the Internet.” I don’t believe that any of these systems display anything like intelligence, and use the term in the sense of (the products of) the field of study that has produced everything from ontological knowledge-representation systems to planning agents to language models.
A lot has rightly come up about the utterly bizarre schism among the wealthy people—the AI Doomers and the Effective Accelerationists, apparently, names so silly that I needed to look them up twice for this paragraph, because I forgot them immediately after the first search, and to compound the problem, the Doomers actually call themselves “Effective Altruists” to make everything even more difficult to follow—pouring money into machine learning. I call it bizarre, because both sides differ so much from how the rest of us see things, that it (almost?) seems fake. Cory Doctorow had a similar parsing of the goofiness, recently.
Specifically, you’ve probably seen me describe the overall AI-landscape as something like this.
Sure, we could point to thousands of years of really smart people trying and utterly failing to build mathematical models for innovation and thought. But it also does make a certain amount of (emotional) sense that, if you pile up enough transistors and wish really hard, that your investment must eventually Frosty the Snowman itself into manifesting itself as your friend, right…?
When I say that, I mean that we’ve yet to find a useful way to model a person’s thoughts, or even measure a person’s intelligence, and we still argue over the existence animal cognition because we can’t even define intelligence, showing that we have no idea how any of this works. But the industry seems to want to believe that they can force emergent behavior—of precisely the sort that they want, and nothing else, to boot—onto a system…primarily through spending money combined with their expectations of a particular result. Personally, I find that disconnect funny, if only because people shouldn’t need to look to someone like me for a rational approach to someone else’s field.
By contrast, over on the other side of the divide, the kids trying to find the right magic hat have decided to argue over whether Frosty will enslave and murder us all if we don’t explicitly block it from doing so (Doomers), or if they can raise Frosty to become a quiet slave well-behaved global citizen (Accelerationists). And in that argument, I see a few maybe-interesting, inter-related ideas to talk about.
We have a sort of chain of worry, to start looking at this.
I forget where I stole this particular idea from—maybe Sugata Mitra—but I’ve always liked the idea that the first computer and artificial intelligence came about before electricity, in the form of the bureaucracy. Both systems seek to automate processes to a degree that the person taking action doesn’t need any knowledge or skill relevant to the situation.
And if you think about it, the way that wealthy people and corporations look at artificial intelligence strongly resembles how the rest of us look at corporations, seeing them as either saviors or despoilers, depending on personal politics. And it makes some sense, because AIs—software in general, really—and corporations work along similar lines, substituting rules for human judgment, at least in part to avoid any individual taking the blame for something going wrong.
In the same way, the problems with using these chatbots look a lot like the problems of dealing with any large agency: Neither cares about what happens to you. They both hide their biases behind a wall of Intellectual Property protections. And if something goes wrong, you can’t legitimately hold anybody responsible, because nobody visible made any decision.
I might even go so far as to say that every hypothetical danger of a future rogue AI already occurs among unregulated corporations.
You get my point, I imagine: The same people who worry incessantly about rogue AI often also run or invest in organizations that do exactly what they worry about, without their objections.
We also need to look at the embodied labor of a human being.
When a company hires a new employee, they get that person’s strength, knowledge, and skill without paying for the hundreds of thousands of hours of labor that went into making that person healthy. If you hire me, I don’t charge you for the work that my family, over a hundred educators including clerical staff, a few dozen prior managers of various sorts, and probably more people than that put in to turn me into the person who you chose to hire. I wouldn’t even want to guess at how much money it would cost to do that on purpose. But if we could jump over the Frosty the Snowman line to build a real artificial intelligence, the creator and owner of that system would need to fund all that labor, making the system no longer cheaper than hiring a human.
This, I think, explains a lot of the schism between—and I need to look up the names again—the “Effective Accelerationists” and “AI Doomers.” They seem to differ primarily on the cost of simulating that embodied expense. If they think that they can have their AI learn by watching footage of real parents, or something similar, then they believe that this will end well. If they believe that will cost them too much, then they believe that AI will fundamentally turn against us at some point if we don’t lock it down.
Finally, I’ve said before that most of us misunderstand dystopian fiction. We see it as a warning of a possible future, but a good dystopian story almost always takes the plight of an existing group who we generally ignore and marginalize, and asks what the world would look like if everybody needed to live with that burden. To paraphrase the (alleged) William Gibson idea, dystopia evenly distributes the future to include all of us.
Content Warning: Discussion of non-Free books that you should probably read for yourself, if you haven't.
For example, as someone with a decent sense of history, it infuriates me when people refer to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as (some variation of) “ushering in Gilead,” because that tells me that the speaker completely missed the point of The Handmaid’s Tale. Margaret Atwood didn’t invent how society treated women in the story, nor did she see the future. Gilead looked at how people treated certain women in the 1980s, and extended that treatment to white, middle-class, straight women.
Likewise, I cringe whenever someone refers to The Parable of the Sower as “prophetic,” especially if they cite the President’s “make America great again” slogan. Why? Well, Octavia Butler didn’t actually write about the 2010s. She probably took the slogan from famous Ronald Reagan campaign material. Do you also think that the idea of minority groups facing violence, or fleeing environmental devastation came from some bespoke imagined future…?
I apologize for repeating the point, but both books have us to look at how we treat an underclass, and ask us to imagine that we all become part of that underclass. And here, I see the other ideas that I have around wealthy-thought around AI coming together.
Many people have reported the lengths that the wealthy go to in hopes of “dystopia-proofing” their lives. They bribe officials, distribute their assets across multiple countries, hire bodyguards to isolate them from angry employees, build doomsday bunkers , and so forth, and they’d love to colonize other planets even though they struggle to reach the Kármán line and would apparently need to reinvent the reusable launchpad . For any problem that might arise, from labor strikes to political regime change to environmental collapse, they at least believe that they can spend money into creating a shield, so that they don’t need to care.
However, the promises of AI often look like dystopia for the wealthy, offering a world where the abuses that they heap on the rest of us could now become problems that they need to live with, too. You can’t bribe an AI charged with enforcing the law, and can’t guarantee that the inherent biases won’t point away from wealthy white people. You can’t build a doomsday bunker resistant to an AI that might see your bunker as raw material to build an impenetrable shield for itself.
In other words, if they don’t control AI, then it might treat them like they treat the rest of us. If they can’t teach these systems to defer to (wealthy) humans, then their wealth might no longer matter, and they need to get by like the rest of us.
I know. If I shed a tear, it’ll probably come from laughter, too.
I have one more twist for you, here: Thinking about God makes people more likely to trust AI. Or, to think about it another way, artificial intelligence may have religious connotations to it.
This might make some sense, if you think about how strongly Cosmism left its influences on Silicon Valley thinking. From here, you get the transhuman impulse for uploading brains to computers and colonizing the universe, effectively a belief in a technology-based afterlife.
And so, they see artificial intelligence as necessarily real, a Frosty the Snowman who also serves some role in their cosmology. That may amplify the dystopian angle, because a robot uprising would seem to have a different emotional resonance if the robots look like some equivalent of angels and demons to onlookers.
Despite this seemingly whole picture, though, it all still rests on the Frosty the Snowman premise, that enough silicon piled together must, eventually, come to life, no matter the expertise or insight of the makers. And like any religious parable catering to the wealthy, Frosty must separate the worthy from the unworthy. In their hubris, they wonder whether they can guide Frosty’s hand, so that they can escape their vengeful snowman’s judgment.
Meanwhile, the rest of us realize that figuring out how to model intelligence—instead of wishing for it and hoping that throwing enough money at the problem will convince the universe to solve the problem for us—would represent such a leap in mathematical sophistication that it would revolutionize how we do anything and everything.
No, really. Think about it: If we had a mathematical model of intelligence, or even some subset of thinking, then we could teach that model, and then a person could follow that process on paper or mentally, if slower than a computer could execute it. And if even a small child can “spin up” a variety of intelligences for help, that changes how we approach all sorts of problems, and maybe even how we interact with each other.
It also raises questions, as I’ve mentioned before, of civil rights. If you have a model capable of independent thought, then doesn’t it have a right to autonomy? If you created it on paper, and so it only “wakes up” when someone interacts directly with it, does that intelligence have a right to have someone keep it active? Could we even keep track of every model created, so that we could protect its rights?
We could also push this premise in the other direction: If piling up enough transistors will Frosty their way into intelligence on their own, and intelligence works mathematically, then would the same hold true of paper and ink? Would the same hold true of snow, since you can carve symbols into snow exactly like writing? Do we need to worry about the Snowman Liberation Movement…?
The Doomers and Accelerationists seem awfully united in one important way: They both want you to know that you should invest in companies hawking artificial intelligence. Either they will save the world, depending on which “side” that you listen to, or they’ll do horrible things that will give you an unfair edge.
Strip away their pseudo-religious overtones and my hypothetical situations, and they don’t actually have much beyond marketing. They don’t have products that do what they claim or warn. They don’t have a plan to get there. But they want you and I to believe that—thumpety thump thump, and all that—they will change the world with nothing more than another deposit from investors.
Oh, and they have a fancier version of a Markov process, I suppose…
Credits: The header image is Melting snowman by Tristan Schmurr, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
]]>To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context.
This should go without saying—even though I plan to repeat it with every Book Club installment—but Content Advisories do not suggest any sort of judgment on my part, only topics that come up in the work that I noticed and might benefit from a particular mood or head space for certain audiences. I provide it to help you make a decision, rather than a decision in and of itself.
The blurb for the repository.
The WNV universe is a free culture story world featuring. Woethief Nyla Valora as the main character.
This repository contains stories and outlines for future stories. Stories can be any genre as long as they take place in the WNV Universe.
I should note that the project has another seventy-five-or-so thousand words in stories marked as in-progress. I opted not to look at those, at least for now, given that the repository has some recent activity.
While I don’t know if this will sustain itself, I have to admit to finding the Denrick character at least somewhat interesting. The story doesn’t mire the character in nearly as much angst as the others, for example. And despite standing as the only other human that we’ve seen so far, the story doesn’t seem to show any interest in pairing him off with Nyla, where so many other fantasy stories in this vein would insist that the two humans must belong together.
Too much of many of these chapters feel redundant, containing lengthy dry exposition that we’ve already seen at least once, such as Nyla’s birthright and the reasons that she lost it, descriptions of the obtrusive pseudo-Christianity, or Theila’s history.
Also, the silly “WoeNyl” nickname has started to escape from the chapter titles and infiltrate the dialogue of characters who don’t seem to have any legitimate reason to use it, assuming that any legitimate reason exists at all. It honestly feels inappropriate or inconsistent for characters to treat our seemingly singular protagonist—the two “personalities” don’t seem any more separate than routine indecision and ambivalence—as two people, but also find it too burdensome to refer to them individually, and give them a single two-syllable name instead of their individual two-syllable names.
The project has the Codeberg repository mentioned above, which seems at least somewhat active, though only Patterson appears to have contributed, so far.
I don’t see anything new in this section, except for a character or two.
Coming up next week, we’ll finish reading Woethief, from WoeNyl Saves Theila to Sentencing, plus a skim of the supplemental material.
As mentioned previously, by the way, the list of potential works to discuss has run low, so I need to ask for help, again. If you know of any works—or want to create them—that fit these posts (fictional, narrative, Free Culture, available to the public, and not by creators who we’ve already discussed), please tell me about them. Every person who points me to at least one appropriate work with an explanation will receive a free membership on my ☕ Buy Me a Coffee page.
Anyway, while we wait for that, what did everybody else think about the book so far?
Credits: The header image is the book’s cover, by Autumn Patterson, released under the same terms as the book.
]]>Also, I don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.
Image Not Shown: Protesters in El Salvador declare 'Yes to democracy. No to authoritarianism' during a demonstration on Jan. 14, 2024
In the face of severe challenges, democracy is under stress – but still supported – across Latin America and the Caribbean from The Conversation
El Salvador stands as an example of how disillusionment can undermine democracy. President Nayib Bukele was reelected on Feb. 4, 2024, with what appears to be over 80% of the vote while overtly flaunting democratic norms.
Hashtags: #Crime #Democracy #LatinAmerica #Populism
You might notice a familiar pattern, here, of one group making a mess of the economy, and then turning around to blame democratic values in order to acquire power.
Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Image Not Shown: Growth in income inequality, US vs. Europe
Media That Benefit From Inequality Prefer to Talk About Other Things from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
Public opinion data suggests that this has worked—53% of Americans see the federal budget deficit as a very big problem, whereas only 44% view economic inequality the same way.
Hashtags: #Media #Corporations #Inequality
Finally, we have someone besides me (a nobody, in terms of the media) talking about how corporate media has a distinct agenda of making its shareholders happy.
Education is the great equalizer, and shouldn’t be limited to the wealthiest few.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Image Not Shown: Members of the Poor People's Campaign gather in Washington, D.C.
Poor and Low-Income Voters Are a Sleeping Giant from OtherWords
The campaign and the Institute for Policy Studies just co-published fact sheets for the nation and all 50 states on the interlocking problems that hit the poor hardest: poverty and inequality, systemic racism, ecological devastation, and militarism.
Hashtags: #Voting #Inequality
Unfortunately, the article quietly neglects the fact that certain parts of the country keep the giant asleep through widespread voter suppression. I appreciate the sentiment, but at some level, this still represents an assertion that politicians need to “excite” the electorate, instead of the electorate lighting a fire under every politician that doesn’t excite them.
The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, “It’s a girl.”
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Image Not Shown: Demonstrators hold signs in support of medication abortion
‘Unreliable’: Studies cited by judge in 2023 abortion pill case have been retracted by publisher from Daily Kos
They generate seemingly authoritative research papers specifically for the purpose of influencing and providing plausible authority to receptive judges, such as Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas.
Hashtags: #Abortion #Science #USPol
In all “fairness,” if these studies didn’t exist, then the judges would probably do what Alito did in Burwell v Hobby Lobby, blocking scientific evidence that Plan B medication didn’t cause abortions, in order to allow the defendant corporation to have “strongly held religious beliefs” about the abortion that doesn’t happen.
How pitiable is it to reflect, that although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of Mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of these rights and privileges, which he hath conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren…which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Image Not Shown: Female student using microscope in the laboratory at university
How allies can fight discrimination against Black, Latino STEM students from Futurity
When fellow bystanders (not just targets) appealed to others to call out discriminatory behavior, they were more likely to do so.
Hashtags: #Education #Discrimination
This gets to the heart of what I meant (almost three years ago) in my post on Doing the Work, that whatever you call yourself based on beliefs, if you don’t act on those beliefs, then those labels only do harm.
It has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States — but we’ve made it.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didn’t fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.
For Female Journalists, Attacks Online and Offline Are Common Threat from
I don’t suppose that I could say anything that makes the point better than the headline itself.
Image Not Shown: The Hugo Awards logo
Leaked Emails Show Hugo Awards Self-Censoring to Appease China from 404 Media
The email replies to this directive show administrators combing through authors’ social media presences and public travel histories, including from before they were nominated for the 2023 awards, and their writing and bodies of work beyond just what they were nominated for.
As you’ve probably noticed, I tend to ignore awards, and incidents like this make it abundantly clear why: Even ignoring the absurdity of a panel holding some universal and consistent definition of quality, it leaves open plenty of room for bias and corruption.
If you appreciate this sort of content, then you should probably follow me on Mastodon to get it as early as possible…and feel free to reply, at least to the good stuff.
Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.
]]>In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names are trademarks of the owners, and so forth, and everything here relies on sitting squarely within the bounds of Fair Use, as criticism that uses tiny parts of each show to extrapolate the world that the characters live in.
I initially outlined the project in this post, for those falling into this from somewhere else. In short, we attempt to use the details presented in Star Trek to assemble a view of what life looks like in the Federation. This “phase” of the project changes from previous posts, however. The Next Generation takes place long after the original series, so we shouldn’t expect similar politics and socialization. Maybe more importantly, I enjoy the series less.
Put simply, you shouldn’t read this expecting a recap or review of an episode. Many people have done both to death over nearly sixty years. You will find a catalog of information that we learn from each episode, though, so expect everything to be a potential “spoiler,” if you happen to have that irrational fear.
Rather than list every post in the series here, you can quickly find them all on the startrek tag page.
Brace yourselves. This episode will probably hurt…
Captain’s Log, Stardate 44614.6. We are approaching Starbase three-one-three, where we will pick up a shipment of scientific equipment for transport to a Federation outpost in the Guernica System. During the journey we will be hosting a special guest.
Presumably, the star takes its name from the town of Guernica.
LAFORGE: You remember about a year ago when we were caught in that booby trap the Menthars set? Okay. While we were trying to get out of it, I went down to the holodeck to study an engine prototype that was made when the Enterprise was first designed. And the computer, well, it gave me an image of the engine, but it also created this hologram of the designer. Doctor Leah Brahms.
Specifically, LaForge skirts through the details of Booby Trap.
BRAHMS: The matter-antimatter ratio has been changed. The mixture isn’t as rich as regulations dictate.
LAFORGE: Experience has shown me that too high a ratio diminishes efficiency. I worked with the mixture until I got the right balance.
The term “regulations” seems striking, here. It implies both that the Federation has laws governing this mixture, and that the Enterprise crew has decided that those laws secretly don’t apply to them.
LAFORGE: Right. Again, I adjusted the flow. Sometimes things happen a little differently here is space than they do on the drawing board.
It didn’t take him long to jump from assuming that he’d make a close friend to dismissing the possibility that Starfleet tests engine designs before slapping them on the most important ship in the fleet…
BRAHMS: Yes. How did you know that?
It would appear that Starfleet keeps its upcoming engine designs secret from its engineers.
LAFORGE: Is that right…?
I have to give the episode credit for showing that LaForge’s attempt to manipulate Brahms actually makes her uncomfortable.
PICARD: We’re out here to explore, to make contact with other life forms, to establish peaceful relations but not to interfere. And absolutely not to destroy. And yet look what we have just done.
We finally found a death that affects Picard emotionally.
TROI: Captain, everything you did was consistent with established Starfleet procedures.
And Troi jumps to dismiss that they might have done something unfortunate, whereas nobody suggests that they might want to change those established procedures.
LAFORGE: Okay. Computer, subdued lighting. No, that’s too much. I don’t want it dark, I want it cozy.
Did I expect to see ribbed velour sweaters? No, I did not. And yet, here we are.
COMPUTER: Please state your request in precise candlepower.
Why would anybody design a user interface like that? Can you identify the candlepower value of any light source in your life, other than estimating a literal candle?
LAFORGE: See, it’s not a matter of precision, computer, it’s a matter of mood. Brighter than this. More. More. A little more. Hold. Right there. Perfect. Now, some music. Maybe a little soft jazz. No, that’s not right. Let me think here. Oh, I got it! Some Brahms! A piano étude. Nah, that’s too corny. Probably everybody thinks of that. Computer, just give me some guitar. Classical guitar. Doesn’t matter who. Yes, thank you.
You see, she has the same surname as Johannes Brahms, so she must like the music. 🙄
LAFORGE: Standard procedure when guests come on board. Protocol. I mean, it was nothing specific, actually. Just, you know…
Such a lazy lie…
BRAHMS: To be honest, people find me cold, cerebral, lacking in humor.
What? People in the Federation harshly judge professional women for not acting sufficiently friendly for their tastes? Whoever would have imagined such a thing? I mean, other than us, after seeing all the other times that we’ve seen it happen.
LAFORGE: Hoped? Guinan, the woman is about as friendly as a Circassian plague cat, only cares about her work, hates what I’ve done to her engines, and to top it off she’s married. Computer never even told me she was married.
In my experience, unfriendly people have a tendency not to get married. Also, compare his line, here, with the Brahms line that I quoted immediately above this one.
LAFORGE: She went where?
How many times has he explained this as harmless? But he objects to her seeing it, so perhaps he has some awareness of a problem, there…?
LAFORGE: All right, look. Ever since you came on board, you’ve been badgering me and I’ve taken it. I’ve shown you courtesy, and respect, and a hell of a lot of patience. Oh, no, no, no, wait a minute. I’ve tried to understand you. I’ve tried to get along with you. And in return, you’ve accused, tried and convicted me without bothering to hear my side of it. So, I’m guilty, okay? But not of what you think. Of something much worse. I’m guilty of reaching out to you, of hoping we could connect. I’m guilty of a terrible crime, Doctor. I offered you friendship.
Yep. They somehow made this her fault, for not embracing a stalker who made non-consensual pornography about her in his spare time.
And for the record, he didn’t “offer” friendship. He presumed friendship, and then worked himself into an infantile snit, called her names behind her back, and tried to seduce her, when she didn’t show an immediate interest.
RIKER: Weapons status?
Well, they got over their grief about killing one of these things awfully quickly…
BRAHMS: I wouldn’t change a thing. Except for the way I behaved. I guess I came here with my own set of preconceptions about you.
What? She decided to let this go? How often do people violate women that she has gotten over this in a couple of hours?
We see some civilian fashion, but mostly, this gets into the atrocities of Federation relationships.
We get the sense, once again, that people don’t believe that regulations should apply to their situations.
Starfleet seems to have no interest in the design process behind the tools that they use.
The episode, however, revolves around the treatment of women. Men expect them to have a friendly attitude towards anyone who likes them, blame them for not having an interest in dishonest stalkers, and want them to accept the blame for how men treat them.
User interfaces for lighting demand inputs in candlepower, a non-standard unit.
Picard briefly mourns accidentally killing a novel form of life…but he gets over it quickly as he prepares to kill more of them.
Drop by next week, when the crew has trouble sleeping, in Night Terrors.
Credits: The header image is Hologram by m_hweldon, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
]]>If you live in the United States, you know about the eruption by reputation, even if you’ve never heard the name or connected it to a volcano. For example, the trouble that the English had in establishing Jamestown and the 1605 California floods both trace their origins to the eruption, and the entire Northern Hemisphere seems to have had at least one wet summer and colder winter around 1601.
I assure you that none of these projects will remotely have the importance of either holiday, and I don’t think that I’d want them to, honestly, unless they actually advocated for protecting people.
I don’t remember if these changes went out during this week, but The Light’s Edge’s landing page now includes a minimal e-mail submission form. For anybody needing to do this, since I already have PHP running on my VPS for other purposes, I whipped up a quick script to pass the address on to me based on this rough pattern.
<?php
if ($_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"] == "POST") {
$email = $_POST["email"];
if (filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
$to = "email.address@example.com";
$message = "Email: $email";
mail($to, $subject, $message);
echo "Email submitted successfully!";
}
}
?>
I don’t have newsletter software running at the other end of this, only an e-mail account from which I’ll manually blind-copy people announcements when parts of the story go live.
As mentioned at some point, I have started some much-needed cleanup, here, such as removing unused code and stubbing out fields that don’t exist in the oldest versions of notes.
However, I also now allow for creating a new note without having a note already selected. I don’t know how I overlooked that problem.
In addition, I have replaced my awful text-based attempts to convey the search modifiers (case-sensitivity, whole-word, and regular expressions) with Material Design’s icons. Alas, Tk can’t read something in their SVG files, so it uses the PNG versions, for now.
For consistency, I have started moving other Material Design icons into place for other features.
I still have work to do on Notoboto, so expect to stay focused there, though the backlog of library updates does keep growing.
Credits: The header image is Hualca Hualca by Leonora (Ellie) Enking, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 Generic license.
]]>Will this provide any lessons to anybody concerned about Microsoft’s new business model? I honestly have no idea. 🤷 But the story might amuse someone, and it at least feels mildly timely.
As I’ve probably mentioned before, for most of my early life—longer than I should probably admit, in fact—I used a Commodore 64 as my only computer. It had everything that I needed for a long time, plus the best-by-far graphics and music, especially for the price. And I only really stopped using mine for school work, when Commodore’s forty-character line lengths made my papers look sloppy, and it became difficult to find a new compatible printer. I could print eighty-character lines like everyone else, but that required using the Commodore 1520 plotter, which used scrolls with the approximate width of toilet paper that looked fairly absurd, and if the mechanism slipped, it could end up overwriting earlier lines of text.
By the time that I could no longer get away with using old Commodore products productively—and with the Amiga far out of my price range and an entirely different monster—my family got an IBM PC-compatible package, with a more traditional (for the time) dot-matrix printer. The computer had CGA graphics with a whopping four colors over 320 by 200 pixels (or sixteen colors, if you dropped the resolution to a hundred pixels by a hundred), and audio limited to a beeping speaker, but it printed in a standard way, which I needed. It ran MS-DOS, I want to say version 3.3 or thereabouts; that gave me my first direct exposure to Microsoft.
While I can’t say that I liked working with MS-DOS, I built a grudging respect for its modularity. If you didn’t see any use for some component, you could probably delete it or replace it. And it did provide valuable services—particularly for input and output—that a programmer could use from assembly language.
And then came Windows, specifically Microsoft Windows, version 3.1. It didn’t really function as an operating system as such, but more a graphical shell over MS-DOS. And I took an instant dislike to it. I couldn’t tell you how genuinely I felt that dislike, considering that I researched to find obscure features, and it sounds a lot like me at that age to dismiss something because it felt “too popular” or “too easy.” More importantly, though, it didn’t last long, and I soon considered myself “a Windows user.”
At that point, I also had my first exposures to UNIX, in the form of then-Sun’s Solaris operating system, which I genuinely liked. Sure, it required what we’d probably call a mainframe to run it, but it ran smoothly and looked great doing it.
Shortly after that, I had my first exposure to Linux, and…it didn’t measure up. That makes perfect sense, because I probably mean only two or three years after Torvalds released the first version of the kernel, but I saw an ugly graphical environment that seemed prone to crashing with no warning, and it might trash its own configuration files on the way out. The kernel, as far as I could tell, constantly needed adjustments and re-compiling, which took forever. And software only existed if you tracked it down and compiled it for your specific system.
You probably didn’t need to know most of that, but I figured that I’d get out of the way that I didn’t start out predisposed to using Linux. In contrast to almost every other system that enabled productivity, using Linux seemed to me to primarily revolve around maintaining Linux.
Years and Windows versions passed, and Microsoft began previewing Windows 8. Many people complained about the mobile-oriented look, but by that point, I had tired of that sort of whining after seeing—and sometimes participating in—it with Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows XP, and Windows Vista, before it. Instead, I objected to Microsoft requiring that Windows 8-certified hardware support Secure Boot, making the company a gatekeeper of which operating systems can run on what could become the overwhelming majority of commodity hardware.
As you know in hindsight, Microsoft has mostly acted fairly towards independent operating system developers to date. We haven’t heard many stories of Microsoft not providing a signing key to get through the Secure Boot process. This may have had something to do with a combination of the public outcry and coreboot becoming a viable alternative to UEFI.
However, not knowing how this would shake out at the time, the shift pushed me to find an alternative, in case Microsoft went the full route of iOS, with full control over everything from the hardware to the selection of available software. And that, not to mention the price, ruled out Apple products, which Microsoft seemed to want to emulate.
I had recently worked in an office where they ran Ubuntu, and didn’t hate it. I didn’t need to do any administration work, so I didn’t know what that would take, but that question seemed like a central part of the experiment.
Consider the alternatives at the time, by the way. ReactOS seems interesting, but risky in a few ways. FreeBSD looks identical to Linux, for my purposes, but with less support. OpenSolaris seemed interesting but had already vanished, and Illumos hadn’t quite established itself, nor did I know how Oracle would manage that relationship as it took over Sun’s branding everywhere. I could never tell if Haiku, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, or Inferno would seriously work, nor would I have any idea where one got software for them, back then, other than manually compiling everything.
I could churn thorough a bunch more alternatives, but you get the general idea: The options either looked so much like a modern Linux that I probably wouldn’t know the difference, or didn’t have enough labor behind it to feel like a serious contender.
If you want to try to follow my path to using Linux regularly, or want an approximate guide that you can quickly adapt to your needs, I present the process that I went through, as well as I can remember it.
First, I took stock of the software that I used regularly on my home computer. I make that distinction, because you can stumble right into the weeds by worrying about replicating your work computer, too—assuming that you work for somebody else who supplies you with a computer—or software that you once installed but never bothered to use. For each item on the list of software that you use, you’ll need to see which category it falls into.
In short, you want to know how much work you have ahead of you.
For my case, I already mostly used Free Software at home, by that point, so knew that I wouldn’t have much of an adjustment on that front. A work computer for me might need Visual Studio, but I don’t generally do much C# work on my own time, certainly not enough that I need an IDE for it.
Once you have your software list figured out, pick a Linux distribution or other operating system. Don’t overthink this, because it doesn’t matter much and you can always change your mind. If you have experience using something, choose that one.
Third, get yourself a cheap laptop. Back when I did this, you could find netbooks widely available, so I went that route. But a used laptop should also work. You’ll install your Linux distribution on this machine.
Why a separate computer, instead of sharing space on the computer you already use? I suspect that you’ll want to spend some time switching between systems to check on issues like rendering, and you probably won’t do that, if you need to reboot your computer to get into the other operating system. You also want to make the choice of operating system as frictionless as possible, so that you can make it freely.
With a separate computer, you also don’t risk anything except whatever you pay for a cheap computer, these days. It won’t happen, but if your installation of Linux “goes rogue” and starts overwriting files with the trashiest high-fantasy fiction, then that disaster won’t affect the computer that you currently use. Put another way, the separation can give you the peace of mind to experiment, because you can’t do much damage.
And I say to get a laptop for this, because that removes placement from the reasons that might affect which computer that you use.
Fourth, as mentioned, install your Linux distribution on the laptop. In most cases, this means writing the installer to a USB stick, booting to the USB stick, and clicking the big “Install” button. The process probably won’t get more technical than finding the instructions to do this…unless you want more complexity.
Fifth—and I consider this maybe the most important step—choose to live with the defaults. I don’t care if you desperately want aquamarine as the default color, the close button in the upper-left, round window corners, or whatever. Do not waste your time messing around with configuration.
I say this for a couple of reasons. Primarily, if you spend all your time on Linux configuring Linux, then you’ll never have time to find out if it’ll do the job for your routine work. But also, configuration can rapidly get out of hand, where you suddenly forget why you’ve copied options from three different websites and hope that they don’t break anything. Whatever your distribution looks like, accept it, at least for now.
And here, the experiment starts. You now have two computers with different operating systems. Which one do you reach for, when you need to work on something? Other than setting up file-sharing to access your work from the other system, how often do you find yourself working at one computer over the other?
In my case, after about a week, my Windows computer acted entirely like a file-server for the Linux box. I kept the machine running, because I needed my files, but barely touched the user interface. Your situation might not swing that far over, but the experience quickly showed me that I didn’t need to bother with Windows anymore.
I should note the handful of cases where I’ve had problems.
Note that you might have problems that I never see, because I may not care about those areas. For example, I couldn’t tell you what mainstream gaming looks like, since my game collection includes a couple of old Humble Bundles—back when they focused on independent studios—an occasional for-charity bundle from Itch, and Free Software. And even then, I don’t spend much time playing, because I have too much of an itch to make things.
Getting on a video call with friends has become a logic puzzle where we each try to list all the networks that we’ve gotten to work recently, then determine the maximal overlaps.
Zoom works consistently. Microsoft Teams for web sometimes works, though it has limitations; an unofficial desktop build exists, but nobody wants to even guess what it’ll do. Google’s works about half the time. I haven’t tried Slack or Discord, but as pure web applications, I would expect them to work.
All the Free Software teleconferencing platforms work, but getting a group of friends to show up there has its own roadblocks, and it becomes even more difficult for a professional relationship.
I once made the mistake—before getting a library card and discovering their apps—of purchasing an e-book that I wanted to read. All major publishers currently only produce digital copies of their material with onerous DRM that only allows you to stream the content in segments, so that one doesn’t have the temptation to ⚞gasp!⚟ share text with friends.
Of those major publishers, none of them bothers to target Linux as a platform where people might want to read. Booksellers also don’t bother to mention this, so you end up buying a compressed XML file with URLs that would tell software where to request encrypted paragraphs, if you had that software.
When I confronted the seller, to their credit, they refunded my money immediately and apologized. But if you want to read on a normal computer, expect to only get books from authors who’ll sell to you directly.
A while back—coinciding with early issues of the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter, as it turns out—I undertook the process of “ripping” my stacks of DVDs to a media server, so that I could actually watch them. No experience, after all, matches up to having a streaming service in your living room that primarily includes things that you want to see, and that where nothing appears based on shaky contracts between companies that might expire at any time without warning.
In any case, I had a painful few weeks trying to find Linux software that could deal with CSS (no, the other one) and its successors. Even paid codecs failed, or software would refuse to acknowledge them.
Presumably, some legitimate solution exists, out there. For the sake of expediency, though, I ended up running an old Windows machine—Windows has all the required codecs built in—to do the boring work of pulling poorly encrypted video files from the discs.
I haven’t had them, yet, but it seems fairly routine for certain classes of hardware to not have Linux support, particularly Wi-Fi modules. You might want to blame the Linux community for not supporting part of your new device, but this generally happens because the vendor won’t supply any information on the device to developers. If the vendor encrypted any part of the system, even trivially, then working out how to connect to it could violate various anti-hacking laws around the world. 🙄
As I said, though, I haven’t personally had this problem, and haven’t heard a “real” Linux user mention it in a long time. I’ve only heard it mentioned by people trying to scare people away from Linux. That doesn’t make it untrue or obsolete, though, because many manufacturers do still find Free Software threatening.
I don’t know how accurately this holds, or if it would even apply to anybody but me, but at least in my retelling of the various stories, I credit my deep interest in Free Culture to my shift over to regularly using Ubuntu.
Sure, maybe the two changes happened to coincide. However, I can’t help but think that, over the course of a few weeks, my choice of Linux distribution centered three things in my vision, every day.
I previously had an interest in material that had fallen out of copyright protection into the public domain, with the intent of using it for various business purposes, a story for another day, maybe. You could, therefore, maybe argue that I didn’t sit so far from becoming something of a copyleft advocate. However, the ideas presented by Ubuntu may have also pushed me to think more in terms of contributing to the commons, rather than trying to stockpile material and extract from it.
Those ideas, specifically, led me to think about Free Software’s value as its collaboration, not its results. They led me to dismiss the idea of building on the public domain purely in order to secure a new copyright on something. And they certainly led me to push further away from big-corporate silos for my consumer habits.
Again, I don’t know that this actually tells a story of causation, or if that cause would apply more widely than me, but I did want to mention it.
If you’ve gotten tired of huge transnational companies trying to control your computer for you, at least look into non-corporate alternatives. What you find might surprise you…or it might not. But at least, then, you’ll know.
And those of you who make the switch, I do wonder if you find any odd shifts in priorities like I believe that I did…
Credits: The header image is Ubuntu Cranes by Duststorm, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
]]>To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context.
This should go without saying—even though I plan to repeat it with every Book Club installment—but Content Advisories do not suggest any sort of judgment on my part, only topics that come up in the work that I noticed and might benefit from a particular mood or head space for certain audiences. I provide it to help you make a decision, rather than a decision in and of itself.
The blurb for the repository.
The WNV universe is a free culture story world featuring. Woethief Nyla Valora as the main character.
This repository contains stories and outlines for future stories. Stories can be any genre as long as they take place in the WNV Universe.
I should note that the project has another seventy-five-or-so thousand words in stories marked as in-progress. I opted not to look at those, at least for now, given that the repository has some recent activity.
While I unfortunately didn’t find much to praise about this chunk of the story, by the end of its run, the pacing has finally started to gain some speed.
Despite the introduction giving us an overview of this world, and more supplemental material at the end of the book, the text still somehow feels the need to explain things that we should already know from the introduction, the characters should surely know, and doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the plot. Despite this redundancy, it also feels like the story ignores information that would make it easier for us to care about the characters.
Related, at least in early chapters, this story seems to have serious “hat on a hat syndrome.” As if the author doesn’t trust any idea to turn out useful, each gets a mention before another one joins it. Nyla has multiple characters sharing her body, one of which has powers, but she also had a secret wedding and more-secret divorce, gestates a fetus, routinely comes back from the dead, comes from outside the world, and more. You could probably sustain a novel with only a couple of those elements in the protagonist, but I find it highly unlikely that every single one of those choices will have serious ramifications for how the story unfolds.
I also hate the “WoeNyl” abbreviation, especially for a character who I know nothing about. Can we not call her “Nyla” after her name?
The project has the Codeberg repository mentioned above, which seems at least somewhat active, though only Patterson appears to have contributed, so far.
Primarily, we get the subterranean world of Ildylia. The “woethief” concept also seems fairly novel, bearing some conceptual similarity to the soulclaine role in Solitudes and Silence, while remaining entirely distinct.
Coming up next week, we’ll continue reading Woethief, from chapters Empty Victory to Coronation Day. If you find yourself in WoeNyl Saves Thelia, then you’ve gone too far.
As mentioned previously, by the way, the list of potential works to discuss has run low, so I need to ask for help, again. If you know of any works—or want to create them—that fit these posts (fictional, narrative, Free Culture, available to the public, and not by creators who we’ve already discussed), please tell me about them. Every person who points me to at least one appropriate work with an explanation will receive a free membership on my ☕ Buy Me a Coffee page.
Anyway, while we wait for that, what did everybody else think about the book so far?
Credits: The header image is the book’s cover, by Autumn Patterson, released under the same terms as the book.
]]>Also, I don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.
Events conspired to push me into skipping the day.
Image Not Shown: Man with hand on head lying in bed
Too much or too little sleep tied to risky changes in the brain from Futurity
The study highlights middle age as an important time to adjust our sleep habits in ways that may help protect our brain health.
Hashtags: #Health #Brain #Sleep
Personally, I rarely do well in the short term if I don’t sleep well—if I oversleep, it usually means that I’ve gotten sick and can expect worse symptoms—so this doesn’t surprise much, except for the magnitude of the problem.
I do not feel capable of writing a single word of counsel to those dear young people, more than to say that my heart goes out to every one of them, regardless of the fact that I have never seen them and may never do so.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Equality in genetics from Wellcome Collection
…preventing, predicting and managing genetic conditions in a healthcare setting isn’t always fair. Not all communities access the benefits of genetic testing and genetic counseling in the same way.
Hashtags: #Equality #Science #Medicine
We definitely need more of this in the world.
There have to be consequences for participating in an attempted violent overthrow of the government beyond sitting at home.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Image Not Shown: Painting of balding man wearing a white shirt and a tie, sitting at a piano and writing on sheets of music.
George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is a story of jazz, race and the fraught notion of America’s melting pot from The Conversation
A century after it premiered, it remains a crowd favorite – and almost always guarantees a sold-out show. But more and more scholars are starting to see the work as a whitewashed version of Harlem’s vibrant Black music scene.
Hashtags: #Jazz #Race #Appropriation
I’ve always had similar concerns about the Gershwins’ work, certainly good and evocative of the intent, but so often convincing people to overlook the precursors to his work.
We expect public servants to be guided in their actions by a strong moral compass.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Image Not Shown: An American flag overlaid on a circuit design
The CHIPS Act treats the symptoms, but not the causes from Pluralistic
When rich people get into debt, bankruptcy steps in to give them space to “restructure” according to their own plans. When poor people get into debt, bankruptcy strips them of nearly everything that might help them recover…
Hashtags: #Economy #USPol #CHIPS
This definitely seems like the wrong direction, but for predictable reasons in a world where we can’t talk about underlying causes.
Politicians, religionists, colonizationists, and abolitionists, have each and all, at different times, presumed to think for, dictate to, and know better what suited colored people, than they knew for themselves.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didn’t fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.
Image Not Shown: White yak in Namtso lake, Tibet
Tibetan Plateau ‘social network’ goes back to the Bronze Age from Futurity
“This not only tells us that people were moving according to needs for farming and herding—which was largely influenced by environmental potential—but that mobility was key for building social relationships and the regional character of ancient communities on the Tibetan Plateau.”
This fascinates me to no end, even though it probably shouldn’t…
The Five-Year Spell is Broken: Introducing the Feminism and Folklore toolkit from Wikimedia Diff
A dedicated team, consisting of people from both WLF and Project Korikath supports the toolkit, ensuring ongoing recruitment, future developments, and maintenance as needed. This approach aims to prevent the initiative from lacking proper attention and accumulating technical debt.
This looks like a great project, and I’ll need to dig deeper at some point.
If you appreciate this sort of content, then you should probably follow me on Mastodon to get it as early as possible…and feel free to reply, at least to the good stuff.
Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.
]]>In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names are trademarks of the owners, and so forth, and everything here relies on sitting squarely within the bounds of Fair Use, as criticism that uses tiny parts of each show to extrapolate the world that the characters live in.
I initially outlined the project in this post, for those falling into this from somewhere else. In short, we attempt to use the details presented in Star Trek to assemble a view of what life looks like in the Federation. This “phase” of the project changes from previous posts, however. The Next Generation takes place long after the original series, so we shouldn’t expect similar politics and socialization. Maybe more importantly, I enjoy the series less.
Put simply, you shouldn’t read this expecting a recap or review of an episode. Many people have done both to death over nearly sixty years. You will find a catalog of information that we learn from each episode, though, so expect everything to be a potential “spoiler,” if you happen to have that irrational fear.
Rather than list every post in the series here, you can quickly find them all on the startrek tag page.
I have good news and bad news about this episode. For good news, this episode has a lot to like about it, probably the best episode of the series to date, with both interesting ideas and some of the strongest social satire in the franchise. As bad news, though, most of the episode has nothing to do with the Federation, so we don’t have much to talk about, even though I’d love to talk this episode out.
Think about, as you watch—I assume that readers watch the episodes, and don’t rely on my excerpts—how similar the xenophobia shown on the planet resembles not only what we see in our world, but in the Federation. Especially when we hear Starfleet officers talk about the Borg, the Ferengi, or the Romulans, the scripts try to give us the impression that we should take what they have to say seriously, because they make important points. Like any good satire, though, by distancing itself from its subject, they can get away with showing this as nothing more irrational fear and hatred. If the episode has a huge flaw—other than the Lanel incident—I’d say that it refuses to engage with that parallel. We won’t see Picard look at Krola’s paranoia and question why he imagines diabolical Romulan or Ferengi plots around every corner.
TAVA: Move him onto the diagnostic pad.
You probably don’t recognize Tava at all, but if you did, you might identify her as Sachi Parker, daughter of Shirley MacLaine. I point out that connection, because I’ve often referred to the strange attachment that this series seems to have to New Age ideas and images, and at the time, MacLaine’s books and films often featured much of the same.
PICARD: We almost always encounter shock and fear on this sort of mission. We hope that you will help us facilitate our introduction.
Wait, does the Federation really make first contact by scaring the heck out of some high-status scientist so that they’ll put in a good word with the local government to guide their space program? That sounds highly manipulative.
MIRASTA: You don’t have to explain. I understand, although not everybody on my planet would. They would think you were trying to infiltrate our society.
I mean…Picard described infiltrating their society, no? He described sending actual spies in to learn how their society works, and also described a process of using that information to find sympathetic voices that will get them the ears of the government, so that they have some control over the culture’s entry into interstellar space.
PICARD: I’ve been saving this for a special occasion. My brother on Earth produces fruit known as grapes, which he turns into wine. He’s really quite good at it. Chancellor, we have a tradition called a toast. It is a drink to salute one’s friends and good fortune, and I would like to propose a toast to a new friendship.
Now we see why the rest of the crew drinks on the job so often…
DURKEN: My world’s history has recorded that conquerors often arrived with the words, we are your friends.
They’ll blow this off with Patrick Stewart’s charm, here, but I should note that—following on the prior discussion of infiltrating their society, which Picard quietly omits here—Durken makes a good point. Picard wants to convey this meeting as a friendly discussion, but it looks much more like a show of power. And he won’t share that power, as…well, let’s get back to the episode.
PICARD: We will leave and never return. Chancellor, we are here only to help guide you into a new era. I can assure you we will not interfere in the natural development of your planet. That is, in fact, our Prime Directive.
DURKEN: I can infer from that directive that you do not intend to share all this exceptional technology with us.
Right, so the Federation wants Durken to see its technology, but won’t let them have access to any of it. And Picard says that they want to “guide, but not interfere,” and I challenge you to find me definitions of those two words that don’t overlap if you ignore optics. In fact, you might consider guidance as a type of interference. Guiding generally either controls or supervises someone, whereas interfering only gets involved in someone else’s affairs.
You might notice, though, that Picard uses the peculiar phrase “natural development,” which raises the question of what that could possibly mean, in a context where he wants to guide the development of their space program. On what terms does Picard get to judge a societal trait as natural or not? We saw this question raised in the original series a couple of times, such as in The Apple, where Kirk might declare a society some synonym of unnatural to justify asserting his guidance.
PICARD: Chancellor, to instantly transform a society with technology would be harmful and it would be destructive.
Wait. Why? Durken will immediately let him off the hook, but why would giving these people technology destroy them? Sure, I can imagine fringe cases where some myopic captain supplies weapons and devices easily turned into weapons, foregoes their education, and pats themselves on the back as petty grievances engulf the planet in civil war. But surely, if the Federation has gotten so good at “guiding” civilizations into space, they could safely share (for example) medical or defensive technology.
Or has Picard admitted that the Federation has found itself thoroughly incapable of destroying societies by its guidance, but does it anyway in situations like this?
I ask the question(s), because this idea—that giving any technology to a civilization before its people would “naturally” develop it, whatever that might mean, will cause irreparable harm—sounds suspiciously like the conservative idea that giving poor people money harms them, and that we need to force them into hard labor for anything, to “build their character.” And I can’t help but notice that the people saying either thing do not need to work for those improvements in their own lives.
No, really. While our world has trust fund babies telling you that your neighbors shouldn’t get food or housing assistance unless they provably work sixty-hour weeks, compare Picard’s stance to Contagion or The Arsenal of Freedom, or even A Matter of Perspective, where Picard raced to find advanced technology, in order to secure it for the Federation. Had those actions succeeded, they would have “instantly transformed [Federation] society with technology.” Would they prosecute Picard, then, for causing harm and destruction? Or does the harm only accrue to other cultures?
LANEL: There are guards out there. You’ll never escape that way. I’m not afraid of you.
You might recognize Lanel as Bebe Neuwirth, who…I mean, it probably doesn’t matter your preferred medium, you’ve probably seen her in something, because she gets around. But we can start with around a hundred episodes playing Lilith Sternin-Crane on Cheers, Frasier, and related shows.
LANEL: Will I ever see you again?
RIKER: I’ll call you the next time I pass through your star system.
It really bothers me that Riker went for an “I only used you, but want you to think of me as nice” approach, and not “no, you violated me and I should have you arrested by either your laws or mine.”
DURKEN: You speak of trust and peace and working together to enter a new era, and at the same time you conduct secret surveillance posing as Malcorians.
It seems worth noting how Picard handles this. Picard tries to put the blame on Mirasta for his decision to hide the infiltrated spies, and then…well, let him tell it.
PICARD: It was my error, not hers. Chancellor, there is no starship mission more dangerous than that of first contact. We never know what we will face when we open the door on a new world, how we will be greeted, what exactly the dangers will be. Centuries ago, a disastrous contact with the Klingon Empire led to decades of war. It was decided then we would do surveillance before making contact. It was a controversial decision. I believe it prevented more problems than it created.
He admits to making the decision, then completely ignores it to tell a completely unrelated story, without apologizing or even taking responsibility for his actions. He only tries to justify it as, if he didn’t spy on them and try to manipulate their space program, then they might need to go to war. To me, that sounds like a threat. He’ll later go on to say that maybe he would’ve brought up the espionage campaign later in the relationship—while also openly wishing that the situation had broken in such a way that they wouldn’t need to disclose anything—which…if you ever have a relationship with someone who says anything like that, walk away.
Even if Picard didn’t mean it as a threat of war, though, does the Federation really teach its people that they went to war with the Klingon Empire because Starfleet didn’t spy on them enough…?
By the way, looking back on this as we are from the future, I should probably note that Discovery’s pilot episode tried to tell a story probably inspired by Picard’s description of first contact with the Klingons.
CRUSHER: And there’s a Malconian male with a phaser wound in his upper chest. I need to get him back as well.
Did Crusher abduct a shooting victim? Don’t get me wrong, help people when you can. But this doesn’t feel like the time to ask for forgiveness over permission, especially when she decides to “borrow” an entire person…
CRUSHER: He was never in any real danger. The phaser was on stun.
MIRASTA: Stun?
PICARD: It’s a defensive weapon. Have you been able to ascertain what happened?
Notice how Picard tries to ignore the stun setting, brushing past the inevitable question of what other settings that the Federation might pack into a “defensive weapon”…that nearly killed her colleague, by the way.
PICARD: Escort Chancellor Durken to the transporter room, Lieutenant. And assign quarters to Minister Yale. She will be remaining on board.
Oh, so we have a new character, a strong-willed and intelligent woman, that we can look forward to seeing…oh, we’ll never talk about her again, not even to find out if she transferred somewhere or made a life for herself on some random other world? Typical…
As mentioned, most of the episode goes to our novel alien culture and its residents, but we do get at least one major issue to talk about.
While they try to frame it as friendly assistance, the Federation’s “first contact” procedures appear to revolve entirely around espionage, manipulation, intimidation, and deception. When pressed, they don’t alter the framing, but they do admit that they do this because they have a fear of allowing uncontrollable cultures into interstellar space. Though they will also happily blame natives for some decisions./
The Prime Directive, likewise, comes from some Puritanical idea about the “natural” advancement of cultures, and the idea that helping people (secretly) hurts them.
We also see some day-drinking.
Come back next week, when Geordi finds out that AI-generated pornography of a colleague causes harm, in Galaxy’s Child.
Credits: The header image is Untitled by an uncredited PxHere photographer, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
]]>I assure you that none of these projects will remotely have the importance of either holiday, and I don’t think that I’d want them to, honestly, unless they actually advocated for protecting people.
An interesting discovery came up during the week.
In my post on thinking about Free Culture works like businesses, I mentioned that the free tier at Lime Survey only included a limited number of responses for all surveys, and briefly worried that I might run out of space.
Well, I never got into any danger of running out of responses; only one person has touched the survey, and I would already have gone to that person for input on the project. I don’t come here to whine about the lack of artists flooding to work on an as-yet-unannounced project where I say that I’ll eventually start bringing people in for paid work, though. I have a tiny audience, after all, which probably doesn’t include many people who think of themselves as artists, and I haven’t really defined the value anywhere.
No, I come here to tell you that Lime Survey resets the number of responses remaining every month.
In other words, if (somehow) twenty-five people do suddenly fill out the survey to tell me about their artistic projects and what it would cost to have them do that work for a Free Culture project, I could tell the hypothetical twenty-sixth person to try again when the new month starts, instead of worrying about running my own instance of Lime Survey. That makes me feel far better about the process.
In other words, dear reader, you have no excuse for not filling out the survey.
OK, sure, you might still have legitimate excuses, like “I don’t make any art,” or “this project sounds terrible.” Touché.
Oh, but speaking of the project, I suppose that I should talk about…
I haven’t set up a repository for the project, yet, and haven’t released any of it. However, if you want the tiniest of sneak peeks into the project, can’t remember where to find the survey, or would like me to remind you when I finally release something, I have a quick placeholder page for The Light’s Edge, as readers of the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter have already heard.
With any luck, having spent some money on the domain name will force me to follow through and release at least the introduction soon.
The big effort, last week, went to getting whole-word searches to work, because every model that I had for it in my head failed miserably. For anybody who might need to do this for themselves, in the future, the correct model follows.
\m
anchors the pattern to the start of a word.\M
anchors the pattern to the end of a word.To put that model into practice, for whole-word searches, if we don’t want to search by regular expressions, then we escape the usual set of command characters, using the ::regsub
command. After we’ve escaped the string, assuming that we needed to, then we can add the aforementioned start- and end-of-word anchors, and set the regular expression search flag.
If that didn’t make any sense, I put together this code, which might make the flow a bit clearer.
if {$wordSearch} {
if {!$regexSearch} {
# Escape all command characters.
::regsub -all {[{$\^.?+*\\|()\[\]}]} $searchTerm {\\&} searchTerm
# Without any regular expression, use a regular expression search.
lappend searchOptions -regexp
}
# Add (regular expression) word boundaries.
set searchPattern "\\m$searchTerm\\M"
}
The actual searching follows that snippet, in the application code.
Other than the whole-word search fiasco, I’ve mostly started cleaning up. The search interface now has check-boxes to turn on case-sensitivity, whole-word searching, and regular expression searching, which goes with the search functionality itself. Plus signs (+
) now show up as part of URLs, as they always should have. Creating a new note can now happen when the user only has a category of notes selected, rather than needing to select a note to create a note; I don’t know how that got past me. And speaking of categories, the application now focuses input on the category list on start-up, to make it faster to get at the desired note.
I discovered some new CSS styles, and integrated them into the existing stylesheets to make things look slightly more consistent.
Somehow, I had not heard about accent-color
before now, which sets the internal color for checkbox
, radio
, range
, and progress
elements. Without it, the browser uses its default color, usually that jarring blue that we’ve all grown familiar with. Now, Boring CSS color schemes will use the “local” magenta color in dark mode, and the yellow in light mode.
Note that, because I “draw them in” with other CSS features, this won’t work with the custom-look controls with the more extensive “design language” files. I’ll need to set their colors separately, at some point.
Similarly new to me, text-wrap
can now take the value balance
, which tries to maintain a similar line length for the entire paragraph, so the style now does that, by default. Despite the temptation to do so, I decided not to apply this style to the blog, because the balanced paragraphs tend to have varying widths, which looked too distracting to me.
I believe that I have Notoboto almost where I want it—though I do want to finish the replacement code, and I’ll certainly want more features over time—so I expect a fair amount of the week to clean up what I have. And following on the CSS changes mentioned above, I may also want to tweak some of the blog code to work better across languages, even though I haven’t given any thought to translating posts so far.
Credits: The header image is Child Soldier Afrika by Gilbert G. Groud, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 Germany license.
]]>Anyway, I don’t know if this routinely happens as a natural part of having a public-facing web presence, but since the blog has felt “established,” I’ve gotten a wide variety of people writing me to ask me to link to their websites from various blog posts. I find this interesting, because of a few factors.
They don’t always send a request to link to their nonsense. The links serve as a low-effort request for me to pick apart, because I do try to stay open to changing posts based on feedback, if the change represents an improvement and fits the goal of the post. However, other requests come from people who want to write a post “for me” to promote their client, or that would include a shopping list with their affiliate links.
Even in the best cases, the proposed post has nothing to do with anything else on the blog, usually wanting to publish job-hunting advice—from someone positioning themselves as an entrepreneur—or parenting stress. Given the consistency, I have to assume that all these aspiring writers got their articles from the same sources and want to make that investment pay off.
In any case, I took to calling these messages “Silly Unsolicited Requests for Exposure”—or SUREs for short—because I mentally respond to them with “SURE, I’ll 🙄 get right on that, because making my blog less trustworthy seems like the perfect goal, and I have nothing better to do than trick search engines into helping probable scammers.” I should probably see it as a compliment that low-end analysts see my dinky website as sufficiently authoritative that it’ll help boost their SEO, but that also doesn’t incline me to take them seriously.
For the record, I have no substantial objections to (hypothetically) accepting contributions to Entropy Arbitrage, in the right cases, including introducing the author and making everything transparent about the terms of the arrangement. They need to make some sense for the blog, though. If I only wanted more content—beyond whatever I feel like writing about, repurposing my old Quora answers, old newsletter pieces like this post, and so forth—I’d republish that content from an interesting and reputable source. For example, The Ford Foundation covers a lot of ground that I wish that I could, and they already make their articles available under CC BY, and so makes a lot more sense than a random person offering me “content.”
Credits: The header image is untitled by an uncredited PxHere photographer, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
]]>To give this series some sense of organization, check out some basic facts without much in the way of context.
This should go without saying—even though I plan to repeat it with every Book Club installment—but Content Advisories do not suggest any sort of judgment on my part, only topics that come up in the work that I noticed and might benefit from a particular mood or head space for certain audiences. I provide it to help you make a decision, rather than a decision in and of itself.
The blurb for the film reads as follows.
A movie about a little girl that wants to race a racy race.
I don’t see any more information on it anywhere, oddly.
If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it at the above link or right here.
I haven’t gotten to do that in a while…
As makes sense for the premise, the driving scenes look and feel great. The designs look good, even if maybe not strictly appropriate to the concept, and the action flows well enough that even the oddities make enough sense to piece together the intent.
Most objects in scenes also act like they exist in a real world, which I also appreciate. Animators often have a tendency to make things fit their aesthetic above all else, so all characters and props look like they need to dance in some zero-gravity ballet, instead of move around naturally. This seems to mostly avoid that.
Something about the audio recording made it almost impossible for me to follow about half the dialogue. The opening scene covers a lot, and I caught almost none of it. Parts of the story also seem to jump around indecisively, too, though—such as Moria’s confidence level—so maybe I shouldn’t blame the audio. But frustratingly, a lot of those weird disconnects seem like they have enough material that they could get pulled into a cohesive whole, and someone made the choice not to do it.
A matter of taste, sure, but I also loathe the look of the characters. They don’t seem to fit the aesthetic of the world, and don’t even really seem consistent.
And finally, I don’t know if I really feel comfortable with an eleven-year-old protagonist who steals a car twice, drives on city streets with no apparent care for safety, and tells caregivers to “shut up” for daring to worry about her behavior. And ending such a story with a #RespectChildren
hashtag feels completely disconnected.
I don’t see any way of contributing anywhere.
Amihud has made all the source files for the film available. However, due to the mass of files, he also created a tutorial on how to get at them. Have another embedded video. Word of warning, though, you’ll need to wade through a surprising amount of coarse language to get the information that you want.
You can access it through Tor, too, if you need to bypass filters to get there.
Otherwise, other than the individual racecars, I only caught Papses Racetrack Inc. as a known entity.
Coming up next week, we’ll start reading the (as far as I can tell) to-date completed stories from the WNV Universe, apparently named for main character Woethief Nyla Valora. Next week starts Woethief, which we’ll break into three parts, followed by a fourth post for the assorted short stories. If you want to get a jump on things, we’ll begin with the first nine chapters, WoeNyl Fights Ankor to The Final Duel. If you start reading Empty Victory, then you’ve gone too far.
As mentioned previously, by the way, the list of potential works to discuss has run low, so I need to ask for help, again. If you know of any works—or want to create them—that fit these posts (fictional, narrative, Free Culture, available to the public, and not by creators who we’ve already discussed), please tell me about them. Every person who points me to at least one appropriate work with an explanation will receive a free membership on my ☕ Buy Me a Coffee page.
Anyway, while we wait for that, what did everybody else think about the movie?
Credits: The header image comes from a frame of the film, under the same license.
]]>Also, I don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.
Image Not Shown: Several people marching in a protest holding placards, one of which reads, You don't have to be Jewish to march against antisemitism
When is criticism of Israel antisemitic? A scholar of modern Jewish history explains from The Conversation
if Jews or Jewish institutions are held responsible for Israeli actions or are expected to take a stand one way or another regarding them, again all three definitions agree this “crosses the line” because it is based on the myth of a global Jewish conspiracy.
Hashtags: #Israel #Gaza #Antisemitism
I always try to tread especially carefully, here, because I’ve had the privilege of knowing quite a few wonderful people who either came from or moved to Israel, and don’t want to try to emulate their own criticisms of their government, while also making sure that I don’t indirectly make their lives worse. This article feels simplistic, to me, but I’d rather talk about something bare-bones than not have the discussion at all.
If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves and allow those responsible to salve their conscience by believing that they have our acceptance and concurrence. We should, therefore, protest openly everything… that smacks of discrimination or slander.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Image Not Shown: Aedes aegypti mosquito head close-up
Mosquito protein could block dengue virus infection from Futurity
Further examination of the molecular interactions between the cuticle protein and dengue virus prompted the researchers to suggest that it blocks dengue virus infection using a two-pronged approach.
Hashtags: #DengueFever #Mosquitoes
I look forward to seeing this research put into action.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others… One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Image Not Shown: Razor wire along a river bank
The Real Border Crisis: Texas vs. the Constitution from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
Houston public media KUHF said this “could be the beginning of a constitutional crisis.” University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck said in an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle that Abbott’s position is a “dangerous misreading” of the Constitution.
Hashtags: #Immigration #Texas
While I don’t expect this to end in another Civil War, because the people behind these acts don’t seem to have any actual spine in them, let alone fight, they certainly want their fans to see them as trying to start a Civil War, and they have four Supreme Court Justices cheering them on.
We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Content Warning: US Politics, Trump
Image Not Shown: Haley speaking at an event
Nikki Haley’s a great reminder of how much Trump hates women from Daily Kos
Trump also can’t seem to distinguish between the many women he despises, like they’ve all melded together in his thick brain.
Hashtags: #USPol #GOP #Haley #Trump
I wonder what Haley has in mind for her endgame, here. She has to know that she can’t win anything in this campaign. At one point, it looked like her goal was to test the theory that you “become white” in the United States by dumping on Black people, but that only ever blows up in the face of individuals. But the longer she stays in the primaries, the more Trump and the RNC need to spend to beat her, and the less coherent he looks.
Don’t get me wrong, here. I doubt that she has the country’s best interests at heart, but if she manages to tank an increasingly fascist party, I’ll at least say something nice about her on occasion…
The present attitude on the part of white women to ignore or undervalue the colored woman, or to accept Negro women who are picked by Tom, Dick or Harry, forebodes evil and ill for both groups.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Image Not Shown: The back of a person looking at a display of diapers, while a baby looks at the camera
It’s Not ‘Inflation’ — We’re Just Getting Ripped Off. Here’s Proof from OtherWords
In fact, their own executives are openly bragging about how they’re going to “expand margins” on earnings calls. Procter & Gamble predicted $800 million in windfall profits as input costs decline. Kimberly-Clark’s CEO said the company has “a lot of opportunity” to expand margins over time.
Hashtags: #Inflation #Capitalism #PriceGouging
I’ve posted many articles about the price-hikes since they started, all saying this, but I appreciate having the numbers to point to.
It’s voting rights or it’s the filibuster. It’s LGBTQ+ rights or it’s the filibuster. It’s union rights or it’s the filibuster. It’s civil rights or it’s the filibuster. It’s our rights or it’s the filibuster. The choice is easy.
Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory
Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didn’t fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.
Image Not Shown: Screenshot from YouTube video ‘Crown jewels looted by British soldiers returned to Ghana on loan’ by BBC News
Ghanaians’ reactions to the UK loaning back treasures it looted from them from Global Voices
She said the loan was “a good starting point” on the anniversary of the looting and “a sign of some kind of healing and commemoration for the violence that happened.” According to a report by the Conversation, the looting happened in Kumasi during the third and fourth Anglo-Ashanti wars (1873–74 and 1895-96). This plundering was not only an opportunistic act but also had a political purpose, aiming to humiliate the inhabitants of the Asante kingdom, as highlighted by both the BBC and the Conversation.
Seriously, as much as I loved looking at them growing up, I feel like permanent museum collections from other cultures should represent a source of massive embarrassment, at this point in history.
Content Warning: US Politics, Fascism
Image Not Shown: Texas National Guard soldiers watch as migrants try to crawl underneath the razor wire after crossing the Rio Grande into the United States, 17 December 2023, Eagle Pass, Texas
Yes, Republican states are now starting to emulate the Civil War-era south from openDemocracy
Not to put too fine a point on it, but these kinds of actions smack of the nullification of federal law that southern politicians employed in the years preceding the American Civil War of 1861 to 1865. To make matters worse, the Republican governors of 25 other states, including Indiana…have signed a statement in support of Texas’s actions that accuses the Biden administration of “attacking” Texas and invokes the notion of state sovereignty that southern states used as a “justification” for secession when they formed the Confederate States of America.
You can largely copy my comment above on the FAIR article down here, if you need me to say something…
If you appreciate this sort of content, then you should probably follow me on Mastodon to get it as early as possible…and feel free to reply, at least to the good stuff.
Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.
]]>In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names are trademarks of the owners, and so forth, and everything here relies on sitting squarely within the bounds of Fair Use, as criticism that uses tiny parts of each show to extrapolate the world that the characters live in.
I initially outlined the project in this post, for those falling into this from somewhere else. In short, we attempt to use the details presented in Star Trek to assemble a view of what life looks like in the Federation. This “phase” of the project changes from previous posts, however. The Next Generation takes place long after the original series, so we shouldn’t expect similar politics and socialization. Maybe more importantly, I enjoy the series less.
Put simply, you shouldn’t read this expecting a recap or review of an episode. Many people have done both to death over nearly sixty years. You will find a catalog of information that we learn from each episode, though, so expect everything to be a potential “spoiler,” if you happen to have that irrational fear.
Rather than list every post in the series here, you can quickly find them all on the startrek tag page.
This post should go quickly, because it leaves very few clues for us to investigate.
Captain’s log, stardate 44502.7. Early completion of our mission at Harrakis Five has allowed me to grant extra personal time for many of the crew. This has come as something of a relief, since our recent tight scheduling has prevented pursuit of the leisure activities that are a normal part of life aboard the Enterprise. I expect our journey past the Ngame Nebula to be uneventful, and am personally using the time to fulfill a promise to a colleague.
Notice the passive-aggressive tone, there, as Picard assures his superiors and any future historians that he will slack off, dammit, and only an absolute meanie would stop him. And it occurs to me that I probably hammer on this absolute disinterest in their jobs so hard, because Picard gave us that big speech in The Neutral Zone about how “material needs no longer exist,” and so they only work at things they love to improve and enrich themselves. But they still hate their jobs, somehow, and can’t wait to play poker or LARP in the back rooms.
Adjacent to that, I have to laugh at how the codependent bridge crew unwinds by awkwardly pretending to do martial arts together, except for Crusher, who apparently uses her free time to manage her Chia Pets.
Also, one imagines that they named the planet for Arrakis, the central planet in the Dune franchise.
GUINAN: Dixon Hill around?
…Speaking of LARPing in the back rooms, the writers have once again assumed that we secretly only watch Star Trek for all that hard-boiled detective work and 1930s slang.
DATA: Sir, I should re-align the ship’s clock with Starbase Four-Ten’s subspace signal to adjust for the time distortion.
Apparently, the Federation still operates on NTP or something like it.
OGAWA: Yes, Doctor?
We met a simulacrum of Nurse Ogawa in Future Imperfect, so this confirms that she really exists.
PICARD: A minor mystery? That seems to be a recurring phrase these days. Oh, Diomedian scarlet moss. I didn’t know you were an enthnobotanist.
Given that Picard so rarely seems to actually know anything outside his own responsibilities and hobbies, I’d almost like to hear the story about how he recognizes some random alien moss on sight.
PICARD: Doctor, we were not unconscious for a full day. Everything on board indicates that we were out for thirty seconds. The ship’s chronometer, the computer, everything, Doctor, including Commander Data.
I feel like I should point out how this mirrors Remember Me, with Crusher bringing specific evidence about a problem and Picard ignoring her.
PICARD: Will you escort Commander Data to Engineering?
DATA: I know the way, sir.
Yeah, but that line only works when people trust you. He should know that an escort doesn’t give directions.
PICARD: Do you also realize that you would most likely be stripped down to your wires to find out what the hell has gone wrong?
It would appear that, despite Picard’s speech in The Measure of a Man about the courts finding the truth for all time, Data (still) doesn’t actually have any civil liberties.
PICARD: Then you must have the capability of affecting memory. Can you erase the short-term memory of everyone on this ship, remove all knowledge of this event, allow us to proceed as if it had never happened?
It occurs to me that the scheme failed because Picard didn’t bother to get consent from the crew for this. A thousand people erasing their trails would have worked out problems like Crusher’s fungus, for example.
…Well, it failed because of that, and the flimsy story of only losing consciousness for thirty seconds. But the fact that Picard allowed aliens to violate a thousand people’s memories without even warning then beforehand seems far more important.
As mentioned, we won’t wring much out of this episode.
The crew continues to find their jobs too much to handle, with Picard now reminding Starfleet that he wants more time off. Yet when they do have time off, most of them spend it together, as if they don’t have or want any other relationships. He also endangers the entire crew by not getting their buy-in before having aliens erase everyone’s memory.
We once again see Picard dismissing Crusher’s insight into the plot, because the problem hasn’t affected him, yet.
We also see again that Data still has no rights in the Federation, with any insubordination considered grounds for “stripping him down to his wires.”
Visit again next week, when Riker nearly becomes the star of his own alien autopsy video, in First Contact.
Credits: The header image is Clue by John Perry, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 Generic license.
]]>