sixth-light
sixthlight
Queer lady Pākehā scientist, in fandom since ages ago. He tangata tiriti ahau. I'm on Twitter @sixthlight and my fanfic can be found
on AO3. Blogging and reblogging about fandom, science, history, feminism, queer issues, and other things that catch my fancy.
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free my girl she did all that shit but the fandom is mischaracterizing her for it
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I posted about it a few days ago, but if you haven’t seen, Steven Attewell, perhaps better known on here as @racefortheironthrone, just passed away.
Steven Attewell wasn’t just a great writer and analyst (though he obviously was), nor just a great podcaster (though he was that too), nor just a great academic mind (though he was that as well). Attewell was a supremely kind, thoughtful, funny, and upstanding human being, someone I was very fortunate to call my dear friend. Hardly a day or two went by without one of us bouncing ideas for an essay or post off the other, or swapping some historical trivia, or sharing thoughts about the latest MCU project. When I got engaged, he was one of the first people I told, and whenever I, say, read a book about New York’s gilded age, or listened to a podcast episode about Reginald Pole, or learned that some Americans were still using hand crank phones into the 80s (no, really), I often thought “Attewell would appreciate that”.
Even now, it seems utterly surreal to think of him as passed. Just a week before he died, I had been telling him how much my fiancé adored his X-Men ‘97 podcast. A few days before, he and I had been joking about the recent east coast earthquake. I knew how excited he was about his “Tyrion IX” ASOS CBC essay, since he and I had been discussing it in the weeks before he died, and his Tumblr posts right to the end displayed that same high quality you could always expect from him. I keep waiting for my messenger app to pop up with his name again, or his familiar avatar to appear at the top of my Tumblr feed with another ask from him.
We have lost a giant of the ASOIAF community, but far more importantly, we have lost a very good person. Read some of Attewell’s works - “Who Stole Westeros” is a seminal piece IMO, as is his CBC analysis of “Eddard XI”, but you can’t go wrong with anything he wrote, and if I tried to list every piece I could recommend from him it would be a novel in itself. Listen to some of his podcasts or vlogs - his excitement over X-Men ‘97 is infectious. Keep reading and writing, just as he was doing. Miss him and grieve, by all means, but know that for the many people, myself included, he inspired and touched and interacted with, his memory and impact won’t be forgotten.
#oh gosh this is sad news#I only kinda knew him as a name that crossed my dash and mentions occasionally#but he seemed like a thoughtful and pleasant person
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I think I can trace my intense hatred for the whole "regulations are just corporate bullshit, building codes are just The Man's way of keeping you down, we should return to pre-industrial barter and trade systems" nonsense back to when I first started doing electrical work at one of the largest hospitals in the country.
I have had to learn so much about all the special conditions in the National Electric Code for healthcare systems. All the systems that keep hospitals running, all the redundancies and backups that make sure one disaster or outage won't take out the hospital's life support, all the rules about different spaces within the hospital and the different standards that apply to each of them. And a lot of it is ridiculously over-engineered and overly redundant, but all of it is in the service of saving even one life from being lost to some wacky series of coincidences that could have been prevented with that redundancy.
I've done significantly less work in food production plants and the like, but I know they have similar standards to make sure the plants aren't going to explode or to make sure a careless maintenance tech isn't accidentally dropping screws into jars of baby food or whatever. And research labs have them to make sure some idiot doesn't leave a wrench inside a transformer and wreck a multi-million dollar machine when they try to switch it on.
Living in the self-sufficient commune is all fun and games until someone needs a kidney transplant and suddenly wants a clean, reliable hospital with doctors that are subject to some kind of overseeing body, is my point.
#I know people who write regulations#believe me when I say: they are not doing it because they love long pointlessly specific lists#they're doing it to make something better#doesn't mean every single regulation is correct every time#but they're written *for reasons*#law#politics#health and safety#in the queue
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I really don't know how to explain to people that supporting gender liberation (liberation for trans people, liberation for gnc people, liberation from all oppressive gender roles) means you have to be able to see someone you think is cis "crossdressing" and be cool about it. You have to be able to see someone presenting in a way that doesn't make sense to you and not interrogate them about their identity. You have to be able to hear someone express a gender identity you don't understand and go "Huh! Neat," and go about your business. If you truly want gender liberation for all then you have to stop trying to exert control over other people's genders, period.
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Sometimes I see posts on here and feel like a lot of you have internalized the idea that the qualifying prerequisites for being LGBT are being cool and interesting and subversive, and that the fact that everyone in the community happens to be attracted to their own gender or else stepping outside of the gender assigned to them is just a happy coincidence, and not like, "not only a qualifying prerequisite, but the SOLE qualifying prerequisite." Being gay IS cool, but THAT'S the happy coincidence. Like I'm sorry to break it to everybody but even boring gay people are gay and even cool straight people are straight, because being gay is not about being cool, it's about being gay.
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I cannot express how much I adore dappled shadows formed by sunlight in paintings and photography and in real life
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its so disturbing how many people get appendectomies when there's no evidence that it even helps with appendicitis :/ hm? oh? no i know about that but it wasn't double blind so it doesn't count. you know. one of those double blind appendectomy studies where we give people with appendicitis a placebo appendectomy and the doctors doing it also don't know if they've actually removed the appendix or not at the end of the procedure. yeah nobody's done one of those so the evidence doesn't count and if looks like there's just no evidence for appendectomies :/ and some of the people getting them might be autistic so idk if they can really consent to having their body permanently altered... but of course you can't talk about any of this because of Woke nowadays...
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"A 2019 sighting by five witnesses indicates that the long-extinct Javan tiger may still be alive, a new study suggests.
A single strand of hair recovered from that encounter is a close genetic match to hair from a Javan tiger pelt from 1930 kept at a museum, the study shows.
“Through this research, we have determined that the Javan tiger still exists in the wild,” says Wirdateti, a government researcher and lead author of the study.
The Javan tiger was believed to have gone extinct in the 1980s but only officially declared as such in 2008...
Ripi Yanuar Fajar and his four friends say they’ll never forget that evening after Indonesia’s Independence Day celebration in 2019 when they encountered a big cat roaming a community plantation in Sukabumi, West Java province.
Immediately after the brief encounter, Ripi, who happens to be a local conservationist, reached out to Kalih Raksasewu, a researcher at the country’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), saying he and his friends had seen either a Javan leopard (Panthera pardus melas), a critically endangered animal, or a Javan tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica), a subspecies believed to have gone extinct in the 1980s but only officially declared so in 2008.
About 10 days later, Kalih visited the site of the encounter with Ripi and his friends. There, Kalih found a strand of hair snagged on a plantation fence that the unknown creature was believed to have jumped over. She also recorded footprints and claw marks that she thought resembled those of a tiger.
Kalih then sent the hair sample and other records to the West Java provincial conservation agency, or BKSDA, for further investigation. She also sent a formal letter to the provincial government to follow up on the investigation request. The matter eventually landed at BRIN, where a team of researchers ran genetic analyses to compare the single strand of hair with known samples of other tiger subspecies, such as the Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae) and a nearly century-old Javan tiger pelt kept at a museum in the West Java city of Bogor.
“After going through various process of laboratory tests, the results showed that the hair sample had 97.8% similarities to the Javan tiger,” Wirdateti, a researcher with BRIN’s Biosystemic and Evolutionary Research Center, said at an online discussion hosted by Mongabay Indonesia on March 28.
The discussion centered on a study published March 21 in the journal Oryx in which Wirdateti and colleagues presented their findings that suggested that the long-extinct Javan tiger may somehow — miraculously — still be prowling parts of one of the most densely populated islands on Earth.
Their testing compared the Sukabumi hair sample with hair from the museum specimen collected in 1930, as well as with other tigers, Javan leopards and several sequences from GenBank, a publicly accessible database of genetic sequences overseen by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
The study noted that the supposed tiger hair had a sequence similarity of 97.06% with Sumatran tigers and 96.87% with Bengal tigers. Wirdateti also conducted additional interviews with Ripi and his friends about the encounter they’d had.
“I wanted to emphasize that this wasn’t just about finding a strand of hair, but an encounter with the Javan tiger in which five people saw it,” Kalih said.
“There’s still a possibility that the Javan tiger is in the Sukabumi forest,” she added. “If it’s coming down to the village or community plantation, it could be because its habitat has been disturbed. In 2019, when the hair was found, the Sukabumi region had been affected by drought for almost a year.” ...
Didik Raharyono, a Javan tiger expert who wasn’t involved in the study but has conducted voluntary expeditions with local wildlife awareness groups since 1997, said the number of previous reported sightings coupled with the new scientific findings must be taken seriously. He called on the environment ministry to draft and issue a policy on measures to find and conserve the Javan tiger.
“What’s most important is the next steps that we take in the future,” Didik said."
-via Mongabay, April 4, 2024
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every time I see someone excitedly speculate that a new WoT cast member could be Gareth Bryne I cross my fingers even harder that he never appears in the show and Moiraine and Thom never even meet
#and to be clear here: I ship book siuan/gareth actually#it's the obvious agenda of breaking up the middle-aged lesbians so they can have a heterosexual endgame that I can't stand#wheel of time#wot tv show#wot book spoilers
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♫baby its YOU♫
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I hope everyone is aware Dev Patel has a movie in theaters right now where he guts a bunch of Hindutva fascists with an army of hijra to a heavy metal soundtrack about killing rapists ok good thanks
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Call me a pick me, but if some creator decides to write about a minority group I belong to but that they themselves are not a part of I'll be willing to overlook small inconsequential inaccuracies as long as the big picture feels accurate and respectful. If we want more representation we can't take the burden of making all of our representation ourselves and let outsiders take a shot at it as long as they're willing to do their research and listen to feedback. And if a little nuance or detail escapes the filter of accuracy I wouldn't mind if the whole sum of its parts is still good rep.
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ishamael: i have won again, lews therin. or shall i say...lose therin
rand: ...
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i made this poll a while ago and watermelon won, which to say the least had many members of the mangoenthusiast.com up in arms about it, so settle this for once and all
no third option, propaganda is welcome. reblog after voting <3
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So this was originally a response to this post:
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Which is about people wanting an AO3 app, but then it became large and way off topic, so here you go.
Nobody under the age of 20 knows how to use a computer or the internet. At all. They only know how to use apps. Their whole lives are in their phones or *maybe* a tablet/iPad if they're an artist. This is becoming a huge concern.
I'm a private tutor for middle- and high-school students, and since 2020 my business has been 100% virtual. Either the student's on a tablet, which comes with its own series of problems for screen-sharing and file access, or they're on mom's or dad's computer, and they have zero understanding of it.
They also don't know what the internet is, or even the absolute basics of how it works. You might not think that's an important thing to know, but stick with me.
Last week I accepted a new student. The first session is always about the tech -- I tell them this in advance, that they'll have to set up a few things, but once we're set up, we'll be good to go. They all say the same thing -- it won't be a problem because they're so "online" that they get technology easily.
I never laugh in their faces, but it's always a close thing. Because they are expecting an app. They are not expecting to be shown how little they actually know about tech.
I must say up front: this story is not an outlier. This is *every* student during their first session with me. Every single one. I go through this with each of them because most of them learn more, and more solidly, via discussion and discovery rather than direct instruction.
Once she logged in, I asked her to click on the icon for screen-sharing. I described the icon, then started with "Okay, move your mouse to the bottom right corner of the screen." She did the thing that those of us who are old enough to remember the beginnings of widespread home computers remember - picked up the mouse and moved it and then put it down. I explained she had to pull the mouse along the surface, and then click on the icon. She found this cumbersome. I asked if she was on a laptop or desktop computer. She didn't know what I meant. I asked if the computer screen was connected to the keyboard as one piece of machinery that you can open and close, or if there was a monitor - like a TV - and the keyboard was connected to another machine either by cord or by Bluetooth. Once we figured it out was a laptop, I asked her if she could use the touchpad, because it's similar (though not equivalent) to a phone screen in terms of touching clicking and dragging.
Once we got her using the touchpad, we tried screen-sharing again. We got it working, to an extent, but she was having trouble with... lots of things. I asked if she could email me a download or a photo of her homework instead, and we could both have a copy, and talk through it rather than put it on the screen, and we'd worry about learning more tech another day. She said she tried, but her email blocked her from sending anything to me.
This is because the only email address she has is for school, and she never uses email for any other purpose. I asked if her mom or dad could email it to me. They weren't home.
(Re: school email that blocks any emails not whitelisted by the school: that's great for kids as are all parental controls for young ones, but 16-year-olds really should be getting used to using an email that belongs to them, not an institution.)
I asked if the homework was on a paper handout, or in a book, or on the computer. She said it was on the computer. Great! I asked her where it was saved. She didn't know. I asked her to search for the name of the file. She said she already did that and now it was on her screen. Then, she said to me: "You can just search for it yourself - it's Chapter 5, page 11."
This is because homework is on the school's website, in her math class's homework section, which is where she searched. For her, that was "searching the internet."
Her concepts of "on my computer" "on the internet" or "on my school's website" are all the same thing. If something is displayed on the monitor, it's "on the internet" and "on my phone/tablet/computer" and "on the school's website."
She doesn't understand "upload" or "download," because she does her homework on the school's website and hits a "submit" button when she's done. I asked her how she shares photos and stuff with friends; she said she posts to Snapchat or TikTok, or she AirDrops. (She said she sometimes uses Insta, though she said Insta is more "for old people"). So in her world, there's a button for "post" or "share," and that's how you put things on "the internet".
She doesn't know how it works. None of it. And she doesn't know how to use it, either.
Also, none of them can type. Not a one. They don't want to learn how, because "everything is on my phone."
And you know, maybe that's where we're headed. Maybe one day, everything will be on "my phone" and computers as we know them will be a thing of the past. But for the time being, they're not. Students need to learn how to use computers. They need to learn how to type. No one is telling them this, because people think teenagers are "digital natives." And to an extent, they are, but the definition of that has changed radically in the last 20-30 years. Today it means "everything is on my phone."
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