I wrote a small ficlet once about convent husbands and Valjean dealing with his own griefs. I don’t know if Valjean would ever deal or think about all his traumas in canon, but I would like to think that he might consider it, with Fauchelevant around.
my favorite magic card is Vindicate and I take male pronouns
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Just saw an otherwise really good proshipper manifesto/faq that went out of its way to distance proshippers from MAP’s/lolicons and like dude if you think it’s okay to say fuck you to people for desires they have independent of whether they even act on them or for openly enjoying especially racy manga how am I supposed to take seriously your supposed ykinmkbykio or defence of free expression or anything else
Stop throwing MAP’s under the bus, people!!
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You know that tumblr post that’s like “Adults: why don’t kids go outside?” and then there’s a picture of a very pedestrian-unfriendly street from probably somewhere in the US?
I’ve been thinking a lot about how community seems to be lacking in fandom recently, and over on Dreamwidth people have been making some excellent points. I think modern social media is another place where adults have created a space that is hostile to young people trying to navigate their way online.
I get a lot of asks and see a lot of posts from young people lamenting the fact that they don’t know how to make friends online. Because this isn’t a problem that I experience, I’ve had a tendency to think along the lines of “kids these days” etc. But that’s the easy out. Most of the people I’d consider “online friends” of mine are people I met online several years ago or they’re people I met IRL and we just don’t live near each other so our friendship happens online. I can’t honestly say I’d feel confident in trying to make new friends on modern social media today.
If you start thinking about it more critically, it makes total sense that it’s harder to make friends now. Modern social media has been optimized for “engagement.” The goal of twitter or tumblr or instagram or tiktok isn’t to help users find each other and talk to each other. The goal of those platforms is to keep people on those platforms. The more people they have on their platform, the more money they make. The more time people spend on their platform, the more money they make.
How do you make people spend more time on the platform? You make it as passive and entertaining as possible. Scrolling through tiktok is like channel surfing on a TV in the 90s or early 2000s. Scrolling through twitter or tumblr or facebook is just putting interesting or pretty or funny or angering things in front of your eyeballs until you get bored and switch to the next app, cycling your way through them.
Timestamps are hard to find. Content isn’t chronological. Posts are dropped in on your feed from unknown sources, decided by an algorithm. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did research into how casinos keep people inside and gambling when they made a lot of these decisions.
Each one of these decisions, all on its own, undermines our ability to find and form a community. Each one makes it harder to make friends to have a conversation. It’s hard to get to know someone or have a discussion with them when you have no idea if what you’re saying will be seen by 1 person or 1 million. I’m probably not the only person on this site that feels like I’m either an observer or a performer, but I’m rarely a participant.
The internet used to be a vibrant, weird, wonderful place where communities could pop up and grow. Now, our best shot at community is getting invited to a Discord server and hoping it still exists 2 weeks from now.
Web 1.0 wasn’t perfect in a lot of ways, but I think it was a lot better for community than what we’ve got now.
I just saw an academic paper and Twitter thread 🧵 about this! They focus more on decision-making than friend-making, but the issues preventing effective X-making are the same: the size of “communities” and information directed by algorithm.
From Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom)
1. We have a new paper out in PNAS today, in which we address the harm wrought by dramatically restructuring human communication of the span of a decade, with no aim other than selling ads.
It might be the most important paper of my career.
2. This thread describes the paper and the backstory leading to it. I’ll be posting over the course of the day as I can find the time.
Three years ago, @uwcip postdoc @jbakcoleman organized a summer meeting at Princeton. I attended, and it changed the direction of my research.
3. Think about how you receive information today, compared to fifteen years or twenty years ago.
Social media, internet search, click-based advertising: innovations in information technology and new mechanisms for monetizing information have rewired human communication.
4. The problem is that this enormous transformation has taken place not as a stewarded effort to improve information quality or to further human well-being, but more or less simply for the purpose of keeping people engaged online in order to sell ads.
5. We don’t have a theory for how human decision-making operates in an algorithm-driven online network of comprising billions of souls—and we argue there is no reason to expect some sort of invisible hand is going to bail us out and ensure that good information floats to the top.
6. It is difficult to overestimate the stakes. If these technologies so effectively sow mis- and disinformation worldwide, how we can hope to solve problems such as global warming, extinction, war, food security, pandemics? How can we prevent democracies from crumbling?
7. Aside: The paper has been in the works for over two years. A 2019 draft said something along the lines of “Imagine that pandemic hit and people wouldn’t follow public health advice because of misinformation spread online. We’d be *really* screwed then.”
8. So what is so radically different now compared to twenty years ago, and why does it matter? In the paper, we explore a few factors.
First, scale. We’ve gone from small face-to-face communities to a global network of 3.6 billion social media users in the blink of an eye.
9. We write “Expanding the scale of a collectively behaving system by eight orders of magnitude is certain to have functional consequences. Not only are societies at the scale of ours rare in the natural world; they also are often ecologically unstable where they do form.”
10. Research in opinion dynamics, animal behavior, network epistemology, and statistical physics reveals that the ability to come to collective decisions depends strongly on the size of the group. Bigger does not mean wiser or better-functioning.
11. Second, network structure. Face-to-face networks limit the scope of influence; we can only talk to so many people in a day. On social media it’s different. IRL I couldn’t tell 200,000 people about this paper in an afternoon. More than that have clicked on this thread already.
12. Moreover, preferential attachment processes (often abetted by algorithms, more on that later) accelerate the inequality of influence online.
Network structure differs as well, with more “long ties” online that accelerate the spread of information and disinformation alike.
13. Third, the ease and fidelity afforded by digital communication. Online, messages can be forwarded, re-forwarded, and re-re-forwarded time and again without a loss of resolution, without breaking down in gibberish like in a kids’ game of telephone.
14. All this takes place at essentially zero cost at staggering speed. Someone pens a piece of disinformation after lunch. It gets amplified a few times, and reaches e.g. the leader of the free world later that afternoon. He retweets it to 90 million people, who amplify further.
15. Suddenly a deception is cascading through every corner of the online world. It’s even hard to triangulate to figure out if it’s true, because by this point it’s coming at you from all sides and seemingly from a plenitude of sources.
The very same day it was crafted.
16. Think about the downside of frictionless communication.
Why isn’t your postal mailbox buried in 50 pounds of junk mail every day? Because stamps cost money.
Why didn’t you get long-distance phone scammers in the 1990s? 25 cents a minute back then, that’s why.
17. I want to correct a misperception I’m seeing. Our message is not “ads are evil.”
It’s that social media etc. been designed largely to sell ads, which means it is not designed with care to facilitate the spread of reliable information, let alone improve human well-being.
18. The fourth and final development we discuss is the role of algorithms and algorithmic feedback.
The posts you see on social media—including this thread, I fear—are fed to you by algorithms designed to maximize your engagement, not the veracity of the content you consume.
19. Perhaps even worse, who you *know* on social media is in some large part a function of whom algorithms wanted you to know.
You may like your online friends because they’re cool or whatever, but you *met* many of them because some algorithm thought that would keep you online.
20. And these algorithms know so much about us. The amount of data is staggering. There are hundreds of simultaneous A-B experiments ongoing at any time to figure out what makes us click, collectively….
21. …and to build up a detailed enough profile to predict what makes you click, specifically.
Sure, the results are sometimes risible. But sometimes they’re not. Machine learning is a powerful beast when competently implemented and fed with an endless supply of data.
22. Algorithms create filter bubbles at times. They recommend that I connect with people who thinking like I do, and even if I seek out divergent viewpoints, other algorithms may learn that I don’t engage with them and start to down-rank them in my feed.
23. Other times, algorithms may learn that agreement is boring and conflict is engaging. In the struggle for attention, righteous indignation outcompetes thoughtful discussion. So that’s what we get. In this way they regulate the emotional tenor of the online worlds we inhabit.
24. Now add in the fact that these algorithms are opaque, sometimes even to their creators, and mercurial. We don’t know what they’re doing, or what effects they are having, because the only people who have the data to measure it consider that information too valuable to share.
25. “In sum, we are offloading our evolved information-foraging processes onto algorithms. But these algorithms are typically designed to maximize profitability, with often insufficient incentive to promote an informed, just, healthy, and sustainable society.”
To be continued…
26. I’ll finish up this thread tomorrow. In the meantime, check out lead author @jbakcoleman’s feed and those of my coauthors.
@WolframBarfuss @icouzin @JonathanDonges @andy_gersick @jenniferjacquet @albert_kao @RachelEMoran @kaiatombak @jayvanbavel @elkeweber @PRomanczuk
end 🧵 2021/06/22
This reply by one of the coauthors, Jay Van Bavel, is spot on:
E.O. Wilson said it best:“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”Strongly opposed to the whole “we’re just cavemen with nukes” narrative, and I’ve got some other some qualms with some of these claims. But the #10 bit about collective decision making in larger and larger networks is interesting in this context, tho I’m not entirely sure why we need statistical physics to speak to it. Still, something to add the reading list.
(via aeschylus-stan-account)
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i have a lot of feelings and thoughts about coelacanths today
like… they’re blue
you have this mysterious fish that no one really cared about, because everyone assumed they’d gone extinct with the dinosaurs. an interesting footnote, but one of many, many fossil species.
and later the coelacanth gets some fame as a so-called “missing link” species, a theory which is now outdated (and not accurate for coelacanths) but was really influential at the time. because they have some weird biological quirks – bones in fins! – people were like “oh, they must be a missing link.” so the coelacanth was launched into some fame with the theory of evolution. it got brought up a lot. drawn in old textbooks as proof.
and then a fisherman finds a weird fish off the coast of south africa and calls a local fish expert who had let it be known she was interested in weird finds, and he brings her the (unfortunately badly rotted) corpse and she’s like “well, this is sure weird,” and sends off the bones to other experts, who start to quietly freak out, and rush to south africa, and rewards are offered for another one, any other one, and a few years later one is caught and frozen before rotting.
and it’s this incredible discovery, this extinct creature come to life (the prehistoric coelacanth lived in swamps and marshes in south america; these now are deep ocean fish in and around the indian ocean, but it’s still recognizably the same species)!
but it’s also blue.
not like, muddy blue, or tumblr-default-background blue.
proper shimmering sapphire blue and white. almost turquoise in some lights. this like… muddy, fossil creature. always drawn in dinosaur browns and grays. and it’s alive and it’s blue. just imagine being the scientist who opened that crate to this creature for the first time. you’re already excited, you’ve known about this fish for decades, you thought it was a story, you know it’s in this box. you expect to see the weird fins and the strange tail. you know it’s large and odd looking. and you open it up and it’s this beautiful, shining blue, you know?
[img described: a coelacanth. it is blue.]
(via max1461)
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SSI Restoration Act of 2021
i have never made a post like this before but i haven’t seen anyone here talk about it yet so i want to at least provide some links because this is extremely important for disabled people with or without benefits in the USA.
she doesn’t name the bill in the video but in the comments it’s clarified that the act referred to is the SSI Restoration Act of 2021.
“The Supplementary Security Income (SSI) Restoration Act of 2021 has been introduced in both the House and the Senate. The bill would improve the lives of millions of SSI beneficiaries around the country, including over 2 million older adults who are living below the federal poverty level due to inadequate benefit levels, and often lose or are denied benefits due to outdated eligibility rules.” (link) - summary from Justice In Aging, an organization dedicated to fighting senior poverty“This bill restores a program that plays a key role in the security of millions of Americans. Specifically, it modernizes and improves SSI by streamlining and simplifying the claiming process, expanding the resources and income limits, and eliminating punitive reductions in benefits.” (link) - summary from the SSI Restoration Act Section by Section, linked on Congressman Raúl M. Grijalva’s website, in the social security tabbelow is taken from the issue brief on justiceinaging.org regarding what the bill entails
• The SSI benefit rate will be increased to at least 100% of the Federal Poverty Level, adjusted annually, so that no one receiving SSI will be left to live below the poverty line.
• Couples will receive their full SSI benefit, totaling twice the individual rate, rather than a reduced marriage penalty rate.
• Low-income seniors and people with disabilities who can’t work enough to meet all their basic needs will be able to save up to $10,000 and couples will be able to save up to $20,000 for emergencies such as car repairs, new roofs, and other unexpected expenses, without losing benefits.
• Individuals will be able to receive up to $128 monthly from other sources, such as Social Security benefits or pension payments, without a corresponding loss in benefits.
• Individuals who are able to work will be able to earn up to $416 a month without being penalized.
• Individuals who live in households with others, including family members, will no longer be penalized with lower benefits through the in-kind support and maintenance provision.
• Individuals who transfer assets (even small amounts of money to a family member) will no longer suffer harsh penalties.
• Eliminate installment payment requirements and extend the time to spend down resources so that SSI recipients who have been waiting for months or years to obtain their benefits can receive the full overdue amount.
• Exclude retirement accounts from countable resources to allow people with disabilities to build up their savings for retirement and use those resources to pay for expenses in later life.
• State and local earned income tax credits and child tax credits will be excluded from income calculations in the same manner as general tax payments.”
here is a link to the official bill
here is the FAQ (also justiceinaging.org)
please reblog
(via soilrockslove)
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Asking advice from wheelchair users
What are folks’ experiences with transport vs manual wheelchairs in terms of comfort?
My family is considering buying a wheelchair for my grandmother so that her kids can take her to museums. (I know museums have wheelchairs on offer. My personal experience is they are not reliably or easily available and they often suck.) She mostly walks with a cane, but can’t stand up for longer than fifteen minutes or so at a time.
She has significant arthritis and won’t be able to push a manual wheelchair herself; so the only reason to spent the money to get a manual vs transport chair is if it’s significantly more comfortable.
A power chair or scooter are probably off the table, for a variety of reasons including that no one involved has a car that can transport one.
I have some experience with a manual wheelchair, but none with a transport chair so I can’t offer helpful comparison.
I’d love to hear advice from wheelchair users on
1) Whether there’s a big comfort difference between manual and transport chairs, and
2) Any other wheelchair purchase advice that you have (websites, brands, sizing, cushioning, etc)
Thank you!
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injygo a demandé:
i liked your daemons post! also did i read that wrong or did you mention you have a daemon in passing? i have so many (excited, curious) questions (is it part of a religious practice? a mental discipline? something that just happened? do you know other daemon-havers or is it a solitary thing? how "pretend"/fictional is it and what does that mean to you?) um anyway feel free to ignore this or answer privately, also tell ada i said hi
ah you have uncovered my breadcrumbs kjfgfdg i was gonna make it a bit more clear in the trends post ‘cause it effects my reading of daemons but yeah! ive got a daemon. technically two.
i am not the best person to answer these questions since ive only been doing this for about a year but i will do my best! if you want more/better information the daemonism community on tumblr (under that tag) is a really good place to start, as well as the daemon forum, though you need an account to see some of the stuff.
anyways! i think my best way of describing it is like…hmmm some sort of mental practice? sometimes i just say a spirituality of sorts but it’s not entirely that since i’m not a huge subscriber to 'the daemon is the soul’ when it comes to real life. the long and short of it is i’ve always talked to myself and always had a sort of…not imaginary friend, thats not the right word, but a sense of missing someone. and then i found daemonism and was like OH yeah okay this makes a lot of sense. and decided to just go all in. its the act of giving a personality and self-hood to the other side of conversations you have with yourself, is where i started with things.
i see my daemons as being as real as i am–like, what is consciousness, at the end of the day? who fucking knows. certainly not me! if i can be alive and real then my daemons can be, too. if you talk to yourself whose to say you cant give a personality to the voice talking back? so i did that. and then me and ada joked a lot about what if there was a second daemon rattling around in here. and then there was a second one, and now i feel…yeah, that’s it, yknow.
again, other people can give better answers. the daemonism community on tumblr isn’t like, huge or anything, but i’m in no means the only person who does this, and if you pop into the tag you’ll see the bigger blogs that post about this stuff and get an idea as to what it’s all about. its different for everyone!
some of this stuff i’ll get into more when i finish the trends post–a lot of how i see and write daemons is based on Real Experience which is what i mean when i say im aware i come into this with just the nichest view on things. like i can confidently say that the number of people who, one, have a daemon, and two, write daemonfic, is probably like. less than 100 people. (and if you ARE one of those people. hey whats up.)
thanks for asking! i dont mind talking about this stuff 'cause it is a big part of my love of daemons, and half the reason this is on my mind 24/7.
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Of the Moon and her myriad nations
[Earth’s Moon], though naturally quite barren, was for centuries an attractive prospect for explorers, colonizers, would-be rebels, and utopians of various stripes. Unlike the other bodies of the Solar System, it can be reached with even simple rockets in just a few days, its gravity is low enough to make export-oriented industries feasible, and, perhaps most importantly, it has a psychological connection to Earth found nowhere else in outer space. The rest of the Universe is beyond that first celestial sphere, beyond the gravitation influence of our home, where the Earth is reduced to a dot in the sky, or entirely invisible. But on the near side of the Moon, the home of your species hangs in the sky, resplendent and cloud-marbled in the darkness, only a glance away–as the Moon in turn has hung, with its pale and shining face, in the skies of Earth since the beginning.
Although several scientific outposts and a handful of desultory attempts at industrial projects dotted the lunar surface at the start of the Second Space Race, settlement of the Moon did not begin in earnest until novel propulsion technologies put most of the Inner Solar System within easy reach, and asteroid-based mining and manufacturing began in high Earth orbit. For processes that required more than microgravity, the Moon was a more attractive production site than Earth, with its low escape velocity and lack of atmosphere. Helium-3 could be found there in relative abundance, along with water, and although the base materials had to be imported from Earth, hydroponically grown and synthetically manufactured foodstuffs could be more easily exported than they could from the Earth’s surface. Because of its close proximity to Earth, the Moon was initially dominated by terrestrial political structures: tellurian corporations and states, and a handful of orbital and Moon-based organizations with close ties to them. The rest of the Solar System was too distant to either rely upon Earth or to be drawn into its political sphere of influence, once the colonists their achieved self-sufficiency. Should disaster befall them, Earth could be of no help, so what was the use of trying to stay forever in her good graces? Not so, on the Moon.
Nowadays, of course, things are quite different. Between Tranquility Base and Maskelyne Anchorage, one may cross through a dozen major or minor sovereign polities, free estates, or discrete political condominiums. Lunar politics, and consequently lunar law, is a tangle of overlapping jurisdictions, most with some form of sovereign right or privilege, that resembles nothing so much as the ancient Holy Roman Empire, or perhaps India in the wake of the Mughal Empire’s collapse. None of these statelets are dependent on Earthbound sovereignties, and indeed they are nothing if not a little scornful of their decadent neighbors, with their wide seas and rich atmosphere. They are resentful of outside meddling, to the point that the surest way to end any dispute on the Moon is to barge in as an offworlder with your own opinion–for then every single party to the argument will turn as one against you. And this is as true in a game of cards over drinks as it is in international relations.
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