Other Voices

Let us begin with the people who will set you up with a sign with the phrase "In our America: All people are Equal; Love Wins; Black Lives Matter; Immigrants & Refugees are Welcome; Disabilities are Respected; Women are in Charge of their Bodies; People & Planet are Valued over Profits; Diversity is Celebrated." Or stickers. Or other such expressions of the phrase.

There's an entire trans-and-nonbinary cast production of Twelfth Night, with Sir Ian McKellen providing an opening for it, and they have livestream options (and access to the stream for up to two weeks after the performance) as well as the live performance one. July 25 is the day in question. Ticket tiers start at 10 GBP, so you may have to add in currency conversion and currency conversion fees to your ticket price.

One of the best parts of being a historian is when new evidence contributes more to a story thought finished. Sometimes people turn out to have evaded those who wanted them dead not just once, but twice. The history is there, often recorded somewhere, but it takes someone looking to find all of it.

What was believed to be a simple later copy of the Magna Carta has, after investigation and further scholarship, been verified as an original copy of the document. Which meant a lot of preservation, making things available, and then the scholars being able to use their technology and come to conclusions of originality. A lot of work, in other words, much of it done by people who may or may not receive any credit in the eventual paper written about it.

A list of "summer reads" produced for members of King Features Syndicate newspapers offered fifteen books by well-known offers, only five of which actually existed, and ten of which were clearly confabulated by a chatbot.

Fansplaining gives us a primer on the history and the significant rise in the Real Person Fanfiction corners of fandoms, and the often ugly collisions between those who are writing about fictional versions of celebrities, actors, musicians, and other figures on our screens regularly, and those who are looking for the secret truth that the people really are into each other more than they can let on. This is made more difficult in the Internet era, where there's a lot of access and behind-the-scenes material produced and released for the fans, and that makes it more difficult to find easy ways of knowing whether you're looking at someone who's working with a public persona and who's writing fic about the secret relationships they believe are right in front of us.

A paper of dubious scholarship and cherry-picked references gets a solid thrashing from members of the community in whose journal it was published, with questions for the publishers and organization about why they chose to accept and publish it in such a state, rather than reject or require strong revisions. Having read the offending paper, the thrashing is entirely deserved, and the questions for the editors who allowed it to be published in this state are also deserved.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that what books a public library carries in its collection are government speech, and therefore subject to being curated as any government employee likes without repercussions or First Amendment challenges. Which gives a massive amount of power to any library employee with collection responsibilities to shape the collection exactly as they desire, without having to worry about keeping collection balance or ensuring a diversity of viewpoint or any of those other things that are generally accepted principles of collection development. I look forward to the library that decides to remove every conservative author from their collection, the one that decides their collection will be composed sole of Black trans women, and the library that completely depopulates their religion section of everything that has to do with Christianity in it, and the courts siding with them based on this precedent, telling the people complaining that it's too bad they don't have a library whose values align with their own, but that book curation is government speech and they don't have standing to challenge it.

(This is a foolish ruling, and they should know better, but fascists and the fascist-friendly rarely believe that the tools they are building to enforce their will on others will be used equally as well to suppress them once they are no longer in power. Or once they're not sufficiently fascist to be in the in-group any more.)

Because they had been determined to be men by sex according to the UK Supreme Court ruling, and governments are going along with the farce, a group of topless trans women protested the decision outside the Scottish parliament building. Why topless? Well, men can't be sanctioned for being out in public topless. Only women. So when the protest also happened outside the English parliament building, the same logic applied. Mind, in the images of the protest, you can clearly see that the "female-presenting nipples" on the protesters have been blurred out, so the media coverage clearly believes they're women, even if the law does not.

( Still more to be seen inside, including the usual parade of US politics behaving badly )

Going out of this post, The Sesame Workshop has made a deal with Netflix to continue Sesame Street, allowing new episodes to premiere simultaneously on Netflix's streaming service and PBS stations (and the PBS Kids app.) The format of the show will be changing with the new season, but there's something fundamentally rotten at having had Sesame Street end up needing to make deals with a corporate partner for significant time, rather than being fully funded (including the research apparatus that helps keep Sesame Street educationally appropriate for the target audience) through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other public dollars for all of their runtime. Surely there's some fighter jet or tank that could be not built and that money appropriated for keeping a quality educational program on the airwaves, and to pay the researchers that help keep it quality.

Also, a primer on various possible motivations for people to be engaged in power-exchange scenes and relationships, written in such a way as to be useful for people who might want to be practitioners and also for those who want to write power exchange in their fictional endeavours.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)