I’m sorry I didn’t upload this before, if there are some amongst you who want to discuss the, er, situation. I have been obsessing about this election for months now and I think that now we’re here I find I’m too anxious to watch the returns coming in as a Trump victory would be the biggest disaster for this country since, I dunno, the civil war? I took a peek at Twitter about twenty minutes ago (I refuse to use its other name) and the people I follow are all sounding very gloomy and now I’m more tense and scared than I have ever been about this election. The Russian bomb threats aren’t helping the situation. I don’t know if I’ll even check the news again tonight (who am I kidding, I will) but if you guys feel like chatting here’s a place to do it.
@GSS ex-noob:
The killer is rich, good-looking, and male, so I’d guess he gets is murder with the possibility of parole, if they get a jury that isn’t hung. Everyone on both the left and the right hates “health” care companies, so it won’t break along ideological lines. Just finding enough jurors who haven’t personally or in their family been screwed over by their insurance is going to be tough.
As of 13 December 2024, Luigi Mangione is already a character in over a hundred AO3 fanfics, the majority being “x Reader”—i.e., as lover to the reader’s self-insert.
The last time there was a gilded age, people romanticized bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde. No one should be surprised about this latest development.
Another $64,000 question: while the public is caught up in the current assassination/healthcare drama, swapping headcanons and favorite conspiracy theories and deciding whom to cheer and whom to fling poop at…are the once and future Powers That Be taking advantage of the diversion to sneak some further awfulness under the radar?
Here’s a bit of holiday cheer that somehow wound up on the Daily Heil:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/embed/video/1369595.html
@FMOx: delightful!
Due to the laws of NY state, the shooter is currently only charged with 2nd degree murder, but they’ll find some excuse (probably for the across-state-lines) to bump it up to first.
His rich family might be able to get him a diminished capacity plea, since despite his target, he does seem to be not right in the head. But the insurance companies and their bought politicians are still going to go for murder one.
In any case, he’s going to be in some kind of institution for a while.
@FMO;
One of the aides to Kennedy has formally filed a request with the FDA to withdraw its approval of a polio vaccine.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/12/13/robert-f-kennedy-jr-ally-petitioned-stop-polio-vaccine/76972463007/
The guy claims that the current version of said vaccine needs a lot more testing to rule it out as a cause of the massive autism epidemic ravishing America’s children.
….it doesn’t say anything nice about these folks when they consider a kid who processes the world differently from the ’norm’ but is otherwise healthy to be a thousand times worse off than a kid sentenced to spend their lives crippled (at best) by polio. Or having a cough so bad it breaks their ribs (whooping cough). Or….
Sure, cuz dying of preventable diseases is so much better than being a little different than average.
Random/Off-topic:
Some time ago, a discussion of the Wheel of Time and how it wasn’t exactly a feminist triumph took place on here. I believe I asked if there was any more feminist friendly fantasy novels out and someone recommended the work of T. Kingfisher.
I never said anything about it, but I did buy a few of her books, starting with Paladin’s Grace, then expanding to the Clocktaur Wars and Swordheart. (I wanted to focus on stories all taking place in a shared universe, so Temple of the White Rat it was.)
I found them very good, well written, with great characters and that oh so nice world building I love so much. I also liked how the romantic characters were portrayed as a variety of different types, usually in their thirties and not always the most conventionally attractive.
This is in stark contrast to a romance novel I read many many years ago where of course the main characters were basically anime characters in their early twenties, i.e. the top heavy woman would make plastic surgeons cry in jealousy at how she made their work a joke, the guy was a six foot six body builder with a porn dick, etc.
At any rate, I don’t remember who recommended what, but I wanted to say thank you to all involved there. I noticed the other day some of her Saint of Steel books have dropped in price and think I may make a purchase or request a last minute Christmas gift.
Yeah, so that was a bit long winded as I usually am, but compared to everything else going on, a little book review is good news right now
@.45: I have also met her in person a few times and she’s so nice. Also check out her work under her real name, Ursula Vernon, under which she has been a finalist for and won Hugos.
@GSS ex-noob:
Sure, cuz dying of preventable diseases is so much better than being a little different than average.
In short: the very thought of getting rid of my like is worth a catastrophic collateral toll in iron lungs and tiny little coffins—the majority of them for neurotypical children.
@.45, GSS ex-noob:
I’ve met her in person as well at conventions, and have autographed copies of some of the original printings of Digger.
@Full Metal Ox:
I think most of these people don’t think of it as a trade-off. Vaccination, much like food safety regulations and many other guardrails, has been a victim of its own success, and many people alive these days simply aren’t old enough to remember when dying from measles was actually a thing that happened regularly.
On top of that, a lot of people have been sold the ‘Just World Hypothesis’ as part of the American Dream; when you get right down to it a lot of Trumpism boils down to:
The third point may be true, but because they’re fundamentally wrong on the second point and probably wrong on the first (they may not start off being wrong on the first, but the harder they cling to the second to justify that they didn’t really make the wrong decisions, the more the first part is false; see Slacktivist and ‘Bad Jackie‘) everything that follows from those axioms is false.
So I figure a lot of people won’t see this as a trade-off because between Just World Hypothesis and self-selection of news, they refuse to believe that they are the ones that will suffer. We saw a number of cases of this when the pandemic was at its peak, with patients on their deathbeds still refusing to believe that CoViD was a thing and families suing hospitals because they didn’t believe it either.
@Jenora Feuer:
Anything which includes the premise of “I am a good person”, whether spoken or unspoken, should be considered automatically suspect. It might not be true, and even if it were, it’s either mostly irrelevant or your argument would be much stronger if it didn’t hinge on that. (Also sometimes there’s the matter of “by what standards?”)
@Snowberry:
Oh, agreed. But fundamentally I don’t think it’s possible to understand Trumpism and especially religious support for him without understanding that a lot of it starts from that assumption and the layers of self-justification required to avoid thinking about the ‘are we the baddies?’ question.
Slacktivist also has had several articles on what he calls the Anti Kitten-Burning Coalition, those people who take the moral high ground against rare and obvious evil… in large part because they’re completely silent against (and often complicit with) much more commonplace and banal evil, but still want to convince themselves that they are good people with the moral high ground.
Reading that, I couldn’t help but think of QAnon. Also the 1980s Satanic Panic. 1980s, 2008, 2020ish … could be a generational thing?
WHTM’s favorite aquatic animal is having a Moment:
Capybaras take their turn as the holiday season’s ‘it’ animal
Alan was ahead of his time with Capybarrister!
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-defense-bill-to-raise-troop-pay-and-bar-trans-care-for-minors-to-receive-final-vote
Dems stopped pretending to care about trans people.
Oh, I think that was obvious when they didn’t defend McBride.
With friends like those, who needs enemies?
A litter of humbugs in a ditch, for whomever might need them:
http://web.archive.org/web/20240421103510if_
https://www.advocate.com/politics/biden-signs-anti-lgbtq-bill
Well
It’s official on the Dems and Biden fucking us trans over.
Happy Christmas to one and all!
May all your dreams come true this year. Except maybe that one where you’re naked and trying to find the room for an exam you haven’t prepared for.
https://postimg.cc/zy630ZgF
As long-timers here probably know, I read the a lot of the Unicode Consortium’s public documents, mainly for the emoji (but not exclusively for that) and I do a long post near the end of the year some years (didn’t last year) for anyone who is interested in the topic. Feel free to ignore this if you don’t care about it.
Let’s start off with the new ones which will be available in early 2025 on most platforms:
·Tired Face With Bags Under Eyes (smiley)
·Fingerprint
·Dead/Leafless Tree
·Root Vegetable (presumed default image = beet)
·Harp
·Shovel
·Splatter (presumed default image is blue-ish, to represent both water and paint)
·Flag of Sark (placeholder only, like with Northern Ireland, as no official flag currently exists)
The reason why so few is in part because of the issue of “emoji bloat” – while people always want more, the already too-large number of them causes issues for both devices and users – but also because the approval process is long and complicated and there were apparently delays in approving things this year (I don’t know the specifics), and emojis weren’t the highest priority, so a few of them have the current status of being re-considered for 2026. This notably includes bigfoot/sasquatch/yeti, which was considered but rejected for an earlier year (I forget which year).
Updates on various emoji-related issues:
Only 2 multi-person emoji which lack the option for separate skintones for each person remain – “People Wrestling” and “People With Bunny Ears”. (The various “family” emoji were depreciated in 2023, with the recommendation to replace the existing usages of them with abstract symbols.) The reason why these two specifically is because multi-skintone emoji are costly for some smaller devices, so there has been a proposal for the past few years to provide less-costly alternatives – specifically, replacing the Wrestlers with abstract symbols, and to turn Bunny Ears People into anthropomorphic rabbits. At present it seems like neither of them are likely to happen and they’ll probably finish the multi-skintone emojis for 2026 or 2027.
In addition, the multi-person emojis which also have multi-gender options will remain in the combinations of M/M, F/M, F/F, and N/N for the foreseeable future, excepting (again) Wrestlers and People With Bunny Ears, both of which currently lack an F/M option. There was a minority faction pushing for N/F and N/M options for awhile, but they seem to have ultimately lost that battle by early 2023. Partly because expanding two-gender + two-race is even more costly, and partly because the majority side insists that the primary use of N emoji is for generic individuals, not for representing non-binary and/or androgynous people, so that this wouldn’t be used often enough to be worth the cost. (Again, their reasoning, I disagree.)
Not counting the covered head-to-toe figures (like the skier), there are three single-person emojis remaining which have no gender options: “Woman Breastfeeding”, “Man Disco Dancing”, and “Woman Flamenco Dancing”. The former they don’t want to touch right now due to being “too politically volatile”. The other two have caused headaches due to the demand for both gender options and more dance styles, which has the potential to get out of control – why this dance and not that one? What if men or women are culturally forbidden to engage in certain dance styles and/or wear certain outfits? The current, tentative solution is to just add “Person (N only) Ballet Dancing” and leave it at that, which they admit is less than ideal. This is currently up for consideration for 2026.
Finally, no more flags will be considered for the foreseeable future unless a new country forms and receives an official country code on the ISO-3166 list (which is not in the Unicode Consortium’s purview) like Sark did. Non-country flags have been considered in past years, with only the Pirate Flag, Rainbow Flag and the Transgender Flag getting through. (The other non-country flags were part of the Japanese Carrier Set which were included in the original emoji set for existing compatibility reasons; most would not likely be approved today.) Side note, the Pan-African Flag, the United Nations Flag, and the Wiphala were the most seriously considered among those which were eventually rejected. This no-flag policy has been in place since at least early last year.
@ snowberry
But why do they need anything other than disco?
Typical. Accommodate women, accommodate trans people, but throw enbys under the bus.
Pah!
Culturally forbidden by whom, where? They can’t assume any such taboo to be universal, they can’t very well play favorites, and they certainly can’t programmatically enforce every such taboo that exists anywhere in the world simultaneously, or no one in an emoji will be allowed to wear clothing or be nude. For starters, there’s no women’s outfit that would be considered acceptable by conservatives in both Texas and Tehran … the only option left is to ignore such taboos entirely and leave it up to users to decide whether and when to observe or violate locally observed taboos with their emoji use. Plus, allowing transgressive and rebellious uses is necessary if they are not to obstruct potentially important political speech.
All that is leaving aside that disallowing certain emoji to avoid offending the conservatives of some culture or another is the start of a slippery slope that ends with unpublishing the poop emoji, removing every single religious symbol emoji, and requiring that certain combinations of the characters “c”, “f”, “k”, and “u” be rendered as four asterisks. A year or two after that and the Unicode Consortium, now rebranded the Ministry of Truth, declares every “negative” emoji, such as the wilted plant and the various stormy weather ones, to be doubleplus ungood.
The Pan-African Flag, the United Nations Flag, and the whaa?
Also: how could they reject the United Nations Flag?! It most certainly should be in there. Along with the flag of the United Federation of Planets. 🙂
Although now I think about it the UN flag is a bit problematic. (No surprise for something that probably dates to the 1940s or so.)
Specifically, it decenters the global south … literally. I’m not sure what to replace it with though. Maybe just a biconic or a Mollweide projection instead of the north polar conic projection used now? Or future-proof it somewhat by switching to a diagram of the Solar System …
Two things to amuse folks here with. One is an article about Andrew Tate declaring that it’s gay for a man to have a good night’s sleep, that Real True Men have PTSD and wake up several times a night by shooting straight up covered in a cold sweat because of the nightmares they’re having.
https://www.boredpanda.com/andrew-tate-roasted-declare-sleep-well-gay-masculinity-rant-takedown/
The other is a capsule summary of Nick Fuentes’ life after smugly declaring ‘Your body, my choice. Forever.’ several weeks ago. He’s learned the hard way that 1. women hackers exist, 2. they are more than skilled enough to track down his private personal information, and 3. have no qualms about making it all public. You know, just like assorted male hackers like to do to ‘uppity’ women who dare say anything they don’t like while not making their boners nice and hard like females are supposed to.