#this uses all data rather than just 2023 data like last time

[coefficiente]

Identifying Communities in the Top 50 HRPF Characters using the last 12 years of published works (Louvain Algorithm)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The CFPB is genuinely making America better, and they're going HARD

On June 20, I'm keynoting the LOCUS AWARDS in OAKLAND.

Let's take a sec here and notice something genuinely great happening in the US government: the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's stunning, unbroken streak of major, muscular victories over the forces of corporate corruption, with the backing of the Supreme Court (yes, that Supreme Court), and which is only speeding up!

A little background. The CFPB was created in 2010. It was Elizabeth Warren's brainchild, an institution that was supposed to regulate finance from the perspective of the American public, not the American finance sector. Rather than fighting to "stabilize" the financial sector (the mission that led to Obama taking his advisor Timothy Geithner's advice to permit the foreclosure crisis to continue in order to "foam the runways" for the banks), the Bureau would fight to defend us from bankers.

The CFPB got off to a rocky start, with challenges to the unique system of long-term leadership appointments meant to depoliticize the office, as well as the sudden resignation of its inaugural boss, who broke his promise to see his term through in order to launch an unsuccessful bid for political office.

But after the 2020 election, the Bureau came into its own, when Biden poached Rohit Chopra from the FTC and put him in charge. Chopra went on a tear, taking on landlords who violated the covid eviction moratorium:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cfpb

Then banning payday lenders' scummiest tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/29/planned-obsolescence/#academic-fraud

Then striking at one of fintech's most predatory grifts, the "earned wage access" hustle:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

Then closing the loophole that let credit reporting bureaus (like Equifax, who doxed every single American in a spectacular 2019 breach) avoid regulation by creating data brokerage divisions and claiming they weren't part of the regulated activity of credit reporting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

Chopra went on to promise to ban data-brokers altogether:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/13/goulash/#material-misstatement

Then he banned comparison shopping sites where you go to find the best bank accounts and credit cards from accepting bribes and putting more expensive options at the top of the list. Instead, he's requiring banks to send the CFPB regular, accurate lists of all their charges, and standing up a federal operated comparison shopping site that gives only accurate and honest rankings. Finally, he's made an interoperability rule requiring banks to let you transfer to another institution with one click, just like you change phone carriers. That means you can search an honest site to find the best deal on your banking, and then, with a single click, transfer your accounts, your account history, your payees, and all your other banking data to that new bank:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

Somewhere in there, big business got scared. They cooked up a legal theory declaring the CFPB's funding mechanism to be unconstitutional and got the case fast-tracked to the Supreme Court, in a bid to put Chopra and the CFPB permanently out of business. Instead, the Supremes – these Supremes! – upheld the CFPB's funding mechanism in a 7-2 ruling:

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/05/supreme-court-lets-cfpb-funding-stand/

That ruling was a starter pistol for Chopra and the Bureau. Maybe it seemed like they were taking big swings before, but it turns out all that was just a warmup. Last week on The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner rounded up all the stuff the Bureau is kicking off:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-06-07-window-on-corporate-deceptions/

First: regulating Buy Now, Pay Later companies (think: Klarna) as credit-card companies, with all the requirements for disclosure and interest rate caps dictated by the Truth In Lending Act:

https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2024/06/cfpb-applies-credit-card-rules

Next: creating a registry of habitual corporate criminals. This rogues gallery will make it harder for other agencies – like the DOJ – and state Attorneys General to offer bullshit "delayed prosecution agreements" to companies that compulsively rip us off:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-creates-registry-to-detect-corporate-repeat-offenders/

Then there's the rule against "fine print deception" – which is when the fine print in a contract lies to you about your rights, like when a mortgage lender forces you waive a right you can't actually waive, or car lenders that make you waive your bankruptcy rights, which, again, you can't waive:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-warns-against-deception-in-contract-fine-print/

As Kuttner writes, the common thread running through all these orders is that they ban deceptive practices – they make it illegal for companies to steal from us by lying to us. Especially in these dying days of class action suits – rapidly becoming obsolete thanks to "mandatory arbitration waivers" that make you sign away your right to join a class action – agencies like the CFPB are our only hope of punishing companies that lie to us to steal from us.

There's a lot of bad stuff going on in the world right now, and much of it – including an active genocide – is coming from the Biden White House.

But there are people in the Biden Administration who care about the American people and who are effective and committed fighters who have our back. What's more, they're winning. That doesn't make all the bad news go away, but sometimes it feels good to take a moment and take the W.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

[reasonsforhope]

"This year the world will make something like 70bn of these solar cells, the vast majority of them in China, and sandwich them between sheets of glass to make what the industry calls modules but most other people call panels: 60 to 72 cells at a time, typically, for most of the modules which end up on residential roofs, more for those destined for commercial plant. Those panels will provide power to family homes, to local electricity collectives, to specific industrial installations and to large electric grids; they will sit unnoticed on roofs, charmingly outside rural schools, controversially across pristine deserts, prosaically on the balconies of blocks of flats and in almost every other setting imaginable.

Once in place they will sit there for decades, making no noise, emitting no fumes, using no resources, costing almost nothing and generating power. It is the least obtrusive revolution imaginable. But it is a revolution nonetheless.

Over the course of 2023 the world’s solar cells, their panels currently covering less than 10,000 square kilometres, produced about 1,600 terawatt-hours of energy (a terawatt, or 1tw, is a trillion watts). That represented about 6% of the electricity generated world wide, and just over 1% of the world’s primary-energy use. That last figure sounds fairly marginal, though rather less so when you consider that the fossil fuels which provide most of the world’s primary energy are much less efficient. More than half the primary energy in coal and oil ends up as waste heat, rather than electricity or forward motion.

What makes solar energy revolutionary is the rate of growth which brought it to this just-beyond-the-marginal state. Michael Liebreich, a veteran analyst of clean-energy technology and economics, puts it this way:

In 2004, it took the world a whole year to install a gigawatt of solar-power capacity... In 2010, it took a month In 2016, a week. In 2023 there were single days which saw a gigawatt of installation worldwide. Over the course of 2024 analysts at BloombergNEF, a data outfit, expect to see 520-655gw of capacity installed: that’s up to two 2004s a day...

And it shows no signs of stopping, or even slowing down. Buying and installing solar panels is currently the largest single category of investment in electricity generation, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental think-tank: it expects $500bn this year, not far short of the sum being put into upstream oil and gas. Installed capacity is doubling every three years. According to the International Solar Energy Society:

Solar power is on track to generate more electricity than all the world’s nuclear power plants in 2026 Than its wind turbines in 2027 Tthan its dams in 2028 Its gas-fired power plants in 2030 And its coal-fired ones in 2032.

In an IEA scenario which provides net-zero carbon-dioxide emissions by the middle of the century, solar energy becomes humankind’s largest source of primary energy—not just electricity—by the 2040s...

Expecting exponentials to carry on is rarely a basis for sober forecasting. At some point either demand or supply faces an unavoidable constraint; a graph which was going up exponentially starts to take on the form of an elongated S. And there is a wide variety of plausible stories about possible constraints...

All real issues. But the past 20 years of solar growth have seen naive extrapolations trounce forecasting soberly informed by such concerns again and again. In 2009, when installed solar capacity worldwide was 23gw, the energy experts at the IEA predicted that in the 20 years to 2030 it would increase to 244gw. It hit that milestone in 2016, when only six of the 20 years had passed. According to Nat Bullard, an energy analyst, over most of the 2010s actual solar installations typically beat the IEA’s five-year forecasts by 235% (see chart). The people who have come closest to predicting what has actually happened have been environmentalists poo-pooed for zealotry and economic illiteracy, such as those at Greenpeace who, also in 2009, predicted 921gw of solar capacity by 2030. Yet even that was an underestimate. The world’s solar capacity hit 1,419gw last year.

-via The Economist, June 20, 2024

--

Note: That graph. Is fucking ridiculous(ly hopeful).

For perspective: the graph shows that in 2023, there were about 350 GW of solar installed. The 5-year prediction from 2023 said that we'd end up around 450 GW by 2030.

We hit over 600 GW in the first half of 2024 alone.

This is what's called an exponential curve. It's a curve that keeps going up at a rate that gets higher and higher with each year.

This, I firmly believe, is a huge part of what is going to let us save the world.

[ms-demeanor]

hello! i vaguely recall you doing a new year's resolution bingo thing - first, was that actually you lol? and if so, how'd it go, any adjustments you'd make from the original idea? (i did a resolution bingo this past year, which mostly ended up being a 24 item quest buffet, which did work for me! but i'm curious for more data). happy new year to you and your various sizes of bastard!

Hello! Yes, that was me. It didn't go great!

I did a resolution bingo in 2022 but it ended up feeling like homework and at a certain point in the year I looked at the spaces that I hadn't filled and it just made me feel bad.

In 2023 I did kind of a chore chart; I used a sheet of college-ruled notebook paper and divided it up into columns with things like "guitar" and "draw" and and "quilt square" and "go for a walk by myself" and numbered out 52 lines and I went through and highlighted each thing as I did it each week. That went very well for some things and not very well for others. I had at least a few columns where I did something every other week, and I totally finished the quilt square column, and I drew something for like 40 weeks, but I also had several categories that I did absolutely nothing for and several categories that had very few highlights.

That chart *also* was kind of a problem and there was a week in, like, august where my brain was being weird and was like "you can't do more of X until you've caught up on Y and Z" because I had to flip the paper over and wanted to finish three columns before I flipped it - that was clearly a very silly hangup but I don't make the rules for what my brain will freak out about and it caused a disproportionate amount of stress.

This year I kind of combined the two and I've made three sheets of paper with different tasks on different lines, and in different amounts. (And none of the papers need to be flipped over so I won't get a weird hangup week)

So instead of having 52 blanks each for "pushups" "squats" and "go for a walk by myself" I've got 156 blanks for "workout: lifting, calisthenics, stretching, walking, cardio." I didn't do a single walk by myself last year, and it turns out I'm pretty unlikely do do random squats or pushups, so rather than try to do one exercise fifty two times I'm just going to try to do *some* kind of exercise three times a week and I'm not going to feel bad about it if that's more bench press instead of more cardio.

I did pretty well with quilt squares so i've set a goal to do twice as many this year. I set a goal for 52 drawings and writing seriously 52 times. My yard is a disaster so my goal is to fill my yardwaste bin 52 times this year.

But what I *haven't* done is divide that up by week. Maybe some weeks I'll get four workouts in and other weeks I'll do two. Maybe I won't draw for a month but I'll get into it a lot over the summer.

One of my two other sheets is things that I'd like to do daily. My four daily tasks that I'm aiming for are: clean something at the house, floss, moisturize, and journal. (Journaling was successful in the bingo year but not at all last year)

The other sheet is the one that's more like the bingo, or what I think the spirit of the bingo is supposed to be. I've got it labeled "Bonus" and each thing on it has about twenty circles that I can check off if I do something but that I don't see as a goal. That includes stuff like "friend hangs" and "go someplace" - stuff that I want to do more of but that I can either plan or do spontaneously and that doesn't have a big project end goal (so it's "do something with music like program a music box or play guitar for a while" rather than "write a song" like it was the bingo year, when no song got written).

I may have also just kneecapped myself by making the bingo squares too hard. Maybe I should do a monthly bingo with smaller goals.

The bingo also got harder when I failed at bullet journaling; turns out that's not a great way for me to manage my time and attention and the bingo was in the bullet journal. Having stuff on a wall next to the light switch in my office helped a lot last year, I think, so that's where my sheets are this year too.

IDK, this is all fun to experiment with and I enjoy it but also I'm never sure if any of it "works" in terms of getting me to do more of the things that I'd like myself to do. It did work for quilt squares last year, though, and that's the best progress I've made on my quilt since I started it in 2021. And the daily chart is helping a lot so far.

But maybe I just like making charts (I do).

[wonderwithin-us]

The dream you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*

Guess who got their phone broken 💗 but it's alright, it's all ok now & I noted down all I did in the past 3 days. My exams were a little bad, really bad to be completely honest, but it's alright, it was my first time giving exams this semester and I learnt what I need to do.

11th of July, 2023 💕

100 days of productivity — day 5, week 1

Economic exam preparation ~ I was so confused, there were so many concepts I'd missed because of my sickness but I tried YouTube and notes online. Procrastination really did get the best of me. I need to lessen my use of insta, seriously, I think Tumblr is more safe in that regard.

Microeconomics — Introduction & Consumer's Equilibrium

Statistics — Introduction & Organisation of Data

I need to work on my graphs, practice more and overall concepts of microeconomics. Also, clear up my concepts on stats. It's easy, but revision is needed.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

12th of July, 2023

100 days of productivity — day 6, week 1

Economics exam, yikes. Next exam was Psych the next day, so I was really nervous because I wanted to score well in it! ❣️

However.

Procrastination got to me, again. I studied for a while then thought it was too easy and I could do it at night, which, evidently, I couldn't.

I think rather than seeing easy topics as something to skip studying or take easy, I should put more effort in them so I can get them perfect and let it pay back to me.

What is Psychology? & Methods of Enquiry

I need to work on my basic concepts, esp in ch-2, and notes. Visual learning works best for me, and making my own notes is essential to my learning 📖

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

13th of July, 2023

100 days of productivity — day 7, week 1

Dear god, I think my psych exam was the most terrible. Which hurt me the most.

I really did lose hope after this. Not only did my incredibly unclear concepts and no notes not help, but the exam was extremely tough, the questions were really vague and I didn't understand them, and the worst of all, I literally forgot I had a whole section to do as objective even after rechecking. I lost 5 marks from that, maybe more.

That really hurt.

Tomm was English exam! I had seen what had happened in the last papers, so I really worked hard here.

I mostly focused on literature, since the creative writing formats were mostly very easy and took less than an hour.

Chapters with details are hard!

Anyways, I was really anxious until the end, and kept a few detailed chapters to the morning after to revise.

I really need to work on studying chapters I've missed before the exams come. It was so messy and frustrating trying to understand all these chapters with online notes and summaries, especially when the chapters are so open ended and the teacher is so strict with answers 💌

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

14 of July, 2023

100 days of productivity — day 8, week 2

WAR!!! IS!!! OVER!!!!

Final exam day, I was nervous but it was actually quite alright!

I absolutely need to work on my speed, though.

Also, I almost always exceeded the word limit in answers. So, I need to practice my creative writing more, not just in my head, but actually on paper, and be more perfectionist in my answers in literature.

I went out with my big brother to eat street food and it was all very lovely 🍝

I also wrote a lot of poetry, which I'm really quite proud of. I also received some really good news! 💕

New week! The first week was really, really overwhelming, and I don't want my future self to end up like that again. It was exhausting and hurtful and I want to get better.

In the end, I've got a lot of stuff to work with and I'm really proud of my self to survive all this! ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* I hope nothing but peace upon my future.

[mariacallous]

As anyone who so much as glanced at the internet in the past few weeks probably noticed, Google’s sweeping AI upgrade to its search engine had a rocky start. Within days of the company launching AI-generated answers to search queries called AI Overviews, the feature was widely mocked for producing wrong and sometimes bonkers answers, like recommendations to eat rocks or make pizza with glue.

New data from search engine optimization firm BrightEdge suggests that Google has significantly reduced how often it is showing people AI Overviews since the feature launched, and had in fact already substantially curbed the feature prior to the outpouring of criticism. The company has been tracking the appearance of Google’s AI answers on results for a list of tens of thousands of sample searches since the feature was first offered as a beta test last year.

When AI Overviews rolled out to logged-in US users in English after Google’s I/O conference on May 14, BrightEdge saw the AI-generated answers on just under 27 percent of queries it tracked. But their presence dropped precipitously a few days later, the week before screenshots of AI Overviews’ errors went viral online. By the end of last week, when Google published a blog post acknowledging its AI feature’s flubs, BrightEdge saw AI Overviews appearing on only 11 percent of search result pages. Their prevalence was essentially the same on Monday.

Jim Yu, BrightEdge’s founder and executive chairman, says the drop-off suggests that Google has decided to take an increasingly cautious approach to this rollout. “There’s obviously some risks they’re trying to tightly manage,” he says. But Yu adds that he’s generally optimistic about how Google is approaching AI Overviews, and sees these early problems as a “blip” rather than a feature.

“We're continuing to refine when and how we show AI Overviews so they're as useful as possible, including a number of technical updates in the past week to improve response quality,” says Google spokesperson Ned Adriance. Google declined to share its internal statistics about how frequently AI Overviews appear in search, but Adriance says that the BrightEdge numbers don’t reflect what the company sees internally.

It’s unclear why Google may have decided to significantly reduce the appearance of AI Overviews shortly after it launched, but the company’s blog post last week acknowledged that having millions of people use the feature provided new data on its performance and errors. The company’s head of search, Liz Reid, said Google had made “more than a dozen technical improvements,” like limiting satirical content from cropping up in its results. Her post noted that these changes would trigger restrictions on when AI Overviews were offered but did not detail how exactly those restrictions would change the frequency with which AI results appeared.

BrightEdge began tracking AI Overviews using its list of sample queries after Google allowed users to opt in to a beta test of the feature late last year. The test queries spanned nine categories, including ecommerce, insurance, and education, and were designed to span common but also rarer searches. They were tested over and over, in some cases multiple times a day. In December 2023, BrightEdge found that the summaries appeared on 84 percent of its searches but saw that figure drop over time. Google’s Adriance said it did not trigger AI Overviews automatically on 84 percent of searches but did not clarify its internal measurements. After Google opened up AI Overviews to all, BrightEdge continued tracking their appearance using a mixture of accounts that had previously enrolled in the beta test and others which had not but saw no significant difference between what the two groups saw.

Google declined to share exactly how much it changed how many AI Overviews it showed the general public versus people enrolled in the beta test, but Adriance said that people who had opted in to the test were shown AI Overviews on a wider range of queries. BrightEdge’s data also sheds light on the topics where Google believes AI Overviews can be most helpful. AI answers appeared on the majority of health care keyword searches, most recently at a frequency of 63 percent. Sample queries included in BrightEdge’s data included “foot infection,” “bleeding bowel,” and “telehealth urgent care.” In comparison, queries about ecommerce return AI Overviews at around 23 percent, while restaurants or travel very rarely trigger AI overview answers.

Yu calls those results “surprising,” because health queries can be especially sensitive, and Google has made a concerted push in recent years to refine what it shows people who ask health questions.

Mark Traphagen, an executive at the search-engine-optimization platform seoClarity, has also taken special notice of how Google is handling health-care-related queries. To track how AI Overviews are rolling out, the company is monitoring the responses to a list of thousands of searches over time. For 26 popular health-related keywords, including “how to treat insomnia” and “symptoms of Lyme disease,” Google shows an AI response for around 58 percent.

Like Yu, Traphagen has been surprised by how often AI Overviews appear in response to this type of question. But they say the way Google’s feature sources its responses to health queries, often relying on trusted websites like the Mayo Clinic or the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is encouraging. “They have really turned up the safeguards,” Traphagen says. “They’re all from well-known, credible sources.”

Google’s AI answers still sometimes misfire, though, including on health queries. Some experts say that Google’s claims to cite high-quality sources for health answers doesn’t stand up. “They frequently cite pages that don’t rank anywhere, including for health queries,” says search engine optimization consultant Lily Ray. Her experiments have documented how AI Overviews seem to struggle to authoritatively answer “softer” health care queries on topics like aging, building muscle, and skin care. It’s much stronger on more straightforward medical queries, Ray says.

Last week, The New York Times reported concerns over the sources that Google’s algorithms used to answer some health queries, reporting that AI Overviews answered questions about the health benefits of chocolate by drawing on the websites of an Italian chocolate and gelato maker and a company that sells at-home “gut intelligence tests.”

When WIRED queried, “Is chocolate healthy?” on Monday morning, the AI Overview that appeared in response cited the same Italian chocolate company, as well as the website for a Minnesota-based chocolatier. But repeating the query later in the afternoon suggested Google had been making improvements: The chocolate companies had been removed from the citations list, which instead pointed to the websites of four reputable health care organizations, like Scripps Health. (The answer still notes that experts recommend eating a small amount of dark chocolate every day, which is, at best, a contestable summary of current medical advice.)

Despite AI Overview’s rough beginnings, Yu of BrightEdge says that long term, AI search is here to stay. “Big picture is that the AI moment in search is inevitable, and I think it’s going to get much better,” Yu says. That may be the case—but it’s an open question whether a new-and-improved AI Overview will make a big enough leap to repair its reputational damage.

[gramophoneturtle]

Update/Pinned Post

Welcome to my art archive. I've posted a lot about my OCs, TWEWY, Persona 5, Xenoblade X and in other fandoms.

Unfortunately due to recent-ish changes on Tumblr I no longer feel comfortable posting here much or at all. I'll keep my blog up for the foreseeable future or maybe even forever because of how Tumblr stores data. I'd rather have the link back to the source.

Or if the other sites explode in the meantime.

This has nothing to do with the date sadly. I'm just at my limit.

Here's where you can find me:

Pillowfort: gramophoneturtle. The most artist respected place and a decent long form blogging place.

Neocities: I'm currently developing an art archive on neocities over here. This will be THE archive place, one day! With RSS, one day!

Bluesky: gramophoneturtle. Twitter replacement. I don't trust it but it's meshing with me more than mastodon. Stream announcements are here b/c I ran out of energy for crossposting.

cohost: gramophoneturtle. I don't trust it'll stay but it has both a draft system & can save alt text on draft edits. Wild stuff to praise but when porting art out of Tumblr, it's helpful to have new drafts.

Twitch & YouTube: I stream weekly on Twitch and store VODs on both. Twitch has all my VODs and YouTube has VODs from Fall 2023 and onwards.

More details, pros and cons about each site below for those who are curious. Thanks for sticking around and reading.

Pillowfort

It's user funded and transparent about the breakdown of funds

They're against generative AI. Their reinforcement came out around the time Tumblr's not-really-against-it stance came out. This is huge to me.

They're working on a PWA of the site so it will have a way to function like a smartphone app

Image post options aren't great but you aren't limited to 4 (unlike cohost - kinda, and Bluesky)

Alt text gets eaten if you edit a post currently which is awful. (Tumblr used to do this.) Alt text isn't an option for picture type posts but is for text posts with pictures. But hey at least you can include alt text!

Communities are nice for fandoms and stuff. You can search by tags but you don't follow tags, you join/watch communities.

They have funding for the next 6 months past any month that was fully funded. So as of April 1, 2024, funding should last until (the end?) of October if they were to not get any more donations/subscriptions from now on. Basically, they have a 6 month buffer and so far for 2024 they've been keeping it and maintaining their monthly funding goals

Neocities

Home page URL should not change but artwork URLs might

The artwork section is inspired by Tumblr's archive page/system. I don't think I want it to be exactly like it (might be a limitation of static pages re: tag filtering) but I want to try and partially make it

Artwork on there have been nightshaded and glazed. I would like to reglaze some pieces that are too glazed for my liking, now that I have a better computer for it (so it doesn't take forever). That's why not a lot of art is on there yet

I might go into detail about how I automated some of the web dev stuff to make my life easier on my my main blog. In summary: I'm using 11ty (eleventy), generating pages from data and templates, using github for version control and github actions for updating the site automatically

Bluesky:

Feeds are cool. I've found and made (through SkyFeed) a lot of Feeds. Feeds can look for text in posts and alt text, and/or specific tags. Can filter out reblogs or replies. Can work off of user lists. Can include/exclude specific posts - like Twitter Moments. There's a lot of flexibility and filtering.

Feeds can lookback anywhere from 25 hours to 1 week when not looking at one user. So when pulling from many users, you could just get the latest updates. For one user (say your own gallery of whatever) you're allowed to go back to the beginning, it can be your art gallery. And then people can just follow that feed so you don't have to worry about your art getting buried if people just want to follow your art

There's a setting you can turn on to warn and prevent you from posting until you add alt text. I love this. Especially since, like Twitter, you can't go back and edit a post

Forcing ALT text has the added bonus of leaving it last so I can double check tags and text in case I accidentally hit the post button before I'm ready

Twitch

There is art. And VTuber stuff. And life updates. Art/project updates. Lots of OC talk. Like I wish I could post more about Null considering how much stuff I've spoken about them on stream but freaking time! And energy.

YouTube

Used to do more Timelapses but stopped because laptop was not having fun with it. Now that I have a new computer it might be better!

Also has Twitch VODs because I want another place to back up VODs since local recordings take up a lot of space. And I can mark Chapters(/Moments?) timestamps to find stuff again.

Special thank you to those that made it all the way down here!

So what is the blog for now? Archiving, mainly, as I said at the beginning. I might link to my neocities page in maybe art updates or to pillowfort. And I might need a place to fall back to if the other sites don't last. I know bluesky and cohost are not much better/probably not better in other ways so I know that posting on them probably won't be good long term.

But that's why I'm working on the art archive site on the side. I'll always have a safe and controlled place where I can have all my art and details and stuff. It's gonna take a while and it's challenging but it's what I feel like I gotta do now.

I'm just so tired.

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2023-12-11

la baguette, etc.

EDIT: god damn this got longer than I expected

Listening: I almost exclusively listened to Against Me! during this trip for some reason. On Saturday night my metro got interrupted and I got kicked out a few kilometers from my hotel, and after watching a couple full busses skip my stop, I just walked back. I put on Black Crosses for the first time, which is a combination of demos and acoustic versions of the songs from White Crosses which is probably one of my favourite punk albums.

I can't listen to some of Against Me! without having a good bad time because of Memories but I do not have that issue with White Crosses. As far as the demo/acoustic versions go, they are much lighter than the mainline releases which is bad if you want something energetic but good if you kind of want to soak in the lyrics.

There's a lot of great ones on Black Crosses including the obvious ones like Spanish Moss and The Western World but the one that really got me while walking back was the acoustic version of Because of the Shame which is positively heartbreaking when given space like this.

Reading: I fell down a rabbit hole on delta-sigma conversion while doing simultaneous reading up on 32-bit float audio and what the hell DSD is. I will reverse explanations.

Delta-Sigma is a collection of techniques used, roughly, to convert between high-sample-rate, low-bit-depth data and low-sample-rate, high-bit-depth data. A delta-sigma audio analogue-digital converter might sample a low-pass-filtered version of incoming signal at 6MHz and 1-2 bits and use that to reconstruct a 16-bit 44kHz version of the signal. Thanks to nyquist and other various equivalences this works with basically zero quantization error if you chose your filters right.

I was familiar with this from class-D amplifiers, which are effectively delta-sigma digital-analogue conversion, which reproduces a low-frequency analogue signal by feeding a pulse-density encoded chain into an amplifier and a low pass filter.

Anyway, DSD is a silly audiophile brand name for an audio codec that stores the 1-bit pulse encoded form of an audio signal rather than storing traditional PCM audio. Fundamentally if your hardware is correct there's basically no difference in information content or density between them.

This led me to these two good articles on dithering and delta-sigma architecture, among others.

Watching: I stumbled across this ongoing good series on YouTube a few weeks ago discussing trends in marketing movies as being "no CGI" when they are absolutely the fuck not. The second part just came out, but here's part 1:

"No CGI" is always a ridiculous claim in basically any modern movie, but this is a really good breakdown of how a combination of irresponsible journalism and intentionally poor communication creates the impression that tons of incredibly effects heavy movies are actually "free of CGI".

Treating computer graphics and effects as some kind of scourge is a misled reflex. It reminds me a lot of backlash against pitch correction, because in most cases people do not realize how much pitch correction is used in basically all music you hear. Big artists playing live performances are even pitch corrected in real time these days.

It's just part of the business, and in a very parallel way, people expect the output of CGI/pitch correction even if they don't know that. If P!nk were to go out on stage and sing her music without pitch correction you'd hear the effects of her ridiculously energetic acts, and people would bitch about it because as evidenced by people who describe good sounding music systems as feeling "like live music", people don't know what live music sounds like! Live music sounds like crap compared to studio production, you're there to inhale six different kinds of cigarette and get hit in the chest by a drunk girl who isn't paying attention to where she's going.

Wow I have a lot of opinions about how people don't realize how much production is in things. This should probably be a post. Later. Hey this is like guys who talk about "no makeup" look-*I AM YANKED OFFSTAGE WITH A COMICALLY OVERSIZED SHEPHERD'S CROOK*.

Playing: Nothing really! Dark Souls stalled not because I'm stuck but because I was doing other things. Making block took up a lot of time.

Making: Hacked together a very basic proof of concept for inserting my own controller into an LED string. As encouraged by definitely unbiased user @compiler-specific I am going to try and write my own DSL for this, which will probably end up resembling a lisp just because that simplifies my life.

Also almost done with hambanner, an IRC ban management bot. I would have finished that if I was not. In Paris. over the weekend. Hopefully this week.

Tools and Equipment: Sometimes you will find that your phone is dead and you need to find your way back to your hotel in a bizzarely convoluted part of La Défense late at night. And at this time you will be grateful that you took the time to orient yourself relative to local streets and the river and the metro station so that you do not have to find a corner to charge your phone and can instead just get back to your hotel. It could happen to you.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Joseph (Jake) Klein

Published: Apr 13, 2023

Segregation has a new brand name: racial “affinity groups.” Race-based “affinity groups” have exploded in prevalence across the United States over the last few years, moving from workplaces into schools, religious congregations, and other organizations all across the country. Affinity groups can also be organized around other identity categories such as gender, sexuality, disability, and religion, but affinity groups were first created around racial identity.

In 1969, Xerox employees based in San Francisco launched the Bay Area Black Employees (BABE) caucus, the first known workplace affinity group ("caucus," "employee resource group," and "affinity group," are all terms that have been used to describe the same idea).  Overall, Xerox's chairman at the time, Joseph C. Wilson, was an important leader in driving workplace integration. He reacted to race riots in the 1960's with a mission to increase integration and hire African-Americans who had previously been denied employment opportunities, and took numerous concrete actions to do so.

However, as has happened on numerous occasions to other well-intentioned leaders (including in response to other 1960’s race-riots), Wilson chose to take advice not just from integration-oriented civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., but from the Black Power activists responsible for the riots. Wilson enlisted the counsel of a group called “F.I.G.H.T.” While much of F.I.G.H.T.’s activism was productive and aimed at pushing back on genuine and oppressive racism, it was also a “decidedly militant” organization that “alienated much of the black middle class” and worked closely with the explicitly anti-integrationist founder of the Black Power movement, Stokely Carmichael.

Today, more than 50 years later, affinity groups have spread to 90% of Fortune 500 companies. These companies sometimes claim that racial affinity groups help foster communication and help bring new ideas to leadership. Corporations also point out that membership in racial affinity groups is usually voluntary, and therefore it cannot be a form of racial discrimination as banned under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

However, despite these claimed positives, many corporations have also found that affinity groups polarize employees, and many people of color are reluctant to join such groups for “fear of being reduced to their racial identity.” Even when they are organized and advertised as voluntary, the social pressures on individuals to join racial affinity groups are substantial. And although some data supports companies’ intuitions that affinity groups are helpful idea generators, these positive results may be better explained by the existence of a group creating increased discussion time, rather than the racial makeup of that group.

With affinity groups’ recent spread throughout K-12 schools, higher education, religious groups, and many other key institutions throughout our society, we face an even worse danger. While businesses are beholden to the profit motive, schools and other non-profit institutions are not. This creates more opportunities for affinity groups in non-profit institutions to advance a fanatical ideology, since organizational leadership doesn't need to worry, as businesses do, about the possibility that a Marxist ideological agenda would compromise their ability to operate in a financially viable manner.

Advocates of racial affinity groups claim they are not racist or segregationist, but do so while practicing racial segregation and making explicitly racist claims. For example, Truss Leadership, a so-called “racial equity” consulting group that works with numerous school districts, declares that “Racial Affinity Groups are NOT … Racist or segregationist,” but also says they are a place where white people can “reckon with their Whiteness” and non-white people can “take care of themselves and one another…in the absence of Whiteness.”

FAIR ally Ye Zhang Pogue has written beautifully for this Substack on how affinity groups in schools can harm our society by needlessly pitting people against each other along racial lines. What advocates of affinity groups often ignore is how prejudice and discrimination is often caused by diminished contact between groups, and can be overcome by increasing that contact and having group members work cooperatively instead of separately (one of psychologist Gordon Allport’s four conditions for reducing racial prejudice). This insight into the power of contact is the same idea that has driven FAIR Senior Fellow Daryl Davis’s pioneering efforts to get Klan members and neo-Nazis to give up their lives of hate.

Even racial affinity groups' most extreme and vocal advocates have acknowledged that “Caucusing can generate anxiety even at a visceral level for some. For people of color, history has shown that real harm can come from spaces exclusively reserved for white people. … People of color may also experience racial anxiety and stereotype threat, the fear of being viewed through societal stereotype ‘lenses’ by white colleagues and supervisors.” These are not ungrounded fears. Corporations seeking to pursue effective anti-racist strategies would do well to remember the horrors of the interoffice segregation of America’s past.

Segregation in the form of racial affinity groups today is disturbingly similar in concept to the separate bathrooms, water fountains, bus sections, and other spaces in generations past. Then as now, we ought to remember the worldchanging verdict from Brown v. Board of Education, that “Separate [is] inherently unequal.” As Supreme Court Chief Justice Fred M. Vincent explained in the Court’s also unanimous decision for McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, which was cited in Brown v. Board of Education, “To separate [children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their-hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

==

The KKK must be beaming with pride at the outright enthusiasm of re-implementating segregation.

Were it discovered that they were shadow-funding this, I would be incapable of feigning any amount of surprise.

Wokeness divides and destroys.

EDIT:

That's so weird. We keep being told that "cRt iS nOt iN sChOoLs." And yet, here we find out that not only is it in schools, but it's a good thing, because "opposing" - as ominous, authoritarian, and nigh on DiAngelo-istic choice of words as I've ever heard - is wrong. Gee, when did that happen? They must have done that really quickly. /s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM2JvQVXWQg

"DiAngelo's essay doesn't talk about disagreements or debates, but only about those who 'practice' social justice, and those who, quote, 'resist' it."

To actually tell people "[not to] entertain this blog or its opinions" or "don't read the post" has really strong religious blasphemy overtones. Like the priest telling the congregation not to read Harry Potter.

Still, the very first thing the kids do when they get home from church after being told not to read Harry Potter is to read Harry Potter. So sermonizing people on how to close their ears to maintain their moral purity usually doesn't work out that well for the clergy. So, thank you for dangling an irresistible temptation for them, like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden..

P.S. Opposing gay conversion therapy and child mutilation is a hill I'm willing to die on. Line in the sand. Pretty comfortable there. The latter, at least, used to be a self-evident taboo: you don't tattoo kids, you don't cut children's testicles or breasts off, you don't drug girls by flooding their bodies with quantities of hormones their body is not equipped to handle so they're balding and infertile at 16. Despite pretence to the contrary, these positions aren't the slightest bit controversial.

[lighthousekeepers-burner-blog]

the irony is before covid and the climate crisis kicked into full gear I was the neighborhood skeptic, my first incarnation of this blog (Clever Beast) was all that, a mania of skeptical pursuits but closely aligned with a healthy criticism of scientism. oh 2008. then the world went batshit, and for many people today anything scientific that doesn't perfectly align with taste got siloed out of existence. now you can mix and match realities to suit your lifestyle. it's enough to make a postmodern postdoc blush.

I still want science to be scrutinized, there's a whole lot wrong, particularly with the institutions funding it and where it doesn't go. As with anything, there are trailblazers that defy the groupthink and make revolutions, and also just solid day-to-day science being done by smart, professional, talented people. I didn't say that enough before, but jesus, in 2023, lets bang some pots and pans for these servants of stoicism.

since 2020 I have spent more and more time reading scientific papers, following scientists, absorbing minutiae of shit I didn't even know existed. I'm no scientist, and my reading is more as an information specialist, and having a lot of time to see how pieces of data interact with other pieces of data, how consensus shifts and evolves. I operate from the primary opinion that people smarter than me know what they are talking about and their consensus on issues pertaining to my health insofar as their opinions are not outright bought by corporations, have greater weight to me than say, Dr Mike's Youtube's channel. That science has a talent for weeding out the shit, although too rigorously it can lose some of the nuances, so it's sometimes necessary to integrate the scientific consensus within a larger framekwork of understanding that can take into consideration human faculties beyond reason to assess value.

The science says we're fucked. climate scientists are losing their shit, and being very unscientific with their hyperbole, and even the fucking Pope is out there dooming away, and the Pope is always twenty years behind the zeitgeist, so you got a good idea of where we are now. and Covid. We don't even know the 5 year prognosis of the disease, and people are pretending it is over. not epidemologists, immunologists, the ones that have been consistently right, over and over, as the minimizers have been trying to downplay the crisis these last three years. Their expert opinions are dire as well. It's affecting fertility, brain chemistry, diabetes, immune systems, we don't have individual all-star variants anymore, we have soups of variants, so that repeat infections are easier to get closer together. and repeat infections are increased chance of long covid, and while minimizers love pointing at deaths as some marker of progress (though awfully silent pre-vaccines) I would rather be dead then experience what some of the long haulers of covid go through, and I read about on a daily basis. At-risk. we are ALL AT-RISK. Co-morbidities... fucking professional athletes are dropping dead, and you want to fat shame us.

Everyone has a threshold for bad news. Seems like a lot of people it is magical thinking to erase it all from their minds, a pandemic ptsd, anxiety, just low tolerance for reality. Ok. Problem is we need to dig ourselves out of this, and the people that can see this clearly, are clamoring for your attention. Denial of reality will kill us all, will kill us faster. I don't know what the best approach is, I don't know how to turn this ship around, but we need to start acknowledging some basics of reality, and be civic-minded, and give a shit about each other. It was dumb but I liked the banging of pots and pans for nurses. it was the last time I felt like I was part of a society. I don't want to pretend anymore. it makes it all more depressing to me. Even a loud minority can make significant changes, it's a weird glitch in the democratic system. We just need to process reality more, being cognizant of facts, speak up when people lie, speak up when people tell the truth, disseminate information the way the media is supposed to do, vote, donate, give a shit. It's good to feel.

this is an unedited rant but you get the idea. wake up, please, wake up. we need you.

[batsplat]

i don’t think marc’s struggles with qualifying rn is a marc on a ducati thing, but rather a marc on gp23 issue. zarco struggled in time attack last year on the machine, a one lap wonder jorge martin only post catalan gp has been able to start taking poles and consistently qualifying on the front row, otherwise the start of the year his grid positions was like 5th or 10th, gp23 absolutely destroyed both bastianini, who qualifies actually pretty well on the latest version of the bike, even though everybody talks about how he isn’t the best qualifier, and bez, who can’t get the bike to turn. yes, marc has done somethings like pressing the wrong button (lol grandpa) and other mistakes, however, him and his crew chief have been more focused on the race pace setups and also lack any sort of data on marc on any given track, so when they arrive to the new place, compared to some other ducatis, they are at a disadvantage. so, i think he’ll be blindingly quick next year, like, i wish he was washed, it’d be more entertaining, but he is just not budging 😭 however, pecco might ask for something in the development of the next bike to introduce gremlins that only he can really conquer (it seems like only he immediately gelled with gp23, no problem), but i don’t think he is smart enough to figure out how to hamstring marc!!!

wellllll I don't doubt there's specific characteristics of the gp23 that can make it tricky to handle, but I'm not entirely sure you can definitively call it a poor bike on a single lap. pecco's grid positions from the start of last year wouldn't really suggest that. jorge's results in general were a lot shakier in the first half of 2023 than the second, though you're right he did also have some qualifying gremlins. zarco's kinda been having issues with qualifying throughout his ducati career (mind u he used to be lethal on the yamaha) and bastianini... I mean he was just bad overall, we're talking average grid of 12.6 vs average finish of 10.15, and his whole gimmick is being a poor qualifier but having late race pace. idk, I don't necessarily think it's going to be a lingering problem, but I do think it is an issue (and I'm aware marc was just being an idiot today, but two other gp23's did outperform him on their first flying laps which was historically quite rare). I do know they're at a disadvantage on a track-to-track level! I just think it's interesting it's more of a qualifying issue, because that isn't actually guaranteed, and 'well we were just focusing more race pace' doesn't quite do it for me as an explanation. again, I think he'll be fine, I just think it's a problem right now and I'm curious whether he'll ever get back to quite some of the ridiculous quali numbers he was posting in some of his prime years (the other reason why this is less likely is that the margins have gotten slimmer since then)

that being said! pecco wouldn't and couldn't be doing that kind of 10d bike development chess. first of all while you can obviously attempt to develop a bike more to your own liking than your teammate's liking, if you start attempting to deliberately introduce gremlins you will just like. be fucking yourself over. secondly ducati aren't idiots and pecco doesn't have that kind of internal sway to engage in this kind of gamesmanship when it's clearly not in the team's advantage. also while he is the 'lead rider', my sense of that dynamic has always been it was more about training up a rider to ride that bike than having a bike be developed in line with a rider's style. in general I reckon pecco will try to just keep to himself, not get involved in any of this kind of thing with marc, just focus on what he's doing. I imagine that's broadly the advice he's been receiving from his mentor too. all this drama and bike development silliness is really marc's wheelhouse, not pecco's, the less attention pecco pays to marc during their teammate stint the better. far from easy, but that's got to be the goal

[beautifulpersonpeach]

BPP, Hi

This is the millionth Time I’m trying to send this.

I’m going to split my ask into three parts and maybe subparts.

A) I’ve seen you’ve talked a bit about Bang PD’s billboard interview. What I want your opinion on is:

(i) The use of AI in music and how it would impact the boys and whether they need to include better data and IP protections within their contracts if not renewed already?

(ii) there are some opinions that he did the interview before Jimins Hot100 achievement and that he never expected that Jimin would be the one to get this record. I personally bias Jimin but I don’t see anything underlyingly sinister in what Bang PD said. At the time he gave the interview, it was too early to say whether Jimin would win that record or not.

B) Jimin wanted a visual album and more music videos. The company said no. But he also wanted this album to be ‘free’. And the company (with his consent, I assume) monetised it- it was released and did amazing sales. Is it possible that the company said no to music videos for all the songs because this is an EP and Jimin’s full Length album is on its way? If I was thinking from a business perspective, I’d blow all my cash (promotions, marketing, merch, music videos and even a tour) on a full length album not an EP. What do you think? Also:

(I) the whole accusation around Hybe and BB sabotaging Jimin - what do you say to that? Have you already spoken on this? Feel free to link here please as I’ve not been able to read through everything, yet.

C) the whole Jungkook stalker saga stinks donkeys balls and I’d expect Big Hit to make make better security arrangements for their baby star candy. Do you think, that since BigHit/Hybe happened, the boys are being treated as disposable resources rather than those who make BigHit? I read something (an opinion) on how Bang PD is an insecure man who wants to ensure that the boys never feel as though they have total agency and power because he wants to have that control. It sounds like bull because in any company setting, you don’t want your employees feeling like they are indispensable for obvious reasons. But still, the boys security should be top priority.

Ta!

***

Hi Anon,

I'll be brief.

A - (i) AI is already being used in music and will likely impact every artist at some point in our lifetimes, but I don't know how AI is being used on BTS today nor how BigHit plans to use it. Nothing in BangPD's interview suggests that technology is currently being used on BTS, but I assume as the executive chairman of a music company in 2023, AI is the last thing you want to be unprepared to handle given how disruptive that technology is. From a business standpoint it's prudent for HYBE to at least have a department that thoroughly understands how their artists can benefit from and be screwed over by AI, to get ahead of their competitors who could use it to gain unfair advantage. I wish corporations worldwide had the spine to pushback on this technology and refuse to engage at all, (for my nerdier followers, Max Tegmark - AI researcher at MIT - makes a strong case for going against AI if you're interested in reading more on the subject), but that's not realistic, so the next best thing is to learn it yourself to leverage for your artists. And yes, the expectation is that better data and IP protections will be put in place. When it comes to their company, I trust BTS to be adult enough to advocate for themselves. I assume this amendment could have already happened or will happen when the guys renew their contracts in 2024 / 2027.

(ii) - You didn't ask a question here so I'll just take it as read.

B - I don't know why the company declined his request for a visual album (or making more MVs) for his EP. It could be related to budgeting or scheduling constraints. It could be BigHit's policy/norm that initial solo projects or EP-length projects get two MVs, inferred from the rapline's initial solo projects all having only two MVs though both Hobi and Yoongi have said they'd have liked to film more. Either way, I don't know. It's not something I see as a big deal so I don't spend any time thinking about it, to be honest.

B - (i) Yeah, I'd say I've spoken exhaustively about it. You can read my views on it here, here, here, and here. And as a bonus here's a reblog that more or less summarizes some of my thoughts on that topic as well, linked here.

B - (ii) Short answer to the question you asked here, is no.

C - It's interesting we're having discussions about how the boys' privacy, security, and safety should be the company's top priority, (which for the record, I agree), but just now when I opened Tumblr to respond to your ask, I saw a shipper (?) saying they're downloading the military app ahead of jikook's enlistment and following an account on Twitter that knows the bases the boys are getting sent to...

Company security for the biggest band in the world can only be beefed up so much without suffocating them, there's greater onus on the fandom to rein in and check the more insane actors within our spaces who constantly blur the line between what they should know about their idols and what they feel entitled to know about them.

Ta! to you too. :)

[atthebell-moved]

Updated QSMP AO3 Work Language Stats-- as of August 13th, 2023

June 6 2023 stats, July 9 2023 stats

Another QSMP language stats update!! Not too much to update on this time, but still some nice numbers.

Fun tidbits/disclaimers to start:

QSMP has 3034 works as of today!! That's 887 more works from last month's 2147, about a 41.3% increase.

French fics have doubled from 5 works to 10!

PT Portuguese has now been tagged in two works!

We've dropped one Mandarin fic, likely due to deletion.

I used the same methodology as last time, which was to manually filter by each language I expected to have works, then do the math to make sure I wasn't missing any and check likely new languages. You can check the original June 6 post to see more about that.

I won't be including overall AO3 stats, as the monthly difference for them is negligible imo. In the future, if I continue to do this for the next year or so, I'll likely pick it up again to note the difference in the last year, or perhaps make a new series of posts about language statistics across the site rather than fandom specific.

Not much change this month! Most numbers have stayed fairly steady; I won't have much analysis as a result.

The numbers:

[Image Description: A table with three columns; the first lists languages, the second the number of works, and the third the percentage of total works. For the languages column, each language is listed first in that language and then in English in parentheses, and English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and French are all color-coded to indicate that they are spoken on the server. End ID.]

English has 2496 works and 82.27% of total works in QSMP

Spanish has 406 works and 13.38% of total works.

Brazilian Portuguese has 113 works and 3.72% of total works.

French has 10 works and 3.72% of total works-- the number of French fics has doubled since last month, although it's still quite low in comparison to the other languages spoken on the server.

New entry! European Portuguese now has 2 works and 0.07% of total works.

Mandarin has 2 works and 0.07% of total works; it previously had 3 works, one was likely deleted.

Russian has 2 works and 0.07% of total works, no change in number from last month.

The last three languages, Latin, Esperanto, and Malaysian Malay, all have 1 work and 0.03% of total works respectively, maintaining their numbers from last month as well.

Observations:

Like I said at the start, not much change here. The most impressive things to note are that French has doubled in number and European Portuguese now has works, neither of which are surprising. Kudos to those authors regardless, glad to see them gaining fics!!

I'll add my usual note that the stats for QSMP are interesting to compare to overall AO3 stats for the reason that we have far more Spanish and Portuguese works than the rest of the site. If you want to see numbers on total site stats, check out the previous stats posts to see those.

And that's pretty much all I've got!! I'll likely continue to post these every month, but when there's not a ton of changes they'll likely be short little posts like this with mostly just the numbers. Again, here's last month's stats and the 6/6/2023 stats. As always, if you have any data/observations on other fanfiction websites, feel free to let me know!

[wumblr]

not much new has changed since the last time i posted my covid charts (3wks ago?), weekly deaths in the US remain slightly elevated (closer to 4k instead of the past few months' steadily below 3k) but there is one thing i can't particularly find an explanation for

there has been a HUGE bump in doses administered globally the past couple weeks. suddenly like 300m doses were given. this isn't really attributable to any one country, the bump shows up in most of europe and east asia (and not in the US). explanation is probably rather dull, maybe just because 300m doses were produced and delivered. i haven't tried very hard to dig into vaccine production and delivery, because i know from trying to find the same info for pox vaccines, that information is often hard to find and comes down to whether producers publish a press release about it

there has also been a spike in deaths globally, predating the spike in vaccinations by a week or two (possibly related...!)

this IS attributable largely to one country... china, letting go of zero covid policy

you should all know by now i don't tolerate US imperial-conspiratorial thinking here, because 80% of americans have been conditioned to abject brainrot on the subject. i'm willing to accept this as largely factual data -- sure it's possible this includes a number of recently identified past deaths or something (US numbers have had a tendency to do the opposite, where previously identified deaths are later retracted, as was the case with about 4k deaths in massachusetts in 2020 or 2021, iirc), but given that we did hear about this in the news while it was happening, and no one in the sewer of corporate-owned US news bothered to dredge up that hypothesis, it's likelier that these are simply accurate weekly numbers. i view any covid deaths as preventable tragedies, but the suddenness and scale of deaths in china is difficult to conceptualize

this does outnumber likely number of lives saved based on WHO excess deaths report, placing china at plausibly 0.01% population loss. (chart showing totals truncated at 2m, india may have 4-7m total deaths including excess. modi's government delayed the excess deaths report by several months for this reason, if you recall. US likely approaching 2.1m)

these charts can be difficult to read even if you're familiar with excess deaths (which, again, include not just plausible undiagnosed deaths from covid, but also indirectly related deaths, i.e. from delayed healthcare during a surge). i couldn't figure out a better way to structure the charts, but think of the darker gray as a possible range (or an error bar), while excess deaths were almost certainly as high as the lighter gray sections, presuming you accept the conclusions of the report

peru continues to lead by a wide margin as percentage of population (percentage chart excludes populations smaller than 10m, otherwise very small island nations like san marino and st vincent rather dubiously show up, with high uncertainty in excess). you can see why in the totals chart (which is, for contrast, untruncated) -- peru ranks 7th in number of deaths (~500k) while ranking 44th by population

there is some additional dubiousness to my methodology here, as i only have excess death data from the 2020-2021 report. i have not tried to model 2022-2023 deaths for every country, the way i have done for the US. here are those (this is what i meant hadn't changed much). they have some additional dubiousness of their own, since i am modeling excess deaths after 2021 as my own estimate, as well as only taking one possible value, somewhere in the middle, for excess deaths

biobot now showing over 50% omicron XBB in wastewater in the US

gisaid still showing slightly less XBB (22f) and more BQ1 (22e) in genetic sequencing in the US, also a new strain (23a), each about 30%

anyway i should have been asleep hours ago bye

[cru5h-cascades]

Splatoon 3 Side Order Update (Again!)

Wazzup wazzup eveyone! I'm back at it again with some more interesting Side Order-related news! Recently a bunch of stuff for Side Order has been datamined (it seems that the devs have been adding stuff for Side Order ever since launch), so I'd like to go over some of the stuff that was found. No spoilers, but if you'd rather be suprised whenever we actually get Side Order this is your warning. Otherwise, here's some new info regarding Side Order (organized by when they were added, which were during splatfests)!

Rock v Paper v Scissors (testfire fest, August 2022):

nothing too noteworthy over here, just some scenes, whatever those might be.

(nothing for Gear v Grub v Fun in September 2022)

Grass v Fire v Water (November 2022)

wave 2 misc scene added

scene attribute to use for the DLC

Spicy v Sweet v Sour (January 2023)

actor attribute added

added two enemy actors under the names Shell and ZakoStandard

Side note: yay new enemies

Dark Chocolate v Milk Chocolate v White Chocolate (February 2023)

actor attribute added to allow enemies to attack a target (possibly the player)

added object actors under the names PaintTargetArea (splatzones), VictoryBall (8-ball), and VictoryBallGoal (8-ball goal)

Side note: YEP THAT'S RIGHT MATES 8-BALL LEVELS ARE COMING BACK.

added scenes imlying progression on a tower (potentially Deca Tower, duh)

Side note: so what that last addition is basically saying is that Side Order will be kinda like Pizza Tower but scary (and marine life themed, of course). But I mean, I guess we should've known about the tower progression for a while now (the French title of Side Order is Order Tower; I talked about this in a post some time ago). But hey, news is news and we're in dire need for Side Order news. Anyways, moving on (things get real interesting after this)

Nessie v Aliens v Bigfoot (March 2023)

added two bosses under the names BallKing and TowerKing (there's been some speculation that BallKing could be the Octowhirl from Splatoon 1, which would be okay with me as long as they don't bring back the Octostamp.... AGAIN....) (also I have a strong feeling in my gut that TowerKing will be the final boss of Side Order)

added an actor for collectible items

added NPC actors

added lift actors (tower control tower)

added spawner objects

added soaker block actor to Side Order

added person names (most likely belonging to the devs) (you know for the credits)

added scenes for a boss fight and something called creator (level creation?)

Power v Wisdom v Courage (April 2023)

added a lift actor to avoid an 8-ball from going somewhere

added an object actor for both inkrails and grindrails

Vanilla v Strawberry v Mint Chip (July 2023)

all Side Order related strings have been removed :(

And that's all we got up to date! Hopefully we get to see Side Order for Drizzle Season 2023 (AKA the game's first aniversery). I mean with all this data in the game you'd think we'd get news soon, right? We got the rewards and now all of this in the game (or at least until all the SIde Order related strings were removed), maybe even more than that. Anyways if you want a more in-depth look into all of this info, please see Splat Channel's vid (I'll link it to the post right here). But with that being said hopefully, one bright and sunny day we'll get a trailer and release date for Side Order. Someday...

Anyways I'll keep y'all up to date with anything new revolving Side Order, I'll even post an in-depth analysis for the Side Order trailer whenever it does come out (I promise this time; I might've forgotten to do one for Sizzle Season but I assure you I will make one this time). Staaay fresh, everyone!

[newstfionline]

Sunday, June 25, 2023

The World’s Empty Office Buildings Have Become a Debt Time Bomb (Bloomberg) In New York and London, owners of gleaming office towers are walking away from their debt rather than pouring good money after bad. The landlords of downtown San Francisco’s largest mall have abandoned it. A new Hong Kong skyscraper is only a quarter leased. The creeping rot inside commercial real estate is like a dark seam running through the global economy. Even as stock markets rally and investors are hopeful that the fastest interest-rate increases in a generation will ebb, the trouble in property is set to play out for years. After a long buying binge fueled by cheap debt, owners and lenders are grappling with changes in how and where people work, shop and live in the wake of the pandemic. At the same time, higher interest rates are making it more expensive to buy or refinance buildings. A tipping point is coming: In the US alone, about $1.4 trillion of commercial real estate loans are due this year and next, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. When the deadline arrives, owners facing large principal payments may prefer to default instead of borrowing again to pay the bill.

Inflation, health costs, partisan cooperation among the nation’s top problems (Pew Research Center) Inflation remains the top concern for Republicans in the U.S., with 77% saying it’s a very big problem. Gun violence is the top issue for Democrats: 81% rank it as a very big problem. When it comes to policy, more Americans agree with the Republican Party than the Democratic Party on the economy, crime and immigration, while the Democratic Party holds the edge on abortion, health care and climate change.

The Brown Bag Lady serves meals and dignity to L.A.’s homeless (USA Today) A Los Angeles woman, known affectionately as the Brown Bag Lady, is serving the city’s unhoused population with enticing meals and a sprinkle of inspiration for dessert. Jacqueline Norvell started cooking meals for people on L.A.’s Skid Row about 10 years ago in her two-bedroom apartment after getting some extra money from her Christmas pay check. She bought several turkeys and prepared all the fixings for about 70 people, driving to one of L.A.’s most high-risk areas to hand out the meals. “We just parked on a corner,” said Norvell. “And we were swarmed.” She says people were grateful and she realized the significant demand. Norvell’s been cooking tasty creations ever since. Norvell garnishes each dish with love and some words of encouragement. In addition to the nourishment, each bag or box has an inspirational quote. “We’ve got to help each other out,” she said. “We have to.”

Facing Brutal Heat, the Texas Electric Grid Has an Ally: ‌Solar Power (NYT) Strafed by powerful storms and superheated by a dome of hot air, Texas has been enduring a dangerous early heat wave this week that has broken temperature records and strained the state’s independent power grid. But the lights and air conditioning have stayed on across the state, in large part because of an unlikely new reality in the nation’s premier oil and gas state: Texas is fast becoming a leader in solar power. The amount of solar energy generated in Texas has doubled since the start of last year. And it is set to roughly double again by the end of next year, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. “Solar is producing 15 percent of total energy right now,” Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, said on a sweltering day in the state capital last week, when a larger-than-usual share of power was coming from the sun. So far this year, about 7 percent of the electric power used in Texas has come from solar, and 31 percent from wind. The state’s increasing reliance on renewable energy has caused some Texas lawmakers, mindful of the reliable production and revenues from oil and gas, to worry. “It’s definitely ruffling some feathers,” Dr. Rhodes said.

Guatemalans are fed up with corruption ahead of an election that may draw many protest votes (AP) As Guatemala prepares to elect a new president Sunday, its citizens are fed up with government corruption, on edge about crime and struggling with poverty and malnutrition—all of which drives tens of thousands out of the country each year. And for many disillusioned voters—especially those who supported three candidates who were blocked from running this year—the leading contenders at the close of campaigning Friday seem like the least likely to drive the needed changes. Guatemala’s problems are not new or unusual for the region, but their persistence is generating voter frustration. As many as 13% of eligible voters plan to cast null votes Sunday, according to a poll published by the Prensa Libre newspaper. Some of voters’ cynicism could be the result of years of unfulfilled promises and what has been seen as a weakening of democratic institutions. “The levels of democracy fell substantially, so the (next) president is going to inherit a country whose institutions are quite damaged,” said Lucas Perelló, a political scientist at Marist College in New York and expert on Central America. “We see high levels of corruption and not necessarily the political will to confront or reduce those levels.”

Chile official warns of ‘worst front in a decade’ after floods, evacuations (Reuters) Days of heavy rainfall have swollen Chile’s rivers causing floods that blocked off roads and prompted evacuation in the center of the country, amid what has been described as the worst weather front in a decade. The flooding has led authorities to declare a “red alert” and order preventive evacuations in various towns in the south of Santiago. “This is the worst weather front we have had in 10 years,” Santiago metropolitan area governor Claudio Orego said.

Crisis in Russia (NYT/AP) A long-running feud over the invasion of Ukraine between the Russian military and Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s private Wagner military group, escalated into an open confrontation. Prigozhin accused Russia of attacking his soldiers and appeared to challenge one of President Vladimir Putin’s main justifications for the war, and Russian generals in turn accused him of trying to mount a coup against Putin. Prighozin claimed he had control of Russia’s southern military headquarters in the city of Rostov-on-Don, near the front lines of the war in Ukraine where his fighters had been operating. Video showed him entering the headquarters’ courtyard. Signs of active fighting were also visible near the western Russian city of Voronezh, and convoys of Wagner troops were spotted heading toward Moscow. The Russian military scrambled to defend Russia’s capital. Then the greatest challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin in his more than two decades in power fizzled out after Prigozhin abruptly reached a deal with the Kremlin to go into exile and sounded the retreat. Under the deal announced Saturday by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Prigozhin will go to neighboring Belarus. Charges against him of mounting an armed rebellion will be dropped. The government also said it would not prosecute Wagner fighters who took part, while those who did not join in were to be offered contracts by the Defense Ministry. Prigozhin ordered his troops back to their field camps in Ukraine, where they have been fighting alongside Russian regular soldiers.

In Myanmar, Birthday Wishes for Aung San Suu Kyi Lead to a Wave of Arrests (NYT) In military-ruled Myanmar, there seemed to be a new criminal offense this week: wearing a flower in one’s hair on June 19. Pro-democracy activists say more than 130 people, most of them women, have been arrested for participating in a “flower strike” marking the birthday of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the civilian leader who was ousted by Myanmar’s military in a February 2021 coup. Imprisoned by the junta since then, she turned 78 on Monday. The protest—a clear, if unspoken, rebuke of the junta—drew nationwide support, and many shops were reported to have sold all their flowers. Most of the arrests occurred on Monday, but they continued through the week as the military tracked down participants and supporters. In some cities and towns, soldiers seized women in the streets for holding a flower or wearing one in their hair. Some were beaten, witnesses said. The police have also been rounding up people who took to Facebook to post a birthday greeting or a photo of themselves with a flower. Phil Robertson, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, called the campaign the latest example of the “paranoia and intolerance” of Myanmar’s military rulers.

Sweltering Beijingers turn to bean soup and cushion fans to combat heat (Washington Post) China’s national weather forecaster issued an unconventional outlook this week: “Hot, really hot, extremely hot [melting smiley face],” it wrote Tuesday night on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter. It was imprecise, but it wasn’t wrong. The temperature in Beijing hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday, a public holiday for the Dragon Boat Festival. It was the highest June recording since 1961. Visiting the Great Wall was “like being in an oven,” said Lin Yun-chan, a Taiwanese graduate student on her first trip to Beijing. The heat wave is almost the only thing anyone can talk about. Much of the online discussion revolves around food. People are sharing advice about the most hydrating snacks for the hot weather: mung bean soup and sour plum drink are popular options. Entrepreneurs looked for ways to capitalize on the heat wave: One promoted a seat-cushion fan designed to combat a sweaty butt, while tourism companies touted trips to the south of the country, which is usually hotter but currently less so.

Your next medical treatment could be a healthier diet (WSJ) Food and insurance companies are exploring ways to link health coverage to diets, increasingly positioning food as a preventive measure to protect human health and treat disease. Insurance companies and startups are developing meals tailored to help treat existing medical conditions, industry executives said, while promoting nutritious diets as a way to help ward off diet-related disease and health problems. “We know that for adults, around 45% of those who die from heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, stroke, that poor nutrition is a major contributing factor,” said Gail Boudreaux, chief executive of insurance provider Elevance Health speaking at The Wall Street Journal Global Food Forum. “Healthy food is a real opportunity.”