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It still just appalls me that people will look you square in the eye and tell you that they won't mask because it's inconvenient to them.

I find it fascinating that every time I say hey, it'd be great if more people were masking at this event, out of nowhere someone who calls themselves a medical professional (usually because they don't want to admit what that actually means, often because their profession doesn't provide them with any special knowledge about masking safety) to lecture me about all the things they suddenly think that I don't know, and half the time to present completely incorrect facts - most recently that people who mask incorrectly are increasing their infection risk.

If you have trouble hearing or understanding me through a mask, I will happily compensate, the same way I would anyone who has trouble hearing or understanding me regardless of masking!

If you don't like how masks feel, I guarantee you there are different types of masks or additional masking equipment that I can help you get that will make you comfortable!

In both cases of people more regularly wore masks, there would be a whole industry out there of products and services ready to help you handle the issues!

There are so few places that test or mask that unless you proactively make it clear your event does either or both, many disabled folks will just assume they can't attend. There are people out there who have genuinely given up even trying to be part of the world anymore. That's why you don't hear from them anymore, so many people made so many excuses that they gave up.

Masking isn't my accessibility issue. But I have had so many people mow me down, ignore me, or treat me like an inconvenience that I am willing to be the cranky and noisy person on behalf of people who do need masking, in hopes that other people will do the same for me when something is physically inaccessible. Most disabled people are just so fucking tired of being dismissed or derided for attending to their own needs, it's often easier to do your best to help someone else instead.

I don't know, this is just a venting post, but after I went to an ADA conference for work and was literally the only one wearing a mask for the entire conference, and then having my friends let me down again, I just needed to say it.

It feels like that everyone wants a revolution but no one wants to do the dishes kind of problem. I'd just love to see one able-bodied person run a fully masked event of any kind. Just once.

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After seeing Representative Zephyr kick major legislature ass, she deserves to wield a massive mallet in the chambers.

Seeing clips of Zooey Zephyr stand up against anti-trans legislation has helped renew hope in me that there are ways we can still fight horrendous policies targeting queer people. She is an inspiration and I cannot express how much I appreciate having her fighting in the fray for our rights. Representation definitely does matter.

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Consent communication skills can be very helpful here too.

You can give someone a 20-second overview and then stop and say "I can go into a lot more detail if you want. Do you want that?". You can say "I have information about the mechanisms, the historical context, and the modern development -- which would you prefer to talk about?". You can say "Do you want background information about the machine, or just what controls to set right now?". Etc.

Not to be a technical writer on main, but I've been bumping into the idea lately that the only reason explaining yourself in more detail never seems to work is because neurotypical people are misunderstanding you on purpose, or because they have short attention spans, or because they just hate listening to you talk – and sure, occasionally that's even true, but most of the time the problem you're running into is more fundamental.

Every time you add more detail, you're running the risk of tripping over a bad assumption on your part about the listener's prior knowledge, or hitting the tipping point where they become overwhelmed with new information (and remember that you don't know which parts of what you're saying will be new information for them), or making a leap of logic that isn't as self-evident as you think it is, or any of a dozen other potential snags which, by definition, you will not see coming until it's too late to correct course.

Basically, every piece of information you add multiplies the odds of you getting blindsided by some vector of misunderstanding you didn't anticipate, even as it addresses the ones you did anticipate. The point of diminishing returns where continuing to elaborate increases the odds of unexpected miscommunication more than it decreases the odds of expected miscommunication is much nearer than you'd like.

The most effective act of communication is not the one which contains the most possible information, but the one which contains the smallest amount of information it possibly can while still getting its point across. It sucks, but it's the reality of the situation. People far more autistic than you have been trying for hundreds of years to invent a way of communicating which doesn't work this way, without success.

All of which is to say that "getting to the damn point" is legitimately a communication skill, not just an accommodation for people who aren't paying attention. If it's any consolation, it's something neurotypical people struggle with just as much as anyone else – if it was easy, technical writers wouldn't have jobs!

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laundry time with neighbors

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aha! you may have mistaken my statement of "women belong in the kitchen" as misogynistic, but you see, i think being in the kitchen is a good thing. women's innate desire to make sandwiches is a positive trait, and we all know if it's positive it doesn't count as a stereotype. i'm very smart and i know what feminism is.

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it you

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I have gotten quite a bit of social pressure to get eye surgery so people could see me without my glasses. It's asshole behavior.

can all fiction forever please stop pretending like glasses take away from someone's attractiveness level. it's just false

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Converting data on a running system is almost always a harder problem than converting data on a paused system. "Harder" can take multiple forms: more human time required, more human skill required, more runtime required, more risk included, more computer resources required, etc. (Usually it includes most or all of those)

When surprised by an emergency situation, there's less wiggle room for handling a harder problem safely. I'm not surprised that they ended up stopping the system for a bit to deal with it.

Also, as much as we all love it, AO3 is not a system whose uptime is necessary for people's safety. It can safely make different choices than a 911-routing system or the reference system for a poison control hotline.

Fucking hate watching children go “um Actually UwU” about AO3. saw someone say that fixing a bug with bookmarks isn’t a good reason to close a site down for a couple hours and they’re all lying about what they spend money on

meanwhile this very week my actual day job shut down the internal programmes for idk how many hours to fix a minor bug that popped up out of nowhere. I mean??? I don’t know shit about IT but “shut down all functions while we fix a problem” is so damn common. And “oh this took longer than we said” as well.

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Get warm with papa

(For context this is a male rescue cat who climbed into an incubator full of orphaned kittens and went mine now)

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It's not a virtue to focus totally on your own peace and disregard problems around you. Ironically, it's also not a virtue to stew in your own anxiety.

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Oh, hmm, I hadn't considered beer pong cups, but maybe those too!

I'm from the US. When you say beer pong cups, I think of cups like these: disposable cups made of opaque bright red plastic with a smooth surface. The cups I was thinking of were like these: reusable cups made out of transparent/translucent dark red plastic with a textured surface. (the photos at the link look new and nice; actual cups in cafeterias tend to look older in all ways, including less vivid coloration)

The cups I was thinking about seem to most frequently come in clear (a good neutral color that mimics glass), dark brown/amber (I don't know why this is popular. Maybe it mimics beer-bottle glass?), and dark red.

hello! my grandmother is a porcelain painter and she was talking about how purple pigments are absurdly more expensive than the other ones because they actually use gold in making it. i know the purple pigment used for dying clothes also used to be extremely expensive before the advent of artificial ones, but i never heard of it coming from gold. i was wondering if you knew whether this was also the case or if they came from a completely different process that also happened to be super expensive. thanks in advance for the reply!

I think the confusion here comes from different pigments being used for different purposes. Also it's important to note that historically purple didn't really mean what it means today, like a violet, but rather a deep sort of aniline red, like wine red or scarlet red.

Purple of Cassius was a pigment used for coloring glass, painting porcelain and glazing. It's formed by reaction of gold salts and tin chloride. The colour is very much what we'd consider red today. Here's purple of Cassius glass and porcelain saucers painted with it.

This was not used to dye fabric though, but purple pigment for fabrics was very expensive for entirely different reasons. The most deep purple in the ancient world was called Tyrian purple. It was extracted from shells of sea snail from the family Muricidae. It required a lot of shells and a lot of labour, which is why it was so expensive. The dye was originally created as early as 1200 BC by Phoenecians of Tyre, where the name comes from, and it's production was continued by the Greeks and the Romans. The method was still known by the Byzantinians after the fall of Western Rome, but was lost in Europe after Byzantine fell in 15th century. Before the invention of the synthetic mauveine pigment in 1856, there wasn't similar colourfast deep purple pigments like Tyrian purple for centuries. Of course there were still purple fabric, the shades were just less bright and deep and they often suffered a lot from colour fading.

The shades that could be produced with Tyrian purple were also mostly red to modern eyes, here's some sample recreated in modern times.

The custom of purple toga worn by male Roman citizens was likely adopted from Etruscans. Here's first a fresco of Etruscans in purple toga-like garments and then a fresco of Roman purple toga. Byzantine royalty continued to favour Tyrian purple. The last example is a Byzantine mosaic.

So you are indeed correct that both pigments came from very different sources but were independently super expensive!

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It would be funny if nuclear waste warning messages become an attraction for future historical linguists.

I mean look at this thing:

A parallel text in 7 languages, with 4 different scripts between them! And pictograms! All designed to be preserved intact!

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A friend of mine from around here who is Very Christian and has never had a Jewish friend before was asking me some stuff about antisemitism today, and it made me realize that the ways people talk about various types of bigotry and racism are so designed to stump people about the nature and purpose of systems of oppression. "Why do people hate the jews so much?" is such a common refrain and while there have been many books and articles written pulling apart all the important contextual and historical things that can help people understand antisemitism SPECIFICALLY, what I ended up saying to my friend was this:

"Something to understand about antisemitism is it isnt just ideological. The expulsion of jews from various countries was very often a method of "legally" seizing their wealth when the church needed money. It has been historically an incredibly convenient source of both a group of people to blame and also an easy way to just... Be able to steal from people, lmao. It has served very concrete material purposes for churches and governments throughout history. Sometimes you have to approach asking those questions from a different angle because it often isnt about the hatred so much as it is about ... Redirecting energy and attention, right, like upholding structures that benefit those in power. The hatred is convenient because it allows those in power to take actions that would not be tolerated if the group in question were not considered to be Exceptional in their inhumanity. Like the undocumented immigrants now, asking "why do they hate the immigrants so much" isnt always a productive avenue of thought because the hatred is usually just... Useful. Rather it is more helpful to ask "Who does it benefit for these people to be treated this way" -> "what do they need to make the general public believe about that group of people in order to justify this treatment". I think sometimes we are made to think hatred of jews is special and rooted in something different than other hatred... It's not. I mean all types of racism etc are unique. But it very much is about justifying actions that benefit a ruling class in all instances, imo."

And she like totally got it!!! She was like "OH I NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT IT LIKE THAT BUT THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE THANK YOU" I am very proud of myself lol :')

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This makes me wonder if purple of Cassius is the reason why cheap mass-produced plastic cups are often dark red. Diners and summer camps and other cheap food-serving places can't afford anything even remotely swanky, but they can imitate historical luxury (as long as they can do it in very cheap plastic that can go through a commercial dishwasher and stand up to a herd of excited eleven-year-olds).

hello! my grandmother is a porcelain painter and she was talking about how purple pigments are absurdly more expensive than the other ones because they actually use gold in making it. i know the purple pigment used for dying clothes also used to be extremely expensive before the advent of artificial ones, but i never heard of it coming from gold. i was wondering if you knew whether this was also the case or if they came from a completely different process that also happened to be super expensive. thanks in advance for the reply!

I think the confusion here comes from different pigments being used for different purposes. Also it's important to note that historically purple didn't really mean what it means today, like a violet, but rather a deep sort of aniline red, like wine red or scarlet red.

Purple of Cassius was a pigment used for coloring glass, painting porcelain and glazing. It's formed by reaction of gold salts and tin chloride. The colour is very much what we'd consider red today. Here's purple of Cassius glass and porcelain saucers painted with it.

This was not used to dye fabric though, but purple pigment for fabrics was very expensive for entirely different reasons. The most deep purple in the ancient world was called Tyrian purple. It was extracted from shells of sea snail from the family Muricidae. It required a lot of shells and a lot of labour, which is why it was so expensive. The dye was originally created as early as 1200 BC by Phoenecians of Tyre, where the name comes from, and it's production was continued by the Greeks and the Romans. The method was still known by the Byzantinians after the fall of Western Rome, but was lost in Europe after Byzantine fell in 15th century. Before the invention of the synthetic mauveine pigment in 1856, there wasn't similar colourfast deep purple pigments like Tyrian purple for centuries. Of course there were still purple fabric, the shades were just less bright and deep and they often suffered a lot from colour fading.

The shades that could be produced with Tyrian purple were also mostly red to modern eyes, here's some sample recreated in modern times.

The custom of purple toga worn by male Roman citizens was likely adopted from Etruscans. Here's first a fresco of Etruscans in purple toga-like garments and then a fresco of Roman purple toga. Byzantine royalty continued to favour Tyrian purple. The last example is a Byzantine mosaic.

So you are indeed correct that both pigments came from very different sources but were independently super expensive!

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no actually i don't think antivaxxers' kids should die from a disease. i don't think gun advocates' kids should die in school shooting. children dying is bad actually, even if they're children of people you don't like.

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