accessibleacademia

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Curation, or, Joy Is Resistance

A while back I made this post, in which I urged lovers of fanfiction and fan art to curate the work they have created and/or loved, and currently trust to online platforms, in case of a Republican election victory in the US. That has now come to pass, opening the door to Project 2025's threats of repressing not just "pornography" as usually defined, but any celebration of things queer or explicit, or indeed any expression that breaks the bounds of 1950s Hays code twin-bed movies.

We're all going to have to brace ourselves without knowing exactly what's coming, or how fast. It may seem a minor thing when you hear language about essentially outlawing trans identity, rolling back marriage rights, or defining any representation of LGBTQ people as "pornographic," including vital sex-education materials and everyday references to queer people's mere existence; about upending the healthcare and education systems and orchestrating mass deportations.

But if you find joy in fanworks, queer or otherwise, explicit or otherwise, I recommend you take some time to preserve your access to the works you have made or love best. AO3 - whose servers are in the US - has already posted on the subject, and we know that they and other groups committed to freedom of expression have been planning for this. But as I write, the House has passed a measure that would allow the administration to unilaterally label a nonprofit group "terrorist supporting" and cancel its tax-exempt status without due process. That could easily expand to any shock label used as an excuse for suppression and censorship. And resistance begins at home.

Get thee, I urge you, a good capacity flash drive or three, with "dual connectors" that will allow you to access the contents on a PC as well as phone or tablet. Download the fic you've loved, the fic you've been meaning to read, the fic you've posted yourself; then copy the files to those flash drives. I've made, and continue to update and back up, a folder:

For my own completed fic as it appears online

For each of my favorite authors

For a general miscellany of fic I've read and loved and bookmarked

For the 1000 (it sometimes seems) fics I'm going to read some day.

Art freely circulated on social media? Make a folder. You can convert a .webp file (which often won't open to full size onscreen) to .jpg with this free online utility. (Just be a good scout; don't repost art you've saved, and respect the rights of artists with a Patreon or similar to control exclusive content.)

One response to my original post said "They will come for everything you love." If, by some happy miracle, "they" don't, you will still have a personal archive of self-selected fanwork for times when the Net is down, or the power is out, and judging by some of the economic lunacy I see coming down the pike, that alone is worth some trouble. Even in the best times, authors take down fic you've enjoyed and want to revisit: I reblogged a post searching for a fic thus lost only this week. It costs only time spent at a keyboard, repeatedly clicking "download" and "save as" when it feels like there's nothing else you can do to make things better. Honestly? When the nerves are rattling, it's a form of meditation.

Right now, preserving fanwork may not be the first thing on your mind. But we will need all the joy we can get; when things get bad, comfort is not just a luxury, it's a lifesaver. Joy is resistance, joy is survival. Bread and roses; the work, but also dancing. Let's not forget there was a time when fanworks existed only in physical form and were shared in secret with trusted friends -- a history of which I myself have only the smallest inkling, and one which we should honor now. If a time comes when we have to dance in secret, let us still dance.

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"how can you be blogging about fun stuff while this horrible thing is going on?"

there's always horrible things going on somewhere. if you refuse to calm down until it all stops, all you'll do is give yourself a stroke

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sometimes i think about the golden record and i want to cry

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I was rambling on the issue of museums and human remains and how certain populations are more likely to have their bodies put on display to be gawked at and then went "well I guess the Pompeii casts were of Europeans. there are bones in there right?" and Googled it to make sure, at which point I confirmed that yes there are bones in there, but more interestingly DNA testing revealed that a cast of an adult holding a child everyone assumed was a mother and child were, in fact, a man and a kid entirely unrelated to him. Honestly that's more moving to me. Maybe they were connected in a way other than blood, but maybe a stranger saw a child when the world was ending and thought the one thing he could do was hold them.

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Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.How to Turn off Word’s AI Access To Your Content

I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”:

File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”

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Italy Recovers Etruscan Artifacts Dug up by ‘Amateurish’ Tomb Raiders

Italian authorities have recovered precious 3rd century B.C. artifacts from an Etruscan necropolis looted by a couple of bungling tomb raiders in Umbria who stumbled across the haul on their land.

The Etruscans flourished in central Italy around 2,500 years ago but were gradually assimilated into the Roman empire. They left behind lavish tombs, pottery and statues but tantalizingly few written documents and patchy evidence of their daily lives.

The artifacts, including eight urns, two sarcophagi and beauty accessories such as bronze mirrors and a perfume bottle still redolent of its original scent, are worth at least 8 million euros ($8.5 million), Carabinieri art police said.

They were found in Citta della Pieve, about 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of Rome.

One sarcophagus contained the full skeleton of a woman in her 40s, while the urns were finely decorated with scenes from Greek mythology and female figures with still-visible red paint on their lips and gold coloring on their jewels.

Police seized the loot from two entrepreneurs who had unearthed Etruscan burial chambers while excavating land they owned, Perugia Chief Prosecutor Raffaele Cantone told a press conference on Tuesday.

They “had nothing to do with the world of (practiced) tomb raiders” and were “clumsy” and “amateurish” in the way they tried to access the black market for looted art, the prosecutor said.

The Carabinieri caught up with them after they posted pictures of their discovery on the internet in the hope of finding buyers, triggering investigations that included phone wiretaps, stakeouts and air surveillance drones.

Police finally swooped on the suspects after one of them posted on Facebook a picture of himself with a looted artifact, Cantone said.

The pair face charges related to theft and trading in stolen goods, and risk jail sentences of up to 10 years, said prosecutor Annamaria Greco, who led the investigation.

Another Etruscan tomb, belonging to the same “Pulfna” family, was found in Città della Pieve in 2015. At the time, the farmer who made the discovery reported it to authorities and got about 100,000 euros ($105,000) as a reward.

Città della Pieve is close to San Casciano dei Bagni, a Tuscan village where a major archaeological discovery was announced in 2022, with ancient bronze statues found among the mud of thermal baths once used by Etruscans and Romans.

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LIST OF DOCTORS IN THE US WHO WILL PERFORM FEMALE STERILIZATION

Hello everyone- the following is a link to a Google doc containing hundreds of doctors in the US, Canada and Europe who are willing to perform female sterilization on individuals who are 21+ regardless of marriage or parental status.

This list has existed for years and is a collaborative effort from patients all over the world to assist people in controlling their own fertility.

This is the document that allowed me to get sterilized this year, as a woman in her 20’s with no partner or children- one 15 minute appointment, one two hour-long hospital visit, and one 15 minute post-op a few weeks later.

The document refers to tubal ligation, however they may offer other methods- for example, bilateral salpingectomy (aka “bisalp”) which is more effective and is becoming more popular with doctors than ligation.

If you know a doctor who performs female sterilization, and they are not on this list, please submit their name and location to the email provided at the top of the document.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14ZhfMB-NdUPnYZxCkytS_IESS9GIRr4jZgLJX4QRDkU/edit

PLEASE SHARE THIS WHEREVER YOU CAN.

The only thing we can control right now are the actions we take and the community we choose to build with each other.

[accessibleacademia]

Your exhaustion is not shameful. It is not a moral failure to be physically, mentally or emotionally tired. It is okay to be overwhelmed. You're not inferior to anyone just because it's hard for you to keep up with a fast-paced life.

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CONTACT YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS

CONTACT YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS 

CONTACT YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS 

CONTACT YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS

[accessibleacademia]

My sibling is alt-right and extremely hateful about his beliefs. He goes on tirades about liberal agendas and screams and insults me and our other family members when we attempt to debate with him. I live with him and being around him negatively impacts my mental health, especially with me being part of some of the groups he hates so much. I don’t know what to do. I feel so much hatred for him, but he’s my brother and we used to be close.

Members of the so-called “alt right” or “manosphere” actually bear very strong similarities to cult members - they become increasingly rigid in their beliefs, they have decreasing tolerance for ambiguity (everything starts to become either right or wrong, with no room for grey areas), they become increasingly preoccupied with “purity” of thought, their beliefs start to become the core of their personal identity, they accept the word of thought leaders without question or critical thinking, their relationships with family and friends deteriorate, and they often experience negative consequences at work or school as a direct result of their beliefs. 

Dealing with a friend or family member who has joined the alt-right is very different from dealing with a family member who is dabbling with the idea of voting Conservative for economic reasons, or dealing with a family member who erroneously believes that Game of Thrones isn’t very good. Reasoned discussion and laying out your point of view will not work here. The tactics that you need to use with him are actually the tactics used to deprogram cult members, which includes things like:

Do not debate him. Never debate a cult member under any circumstances. It’s a complete waste of time for everybody involved, and it only serves to further entrench him in his toxic beliefs. Cult members do not approach debates in good faith - they are not open to having their minds changed, and they have no intention of ever listening to the other side. Cult members use debate as a tool to recruit people with possibly like-minded beliefs, or as a tool to gather evidence that the “other side” is delusional. The more you debate, the harder he will fight to come up with justifications for his beliefs, and the more satisfaction he will get from feeling like he is defending his “side” from attack. Shut down all debate with him. If he tries to start a debate, redirect immediately. If he makes an inflammatory statement at the dinner table, respond with something non-committal ( “hmmmmm”, “is that so?”, “okay” ) and immediately change the subject. Don’t get sucked in. No matter how hard he tries to open up a debate, deflect, shut him down, or walk away. 

Treat him with detached politeness. I know that it is very difficult not to get visibly upset when someone is insulting the very core of who you are as a person and what you believe, but but you have to stay calm and detached here. Do not let him see that he is upsetting you. When he is going on rants about his beliefs, treat him like a child who is explaining the rules to a video game that you don’t particularly care about - have an air of detached boredom, and no matter how hostile he gets, respond only with politeness. Remember, part of the core beliefs he’s being fed is that people outside of the alt-right are “emotional”, and that his beliefs are “triggering” to those people. Give him no evidence to suggest that is true. Stonewall him. Give him nothing but bored stoicism in response to his outbursts. No matter how much he escalates or how horrifying his beliefs get, always act as though you are having a polite conversation about the weather with a stranger at Starbucks. If he tells you that women should should be property and gays should be killed, respond only with a polite “Well, I suppose that’s one perspective”, or “Yes, I believe you have mentioned this before”. Nothing takes the wind out of a cult member’s sails faster than being treated with calm politeness when they are expecting a fight.

Do not insult him or the people who share his beliefs. The glue that holds cults together is a persecution complex. Cults absolutely thrive on being persecuted for their beliefs, and they depend on it to keep members from leaving. “People outside this group hate you and they will treat you much worse than we will” is the message that keeps people from leaving hateful cults, all the way up until the Kool-Aid is served. He is being fed the message by his fellow cult members that he is hated for who he is - a, presumably, straight white man - and that “Liberals” hate him so much that they want to take away the things he is “owed” (money, power, security, etc) and give it away to undeserving minorities who haven’t really “earned” it. Give him no evidence to suggest that this is true. Refrain from insulting him, or insulting the people he views as thought leaders or role models. You can definitely express your political opinions and make it clear that you are not buying into your brother’s worldview, but keep things direct and refrain from personal attacks. If he is gloating about the president to intentionally get a rise out of you, a simple “I disagree with his policies” is all you have to say - launching into attacks about the president’s looks, family, mannerisms or intelligence is fuel for your brother’s hateful beliefs. Remember that when it comes to your brother, you are not acting in the role of a left-wing activist facing off against a dangerous right-wing activist with a platform. You are a concerned family member dealing with a family member who has gotten involved in a cult. 

Ask polite questions, but do not engage directly with his beliefs. Do not read any of the reading material he recommends, listen to any of the podcasts he puts forward or view any of the videos he asks you to watch; it might be tempting to do so just to prove that you are engaging with him in “good faith” and that you have given his views an “honest try”, but this is a mistake. There is no such thing as “good faith” or intellectual honesty when it comes to cults, and there is nothing to gain from engaging in their propaganda. Do not treat anything produced or recommended by a cult as if it has value, because it does not. When he provides you with something he wants to you read, behave as though a young child has just handed you a live earthworm - thank him for the gesture, but decline to accept. Engaging with propaganda just legitimizes it, and gives him more ammunition to hunker down in his beliefs. When you do ask questions of his beliefs, be detached and polite. If he is ranting that all women are whores, ask him what the basis is for that belief. You are not looking to debate him or get a rise out of him - don’t fire back with counter-points, but make a polite, disinterested noise of acknowledgement, or ask for further clarification. You are merely looking for holes in his reasoning, or gaps where he doesn’t have evidence to back up what he says. You don’t need to point these holes out to him - there will be many. When he is unable to be specific, once again, make a polite acknowledgement ( “Interesting.” ) and move on.

Emphasize how much you miss your former relationship with him. Tell your brother that you miss him. Be specific - talk about the things that you used to do together, and the ways that he used to be involved in your life. If he tries to deflect and start talking about his beliefs again, or how he can’t be involved with you anymore because of your own beliefs or identity, don’t engage. Go back to talking about how you miss the relationship you used to have with him. If he insults you, pretend you didn’t hear him and remind him of a happy memory or a fun thing that you used to do together. It can take a really long time to have success with this tactic, but your brother does remember the relationship he used to have with you, and it is possible to remind him of what he is missing out on by continuing with his hateful beliefs. The idea is to take his beliefs out of the equation as much as possible - make him miss the relationship that he used to have. Any attempt at mending the relationship on his end will necessarily require that he get less extreme in his beliefs - it’s difficult to pursue a close relationship with someone and still insult them. 

Remind him of normal life outside the cult. People in the alt-right - and other cults - tend to become hyper-focused only on issues that concern the cult, and begin to forget about normal life. Your brother is likely spending a lot of time and focus on things like the “sexual marketplace”, abortion rights, refugees, gay rights, female superhero movies etc. Bring him back to earth as often as you can with reminders of things that are outside the scope of the alt-right, and are minimally politically charged. Start a conversation about a new restaurant that is opening up in your town. Show him a funny cat video. Ask him if he’s seen a minimally controversial movie. Constant reminds of normalcy can gradually help him realize how hyper-focused he has become on a few small issues, and remind him that his worldview and priorities are incredibly skewed.

Protect your own mental health. Living with a cult member is exhausting. The combination of fending off the insults, being bombarded with hate rhetoric and missing the person they used to be is exhausting. Make sure you are protecting your own mental health. Take breaks. Leave the house and spend time with other people. Lean on friends and other family members for support. Take care of yourself. Getting someone out of a cult is a marathon, not a sprint, and it’s important to conserve your energy. It can take up to five years to get someone to fully leave cult beliefs behind. Be patient. 

One of the hard parts about dealing with alt-right family members is that people make the mistake of approaching them as a political movement, when it is more appropriate to address them as a cult. The way that they operate is much more similar to the dynamics of a cult than the dynamics of a mainstream political movement, and deprogramming techniques are your best bet for getting your family member back. I highly recommend that you and your family read up on cults and the tactics used to get people out of them. It is especially helpful to read testimony from people who have escaped cults or successfully been persuaded to leave them - if possible, look for materials from people who have left the alt-right, and try to present this material to your brother. This is an incredibly difficult thing for a family to go through, and I highly recommend that you seek out other families who are dealing with similar situations - you are far from alone here. 

Best of luck to all of you. 

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girls I know this isn’t at the top of the concerns list but you’re gonna want to stop eating commercially produced meat real soon

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The continuing release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a major driver of global warming and climate change with increased extreme weather events. Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have now presented a method for effectively converting carbon dioxide into ethanol, which is then available as a sustainable raw material for chemical applications. "We can remove the greenhouse gas CO₂ from the environment and reintroduce it into a sustainable carbon cycle," explained Professor Carsten Streb from the JGU Department of Chemistry. His research group has shown how carbon dioxide can be converted to ethanol by means of electrocatalysis.

Continue Reading.

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Stupidest of stupid questions: So humans are trichromatic, right? We basically have RGB eyes. How inefficient would it be to have CMYK eyes? Is it even possible?

You could absolutely do CMY eyes, but the K (being black) is a little more difficult because black isn't a wavelength of light so much as the absence of light. I suppose you could call the K your rods, which are best used in low light and convey things like "shadows" and "movement" particularly effectively. As a human, the most sensitive part of your retina, the part you're using when you directly look at things, is called the fovea. It is PACKED with cones, which are good for color and also tight spatial resolution; rods are found outside along the periphery of both the retinal and visual field. So we're just going to set the K aside now and think about those cones.

Honestly, tetrachromat eyes are technically pretty easy to achieve: all you need is four versions of cone-rhodopsin genes getting translated into different kinds of cone-rhodopsin cells in your retina. Old World primates evolved our trichromat eyes from dichromat mammalian ancestors exactly this way: with a gene duplication in one core cone-rhodopsin gene that allowed one of the copies to accumulate mutations until a sufficiently divergent copy fixed in the population.

So to have CMY eyes, you'd need three cone-rhodopsins with different wavelength sensitivities: one that is most sensitive to cerulean, one most sensitive to maroon, and one most sensitive to yellow. You might or might not have better color resolution than a regular old RGB human, though: color resolution is partly a function of the sensory information hitting your retinas, but it's also partly a function of how much brain space you dedicate to processing that information.

I mentioned my blind cat Arthur the other day--here's a photo:

Arthur is what we call cortically blind. As a kitten, he had an intact pupillary reflex and could probably see light vs dark, but he also had severe nystagmus, so his pupils jittered uncontrollably all the time and he probably didn't get a whole lot of useful visual input. Without the visual experience of seeing things and learning how to organize and process visual information, his brain as he developed went "you know what? fuck this" and stopped dedicating any processing power to whatever visual input he was getting.

Basically, he lost visual acuity because the information he was able to pipe to his brain was fragmented and poor-quality enough that his brain stopped bothering to process it. If I pulled his current eyeballs out and magically hooked up new totally functional ones, he wouldn't be able to do anything with them: his brain has given up sorting out the information.

So the question of whether theoretical CMY humans could distinguish colors better than RGB humans is driven by two things: one, whether having two highly-overlapping cones helps you distinguish between slightly variant light types better than very different cones, and two, whether we're extending the total visual range by moving the cones at the external ends of the range (B and R) farther apart. Overlapping but unique sensory information can be really helpful for localizing and distinguishing similar-but-not-identical inputs--that's one of the reasons owls are good at localizing quiet noises, actually, their ears are wildly asymmetrical and they can computer where a noise is made based on how loudly it can be heard with each ear, especially if the owl is on the move as it listens. Like the Doppler effect, but faster with a lot more processing power on it.

I have no idea which would be more effective, but it's a fun thing to think about!

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TIL anyone who's going to overwinter in Antarctica has to have had their appendix out. Because removing an appendix that's not causing any trouble just as a precaution is way better than having one that's about to burst when you're on the ass-end of the planet with no way to be rushed to a hospital if shit gets real.

[accessibleacademia]

Haven't figured out a politic way to word this but before saying someone/thing "makes you uncomfortable" please ask yourself this important question: is it any of your fucking business