Inside the Little Plastic Castle

A Statistically Significant Love Song

from HenrikWidegren featuring Johanna Körner Berglund with excellent subtitles in 11 languages!

watch on YouTube or

( stream it here )

(thanks to the Ask.Metafilter thread on Songs about data or statistics)

I was listening to Lingthusiasm, (the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics) and Gretchen plugged an old yet still-wise blog post. While her advice is particularly helpful for graduate students, it also applies to SF cons and any context where you’re a fan and want to actually communicate with the presenter.

How to interact with someone who’s just given a talk - A guide to academic conversations

The key thing to realize is that most of the time, you know more about the speaker than they know about you, so you need to start the conversation and you get to pick what it’s about.

[… snip …]

(a)s someone who has now been on the receiving end of occasional fangirling, I find it endearing but also I don’t always know what to do with it. It’s super helpful if you can set us on the course of having an actual conversation, rather than putting me into the weird position of “why yes, I agree, I am awesome.” It’s always nice and safe to start with “I enjoyed your talk” but follow that up with something concrete.

https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/145122859819/how-to-interact-with-someone-whos-just-given-a

remnantglow has compiled a database

tinyurl.com/oldgaySF

cataloguing every single older queer science fiction book I've managed to track down, consisting of just over 200 titles with LGBT characters/themes & by LGBT authors, spanning over a century (1880-2000)

The database can be filtered by representation, subgenre, whether the book is currently in print, and more; additionally, it includes my own ratings & brief thoughts on the ones i have read, if anyone needs a suggestion on places to start! (or feel free to shoot me an ask for a more personalized recommendation)

Declaration of Interdependence from queerspacepunk (aka emmett)

A tiny snippet from a lovely thread

i want to be asked to come over and help put my friend's kids to bed as casually as they might text their spouse and ask them to pick up milk on the way home

i want to stop and pick up milk for another friend because i know their spouse hates the grocery store

i want to buy fruit that i dont like because it's on special and i know people who do

i want to pass lemons over the fence and to take my neighbours bins out when the forget

i want group chats instead of rideshare apps, calls in the middle of the night because someone's at the hospital, lonely or hungry or both

i want to do the dishes in other people's houses, extra servings wrapped in tinfoil and tea towels so it's still warm when you drop it off, a basket of other people's mending by my couch

i want to be surrounded by reminders that 'imposing' on each other is what we were born to do

https://queerspacepunk.tumblr.com/search/interdependence

Today I learned there are graphic resources—icons and banners—on the Archive of Our Own!

https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Banners%20*a*%20Icons/works

(Sadly AO3’s metatags don’t create RSS feeds, so I can’t add one here.)

New DW community for people who archive information from the web: datahoarders

timeasmymeasure provides resources for would-be archivists without tech skills: https://datahoarders.dreamwidth.org/3299.html

Of particular interest to me:

AO3 Downloader: a life-saver for any person who has thought, "God, I wish I could download all of my bookmarks, but that would take sooo long to do individually." Another Github download which is saved by its thorough instructions!

The world is changing and now, more than ever, your experiences and voice as a person with a DISABILITY and/or CHRONIC HEALTH CONDITION need to be heard!

The Institute for Health and Disability Studies at the University of Kansas has been conducting the National Survey on Health and Disability (NSHD) since 2018. The goal of this research is to let decision makers and policy makers know what people with disabilities and chronic health conditions experience every day! You can enter your name in a drawing for one of fifteen $100 gifts cards, if you choose. Drawings will be held weekly.

kuhealthsurvey.org

If you need accommodations or would prefer to take the survey with a KU staff member over the telephone, please email Noelle at healthsurvey@ku.edu or call toll-free 1-855-556-6328.

( Why I've been filling out this survey for seven years.  )

mdbear led me to Switching.Software, a site that offers free, open-source alternatives to the services run by billionaires who are making bad policy decisions. (Whistles loudly to blot out discussions of the choices they’re making)

solarbird explains how Mastodon and Bluesky users can follow each other through a "bridge"
https://solarbird.dreamwidth.org/2021328.html

The annual snowflake_challenge is underway. Following the tag from DW’s "latest things" is a good way to meet new people and reconnect with old pals. petra answered the best canon prompt by linking to Slings & Arrows, season 1, episode 3. The version they linked to is ODavies’s passion project of upscaling older shows and movies in glorious 4K. They look good, and at least Slings & Arrows’s captions survived the transfer (although many ks display as js)

Although I’ve been deploying pacing strategies to manage my chronic illness (CFS/ME) for 30 years, thanks to sonia for sharing this NHS video, which claims that true resting to recharge the parasympathetic nervous system requires no reading. This is a shocker for me, since I routinely listen to (admittedly low effort) audiobooks and podfics when resting.

How to rest properly to help recovery: watch on YouTube w A+ captions

( or stream it within )

Finally, this boomer realizes she’s living in the future: I’ve got a new mutual subscriber barbaratp. She writes in Brazilian Portuguese; I have no language even close. Yet we can mutually understand each other thanks to machine translation. (Of course there are glitches, and thankfully we’re humans and can double check that messages received is the message sent.)

Better than flying cars, really.

Any lovely things you've found here and wish to share?

ETA: 24 May 2025 correct pronouns

pudding.cool hosts remarkable visualizations of a wide, wide range of data. As their front page boasts:

The Pudding is a digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays makes cool shit on the internet. You might have seen our story on women’s pockets, but we’ve also made stuff about mapping famous people and celebrity name spelling.

The point of the site is making aesthetically pleasing data visualization, and the design withstands being zoomed up to 175%. I can’t speak to its accessibility otherwise. What’s revved me up this time is

Who gets shipped and why?

Extensive data visualization of relationship patterns in fanfic on the AO3. They quote thinkers I’ve enjoyed in the past — Kristina Busse and Joanna Russ among many — and as a treat, they host a random relationship generator at the top of the page.

( 125 word snippet )

https://pudding.cool/2024/10/fanfic

The OED Cares About Fannish Language

The Oxford English Dictionary was an early fandom for me — our family squabbled over who got the magnifying glass when the Compact OED arrived in 1971. (It squeezed 20 volumes into two by making the print tiny — essentially a paper microfiche.) So I was charmed by Dr Catherine Sangster’s article "Looking back at Geek Dictionary Corner"

( 125 word sample )

https://nineworlds.co.uk

And there’s more…

Seminar: The influence of pop culture on mainstream language

Thursday, November 21, 2024
1700 UTC (11:00 a.m. central US & Canada)

Join editors Dr Catherine Sangster and Fiona McPherson, and guest speakers Prof Dr Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer and Dr Fraser Dallachy for a discussion on the language of science fiction, fantasy, gaming, and other specific fandoms:

• How and why language that develops in these communities is adopted more widely
• How does the OED monitor these developments, and decide what should (or should not) be recorded
• Interesting examples
• The influence of World Englishes varieties and other languages
• Q&A time – bring your questions to the panellists or send them in advance to oed.uk@oup.com

Sign up to watch live https://events.oup.com/oup-academic-marketing/OED-pop-culture.

Will probably show up on OxfordLanguages’s YouTube channel.

erinptah collates amusing and horrifying examples of large language models ("AI") spewing nonsense after they steal the hard work of artists like herself:

https://erinptah.dreamwidth.org/tag/artificial+unintelligence

ysabetwordsmith posted eighteen subtle and beautiful eclipse shots at the "share your photos" community common_nature https://common-nature.dreamwidth.org/253608.html

jenroses’s Fork Theory is a most excellent complement to spoon theory

http://jenrose.com/fork-theory/

You know the phrase, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done,” right?

Well, Fork Theory is that one has a Fork Limit, that is, you can probably cope okay with one fork stuck in you, maybe two or three, but at some point you will lose your shit if one more fork happens.

A fork could range from being hungry or having to pee to getting a new bill or a new diagnosis of illness. There are lots of different sizes of forks, and volume vs. quantity means that the fork limit is not absolute. I might be able to deal with 20 tiny little escargot fork annoyances, such as a hangnail or slightly suboptimal pants, but not even one “you poked my trigger on purpose because you think it’s fun to see me melt down” pitchfork.

Finally, this pro-captioned video summarizes the findings from an Hungarian research paper published last month in Cell. It supports that dogs make mental representations of human words.

stream on YouTube or … ( stream here )

Boros, Magyari et al. (2024) Neural evidence for referential understanding of object words in dogs https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.02.029

https://thesqueakywheel.org lives to snarl about the bullshit disabled people in the US deal with daily. Today's headline feed, for example:

• Urologist Gives Personalized Rock Sculpture to Patient for Passing Kidney Stone in Record Time
• Goodwill Raises Disabled Employee Wage from 7.25 to 15 (Cents per Hour)
• New SSI Application Shreds Itself Upon Completion

Inclusive Stick Figure Family Features Woman’s Immortal Pressure Sore

[Image of van's rear window, with white sticker evoking a chalkboard scrawl of 4 humans and the sole of a human foot with a big frown]

( 150-word excerpt )

Since I know many of my readers are autistic or otherly neurodiverse, I'm boosting my own post over at access_fandom.

Academic Sean Yeager wants to discuss experiences of time and narrative in science fiction. Get paid! Participants will be compensated $100 for 60-90 minute talk re: their experiences of time with an openly autistic interviewer.

Is an entertaining and enlightening podcast! It’s produced by a sound design company as a portfolio project, and they do great work—-listen with headphones if you can. Each episode page has an audio player, credits for all the music, and a transcription (thank you for this excellent design!) 20k.org has almost 200 episodes.

https://www.20k.org/episodes/domesticsymphony explores ambient noises — audio feedback and alarms from appliances like dishwashers and ovens — as well as a firm advocating quieter tools:

( 100 word taster )

https://www.20k.org/episodes/videolessgames features two blind gamers.

( 130 words )