Not for following

I read the Odyssey in high school and I liked it! But I feel absolutely zero emotions about seeing it on screen. Just a big "why would somebody take the time to do that?" Which is weird!! Because I have been excited for movie adaptations of books before! But not this one???

Contrary to a popular belief, pollution plays virtually no role in creating urban heat islands. They're due to dense concentrations of buildings and impermeable surfaces.

Climate change, land take and urban density contribute to rising air and ground temperatures in city centres – especially at night, when road surfaces release the heat they have absorbed throughout the day. A number of factors combine to create a heat island – the materials used to create buildings (bricks, stone, concrete, etc.) and road surfaces (e.g. asphalt mixes), land use (i.e. building density), most often without plant cover, as well as human activities such as road traffic and the use of heating and air conditioning.

More nature in the city

Trees, shrubs and plants help cool the city by providing shade and 'evapotranspiration', which refreshes the atmosphere. Local temperatures can drop significantly by:

reducing the waterproofing of pavements

planting trees

placing mobile forests

greening the ground, facades and roofs

Improving access to water in the city

In its Climate Plan and Municipal Water Plan, the City has committed to improving access to drinking water for residents and users of the City. Several water access points have been set up for this purpose:

Drinking water fountains

Water bottle network: a network of shops that fill water bottles free of charge in Brussels

Adapt buildings and urban landscaping

Adapt materials to the amount of sunshine in the area

Prefer light-coloured cladding or white roofs that reflect rather than absorb the sun's rays

Allow wind to circulate by considering the urban form of construction or renovation projects

Insulate buildings to prevent overheating

Create shade with shade sails

Cool spaces during heat waves

Map and make available private or public indoor spaces to provide cool places nearby for shelter during heatwaves: Map with urban cooling islands

Provide support to vulnerable populations

Thanks for the question, and please bear with me re asks gang, I was stupid enough to leave inbox on for a while, not realising the post would break containment, so I’m snowed under atm ☠️

So there’s a lot of talk about Tolkien being ‘of his time and class’ but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. ‘Of his time’ is not a neutral statement and it certainly isn’t applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, ‘norms of his time’ seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to ‘what Tolkien said’ rather than ‘what was actually happening then’.

Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the “the fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his time” line really annoys me (and others!) because imo it lets Tolkien's own Oxford tea table stand in for the entire twentieth century as if there wasn't an entire world outside the Inkling Orgy arguing furiously about race and empire.

I can give you an example literally from Oxford itself! The Indian Majlis had been meeting at Oxford since 1896! The Majlis, for those who might not be aware, was a full-on political and debating society which produced a fuckton of the people who'd go on to lead independence movements across South Asia. This was not some obscure footnote he would need to trudge to a specialist archive to dig up, and I can confirm that attending debates and discussion groups is, was, and has always been a large part of Oxford University life. Ie this was happening in his university in his lifetime among people of his class group he'd have had every opportunity to meet and engage with, whose existence he absolutely would have been aware of.

this is a picture of me, in my city, fully clothed, wearing a day collar.

obsessed with how all you need to do is throw money at public education and eliminate most standardized testing and you will start getting smarter, more engaged, kinder adults. obsessed with how giving people safe housing, reliable access to good food, and decent wages dramatically reduces drug overdoses and gun violence. obsessed with how much people actually want to get together and fix infrastructure, invent new ways of helping each other, and create global ways of living sustainably once you give them livable pay to do so. obsessed with how tracking diseases, developing medicines, and improving public health becomes so much easier when you just make healthcare free at point of use.

Where if you're used to thinking "oh, I'm not great at this, but I'm having a good time and I hope you like this thing I made" or "yeah, I'm actually pretty good, because I've studied this/I have a specific Thing I'm especially good at that some people want/wev" you're less likely to feel vulnerable over it.

I Might Just Be Average is threatening when everyone wants to be Something.

I don't care for Anne Rice but apparently her writing has some quality that makes a lot of people enjoy it but that I'm just not tuned into. If I knew how to duplicate that quality, I would be doing it.

Obviously Anne Rice is also from a different time and being successful is often about being in the right place at the right time and producing the specific thing that resonates with the cultural zeitgeist at that specific moment, but there are still going to be multiple people doing it, and what makes one person's work resonates while another's quietly dies is often quite mysterious.

It feels very confident and smug about how this isn't going to be a dystopian surveillance state. But the main thing I was thinking through the entire first part was "couldn't a government abuse these powers to stop people from running cutting-edge AI on their own hardware? Setting up the infrastructure to do that is totally unacceptable." And then I get to part 2 where he says "also we'll need to stop people from running cutting-edge AI on their own hardware."

Like, the big concerns I have about LLMS are that they're being run centrally, on servers, where people can read what we say, and where both companies and potentially the government can regulate how it gets used. The thing I want to make sure happens is this gets decentralized, so people can run it locally, without being observed, and ideally disable stupid ethical blocks like "I won't make porn".

And Scott's post is basically saying "we already don't live in that world, so it's not a problem to move further away from it". But it is! I want people in the AI space actively advocating for more decentralized AI use—and as strong a taboo as we can fashion against the government limiting AI, or really anything about the software we run on our computer. Total legal ban on in-hardware DRM. Crash course on fully homomorphic encryption so we can set it up so that openAI can't read our chat logs. A government commitment to reverse-engineer any model and publish the weights openly.

(I feel like we should all be really worried that the government feels like it can ask openAI to pause a chatbot release. That shouldn't be allowed! That's...well, it's not in the top fifty bad things the Trump administration has done, but it's a serious civil liberties problem that has me deeply worried.)

But the real upshot of this is that I'm definitely not the target audience, and in a real sense, Scott and I are on opposite sides.

Plan A’s regulations on chips bear more than a passing resemblance to the way the United States currently regulates “controlled substances” - potentially addictive medications like Xanax or Adderall. ... But has the existence of controlled substance regulations indirectly plunged the world into Orwellian dystopia? Has it turned life into a global panopticon? I wouldn’t say so.

Going back to ME1, it's just… very clear that the outlook for a lot of people on Earth in the 2180s is… horrific.

Basically, every colonist we meet is eager to escape Earth. This is especially obvious with the people of Zhu's Hope on Feros, or in the cut content for Caleston. If we piece everything together, when you want to leave Earth and have no capital or marketable skills :

you can join the Alliance military and benefit from the Deferred Education Plan (if you don't die in the line of duty first !)

you can, apparently, go to some bureaucratic entity called Colonial Affairs, which sets you up for a colony and definitely isn't downplaying how awful and dangerous it gets because they want as many colonies as fast and far as possible (Fai Dan : "Life is hard and often brutal, even without our current problems. Colonial Affairs back on Earth told us we'd be beneath the notice of any raiders — I guess they weren't counting on the geth." Hollis Blake : "It's a little different from what they claimed."), and worst of all it pushes you toward "corporate sponsors" like ExoGeni or Genex Chemical who are eager to make a profit on your back and at your expense (presumably to offload the financial burden of setting up colonies to the private sector ?) — and if I take Arcelia at her word when she says that "most of us" worked for ExoGeni, that means the colonists are also contractors, liable for damages if they do not fulfill their end of the bargain.

you can bypass the Alliance's bureaucracy entirely and go straight to Eldfell-Ashland Energy, who'll give you a job and an education through their subsidiaries, though you'll eke out your contract in a company town for God knows how many years.

per cut content, you can also benefit from an aid program called "contractual transit" (basically, an organization pays for your transit off-Earth to a location where you'll get to work) except when you end up on an independent colony technically outside of the Alliance's jurisdiction you've got no protections and might end up becoming a debt slave who's ruthlessly exploited.

if you can somehow scrounge up enough resources, you can set up your own independent colony outside of the Alliance's purview, like Horizon… but you're entirely at the mercy of space bogeys. And with no prospects. So the best shot for your kids, like Traynor, is… the Systems Alliance military, and the Deferred Education Plan.

"Colony Life — It's Not That Bad !"

their analysis is so resistant to acknowledging transphobia as a form of oppression that they cannot account for even other TME trans people. like this is fundamentally incoherent theory--it explains nothing about anything! I don't care what terminology you use (transandrophobia, transmisandry, anti-transmasculinity, etc etc)-- your entire framework for understanding sexgender does not hold up at all.

Also...these panels