Silver, they/them. Should probably start posting

a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.

i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.

the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)

and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.

an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:

"Jeremy, I'd really like my orbital sander back ^_^"

"... didn't know it was yours..."

(Legit excited, no sarcasm) "Someone ELSE has the original Box 20-Volt Brushless Cordless Detail Sander with Dust Management?!?!?!?!"

"...no..."

Teacher walking up like "Miss Woods, is that a nail file"

(Elle, blasting compressed air to get rid of the nail file sand)

"Actually, its an emery board. But yes! :D It's a finer grit than what we have, and I've always found these easier to handle"

"...Ok, fair enough."

Elle making friends with the 6 year old daughter of one of her classmates. (Child care ain't cheap, I get it. Bring your kid to class)

Elle learning how to drive a forklift/motorcycle/semi-truck

Elle giving an impromptu lecture in the break room about what gifts to give their wives/girlfriends/mothers

Fucking laser cut "bless this mess" sign on her locker (I lied. It would totally be live, laugh, laser)

Elle's car breaks down and 20+ dudes coming out to show her how to fix it. (And realizing her mechanic is ripping her off)

Every single guy in the building filled with instant despair when she gets with one of the butch lesbians in the program.

but the thing is that this stuff is just factually wrong. eugenics doesnt work. race science isnt true. theyre morally wrong, yes, but theyre also factually incorrect, ideas that are deployed in service of monstrous ideology despite the fact that they simply arent true.

The bad guy in X-Men: First Class says "I find the Nazis detestable, but I must admit their methods are effective," and then he uses those methods to trigger Magneto's powers. Except those methods are not effective and it shouldn't have worked.

In Magic: the Gathering back in the 90s, they had Urza do "good guy" eugenics to combat Yawgmoth's evil eugenics; they portrayed it as morally wrong, Urza's a bad guy, but they also portrayed it as successful. But it literally doesn't make any sense at all and would never work.

There is no such thing as a best way to be. There is no such thing as "more intelligent" or "more physically fit" as broad categories; intelligence and fitness are huge clusters of unrelated traits. And most importantly, almost none of those traits are genetically heritable except over millions of years.

When I talk about this, people always bring up height, because it's one of the very few traits that is genetically determined and accurately measurable, and you could do eugenics to breed people to be taller-- and who cares? The ubermensch is not an average Joe who's 6' 6" and otherwise unimpressive. Height would not have defeated Yawgmoth, height would not let you create the world's most powerful mutant.

but the thing is that this stuff is just factually wrong. eugenics doesnt work. race science isnt true. theyre morally wrong, yes, but theyre also factually incorrect, ideas that are deployed in service of monstrous ideology despite the fact that they simply arent true.

This is actually a great question! I sort of reflexively used "incandescent" as a synonym for "brilliant (fury)" and didn't think of why a word literally meaning "glowing" stuck in my hand as shorthand for "angry", so this ask made me look it up

Turns out that "incandescent" used LITERALLY as an adjective means "bright, brilliant, glowing, dazzling", and used FIGURATIVELY it can be applied to almost any emotion or expression of feeling to heighten it- like how "he said hotly" means "angry" without SAYING "angry", or "she said brightly" means "energetic" without SAYING "energetic".

So someone can- figuratively- be incandescent with joy, or have an incandescent smile, or simply APPEAR incandescent.

But speaking out of anger, I reflexively wrote that "something infuriating has happened- I am incandescent", so the reader's only clue to my meaning g would have been the context of the previous paragraph.

Which is actually fascinating, because it implies that 1. I've READ and HEARD so many others say "incandescent with rage" so often that my brain equivocated it with "rage", suggesting that over time the word itself might completely change meaning if enough people start slipping into a similar pattern, and

2. For some reason, when we were first creating language, we decided that "hot, bright, fiery, burning" were ENERGETIC before even fully understanding the science behind energy, and that conversely, "Coldly, glacial, icy, frosty" were words for FLAT, EMPTY, VOID"

And more median words like "warmly" or "cooly", just like moderate temperatures, are linked to moderate emotion

Which I can only guess has something to do with the human circulatory system? A rush of hot blood when angry, a warm glow when comfortable, and icy when shocked or upset.

My nephew is very allergic to eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, and sesame. Last year my sister discovered all hot dogs and hamburger buns now contain sesame. Not "may contain", but listed in the ingredients. This year basically every brand of sliced bread also now contains sesame, making it very difficult to find bread items he can eat.

They're just adding it to their products, so they can just list it as an ingredient and not bother with worrying about cross contamination. And they aren't even bothering with telling anyone. Capitalism is going to kill us all.

"Which brings us back to Kellogg’s. Back in 2016, the company found a way around the added burden and expense of complying with the FSMA: they simply began adding trace amounts of peanut flour to their cracker products. Doing so allowed them to list peanuts as an ingredient of the product, freeing them from having to prevent cross-contact.

Questions for Killian, child of polycule divorce, also the orbital station grandmas. (Well, grandpers/grandparents is more accurate, but none of them are very strongly invested in gender, that's a bisex human problem.)

In microgravity, suspenders help keep your shirt from floating up, instead of keeping your pants from falling down. Or maybe both...

Because it's a massive East Coast city but the property values are probably like $200 a month for a three bedroom apartment, and most Gothamites are like, "Hey, Bane never swore to break my back."

And here's the thing: you're not just moving out of Gotham City. You're moving into the rest of the DC universe. And it has hero-based power scaling.

Oh, Metropolis looks fucking great. But it gets invaded by aliens and robots and demigods, because Superman is there.

Wonder Woman's tangling with gods.

You go to Central City, and some Reverse-Flash motherfucker runs backwards from an alternate future and kicks your balls off at the speed of light.

You could move to the West Coast, and oh, an entire city just gets exploded by Cyborg Superman or some shit.

How about you move to Indianapolis, or Cleveland? Haha, no. They have no protector during the alien invasions, and you're in Cleveland

So stay in Gotham. Sure, you have lunatics, but you know that if you had a gun, you at least have a chance against the Joker or Riddler. Mongo of War-World would crush you. But Gotham just has creeps, and you know you have a chance. Even Bane, R'as Al-Ghul, Killer Croc, and Mr. Freeze are just slightly altered dudes. Oh no, Poison Ivy is going to kiss me to death! Who gives a shit, you kinda wanted to go out that way anyway.

I think it's all about perception. Gotham City has crime. But when Ares sends his undying legions to march upon the mortal realm and Wonder Woman has to punch all of them, people don't internalize that as "crime." That's "a crisis" or "a religious event" or at best, terrorism. Same thing when Superman has to stop Brainiac from shrinking Metropolis or whatever. That stuff is objectively more dangerous but it's on such a huge scale that "crime" is not the word for it. The cops don't involve themselves in this at any point. But the stuff Batman deals with is like, robberies, assaults, gang wars, serial killings. All his villains commit actual crimes, so they go into police reports, which end up as statistics. So when someone compiles all this data, oh look, Gotham City has the highest crime rate in the country, yet again. Forget the fact that 10% of Keystone City's population had their skulls crushed by invading superintelligent gorillas. Who cares that a random guy in Opal City accidentally teleported the entire state to Hell after he found out the hard way that he was born a wizard. Those are not crimes. There's nothing in the police recordkeeping app's drop-down menu for a Gorilla invasion. Closest thing we've got is Random Chimp Event.