The Whispering Escapes

the field is a standard football field including the goals, goalposts, and end zones

there are four teams: two football teams, and two football teams

the two football teams play football and follow all the usual rules for it

the two football teams play football and follow all the usual rules for it

at the same time

on the same field

while dodging around the teams playing the other football

Lena, our host in Santorini, Greece

on the other hand...

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

The only other thing is that not all USB-C cables are created equally. The form factor is standardized, the insides are not, some shitty, cheap, cables are only rated for data not power, or for low power needs. You can search for charging cable to make sure you get one intended for power transfer.

EIGHTEEN MILLION DOLLARS!!! For something that doesn't improve the lives of autistic people, and never will!!!

Their current genetic research problem is called "MSSNG." Pronounced "missing."

Uh. I'm sure this doesn't have a deeply ableist meaning linked to the pervasive idea that autistic kids have been "stolen" from their parents and need to be cured. Yeah.

Even the research that has anything whatfuckingsoever to do with actual autistic people who are alive is bullshit:

From an article about trauma and its intersection with autism...

1 (one) (O N E) out of 456 (four hundred fifty six) intervention articles focused on "mental health and well-being" as a goal.

"Promotion of normal development" "reduction of rigidity" "elimination of nonspecific maladaptive behaviors" "alleviation of family distress" found to be the most common goals in clinical treatment plans for addressing autism.

For those curious about how thid all actually works (and why one CAN in fact get search results at most major archives and libraries for terms like trans or lesbian even when searching in institutional catalog records for, say, resources about colonial American history before this term would have been used as we now use it), essentially the LOC maintains our primary list of key terms (subject lists) that link into their database. Whenever a new work is entered into copyright (which goes through the LOC), a point person at the press will submit the work’s application with the relevant keywords selected from their subject lists, which help ensure the work is properly indexed in the catalog. The point of having an overarching list like that is to ensure that we all share a common vocabulary so that researchers don’t have to learn the unique search terms at every single institution they visit (which would be not just onerous, but completely unworkable as a system that needs to maintain continuity across generations of new employees!). But when you have a list like that, it’s necessarily a little slow to evolve by default - changing even just one category’s terms requires a lot of work and coordination across institutions all across the country.

BUT individual archives, collections, and libraries can (and most major and plenty of smaller ones DO) choose to build a digital infrastructure that links a whole host of related search terms into the LOC’s catch-all subject grading, such that when you search for something, you don’t need to figure out the relevant LOC subject tag, but you can instead use more popular, affirmative, and/or contemporary language and still get all the potential matching hits and resources you’d want to find (even when the terminology you’re using isn’t accurate to that time period, which is particularly relevant and useful for those of us doing work on queer and trans histories or histories of medicine and disability where terminology had really changed over time).

And indeed, to make this work easy to implement across institutions, even those with small staff, there are volunteer orgs like the queer metadata collective and the trans metadata collective and the digital transgender archive who have created and continue to update and maintain wonderful free resources like the (perfectly named) Homosaurus, which, as they note, “is intended to function as a companion to broad subject term vocabularies, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions are encouraged to use the Homosaurus to support LGBTQ research by enhancing the discoverability of their LGBTQ resources.”