Call them what they want to be called. You can do it, we do it all the time. Think of it this way: David Evans woke up one day and said "Everyone call me The Edge." And everyone said, "Fine, The Edge, are we talking the noun or the verb?" And it's not just that. Over the past 20 years. We've agreed to call this man, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, just Diddy, and now Puff Daddy again, and most people don't even like him.
The woman responsible for facebook's gender options was kicked off facebook for using the name she had on her nametag at work.
Facebook is a vital tool for community, especially for those of us who are marginalised. It withholds our access to friends and support in order to enforce their policy, and in so doing we are faced with a stark choice between a name we do not identify with and do not want to use, or being disconnected. If we make the choice to stay we find ourselves increasingly recognised by other people by that forced name.
By forcing us to change our names on the site, Facebook changes the names we are known by in real life — whether we like it or not.
— My name is only real enough to work at Facebook, not to use on the site Zip @ Medisum
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.
The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.
— Justice Kennedy's Majority Opinion
Biologists realize they have been drawing the precambrian beastie upside-down and backwards since the 1970s.
Ancient mini-monster head mystery solved — here's how we did it
Two views of masculinity:
This is something that I have been discussing with close friends and working on what this means for myself. As somebody who is considered an academic in some sense, a lot of figuring this out means I’ve been reading loads of research articles, books, and articles online to look at loads of different perspectives and see how that looks next to the many conversations that I have had with close friends and family. The academic portion of this journey has proved to be difficult as a consequence of the white history of the term “queer” and the lack of theorization of queer masculinity for Black women that is not solely described as one for Black lesbians. As a Black person whose gender identity is queer masculine, I have been wrestling with what this means to me and working on constructing a queer masculinity that is decolonized. And by that I mean depatriarchalized, a masculinity that isn’t defined by or nested in patriarchal domination.
— Under Construction: Decolonized Queer Masculinity(ies), Shay @ Decolonize all the Things
So, so, so many people, especially musicians, have done this before me. I wear dresses on stage and to occasional fancy dress events because I do not enjoy neckties. I wear dresses to embrace femininity (adjective) but not to re-assign my gender to female (noun). I think that it is absurd to think that there is a rigidity to the identity of CIS and Heterosexual males and females -- that for a man to wear a dress or for a woman to wear pants must mean that they are LGBTQ.
— Is It Really That Strange For a Guy to Wear a Dress?, Miles Robbins @ Huffington Post
Bad news from the UK. Hate crimes:
The report from the University of Leicester's Centre for Hate Studies says that some 35,000 hate crimes towards people in the LGBT communities go unreported every year, motivated by the fears of being outed, negative experiences with authorities and the normalisation of victimisation.
— Hate crimes 'routine' for Britain's LGBT community, report warns, Blathnaid Healy @ Mashable
STDs:
Large increases in diagnoses of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) were seen last year in men who have sex with men (MSM), according to figures published today.
— Gonorrhoea and syphilis on the rise as STI diagnoses soar among gay and bisexual men, Tim Moynihan @ The Independent
Spoilers for Jurassic World, The Strangely Cruel And Unusual Death In Jurassic World Devin Faraci @ Birth.Movies.Death.
Discusses one of the more gratuitously violent scenes in Jurassic World, one that sticks out in a film filled with edited cut-aways. One of the things I appreciated about Interstellar was that while every death could have been a drawn-out dramatic affair, most of them happen quickly but unambiguously.
Same-sex marriage isn’t some overnight cause, some progressive novelty, especially not when it’s put in its proper context, as part of a struggle for gay rights that has been plenty long, patient and painful.
— Gay Marriage’s Moment, Frank Bruni @ New York Times
My soapbox: Defense of marriage was never just about marriage, it was a legal rationale for a broad spectrum of discrimination and opposition to same-sex relationships. Which is why it was passed in states like Indiana where a handful of employers were considering limited domestic-partnership benefits.
Colored Kirby concept for Lord of Light. The movie didn't get off the ground, but the images were used as props for the Argo hoax. More at "Behold The Psychedelic Glory Of Jack Kirby's Argo Art, In Color At Last," James Whitbrook @ io9
Emacs is a great tool for book editing and writing. I used reStructuredText text but Markdown, ASCIIDoc, Docbook or any number of formats would work equally well. Emacs’s ediff is a powerful diffing tool that made it possible for me to track the changes made by the proofreader and selectively apply, but also edit, the changes she made before committing them to the original manuscript. I think that feature alone made it worth writing it in Emacs.
— How to write a book in Emacs, Mickey Petersen @ Mastering Emacs
A nice description of how reStructuredText and pandoc can be used in a publishing workflow.
I am the Lord and the Cosmic Soul; I am myself the Cosmic Body.
I am Brahma, Vishnu, and Rudra, as well as Gauri, Brahmi, and VaishnaviI am the sun and the stars, and I am the Lord of the stars.
I am the various species of beasts and birds; I am also the outcaste and thief.I am the evildoer and the wicked deed; I am the righteous person and the virtuous deed
I am certainly female and male, and asexual as well.And whatever thing, anywhere, you see or hear,
That entire thing I pervade, ever aiding inside it and outside.
— Devi Gita, verses 3.13 – 3.16, C. Mackenzie Brown, translator (Amazon Link)
Last night can be pretty well summed up by the phrase “not like this.” We wanted Peridot to come back! But not like this. We wanted to learn more about Garnet’s life as a fusion! Never like this. It has frankly come to a point where I am afraid to type words lest the Monkey’s Paw machinations of the crewniverse twist my words into some pitched irony of themselves. All of which to say this was a marvelous episode, and I can’t wait to talk about it.
A heavy spoiler recap that hits all of my most important thoughts.
Steven Universe Recap: “Keeping it Together” Vrai Kaiser @ The Mary Sue
Neural net hallucination caused by force-feeding Google's image recognition engine.
If we apply the algorithm iteratively on its own outputs and apply some zooming after each iteration, we get an endless stream of new impressions, exploring the set of things the network knows about. We can even start this process from a random-noise image, so that the result becomes purely the result of the neural network, as seen in the following images:
Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks Alexander Mordvintsev, Christopher Olah, and Mike Tyka, @ Google Research
Watching cat videos online may well have contributed to this general happiness. Participants reported a decrease in negative emotions—annoyance, anxiety, sadness, guilt—after an Internet cat fix, as well an increase in positive emotions (hope, happiness, contentment). Thus, the use of Internet cats as a mood modifier—the Emergency Kitten hypothesis—appears to pan out. As for the motivations behind those procrastinators, Myrick's data works with her model. Although procrastinators felt guilt after watching videos of cats knocking things off desks when they should have been working, that was more than offset by the pleasure obtained. The effect was also dependent on the quality of the cat content.
Watching cats on the Internet is good for you Jonathan Gitlin @ Ars Technica
Comparing transracial identity to transgender identity strikes me as very much along the same idea as comparing the anti-vax position to modern immunology because, after all, they're both theories and we should "teach the debate."
The word and self-identity of LGBT people has never been sufficient. Medicine and psychology has reluctantly come to support and acceptance in the 21st century. This happened because the alternatives were proven failures that were more brutal than non-intervention. We can debate the etiology and ontology of sexual and gender identities until the cows come home. We can't debate the practical problem that attempts to coercively change those identities kill people.
Bookmarks saved over vacation:
More than one-third of the sample (African-American lesbian or bisexual women) reported a negative health care experience in the past 5-years. One fourth of those reporting a negative experience attributed it to discrimination including race/ethnicity (70.4%), gender (58.2%), and sexual orientation (46.2%). (The categories were not mutually exclusive). Reduction in health care utilization (i.e., didn't see a doctor next time when they were ill) following the negative experience was common (34%).
Predictors and Consequences of Negative Patient-Provider Interactions Among a Sample of African American Sexual Minority Women, Chien-Ching Li @ LGBT Health
In a hashtag chat with DC Comics, writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner confirmed that Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy are totally a thing.
Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy Confirmed As Girlfriends “Without the Jealousy of Monogamy”, Jessica Lachenal @ The Mary Sue
Bauer’s team looked at 13 modifiable factors in the lives of trans people. They found that strong parental support for expressed gender “corresponds to a potential prevention of 170 trans persons per 1000” from seriously considering suicide, and those who reported experiencing lower levels of transphobia were 66 per cent less likely to have seriously considered suicide in the past year.
Suicide risk for trans people can be reduced, new study shows, Julian Uzielli @ The Globe and Mail
Psychosocial vulnerability and HIV-related sexual risk among men who have sex with men and women in the United States, Dyer, et. al @ Archives of Sexual Behavior (Pubmed)
“Gay people stood up and said, ‘This is who I am,’” Ginsburg said, and Americans saw that the person was a neighbor, a child’s best friend or maybe even their own children. They were “people we know and love and respect.”
As she was speaking, the gay pride parade was rolling through downtown just a few blocks away, and the Capital Hilton, where the ACS was meeting, was flying a rainbow flag just below Old Glory.
“The court is not a popularity contest, and it should never be influenced by today’s headlines,” Ginsburg said. But she added that it “inevitably it will be affected by the climate of the era.
Looking for clues to Supreme Court’s final rulings in Ginsburg’s good mood, Robert Barnes @ The Washington Post
Explanation: Braided, serpentine filaments of glowing gas suggest this nebula's popular name, The Medusa Nebula. Also known as Abell 21, this Medusa is an old planetary nebula some 1,500 light-years away along the southern border of the constellation Gemini. Like its mythological namesake, the nebula is associated with a dramatic transformation. The planetary nebula phase represents a final stage in the evolution of low mass stars like the sun, as they transform themselves from red giants to hot white dwarf stars and in the process shrug off their outer layers. Ultraviolet radiation from the hot star powers the nebular glow. An unrelated, bright, foreground star is near center in this close-up, telescopic view, while the Medusa's transforming central star is actually the dimmer star below center and toward the right-hand part of the frame. The Medusa Nebula is estimated to be over 4 light-years across.
"Nevermind all those fossils that demonstrate the presence of feathering in all birdlike dinosaurs, or the bony feather attachment knobs present on the arm of velociraptor. Judging from the trailers, Jurassic World has opted to stick with scaly-skinned raptors, scientific advancement be damned." (Darren Nash)
...
Thomas R. Holtz, Jr, a paleontologist at the University of Maryland, told CBS News. "Sadly, the dinosaurs in Jurassic World have not been updated with any new information from the 1990s or 2000s or 2010s, and indeed in a few cases are less accurate than in the original movie."
Oh, good, I'm not the only one who noticed.
Jurassic World dinosaurs slammed by paleontologists: Nick Allen @ The Telegraph
Tentative candidate for the lost Philae lander on comet 67P/C-G. The search for the landing site is described in an ESA Blog Post. (Emily Baldwin @ ESA)
Gets really weird about 4:30.
The video is cited in this paper (PDF).
@marcoarment We also argue which 1970s text editor is best to use in a 1990s emulator of a 1980s terminal
— Colin Weir (@radiocolin) May 18, 2015A new video animation of dwarf planet Ceres, based on images taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, provides dramatic flyover views of this heavily cratered, mysterious world. The images come from Dawn's first mapping orbit at Ceres, at an altitude of 8,400 mile (13,600 kilometers), as well as navigational images taken from 3,200 miles (5,100 kilometers) away. The images provided information for a three-dimensional terrain model. The vertical dimension has been exaggerated by a factor of two, and a star field has been added in the background.
(Reposting this from tumblr.)
Biphobia I have personally experienced:
Biphobia I've witnessed in my culture:
She says she has come to consider her own sexuality -- even her own gender identification -- fluid. "I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn't involve an animal and everyone is of age. Everything that's legal, I'm down with. Yo, I'm down with any adult -- anyone over the age of 18 who is down to love me," she says. "I don't relate to being boy or girl, and I don't have to have my partner relate to boy or girl." She says she's had romantic entanglements with women that were just as serious as the ones (Liam Hemsworth, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Nick Jonas) that ended up in Us Weekly. "I've had that," she admits. "But people never really looked at it, and I never brought it into the spotlight."
(Since everyone else is blogging Miley.)
Stepson of Stuxnet stalked Kaspersky for months, tapped Iran nuke talks @ Ars Technica
Developers planted several false flags in the malware to give the appearance its origins were in Eastern Europe or China. But as the Kaspersky researchers delved further into the 100 modules that encompass the platform, they discovered it was an updated version of Duqu, the malware discovered in late 2011 with code directly derived from Stuxnet. Evidence later suggested Duqu was used to spy on Iran's efforts to develop nuclear material and keep tabs on the country's trade relationships. Duqu's precise relation to Stuxnet remained a mystery when the group behind it went dark in 2012. Now, not only was it back with updated Stuxnet-derived malware that spied on Iran, it was also escalating its campaign with a brazen strike on Kaspersky.
Waking up in the wrong science fiction future.
But this is lisp. We're very non-functional and very proud of it.
— Doug Hoyte Let Over Lambda
HIV risk among young gay, bi men tied to societal issues - Business Insider:
People who described themselves as being in low to average social and economic groups were more likely to become HIV-positive than those in higher socioeconomic groups.
...
"HIV is a biological phenomena and it is a behavioral phenomena, but in this day and age it is a social and structural phenomena," he said.
ETA
Homophobia Increases HIV Risk In Gay, Bisexual Men @ University Herald
"Our findings suggest that rather than primarily being the result of personal failure, HIV risk is largely determined by national laws, policies, and attitudes toward homosexuality," John Pachankis, lead author of the study, said in a statement. "This study shows that gay and bisexual men in homophobic countries are denied the resources, including psychological resources like open self-expression, that are necessary to stay healthy."
For the study, researchers collected and analyzed data from the European MSM Internet Survey, which was completed by 174,000 gay and bisexual men. They compared this data to a measure of country-level laws, policies, and social attitudes toward homosexuality.
They found that attitudes about homosexuality varied greatly across the continent, but they noticed that men living in countries with higher levels of homophobia knew less about HIV and were less likely to use condoms. This finding leads the researchers to conclude that homophobia reduces the use of health services and compromises health-service quality.
“I spent a lot of time, in my earlier years of limelight, suppressing myself.” The rapper, who tackles homophobia and rape culture in verse, is making forays into TV and photography, working on a new record — and refusing to be suppressed any longer.
‘I want you to see my child as I do,’ he said.
‘See pictures of her smiling like the world has no gravity. See how lovely she looks in a sparkly dress. See how perfect she is.
‘Then I want you to notice that all of my children look that way. So do yours. They are too young to be malicious, or contrived.
They simply exist, and when we allow them to exist as they really are, they are happier than anything you will see in an adult.
‘ I don’t ever want the light that beams from my children’s eyes extinguished.’
Sense8 (released on Netflix) tends to get a bit preachy at times. But it does something that I've seen lacking in many treatments of sexuality in mass media. It puts the LGBT community and culture of Nomi and her lover on the same footing as the other communities that the protagonists live in. Participation in San Francisco Pride is treated the same way as a Russian/German funeral, prenuptial celebrations in India, the business etiquette of Seoul, a Mexican movie premiere, and a day on the job for a Chicago police officer. And it's nice to see LGBT people who are not "straight-acting" as characters that are not played up for comedy, including the punky bears in the opening credits.
The post-apocalyptic dimensional space of Native video game design | Ars Technica:
Doom's potential connections to Native culture go farther than that, though. “I have a theory,” LaPensée said from her home in Oregon. “John Romero broke ground with Doom, but what was it that he was doing? He was expanding dimensional space in that game.” The PhD graduate from Simon Fraser University, and her family, were familiar with concepts like dimensional space well before they could be related to the alternate realities of games like Doom. She talked about the teachings she drew upon as a member of the Anishinaabe and Métis tribes—along with those of the Cree—and their commonalities.
Using Racket to generate identicons:
I’ve always liked identicons, which WordPress and GitHub have used to great effect. The premise is simple: take a user identifier such as an IP or email address and deterministically convert it into an image based on a simple algorithm. To that I end I started hacking on Identikon - a little Racket program that generates different types of identicons based on rules modules.
After being censored and outed by his principal, a Colorado teen gets to give his valedictorian speech.
But among the social conservatives who are a powerful force within the Republican Party, there is a far darker view. To them, the widespread acceptance of Jenner’s evolution from an Olympic gold medalist whose masculinity was enshrined on a Wheaties box to a shapely woman posing suggestively on the cover of Vanity Fair was a reminder that they are losing the culture wars.
Bisexual community mourns loss of bisexual teen, Adam Kizer
REMEMBER before you pack for a trip that has no return, try and reach a community of people who have pretty much been there and survived. Give us the chance to remind you of your inheritance still to come. From orange juice boycotts to sex education to PRIDE itself, you are part of a legend still in the making but only if you make it to tomorrow.
--Faith Cheltenham
Advocate coverage of the Adam Kizer suicide.
Deportation is on hold, again, for bisexual Orashia Edwards. His forced flight from the U.K. to his native Jamaica has been canceled, pending another appeal, as he tries to convince British authorities he is, in fact, bisexual.
A trial in New Jersey this week will determine whether telling gay people that they can become straight constitutes consumer fraud. The ruling might mean the end of so-called “conversion therapies” for good.
…
For one session that reportedly cost $100, Downing asked Levin to stand in front of a full-length mirror. According to court documents, Downing told Levin to say a negative thing about himself and remove an article of clothing with each criticism. When he was fully naked, Levin alleges that Downing told him to touch his penis and his buttocks. Eventually, Downing said “good,” and the session ended. Downing allegedly tried similar nudity-based methods on other JONAH clients.
Queereka | #BiphobiaKills – Why We Need To Talk About Bi Suicides - http://queereka.com/:
According to a 2011 study conducted by Joseph Robinson and Dorothy Espelage of the Illinois College of Education, out of the 33% of LGBTQ students surveyed who reported thinking about suicide during the past month, 44% of the bisexual youth surveyed they had contemplated suicide, placing bisexuals at a higher risk. The report also shows bisexual youths “wereat elevated risk of suicide attempts, with more than 21 percent reporting that they had made at least one attempt during the prior year.”
Three great videos from Rainbow Health Ontario:
Bisexual Community and Partners
Bisexual Community and Friends
Bisexual Community and Parents
They really highlight why I think being out to family, friends, and partners is important to me.
I’ve been having a problem with ido screwing up on windows. Here is a fix.
;;disable ido caching on windows
(require 'ido)
(when (equal system-type 'windows-nt)
(setq ido-max-dir-file-cache 0)
(add-to-list 'ido-work-directory-list-ignore-regexps
"Local Settings")
(add-to-list 'ido-work-directory-list-ignore-regexps
"Application Data"))