Five Senators Join the Fight to Learn Just How Bad Ring Really Is: “…if police want to request footage from a person’s front door in reference to a car break-in on that street, there is no need for police to verify that footage would be helpful to solving that incident, or whether the footage would even be used for that particular incident and not for other purposes. If a person agrees to share their footage with police, police then have that footage forever and can share it with whoever they want without oversight or restrictions. This means footage from your door, requested by local police to catch an alleged thief in the neighborhood, could end up being used by another law enforcement agency for a completely attenuated purpose, such as identifying someone for deportation—without your knowledge or direct consent.”
Month: November 2019
Every scan they had run on the canister since they’d unearthed it had shown it to be hollow. It was only after they cracked the seal that they understood that hollow and empty were two very different things.
She’d heard all the comments: Everyone only remembers the first person to do something. Once it’s done once, it’s not exciting. Who was the second person on the moon, after all?
But really—being the second person on Mars was still pretty damn exciting.
Apple sleuths hunt Northwest for varieties believed extinct: “E.J. Brandt and David Benscoter, who together form the nonprofit Lost Apple Project, log countless hours and hundreds of miles in trucks, on all-terrain vehicles and on foot to find orchards planted by settlers as they pushed west more than a century ago.”
The ship drifted in space, sensors active, waiting for the radiation surge to abate so the crew could be revived. But the stasis pods weren’t shielded against this type of radiation, and what emerged would be very different from what had gone in.
The parts arrived in the mail, each one with just enough instructions to allow him to attach it to what had come before. Who sent them or what they would build were the mystery that kept him working, but the quantity of needles was starting to worry him.
Monty Python and Enjoying Problematic Media
There are the Monty Python skits everyone knows and remembers fondly. Then…there are the others.
One of the interesting things about going through all four seasons of Monty Python (not watching, but stepping and skimming through as I add chapter markers for the skits to my rips of the just-released restored box set) is realizing just how frequently blackface (and full-body makeup) appears. It’s not every skit or even every episode, but it’s not just a one-off occurrence, either.
I’m sure this isn’t exactly breaking news, nor particularly surprising to those who have a more in-depth familiarity with Monty Python over the years than I have. I watched it in my youth, I know the most popular sketches, have watched and own many of the movies, and so on, but haven’t just sat and watched the shows themselves in ages (and I have to wonder how much the shows I saw were edited for US/PBS broadcast when I was first seeing them). And while the full rewatch will happen a bit later, after I’m done getting the rips chapterized, converted to .mp4, and added to my Plex server, even this quick skim through has been a somewhat eye-opening experience.
This doesn’t mean I’m no longer a fan of Monty Python. But it’s another reminder that it’s okay to be a fan of problematic media, but you should be able and willing to recognize and think critically about those parts that are problematic, rather than just glossing over them or shrugging them off.
“Truly,” thought the commander, overlooking the fleet of ships before their eyes, “this is magnificent. Surely, no fleet as superb as this one had been seen since—“
“Alex!”
“What, mom?”
“Turn off the holoprojector and get in bed! Now!”
They sighed.
One nice thing about the aliens being so selective about who they accepted, even if the reasons were unknown, was that anyone who wasn’t an economically privileged cis straight white male could just get on with their lives. Things improved quickly.
Only after she let her fingers slip over the side of the boat to drift through the water did she realize that the lake was more clear than she thought. Or at least, the murky substance wasn’t part of the water, as it flowed over her hand and up her arm.