湯豆腐kurage

ﾋﾟｯﾋﾟｯﾋﾟｯﾋﾟｯ!

https://www.youtube.com/@kurage7014

total aside, but Kurage seek room has a youtube channel that they've been uploading new tracks to. their production has gotten a lot more refined!

Now seems as good a time as any to remind ppl of the IP lobby’s complicity in the continued ravages of covid-19

Hollywood Lobbyists Intervene Against Proposal to Share Vaccine Technology

Industries that rely on copyright enforcement want to limit the scope of the World Trade Organization waiver.

https://href.li/?https://theintercept.com/2021/04/27/covid-vaccine-copyright-hollywood-lobbyists/

ultraviolet-divergence

The crisis is upon us. Meta has lost its bet that we will all volunteer to live out the rest of our days as heavily surveilled, legless, sexless, low-polygon cartoon characters. It is firing thousands of technologists and hemorrhaging money.

Amazon has lost its bet that we will all volunteer to install hidden microphones in every room of our house so that the company can mine our every thought for actionable market intelligence. Alexa has lost billions and Amazon is reducing its team to a skeleton crew.

Softbank, the investment fund that funneled tens of billions in Saudi royal oil money into bets on monopolies like Uber and WeWork is now broke, and its founder, Masayoshi Son, is in disgrace and billions of dollars in debt.

The idea that we could strip-mine useful and productive businesses forever has an obvious flaw: eventually you will run out of productive businesses. But there’s another, slightly less obvious flaw: long before the entire productive economy grinds to a halt, everyone who relies on it will get very, very angry.

'Avatar 2' Delayed Until at Least 2015, Says Jon Landau

James Cameron is collaborating with effects firm Weta Digital on an "underwater motion capture system" for sequences that will explore the o

https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hollywoodreporter.com%2Fheat-vision%2Favatar-2-delayed-at-2015-308743&t=ODM1Y2E0MTY3MjUzODc5MjgwZjkxZDc2OGU3NjEwNWU4YWY4YmU1ZSwyOTZhOTAyNGExOWU2MTUwMDM0ZGJlNmUwM2IyMjgxODkxM2FmMWJh

Cant wait

studentofetherium

new story! another one set in @toskarin's boyfriend of steel universe. this is a horror mecha story about how being gay can sometimes cause problems

studentofetherium

hey i wrote a thing and you should read it because it's good!

new story! another one set in @toskarin's boyfriend of steel universe. this is a horror mecha story about how being gay can sometimes cause problems

Statement from Kurvitz and Rostov has just gone up. Oof.

Kishida eyes launching probe into controversial Unification Church

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is considering launching an investigation into the Unification Church, a religious group under increas

https://href.li/?https://japantoday.com/category/politics/update3-japan-pm-eyes-launching-probe-into-controversial-unification-church

Lmao [15 Oct 22]

studentofetherium

i wrote fanfic for @toskarin's Boyfriends of Steel setting! it's about plurality and aphantasia and how weird thinking is

studentofetherium

also! this was the 150th story i published on AO3 and that's pretty cool

saxifraga-x-urbium

Two decades of Alzheimer's research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives

Last month, drug company Genentech reported on the first clinical trials of the drug crenezumab, a drug targeting amyloid proteins that form

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2022/7/22/2111914/-Two-decades-of-Alzheimer-s-research-may-be-based-on-deliberate-fraud-that-has-cost-millions-of-lives

fucking livid

partisan-by-default

Last month, drug company Genentech reported on the first clinical trials of the drug crenezumab, a drug targeting amyloid proteins that form sticky plaques in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients. The drug had been particularly effective in animal models, and the trial results were eagerly awaited as one of the most promising treatments in years. It did not work. “Crenezumab did not slow or prevent cognitive decline” in people with a predisposition toward Alzheimer’s.

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) narrowly approved the use of Aduhelm, a new drug from Biogen that the company has priced so highly that it’s expected to drive up the price of Medicare for everyone in America, even those who never need this drug. Aduhelm was the first drug to be approved that fights the accumulation of those "amyloid plaques" in the brain. What makes the approval of the $56,000-a-dose drug so controversial is that while it does decrease plaques, it doesn’t actually slow Alzheimer’s. In fact, clinical trials were suspended in 2019 after the treatment showed “no clinical benefits.” (Which did not keep Biogen from seeking the drug’s approval or pricing it astronomically.)

Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It’s not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer’s has a record that makes the batting average in other areas look like Hall of Fame material.

And now we have a good idea of why. Because it looks like the original paper that established the amyloid plaque model as the foundation of Alzheimer’s research over the last 16 years might not just be wrong, but a deliberate fraud.

saxifraga-x-urbium

thanks for the text extraction, i was on my phone <3

weird-ecologies

Jesus christ

anarchy-in-new-vegas

It would've been one thing if they were upfront about this, but hiding it means they can't be trusted. Time to look for a new search engine. Any one know any other tracker-resistant search engines?

sibyl-of-space

I looked into this because I use DuckDuckGo and I think it's really important to keep organizations accountable especially when they claim to be different TM than shitty ones. So it looks like this is true (as of now) for the mobile browser application specifically, not the search engine in general.

which means that using the search engine on another browser like Firefox should be fine, and also now is a great time to let the company know exactly why you are uninstalling their *application* on your device to hopefully either force a backpedal or heavily discourage further shit like this down the line.

it's a slimy move to be sure. I just think it's important to be specific and precise. Here's another article on the subject:

��� https://www.searchenginejournal.com/duckduckgo-microsoft-trackers/452006/

DuckDuckGo's Search Deal Stops Browser From Blocking Microsoft Trackers

DuckDuckGo's mobile web browser allows Microsoft data trackers, despite promising privacy protections.

https://href.li/?https://www.searchenginejournal.com/duckduckgo-microsoft-trackers/452006/

martinkhall

The problem I think a lot of people are having though is that while this was only on their mobile browser they also didn’t tell us about it until after someone else found it and alerted people.

So what might they not be telling us about their desktop browser and search engine because no one else has discovered it yet?

United Workers of Seven Seas

United Workers of Seven Seas's manifesto and demands

http://uw7s.squarespace.com/

The workers of @sevenseasentertainment just announced formation of a union. This is the first union for the manga, light novel, and danmei industry. Among their demands are healthcare coverage, paid time off and vacations, an end to crunch, an end to treating freelancers like full time employees, as well as extending benefits and protections to freelancers when hiring freelancers is appropriate.

Seven Seas employs over 40 staff members and works with many freelancers on top of that number to bring one of the most diverse lineups of any company in the industry to English-speaking readers, including a label for boys’ love and yuri comics and light novels, danmei titles such as the English edition of MXTX, as well as several award-winning and best-selling manga and light novels across a wide variety of genres. They are one of the fastest growing small publishers in the industry.

As a fellow manga industry professional I urge @sevenseasentertainment to recognize the union and bring them to the negotiation table immediately!

nflstreet

Activision Inexplicably Introduces Tool to Rate Character Diversity Metrics

The tool is theoretically supposed to rate character designs on different diversity metrics, which is an utterly weird solution.

https://www.fanbyte.com/news/activision-inexplicably-introduces-tool-to-rate-character-diversity-metrics/

you know, i’m not surprised that activision blizzard has committed to the bit of being faux-woke so much that it circled around back to doing physiognomy for video game characters. kind of a natural end point if you think about it. anyways this is fucking weird

normal-horoscopes

[hits the Delphic fumes] “Apollo says that the inherent societal goodness of a video game character can be plotted on a chart.”

Bored Ape Yacht Club Just Broke the Ethereum Blockchain

A new NFT collection was launched on Saturday by the Bored Ape Yacht Club team. The Ethereum blockchain was crushed by the demand.

https://href.li/?https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/crypto/bored-ape-yacht-club-just-broke-the-ethereum-blockchain/

Start with gas fees. To transact on Ethereum, you need to pay for "gas" -- essentially a transaction fee, the expense of which is determined by how much activity is occuring on the blockchain. Gas fees between $10 and $100 are typical. But because of the massive demand -- and because traders outbid each other by paying higher gas fees so their transactions go through faster -- people minting Otherside land NFTs were dropping up to $7,000 in gas fees (2.6 ether). 

[...]

Because the Otherside mint impacts the whole blockchain, people doing completely unrelated things like selling ether or trading altcoins would also have to pay huge fees, and wait hours for their transactions to clear. Someone tweeted a picture of them trying to send $100 in crypto from one wallet to another, showing it required $1,700 in gas fees.

Over $175 million was spent on gas alone. Ethereum's blockchain has a deflationary protocol that burns most ether spent on gas -- so much of that $175 million is now simply gone.

things are continuing to go well in the crypto world I see

callmearcturus

"Consent" Is the Wrong Framework for Experiencing Art

Moral panic about fiction is a misguided outlet for anger about the real world

https://href.li/?https://www.gawker.com/culture/can-you-consent-to-fictional-events

What separates the people who spend their lives crusading against depictions of homosexuality in art and public life from those who spend theirs railing at independent creators for not perfectly protecting them from anything that might give them a negative emotion? For all that users posit that it’s an artist’s duty to provide trigger warnings as a matter of public safety and responsibility, allowing their audiences “avoid harm,” the very idea that art itself can cause harm either by victimizing someone engaging with it or by “normalizing” antisocial behavior pushes the conversation into reactionary territory. War and rape and interpersonal brutalization have been fixtures of human interaction since before history’s record began; the engines driving them are power, abuse, poverty, and other broad and tangible social forces. Depictions of morality in art offer only a pale reflection of these real-world horrors, and so function for many frustrated and powerless people as a safe arena in which to battle out ideas unrelated to art’s role in society.

Perhaps a movie reminds a viewer of abuse suffered in their childhood. Perhaps that viewer is then triggered, and must leave the theater in a state of severe agitation. Perhaps their day is ruined, their week thrown off, their compulsive behavior thrown into activation. The harm in this situation, the tangible damage to a human life, was done before the viewer ever bought a ticket. It was done between human beings, and no matter how terrible the effects of being brought back to this experience are, responsibility lies with the trauma’s original cause, not with art which coincidentally recalls it.

/standing ovation

This is why I get so angry. The things we warn for, the content that triggers huge groups of people, these are things we can push back against and fight. We can try to reduce abuse and poverty.

But for the people who get up in arms about Problematique Media, its easier to get mad at a piece of art than it is to work on the actual problems, and thus shifts the focus and blame off the problems and onto art that depicts it.

INCREDIBLE read.

stripedroseandsketchpads

Another excellent quote:

This isn’t to say that someone cannot experience an intense emotional reaction to a video game like Boyfriend Dungeon, but such a reaction’s relationship to the social concept of consent is radically different than if such a feeling arose during an interpersonal interaction. A video game might upset you, it might remind you of traumatic experiences, it might have as its subject matter something you find fundamentally unpalatable or unapproachable, but at the end of the day you can turn it off, return it, or otherwise choose not to keep interacting with it. A video game does not have human agency and cannot inflict itself on players. It cannot violate consent any more than a dog can, or a rock. Similarly, regarding Mardoll’s claims that Boyfriend Dungeon is “unsafe” because it fails to conform to his idea of good aromantic and asexual representation, a story does not become dangerous when it isn’t exactly what any given segment of its audience wants or expects.

( I just also wanted to clarify, because out of context it might seem like it’s potentially belittling an actual problem - this guy’s claim that it’s “hostile to aro/ace people” isn’t because of any in-game or creator aphobia; it’s just… the fact that it’s a sexually suggestive dating sim. It’s the fact that it is in that genre and it exists. Which is clearly a bad-faith argument made by someone who knew “this personally upset me” wasn’t actually a good enough excuse to convince everyone that this thing was irredeemably terrible, rather than actually about caring about aroaces.)

Edit: further clarification, I personally am in favor of content warnings and I don’t think I agree with the position the author makes about them at the end, but I do fundamentally agree that the source of harm caused by triggers is he trauma itself, not the work of fiction/whatever huge number of other things it may be that triggers the traumatic memories. Triggers are worth knowing about and avoiding but they are not literally the trauma itself.

profsycamore

Click on it twice. These are your two super powers.

joyceanfartboner

everyone else always seems to fucking get cool shit and i always get like “gel manipulation” and “using dust along w/ your fighting style”

zarya-zaryanitsa

Stop Boycotting Random Russian Things

Dump all the vodka you want. You are not stopping the war in Ukraine.

Dan Kois

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/03/russia-boycott-ukraine-war-smirnoff-stoli-vodka-stupid.html?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=traffic&utm_source=article&utm_content=twitter_share

Few words on boycotting mindlessly.

dipshit-chan

remember when ppl were saying that russophobia was gonna end up fucking over ukranians ?