We just passed the halfway point of our fundraising goal for Banned Books Back! Moms for Liberty, eat your hearts out! 😏
To recap, our collective received a serendipitous donation of children's books that had been removed from Florida schools as part of an ongoing effort to censor titles depicting queer joy, civil rights history, immigrant stories, and more. Right now, our collective is harboring dozens of boxes of these "dangerous" titles — but not for long. Later this month, we'll be calling on our local community to help package bundles and send these Banned Books... Back!
Thank you so much to the folks who have boosted this effort, including but not limited to Autostraddle, The Washington Post, LGBTQ Nation, so many rad bookseller buddies, and the 270+ folks who've donated. 💓
According to Jon Bakos on Bluesky, 🍉 (to show Palestinian solidarity) is the Political Word of the Year in the American Dialect Society voting. #Woty2023
The downside is it makes Google the de facto owner of all of your online information. You could never use a Google product, but because they have such a large market share they’ll essentially force every site and platform to use their solution.
So, having played some #geometrydash 2.2 for a while, I'm starting to warm up to the swing. I'm still not a massive fan and way prefer the ship (which gives you more control), but the swing's long sweeps can help give sections with it a large, grand vibe (e.g., the swing section in Dastardly). Maybe my distaste is just a skill issue. Idk.
Zit er iemand op Goodreads, of weet er iemand een goed alternatief?
Achtergrond: ik heb me dus voorgenomen om wat meer te lezen. (Ben begonnen aan 'La Vieille' van Georges Simenon. Mijn tweede voornemen is om mijn verroest Frans wat WD40 te geven.)
Ben op zoek naar allerlei leestips, vandaar. ik lees uitsluitend fictie, en van het soort waar personen centraal staan. My all time favourite is El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha. (dat is trouwens mijn leestip aan jullie!)
#domicide must be recognised as an international crime
The massive, arbitrary destruction of civilian housing in violent conflict should be recognised as a crime under international law, the UN’s independent housing rights expert told the General Assembly today [28 October 2022].
"I do believe that #Israel's actions amount to domicide, and may now very well constitute acts of genocide as well. The attacks by Israel have destroyed not just homes, but hospitals… historic streets, public buildings holding important records and archives… the main public library, all four of Gaza's universities, #Gaza's old city, the ancient port of Gaza, and many museums including the newly opened #Rafah Museum of Palestinian Heritage. This utter annihilation of Gaza as a place erases the past, present and future of the Palestinians."
[cont’d] The obliteration of Gaza’s multi-civilizational treasures [Ibtisam Mahdi]
[…] #Israel’s war has brought ruin to thousands of years of rich heritage in #Gaza, with Palestinian experts decrying the destruction as a cultural genocide.
Using #language to counter bias favoring masculine-specific representations:
• gender-unmarked forms (neutralization strategy, e.g., “l'enfant”) are not fully effective in neutralizing the masculine bias.
• contracted double forms (re-feminization strategy, e.g., “un·e enfant”) are more effective in promoting gender balance compared to gender-unmarked forms.
Love is not supposed to be beautiful. It’s supposed to be a raw, gritty struggle that forces you to face the most vulnerable parts of yourself, so that when the good times come, you can savor and enjoy them, fully appreciate what they’re worth. Otherwise, you take it all for granted. —Lana Myers
The Cairo Geniza is a collection of 400,000 documents found in a synagogue in Egypt that span the Middle-Eastern, North African, and Andalusian Jewish history between the 6th and 19th centuries CE, and comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world.
@baruch and you can access over 18.000, 4.000 of which have keywords 🤩
"Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, over 4000 documentary Genizah manuscripts (e.g. letters and legal documents) have been associated with key terms - such as ‘cheese’, ‘pirates’, or ‘ gambling’ - as well as names, dates and places drawn from over 100 years of published scholarship on the Collection." https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/genizah/1 #JewishHistory@histodons
@Kay@bookstodon yes I love the #bookstodon tag, one of my favorite tags on Mastodon. I don't really have an issue finding books to read though, it's kind of the opposite actually. I have too many I want to read. 😅
I've been thinking about getting a hardware security key and have heard of yubikey before; but I want to see what my options are and if they are worth it in your opinion.
My current setup is a local KeePassXC database (that I sync between my PC and phone and also acts as TOTP authenticator app), I know that KeePass supports hardware keys for unlocking the database.
I am personally still of the belief that passwords are the safest when done right; but 2FA/MFA can greatly increase security on top of that (again, if done right).
The key work work together with already existing passwords, not replace them.
As I use linux as my primary OS I do expect it to support it and anything that doesn't I will have to pass on.
PS: what are the things I need to know about these hardware keys that's not being talked about too much, I am very much delving into new territory and want to make sure I'm properly educated before I delve in.
When I did some research on hardware keys I was between Yubikey and Nitrokey. I ended up going with Yubikey because KeepassXC supported it.
Something to keep in mind is purchasing a backup key. I bought one for my wife and we use each other’s as a backup.
For KeepassXC it does not support registering multiple keys (at least not that I have figured out), so I have a copy of my database where it uses my wife’s key as a backup.
It's 4 January, the anniversary of Louis Braille's birth. Every year at this time, I like to reflect on a man who was a teacher in his lifetime, and who in the years after his death has taught us lessons of empowerment, resilience, and self-determination.
Every day, I am grateful for the gift of literacy he gave me and millions like me who are blind. In the last year, I have benefited from that gift by labelling and identifying items.
I have referred to copious notes in meetings as part of my job as a CEO. Also in that role, I know that if I take the time to proof a document with Braille, it will be accurate all the way down to picking up extraneous punctuation that I might miss with text-to-speech.
It has helped the global community of blind podcast listeners as I read aloud with fluency the many contributions that come into my Living Blindfully podcast. One of the most wonderful things about that podcast is when I hear from people who were denied Braille as a child, or who became blind later in life, who have told me that my reading Braille on the podcast has encouraged them to embark on their own Braille reading journey.
I've delivered presentations to audiences around the world, some of those were large audiences, and read my speech notes in Braille.
Best of all, Braille allows me to read stories for my granddaughter, just as I read to my own children when they were little.
My life would be very different, and very much the poorer, without it. And my story is not unusual. The data are clear that blind people who know Braille have a far higher chance of finding employment.
The story of the Braille code shows us that the best people to develop solutions for blind people are blind people ourselves. Louis Braille designed, then refined his code, and taught it to other blind people. There was a period where the books containing his code were burned. The Braille code was driven underground because some sighted people felt threatened by its otherness. They insisted that blind people should conform and read raised print, even though it was inefficient. Thankfully, the Braille code prevailed. That lesson is just as applicable today.
Some think Braille is no longer necessary because blind people have talking books and talking computers now. This view is wrong and harmful. To people who say these things, I say we'll give up Braille when sighted people stop reading print and use audio exclusively too. Braille is our equivalent to print. When something is under my fingertips, I remember it more clearly. It is the same as being a visual learner.
And Braille is more vibrant than ever, thanks to an exciting range of Braille displays. It is also a tool of profound significance for those who are DeafBlind, for whom audio isn't an option.
So once again, a toast to Louis Braille the man, and Braille the code which in New Zealand we capitalise to always remember his genius and his sacrifice.
@JonathanMosen this is great stuff, I especially thought about this snippet:
"Some think Braille is no longer necessary because blind people have talking books and talking computers now. This view is wrong and harmful. To people who say these things, I say we'll give up Braille when sighted people stop reading print and use audio exclusively too."
Braille and also print both allow for a VERY flexible reading velocity based on your capacity to understand the respective words!
📖 The Fragile Threads of Power, by @veschwab. What a promising start to this new trilogy! So much of what I loved from the Shades of Magic universe is still here, but also a lot of novelty and very strong characters building. ✨ https://kevinplattret.com/reads/the-fragile-threads-of-power
How would commercial translation and transcription models perform when faced with genuine news content, exacting journalists and the pressing demands of a newsroom? We devised a quality assessment to help BBC journalists decide.