MJ Paxton | Unusual Velocity

Author: admin

  • Social media & RSS

    I’ve been a huge fan of RSS for a long time; over the last few months I’ve been think of RSS feeds more and more as a way to get around the broken algorithms of Twitter, FB, and IG’s apps & main sites.

    Unfortunately, because of that utility these sites often don’t have built-in RSS support. Mastodon does (and I need to add more mast feeds to my reader), and so does YouTube, but twitter and IG need third-party sites to scrape up feeds. Which are fine as long as they work, but are by nature a fragile mechanism.

    For the last year and change, my primary interaction with Twitter has been through these hacked together RSS. And honestly, I love not going to the site. I can skim through tweets in chronological order, and only have to go in to interact with a post. It’s remarkably easy to reach this level of control over your feeds; I wish more people would.

    Not sure how to wrap this post up, but a call to action is always good. So how about this – if you use an RSS reader, look into how to migrate your social media feeds in so you can control your inputs. If you don’t use RSS yet, check into them. Or comment on this post and ask for recommendations? Something like that.

  • Fuck Mike Pence and the Trump he rode in on

    From Vanity Fair, but reported elsewhere: The Trump Administration Wants to Define Gender as Biological Sex at Birth

    I’m upset enough about this that I don’t have anything coherent to say right now. If I mean anything to you, please work to protect LGBTQIAA+ people from the bigots in office right now. Call your reps, national and local.

  • What Kavanaugh means for evangelical/Christian fundamentalist voters

    You no longer have an excuse.

    In 2016, evangelical and Christian fundamentalist leaders said it was okay to vote for Trump, because he would give you the courts. You’ve got them now.

    From here on, if you vote for Trump you are voting for

    • A man who wants to put children in concentration camps, where many will die
    • A man who bragged about sexually assaulting women
    • A man who thinks neo-Nazis are “fine people”
    • A man who wants you to believe that men are more likely to be falsely accused of assault than women are to be assaulted, abused, or rape, and that men are the real victims of sexual assault

    These are not political issues. These are clear-cut moral lines. We know what kind of person Trump is, because he told us.

    What kind of person are you?

  • I just watched a wonderful critique of The Hobbit movies

    A few years ago (2012 or 2013 I think?) there was a multipart YouTube series from a channel called “RedLetterMedia” that broke down all the reasons why the Star Wars prequels just didn’t work, everything from general storytelling to contradicting worldbuilding in the original trilogy. That series was punctuated with some very disturbing “framing elements” with some severe misogyny, though, that’s made me unable to go back to it.

    I mention that because tonight I just watched a series that critiqued The Hobbit movie trilogy and was as good or better from a storytelling analysis perspective and was, at least on first viewing, entirely unproblematic. The review, I mean. The Hobbit had plenty of problems, on- and off-screen. One quote that really stuck with me was “I find myself unable to remember why I was so passionate about The Lord Of The Rings and the works of Tolkien in the first place,” because it made me realize that I used to rewatch LOTR every year or two, but haven’t even had the desire since seeing the Hobbitses.

    I’m embedding all three videos below.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTRUQ-RKfUs]
    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElPJr_tKkO4]
    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi7t_g5QObs]

  • I wish I could quit facebook

    Whenever I start thinking about what my ideal social media platform would be, before long I realize I’m describing “my own website + RSS to follow others + email”

  • “The Iran Deal”

    I’m more worried about the consequences of unilaterally pulling out of a peaceful nuclear deterrent deal – one that many inspectors said Iran was abiding by – than I was about all of President Trump’s cock-waggling at North Korea in his first 14 months.

    We finally gave peace a chance, and it was working, and Trump couldn’t stand it because the deal was negotiated by a black left-of-center president. This racist child wants to go to war so that his favorite TV shows will say he’s a big man.

  • Oliver North

    It seems strange that the NRA, chief proponents of the “good guy with a gun” myth, would appoint as president a person most famous for illegally supplying bad folks with guns.

  • Phrasing

    I think I’ve figured out what bothers me about the phrases “this is not normal” and “don’t normalize this.” I’ve said for a while that if you listen to marginalized people, the things we say “this is not normal” about actually are normal, they’ve just been said and done more politely.

    Instead, I think we should be saying “this is not acceptable” (or “don’t accept this”) – because the evil is normal, but we shouldn’t put up with it.

  • Everyone deserves a fair hearing

    And that a “fair hearing” includes “suffering consequences for the wrongs you have done”

    And that a “fair hearing” does not include badgering non-white politicians for their birth certificates

    And that a “fair hearing” does not include insisting political rivals (or former rivals) be investigated for crimes that multiple investigations from multiple branches of government have already cleared them of

    And certainly not extra-judicial police violence, or discrimination based on country of origin, or reducing avenues of legal immigration

  • Hearing complaints about California’s open primary

    …and want to yell at the entire country that the solution is a ranked open primary, not closed party primaries.