Blogaround

"A man carries a child through a flooded street in Beijing, Aug. 1, 2023. Thomas Peter/Reuters via IC" Image and caption source.

1. There has been really bad flooding in Beijing recently because of Typhoon Doksuri. Here are some links from Sixth Tone about it:

After the Rains, Beijing Residents Begin Counting Their Losses (August 2)
China Floods: What Is the Cause and Why Has Rescue Been So Difficult? (August 3)
Collage: Floods in Beijing and Hebei (August 2)
Tales of Survival From Submerged Beijing, Hebei (August 3) [video]

Also from Sixth Tone: 

In China’s Dance Schools, a Dangerous Obsession With Weight Loss (August 3) "Most children applying to art schools now need to have legs not 12 cm, but 17-19 cm longer than their torsos, said Xue Ping, one of the teachers at Feeling Dance. They’re also dieting harder than ever."

Hangzhou To Pay Parents 25,000 Yuan For Third Child From September (August 8) China is very concerned about the low birth rate, and is inventing all kinds of incentives to get people to have more kids. "A mother in Hangzhou with one child told Sixth Tone that the new policy does not change her mind about not having another child, citing the high cost of education." Well, yeah.

2. Introducing Jetpack AI Assistant in WordPress.com (June 6, via) Oh geez, Wordpress has some new feature that will use AI to write an entire blog post for you. :/

3. On Orientation as a Compatibility Gate (August 1) "This view of orientation as a compatibility gate is a part of why I do not identify with orientation types other than sexual orientation. It’s not that I’m endlessly compatible with all people on all other fronts — certainly not — but my compatibility constraints around socializing, partnership, and touch do not follow the kind of patterns that lend themselves to this kind of shorthand."

4. Breaking Down the Controversy Over Florida's New Slavery Curriculum (July 28) "In a statement to TIME, the College Board said: 'We resolutely disagree with the notion that enslavement was in any way a beneficial, productive, or useful experience for African Americans. Unequivocally, slavery was an atrocity that cannot be justified by examples of African Americans’ agency and resistance during their enslavement.'"

5. The Trans Good Doctor Episode (June 28) 54-minute video. This is about the trans episode of the show "The Good Doctor." ("The Good Doctor" is a show about an autistic doctor, and I've never watched an episode but I've seen a few clips and I am not really a fan of how it portrays autism...) I have seen people on Twitter mocking the show's assumption that an autistic person would be totally unable to understand anything that doesn't fit into the gender binary... like... umm, in reality there is a HUGE overlap between the autistic community and the trans community. Autistic people are all about pointing out when societal expectations simply make no sense- and indeed, it makes no sense that society expects people's interests/abilities/personality/clothing/appearance to be determined by what kind of genitals they have.

Anyway, though, in this video, Youtuber Lily Simpson goes through the entire plot of this episode, and actually it turns out to be pretty good in terms of how it handles trans issues. 

6. A Weird and WONDERFUL Ruleset (August 5) 1-hour-12-minute sudoku solve video.

7. Overworked and Underpaid, VFX Workers Vote to Unionize at Marvel (August 7, via) "While fellow below-the-line workers in such divisions as costumes and wardrobe; hair and makeup; lighting, props and paint; and script supervision have been historically championed by IATSE, underappreciated VFX professionals have been unable to claim benefits such as paid overtime and health care, and have been at the mercy of pronounced labor shortages and managers’ unrealistic deadlines — despite the workers’ increasing indispensability within popular culture."