you know parents make such a big deal about explaining homosexuality to their children but when I was a kid I watched a show where one of the villains was a satanic cross-dressing lobster and never once questioned it
Yes!! This!! Kids are way more accepting then adults. It is quite easy to explain it to a child. Because honestly they mostly don’t even care. So if you tell them ‘Some boys like boys’ or ‘Sometimes girls like other girls’ (or any variation thereof) they will just smile nod and ask you for ice cream.
I love the Star Trek trend of characters who present themselves as loyal, exemplary members of their cultures but end up inadvertently or begrudgingly subverting tradition and becoming vanguards of major sociopolitical change.
Like we have Worf, originally introduced as this archetype of Klingon values; the guy who applies his strict honor-and-tradition moral compass to every situation, who has to be talked into bending the rules by both of his captains, whose interior design aesthetic is just knives. And yet everything he does has ripple effects throughout Klingon society. He’s the first Klingon in Starfleet, the traitorous son of Mogh, the reason Gowron has any significance at all, hell, he even becomes the deciding vote on whether to allow a clone of Kahless to become a religious figure on Qo’noS. And yet throughout all that we see him defending tradition to Alexander and butting heads with Odo on the concept of what law enforcement should mean. But when it comes to his actual effect on Klingon society, on the very definition of Klingon-ness, Worf is a revolutionary (as much as that would pain him to admit).
And then there’s Quark. He adheres so strongly to Ferengi customs, and yet he works to change them, sometimes accidentally through association and sometimes actively, through his own doing. He attributes his slip-ups in following the Rules of Acquisition to living on a station full of Federation and Bajoran ideals. But look at his family: he has a liberated feminist mother, his brother is an engineering genius and one-time union man, and his nephew is in (unprofitable) Starfleet. He claims not to respect “females,” but has relationships with Pel, Grilka, and Natima Lang (aka basically the three strongest-minded women he could possibly find) and a long-standing friendship with Dax. He defies the dogma of profit to prevent a genocide and nearly dies on a damn mountain to save a cop. And that’s not even mentioning the tangible impact he has on Ferengi politics and society through Brunt and the Grand Nagus. But every Quark episode basically ends with him shrugging and saying “I did it for the latinum”. Like NO you didn’t, bud, you’re a damn liar and also a revolutionary.
Honestly this trend applies to so many Star Trek characters. Spock (Extremely Vulcan Man feels everything deeply all the time and loves Kirk so much that he becomes a literal ambassador for Kirk’s values) Garak and Damar (spend a ton of time defending the State, then become actual resistance fighters who destroy the State to save Cardassia, as it were), even Seven of Nine could fit in this category (as someone who strives for Borg perfection but consistently undermines that goal by fighting for the individuality of herself and other drones).
This is one of my favorite things about Star Trek, because it’s an inherently complex concept but also one that rings true to anyone who both loves and critiques their home culture. Because you can do both. You can cherish some traditions and break others, because doing the real hard work of changing your society for the better doesn’t defy love for your culture, it requires it. It’s the necessary counterbalance to blind nationalism, the unstoppable force that keeps us moving forward. It’s an immensely positive, rewarding view of culture and I’m so glad that Star Trek has always promoted it.
“My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” –Carl Schurz
Gerda Wegener’s depictions of lesbian sex, painted in the early 1900s
so turns out this is the Gerda Wegener who was married to Lili Elbe, and basically it is substantially possible that she was A Giant Lesbian and that she and Lili got married because they were both Real Queer and needed beards to make it in the art world
Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of Silicon Valley, there was an age undreamed of…
Movies were sold on big reels of tape, wound up inside little plastic boxes.
And played on machines called VCRs.
And if you wanted to create a copy of a movie, you could hook two of these machines together and do it with no problem. In fact, it was ruled in a court of law that it was a fair use of someone elses copyrighted movie to make yourself an archival copy, so that if your tape broke, or the machine ‘ate it’ you wouldn’t have to buy another one.
Hollywood didn’t care for this.
So, when the digital age dawned, someone came up with the bright idea of selling movies on DVDs. And one of the big selling points, so far as Hollywood was concerned, was that you could encrypt the data of the movie on the disc, and put hardware to decrypt it in the DVD player, in such a way that it wouldn’t play if two DVD players were hooked together, and so that someone who put a DVD into a computer couldn’t copy it.
Techies and hackers didn’t care for this.
So, they started trying to figure out how to cryptanalyze the DVDs, which were encrypted with a tech called CSS, for Content Scrambling System. And they didn’t have much luck, because crypto is hard, and breaking it is harder. And then one day they caught a lucky break.
Some manufacturers of DVD players, from Taiwan iirc, put out a new product, one of which was bought by a hacker somewhere, who tinkered with it and realized that the makers had made a mistake. They hadn’t properly protected the chips that contained the CSS decryption key, which allowed this guy to get access to it and copy it. He then created a program called DeCSS, which would allow you to put a DVD in a computer and then ‘rip’ the data to your hard drive, then write it to another DVD. He posted it online, and within hours the news, and copies of the key and code, had spread all over the world.
Hollywood flipped their shit over this.
They brought the legal hammer down on this guy, and it ended up in court. He said he had a right, as per the previous Fair Use ruling, regarding VHS tapes, to copy DVDs as well. When people had previously complained that encryption was stripping them of their rights, Hollywood had argued that there was nothing in the law that said they had to make copying easy, and basically challenged them to figure out how to break it. In the court case, Hollywood argued that under a new law that had passed, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, it was illegal to circumvent an DRM, or Digital Rights Management system. The plaintiffs counter-argued that they hadn’t really reversed engineered anything, that the dumb machines had been built wrong, that they had a right to tinker with it and see how it worked.
So, sitting between these parties was a judge who… to put it kindly, was probably in over his head. Probably some old guy, the kind of guy who still owned a VCR with the clocking blinking 12:00 PM because he didn’t know how to adjust the time. An old grandpa sorta guy. Maybe not a bad guy, just clueless about how tech works. So, when Hollywood argued that there should be some sort of injunction against the spread of the DeCSS software online, that it should be illegal for people to host it, or for others to download it, or to tell people how it worked, or even to link to it, gramps said, “Sure, why not? Here you go, here’s an order that says it’s illegal to possess this software.”
Well, the tech people freaked out about this, because it contradicted a number of already established precedents. Like Phil Zimmermann publishing the source code of PGP and shipping the books containing it to Europe, despite the fact that the encryption tech it contained had been ruled a munition that couldn’t be sold overseas. The precedent, that code was speech, and therefore subject to first amendment protections, seemed to be being thwarted in the DeCSS case. And the tech/hacker community wanted to make it clear that they weren’t going to stand for that.
So, some bright person somewhere, went out and got himself a shirt made, that had the source code of DeCSS printed on it, along with some quote from the order basically saying that it was illegal to buy or own this shirt, then started selling them on his website. This clever idea opened a floodgate of people coming up with unique ways to spread the source code of DeCSS, in a way that was tempting the court to try to stop them, on the grounds that the ruling would then go to a higher court and be turned over on first amendment grounds.
“Take t5’s low byte (AND t5 with two hundred fifty five) to put it
in the ith byte of the vector called k. Now shift t5 right eight bits;
store the result in t5 again. Now that’s the last step in the loop.
No sooner have we finished that loop than we’ll start another; no rest
for the wicked nor those innocents whom lawyers serve with paperwork.”
One of these people, Phil Carmody, raised an interesting argument. He said that software is just numbers. In fact, every piece of software is a single number, that is also a infinite number of numbers (or practically so) as there are nearly an infinite number of mathematical conversions or encodings you can perform on a number. So he wrote a little script version of DeCSS, then converted it to a number, then started to look to see if this number was the same as another somewhere. Was it hidden somewhere in pi? Or the Golden Ratio? What if you doubled it? or added 1 to it?
And after some searching, he found a list of the largest known prime numbers, wherein the 19th largest prime that had been found by that time, was the same as his code for DeCSS. So he posted this info online, and said, “If you go to this website, take this prime number, and save it in a file, then compile it, the output is this piece of software that is illegal to possess, transmit, or share information about.” Here it is, by the way:
Carmody argued, if the ruling that it’s illegal to do these things with the DeCSS software
holds up, then it’s also illegal to possess, transmit, or share
information about this prime number. It will become an illegal number. It would have to be redacted from websites, and whatever books it might appear in. People searching for new primes, or any other number, will have to worry about sharing them online, that they are on some list of illegal numbers somewhere. The lists will grow exponentially, as the precedent that this software is forbidden to possess or share, will lead others to demand that software, and numbers, they don’t care for be made illegal as well.
And then… I forget the rest. Whether it was finally ruled in the favor of common sense, or if the case simply petered out and nothing more was ever heard about it. I do know that no one was ever brought up on charges for possessing a number, and DeCSS has been widely available ever since the day it was first posted online (if you’ve ever used a movie ripping software like ffmpeg, you’ve used DeCSS or it’s descendents.)
More info. Also, this is now a crypto history blog, deal with it
This is why you have to manually install libdvdcss or something if you want to play commercial DVDs on popular Linux distributions.
This whole thing also led to a bunch of illegal images, for example this one that I made back in grad school when all this shit was going down:
This version probably won’t work (because Tumblr converts and resizes images when uploaded) but that code in the corner is not the DeCSS source – instead, it’s a short program that, when fed the image it’s inside (in pnm format), produces the DeCSS source that’s hidden within the bits of the image.
Also, some other fun background information on the DeCSS suit: The primary defendant (Jon Lech Johansen) was a Norwegian citizen who didn’t even write the code in the first place. But he was extradited and tried on US soil for someone else breaking a law that didn’t apply to him in the first place. It was a huge abuse of power all around.
(Also, you know how common DMCA takedown notices are these days? Many of them are for general copyright and trademark violation and not things that the DMCA is supposed to cover in the first place, but the DMCA allows for a fast-track takedown on “infringing content” and is incredibly difficult to fight against, and there’s no provisions for recompense against an erroneous takedown. It is a hideously bullshit law that started with good intentions but ended up in a terrible spot, as many laws involving technology tend to do.)
PSA: Assholes like these still exist in the world in great quantities. Let’s see how much hate I get for that reply…
Lmao Facebook is the most toxic place ever, I don’t understand why people even use that piece of shit website. It’s a disease in this world and it breeds hate.
Oh good to see the fake nerd girl thing is spreading to other subcultures!!
Sad to say the “fake x girl” has **been** a thing outside of nerd subculture for so long. I listen to every genre of music, my fashion style fluctuates greatly between goth/metal/punk, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been called a fake fan. I’m a fake metal fan because I don’t wear hella spikes or chains to shows; I’m a fake goth because there’s just a touch too much pink in my wardrobe; I’m a fake punk because I don’t want to put patches on my favorite vest. This has been a thing in music and fashion subculture for as long as I can remember. A friend and I went to a metal show as teenagers at a local all-ages venue back in the early 2000s, and because she had been shopping previously at Aeropostale for work shirts, a group of metal heads burned her shopping bag
I’ve seen way more of this crap around music over the years than from other types of gatekeeping nerds, tbh. Having spent too much time exposed to all of the above. It gets old fast, and they all seem to think they’re so witty and original with it 😩
Not so much fluctuating style as some kind of punk/metal/goth amalgam here, btw. When I was younger I was also too fat, actually nerdy, dykey, and generally other than hot by their standards to make a very tempting target for that shit personally. Hard not to witness plenty of that behavior, and how much less than subtle the different standards are there. Now that I’m older too, that type just tends to avoid us and pointedly ignore that more than a few of us are there and have been for way longer than them. Which is darkly funny in its own way, as just part of the shitty pattern.
But sure, this recent invasion of poseur girls is totally a major problem in $subculture. And has been for the past 30 years that I can remember *sigh* They just didn’t used to have FB for bad memes.
A.C. Strip has long understood the significance of the diary his older brother kept as they fled the Holocaust with their parents. He turned it into a self-published book that he gave to his brother as a 90th birthday gift.
But Strip never considered the diary to be an important historical document. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is making him rethink that.
Strip’s brother’s journal is one of more than 200 diaries written by Holocaust victims and survivors the museum hopes to digitize and make available to the public with the help of its first crowd-funding campaign. The museum is seeking $250,000 for the project and will begin soliciting donations through Kickstarter on Monday, the birthday of the most famous Holocaust diarist, Anne Frank.
If their goal is reached, their entire diary collection will be catalogued, translated, and published online for EVERYONE. They hope to stem holocaust denial by the power of so many readily-available firsthand accounts.
Please signal boost even if you can’t spare $5 to donate!
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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