Stephanie Leary

@sleary.bsky.social

1643 Followers 522 Following

Front End Developer doing UI and accessibility work on open source library software. Previously: MLIS @ UW iSchool; tag wrangling; wrote some tech books a while back. Pretty young for an Old Internet Person.

Tweet from WorldReads: terrible time to have a history degree & pattern recognition skills
The pointlessly empty Reflecting Pool as seen from the Lincoln Memorial, with the Washington Monument on the horizon
The Lincoln Memorial at sunset
The mess of tarps and construction equipment that is the Reflecting Pool
Loop statue outside the Smithsonian against a cloudy late afternoon sky, with the Washington Monument in the background
The Watergate Hotel, as seen from the Kennedy Center terrace
Downtown Washington DC, seen from the roof terrace of the Kennedy Center
The Kennedy Center, from the front door
The Irritating Gentleman (Der lästige Kavalier) by German artist Berthold Woltze. A man leans over the back of the train seat where a teenage girl in a mourning gown sits alone with her carpet bag, presumably on her way to or from a funeral. She has a long-suffering expression as he leans over her shoulder to speak directly into her ear.
Downfall, the Kristi Noem edition: If I have to fly all over this country, I deserve a sex plane with a bedroom.
So you get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism and the karaoke menu of things that you go through to do it. You could list them from the show, or you could list them from the newspaper. In the beginning, it was very confusing. People were like, “Oh, you’re psychic,” or, “The show is prescient.” But in the rear-view mirror, it’s really a much sadder explanation than that.
Bosses often ask us if there are specific words they should say to jump in if something goes off at work. Like if someone yells in a heated meeting. Or a new exec uses a slur during a competitive ping pong game. We get variations of this all the time because, in actual real life at actual real work, shit really does go off. They aren't generally asking about horrors or atrocities. More like, how to dissent with your mouth when you've already clocked that you dissent with your brain. The core of this question is beautiful. It's basically, "How do I use my power in a situation like this? I may not be the most senior person but I'm still a leader here. And I don't want to manage in an org where bad shit just goes unremarked, y'know?" We do know. And the answer for them is the answer for you, too.
While other great Southern universities-such as Ole Miss- may be neurotic about race for the rest of time, A&M's anxieties have been more about gender and sexuality. Women weren't allowed to attend until 1963; the…
In July, Melissa McCoul was teaching a class on children's literature that included a middle-grade book titled Jude Saves the World, in which the main character is nonbinary. Such books are banned in Texas public schools. But the ideal candidate for a university education is a person mature enough to withstand the psychological torments of what some might consider a distasteful kids' book. Not everyone in McCoul's class possessed this maturity.
Madness had taken hold. The adults proposed starting their own student newspaper as an anti-woke counterbalance. And the association recommended using Ancestry.com to research the family trees of professors, beginning with the anthropology, sociology, and psychology departments, the last of which might have offered some useful therapeutic assistance.
Ilya Rozanov speaks
Just Seeds font samples: Medicine, Busted Knuckles, Upright Citizen, Green Bans, Rise Up, Respect, Libertario, ¡Squat!, Mujeres Libres
Black spiral planner titled Carpe Fucking Diem
Angry goose meme: Hidden? Hidden from whom?
The fictional New York Admirals jersey showing the Empire State Building with a starburst at the tip
Out of Your League sent a detailed list of questions to Harlequin regarding the promotional plan for Heated Rivalry, including asking whether there were plans to print more copies, whether Harlequin printed copies ahead of the TV premiere or sent stock to bookstores to prepare for the increased interest; whether there were plans for a tie-in cover or special edition of the book; or if Harlequin was involved in any upcoming promotional plans or events. The publisher declined to answer specific questions and instead sent a statement. “What we can share is that we’re so excited for the continued support of Heated Rivalry and the Game Changers series,” said Lianna Cohen, the Senior Manager of Brand Publicity & Influencer Marketing at Harlequin. “As retailers continue to place orders, physical books are being shipped to fulfill orders and supply replenished with reprints to ensure availability. We’re excited to have Heated Rivalry readily available in audiobook and eBook formats in addition to trade paperback.”
Judith Beheading Holofernes, by Artemisia Gentileschi
The Doctor Who Exploding TARDIS 1000-piece puzzle, based on the lost Vincent Van Gogh painting from "The Pandorica Opens." The broken TARDIS in the center is surrounded by fiery swirls in the dark blue sky, in the style of Starry Night. An extraordinarily difficult puzzle, since everything is gold and blue, and most of the image is swirls of abstract color.
The completed Zero Gravity 1000-piece puzzle by Galison. It’s a collage of colorful planet illustrations in varying styles and sizes on a black background with a suited astronaut drifting at the center. 10/10, will puzzle again.
complicity: Aha, those sanctimonious New Englanders were just as tied to slavery as the Southerners! But complicity seems too easy. Isn't everyone, in one way or another, complicit in systems of exploitation that sometimes they choose not to see, and that sometimes they can't see? What's interesting then, is not complicity or non-complicity. I suggest we take complicity as a given and then look for the ways in which it is lived at a given moment by specific historical actors. I hope that readers come to see that our own moment doesn't give us a cut-and-dry option regarding complicity in structures of economic and ecological exploitation. We should start with the premise that it may be very difficult to find ourselves with clean hands under the configuration of the world that we presently inhabit—and then figure out what we want to do about it.
Basically, it’s Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor (fealty, ethics, loyalty, the joy of serving a worthy and honorable lord), meets The West Wing (liberal politics, conversations in hallways, the long slow process of making the world better by increments, and the quote: “Do you have a best friend? Is he smarter than you? Do you trust him with your life? That’s your chief of staff.”), meets Moana (leaving home to follow the call of a powerful dream, returning home to bring back the dream and the fruits of your labor to your people; community and family; a solo journey across the sea mirrors an internal journey of personal identity). It is my favorite book in the entire world, hands down.
Cover art: a stylized sun with a face on a plain black background
Q: Anything you don't like about it? A: I can't really see the front out of the windshield because it's so long.
Men is too headache.
This is not merely a matter of improving the chatbots' programming so that they more believably imitate humans, or provide more responsible outputs when presented with poisoned cognition in their users. There is a simple and tragic category error at the core of the Al chatbot push-at the core of so incredibly much of 21st-century American life, really-that only gets more alarming and more obviously deadly to all of us the further the psychotic tech industry projects it out among us. It is the idea that things like connection, friendship, intimacy, and care are essentially sensory arrangements, things an individual feels, and therefore things that can be reproduced by anything that provides something like the right sensations. This misapprehension holds that a person who is socially isolated is merely experiencing a set of sensations called "social isolation," and so also holds that this can be resolved by interacting with a mindless computer program that produces in the isolated person the impression that they are connecting to another being. This is deeply poisonous. More to the point, it is also just wrong! Incorrect!
A published Medium article with identifying specifics redacted. It includes a Visual Breakdown subheading followed by a prompt: “If this were visualized in a Medium article: …” and then two placeholder descriptions for before and after screenshots that were never inserted. Hope that person got their certificate and will be working with you soon!
A vintage Swingline saddle stapler. It is gray and angular and industrial and looks like Agent Peggy Carter could kill a man with it. This is the stapler you need to bind your subversive pamphlets without crunching the pages. Hot.
Tumblr drakensberg-blog: The reading comprehension and overall common sense on this website is piss poor. poupon: how dare you say we piss on the poor
Murderbot with a speech bubble that encompasses the quoted post
Screenshot of an aside in Smashing's "Fostering An Accessibility Culture" article, showing medium-gray text on the dark gray background in dark mode.
The Murderbot figurine from the opening credits lands on its back in the dirt after apparently falling from somewhere in space
Zuckerberg's concerns about overly restricting bots went beyond fantasy scenarios. Last fall, he chastised Meta's managers for not adequately heeding his instructions to quickly build out their capacity for humanlike interaction. At the time, Meta allowed users to build custom chatbot companions, but he wanted to know why the bots couldn't mine a user's profile data for conversational purposes. Why couldn't bots proactively message their creators or hop on a video call, just like human friends? And why did Meta's bots need such strict conversational guardrails? "I missed out on Snapchat and TikTok, I won't miss on this," Zuckerberg fumed, according to employees familiar with his remarks.
Unlike the chat in which The Atlantic was mistakenly included, the newly revealed one was created by Mr. Hegseth. It included his wife and about a dozen other people from his personal and professional inner circle in January, before his confirmation as defense secretary, and was named "Defense | Team Huddle," the people familiar with the chat said. He used his private phone, rather than his government one, to access the Signal chat. The continued inclusion following Mr. Hegseth's confirmation of his wife, brother and personal lawyer, none of whom had any apparent reason to be briefed on operational details of a military operation as it was getting underway, is sure to raise further questions about his adherence to security protocols.
A sane engineer would come to you, palms upturned, arms wide, and preach the virtues of Excel in a conciliatory tone. "It really empowers non-technical staff"', they would say. "The democratization of data is an important element to the modern workplace, and it is an incredible testament to Excel's flexibility that it has enabled so many people to leverage the power of computing." But that is a mere sane engineer, the first to die in the revolution, and when you have seen enough of what happens when you yield to this blatant cowardice, you move beyond mere sanity, into righteous logic so cold that it burns like fire. I tell you now, if you suggest that we put that spreadsheet anywhere near any process, no force on this planet will save you from me.
Tumblr post from drakensberg-blog: The reading comprehension and overall common sense on this website is piss poor. Reply from poupon: how dare you say we piss on the poor
Cross stitch pattern and DMC thread colors for bilberries (for treason) with cursive writing: My Senator is a craven quisling
Small cross stitch of bilberries (for treason) with cursive writing: My Congressman is a craven quisling
Few, if any, were more high-profile than Morris, who steadily involved himself in state and national politics after founding Gateway in 2000. In 2017, Morris was tapped by Gov. Greg Abbott to help support the so-called "Bathroom Bill" that sought to ban transgender people from using their preferred bathroom — in part by arguing that it would allow children to be sexually abused.
According to interviews and presentations viewed by WIRED, the goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
A black iPod Classic 5th Gen, with the click wheel and everything. This sucker is 20 years old. Vintage. (lolsob)
Her suggested cuts were funds going to groups like Global Refuge, a faith-based organization that provides safety and support services to immigrants, migrant refugees and asylum-seekers around the world. Two weeks later, Musk declared at 3:14 a.m. on a Sunday that DOGE was “rapidly shutting down” supposedly “illegal payments” to Global Refuge. A newly-launched corresponding website DataRepublican.com lets users search for charities and nonprofit officers. A false claim that Jeffrey Epstein was paid by USAID appears to have started with people using the website and mixing up the notorious sex offender with another Jeffrey Epstein.
Google info pane reading Released: 2007
Page from Subversive Cross Stitch showing the difference in size between 11, 14, and 18 count fabric.
New Subterranean Press collection: Velveteen vs. the Early Adventures by Seanan McGuire
Title screen of Charlie Jade, a Canadian/South African multiverse SF show from 2005
"If this was Massachusetts or Ohio, she would have had that delivery within a couple hours," said Dr. Susan Mann, a national patient safety expert in obstetric care who teaches at Harvard University. Many noted a striking similarity to the case of Savita Halappavanar, a 31-year-old woman who died of septic shock in 2012 after providers in Ireland refused to empty her uterus while she was miscarrying at 17 weeks. When she begged for care, a midwife told her, "This is a Catholic country." The resulting investigation and public outcry galvanized the country to change its strict ban on abortion. But in the wake of deaths related to abortion access in the United States, leaders who support restricting the right have not called for any reforms.
In a phone interview with the Statesman, Harrison, who is a Texas A&M alumnus, emphasized that his reasons for "pounding the drum" against the LGBTQ+ studies minor for nine months was due to his fiduciary responsibility to ensure public money is used efficiently. When asked how much money he expected Texas A&M's programming cuts to save, he said he did not know.
Tweet from Victoria Duncan @SNeurotypicals Neurodivergent screening tests will be like "do you struggle with wearing socks" and ND people will be like "nope does not describe me, for you see I have a System" and folks that is what the question is getting at 5:38 PM on Oct 10, 2022
Texas voter registration deadline: Monday, October 7. Texas requires in-person or mail-in registration; no online registration available. Need help? Check out voteriders.org. Vote safely this November 5!
NO. NOW GO AWAY, OR I SHALL TAUNT YOU A SECOND TIME.
Marilou Schultz’s weaving, left. Pentium die photo, right. Via Ken Shirriff
An internal investigative report, made public this month by Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, details the findings of DHS lawyers concerning a previously undisclosed effort by Trump's acting secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, to amass secret dossiers on Americans in Portland attending anti-racism protests in summer 2020 sparked by the police murder of Minneapolis father George Floyd. The report describes attempts by top officials to link protesters to an imaginary terrorist plot in an apparent effort to boost Trump's reelection odds, raising concerns now about the ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars' worth of domestic intelligence assets for their own political gain. DHS analysts recounted orders to generate evidence of financial ties between protesters in custody; an effort that, had they not failed, would have seemingly served to legitimize President Trump's false claims about "Antifa,"…
The Not Like Any Other Children’s Book, Book “A Sometimes fairly decent accumulation of stories, poems and things to do, that are very possibly not like any other stories, poems and things to do that you’ve ever seen, but on the off chance that you’ve seen any of these things, please don’t get mad and write the editors—after all there are probably a lot of kids who haven't seen most of these things or at least a few of them who haven't seen some of the things." (We know for a fact that Roslyn Snitch across the street has read one of the stories) -The editors. (Arrow pointing to an unflattering sketch of a child, labeled Roslyn Snitch) I HATE MY OLDER BROTHER by Judith Jagusch Johnson Excerpt from "A Romantic Education" by Patricia Hampl A New School for Becky by Margaret Haskins Durber, the Poet Laureate of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota Monster Story by John Calvin Rezmerski Prose by Keith Gunderson
Lactase supplement fact sheet, which clearly says at the bottom, “Take 3 caplets with your first bite of dairy food.” Who instituted the isolated blister packs? I just want to have a conversation…