Notices by Author-ized L.J. (ljwrites@writeout.ink)

@lookitmychicken One of my favorite games EVAR. I did play it twice in short succession (once in English and once in Chinese, which had some interesting differences) and I may play again in French or something. I wouldn't be averse to replaying in one of the previous language either, since it's been a while.

@mekkaokereke I like his record. Ending charges for marijuana possession, no cash bail for misdemeanors and non-violent offenses... I can believe this is the kind of guy who'd try to minimize cruelty to people caught up in the system while going after vote suppressors with extreme intensity.

@rowyn Deep-red Kansas! Who'd have thought?

"Comanche soldiers of the 4th Signal Company compiled a vocabulary of 250 code terms using words and phrases in their own language. Using a substitution method similar to that of the Navajo, the code talkers used descriptive words from the Comanche language for things that did not have translations. For example, the Comanche language code term for tank was turtle, bomber was pregnant bird, machine gun was sewing machine, and Adolf Hitler was crazy white man."

"Because Navajo has a complex grammar, it is not mutually intelligible with even its closest relatives within the Na-Dene family to provide meaningful information."

Thank you for this excellent excuse for the complete failure of my attempts to pick up Navajo 🙏

"Platoon 382 was the Marine Corps' first 'all-Indian, all-Navajo' Platoon. The members of this platoon would become known as The First Twenty-Nine. Most were recruited from near the Fort Wingate, NM, area. The youngest was William Dean Yazzie (aka Dean Wilson), who was only 15 when he was recruited."

Sounds illegal as shit, man

"The Navajo code talkers were commended for the skill, speed, and accuracy they demonstrated throughout the war. At the Battle of Iwo Jima, Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, had six Navajo code talkers working around the clock during the first two days of the battle. These six sent and received over 800 messages, all without error. Connor later said, 'Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.'"

"The Navajo code is the only spoken military code never to have been deciphered."

First, damn. Second, never let it be forgotten this achievement was the product of the code talkers' own ingenuity and cooperation--they created the initial code, and they met to update it in response to the demands of field use. Navajo creativity and resourcefulness, based on their heritage that settlers attempted to annihilate, beat the difficult problem of tactical speed cryptography, decoding in 20 seconds messages the machines at the time took 30 minutes to process. The Navajo code books were never taken into the field (that was how the Nazis' Enigma code books were captured, during battle); the code talkers kept everything in memory, and they beat the latest computing technology and the advances of the Japanese Empire's cryptography. If that's not punk as fuck idk what is.

Edit: It seems that other Native spoken codes such as the Comanche one were also never cracked, see The Comanche Code Talkers of World War II by William C. Meadows.

"German authorities knew about the use of #codeTalkers during World War I. Germans sent a team of thirty anthropologists to the United States to learn Native American languages before the outbreak of World War II. However, the task proved too difficult because of the large array of Indigenous languages and dialects." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_talker

I mean, 'Nazis defeated by diversity' seems almost a tautology and yet... :blobcat_giggle: #history #NationalCodeTalkersDay #NationalCodeTalkersDay

@weirdwriter That is brilliant and scary omg. I read an article recently (maybe through you?) saying that LLMs are inherently insecure because input and commands can't be separated, and evidently there's no way to stop those prompt injection attacks that were in the news.

@weirdwriter Oh yes, there were attacks by researchers that got ChatGPT to disclose people's really sensitive personal information, as I recall. And who knows how many malicious attackers did similar things without making their activities public?😬 I guess rolling out the product for the $$$ and hype was more important than having a secure product!

You did your friend a good turn, like theoretically an attacker could have asked for all details about his financial information and location and personal life, anything that's available in his inbox and... giant yikes all around.

Fortunately lots of people do seem to be willing to rethink and learn, and maybe things will get better over time. Idk. But the relentless dominance of whiteness in fandom and and literary spaces is a tiring reality, often even outside direct Anglophone spheres.

And white women and queer people have often been at the forefront of these antiblack attacks under the auspice of protecting white women and queer people from the big scary Black menace (now where have we seen that rhetoric before?). Fandom has taught me that all too often white feminists and queer people's allegiance will lie with whiteness first and foremost, and fedi solidified that lesson.

Never going to forgive or forget that whenever Black people have suggested that hey, cultural spaces and discourse should be maybe a tiny bit less racist, white liberals, leftists, and queers have responded by screaming about the evils of censorship and tarring Black people as oppressors and abusers (:

I was kind of floored to learn that no Japanese-American internment took place in Hawaii unlike in the mainland U.S. You know, the Pearl Harbor Hawaii? The attack that was the reason the U.S. went to war with Japan? More vulnerable than any other of the so-called U.S. territories to hostile capture and sabotage, if Japanese-American loyalty was so uncertain as the U.S. government so racistly claimed?

I mean that factoid makes it SO OBVIOUS internment wasn't based on security concerns, even ones made up as a pretext for racism, but by economic and politic concerns. There were, put simply, too many people of Japanese descent in Hawaii and too many in key positions for the settler-capitalist economy imposed on Hawaii to function through mass internment of Japanese Americans, or for internment to be politically feasible. Just another reminder that Japanese-Americans in the mainland U.S. were rounded up, and their properties snapped up in fire sales to white people, because they didn't have the numbers and the political power to resist racist scapegoating and not for any real security concerns.

This ended up kind of blowing up in the U.S. Army's face when it couldn't meet its own recruitment goal for inducting Japanese men from the mainland. Locking people up based on their ancestry didn't inspire a whole lot of fervor to die for their country, who knew! 10,000 Japanese-Americans in Hawaii volunteered, on the other hand, far over the Army's quota. No doubt it was helped by the established U.S. military presence there and the fact that the war was precipitated by an attack so close to them--but not being subjected to racist internment probably helped too, just sayin'. The Army later ended up drafting Japanese-Americans straight from internment, real classy and consistent there I guess.

I am loving this article for not only the in-depth discussion of John Campbell's racist, imperialist grift in the field of #mythology and #folklore, but also for confirming that #StarWars is a story with deeply ingrained Christian preoccupations and imagery. https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/ (Article CW for sexism, racism, imperialism, sexual violence & slavery discussions)

@AnthonyJK And the swimmer is only 16! The kids are all right.

Got some stuff to get around to today, so going to try and get #DailyWriting out of the way. I both dread and love large battle scenes.

#WritingTreat in about... 20~30 minutes? Idk all the clocks point to different times what even is time

Writing Treat is now open! https://meet.jit.si/TheWritingTreat