Right, post the linkspam - Early March 02023

Let's begin with photographs of the changes of fashion as the Gold Coast became the nation of Ghana. Although trying to think of the continent of Africa as having pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods still gives the influence and the power to the Europeans, rather than acknowledging the rich history of all of the kingdoms, empires, and colonies of Africa, including those times where parts of Europe were part of African empires. To decolonize museums is to do more than just get rid of a building and its artifacts, but to defeat the parts of society that want to hold onto the things that they took without permission and without fair dealing.

The DIY Methods conference, soliciting pitches, for researchers who want to make a zine and talk about their research process, ethics, and other othings with an interdisciplinary and likely intersectional lens. All the accepted zines will then be gathered, printed, and shipped to the participants in August, with some amount of ways to contact each other for more interest.

A proposed bill in Florida would conflate bloggers, journalists, and lobbyists by requiring anyone who writes about government officials and gets paid for their writing to register with the state government and disclose how much they were paid and by whom. Persons who work for approved organizations would be exempted from this, of course, but the point is to try and stifle the possibility that someone might have an opinion and other people might be interested in giving them money for it. I assume that this proposed law would only ever be used against people who are critical of the government.

Elsewhere in Florida, a state lawmaker made a proposal to disband both of the major political parties in the state by making it illegal for any party to exist in the state that historically supported the slavery of black people. The lawmaker believes that his legislation would only disband his political opponents, of course, but his grasp of history is equally as shaky as his grasp of grammar.

( And all the rest inside )

Last for tonight, The OTW might need to start considering the creation of A Wiki Of One's Own, based on the way that the company previously known as Wikia has been acquiring wikis and other encyclopedic or informational sites, and then turning the screws on them to conform and be palatable to the advertisers that the company is forcing on the people in the wikia orbit. But not all other places are necessarily alike, and it's worthwhile to pay attention to the politics and the biases put out in the open in an application process, like Fanexus's. ([Bad username or site: osteophage @ pillowfort] has some excellent meta, especially about aspects of fandom that could use some additional scrutiny.)

And how the culture of Tumblr and its fundamental hostility to comments and conversation carries over to a reluctance to use the comments on the Archive of Our Own. Which makes sense, because as someone who came of Internet in journaling and forums, the comments are normal for me, rather than a potential source of hostility or people yelling at your about your faux pas. (Unless, of course, you commit the faux pas of leaving a disparaging comment on someone else's work or insist that it should be something other than what it is because you wanted an F/F story to focus more heavily on the M/M relationships of your own space.)

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)