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silveradept[Last one before the calendar year rolls over! Thanks for another year of interesting links.]
Good day. Assuming they haven't already been nuked at this point, if you're even a moderately popular author who writes in popular fandoms, you may want to check and see if someone has reposted your fic as supposedly their work to make a dollar.![[twitter.com profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
kokomroily posted about yet another scam Kindle shop stealing fic and pairing it with stolen fanart or official art, this one called Plushbooks (which has other names as well). Peruse as you like, and also, if you see your work, feel free to sling the DMCA takedown notice, properly formed, at everyone who needs it.
How do shops like this open up? Well, as Cory Doctorow (eventually) explains in Why None of My Books are Available on Audible, Amazon has gotten to the point where it believes that if something doesn't exist on one of its sites or services, it must be because the author hasn't put it there yet. So whomever uploads it to their service must be the author with the right to license and make money on it, assuming they don't already have an official version they can compare it against.
So the fic you provide on AO3, specifically with the idea in mind that nobody should make money on it (which is one of those things that also helps keep the people who might otherwise take you to court for unauthorized use of their IP) becomes the fodder for a scammer to upload as books to their Amazon store. This situation is actually one of the things the DMCA takedown notice was made for, so crush them there and see if you can't get them to fork over any money they made selling your worth without authorization.
On the idea of the portal story, rather than the portal fantasy, because the double consciousness that happens, we might call "code-switching" in a less fantastical context. The danger of a single story, especially one that carves bits and pieces off of things to fit itself, like the Campbellian monomyth does.
liv, who posts many thoughtful things, muses on not being Christian, being part of a household with Christians, and how that can play out with regard to religious Christmas celebrations and the civic Christmas season that appears in both England and the U.S.
From another direction, a suggestion for us to contemplate whether the lives we have lived and the actions we have done so far would allow to be happy in the afterlife that A Christmas Carol presents to us, or whether we might be chained and despairing that we no longer have the power to make change that we could have in life.
On why the Muppets are extremely well-suited for enchantment, including why Muppet Christmas Carol works well. Which was next to The Sunrises We Will Never See, which is about the uncertainty of life (mentions cancer and those who have died from it, fuck cancer forever), but also reminds me of one of the stories I read in Eastern Philosophy about the calligrapher's sign and its message: Grandfather Dies, Father Dies, Son Dies. Which is also about sunrises you will never see.
Census data can tell you a lot about where there are pockets of queer people, even if they're not necessarily living openly or allowed to identify as the people they are. That's the benign form. The malevolent form is when an attorney general who already has instructed state agencies to prosecute parents who provide or accept gender-affirming care for their children as child abusers asks the agency that issues driver licenses to compile a list of numbers, and likely names, of people who changed their gender markers on their licenses recently, since that is a useful proxy for finding trans people to persecute.
In other parts of the world, Spain passed a bill making it easier for trans teenagers to change their legal gender. For some ages, there's still parental consent required, but there's a lot less roadblocks. Scotland passed similar legislation to make changing legal gender easier, although Westminster threatened to spike the bill and prevent it from taking effect, because they'd rather cater to reactionaries.
Most attempts to say the romance genre is different now rely on a mythic past, and they overlook the very real problems that have persisted in the genre, or more generally across publishing, to this day. What's in that article doesn't really touch on the gendered-ness of it as well as the stereotype, so there's an entire second element that's not being addressed at that point, but it's still worth the read.
The librarian agrees - thou shalt not shame someone for listening to their interesting material instead of reading it in print. The "generational shift" aspects of it, I think, have much more to do with the fact that listening has gotten so much easier in the digital era, and we can carry more than enough material with us on devices (or have it accessible over the radio waves) that it's almost possible to fill down time or repetitive task time with something equally as interesting.
The city of Huntsville, Texas, chose to privatize its public library to exert greater control over materials and displays at the library that city officials objected to. And the ghouls at Library Systems and Services, who tout privatization as a solution to the costs of running a library (or annexing to a library system), will more than happily take another library under their wing to try and run as a profit-making venture, to try and get other places to do the same. And while the Education Department is investigating allegations of improper book removal in the Granbury Independent School District in Texas, it's probably a different entity that would have to investigate whether the city's decision to privatize was improper or motivated by impermissible reasons. (That they also bypassed the library board without consultation strongly suggests there are impermissible reasons.)
Communities in Louisiana are attempting to keep their libraries from doing the bidding of far-right board members, likely installed from a motivated few and an apathetic public who didn't recognize how important their local elections were. That piece is by the incoming President of ALA, Emily Drabinski, who I hope can manage to do more toward pulling the organization into action and taking a side as libraries come under attack from reactionaries who insist the library only ever cater to their version of reality. She also gave an interview to WNYC's On The Media about the increased effort to prevent libraries from providing material from all kinds of life experiences. Because most people who work in libraries did not sign up for vitriol and accusations of impropriety from the fringes of their communities nor the overwork that comes from their institutions being chronically underfunded.
It seems pretty clear that these particular attackers, much like LS&S, are far more intent on removing humans, who can change and ask questions, and replacing them with machines that will only replicate the status quo and what they've been programmed to do. Even if, supposedly, it's a concern about people and what they have access to.
The period after the Second Great War was one where the United States attempted hegemony in multiple sectors, building a way to export their own news and culture while constricting the amount of news and culture that came into the country or to the people who traveled abroad. Which, to some degree, is where you get the "ignorant American" stereotype from, since the United States did its very best to make sure that any of its citizens traveling abroad would encounter something familiar and of the U.S.
Not as unrelated as it looks, the belief in the meritocracy generally tends to produce a belief that one's own systems are just and meritorious, which creates the opposite of the situation that the meritocracy is supposed to produce.
In-person conferences are excluding a lot of people who were able to attend virtually, and they're almost certainly going to be responsible for spread of the thing that's still here, no matter how much people pretend it isn't, in any conference that doesn't take sufficient precautions against it.
Where you can, stop overworking, and stop normalizing overwork as work. Because broken systems shouldn't be propped up, they should be fixed.
Something useful: The Early Modern Recipes Online Collection.
In technology, breaking the myths of the use of the turkey baster as an insemination tool.
Criminals attacking Yahoo! e-mail accounts would set up police responses (SWATting) and then, thorough checking for password reuse, use the Ring cameras to record the police response as it happened. Surveillance devices that law enforcement can access without warrants are a no-no, as is password reuse, but I still hope for strong fines and long pison sentences for the kinds of people hat think it's fun or funny to summon the police against people and then record it for their own enjoyment.
If you are looking for things to do with an archive of Twitter, assuming that you have left the platform and downloaded your archive, a browser-based tool to turn your archive into a static website, which is one of many tools like TweetBack, a Twitter archive tool that can allow someone to retrieve their tweets and turn them into a similarly static website as a brace against the possibility of Twitter becoming unusable and unsustainable.
After that, of course, people will want to do things that they could have done on Twitter, or on other sites when they stop being profitable enough (or, more often, the data is no longer profitable enough), which means it's time for a list of ActivityPub-compatible social networks that you could migrate your centralized social media self to and a recently-updated introduction to using Mastodon, the microblogging software that uses ActivityPub.
Because of things like redlining and other such, the price you pay for internet service may be much greater than the price your neighbor pays, and give you less bandwidth. Companies will claim a multitude of reasons why this is the case, but you dig far enough down, and somebody's racism (or classism) is probably to blame, along with the reality that a company will charge you as much as they feel they can get away with for the worst possible service for that price. It's how they make profit.
Last for tonight, Black Metal Rainbows, more than 100 tracks of the darker, grindier side in support of LGBTQ+ charities.
And the fundamental problem of people who want to make online communities of consumers - people use the tools to make online communities instead, and the consuming part often happens as an afterthought. Depending on the cultural mores of the space you are in, even if it's a space that declares itself to be against vulture capitalism (or all capitalism), there's always the potential trap of believing that there are technological solutions to all problems. This isn't true, and worse, solutions like "go start your own instance" often reinforce problems that need fixing instead of fixing them.
(Materials viaadrian_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 ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, and anyone else that's 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.)
Good day. Assuming they haven't already been nuked at this point, if you're even a moderately popular author who writes in popular fandoms, you may want to check and see if someone has reposted your fic as supposedly their work to make a dollar.
How do shops like this open up? Well, as Cory Doctorow (eventually) explains in Why None of My Books are Available on Audible, Amazon has gotten to the point where it believes that if something doesn't exist on one of its sites or services, it must be because the author hasn't put it there yet. So whomever uploads it to their service must be the author with the right to license and make money on it, assuming they don't already have an official version they can compare it against.
So the fic you provide on AO3, specifically with the idea in mind that nobody should make money on it (which is one of those things that also helps keep the people who might otherwise take you to court for unauthorized use of their IP) becomes the fodder for a scammer to upload as books to their Amazon store. This situation is actually one of the things the DMCA takedown notice was made for, so crush them there and see if you can't get them to fork over any money they made selling your worth without authorization.
On the idea of the portal story, rather than the portal fantasy, because the double consciousness that happens, we might call "code-switching" in a less fantastical context. The danger of a single story, especially one that carves bits and pieces off of things to fit itself, like the Campbellian monomyth does.
liv, who posts many thoughtful things, muses on not being Christian, being part of a household with Christians, and how that can play out with regard to religious Christmas celebrations and the civic Christmas season that appears in both England and the U.S.From another direction, a suggestion for us to contemplate whether the lives we have lived and the actions we have done so far would allow to be happy in the afterlife that A Christmas Carol presents to us, or whether we might be chained and despairing that we no longer have the power to make change that we could have in life.
On why the Muppets are extremely well-suited for enchantment, including why Muppet Christmas Carol works well. Which was next to The Sunrises We Will Never See, which is about the uncertainty of life (mentions cancer and those who have died from it, fuck cancer forever), but also reminds me of one of the stories I read in Eastern Philosophy about the calligrapher's sign and its message: Grandfather Dies, Father Dies, Son Dies. Which is also about sunrises you will never see.
Census data can tell you a lot about where there are pockets of queer people, even if they're not necessarily living openly or allowed to identify as the people they are. That's the benign form. The malevolent form is when an attorney general who already has instructed state agencies to prosecute parents who provide or accept gender-affirming care for their children as child abusers asks the agency that issues driver licenses to compile a list of numbers, and likely names, of people who changed their gender markers on their licenses recently, since that is a useful proxy for finding trans people to persecute.
In other parts of the world, Spain passed a bill making it easier for trans teenagers to change their legal gender. For some ages, there's still parental consent required, but there's a lot less roadblocks. Scotland passed similar legislation to make changing legal gender easier, although Westminster threatened to spike the bill and prevent it from taking effect, because they'd rather cater to reactionaries.
Most attempts to say the romance genre is different now rely on a mythic past, and they overlook the very real problems that have persisted in the genre, or more generally across publishing, to this day. What's in that article doesn't really touch on the gendered-ness of it as well as the stereotype, so there's an entire second element that's not being addressed at that point, but it's still worth the read.
The librarian agrees - thou shalt not shame someone for listening to their interesting material instead of reading it in print. The "generational shift" aspects of it, I think, have much more to do with the fact that listening has gotten so much easier in the digital era, and we can carry more than enough material with us on devices (or have it accessible over the radio waves) that it's almost possible to fill down time or repetitive task time with something equally as interesting.
The city of Huntsville, Texas, chose to privatize its public library to exert greater control over materials and displays at the library that city officials objected to. And the ghouls at Library Systems and Services, who tout privatization as a solution to the costs of running a library (or annexing to a library system), will more than happily take another library under their wing to try and run as a profit-making venture, to try and get other places to do the same. And while the Education Department is investigating allegations of improper book removal in the Granbury Independent School District in Texas, it's probably a different entity that would have to investigate whether the city's decision to privatize was improper or motivated by impermissible reasons. (That they also bypassed the library board without consultation strongly suggests there are impermissible reasons.)
Communities in Louisiana are attempting to keep their libraries from doing the bidding of far-right board members, likely installed from a motivated few and an apathetic public who didn't recognize how important their local elections were. That piece is by the incoming President of ALA, Emily Drabinski, who I hope can manage to do more toward pulling the organization into action and taking a side as libraries come under attack from reactionaries who insist the library only ever cater to their version of reality. She also gave an interview to WNYC's On The Media about the increased effort to prevent libraries from providing material from all kinds of life experiences. Because most people who work in libraries did not sign up for vitriol and accusations of impropriety from the fringes of their communities nor the overwork that comes from their institutions being chronically underfunded.
It seems pretty clear that these particular attackers, much like LS&S, are far more intent on removing humans, who can change and ask questions, and replacing them with machines that will only replicate the status quo and what they've been programmed to do. Even if, supposedly, it's a concern about people and what they have access to.
The period after the Second Great War was one where the United States attempted hegemony in multiple sectors, building a way to export their own news and culture while constricting the amount of news and culture that came into the country or to the people who traveled abroad. Which, to some degree, is where you get the "ignorant American" stereotype from, since the United States did its very best to make sure that any of its citizens traveling abroad would encounter something familiar and of the U.S.
Not as unrelated as it looks, the belief in the meritocracy generally tends to produce a belief that one's own systems are just and meritorious, which creates the opposite of the situation that the meritocracy is supposed to produce.
In-person conferences are excluding a lot of people who were able to attend virtually, and they're almost certainly going to be responsible for spread of the thing that's still here, no matter how much people pretend it isn't, in any conference that doesn't take sufficient precautions against it.
Where you can, stop overworking, and stop normalizing overwork as work. Because broken systems shouldn't be propped up, they should be fixed.
Something useful: The Early Modern Recipes Online Collection.
In technology, breaking the myths of the use of the turkey baster as an insemination tool.
Criminals attacking Yahoo! e-mail accounts would set up police responses (SWATting) and then, thorough checking for password reuse, use the Ring cameras to record the police response as it happened. Surveillance devices that law enforcement can access without warrants are a no-no, as is password reuse, but I still hope for strong fines and long pison sentences for the kinds of people hat think it's fun or funny to summon the police against people and then record it for their own enjoyment.
If you are looking for things to do with an archive of Twitter, assuming that you have left the platform and downloaded your archive, a browser-based tool to turn your archive into a static website, which is one of many tools like TweetBack, a Twitter archive tool that can allow someone to retrieve their tweets and turn them into a similarly static website as a brace against the possibility of Twitter becoming unusable and unsustainable.
After that, of course, people will want to do things that they could have done on Twitter, or on other sites when they stop being profitable enough (or, more often, the data is no longer profitable enough), which means it's time for a list of ActivityPub-compatible social networks that you could migrate your centralized social media self to and a recently-updated introduction to using Mastodon, the microblogging software that uses ActivityPub.
Because of things like redlining and other such, the price you pay for internet service may be much greater than the price your neighbor pays, and give you less bandwidth. Companies will claim a multitude of reasons why this is the case, but you dig far enough down, and somebody's racism (or classism) is probably to blame, along with the reality that a company will charge you as much as they feel they can get away with for the worst possible service for that price. It's how they make profit.
Last for tonight, Black Metal Rainbows, more than 100 tracks of the darker, grindier side in support of LGBTQ+ charities.
And the fundamental problem of people who want to make online communities of consumers - people use the tools to make online communities instead, and the consuming part often happens as an afterthought. Depending on the cultural mores of the space you are in, even if it's a space that declares itself to be against vulture capitalism (or all capitalism), there's always the potential trap of believing that there are technological solutions to all problems. This isn't true, and worse, solutions like "go start your own instance" often reinforce problems that need fixing instead of fixing them.
(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 that's 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.)
