2019 Linkspam

If a link is broken or missing, please leave a comment at the original post. Most Twitter links are probably broken in some way, idk how to fix them.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/44684.html

Author Claire Ryan put together a timeline of the ongoing implosion of the Romance Writers of America.

Jellyfin is a FOSS alternative to Plex, though I can't get my install to work and it's not compatible with anything but a browser yet.

This is pretty horrifying, and complete bullshit besides:

Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands.

Fallen out of the habit of reading books? Here's some little tips to get back into reading. I like the idea of replacing an urge to go on social media with picking up a book instead.

Here's an argument for blocking Google from indexing your not-for-profit site. (h/t alisx)

I don't collect Strawberry Shortcake, but I certainly appreciate this collector's in-depth encyclopedia of everything in the Strawberry Shortcake product line.

Speaking of 1980s toys, I can't get over this line of scifi dolls:

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/43408.html

I used Netflix’s DVD mail service to watch movies instead of TV for a year:

At some point toward the end of last year, my husband and I realized that watching TV wasn’t as fun as it used to be. Oh, the watching itself was as easy and pleasant as ever. Every night after our toddler went to bed, we’d gulp down a few episodes of the hot prestige series of the moment. But in between “big” shows, we’d spend weeks half-watching familiar sitcom reruns while scrolling through our phones. We were in a rut.

And so we decided to try something new in 2019: We would spend the year watching movies, and only movies—not as a backup plan when we were between TV shows, but as intentional programming. The idea was to reset our screen habits, and perhaps to do a bit of cultural self-improvement along the way.

I really like this idea! I mean, I love streaming. It's VERY convenient and takes up much less room than a roomful of DVDs.

However, I totally relate to that first paragraph. I spend way too much time scrolling through lists trying to find something to watch. It is NOT fun; it's exhausting. I usually just end up rewatching something I've already seen, or leaving Youtube on auto-watch.

I'm not super worried about changing things right now, but I'm thinking I'll take the opportunity during RV living to switch over to something else besides stream-dependent.* Either I'll go back to DVDs, or I'll just watch stuff I've downloaded, or I'll…read a book! Something.

*This'll also be easier as streaming on the road can be iffy at best.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/41862.html

'For me, this is paradise': life in the Spanish city that banned cars:

The historical centre was dead,” he says. “There were a lot of drugs, it was full of cars – it was a marginal zone. It was a city in decline, polluted, and there were a lot of traffic accidents. It was stagnant. Most people who had a chance to leave did so. At first we thought of improving traffic conditions but couldn’t come up with a workable plan. Instead we decided to take back the public space for the residents and to do this we decided to get rid of cars.

This article about the constant tweaking of one's face in search of perfection reminds me heavily of the plot to Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series. If you've never read it, the premise is that at 16 everybody gets a new, surgically altered, perfect face (also lobotomized! and anybody with an un-altered face is an “Ugly.” It is worrying that so many YA dystopian books are apparently coming true the further away from 2005 we get.

Why I Am Not a Maker: “When new products are made, we hear about exciting technological innovation, which are widely seen as worth paying (more for. In contrast, policy and public discourse around caregiving—besides education, healthcare comes immediately to mind—are rarely about paying more to do better, and are instead mostly about figuring out ways to lower the cost.”

Is this just a really well-made car, or was the owner exceptionally good at taking care of it? Florida Woman, 93, Reached End of the Road After 567,000 Miles in Her 1964 Mercury.

Rachel Veitch, a retired nurse, a mother of four, bought “Chariot” in February 1964 from a dealer in Sanford, Fla., for $3,289. The car has outlasted her three marriages and has gone through eight mufflers, at least 17 batteries, three sets of shocks and countless oil changes.

How a relentless speedup is reshaping the working class aka the shit happening in Nickel and Dimed is still happening, but WORSE.

A humorous CATS-themed video to end on, because I just realized this post is mostly full of depressing articles:

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/40749.html

Is Cwtch the New Hygge? aka people want to be cozy in their homes and that means having stuff that makes you feel good in it.

Want to start a new hobby or project or thing, but lack motivation? 100 Day Project might be something you're interested in.

rachelmanija has a poll re: tragic childhood books and the tropes therein. Why so many dead animals, childhood books?

This seems like a useful tool: convert Medium posts to markdown.

NFG's Arcade Font Engine generates text in the style of vintage arcade games. Neat!

An old TED talk about creating video games specifically for girls, in the late 1990s:

All but one Purple Moon game is available at the Internet Archive, btw.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/39628.html

Game devs used robots to make 1,500 slot machine apps]] and they made lots and lots of money.

I'm constantly struggling to have a hobby and not just a new side hustle]] and apparently so is everyone else.

The Heart of the Issue: Mattel’s Forgotten Family:

The Heart family demonstrated a more family-oriented, simplified lifestyle, which seemed a refreshing change from those countless weekends in Malibu. In place of a pink Corvette and large motor homehttp://www.thestrong.org/online-collections/nmop/2/35/109.1907, the Hearts drove a sensible Volkswagen Cabriolethttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBL6Rr0CWZU complete with car seats for the kids, illustrative of their safety-conscious nature, while the convertible top suggested they still had a fun-loving side. Furthermore, the Heart Family didn’t reside in an enormous dream mansion, instead occupying a sensible four-room home that included the basic furniture and necessities required for family life, such as bassinets, high chairs, and the all-important family table. In short, the Heart Family seemed to convey that the house wasn’t nearly as important as the love inside it.

I don't see what's all that exciting about a middle class doll family but it's an interesting tidbit in toy history nevertheless.

This ultimate Ghibli song mash-up by smaug-official makes me want to rewatch every single movie ASAP.

Here's a nifty article about retro tech's enduring allure and it doesn't just talk about vinyl records vs. MP3s for once! I do think that having a physical thing makes media seem more tangible.

I stream so much nowadays that I barely even use my DVD player, and I do think I lost an important element of watching a show or movie, somehow? I'm much more likely to give up on a show now than I was when I was watching it on DVD (or even VHS tape, maybe because I can so easily switch to something else without having to physically get up and walk over to the TV.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/39112.html

I love how the past keeps cycling through into the present, with slight changes.

This series of informative videos about different kinds of antiques from the British Museum is really adorable. And interesting!

How 1970s-1990s telephone hacking worked. Old hacker movies make MUCH more sense now!

A beauty/fashion vlogger talks about the impact social media can have on your perception of yourself, self-confidence, and growing as a person. Warning for talk about self-harm/eating disorders.

A contrabass player from South Korea jams with a street band in Florence, Italy.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/38095.html

Baldwin, Fla., opens town-run grocery store after becoming a food desert:

Over the summer, after holding several workshops, the town council approved a $150,000 loan from a reserve fund to get the Baldwin Market up and running. There wasn’t much hesitation about getting into the grocery business, Lynch says, since just about everyone was frustrated with the lack of options. The IGA’s former manager gladly took her old job back and resumed her duties as though nothing had changed.

This is a compilation of music collected from cell phone memory cards in the Saharan desert. As explained by the editors: “In much of West Africa, cellphones are are used as all purpose multimedia devices. In lieu of personal computers and high speed internet, the knockoff cellphones house portable music collections, playback songs on tinny built in speakers, and swap files in a very literal peer to peer Bluetooth wireless transfer.” It's REALLY COOL music, and 50% of the proceeds of the album go to the song creators.

It's time for another COPPA review, and Youtubers are freaking out for reasons that seem highly misinformed.

The early history of Usenet, from the perspective of someone who was there at the time.

I've been looking through old toy websites trying to find info, and the retro web designs are giving me heavy nostalgic feelings. For instance, here's the Cabbage Patch Kids website from 1999.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/36554.html

Good morning! Here's a selection of links for your perusal:

Fanfiction: The Infinite Free Buffet:

Fanfiction is what taught me to forget shame. Fanfiction taught me to love audaciously and at great volume, because, no matter what, the quirkiest trope or literary device or emotional kink that I’m weirdly, obsessively into? There’s a thousand other people or more who love it, too, and a hundred people who are writing fanfic about it. It’s a door of the world flung wide open with a neon billboard saying, “Welcome to the infinite free buffet!” and there’s nothing but food as far as the eye can see—every possible kind of every possible quality. If there’s something you’ve been longing for years to eat, you can find it. You can, possibly for the first time in your life, not just be fed but be *nourished*.

delphi wrote a Nero Wolfe fandom promo for historium and it is REALLY good. I'm a fan of the early 2000s A&E TV show, but haven't read many of the books. I might add them to my TBR list, though!

via larryhammer on my Music for when you need to do stuff post: another neat music streaming site– Soma.fm. I particularly like their playlist genres, like Secret Agent and Boot Liquor.

Archive.org is a website of many delights, and recently what delighted me was this vintage ABC Primetime TV block from 1991. Featuring old Christmas ads and the Ernest Saves Christmas movie!

Btw I wrote this post on Typora.io, a free Markdown editor/reader that basically works like Notepad, but slightly fancier. Liking it so far, though I feel like there's a slight lag between my typing and the words appearing on the screen? Though the longer I use it, the less I notice. Cool! (via alisx)

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/35547.html

California Rare Fruit Growers is a group of hardcore fruit enthusiasts. Check out their newsletters, plant sales, and available library!

Leupagus wrote a meta piece about fan interactions:

So it’s not always about cleaning up the filth for the benefit of any creators who might drop by—but I think in this day and age, with the fourth wall more porous than it’s ever been, that often creators are used (and use themselves) as a bludgeon. I remember recently someone bemoaning the lack of civility in their fandom by saying that the creator would be unhappy to know about some mean comments being flung around—to which another person responded by asking how the creator would feel about the RPF that fan had written about the creator. It can get very “I’M TELLING MOM” basically.

~50GB of cooking recipes built from plain text, ancient websites. Original-Directories is the original mirrored websites, Recipes is trimmed down to just recipes.

Who was Hilma Af Klint? tl;dr she was a Swedish abstract artist who started painting in that style way earlier than the “pioneers of abstraction” did.

São Paulo enacted a Clean City Law 13 years ago, where all advertising (e.g. billboards, big signs on business, posters, pamphlets) was banned on the city streets. Here's some of what that Law uncovered-- and it's not just empty building walls.

It's a little late for NaNoWriMo participants, but here are some pretty year-round word tracker spreadsheets, in a variety of colors.

The switching.social site has gone dark and the owner disappeared from social media. There's a mirror up now: switching.software.

If you'd like to explore self-hosted applications and network services, here's a list of free software to get you started.

Here's a company developing free/open source semiconductor manufacturing process standard, e.g. democratizing microchips.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/33946.html

I guess Medium's in financial trouble, or soon will be, because Pinboard creator recommends Medium creators dump the platform and self-host. One of the benefits of Medium is being able to share articles with a wide audience, whereas a blog needs to build views and visitors to be as effective. However, everyone should at the very least be backing up their articles to their own sites.

A shorter work week to help the planet?:

Advocates for a Green New Deal that includes a reduced work week are looking to challenge the assumption that growth is always good. A reduced work week without salary cuts would be one among many steps to rebuild an economy based not on the pursuit of growth but of sufficiency.

Peertube, a federated video hosting platform, released version 2 today. I have yet to explore Peertube, but I'm looking for a good instance to join, if anyone has recommendations!

Here's a list of LGBTQ indie games, many of which are free.

Starting a garden in the spring and want to keep track of stuff? Growstuff might be the website for you. Features include a garden journal, harvest predictions, forums, lots of pictures of plants and seeds, a trading system, and a community map.

This might be one of my new favorite things: someone walking around Japan with a GoPro strapped to their body and NO background music:

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/33629.html

Youtube's updated TOS includes the possibility of terminating your account if it's not profitable for Google. Okay.

AT&T fined $60m for throttling "unlimited" data plans:

AT&T promised unlimited data—without qualification—and failed to deliver on that promise,” Andrew Smith, the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection director said in a statement. “While it seems obvious, it bears repeating that Internet providers must tell people about any restrictions on the speed or amount of data promised.

AT&T was previously fined in 2015 for basically the same problem, soooooo.

Do you like writing posts in Markdown? Here's Markdeep, a Markdown extension meant for turning txt files into website pages.

So, hey: China uses QR codes to automate some things for their citizens, like shopping, baking, train tickets, etc…and I'm pretty sure also tracking everything they do on a highly creepy scale.

RPG/tabletop gaming fans: did you know there's a Jane Austen roleplaying game and it looks amazing??

I have recently become obsessed with homestead/canning video channels; here's a video from one of those channels about fitting in scratch cooking while working full-time:

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/32310.html

Physical-equivalent privacy:

In some library conference talks I’ve done, I’ve groped toward a formulation I’m now calling “physical-equivalent privacy.” That is, if we wouldn’t track a print book, or a person using the physical library, in a particular way, the digital analogue to that tracking behavior is also not okay. (h/t alisx)

My library doesn't track the physical books that people check out (once they return it, it's wiped from the system), but I can't say the same for our ebook vendor(s).

I really liked this Dreamwidth Starter Kit post that bisharp wrote a few years ago; it has numerous helpful links and guides, including some meta about Dreamwidth as a platform.

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet:

Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on. This is where Facebook is pivoting with Groups (and trying to redefine what the word “privacy” means in the process).

These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. The cultures of those spaces have more in common with the physical world than the internet.

jesse_the_k wrote about using Pobox as an alternative to Gmail. Do you use an email provider other than Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail/etc?

Christine Doderill created a tarot procedure for hackers:

It’s actually an extremely philosophical act to draw from a tarot deck and interpret the results. Over the years there have been many interpretations and frameworks of interpretations about tarot; but I would like to introduce a meta-framework for using tarot cards as a debugging tool.

As you work on computer systems, you put parts of yourself into them. You create bonds between yourself and otherwise anonymous inner parts of machines you have never seen or touched. These bonds stick from idea to development to testing to deployment phases and can even stay around after you stop working on something. Ever gotten a weird sense that you can recognize the author of some code while reading it? Same idea.

A short documentary on water conservation, farmers, and agriculture in the US:

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/30472.html

Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, has a new book coming out after 16 years!

Out in September next year, Clarke’s Piranesi will follow the story of its eponymous hero, who lives in the House, a building with “hundreds if not thousands of rooms and corridors, imprisoning an ocean. A watery labyrinth.” Occasionally, he sees his friend, The Other, who is doing scientific research into “A Great and Secret Knowledge”. Piranesi records his findings in his journal, but then messages begin to appear, and “a terrible truth unravels as evidence emerges of another person and perhaps even another world outside the House’s walls,” said Bloomsbury, which announced on Monday that it had acquired the novel in a two-book deal.

So really it's TWO books! (Maybe it's two books because it, like JS&MN, is like 1000 pages long?)

I've read JS&MN twice; it has interesting footnotes and a good plot, but I hated both protagonists and that made it difficult for me to enjoy it as much as I wanted to. (I haven't seen the miniseries for the same reason.) I'm still looking forward to this new book, though!

A freelance illustrator conducted a survey about pricing and it was pretty abysmal news. She then wrote a response about good pricing strategy and creating a sustainable life as a full-time illustrator. I think a lot of that could apply to any freelancer, really, especially ones doing something creative like writing/graphic design/etc.

Here is an analysis of the gender disparity between authors of Star Trek tie-in novels, with pie charts.

And here is a comic which I enjoy: The Center for Otherworld Science, which is described as a comic “about three women, awkward romance, interpersonal workplace dynamics, and a cryptozoology institute with questionable ethics.”

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/29311.html

An employee at the Internet Archive was fired for her Mastodon toots. Part 1, part 2, part 3. I'm guessing someone ratted her out, since it's more difficult to find toots than tweets through, like, Google.

A neat Dreamwidth community: the_postal_pub - for people who love letters and stationery and stamps!

An industrious person has created Good Omens Stardew Valley mods. If I can figure out how to make it work, it might actually get me to play SV again!

Features:

• Play as four gender-variable Farmer Crowley presets - or romance Aziraphale with your own custom character. You decide!
• Live ineffably-ever-after when you date and marry a literal angel. You can even make an Effort and raise children together.
• Aziraphale has his own unique dialogue, gift tastes, disposition, and schedule. Even better: he’s made out of genuine husband material.
• The clinic has a new tartan look.
• No star-crossed apocalyptic mayhem to worry about! Framed as mortal AU Omens, Aziraphale’s events and cut scenes are sure to please anyone who appreciates fluff and happy endings.
• More to love: Aziraphale has seasonal outfits AND an adorably embarrassing aerobics ensemble.

A reminder that text-based forms of communication are still important to people despite the prevalence of video.

A discussion about non-transformative fandom vs. transformative fandom on Tumblr.

Here is a little hacking thing which learns how to get better at hacking (I think) AND has a cute little face.

Pwnagotchi is an A2C-based “AI” powered by bettercap and running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W that learns from its surrounding WiFi environment in order to maximize the crackable WPA key material it captures (either through passive sniffing or by performing deauthentication and association attacks). This material is collected on disk as PCAP files containing any form of handshake supported by hashcat, including full and half WPA handshakes as well as PMKIDs.

A song to end things on:

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/26307.html

The Making of an American Girl:

In February, the American Girl brand, beloved for its expansive (and expensive) line of books, toys, and clothing, made an announcement: A new doll in its collection of historically themed characters, a black girl growing up in Detroit in 1963, was on her way.

Though it wasn’t noted in the press release, the significance of the news wasn’t lost on parents of American Girl enthusiasts or women like myself who grew up with the dolls. Melody Ellison is only the second black doll that is currently for sale from American Girl’s line of historical dolls. (Her immediate predecessor Cécile Rey, a girl from a well-to-do family in 1850s New Orleans, was introduced in 2011 and “archived” in 2014.) And, perhaps more important—unlike American Girl’s only other available black doll—she wasn’t born a slave.

I love American Girl, but there are SO MANY ISSUES with their historical girls line.

Light Phone 2: the high hopes of the low-tech phone: “There was just one problem: Light’s marketing material suggested the phone was “designed to be used as little as possible,” and the creators had outdone themselves. In fact, very few people used the thing at all.”

One of my coworkers is obsessed with this phone, but I can't see the point except for getting “cool points” with other minimalists.

jesse_the_k found this cool bookmarklet tool that's made MY life a little easier.

Permanent Sailor Moon restaurant opening in Tokyo with live stage shows every day!: “Called Sailor Moon Shining Moon Tokyo, the restaurant of course offers Sailor Moon-themed food, like the Pretty Guardian Lunch Box and Moon Prism Rice Burger for lunch, or the Sailor Planet Round Sushi, Mako-chan-invented Somen cold noodles, or Tsukino Family’s Bunny Curry for dinner.”

I like the musical show angle. Sounds fun!

I'm not planning on renting anything in Los Angeles, but this is one of the cutest real estate websites I've ever seen: The Rental Girl

Here's a bunch of audio drama podcast recommendations (lots of different genres) from LifeHacker.

A list of recommended bi and pan scifi/fantasy books, both adult and YA, plus a good mix of new releases and classics.

Solarpunk Living in a Rented Apartment: “Many people I’ve talked to through the Scuttlebut patchwork network live a solarpunk lifestyle out in more rural areas, and it seems to favour that. Closer to vibrant ecological systems and greater access to space allow for so much more. However I am the proverbial city mouse. For all its hardships I love living in a city. So I asked other people in the community for advice on how to live by solarpunk principals when your in an apartment with no green-space like a garden.”

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/23778.html

A documentary about a rainwater harvester and eco-activist in Arizona.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/23152.html

Online gay culture and soc.motss: How a Usenet group anticipated how we use Facebook and Twitter today.: “Since the early 1980s, there have been many LGBTQ spaces on the Net: newsgroups, bulletin board systems, or BBSs, mailing lists, social networks, chat rooms, and websites. But the very first LGBTQ Internet space, as far as I’ve been able to find, was the soc.motss newsgroup. And it hosted conversations that had never been seen before online—and that arguably remain in too short supply even today.”

That led me to finding: MOTSS.CON PICTURE PAGES, a collection of photos from previous soc.motts conventions from 1988-2013.

This academic paper (From Usenet To Gaydar: A Comment On Queer OnlineCommunity) has one of my favorite keywords I've ever found: <b>cyberqueer</b>.

I really liked this quote from a personal website from a former Apple employee: “Most often, people are adding the superfluous graphics to web pages just because they can, not because they've thought through the issues carefully and designed something that will actually improve the presentation. It's a “form versus content” issue - I'm more interested in content than form, as a general rule; “what does it say?”, rather than “how does it look?””

And then this showed up due to a type in the search form: the Lucretia Coffin Mott Papers Project. “LCM's letters reflect her regular travels in the mid-nineteenth century throughout the East and Midwest as she addressed various reform organizations such as the Non-Resistance Society, the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women as well as the quarterly and yearly Quaker meetings. Her letters not only express the thoughts of a public figure but they also show the anxieties and joys of a nineteenth-century woman. Forceful and intelligent, her letters also reflect Mott's character and Quaker background.”

These links are not from the rabbit hole search: letzan has been putting together femslash stats each week.

Explore the internet through a recreated WorldWideWeb NeXT browser, circa 1990! h/t alisx

My Shadow Library: A Chinese Author on Book Piracy– physical books, not electronic!

Speaking of books: LibraryBox is an “open source, portable digital file distribution tool based on inexpensive hardware that enables delivery of educational, healthcare, and other vital information to individuals off the grid.”

And finally, a video:

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/22540.html

How to run a small social network site for your friends: “This is my pitch to you: using big social media sites is easy, but you pay a steep price for it. You should consider running your own site, which is harder, but can be extremely rewarding.”

Another quick guide on how to set up a Mastodon instance for relatively little money.

Sometimes I find how-to articles that don't apply to me, but might be useful to someone on my friends list. This is one of those: Independent music distribution, 2019 edition, including direct downloads, streaming, cd/vinyl manufacturing, etc. Another option for CD manufacturing not mentioned in the article might be Kunaki.com, another POD company that isn't Amazon.

Everything wrong with science fiction is John W. Campbell’s fault.: “So… yes. Campbell launched careers, but he launched a very specific type of career, for a very specific type of man, who was prepared to espouse a very specific type of ideology. And here’s the thing. Because for all mid-1900s sci-fi is referred to as “the Golden Age”, for those of us who are not members of the SWARM5 and have tried to read the works it produced, it may as well be called the “Alienating Bigoted Garbage Age”.”

Iceland holds funeral for first glacier lost to climate change: “As the world recently marked the warmest July ever on record, a bronze plaque was mounted on a bare rock in a ceremony on the barren terrain once covered by the Okjökull glacier in western Iceland.”

Best title ever: Hahahaha, Suck It Andrew Carnegie, workers in the Carnegie Library system in Pittsburgh voted to unionize with the United Steelworkers this week.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/22424.html

Growing a Greener World has played on my local PBS station like three times now, and it's a VERY good show. This particular episode is about growing plants specifically to attract butterflies, pollinators, and insects diversity. I specifically like how they talk about finding out what plants are local to your area, and then making sure to plant a range of them so pollinators will have food year-round. And you can do it with just a small garden plot!

Some articles and discussions about Mastodon that I've found recently:

Lessons (so far) from Mastodon for independent social networks:

A lot of these lessons aren’t new at all. We’ve seen them before with Dreamwidth, Diaspora, StatusNet, Gnu Social, Pinboard, Ello, and others. Mastodon’s a good reminder that they’re still true, so they’re worth reiterating here:

- A lot of people want an alternative to corporate-owned ad-funded social networks. - Paying attention to marginalized communities is a great way to get critical mass and visibility. - A small team of developers can get something usable out quickly - There’s interest across the world, not just in the U.S. Mastodon’s lead developer is German, the most active instances are based in Europe and Asia; France is the first government to have an instance; and initial corporate adoption came in Japan. - Decentralization makes things more complex.

Transforming Tech with Diversity-Friendly Software (presentation):

The presentation talks about Mastodon as an example of diversity-friendly software based on its early focus on harassment, and the importance of furries and LGBTQ+ people in the early user base and development team. In particualr, key functionality like content warning and user muting has been largely driven by trans, queer, and nonbinary Mastodonians. That said, the Mastodon community currently has some significant diversity challenges in some other dimension (for example, very few Black and Latinx people), an attitude on many instances of shutting down discussions pertaining to identity or systemic oppression as “irrelevant”, and situations where people of color have been harassed. It will be interesting to see how things unfold.

Mastodon’s Complicated Relationship with Queer Activism by <user name=“hoodieaidakitten|:

and if you want a TLDR, here goes. queer activism has been the catalyst of change for mastodon from the beginning, and many of it&rsquo;s most defining features would never have come into existence without it. but gargron refuses to acknowledge that, or change for transparency to allow for this to be a stronger influence, to allow for positive change. instead he whines about it publically, pettily, and places the blame on the people who made mastodon what it is now.

Mastodon is crumbling—and many blame its creator | The Daily Dot: “Mastodon’s development process is pretty standard in the free open-source software community, but Mastodon isn’t a standard open-source project, and its queer users have long fought with Rochko over how credit is given out for features.

In other new: an employee at an “infrastructure firm” was outsourcing his job to three people in China.

Still have an iPod (Classic)? Want to get back to a time when your music wasn't attached to a device with a million other distractions? Yay, me too! (I'll write more about this later.)

And here's how to upgrade your old iPod so it works just like new! I have two iPods myself (and two iPod Touchs, eek), one with a bad battery and one with an okay battery. I'll be messing with the one with the bad battery– replacing the battery, adding in flash memory, and running Rockbox on it. Fun!!

And finally, here is a list of classic books written by women and nonbinary authors, specifically created as an alternative to the “best of” lists that ONLY have male authors on them.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/21733.html

Robin Sloan: No reasonable human needs more than 10,000 other humans to read their words within twenty minutes of writing them. e.g. the problems of social media were largely developed by the companies who created social media, and can be fixed by the same.

Sidenote: I don't know what kinda website that thread is posted on, how it works, who runs it, why it looks so cool, or why it has neat names and little cutesy icons, but I want to know MORE. What's a threadgoblib? What's a twig? How do I get one??

Also, OP is an author who wrote a fun book a few years back called Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. If you're a book nerd, you might like it!

If you're interested in Mastodon but aren't sure what to do with it, here's a comprehensive guide to Mastodon and how to use it, including cultural stuff that may not be super obvious like content warnings and other etiquette.

This is a cute art/craft Youtube channel from Australia:

I am constantly on the lookout for more GLBTQ romances to read; if you are, too, here is a PoC Queer Romance Authors Community page with tons of authors and books on it that I am adding to my to-read page ASAP.

Speaking of books:

Surveyed my new seniors. 72% of them cannot identify a single author they like. Two-thirds of them “never” read in their spare time. Never. I know there are many factors behind this, but I can’t help wonder what role schools have played in killing the ❤️ of reading.

Posted by Kelly Gallagher (@KellyGToGo) on August 9, 2019

My guess: a mix of over-scheduling after-school activities, no longer having sustained silent reading during the school day, not encouraging reading for fun/over-emphasis on “reading levels” and reading programs, not having access to a library and/or books, not having access to adults who read for fun AND talk about books they enjoy (not just assign for schoolwork), annnnnnd they're probably reading a LOT of fanfic instead of traditional books.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/21370.html

My list of podcasts to listen to grows ever longer and I despair of ever catching up, but this Dune readalong podcast hosted by Megan Sunday and Beau North sounds great!

Twitter art:

Back to the 90s! This is an establishing shot I painted for DreamWorks the Road to El Dorado. It&#39;s painted in acrylics on Crescent 100 illustration board, plus there’s a teeny bit of digital touch up. I painted for the show in ‘98 and ‘99 and it was released in 2000.

Posted by Nathan Fowkes Art (@NathanFowkesArt) on May 4, 2019

Like to DIY stuff? Prefer low tech solutions to problems over expensive high tech ones? Low Tech Magazine and its sister No Tech Magazine are the sites for you!

If you switched from using Google to Duck Duck Go, here's a helpful guide to digging deeper into its search functions.

I am not the only person to switch from using a purse to using a (mini) backpack. My shoulders/back have stopped hurting and it's WONDERFUL!

Why there’s so little left of the early internet:

Fifteen years may not seem a long time, but in terms of the internet it is like a geological age. Some 40% of the links on the Million Pixel Homepage now link to dead sites. Many of the others now point to entirely new domains, their original URL sold to new owners.

The Million Dollar Homepage shows that the decay of this early period of the internet is almost invisible. In the offline world, the closing of, say, a local newspaper is often widely reported. But online sites die, often without fanfare, and the first inkling you may have that they are no longer there is when you click on a link to be met with a blank page.

I'm always on the lookout for more GLBTQ romances to read, so the Queer Romance PoC Authors Community Page will no doubt come in handy.

How to minimize targeted ads on popular social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube.

Why does America's mass transit systems mostly suck? It's not because of cars.

So, in the postwar years, systems cut back their service and riders fled, prompting a cycle of further service cuts and ridership declines until there was virtually nothing left. This happened even in many of the municipally owned systems.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/20307.html

Hey! You know how it's really annoying how every other Instagram user is now doing paid sponsorship posts? The tide may be turning against so-called influencers and people who monetize every aspect of their life. It may have worked for a while, but it can't keep working if we're going to have any semblance of an actual internet community– versus a “community” of influencers and their audiences. (h/t lj-writes)

Sometimes when I go visit Twitter the algorithm brings me useful links. Like this one about how PornHub did NOT pay for snow plows in Boston a few years ago. Yeah! It as a total lie.

Git repositories are under attack from a hacker who's holding their code ransom for Bitcoin. As a (returned) Linux user, I use GitHub to get applications all the time– yikes.

I spent the last day or so trying to find a self-hosted alternative to Goodreads, and I didn't find much. I DID find these two things:

BookStack, which is actually a very pretty Wiki software.

ReaDB, which is kinda what I want but only works on a home server (which I don't have yet) and looks like it just duplicates whatever I can do on Calibre anyway.

Anyway I deleted my Goodreads account.

Twitter algorithm also brought me this indie game: I HATE THIS TOWN: An Emo RPG: “A game about being a teenager in the early 2000's. Foil the adults' plans and Get Out Of Town before you and your friends become too emo or too mundane to make your escape. Mostly silly, although I suppose you could make it serious if you tried.

Diceless – driven by a collaborative playlist. Requires access to a copy of My Immortal.”

The various aesthetic/political -punk movements are totally my jam. Check out this one: A Tentative Definition of Kudzupunk by Ruth Kitchin Tillman.

And finally, an article I haven't read yet but I dig the title: The Ecological Impact of Browser Diversity

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/19291.html

There's been a recent massive blow-up with a romance author who plagiarized, like 90+ books more on that here– anyway, within that mess, Nora Roberts has been writing some really cool posts about her novel-creation process. This one's my favorite: Here's How I Work: “I work on a three-draft method. This works for me. It’s not the right way/wrong way. There is no right or wrong for a process that works for any individual writer. Anyone who claims there is only one way, or that’s the wrong way, is a stupid, arrogant bullshitter. That’s my considered opinion.”

lucyknisley (Twitter) has been posting really adorable comics starring her kid and her cat.

Here is another adorable autobiographical comic from Yvonne Hsuan Ho about her grandparents, her summers with them, and her love for lychee.

I am going to try making my own laundry soap once I run through my current supply. Because why not, right?

Do y'all remember when Wizard Rock (Harry Potter), Sherlock Rock, Time Rock (Doctor Who), and similar music was SUPER popular? It's like filk, but not necessarily folksy. I have a major stash of fan songs from years past, and I recently stumbled across some new-to-me singers/bands on Bandcamp A Bromance In Bohemia and I am now DEEP into the nostalgia.

Here is a man who made an organ out of Furbies:

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/16788.html

The Verge wrote about Why CAPTCHAs have gotten so difficult– basically, machines are learning TOO FAST and that means we're stuck picking storefronts and crosswalks, which is actually pretty difficult! I can never manage to find all the bicycles, and that means clicking tiny blurry pictures over and over again until I can get through. I guess “they” are developing new CAPTCHA technology to address this, which is just. Great.

If San Francisco is so great, why is everyone I love leaving?: I mean the title alone is a punch to the heart? But the actual article is more about gentrification ]of course, high rent prices ]duh, but also

“Had we drifted? Of course we had. But it was more than the traffic and geography that was the source of my guilt. I felt I had played into the system that was financially and culturally kicking her out. And I’d realized it for the first time just as she was leaving.”

I mean, I don't think somebody working in tech necessarily is the reason behind all the stuff that's happening? Shouldn't we blame the tech businesses who are all building their shit in one tiny area instead of, like, the midweest? Anyway.

Finding Lena Forsen, the Patron Saint of JPEGs– I keep finding good articles when looking through Pinboard's popular links page. Fun! “Among some computer engineers, Lena is a mythic figure, a mononym on par with Woz or Zuck. Whether or not you know her face, you’ve used the technology it helped create; practically every photo you’ve ever taken, every website you’ve ever visited, every meme you’ve ever shared owes some small debt to Lena.”

Kinda building off a lot of recent articles about missing pre-2010 internet: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? starts off with a lament for Myspace layout designers (??) and then it ends with an advertisement for a still-in-development blogging platform, so screw that.

Bitter Old Fanfic Queen: “A BOFQ is a jaded, martini-swilling cynic who has seen it all. She might say something like “Get offa my lawn” on occasion, and will tend to be both familiar with and tired of common and recurrent arguments.”

Discovered this Canadian(!) surf rock group thanks to Twitter; I love them and have bought their stuff from Bandcamp even.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/14554.html

_tierhund (Twitter) posted a super cute winter fashion comic for Venom and Eddie. The floof!

[https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/14/elsevier-journal-editors-resign-start-rival-open-access-journal|Editorial Mutiny at Elsevier Journal]]– the editorial board of Journal of Informetrics all resigned and are starting a open-access journal in protest to commercial control over scholarly work.

Anil Dash's Function podcast has an interview with Bruce Ableson (founder of Open Diary), Lisa Phillips (former senior system administrator at LiveJournal), and Andrew Smales (founder of Diaryland). Includes a full transcript, so you can just read if you want! AND screenshots of the early versions of all those sites. I only ever used LJ (and then maybe InsaneJournal for a bit), but I remember Open Diary being popular among personal journal-ers.

Over at Slate, an analysis of the various -punk literary movements: Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction:

The persistence of cyberpunk under different labels is, perhaps, to be expected. After all, as many writers insist, science fiction isn’t in any real sense about the future.

Hmmmmm. The Beginning of the End for Physical Media: “What else was announced at CES 2019? Tons of great new Blu-ray and 4K players, right? Nope. Just three major brand models. THREE.”

Wanna play a game? How about this game where you guess which parked domain is worth more?

Fanart on Twitter:

Someone suggested sailor moon in a comment today and I needed to get this out of my system

Posted by Harpsona (Nile) (@harpsonaTweets) on January 18, 2019

I re-found the Clex Fanfiction Festival website and was thrown BACK IN TIME. I think the CLFF was one of the first fandom festival events that I knew about– before that, I only ever found fics randomly on mailing lists and forums and (maybe) a few author websites. And HERE was a MASSIVE FANFIC FESTIVAL! Amazing!

There is a femslash convention in Orange County! It's next month, even! TGIF/F: a gal pals convention. Their schedule is up, tickets are available, and I kinda really want to go.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/12453.html

alchemistdoctor posted a handy copy-paste resource for fanfic recommendations. Did you all know that AO3’s share buttons came with pre-formatted info? Because I did NOT and I feel like a huge dumbass. alchemistdoctor’s takes that pre-formatted stuff and turns it a little nicer-looking for Dreamwidth. I’m definitely going to use it!

Also from alchemistdoctor: a new comm! sherlockkinkmeme, a fic promting community for any and all Holmes fandoms.

The Hugos are upon us! Here is a collection of Hugo Nomination Resources from forestofglory.

I thought it might be fun to highlight some older fan sites that are still around in my links posts, partly because I just love them and their aesthetics, partly because they're kinda hard to find if you're just doing a casual Google search. Anyway!

Whoosh.org, started 1996 and centered mostly around Xena:

Here be essays, articles, commentaries, episode guides, historic airing schedules, convention reports, boutique websites, uber fiction, various analyses of genre television shows and cinema, and a plethora of other materials concerning strong women in popular culture, popular women in strong cuture, and other stuff that strikes me as cool, weird, interesting, or fun (in a pleasant or not so peasant way). Welcome, make yourself at home, and stay a while. I'll put the kettle on and please, jump in anywhere.

oanja is doing a readalong for The Goblin Emperor!

I’m not sure what I’d use this digital "automatic writing tool and Integrated Divination Environment" for, but it SOUNDS cool.

Lisa Frank meets Satan in this creepy-cute art by honeyed.

Chloe Condon was harassed by some rando who turns out to have fabricated almost every single thing about his life. For YEARS. This thread is a wild ride from start to finish.

Any D&D players in my circle? Here's a electronic character sheet which I think automatically calculates things for you.

404 Page Not Found:

Like many people my age and older, I miss the pre–social media internet. The new internet knows this, and it capitalizes on my nostalgia as it eats away at the old internet. It amounts to an unforeseen form of technological cannibalism.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/11066.html

Hannibal fanartist Flying Rotten has found a new home for her Hannistag comic (explicit, 18+!) because some of the pages were deleted on Tumblr after the Purge. Yay!

Excellent fanartist Reapersun has been reposting her art at Pillowfort, including The Bed Day (Sherlock/John, Mature) which I must've missed the first time around because it's TOO CUTE.</cut>

I have not read these yet, but here are some free books/original short stories:

Scifi/fantasy author Dorothy J. Heydt aka Katherine Blake has multiple books available for download at her site, including The Interior Life, The Witch of Syracuse and A Point of Honor.

M/M romance authors Alexa Snow and Jane Davitt have put almost all their books up on AO3 after their publisher closed.

Hyakunichisou 13 has written some AMAZING STUFF, mostly m/m scifi/fantasy/mystery, all for free on AO3.

Random fan stuff!

siria wrote A BuzzFeed Unsolved Primer which is so sweet and lovely and makes me want to watch the show.

Fandom in Stitches is a multi-fandom quilt pattern blog designed by fans! I may have posted about this already, but it's worth posting again.

Fandom Before Computers:

The advent of the computer, which made producing the master copy of a zine much easier than typing clean copy for offset printing or cutting mimeo stencils, and more available (and cheaper) photocopying techniques made it even easier to produce zines, but few computer-generated zines would be as beautiful or sophisticated as some of the early S&H zines. Since many newer fen have never even seen a zine, never mind one of the older mimeo or offset printed zines, a little history can make some of these now obscure terms more relevant to digital-age fen.

absolutedestiny wrote cheap big media hosting which could be good for fanartists and vidders.

And one little leftover link:

@kentcdodds on considering how screenreaders interact with cutesy font– always good to consider how other people experience the internet!

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/10961.html

@rhodanum talks about the history of the Star Wars Prequel fandom, particularly re: girls and women's fansites and fanworks. This brought back some memories for me– I was 11 or so when they first came out, and I remember REALLY liking the first Prequel movie, mostly because of Padme. I was VERY MUCH into her costumes/history/etc. and I collected what stuff I could. And then when the second movie came out there was this massive backlash. It was NOT COOL to like the Prequels any more, and it hasn't been cool for like 15 years. But now it's swinging back around again!

A fancomic rec: RSVP by Sonia Liao, Tim/Kon (DCU), Explicit (18+) comic about awkward family moments on the eve of Tim and Kon's wedding.

Sidenote: why don't more fanartists host their stuff on their own websites? Is it a cost thing?

SFZero: “SFZero is a Collaborative Production Game. Players build characters by completing tasks for their groups and increasing their Score. The goals of play include meeting new people, exploring the city, and participating in non-consumer leisure activities.”

I think this website/game might be stagnant, but I really like the idea of a game that encourages people to go out and try new things, particularly if it's tied to a city.

Gwenfar's Garden collected solarpunk descriptions. I like solarpunk! It's like steampunk but more garden-y.

Also, see how it's posted on Plume?? I love seeing people using federated tech, as it makes it less scary for me to use myself. If they're doing it, I could do it! Not that I need another blogging site, but still.

fh14 wrote a great Doctor Who season 6 (Classic) review, which goes over not only the episodes/story arcs but also the characters!

I'm Rethinking RSS from J.R. Schwab:

After some thinking about the current state of social media and mass email lists, RSS came to mind, and it's actually a much better alternative for privacy. No data collection, no feed manipulation, no email newsletters. It's like someone from the future went to the past and gave us the answer to subscribing to creators without giving our away every detail about our lives.

I switched to Feedly when Google Reader kicked the bucket, but then dumped that and haven't used an RSS reader since. (And now it looks like there's paid stuff/ads on Feedly? Ugh.) I still don't really read (non-DW) blogs, because I'm so dissatisfied with the RSS reader options. BUT, most sites, even social media sites, do have an RSS option (even if it's hidden), and that could be a good way to get everything onto one “dashboard” kinda thing.

enchantedsleeper wrote "On finding new fandom communities":

My point is that I think the narratives we construct around online fan communities/fannish social networks and fandom migration tend to characterise certain websites as the be-all and end-all of fannish activity (i.e. the primary purpose of fans being on those websites is to Do Fandom, and when they migrate they go to Do Fandom somewhere else), and I can't relate to that, but I have no idea if that's just me, or if it's not and I'm just misreading/over-simplifying the narrative. Maybe it's just the circles I now move in, which are dominated by people who were either once in LiveJournal fandom and miss it, or are in Tumblr fandom and are trying to figure out how to replace it.

jesse_the_k wrote "Why I Love Instapaper for Reading Fanfic." A good option for downloading fic for offline reading!

I ended up using Marvin for fanfic reading (send downloaded AO3 file to it) as it has more font/color options as well as notes/highlights/etc. BUT I have used Instapaper for saving non-AO3 fanfic off the web before, and it DOES format things very nicely. Plus Marvin Pro is like $4 and Instapaper is free!

Why does decentralization matter? from the Mastodon blog:

Decentralization upends the social network business model by dramatically reducing operating costs. It absolves a single entity of having to shoulder all operating costs alone. No single server needs to grow beyond its comfort zone and financial capacity. As the entry cost is near zero, an operator of a Mastodon server does not need to seek venture capital, which would pressure them to use large-scale monetization schemes. There is a reason why Facebook executives rejected the $1 per year business model of WhatsApp after its acquisition: It is sustainable and fair, but it does not provide the same unpredictable, potentially unbounded return of investment that makes stock prices go up. Like advertising does.

Fanfiction Feedback Form from tehomet.net. Could be used for either email contact or a long-ish comment!