2021 Linkspam

If you enjoy any of these links, please leave a comment at the original post and we can talk about it! Don't worry if it's years old, I'm hapy to chat anyway. Most Twitter links are probably broken in some way, idk how to fix them.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/108811.html

The digital death of collecting:

My lostness comes from the sense that our cultural collections are not wholly our own anymore. In the era of algorithmic feeds, it’s as if the bookshelves have started changing shape on their own in real time, shuffling some material to the front and downplaying the rest like a sleight-of-hand magician trying to make you pick a specific card — even as they let you believe it’s your own choice. And this lack of agency is undermining our connections to the culture that we love.

Related: Music Collectors Talk About Why They Still Bother in the 21st Century / The Youths Are Bringing CDs Back / The End of Owning Music: How CDs and Downloads Died

Encyclopedia Of Forlorn Places, a travel guide for ghost towns, dystopian landscapes, and forgotten destinations.

UMG Seems to Think it Copyrighted the Moon aka copyright trolls are a plague upon everyone.

An old school website still regularly updated: DigitalBookIndex.org which collects free (legal) ebooks and organizes them into topic lists. Especially good for scholarly research or people with particular special interests.

Speaking of books, here's a subgenre to explore: Subterranean fiction is “a subgenre of adventure fiction, science fiction, or fantasy which focuses on fictional underground settings, sometimes at the center of the Earth or otherwise deep below the surface.”

I couldn't get this to work, but if you use Plex and want to experience TV as it used to be before streaming took over, try pseudo-channel, which will “act like a real TV channel with show scheduling, commercial breaks, movie nights, etc.”

A cute Breath of the Wild fan animation:

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/103535.html

Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th (THIS YEAR), and it's bringing up a lot of discussion about archiving, fandom spaces, and how much Yahoo sucks. Here's a good thread by KaylaAncrum (twitter) which talks a bit about her troubles finding early 2000s Star Trek sites after the death (murder) of Geocities.

I Miss My Cafe is another background noise generator focused on the sounds of American coffee shops. It's been blowing up on TikTok so the servers might be a bit hammered at the moment.

Collapse OS:

Winter is coming and Collapse OS aims to soften the blow. It is a Forth (why Forth?) operating system and a collection of tools and documentation with a single purpose: preserve the ability to program microcontrollers through civilizational collapse. It is designed to:

Run on minimal and improvised machines.
Interface through improvised means (serial, keyboard, display).
Edit text and binary contents.
Compile assembler source for a wide range of MCUs and CPUs.
Read and write from a wide range of storage devices.
Assemble itself and deploy to another machine.

The guy who did the Animorphs book covers sells prints of said covers on Etsy! Signed and NUMBERED prints!

Scramoutcha vs the Community: a niche P2P community's troubles with one specific user get turned into an experimental zine.

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/97369.html

I never was much of a Gap fan, but if you were (or if you just really like 90s music), you might want to check this out: Gap In-Store Playlists 1992 to 2006.

How Has the Sailor Moon Fandom Changed Since 2000?

It’s always hard looking back on the past because it’s far too easy to come across as either overly critical or to glorify “the good old days.” While I look fondly on those days of my misspent youth running my own *Sailor Moon* fan site, moderating *Sailor Moon* message boards, and even staying up late into the night arguing with people on guest books about things that didn’t really matter, I realize that it’s the *memories* that I treasure and not necessarily the events themselves that were important.

Another background music website to add into your rotation: Sounds of Disneyland.

On January 1st another huge bunch of creative works went into the public domain! More info here from Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Speaking of the public domain, beloved public domain ebook provider Project Gutenberg got a face-lift over the summer and looks mildly more modern than before.

This is a stylized Youtube playlist focused on the 1990s. Kinda fun! There's also a playlists for the 1970s and 1980s.

Window Swapshows videos out of people's windows from across the world. You can submit your own window, too.

Presented without comment:

Original post: https://tozka.dreamwidth.org/96280.html

Clearing out more links that've been lurking in my Pinboard for a while (in 2021 I WILL get back to sharing links regularly!:

The Pressure to be a Professional Witch:

When a person writes books, travels to speak at festivals, blogs on a major platform, or has a substantial social media following, we often assume that that’s what they do for a living, especially in magical communities. Lots of people do make their living that way, of course! And it certainly seems like something people should be able to do if they choose–we shouldn’t expect presenters, musicians, authors, and artists to contribute for free just because these are spiritual communities–but underlying all of this is a sentiment that exists in American work culture as a whole, and seems to hit creatives the hardest. And that’s the idea that we should all be doing what we love in order to make money, and that a passion isn’t really a passion unless we’re striving to make it a career.

In witchcraft and Pagan communities, this manifests as the idea that once we reach a certain level of proficiency or knowledge as a practitioner, it’s time to turn it into a business.

I see this pressure manifesting in almost every area of life– like if you have any sort of hobby or interest, you should be aiming to make money from that hobby or why bother doing it. There's also the increasing pressure to make yourself into a “brand,” which I find abhorrant on almost every level…

A little sports and GLBTQ+ history: The Hidden Queer History Behind “A League of Their Own”.

Sometimes I just look up weird prehistoric animals and am glad we don't live with them nowadays (giant sloths, giant sharks, those weird tiny horses. Check out the **Chalicotheres**, a thankfully herbivorous mammal from 780k+ years ago.

This article is basically an ad for a documentary (which I watched; it was just okay but it's an interesting tidbit from technology's recent past: General Magic tried to invent a smartphone in the 1990s. This is why it failed.

Here is a doujinshi (Japanese fan comic database, currently with over a million “objects” listed.

About That Wave of Anti-Racist Bestsellers Over the Summer…:

Now that the election is over, it’s hard to know what to feel. While I do appreciate the white people who marched beside me, yelling that Black lives did indeed matter, I worry that some of them went home, placed their handwritten signs down, and will never pick them up again, except to place them in the trash. I worry that white customers ordered these books and simply thought “I did a good deed today,” and rolled over to sleep. I worry that when the next Black person is killed by police, I will have to scroll through my timeline, only to stop and hesitate while reading comments such as “What was he doing?” or “They wouldn’t have been killed if they had simply obeyed the police!” What do I do then? There are simply no words in any book that will prepare me for that.

The US Government Says Facebook Needs To Sell Instagram And WhatsApp which would be amazing if it actually happens.

And finally: