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[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

[anahata0108]

This. This is how you do April Fools Day. Not with bullshit that causes people anxiety or causes people to revisit trauma. Just a silly practical joke that you immediately see through and that won't cause anyone any stress.

[anahata0108]

No thank you, tumblr. Keep your grossly environmentally irresponsible egregious manifestation of capitalist privilege the fuck away from me.

[pristinebiscuit-blog]

Visit Original Link

The Cinematic Orchestra – Arrival of the Birds

Edit: This track, along with the perfectly suited additional track “Transformation” [offering an additional 5 minutes of astonishing beauty] can be found here.

[anahata0108]

Crucial correction to the OP: the right link to the full track is here, not where OP said.

This is the kind of contemporary classical that I love. It doesn’t have the anxiety-ridden, dread-brewing atonality that neoclassical is infamous for, but also doesn’t stray into the saccharine synths of new age. This kind of music very specifically has been my musical hyperfixation for a very, very long time. Some of my absolute favorites, with some notes:

Ólafur Arnalds: closest match; a similar small orchestra feeling with similar tempo and feeling. Specifically, his NPR Tiny Desk (Home) Concert is exactly the kind of thing I think people in this post would love

Max Richter: more ornate, grander scale, but not baroque; think the quiet, pensive moments in great films / TV shows. This is apropos, since that’s the majority of his work, e.g. the Black Mirror soundtrack

Nils Frahm: more intimate, much smaller scale (often just Nils and his piano), yet just as powerful. Ambre made me cry when I heard it the first time and can still provoke that reaction.

[anahata0108]

Oh, oh, another artist for the list! Ludovico Einaudi. I'd put him midway between Ólafur and Max in terms of orchestral complexity, just as beautiful as anything else. I have a soft spot for the piano, as you might be able to guess from the above recommendations, and Ludovico brings out its beauty about as well as Nils does.

Something that stands out about this list is that it's all white men. I would love to see some diversity here, so please bring your recommendations.

[pristinebiscuit-blog]

Visit Original Link

The Cinematic Orchestra – Arrival of the Birds

Edit: This track, along with the perfectly suited additional track “Transformation” [offering an additional 5 minutes of astonishing beauty] can be found here.

[anahata0108]

Crucial correction to the OP: the right link to the full track is here, not where OP said.

This is the kind of contemporary classical that I love. It doesn't have the anxiety-ridden, dread-brewing atonality that neoclassical is infamous for, but also doesn't stray into the saccharine synths of new age. This kind of music very specifically has been my musical hyperfixation for a very, very long time. Some of my absolute favorites, with some notes:

Ólafur Arnalds: closest match; a similar small orchestra feeling with similar tempo and feeling. Specifically, his NPR Tiny Desk (Home) Concert is exactly the kind of thing I think people in this post would love

Max Richter: more ornate, grander scale, but not baroque; think the quiet, pensive moments in great films / TV shows. This is apropos, since that's the majority of his work, e.g. the Black Mirror soundtrack

Nils Frahm: more intimate, much smaller scale (often just Nils and his piano), yet just as powerful. Ambre made me cry when I heard it the first time and can still provoke that reaction.

[flightlessartist]

you think you’re going to have a normal field trip and she shows up wyd

✦ find me on instagram @the.flightless.artist ✦

[sophiamcdougall]

Please don’t pirate books at least while the author is alive. I’ll make an exception for actual billionaires and wildly expensive textbooks you cannot afford yet need to complete your studies. I can’t make an exception for assholes, because we’re all considered assholes by someone.  I don’t know how many people realise how many writers who created successful, beloved stories and characters still die poor while other people get rich off the same work. I don’t think people realise that in the UK the current average yearly earnings for an author has nosedived over the last fifteen years to £10,500. That obviously is forcing people to quit writing. It increasingly means writing is a job for people who’ve inherited money or have wealthy spouses who can support them. I don’t know if people realise that in general, writers are poor and getting poorer. I’m sorry, but if you think widespread sense of entitlement to free books has nothing to do with that … you’re just wrong. 

I say I don’t think people realise - the truth is I hope they don’t, because the alternative is that they don’t care. That’s certainly the impression I’ve got from Twitter, where a truly horrifying number of people are arguing that copyright on  all books should expire after thirty years, and you should be able to acquire books for  free after that. This … would not just mean that everyone gets free books. It would mean if you write a book at 30, not only do you lose any royalties from it at 60, but Disney can take it, make a franchise out of it, Scrooge McDuck it up in a pool of money while you starve because writers don’t get workplace pensions.

Some threads on the unintended (?) consequences of this. I can’t go over it all again. John Brownlow NK Jemisin Michael Marshall Smith Me Marina Lostetter Kari Dru and others William Gibson and others

There are plenty of others. It’s not that this actual idea will actually happen, but I do think it reinforces the idea that it’s not only okay, but sometimes actually virtuous to search for ways to enjoy writers’ work without paying for it. Like it’s somehow a step towards a better world. Not just at the reader end, to be fair, at the employer end too. And I do see a lot of people here too who are all about supporting workers unless the workers are writers in which case fuck’em. 

Like. If you want to radically change society in such a way that mass-media conglomerates don’t exist and so can’t exploit us and we’re supported to make art in some other way than fine. But can you start the revolution with actual rich people please, not ask us to live right now, in the society we’ve got, without the money we need to survive it. Finally, a plea: I really, really, do not want to debate this. This whole thing genuinely makes me feel tense and shaky and sick. If you’ve got to disagree - unfollow me, block me, vagueblog somewhere I can’t see it. The Twitter version of this already has me feeling like I’ve been kicked in the gut. I didn’t want to write this post. I just felt I wasn’t going to have any peace until I did.

[sophiamcdougall]

More from Courtney Milan, including on how no, it’s not like patents.

[feuervogel]

So much good here. 

[mikkeneko]

not even about the topic at hand but

I can’t make an exception for assholes, because we’re all considered assholes by someone

[sophiamcdougall]

No there freaking isn’t. A millionaire is not a billionaire-lite. A millionaire is not someone who has absolutely no risk of suffering personal want, and the power to fix multiple social issues and chooses not to.

I chose my words deliberately. If I’d meant “and millionaires” I would have fucking said that. I didn’t forget. 

So much has been said about the difference between a million and a billion that I would have hoped it was no longer necessary to explain it, but here we are. 

 A million is a thousandth of a billion.  A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 32 years. 

If you earned £1000 a day, and spent nothing, it would take you three years to become a millionaire. It would take you 2,470 years to become a billionaire. They’re not even close to the same kind of thing. Obviously it’s fortunate and unusual to be in possession of a million anything at once, (although it’s worth noting that different currencies mean significant differences in how much wealth we’re actually talking) but in a career where it often takes years to create and sell even one book, it should be understood as equivalent to several years of salary coming at once. The safest thing for any writer would be to assume it will never happen again. Your next book bombing - or simply not getting the lucrative film deal your last book did – these are very normal occurrences. Yeah, that wouldn’t in itself take you back to poverty, but it could very easily mean the status of “millionaire” is a one-off blip, not a static condition.    And factor in one fairly normal problem like having to pay for your own or a relative’s longterm care, or any kind of health crisis at all for writers in the US, and you could be back to average levels of wealth at best very quickly.  Also how the hell do you know who is a millionaire? You don’t. 

And people are very quick to assume writers are millionaires, because a book has sold fairly well or has been made into a film or even simply because they’ve heard of them. That’s a big part of the point of this post. People think writers are much, much richer than they are. They are very unaware of how often even books that make money don’t necessarily make money for the writer. (Just look at what happened to Peter Beagle, for a particularly heinous recent example.) They are very keen to find loopholes to  put writers in a special category of person it’s okay to exploit.

Don’t. 

[alexseanchai]

[image: tumblr tag reading “#also an exception for millionaires”.]

[jabberwockypie]

It’s worth noting that those net worth sites where you can google an author’s or a celebrity’s name and their net worth, are complete bullshit with no real basis in fact.

[chaoticgouda]

shipment officers, gently nudging Ever Given with their 8 tugboats: Ever Given move out of the way please so you don’t block the entire global trade

Ever Given, her lamplights enormous: you SHOVE ever given? you shove her hull like the big boulder? oh! oh! no commerce for human! no commerce for human for One Thousand Years!!!

[whitepeopletwitter]

[anahata0108]

Bonus round infuriating when you know how to build the software into the site that does what you want, but for Reasons™ (read: money) it doesn't exist.

[prokopetz]

Writing tip: if you need to provide a lot of worldbuilding information at once, but don’t want a bunch of characters explaining things to each other that they already know, have somebody do something terrible that’s related to the thing you want to explain, then have them morally justify themselves in a way that requires them to explain the thing.

Recognised variants:

The “it’s not what it looks like” explanation

The “I know this looks bad, but let me provide context” runaround

The “outlining the extenuating circumstances” ramble

The “really this is as much your fault as it is mine” reproach

The “it was a hard decision and you should pity me” appeal

The “here’s why I had no choice but to do what I did“ rationalisation

The “I was justified because fuck you“ rant

[anahata0108]

So, like, if we eat the rich and abolish the police, can we use #7?

[lastoneout]

Im a simple polyam, I see three or more idiots, I ship them together.

[lastoneout]

Fuck ship wars everyone is dating no I will not take constructive criticism

[lastoneout]

Join me in polyshipping the only thing you have to lose is your chains

[anahata0108]

... but

... but

... but

... the chains are FUN and USEFUL and if having one partner chained up is fun, imagine how much fun it is to have ALL of them chained up

[ladydrace]

Has anyone else noticed how, when you have a chronic condition of some kind, that there’s always the basic assumption from people around you that you’re not already doing everything you can?

[squidsqueen]

It’s all about the illusion of control. People who are healthy like to believe they can always keep being healthy if they do the right things. They don’t want to think about how good people get struck with terrible circumstances for no reason. So they keep assuming that if they got sick, they could do something to make it better. And if you’re still sick, that must mean you’ve done something wrong or not done enough.

[atalantapendrag]

Nail. Head. The same attitude can be seen in how a lot of people talk about poverty.

[anahata0108]

And in how people talk about making friends / finding a partner / other social success. "oh, you'll find the right person!" says someone who just celebrated 40 years of marriage. "Oh, just put yourself out there, you'll make friends!" says someone with an absolutely packed calendar.

No. It's not that easy. It doesn't "just happen" and the insistence that it does only exacerbates the loneliness that people without those others in their lives feel every day.

This isn't some incel rant, I don't believe people owe me anything or that women are terrible or any of their other nonsense, but the toxic positivity about finding love / friendship is pretty awful. I do have some friends who've never said that to me, and I'm very grateful for it, but hearing it from everyone else is, somehow, infuriating and depressing at the same time.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[icarus-suraki]

Important Announcement:

April Fools Day (April 1) is one week away. To that end, I just want it known now, well before the day, that this blog will NOT be posting any jump scares, fake announcements, freak-out posts, fake hackings, fake emergencies, fake news, and “gotcha!” stuff on April Fools Day. We’re staying safe and chill around here.

I’m honestly not into April Fools Day, really, unless the jokes are obvious and silly–like Rickrolls and Dad Jokes. Rickrolls and Dad Jokes are just traditional. 

[anahata0108]

Ugh, thank you for the reminder about the Internet Annual You Are Not As Funny As You Think Day.

[frikiskrew]

[tygermama]

there is no such thing as unskilled labour

[cryoverkiltmilk]

I’ll keep saying it.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS UNSKILLED LABOR.

THERE IS ONLY UNDERVALUED LABOR.

[cheahandonions883]

“You see, no labor is really menial unless you’re not getting adequate wages.”

— Dr Martin Luther King Jr. “The Other America” 1968

[left-reminders]

All power to the working class 🚩

All power to the people 🚩

[alden-the-commenter]

Conservatives will point out that anyone can be trained to do these things: they’re easily replaceable. You don’t have to pay them enough to live on because there will always be more people to fill the role.

And I’m just like… Oh honey… You are *this* close to the point.

Yes. That’s why the homeless/unemployed exist. So that we’re always so insecure in our survival that we will accept any demeaning thing they want to do to us. But the thing is that we NEED people in “menial” jobs. Software engineers, managers, CEO’s Lawyers, politicians: they can take a week off of work and everything is fine. Nobody goes hungry.

“Menial” laborers all take a week off work and society comes to a grinding halt. People start going hungry.

So why can’t we allow those workers to survive? Don’t give me any bullshit about how profits will go down, I don’t give a damn about how many zeros are in Jeff Bezo’s bank account. Tell me why it will cause more harm to allow workers to comfortably survive than to allow them to be sick and food insecure and homeless.

I don’t care if educated and affluent people like me have to pay a little more for burgers. Yeah it’ll suck, but I’m a big boy: I can endure a slight inconvenience.

[m0rdred-the-fallen]

That last one is The Best Possible Addition to the post.

[anahata0108]

It sucks that the system is this way, but if you want to do something right now, tip more!

Yes, the system that made tips necessary is awful, but! I'm not sure what else the average person who's doing well can do in this situation. Well, voting, but I mean more immediately.

[serenata-your-neighborhood-lefty]

“Shouldn’t the man who invented the iPhone own his own creation?”

An explanation by anti-capitalist brad pitt.

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Mazzucato lists twelve crucial technologies that make smartphones “smart”: (1) microprocessors;(2) memory chips; (3) solid state hard drives; (4) liquid crystal displays; (5) lithium-based batteries;(6) fast Fourier transform algorithms; (7) the internet; (8) HTTP and HTML protocols; (9) cellular networks; (10) Global Positioning Systems (GPS); (11) touchscreens; and (12) voice recognition. Every last one was supported by the public sector at key stages of development.”

Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, The People’s Republic of Walmart

[anarchblr]

“A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions [..] are the work of a single individual.”

–Karl Marx, Capital

[anahata0108]

OKAY SO Brian Merchant (yes, yes, ironic) literally wrote the book on specifically, exactly this topic. Literally. Go check out his book, The One Device, which tells the story of the actual people who “invented” the iPhone. It was a lot of work and it was a lot of people and there was a huge price paid by those of people in terms of time and mental stress and exhaustion and so on. It focuses on the iPhone itself, and doesn’t cover other stuff like battery technology or the computer chips, but just extrapolate what you learn in that book to alllllllll those technologies.

And yes, there was a British trans woman who designed the first version of the machine-level software running every single mobile phone on the planet (Sophie Wilson), and most other mobile devices, too (including your Nintendo Switch).

[anahata0108]

And if you think having the records of who worked on something--publicly, freely, readily available to anyone who wants to look--will stop this "great man" view of technology, you're wrong.

Open source software makes it very easy to see all the individual contributors to a project, what they did (at least in terms of code, which is sidestepping the other contributions, but that's a different problem for another post), and when they did it. Yet we still think of Linus Torvalds when we think of Linux. We still think of Guido van Rossum when we think of Python. But go look at the logs. There's thousands of people involved in every big project. Some may only have changed a single character in a single file, but they are all part of the software you use every day, even if you don't realize it.

[serenata-your-neighborhood-lefty]

"Shouldn't the man who invented the iPhone own his own creation?"

An explanation by anti-capitalist brad pitt.

[probablyasocialecologist]

"Mazzucato lists twelve crucial technologies that make smartphones “smart”: (1) microprocessors;(2) memory chips; (3) solid state hard drives; (4) liquid crystal displays; (5) lithium-based batteries;(6) fast Fourier transform algorithms; (7) the internet; (8) HTTP and HTML protocols; (9) cellular networks; (10) Global Positioning Systems (GPS); (11) touchscreens; and (12) voice recognition. Every last one was supported by the public sector at key stages of development."

Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski, The People’s Republic of Walmart

[anarchblr]

“A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions [..] are the work of a single individual.”

–Karl Marx, Capital

[anahata0108]

OKAY SO Brian Merchant (yes, yes, ironic) literally wrote the book on specifically, exactly this topic. Literally. Go check out his book, The One Device, which tells the story of the actual people who "invented" the iPhone. It was a lot of work and it was a lot of people and there was a huge price paid by those people in terms of time and mental stress and exhaustion and so on. It focuses on the iPhone itself, and doesn't cover other stuff like battery technology or the computer chips, but just extrapolate what you learn in that book to alllllllll those technologies.

And yes, there was a British trans woman who designed the first version of the machine-level software running every single mobile phone on the planet (Sophie Wilson), and most other mobile devices, too (including your Nintendo Switch).

[draculasdaughter]

This is about Sci-Hub. yeah we get it.. gatekeep knowledge and protect the interests of capital…

[three-blogs-in-a-trenchcoat]

Listen, this is serious.

Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!

It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.

Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.

So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?

[whateverthebeeswant]

Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.

[three-blogs-in-a-trenchcoat]

Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.

[anahata0108]

The nice thing about zlibrary is that sites like that tend to be shut down quickly, because textbook publishers are very good about making sure their work is protected. I wouldn't be surprised if it was shut down soon. I certainly haven't heard of many similar sites being taken down while other, similar sites that don't focus on textbooks stay up.

By the way, if you ever want to do a DOI search, say, to get an article's abstract or citation information in Google Scholar, it's typically listed on the article's page. Sometimes just the article's URL is the DOI.