constantly changing my major

uhh yeah

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers' libraries

Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn’t making enough money, so they’re shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1.

Customers will receive refunds.

This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast. I have bought a lot of MP3s over the years, thousands of them, and many of the retailers I purchased from are long gone, but I still have the MP3s. Likewise, I have bought many books from long-defunct booksellers and even defunct publishers, but I still own those books.

When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing the book that I sold you. If I regretted selling you a book, I didn’t get to break into your house and steal it, even if I left you a cash refund for the price you paid.

People sometimes treat me like my decision not to sell my books through Amazon’s Audible is irrational (Audible will not let writers or publisher opt to sell their books without DRM), but if you think Amazon is immune to this kind of shenanigans, you are sadly mistaken. My books matter a lot to me. I just paid $8,000 to have a container full of books shipped from a storage locker in the UK to our home in LA so I can be closer to them. The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job.

https://boingboing.net/2019/04/02/burning-libraries.html

[greenycrimson]

If you’ve got an ereader and want to actually own your books, I heartily recommend using cailbre to scrape the DRM off and so you can backup the files.

Cailbre d/l:

https://calibre-ebook.com/download

How to use cailbre to remove DRM:

http://www.geoffstratton.com/remove-drm-amazon-kindle-books

[dee-the-red-witch]

Seconding calibre as a brilliant tool for ebook management in general. 

[slayerbuffy]

Happy 20th Anniversary to Gilmore Girls! (October 5th, 2000).

[prokopetz]

Look, Patreon cracking down on smutty fan-artists sucks, you’ll get no disagreement from me there, but folks are talking like this is the start of a slippery slope – and no, it isn’t. It’s the end of a slippery slope.

There’s a specific trajectory that platforms like Patreon tend to follow:

1. The platform starts out relying on sex workers for the majority of their business, typically presenting themselves as a safe venue for this type of transaction. Indeed, at first this may legitimately be the case!

2. Once they’ve become established and gained a reputation as a trustworthy service provider, the platform begins stealing money from those same sex workers, usually by freezing their accounts due to minor terms-of-service infractions and claiming any saved balance as “administrative fees”. Sex workers are specifically targeted because the quasi-legal nature of their work leaves them with few options for disputing the platform’s actions.

3. Owing to a combination of institutional inertia and the perception that there are no good alternatives, this misconduct is initially tolerated, allowing the platform to become increasingly brazen and steal increasingly large amounts of money, until a critical point is reached and sex workers begin abandoning the platform en masse.

4. When this tipping point is reached, the platform initiates widespread crackdowns to chase away the stragglers. This forms part of a broader effort to re-write history and claim the platform was never a haven for sex work in the first place, thereby rendering it more palatable to mainstream advertisers and other potential business partners.

5. Once all the sex workers are gone, the platform moves on to sex work adjacent targets and repeats the process. This cycle typically happens several times before they get to targeting smutty fan-artists, but they’ll get there eventually.

Again, I’m not saying it doesn’t suck, but there are a couple of things you need to recognise about the nature of the problem:

a. By the time they get around to going after Sonic the Hedgehog porn, you’re not looking at the thin end of the wedge – you’re looking at the culmination of a process that’s been ongoing for many years; and

b. What you’re seeing isn’t an exercise in misguided puritanism: it’s a business model. When crackdowns on smutty fanart occur, it’s tempting to view it through the lens of fandom drama, but it’s important to recognise that all the fandom drama is really doing is furnishing the platform with a thin veneer of justification for something they were planning on doing anyway. Reforming fandom culture isn’t going to stop it, or even meaningfully slow it down.

(And yes, Paypal itself when through this very process, probably one of the first platforms to do so. Bear that in mind the next time somebody tries to tell you that sure, Elon Musk may be an asshole, but at least he helped found Paypal! During Musk’s tenure, stealing money from sex workers formed a large part of Paypal’s core business model.)

[roboco-san]

celebrity chef theory of imperial collapse

[illingkeve]

killing eve; a summary

[tinaseh]

so the minnesota freedom fund turned out to be fraudulent :///

[tinaseh]

[doctorfreak]

y’all..........remember 1. most grassroots organizations aren’t prepared or expecting to raise 30+ million dollars in 3 weeks 2. days after they started they said they had enough donations and asked people to direct funds to needier orgs 3. they announced they’ve spent over $200k bailing people out and are working on doing more 4. community organizing done right is hard work with a lot of different factors and limited resources Beyond just money.

hold these organizations accountable and demand transparency. but this original post has such little information and y’all are just circulating it? read the thread from the oakland mask org that started years ago and how intense this work is. it’s been three weeks and these are what looks like less than 12 people who have been given an immense amount of cash in an unbelievably short amount of time. i wouldn’t be so quick to call this a shaun king situation.

[anonymusbosch]

I follow Fadumo. She's deleted these tweets.

The MN Freedom Fund has existed since 2016. Prior to the George Floyd protests, they were a small bail fund that paid out around $1000 per day. Paying out over $200,000 in 20 days puts them at over 10 times their previous payout rate.

They stopped taking donations very early on because the support overwhelmed their capacity.

Their front page now, as it has been since late May, is almost entirely links to local efforts which need more support - Black Visions Collective, Reclaim the Block, and funds like Rebuild Lake Street and the Northside Business Association.

Meanwhile, The National Lawyers Guild has said that jails are delaying activists from being able to release protestors.

The MNFF should be transparent about how it's using the money, yes. I believe they should also redirect the donations they can't immediately use to other organizations. But they're a 501(c)3 nonprofit, there are restrictions on how they can spend and transfer money. You can check out their nonprofit filing forms on ProPublica - no one at MNFF receives a salary.

Keep orgs accountable, keep pushing for transparency, but please do a little more leg work before accusing an org of fraud.

[learn2anarchy]

Genie’s way out of the bottle on this one, but please don’t share unsubstantiated claims about undercover cops, outside agitators, and agents provocateur. This is called bad-jacketing and it is…bad. Here’s why.

Undercover cops exist. Conflict tourists exist. Fascists exist. Alienated, cagey, angry, confused people with poor social skills definitely exist. All these characters are presences in the world of organizing to be acknowledged and contended with. But what overcomes them is not conspiratorial speculation. It is working together, building trust, and strengthening bonds of solidarity.

During the first few days of the uprising, the media tried to deploy the standard, not-so-subtley racially coded “looter” rhetoric. I’m actually impressed by how many people seem to be inoculated against this these days. Still works reliably on republicans but, well, those guys drink bleach. So now the narrative is shifting to “outside agitators.” Undercovers are smashing the windows at Autozone! All the fires were started by fascist militias! Everyone arrested was from out of state!

These are all claims I have seen shared and repeated ad infinitum. Not a single one of them has been substantiated in a credible way. The last one is just flatly not true and it was made by the governor of Minnesota.

But people hear these. They get scared. They feel betrayed. They hit share. And now the mass uprising to which they felt connected seems compromised, unsafe, suspect. Social media is the perfect vehicle for amplifying fear and confusion. It is the perfect vehicle for switching the narrative from POLICE ARE MURDERING BLACK PEOPLE WITH IMPUNITY to ~the enemy within~. No bueno.

Look at public statements from any governor in any state where there have been major protests in the last 72 hours. I guarantee you will find outside agitator rhetoric. In Minnesota, the governor explicitly cited “organized outside groups…promoting unrest” as the pretext for deploying THE ENTIRE NATIONAL GUARD saying, “this is no longer about protesting…this is about violence and we need to make sure it stops.”

Wait, what were the protests about again?

[gothicprep]

“is this moment radicalizing you?”

while i’m here, and still somehow have followers on this website, i thought it would be useful to repost an activism resource masterpost i saw on twitter a few days ago. it looks like the OP (@thebryreed) set her account to private, but i saved the links and figured they would be useful reading & listening, given everything that’s going on right now.

Malcolm X (1964) The Ballot or the Bullet

Martin and Malcolm by James Baldwin (1972)

Assata Shakur’s Autobiography (1987)

The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House by Audre Lorde (1979)

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis (2003)

The Invention of Women by Oyěwùmí (1997) (this requires institutional access or creativity)

Sylvia Rivera’s Y’all Better Quiet Down speech (1973)

Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize Speech (1993)

Fidel Castro’s History Will Absolve Me (1953)

Toni Morrison (2015) No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear 

W. E. B. DuBois Why I Won’t Vote (1956)

[guerrillatech]

[demonius-darkblade]

fuck off, getting me all excited like that

[heartshop]

[eternalgirlscout]

Avatar OC concept: a pedantic earthbender with a degree in geology who can bend ice on a technicality

[bananonbinary]

the implication that bending is completely reliant on whether you think you should be able to instead of like…innate laws of the universe pleases me greatly

[hesperocyon-lesbian]

me bending someone’s bones: buddy they’re practically just limestone I mean it’s on you for walking around full of rocks

[dzamie]

I mean that’s pretty much how Toph did her thing:

“There’s bits of metal in rocks. Probably bits of rocks in metal. I can bend the rock in the metal, and that’s PRETTY MUCH metalbending so yeah imma just invent a whole new discipline of bending.”

[dzamie]

Actually, things that you could probably rules-lawyer your way into doing:

Earth: ice is a crystal; bones are pretty much rocks so at worst I can debone you like a fish; dust

Fire: drawing heat away makes things colder; it’s not airbending if I’m just making warm and cold places in the air; did you know you have lightning in your nerves; it’s not metalbending if I’m just wrapping lightning around this metal rod

Water: no need for a puddle when there’s any kind of humidity; it’s not earthbending if the rock is damp; bloodbending is illegal but throwing someone’s bladder around inside them isn’t

Air: it’s not X-bending if I’m just lifting it with air; sounds and voices are just funky air

and of course

non-bender: gun

[zumer-feygele]

Waterbenders: I cast piss your pants

[guerrillatech]

ICE is non-essential. Shut them the fuck down.

[quoms]

Reminds me of the fact that Afghanistan’s low vaccination rate (including for polio) is partially attributable to the fact that the CIA posed as doctors and used a fake vaccination campaign to gather info on Bin Laden

[mens-rights-activia]

[e-v-roslyn]

[allthingslinguistic]

“Verlon Jose of the Tohono O’Odham Nation says that elders were slow to believe the news of the pandemic when it came, but in his community, as in most, compliance with lockdown orders has taken hold. He and his son, however, worry about the loss of the knowledge of the elders in their community, where five have died. Mr Jose says that though the language is not at death’s door, its cultural embedding is weakening. Someone fluent in the language texted him recently to seek advice about the proper words to be used in a sacred annual ceremony, without which the world will end. At 52 he is reluctantly taking on an elder’s role he is not quite sure he is ready for. His son Kendall describes his grandmother teaching him how to gather and prepare the buds of the calcium-rich cholla cactus, long a staple of the tribe, and how to skin a rabbit, a skill that came in handy when the pandemic led to runs on the supermarkets. The elders represent thin threads connecting native communities to their identity, rooted in the past. Those threads were already fraying; the pandemic threatens to snap many of them. Or, as Verlon Jose puts it: “Every time we lose an elder, another chapter of our history closes.””

— How the pandemic threatens Native Americans—and their languages by Lane Greene in The Economist. 

[jooferslannister-deactivated202]

[honeyglazedbabe]

My favorite tweet

[thesociologicalcinema]

Paul Sr.: Anthropology is a means of reproducting the “Orient” for the Western observer!“ (see Said 1979) Paul Jr.: There is still valuable knowledge to be gleaned from classic ethnographies and our encounters with those encounters (Jackson 2017) Paul Sr.: Knowledge which is inseparable from the power dynamic producing it! Paul Jr.: We can decolonize anthropology! Or work with interlocuteors to mend problems of representation. Paul Sr.: “Decolonization” without changes in material conditions is liberal politics serving only the colonizer (Coulthard 2014, Tuck & Yang 2012)