Western Americana

[westernamericana]

We were so crushed we couldn't dare to imagine a utopian society. Worse we said placidly that only mad men could dream of a utopian life.

[cryptotheism]

One of my greatest inspirations as a writer is the late great LA Times food reviewer Jonathan Gold. I legitimately think he should be considered one of the best writers of the last 100 years. Look at this.

Poetry. Non-fiction par excellence. This is a man who not only understood the visceral, the sensory, the sublime, but he could put it into words.

[callese]

refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

pdfdrive.com

[clair-audients]

[westernamericana]

Beneath the sun he says, "A strange doldrums exists for me now. An unmoving, melancholy solitude, as if a storm is perched, one beyond anything I could prepare for. Somehow as always, I will bear the wind, the ripping juxtaposition of everything that was, versus everything that will come. In less then half a year I will say, 'I was less then half the man then than I am now' and in the interim I'm a lone captive on an island. Someone for whom the life that came before, amongst the distinguished and dapper, is simply a fading memory. A memory that is highlighted and glistening by rounded bulbs, bright colors, and smooth textures, somehow twinkling as if a foretelling of what comes beyond the storm." In kind earnest humility, the castaway bows toward where he thinks his homeland lays and says, "Parting is such sweet sorrow", he then turns to face his leviathan, hurricane, and torrents.

[westernamericana]

[westernamericana]

God is just an image. The depth lives in its shadow, the true way pulls behind the delusion.

[westernamericana]

The ancient Greek word for truth was not truth as a higher ideal, something that we reach for. Instead it was more akin to unveiling or uncovering.

[westernamericana]

They wandered the forest at night, their headlamps making a cone in front of them.

"I hate hiking at night. The darkness makes it feel like the forest is watching you, like theres something right outside of the light."

"I always just imagine that we're explorers on the dark side of a planet. Its reassuring somehow."

From above their lights made black silliottes of the pine branches, a tunnel in the trees. The stars twinkling against the deep blue of the night.

[westernamericana]

[westernamericana]

All of them say riot. None of them ask the right gas mask for tear gas.

[westernamericana]

I'm amazed Grubhub and Uber eats aren't used more for peddling drugs.

[westernamericana]

[westernamericana]

All life and thought should be embraced as terra incognita, and this phrase should inspire the wildest smiles.

[westernamericana]

Remember VPNs

[whateverthebeeswant]

Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub and Open Science: We are the library.

If you haven't been following Sci-Hub news recently, then you might not know that academic journals are coming down hard on Sci-Hub. These journals exploit academics through the triple-pay system; they are parasites sucking on the scientific community. The collective knowledge of humanity ought to be shared by all. Archivists on r/DataHoarder are working to save Sci-Hub before academic journals get it expunged from the internet.

This is a collective revolution against the privatization of science. If you can, please participate and/or reblog this post. Fuck Elsevier and fuck the commoditization of knowledge.

(All text below copied from this Reddit post by u/shrine on r/DataHoarder-- I didn't screenshot for accessibility reasons)

Rescue Mission Link

Quick start to rescuing Sci-Hub: Download 1 random torrent (100GB) from the scimag index of torrents with less than 3 seeders

Sci-Hub Rescue Mission Tracker (sort by TYPE), thanks to phillmac

Contribute to open source Sci-Hub projects: freereadorg/awesome-libgen

Join r/scihub to stay up to date

A Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub and Open Science

Elsevier and the USDOJ have declared war against Sci-Hub and open science. The era of Sci-Hub and Alexandra standing alone in this fight must end. We have to take a stand with her.

On May 7th, Sci-Hub's Alexandra Elbakyan revealed that the FBI has been wiretapping her accounts for over 2 years. This news comes after Twitter silenced the official Sci_Hub twitter account because Indian academics were organizing on it against Elsevier.

Sci-Hub itself is currently frozen and has not downloaded any new articles since December 2020. This rescue mission is focused on seeding the article collection in order to prepare for a potential Sci-Hub shutdown.

Alexandra Elbakyan of Sci-Hub, bookwarrior of Library Genesis, Aaron Swartz, and countless unnamed others have fought to free science from the grips of for-profit publishers. Today, they do it working in hiding, alone, without acknowledgment, in fear of imprisonment, and even now wiretapped by the FBI. They sacrifice everything for one vision: Open Science.

Why do they do it? They do it so that humble scholars on the other side of the planet can practice medicine, create science, fight for democracy, teach, and learn. People like Alexandra Elbakyan would give up their personal freedom for that one goal: to free knowledge. For that, Elsevier Corp (RELX, market cap: 50 billion) wants to silence her, wants to see her in prison, and wants to shut Sci-Hub down.

It's time we sent Elsevier and the USDOJ a clearer message about the fate of Sci-Hub and open science: we are the library, we do not get silenced, we do not shut down our computers, and we are many.

Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub

If you have been following the story, then you know that this is not our first rescue mission

We protected the Library Genesis book collection

We unlocked over 5,000 COVID-19 research articles

We successfully petitioned publishers to unlock their COVID-19 paywalls

bookwarrior, the founder of Library Genesis, took his library onto the de-centralized and un-censorable IPFS web

Next? Make Sci-Hub un-censorable too.

Rescue Target

A handful of Library Genesis seeders are currently seeding the Sci-Hub torrents. There are 850 scihub torrents, each containing 100,000 scientific articles, to a total of 85 million scientific articles: 77TB. This is the complete Sci-Hub database. We need to protect this.

Rescue Team

Wave 1: We need 85 datahoarders to store and seed 1TB of articles each, 10 torrents in total. Download 10 random torrents from the scimag index of < 3 seeders, then load the torrents onto your client and seed for as long as you can. The articles are coded by DOI and in zip files.

Wave 2: Reach out to 10 good friends to ask them to grab just 1 random torrent (100GB). That's 850 seeders. We are now the library.

Final Wave: Development for an open source Sci-Hub. freereadorg/awesome-libgen is a collection of open source achievements based on the Sci-Hub and Library Genesis databases. Open source de-centralization of Sci-Hub is the ultimate goal here, and this begins with the data, but it is going to take years of developer sweat to carry these libraries into the future.

Heartfelt thanks to the r/datahoarder and r/seedboxes communities, seedbox.io and NFOrce for your support for previous missions and your love for science.

Update 5/17/2021: The rescue mission covered in Gizmodo

[westernamericana]