Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it’s a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me — because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

Amazon owns Audible, the monopoly audiobook platform that controls >90% of the audio market. They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon’s monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.

That’s a hell of a lot of leverage to hand to any company, let alone a rapacious monopoly that ran a program targeting small publishers called “Project Gazelle,” where execs were ordered to attack indie publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”:

https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10

Keep reading

DRM ON FUCKING BOOKS???

The publishing industry 100% loves DRM on books. Like the publishers themselves will often insist upon it because they think it stops piracy.

FUCK DRM!

Also, fantastic to hear Cory Doctorow’s got another book out! 😁

FYI, the Kickstarter includes your choice of audiobook, ebook, and/or hardcover copy of the new book!

You can buy DRM-free ebooks from ebooks.com. I don’t know anything about their ethics or how big a cut they take (feel free to milkshake duck them for me), but I have bought books from them just to avoid supporting Amazon and ebook DRM.

And audiobooks purchased through Libro.fm are also DRM free and a portion of the sale supports indie bookstores.

You can get a monthly subscription on Libro.fm, paying $15/mo for ebook credits that never expire, and sometimes they have sales on top of that - I got all the Murderbot Diaries novellas for like $8 each.

Libro.fm takes their anti-DRM so seriously that they won’t sell books where the publisher requires it. They just put a notice on the page that the publisher’s policies conflict with their own.

They are 👍❤️

Thanks to this post, libro.fm is now my main waterhole for audiobooks. Thank you friends!

Human: “It must be a dreary existence, unable to love, to eat, to sleep, to laugh… I feel sorry for you.” Robot: “I can laugh. I have a sense of humor, you know.” Human: “Really? I’ve never heard you laugh before.” Robot: “I’ve never heard you say anything funny.”

Hello 911 I’d like to report a violation of the First Law of Robotics, this robot just straight up murdered a human

For years I've heard that those booby mousepads are actually really good for a person with carpal tunnel syndrome but didn't decide to test that knowledge because I don't want to buy a booby mousepad that would make me some sort of sex pervert, I was raised Catholic I'm a good boy not a sex pervert. But earlier this year I bought a Gigan body pillow as a joke only to find out body pillows are actually really comfortable sleep aids, so... so I bought one... I bought a booby mousepad.

...and my wrist feels so much better when I'm using it.

How many other comforts and aids have I forsaken because they're embarrassingly horny? How many discomforts have I endured purely out of a societal shame about expressing anything sexual? This world is fucked man.

For those curious why exactly this is, it's because booby mousepads are pretty much the only ergonomic mousepads which still use silicone gel. Basically everything else has switched to either air-filled memory foam or a cured silicone rubber – like the kind used in silicone bakeware – because it's not prone to springing leaks and oozing everywhere; unfortunately, it also doesn't work nearly as well.

(In theory, if you're not a fan of boobs you could get a silicone gel wrist pad without the booby design. In practice, good fucking luck; consumer fraud is rampant in non-prescription medical and assistive devices, and the overwhelming majority of non-booby mousepads which claim to use silicone gel are straight up lying – what you actually receive if you order one will be air-filled memory foam or solid rubber at least 80% of time, regardless of what the product description says.)

A pair of Ethiopian wolves snuggling on a chilly morning in the Bale Mountains.

Dog Shoes

So, I saw YET ANOTHER video of a dog wearing shoes for the first time and doing that high kick walk. This IS funny to watch, but if this is happening, it means you did it wrong.

Dog pads are very sensitive, so basically, picture someone just sticking oven mitts over your hands for seemingly no reason and telling you to go about your day while wearing those. No, you can't modify them in any way or pull them off at any time. What do you mean you can't scratch your nose? Well that's just too bad, isn't it. It's similar to dog boots.

It may take longer initially, but it will be much easier in the long run if you acclimate them to the shoes first and make it a positive experience.

In order to do this, have some high value treats ready. Hold up one shoe. Let the dog take their time sniffing it if they care to. Don't let them chew it, it's not a toy, but if they're curious, that nose should be allowed to go where it pleases.

Once the sniff part is done, give treat.

Put the boot on your dogs foot. Treat. Remove boot. Treat. Repeat this one more. If your dog tries to remove the boot, distract them with yet another treat. Do this until your pup is comfortable with you putting the boots on all four paws.

Once you get the shoes on, lead them around the house with treats, keep their attention on the food instead of their own feet. You'll be amazed at how quickly they get used to the footwear.

Once they stop high stepping in the house, take them outside and do more luring with treats until they seem more comfortable. Let them explore the yard a little. Feeling ambitious? Take them for a nice, relaxing walk.

Come back inside, remove the boots, treat.

Congratulations. You've just trained your pup to accept boots. And it will be much less of a struggle in the future! When I need to put Sutter Cain's boots on, it takes maybe 2 whole minutes if I'm not in any rush. He never struggles, fusses, never dodges, runs away, hides, or tries to pull them back off. He just stands there patiently while I lift his foot, slip on the shoe, then do the velcro.

He doesn't high step, doesn't shake his feet, doesn't mind them at all.

Compare that to the people who tell me all the time how their dog fights them every step of the way until they finally gave up.

It may take longer AT FIRST, but if you do it right, your life gets easier in the long term.

Firefox and Thunderbird are more than just programs to me

they are also handsome anthro men gently caressing me and offering to sync my tabs with mobile, swearing that they’ll never spy on me like that WHORE google chrome does

this could be us but you wont uninstall chrome

Disaster situation @ Medieval Museum in Stockholm, Sweden

Moving and effectively closing the Medieval Museum for an indefinite period is a cultural and historical disaster.

As the heart of the museum is the archaeological excavations the whole facility is built around, a move will mean that the museum loses invaluable tangible heritage and in instead will become a display of minor props instead of the living history it is now.

The Riksdag's (Parliament's) need for more office space must not affect an important and people-forming activity with hundreds of thousands of visitors in a normal year. The Medieval Museum manages an important part of our cultural heritage and makes a big contribution to the education of all generations.

We want the decision to close down to be stopped and for the Riksdag to investigate other options to solve its lack of office space.

Please help share this and sign the petition so that there may be a chance to halt decision.

In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.

The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.

~ Ed Yong, NY Times Opinion, 6-21-22

yet another scene from @normal-horoscopes’ Amber Skies. this scene has stuck with me for two years now, so I’m finally trying to do it justice.

Show him the fruits

Im sick with flu so naturally I picked up my newly bought copy of Howl's Moving Castle which includes DWJ interviews in the back.

And im in love with the way she tells these stories feels like a part of her books.

And my favorite:

The magic in the mundane :)

she roasts us howl girlies for loving his loser ass, and she based him on her husband and son smh

Octopuses can fit through any gap larger than their beak.

What a beautiful octopus.

because i had to (politely) warn/criticize an acquaintance musher who was out on the trail in 86% humidity and 80F weather running their dogs on a rig when i was there today, i thought now was a good reminder that:

and look. I've been at the receiving end of weather temperature criticism myself. I once ran Sigurd and Zombie on a like...60F degree evening in summer as a novice and my mentor tore me a new one. I felt bad (and cried lol), but it is what it is and i never did it again. It's also why working with and/or seeking advice from sport veterans is important. I will also never stall or refuse to tell somebody they're posing a risk to their dogs, not only bc i care for their animals well beings, but because mushers pushing dogs like this does reflect badly on the sport.

The one thing i do to make sure i'm aware of how hot my dogs may be besides monitoring the temperatures? I overdress whenever i take them out.

Herakles, Euripides (tr. Tom Sleigh)

Solid life advice from Sue the T. Rex.

"In 1984, a few years before his death, James Baldwin explained to an interviewer from the Village Voice that queers could see the precarity of heterosexuality, even as straights kept it hidden from themselves. 'The so-called straight person is no safer than I am, really. The terrors that homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if society itself did not go through so many terrors it doesn't want to admit.'

As Baldwin saw it, it is not simply that straight people are suffering and in denial about it, but that heterosexual misery expresses itself through the projection of terror onto the homosexual. One way to think about this is that homophobia is the outward expression of heterosexual misery; a kind of subconscious jealous rage against the gendered and sexual possibilities that lie beyond the violence and disappointments of straight culture."

-Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

I'm probably gonna get yelled at for saying this but sometimes something isn't a real problem in fandom, you just learned a Japanese word describing a general fandom practice and got scared and decided it meant "The Bad Ones" of that practice

Whenever you see someone being like "we don't mind when women enjoy or even create m/m content, we just hate fujoshis" you are being racist. If you mean "I hate the way some female fans treat gay men like fetish objects" then say that, and we can have a conversation based on that, but "fujoshi" is, I cannot stress this enough, just a word for any woman who likes M/M content, for better or worse. It may have started out as a reclaimed insult (by the way, the insult was based on "liking gay shit makes you perverted and sinful," not "please respect the humanity of gay men") but it does not make a distinction between The Good Ones and The Bad Ones. You just decided to No True Scotsman it and that the English word for that should describe The Good Ones and the Japanese word for it should describe The Bad Ones

Same goes for the people I saw just the other day whose discord server explicitly disallowed "Yaoi" but said that M/M content was allowed. What they meant was "M/M content is allowed as long as it isn't pornographic and fetishistic." What they actually said was "M/M content is allowed, but M/M content is strictly forbidden," and expected you to understand that the Japan-Adjacent term has porn/fetish connotations while the English-language term for THE SAME THING refers to the "normal, non-perverted" version.

It'd be like if you used the word "cartoons" to refer to all Family-Friendly animation, regardless of style or country of origin, whether it's Japanese or American or French or whatever, and used the term "anime" to refer to all animated pornography regardless of style or country of origin. There's plenty of animated pornography that isn't Japanese! There's plenty of anime that's not pornographic! But this is the sort of thing you do when you say shit like "obviously women can read stories about gay men, but NO FUJOSHIS"

Francisco Riolobos