#books to read during lockdown

[antigonenikk]

modern day liebgott is an uber driver who exclusively plays chief keef on his busted out speakers. his car is a 2004 toyota corrolla that smells like cigarette smoke and axe body spray. the rubber is peeling off of two of the doors. the left blinker does not work. a door handle has been mysteriously ripped off and the windows wont roll down. he has ten parking tickets he refuses to pay off and does not care about right of way. if hes delivering your food for uber eats you can count on the fact that he has eaten some of your fries. in spite of all of this he pulls more bitches than all of his friends combined.

[devilsskettle]

actually it does kind of bother me that people don’t want to talk about how margot verger is a poorly written/poorly adapted lesbian character because we want to like her so bad given her sympathetic circumstances and tentatively happy ending/happy marriage. also because it’s hard to parse if she’s a more or less offensive depiction of a lesbian in the book because she’s a “stereotype” (butch) and it’s implied that she’s only a lesbian because of abuse at the hands of her brother (not an implication they reverse in the show necessarily) and because the writing is both a product of its time (the 90s) by a writer who has previously written transphobic/homophobic tropes (see: the silence of the lambs, which the show does not adapt, which i think was a smart move tbh). but low key wouldn’t it have been cool to have a butch lesbian get a (tentatively!) happy ending in a mainstream horror tv series

[magicalrocketships]

what are your favourite poirot and miss marple episodes please?

oh my god i'm very tired so this is a short list but:

Joan Hickson's Miss Marple

A Murder is Announced

Nemesis

The Moving Finger

Agatha Christie's Marple (Geraldine McEwan/Julia McKenzie)

At Bertram's Hotel

The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side

Angela Lansbury's Miss Marple

The Mirror Crack'd (I fucking love this film)

Margaret Rutherford's Marple films

(they're all terrible dramatisations but so entertaining)

Peter Ustinov's Poirot

Evil Under the Sun (Diana Rigg and Maggie Smith vying for who's the cattiest, I love it)

Death on the Nile

Albert Finney's Poirot

Murder on the Orient Express (sumptious)

David Suchet's Poirot

The murder of Roger Ackroyd

Evil Under The Sun (so different from Peter Ustinov, love them both)

Five Little Pigs

Death on the Nile

Three Act Tragedy

Please note that neither Kenneth Branagh's Poirot nor John Malkovich's Poirot are on this list because I hated them both.

[newtness532]

okay i need to find something to crochet or knit or sth cause i really cant spend one more day just sitting in my bed doing nothing

[serenanymph]

19 and 26!

Thank you for the ask!! From the writer/artist ask game

19. What are some things that inspired your stories? Real events? Maybe a dream?

Would you believe me if I told you Beast was inspired from a sports anime. Would you.

Okay so story time: when I was hyperfixating on said sports anime around the end of 2021 I somehow discovered that the author had once drawn a silly fake poster for a fantasy au. Of course this was what my brain latched onto and then I desperately rifled through ao3 for fic but most of them were oneshots and none had the specific concept I wanted. So for a while I played with the idea of writing one myself.

That idea promptly ran away from me, combined with another au idea, stole more characters from other anime, two from a game, made them all ooc and created several ocs for good measure. By the time I was chatting with my friends about it I knew I was done for. And here I am, nearly two years later, trying to wrestle the first draft of the second book into shape. For a five-book series.

26. What are your favourite books?

Okay honestly I have no idea because I have read a lot of books and I don't tend to hyperfixate as strongly on them as I do on manga, but!! I will say PJO was my entire childhood, and I think the fandom I got most into for a book series recently was the Grishaverse series. For a while I was obsessed with a really niche book series called Rebel Skies (though it's still unfinished), and as for standalone books, Alice Oseman's Loveless and Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land were literally life-changing. If you're trying any of these books try the last two

[givemethedamnflowers]

A couple years ago we had the twilight renaissance now we have the hunger games renaissance and im fucking living for it yeah babes go back to happier times

[rotomicity]

Something was in the water when i read tgcf the first time

[fitgothgirl]

I usually have all my to-read books on my bookcase but decided to set them aside in their own pile. Need to keep a visual reminder since I just bought a new book (the Marcus Aurelius one above) today lol. And there are more I want… Also I’ll note I’m about 20% of the way through Mistborn! I just had put it down for a little while but I’m ready to pick it back up again. (And not pictured is four Anne Rice books lol.)

[thegirlfromtheislands]

The day after we broke up, I went for a long walk and listened to sad love songs. I slept for two hours. It was raining. I remember walking into a grocery store and reading all the ingredients on items so I could find something else to think about. I cried all night. I wanted you to know that, but it was unfair to tell you because you didn't want to talk anymore. I didn't want to guilt trip you into staying with me, but I wanted you to stay.

While you moved along with your life, I wallowed. I sat in shame, embarrassment. What had I done wrong? What did I say? Maybe I should have made myself smaller, quieter, taken up less space? Or did you want more? Or do you just want someone different?

I returned to my room after hours of wandering around and looking for hopeful things to think about. I sat on my bed and watched the rain drops gently patter on my window. Rain drops made calming sounds as they hit on my window. They began as a little blob of water and split into two.

I was in love with you. I was so taken with the idea of you. Nothing and no one else could come in between that. Why can't we all just find someone to love and love us in return? Why is it always so hard? We give years away to someone who wraps the relationship up with a tidy bow and says goodbye.

I remember going to different cafes and sitting down with books and my work laptop and trying to make myself busy. My mind was running nonstop. I had so many different things going on in my head and you were the foundation of all my mental ramblings. My brain was trying to retell the story and give me new details so I wouldn't miss you so much. I tried to hate you, but you were really good to me.

It's hard to be in love with someone so kind who just wants to be with someone different. I would have given anything in the world to be the person you needed, but I am completely myself. I am talkative and energetic. I am also introverted and like my space, but never from you. I get emotional and I feel passionate about certain topics and I start talking too much right before bedtime and cooking videos keep me up at night. You are introspective and you like to keep a schedule. You feel passionate but you're also pragmatic.

Maybe it wasn't meant to be, but I hoped for it to work out so much that I felt my heart would change its shape because of the grief. I mourned the loss of our relationship.

Break ups can be so traumatic and life changing, but the recovery process makes you a new person. I'm kind of mad, I don't hate you, but I want you to know that I'll remember you fondly at some point in the future.

[weather-mood]

No. 10 for the Book asks!

Guilty Favourite

Ice Planet Barbarians series by Ruby Dixon. 🫣

Romance! Aliens! Survival on an inhospitable planet! And they are just legitimately very sweet and kind-hearted books? They’re silly but they have a lot of heart. Like yes, community building! Navigating change! Learning how to hunt! We love to see it.

[tinandabin]

nothing hurts more than going through your 'finished' section on quotev like nooooo why did the books have to end? That's So Cruel

[annarubys]

my desire to jump headfirst into the spn rewatch that i technically started a month ago vs the knowledge that finally spn and mcr are both mercifully silent and i also have relatively low levels of responsibility for the next month or so which means i am perfectly poised to catch up on my frankly ludicrous backlog of unfinished tv shows and books that i started anywhere between a month and six years ago

[poetka]

I'm not a fan of the dark academia movement because of elitism and snobbery etc etc but experiencing a short-lived interest in the aesthetic back in like 2018 played a big part in me increasing the number of books I read exponentially

[magratpudifoot]

Finished 24 January 2024:

Zyzzyva, Spring 2021 issue

This was among the items that I picked out on my first post-lockdown trip into a bookstore. I had never heard of this literary magazine before, but I have both a self-destructive reverence for the-book-as-(beautiful)-object and a background in electrical engineering, and I was as unable to leave the store without this as I was the day the Siren Queen sang out to me two years later. I am not even bothered that the designer didn't connect that barcode IC to the rest of the board, that cover is gorgeous.

Juhea Kim's "Biodome" and Anthony Veasna So's "Generational Differences" were the standout prose pieces for me, though there were moments of genius throughout the collection. Hector Tobar's "The Sins of Others" also deserves special mention for its ability to haunt the conscience.

The pieces worth the price of admission on their own were Dave McClinton's art gallery (including the portrait at the cover's center) and William Brewer's poem "Will", which I will return to throughout my life I am sure.

I was not prepared for how much my lack of familiarity with Tarantino and the Coens was going to hamper my comprehension of this collection. Luckily I have at least seen Fargo...

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification

THIS WEEKEND (November 8-10), I'll be in TUCSON, AZ: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

Nineties kids had a good reason to be excited about the internet's promise of disintermediation: the gatekeepers who controlled our access to culture, politics, and opportunity were crooked as hell, and besides, they sucked.

For a second there, we really did get a lot of disintermediation, which created a big, weird, diverse pluralistic space for all kinds of voices, ideas, identities, hobbies, businesses and movements. Lots of these were either deeply objectionable or really stupid, or both, but there was also so much cool stuff on the old, good internet.

Then, after about ten seconds of sheer joy, we got all-new gatekeepers, who were at least as bad, and even more powerful, than the old ones. The net became Tom Eastman's "Five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four." Culture, politics, finance, news, and especially power have been gathered into the hands of unaccountable, greedy, and often cruel intermediaries.

Oh, also, we had an election.

This isn't an election post. I have many thoughts about the election, but they're still these big, unformed blobs of anger, fear and sorrow. Experience teaches me that the only way to get past this is to just let all that bad stuff sit for a while and offgas its most noxious compounds, so that I can handle it safely and figure out what to do with it.

While I wait that out, I'm just getting the job done. Chop wood, carry water. I've got a book to write, Enshittification, for Farar, Straus, Giroux's MCD Books, and it's very nearly done:

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Adoctorow+%23dailywords&src=typed_query&f=live

Compartmentalizing my anxieties and plowing that energy into productive work isn't necessarily the healthiest coping strategy, but it's not the worst, either. It's how I wrote nine books during the covid lockdowns.

And sometimes, when you're not staring directly at something, you get past the tunnel vision that makes it impossible to see its edges, fracture lines, and weak points.

So I'm working on the book. It's a book about platforms, because enshittification is a phenomenon that is most visible and toxic on platforms. Platforms are intermediaries, who connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, workers and employers, politicians and voters, activists and crowds, as well as families, communities, and would-be romantic partners.

There's a reason we keep reinventing these intermediaries: they're useful. Like, it's technically possible for a writer to also be their own editor, printer, distributor, promoter and sales-force:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

But without middlemen, those are the only writers we'll get. The set of all writers who have something to say that I want to read is much larger than the set of all writers who are capable of running their own publishing operation.

The problem isn't middlemen: the problem is powerful middlemen. When an intermediary gets powerful enough to usurp the relationship between the parties on either side of the transaction, everything turns to shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/direct-the-problem-of-middlemen/

A dating service that faces pressure from competition, regulation, interoperability and a committed workforce will try as hard as it can to help you find Your Person. A dating service that buys up all its competitors, cows its workforce, captures its regulators and harnesses IP law to block interoperators will redesign its service so that you keep paying forever, and never find love:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2024/02/13/1228749143/the-dating-app-paradox-why-dating-apps-may-be-worse-than-ever

Multiply this a millionfold, in every sector of our complex, high-tech world where we necessarily rely on skilled intermediaries to handle technical aspects of our lives that we can't – or shouldn't – manage ourselves. That world is beholden to predators who screw us and screw us and screw us, jacking up our rents:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/yes-there-are-antitrust-voters-in

Cranking up the price of food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

And everything else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

(Maybe this is a post about the election after all?)

The difference between a helpmeet and a parasite is power. If we want to enjoy the benefits of intermediaries without the risks, we need policies that keep middlemen weak. That's the opposite of the system we have now.

Take interoperability and IP law. Interoperability (basically, plugging new things into existing things) is a really powerful check against powerful middlemen. If you rely on an ad-exchange to fund your newsgathering and they start ripping you off, then an interoperable system that lets you use a different exchange will not only end the rip off – it'll make it less likely to happen in the first place because the ad-tech platform will be afraid of losing your business:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Interoperability means that when a printer company gouges you on ink, you can buy cheap third party ink cartridges and escape their grasp forever:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Interoperability means that when Amazon rips off audiobook authors to the tune of $100m, those authors can pull their books from Amazon and sell them elsewhere and know that their listeners can move their libraries over to a different app:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

But interoperability has been in retreat for 40 years, as IP law has expanded to criminalize otherwise normal activities, so that middlemen can use IP rights to protect themselves from their end-users and business customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

That's what I mean when I say that "IP" is "any law that lets a business reach beyond its own walls and control the actions of its customers, competitors and critics."

For example, there's a pernicious law 1998 US law that I write about all the time, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the "anticircumvention law." This is a law that felonizes tampering with copyright locks, even if you are the creator of the undelying work.

So Amazon – the owner of the monopoly audiobook platform Audible – puts a mandatory copyright lock around every audiobook they sell. I, as an author who writes, finances and narrates the audiobook, can't provide you, my customer, with a tool to remove that lock. If I do so, I face criminal sanctions: a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

In other words: if I let you take my own copyrighted work out of Amazon's app, I commit a felony, with penalties that are far stiffer than the penalties you would face if you were to simply pirate that audiobook. The penalties for you shoplifting the audiobook on CD at a truck-stop are lower than the penalties the author and publisher of the book would face if they simply gave you a tool to de-Amazon the file. Indeed, even if you hijacked the truck that delivered the CDs, you'd probably be looking at a shorter sentence.

This is a law that is purpose-built to encourage intermediaries to usurp the relationship between buyers and sellers, creators and audiences. It's a charter for parasitism and predation.

But as bad as that is, there's another aspect of DMCA 1201 that's even worse: the exemptions process.

You might have read recently about the Copyright Office "freeing the McFlurry" by granting a DMCA 1201 exemption for companies that want to reverse-engineer the error-codes from McDonald's finicky, unreliable frozen custard machines:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Under DMCA 1201, the Copyright Office hears petitions for these exemptions every three years. If they judge that anticircumvention law is interfering with some legitimate activity, the statute empowers them to grant an exemption.

When the DMCA passed in 1998 (and when the US Trade Rep pressured other world governments into passing nearly identical laws in the decades that followed), this exemptions process was billed as a "pressure valve" that would prevent abuses of anticircumvention law.

But this was a cynical trick. The way the law is structured, the Copyright Office can only grant "use" exemptions, but not "tools" exemptions. So if you are granted the right to move Audible audiobooks into a third-party app, you are personally required to figure out how to do that. You have to dump the machine code of the Audible app, decompile it, scan it for vulnerabilities, and bootstrap your own jailbreaking program to take Audible wrapper off the file.

No one is allowed to help you with this. You aren't allowed to discuss any of this publicly, or share a tool that you make with anyone else. Doing any of this is a potential felony.

In other words, DMCA 1201 gives intermediaries power over you, but bans you from asking an intermediary to help you escape another abusive middleman.

This is the exact opposite of how intermediary law should work. We should have rules that ban intermediaries from exercising undue power over the parties they serve, and we should have rules empowering intermediaries to erode the advantage of powerful intermediaries.

The fact that the Copyright Office grants you an exemption to anticircumvention law means nothing unless you can delegate that right to an intermediary who can exercise it on your behalf.

A world without publishing intermediaries is one in which the only writers who thrive are the ones capable of being publishers, too, and that's a tiny fraction of all the writers with something to say.

A world without interoperability intermediaries is one in which the only platform users who thrive are also skilled reverse-engineering ninja hackers – and that's an infinitesimal fraction of the platform users who would benefit from interoperabilty.

Let this be your north star in evaluating platform regulation proposals. Platform regulation should weaken intermediaries' powers over their users, and strengthen their power over other middlemen.

Put in this light, it's easy to see why the ill-informed calls to abolish Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which makes platform users, not platforms, responsible for most unlawful speech) are so misguided:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

If we require platforms to surveil all user speech and block anything that might violate any law, we give the largest, most powerful platforms a permanent advantage over smaller, better platforms, run by co-ops, hobbyists, nonprofits local governments, and startups. The big platforms have the capital to rig up massive, automated surveillance and censorship systems, and the only alternatives that can spring up have to be just as big and powerful as the Big Tech platforms we're so desperate to escape:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

This is especially grave given the current political current, where fascist politicians are threatening platforms with brutal punishments for failing to censor disfavored political views.

Anyone who tells you that "it's only censorship when the government does it" is badly confused. It's only a First Amendment violation when the government does it, sure – but censorship has always relied on intermediaries. From the Inquisition to the Comics Code, government censors were only able to do their jobs because powerful middlemen, fearing state punishments, blocked anything that might cross the line, censoring far beyond the material actually prohibited by the law:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos

We live in a world of powerful, corrupt middlemen. From payments to real-estate, from job-search to romance, there's a legion of parasites masquerading as helpmeets, burying their greedy mouthparts into our tender flesh:

https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/visas-hidden-tax-on-americans

But intermediaries aren't the problem. You shouldn't have to stand up your own payment processor, or learn the ins and outs of real-estate law, or start your own single's bar. The problem is power, not intermediation.

As we set out to build a new, good internet (with a lot less help from the US government than seemed likely as recently as last week), let's remember that lesson: the point isn't disintermediation, it's weak intermediation.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/07/usurpers-helpmeets/#disreintermediation

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

[neil-gaiman]

'Ello there, Mr. Gaiman. Back on tumblr after a few years absence. Read a fair few of your books during the lockdown and I have to ask; was Stardust just your imagination going haywire? Don't get me wrong, I loved it and have zero complaints about a story set in the Land Under the Hill, but it did seem you were having an imense amount of *fun* with it.

Love your books! Ta-ta~

I hope it looks like that, because I was.