#link aggregator

[sweetmapple]

Give your heart and soul to charity,

‘cause the rest of you, the best of you,

honey, belongs to me

[insanityclause]

Have you seen the new article about tnm 2. It seems his hair has grown again the short hair reign was really short. I hope it's part of the plot because I am really not vibing with long hair JP or he is very reluctant to any type of change. Dude you are an actor there are a lot of actors more successful and accomplished than you who go through intensive body change and makeup for their role and you can't seem to cut your own hair seriously. These really dampens my interest in the show and whatever excitement I have for this show just vanishes.

https://x.com/whatsn2day/status/1844785316596793418.

Doesn't he look great?? Kind of like Jonathan Pine 9 years later, which is, of course, THE POINT. The character has developed since series 1, and the world has changed drastically. Or perhaps you didn't hear that part when Tom was talking about looking forward to the new season.

Also, if that's 'long-hair JP', wow. Do I have news for you.

Sorry you're stuck in 2016.

Feel free to unfollow any time. There are plenty of blogs who are more than happy to pre-judge any of his work based on 'vibes', rather than, I don't know, waiting and watching the season when it airs, and who seem to have memory-holed the first series and anything Tom's said.

[letspepaymentgateway]

Artificial Intelligence, aka AI, is playing a vital role in fraud prevention for Payment Gateways today. There are many tools updated in the market used to make payment gateway services more secure daily. Hackers are becoming advanced and there is always a threat that they may crack the code to break the latest technology used in fraud prevention for the payment gateways. This generated the need to update the AI technology used for the prevention of payment gateways.

[gaypornvideoswebsite]

the rafah border crossing could close as soon as next month, leaving people in gaza with no way out. please continue to fund trusted people who are on the ground. do not donate to anyone who does not know what they are doing or how to get funds moved properly, or those who have no connections to volunteers in cairo who are working tirelessly to transition traumatized people as smoothly as possible while the egyptian government does squat. many sources are aggregating vetted funds like the linktree to several funds below.

[jdunlevy]

From the archives: A roundup of old “Did you read” blog posts

I've gone back and gathered links to old Chicago Reader “Did You Read __________?” blog posts that I contributed items to from 2012 to 2016. These posts were all “authored” by “Reader staff” with attibution to the individual contributors appearing in the body text next to their contributed items. So like some other things with the top-level byline done in this way, they don't appear on individual contributors’ author archives pages.

I got the post URLs using Google Search and then wrote a PHP script pulling all the URLs from the Search results into an array and fetching each post’s headline, subheadline, and publication date, sorting it all in reverse chronological order, and then outputting a useful list of links in nice HTML for presentation on the web. It’s probably most but not all of these posts that I contributed to.

(Among possibly other things, this let me add these to my Muckrack portfolio.)

“Did You Read __________?” [snapshot in the Wayback Machine at archive.org] was a topic series—you can think of it simply as a blog��that started in January 2012 in The Bleader blog (previously “The Blog,” sort of a single-company blog network or parent blog under which individual blogs or sub-blogs existed) on chicagoreader.com that ran initially as a more-or-less daily place for Reader staff to share interesting things, usually articles, from elsewhere on the web, sort of quick-hit link sharing. It shared links to “stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us.”

It was the successor to “What the Reader’s Reading” [Wayback Machine snapshot], a regularly updated feed of links from early 2010 to late 2011 powered by a news-aggregation platform called Publish2 that the Creative Loafing folks were especially excited about but did actually do some cool microblogging things including tagging and categorizing content and, if I recall, also had some rudimentary social media-type features built in. Links shared this way were presented in various places on the site, especially on the Reader homepage and on section-specific posts (e.g. music-tagged links [Wayback Machine] on music posts) and on section table of contents [Wayback Machine] pages.

Later, the idea of daily “Did you read” posts as compilations of staff contributions was dropped and freelancer Kate Shepherd wrote all the posts for the rest of the series from January 2016 until it was discontinued after Valentine’s Day in February 2018—at a particularly tumultuous time in the Reader’s history.

[yes-these-obsessions-are-healthy]

“DATV is about hope and is escapist” then why is the story retroactively trying to paint Solas, the only person of the Evanuris who used his power and privilege to help end slavery and liberate the elves, as a prideful arrogant self-centered bastard who secretly loved being worshipped as a god when every single thing he has ever said and done contradicts those assumptions made by the Veilguard companions.

Oh I’m sorry, do you think slave rebellions can be accomplished through peaceful means? Through purely decentralized anarchist uprisings? Are we trying to argue that Solas didn’t rebel the “correct way”? Are we trying to argue that Solas actually wanted to be worshipped as a god by those he freed. Solas, a man who wanted nothing more than to be a spirit of Wisdom and act as nothing more than an entity that would help people act and think mindfully?

The game’s dialogue for the companions tries to make it out like Solas enjoyed being a rebellion leader, rather than it being one of the most frustrating and agonizing and embittering experiences of his existence. The game is so clumsy that is seems to imply that Solas trying to do right by the elves with the rebellion was another mistake on his part, as if someone trying to fight for the rights of an oppressed people is something that is ever a mistake one could make.

Real liberal (derogatory) hours here. Even at your most uncharitable—Solas helped give the elves bodies and helped the Evanuris secure their power—he was trying to correct that mistake and was the only one of the Evanuris that was actively doing so. Mythal was dragging her ass the entire fucking time trying to be a fence-sitting centrist that thought you could actually parley and negotiate with slave owners. Oh but wait, Veilguard conveniently proves you can! Just look at Dorian! Apparently all you needed to dismantle centuries upon centuries of brutal inhumane slavery was a dandy saying “please let the slaves go” and everything is all but resolved in ten fucking years. Solas, why didn’t you try taaaalking to the blood magic warmongering slave sacrificing Evanuris? Maybe things would’ve gone better if you’d just asked nicely 🥺

Veilguard tries to go the “Solas is corrupting into Pride” and they botched it so terribly. Solas is prideful, but the writers made him out like his problem was a secret vanity or desire for power. No, his problem was that he thought he was correct. That is a 100000% entirely different issue and it shows that the writers have no concept of nuance for psychology or even what Wisdom and even Pride are. And for people to swallow “Wow Solas was just a power-hungry arrogant bastard all along” is like reading Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee —the abandoned prototype of To Kill a Mockingbird that was meant to remain an unused manuscript—and thinking that is the real story and everything established in TKaM about Atticus Finch was just smoke and mirrors. Like come the fuck on.

Solas’s issue is that as a mortal he is inundated with mortal feelings that interfere with the purity of Wisdom. All mortals have levels of dignity and pride that are inextricably linked and mutually dependent to their recognition of their own personhood. Self-esteem, if you will. Wisdom is the act of deliberating and determining and enacting the best—most morally correct, most benign, most “good”—course of action in a scenario based on an aggregation of information and experiences. Solas’s “Pride” and biggest flaw is that he believes his judgments are the most objectively correct or best because this guy has spent tens of thousands of years watching and observing and experiencing people make the same mistakes over and over, behave in similar cyclical predictable ways in matters of love, power, violence, hatred, greed, tyranny, cruelty, ignorance, oppression, pride, grief, etc. Because Wisdom is derived from being able to apply knowledge and history and experience to solve a present problem, Solas naturally thinks he’s no spring chicken to all this and that he’s got a better grasp than most. Where Wisdom turns into Pride is the nature of the mortal mind, which for many likes to rely on rules of thumb and shortcuts and patterns to solve issues. While this is present in the dissemination of Wisdom, the flipside is that it can leave one vulnerable to stubbornness and partiality to one’s viewpoint regardless of new developments. Again, the mortal mind likes shortcuts because it saves time. Puzzling out whether this person or that scenario is truly uniquely unique every single time, wastes time. This is how presumptions and stereotypes arise. That Solas could only observe modern Thedas through what was reflected in the Fade gave him a half-understanding of people. That he chose to develop a resentment toward the Dalish after one bad encounter and remain detached from other races before joining the Inquisition meant he had fallen prey to these intellectual pitfalls, which is the result of his mortal nature interfering with his Wisdom nature.

It is also why he seems so philosophical and open-minded and lofty in some conversations and extremely definitive and judgmental in others over the same topic, notably modern elves and Dalish. This is the humanitarian nature of Wisdom—the pacifistic thoughtfulness—having been granted reactive, if at times impolitic claws. He is a man in flux, frustrated at the presence of pride in others; flush with his own thread of pride as an ages-old being; forced to endure ignorance of the Dalish that he cannot alleviate because he tried to once and failed, and to try again now while in the Inquisition would risk his identity being found out; and in his frustration forgetting what he knows very deeply, which is that the reason the Dalish are ignorant is because elves have suffered centuries of erosion of their civilization and culture, on top of enslavement, conquest, and cultural genocide. The Wisdom part of him knows that. At times he can remark and highlight very astutely on the plight of people when the topic of oppression comes up. The mortal part of him that is “active”, i.e. flossed with personality, esteem, and cognitive bias, obscures this clarity granted to him by his original nature. It clouds his thinking, it makes him forget, and it is even harder for him to recalibrate and remember their circumstances because once his Pride radar is pinged, it’s what he latches onto and mirrors. Unfortunately, Pride rarely conquers Pride. They only amplify each other, like gasoline on flames, so Solas’s mirroring unintentionally encourages more of what he detests. The pure material world is not like the Fade where strength of will can consume or cancel out another will. He should know that by now, but as stated, he’s in flux. His grasp on How to Be a Person is far more extensive than Cole’s, but it seems former-spirit-turned-mortals possess some lingering cognitive habits from their time as spirits, and this throws their mental gears out of whack.

Solas has never wanted to rule over people. He has never once wanted to be worshipped even at his most manipulative and Machiavellian. He wants to sit under a tree in the summer and idly discuss whether fire could be considered alive and if good requires evil to exist and the pros and cons of allowing collective memory to remain unchallenged. He wants to explore the Fade and see what new gentle incorporeal friends he might encounter.

Like of all things, the butchering of Solas’s character pisses me off to no end. Dislike him if you want, hate him if you want, but don’t for a second try to misconstrue that his problem is that he has secret aspirations for godhood. Does he think ancient elves are a superior race? There are definitely indications. But he doesn’t think of himself as someone to be worshipped by anyone, least of all other elves. Very huge distinction.

Edit: proof of what I’m saying about spirits and Natures straight from the horse’s mouth

[pinkrangerv]

Fark.com is a news aggregator--they take links from a lot of different news sites and discuss it in forums. People with various expertises will chime in as well.

The BBC and Al-Jazeera English are good places to start with news organizations.

There are other news sites, but these are ones I can personally vouch for as good places to start getting news.

On a similar note, the Supernatural Breaking News meme was funny earlier on, but as it's coming to be used for literally every single bit of minor news and people are more and more going "this is always how I learn about news first" or "I get my news only through this meme", I am BEGGING YOU to not get your news primarily off random Tumblr users and memes.

Subscribe to the (free) email newsletters of the national newspapers of record, multiple of them to catch the spectrum. Do the same for your regional, specialty, or local papers, especially the dailies and the ones that are not tabloids or conservative rags. Tune into their daily and weekly news brief podcasts and shows.

Contribute to their circulation count by actually reading and listening to their coverage. If you means to do so, actually subscribe to these papers; journalism and news reporting requires financial support. If their reporting or coverage is insufficient or does something you don't like, consider writing a letter to the editor complaining about it; if their reporting or coverage is fantastic and does something you do like, considering writing a letter to the editor highlighting it.

Some of you act like news reporting comes out of thin air and keep giving credit to memes and Twitter reposts, then don't contribute any credit or support to the journalists and organizations that actually did the reporting in the first place. There is constant eulogizing about how journalism, local newspapers, and print news is dying—that reporting of non-conservative political leaning is getting smothered—and then absolutely none of you put any effort into getting your news anywhere that isn't a Supernatural meme.

[gael-garcia]

PALESTINE FILM INDEX

Palestine Film Index is a growing list of films from and about Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for liberation, made by Palestinians and those in solidarity with them. The index starts with films from the revolutionary period (68 - 82) made by the militant filmmakers of the Palestine Film Unit and their allies, and extends through a multitude of voices to the present day. It is by no means a complete or exhaustive representation of the vast universe that is Palestinian cinema, but is only a small fragmentary list that we hope nontheless can be used as an instrument of study & solidarity. As tools of knowledge against zionist propaganda and towards Palestinian liberation.

The century long war against Palestinians by the zionist project is one waged not only militarily but also culturally. The act of filmmaking, preservation, and distribution becomes an act against this attempted cultural erasure of ethnic cleansing. The power inherent in this form as a weapon against the genocidal project of zionism is evidenced in the ways it has been historically & currently targeted by the occupation forces: from the looting & stealing of the Palestine Cinema Institute archives during the siege of Beirut in 1982, through the long history of targeted assassinations of Palestinian filmmakers, journalists, artists, & writers (from PFU founder Hani Jawharieh, to Ghassan Kanafani, Shireen Abu Akleh, Refaat Alareer, and the over 100 journalists killed in the currently ongoing war on Gaza).

It is in this spirit of the use of film and culture as a way of focusing & transmitting information & knowledge that we hope this list can be used as one in an assortment of educational tools against hasbara (a coordinated and intricate system of zionist propaganda, media manipulation, & social engineering, etc) and all forms of propaganda that is weaponized against the Palestinian people. Zionist media & its collaborators remain one of the most effective fronts of the war, used to manufacture consent through deeply ingrained psychological manipulation of the general public agency. Critical and autonomous thought must be used as a tool of dismantling these frameworks. In this realm, film can play a vital roll in your toolkit/arsenal. Film must be understood as one front of the greater resistance. We hope in some small way we can help to distribute these manifestations of Palestinian life and the struggle towards liberation.

This list began as small aggregation to share among friends and comrades in 2021 and has since expanded to the current and growing form (it is added to almost every day). We have links for through which each film can be viewed along with descriptions, details such as run time, year, language, etc. We also have a supplemental list of related materials (texts, audio, supplemental video) that is small but growing. We have added information on contacts for distributors and filmmakers of each film in order to help people or groups who are interested in using this list to organize public screenings of these films. The makers of this list do not control the rights to these films and we strongly urge those interested in screening the works to get in touch with the filmmaker or distributors before doing so. This list was made with best intentions in mind, and in most cases with permission of filmmaker or through a publically available link, but if any film has mistakenly been added without the permission of a filmmaker involved and you would like us to remove it, or conversely if you are a filmmaker not included who would like your film to be added, or for any other thoughts, suggestions, additions, subtractions, complaints or concerns, please contact us at palestinefilmindex@gmail.com. No one involved in this list is doing it as a part of any organization, foundation or non-profit and we are not being paid to do this, it is merely a labor of love and solidarity. From the river to the sea, Palestine

[communistkenobi]

it’s sometimes frustrating when people respond to posts lamenting like, the fact that every news article is paywalled or every social media site is overrun by reactionaries or that all recipe websites are impossible to use because they’re covered in malicious ads or etc with “here’s a site that gets rid of those paywalls!” “install this recipe-unfucker browser extension on your computer!” “just join [obscure social media site that no one uses] or [dead forum]!” like I get the intent, I don’t take it as like malicious derailing or anything, and I even understanding wanting to spread resources to people esp adblocker resources. but this pattern of response in the aggregate feels like it’s fundamentally missing the point on some level - it is infuriating that you can’t spend an hour on social media without being reminded that the world viscerally hates you and wants you dead for the crime of being a minority, it is infuriating that you’re constantly condescended to about the “dangers of disinformation” by the same professional class that paywalls every single piece of data from the public, it is infuriating that the internet is rapidly approaching a point of total unusability for the express purpose of further lining a billionaire’s pockets, and no browser extension or obscure discord clone is going to fix that. These are structural problems and I think people are using these things as examples to complain about these structures, and it sometimes feels like people are missing that point when they post a link to a mozilla-only browser extension. it feels like unwanted advice to a problem that is already unsolveable via individual solutions. often it borders on patronising, as if people aren’t aware they can log off tumblr and post on a Web 2.0 forum that 1000 people collectively use or haven’t heard of the concept of an adblocker. but again like what else are you supposed to do the next time you want to look up a chili recipe or watch cat videos online or read the news. sucks ass

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Word List: Black

beautiful words with "black" to try to include in your poem/story

Blackberry - the usually black or dark purple juicy but seedy edible aggregate fruit of various brambles (genus Rubus) of the rose family

Blackbody - an ideal body or surface that completely absorbs all radiant energy falling upon it with no reflection and that radiates at all frequencies with a spectral energy distribution dependent on its absolute temperature

Black flower - a bunchflower (Melanthium virginicum) of the eastern and southern U.S.

Blackfly - any of various small dark-colored insects

Black frost - frost or cold so intense as to blacken vegetation and usually unaccompanied by hoarfrost

Blackguard - obsolete: the kitchen servants of a household; a person who uses foul or abusive language

Blackheart - a plant disease in which the central tissues blacken

Blacklead - graphite (i.e., a soft black lustrous form of carbon that conducts electricity and is used in lead pencils and electrolytic anodes, as a lubricant, and as a moderator in nuclear reactors)

Blackseed - black medic i.e., a prostrate herb (Medicago lupulina) with heads of small yellow flowers and curved black pods

Blackshop - the part of an electrotyping plant where blackleading is done

Blacksmith - a smith who forges iron

Blacksnake - any of several snakes that are largely black or very dark in color

Blackstick - quinoidine molded into sticks

Blacktail - mule deer i.e., a long-eared deer (Odocoileus hemionus) of western North America that is larger and more heavily built than the white-tailed deer

Blackthorn - a European spiny plum (Prunus spinosa) with hard wood and small white flowers

Blacktop - a bituminous material used especially for surfacing roads

Blackwater - any of several diseases (such as blackwater fever) characterized by dark-colored urine

Blackwood - any of several hardwood trees (such as Acacia melanoxylon) or their dark-colored wood

Bootblack - one who shines shoes

Lampblack - a finely powdered black soot deposited in incomplete combustion of carbonaceous materials and used chiefly as a pigment (as in paints, enamels, and printing inks)

If any of these words inspire your writing, do tag me or send me a link. I'd love to read your work!

More: Word Lists

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A media literacy handbook for Israel-Gaza

Next Tuesday (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Media explainers are a cheap way to become an instant expert on everything from billionaire submarine excursions to hellaciously complex geopolitical conflicts, but On The Media's "Breaking News Consumers' Handbooks" are explainers that help you understand other explainers:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-and-gaza-edition-on-the-media

The latest handbook is an Israel-Gaza edition. It doesn't aim to parse fine distinctions over the definition of "occupation" or identify the source of shell fragments. Rather, it offers seven bullet points' worth of advice on weighing all the other news you hear about the war:

https://media.wnyc.org/media/resources/2023/Oct/27/BNCH_ISRAEL_GAZA_EDITION_1.pdf

I. "Headlines are obscured by the fog of war"

Headline writers have a hard job under the best of circumstances – trying to snag your interest in a few words. Headlines can't encompass all the nuance of a story, and they are often written by editors, not the writers who produced the story. Between the imperatives for speed and brevity and the broken telephone between editors and writers, it's easy for headlines to go wrong, even when no one is attempting to mislead you. Even reliable outlets will screw up headlines sometimes – and that likelihood goes way up in times like these. You gotta read the story, not just the headline.

II. Know red flags for bullshit

The factually untrue information that spreads furthest tends to originate with a handful of superspreader accounts. Whether these people are Just Wrong or malicious disinfo peddlers, they share a few characteristics that should trip your BS meter and prompt extra scrutiny:

High-frequency posting

Emotionally charged framing

Posts that purport to be summaries or excerpts from news outlets, but do not include links to the original

The phrase "breaking news" (no one has that many scoops)

III. Don't trust screenshots

Screenshots of news stories, tweets, and other social media should come with links to the original. It's just too damned easy to fake a screenshot.

IV. "Know your platform"

It used to be that Twitter got a lot of first-person accounts from people in the thick of crises, while Facebook and Reddit contained commentary and reposts. Today, Twitter is just another aggregator. This time around, there's lots of first-person, real-time reporting coming off Telegram (it runs well on old phones and doesn't chew up batteries). Instagram is widely used in both Israel and the West Bank.

V. "Crisis actors" aren't a thing

People who attribute war images to "crisis actors" are either deluded or lying. There's plenty of ways to distort war news, but paying people to pretend to be grieving family members is essentially unheard of. Any explanation that involves crisis actors is a solid reason to permanently block that source.

VI. There's plenty of ways to verify stuff that smells fishy

TinEye, Yandex and Google Image Search are all good tools for checking "breaking" images and seeing if they're old copypasta ganked from earlier conflicts (or, you know, video-games). The fact that an image doesn't show up in one of these searches doesn't guarantee its authenticity, of course.

VII. Think before you post

Israel-Gaza is the most polluted media pool yet. Don't make it worse.

There's plenty more detail on this (especially on the use of verification tools) in Brooke Gladstone's radio segment:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-breaking-news-consumers-handbook-israel-gaza-edition

The media environment sucks, and warrants skepticism and caution. But we also need to be skeptical of skepticism itself! As danah boyd started saying all the way back in 2018, weaponized media literacy leads to conspiratorialism:

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2018/03/09/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you.html

Remember, the biggest peddlers of "fake news" are also the most prolific users of the term. For a lot of these information warriors, the point isn't to get you to believe them – they'll settle for you believing nothing. "Flood the zone with bullshit" is Steve Bannon's go-to tactic, and it's one that his acolytes have picked up and multiplied.

It's important to be a critical thinker, but there's plenty of people who've figured out how to weaponize a critical viewpoint and turn it into nihilism. Remember, the guy who wrote How To Lie With Statistics was a tobacco industry shill who made his living obfuscating the link between smoking and cancer. It's absolutely possible to lie with statistics, but it's also possible to use statistics to know the truth, as Tim Harford explains in his 2021 must-read book The Data Detective:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#harford

There's a world of difference between being misled and being brainwashed. A lot of today's worry about "disinformation" and "misinformation" has the whiff of a moral panic:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/10/are-we-having-a-moral-panic-over-misinformation.html

It's possible to have a nuanced view of this subject – to take steps to enure you're not being tricked without equating crude tricks like sticking a fake BBC chyron on a 10-year-old image with unstoppable mind-control:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

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/2023/10/28/fog-o-war/#breaking-news

[exeggcute]

interesting links roundup #2

reading

America’s dairy farms are disappearing

The Canary (forgive me for sharing a michael lewis wapo piece but it's about mineshaft engineering safety which is super neat I promise!!!)

‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’

Diving lizard’s built-in ‘scuba tank’ allows it to breathe underwater

The Empathy Punishment

The Final Penalty

Gold Treasure Worth a Fortune Was Just Hidden in a Forest. The Hunt Starts Now

How a Scientific Dispute Spiralled Into a Defamation Lawsuit

How to succeed in MrBeast production

How Weed Strains Get Their (Amusing, Provocative, Downright Wacky) Names

Human cases of raccoon parasite may be your best excuse to buy a flamethrower

I sell onions on the Internet

Jawbreakers

Man Called Fran

Moral progress is annoying

The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero

Planet of Person Guys

Real-Estate Shopping for the Apocalypse

Some Notes on Attunement

U.S. overdose deaths plummet, saving thousands of lives

Why Is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?

Why We’re Turning Psychiatric Labels Into Identities

You are not a commercial for yourself

tools/reference

archive.is (this is the paywall remover I've been running all the paywalled links through (you're welcome) and pairs nicely with the news aggregators below)

Microsoft Activation Scripts

Radio Garden

Tom Paine Today and The Brutalist Report (both of these are news aggregators that let you quickly see what's in the headlines and how different outlets are reporting on it, although the latter is a bit more tech-focused)

Unclaimed Baggage

other

Observations - Journey (YouTube)

Shouting in the Datacenter (YouTube)

This American Life #839: Meet Me at the Fair

[pumpkinpaix]

You have questions! We might have answers.

What is this collection?

As Maria puts it: this collection is a critical look at some of the things that we, the editors, think have made CQL such a hit around the world. Of course, part of that success comes from the webnovel MDZS and the show CQL themselves—we love the characters, the mystery, and the drama, who doesn’t?! However, the authors in our book also look at topics like translating danmei (both officially and unofficially), adapting danmei for new audiences, and interacting with fandoms and fanworks. The larger argument of the book is that all of these things played a huge role in CQL’s visibility and success, and we wanted to start making those moving pieces visible, especially for audiences who mainly watched CQL in translation.

You keep using the word “academic”—what does that mean, exactly? 

Maria: Ok, not to get pedantic here, but this actually touches on some things that I’m really excited about for the book. Traditionally, academic work is written by people who have a deep expertise in the subject (signified by having a PhD and doing specific kinds of research), and then the work itself is peer-reviewed (i.e., sent to other experts in the field for them to evaluate whether it’s sound, original, and interesting enough to publish, without knowing who wrote it). And both of these things are true about our book—our authors have deep knowledge and the book was peer reviewed—but also. We specifically asked for chapters from younger scholars and from fans who also have deep knowledge about topics that academia doesn’t always know or value enough, and we include an interview from the fan-translator K. who did the Exiled Rebels translation. So the hope is that: this book is academic, and also—more!

Who are you? 

Yue studies adaptation, fantasy, and popular culture texts using a feminist lens. She wrote an early, influential article about danmei adaptations and also has a book about feminist adaptations of Chinese fantasy.

Maria studies fanworks, contemporary fantasy, and genre literature. She’s scrambling to finish her dissertation right now.

How were the chapter spotlights chosen?

Voluntarily! The concept of a small social media promo was kicked around by some of the contributors and those interested in the idea filled out a short interview with what they wanted to share. We'll be posting about 2 introductions and 2 spotlights a day for the next week or so!

Who's running this social media campaign anyway?

Not the publishers! A few enthusiastic collection contributors got together and, with the assistance of the editors, have put this promotion together. We do not in any way represent Peter Lang in an official capacity! We just worked hard and wanted to share. :)

Are you making any money off of royalties from this book? 

LOL not even remotely

What about this promotion?

also no. alas

Where can I find this book? 

You can find our listing on Peter Lang’s website here. As for other retailers, a quick search should turn us up!  

How can I access this book if I cannot buy it from Peter Lang / [book retailer of choice]?

As collection editors and contributors who signed a legal agreement with Peter Lang, we have granted Peter Lang exclusive right and license to edit, adapt, publish, reproduce, distribute, display, and store our contributions, and we must cooperate fully with the Publisher if the Publisher believes a third party is infringing or is likely to infringe copyright in the contribution. 

That being said, these are academic papers, which means that contributors may make copies of the contribution for classroom teaching use! (These copies may not be included in course pack material for onward sale by libraries and institutions). Of course, any linking, collection or aggregation of chapters from the same volume is strictly prohibited.

(FAQ may be updated periodically!) (all posts on Catching Chen Qing Ling)

[transmutationisms]

tbh people love to give notes to posts that aggregate a bunch of fundraisers into a list but if you actually look at the donations that come in this is the most useless form of fundraiser post, literally almost no one clicks through, it would be more useful to silently post a single gfm link with no comment or explanation than to jam it into a list with 10 other people to be reblogged by serial back-patters tagged as #important. i understand the appeal of making these posts (i have done so in the past!) but it's literally not a good use of your time or a help to the people you're trying to promote, post or rb them individually. people on here think of rbing a list post as already equivalent to action, it's a losing game. and donate to mohammed while i have you

[centrally-unplanned]

Very much enjoyed Tracing Woodgrain's foray into the internet life of jilted ex-rationalist and Wikipedia editor David Gerard. It is of course "on brand" for me - the social history of the internet, as a place of communities and individual lives lived, is one of my own passion projects, and this slots neatly into that domain in more ways than one. At the object-level it is of course about one such specific community & person; but more broadly it is an entry into the "death of the internet-as-alternate-reality" genre; the 1990's & 2000's internet as a place separate from and perhaps superior to the analog world, that died away in the face of the internet's normalization and the cruel hand of the real.

Here that broad story is made specific; early Wikipedia very much was "better than the real", the ethos of the early rationalist community did seem to a lot of people like "Yeah, this is a new way of thinking! We are gonna become better people this way!" - and it wasn't total bullshit, logical fallacies are real enough. And the decline is equally specific: the Rationalist project was never going to Escape Politics because it was composed of human beings, Wikipedia was low-hanging fruit that became a job of grubby maintenance, the suicide of hackivist Aaron Swartz was a wake-up call that the internet was not, in any way, exempt from the reach of the powers-that-be. TW's allusion to Gamergate was particularly amusing for me, as while it wasn't prominent in Gerard's life it was truly the death knell for the illusion of the internet as a unified culture.

But anyway, the meat of the essay is also just extremely amusing; someone spending over a decade on a hate crusade using rules-lawyering spoiling tactics for the most petty stakes (unflattering wikipedia articles & other press). The internet is built by weirdos, and that is going to be a mixed bag! It is beautiful to see someone's soul laid bare like this.

It can be tempting to get involved in the object-level topics - how important was Lesswrong in the growth of Neoreaction, one of the topics of Gerard's fixations? It was certainly, obviously not born there, never had any numbers on the site, and soon left it to grow elsewhere. But on the flip side, for a few crucial years Lesswrong was one of the biggest sites that hosted any level of discussion around it, and exposed other people to it as a concept. This is common for user-generated content platforms; they aggregate people who find commonalities and then splinter off. Lesswrong's vaunted "politics is the mindkiller" masked a strong aversion to a lot of what would become left social justice, and it was a place for those people to meet. I don't think neoreaction deserves any mention on Lesswrong's wikipedia page, beyond maybe a footnote. But Lesswrong deserves a place on Neoreaction's wikipedia page. There are very interesting arguments to explore here.

You must, however, ignore that temptation, because Gerard explored fucking none of that. No curiosity, no context, just endless appeals to "Reliable Source!" and other wikipedia rules to freeze the wikipedia entries into maximally unflattering shapes. Any individual edit is perhaps defensible; in their totality they are damning. My "favourite" is that on the Slate Star Codex wikipedia page, he inserted and fought a half-dozen times to include a link to an academic publication Scott Alexander wrote, that no one ever read and was never discussed on SSC beyond a passing mention, solely because it had his real name on it. He was just doxxing him because he knew it would piss Scott off, and anyone pointing that out was told "Springer Press is RS, read the rules please :)". It is levels of petty I can't imagine motivating me for a decade, it is honestly impressive!

He was eventually banned from editing the page as some other just-as-senior wikipedia editor finally noticed and realized, no, the guy who openly calls Scott a neo-nazi is not an "unbiased source" for editing this page wtf is wrong with you all. I think you could come away from this article thinking Wikipedia is ~broken~ or w/e, but you shouldn't - how hard Gerard had to work to do something as small as he did is a testament to the strength of the platform. No one thinks it is perfect of course, but nothing ever will be - and in particular getting motivated contributors now that the sex appeal has faded is a very hard problem. The best solution sometimes is just noticing the abusers over time.

Though wikipedia should loosen up its sourcing standards a bit. I get why it is the way it is, but still, come on.

[genshinresource]

Hey guys, this is kind of sudden but my time in genshinresource will end starting today. I've given a lot of thoughts about this but I can't find joy in Genshin anymore, to the point that I feel uncomfortable just by looking at any Genshin-related stuff, therefore I thought it would be best to stop now. Should anyone wants to make another Genshin resource blog or wants to look for other official art, you can find the source links for everything under this post's break line.

This blog will still be open for public view but it won't be updated any further, same goes for the AIO links and the Ask box will be disabled permanently. I will now fully focus on my Star Rail resource blog instead and will keep running it for as long as I can.

Thank you everyone for the past 2 years. I really appreciate all your thoughts and encouraging messages as well as all the new stuff I could learn from you guys. I apologize for not being able to contribute to the Genshin community anymore.

So long, everyone.

CN links:

Genshin's Miyoushe forum: https://www.miyoushe.com/ys/home/28 - Almost everything can be downloaded without the need of Miyoushe account except avatar frames and other account-related settings. The 资讯 tab is where they post all official art like birthday artworks, celebration artworks etc.

Official Genshin CN Bilibili: https://space.bilibili.com/401742377/dynamic

Official Genshin Weibo: https://weibo.com/ysmihoyo

Official Paimon's Work Note Bilibili: https://space.bilibili.com/1669328690/dynamic

Official Paimon's Work Note Weibo: https://weibo.com/pmmihoyo

Teyvat Fan Association's Bilibili: https://space.bilibili.com/1113861913/dynamic - This is where they post all stuff related to sponsored special fan-made programs like New Year Party, Birthday Party countdown artworks etc.

Global links:

Genshin's HoYoLAB forum: https://www.hoyolab.com/circles/2/27/official?page_type=27&page_sort=events.

HoYoFair's HoYoLAB forum: https://www.hoyolab.com/accountCenter/postList?id=244938673

Official Genshin Twitter EN | JP | KR | BR | ES | FR | TH | ID | RU

Official HoYoFair Twitter: https://twitter.com/HoYoFair_0

Official Paimon JP Twitter: https://twitter.com/paimon_genshin7

Official HoYoLAB Twitter: https://twitter.com/HoYoLAB_Mimo

Official Genshin Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/

Official Genshin HoYoWiki: https://wiki.hoyolab.com/pc/genshin/home

Unofficial Genshin wiki: https://genshin-impact.fandom.com/wiki/Genshin_Impact_Wiki

Media-focused links:

HoYoWiki's Genius Invokation TCG cards: https://wiki.hoyolab.com/pc/genshin/aggregate/tcg_character

Official Genius Invokation TCG display page: https://act.hoyoverse.com/ys/event/e20221207-card-dhcksn/index.html

Official Genshin CN's version KV gallery: https://act.mihoyo.com/ys/event/community-content-collection/index.html#/wallpaper - recommended for CN logo KVs if you can't download from Baidu Wangpan

asddzr's Bilibili for upscaled art: https://space.bilibili.com/1550564/dynamic

景三尧's Weibo (another upscaler with great art quality): https://weibo.com/u/7654321688

For twins version birthday shorts, you can find a lot from Miyoushe forum by searching with CN character name + 生日 but it's best to bookmark user(s) who often post them, I usually went to this user's profile page for those.