#tumblr should be like. like wikipedia

[ceiling-karasu]

I was discussing Korean shamanism with @agotia-t after they introduced Hanbam, and this encouraged me to finally draw my White-Naped Crane shaman OC, Chongsu (link to months old post here), as I said I eventually would. I have briefly included her in The Rod that Blocks the Lightning (here, about 2/3rds of the way through the chapter), as well.

She participates in the spiritual and medicine making practices of the mudang, while avoiding the performances of the kisaeng path.

Here is an example of one of her gutdang worship rooms, in which she would perform sacred ceremonies.

Generations past, a Joseon style caste system was kept in place with the help of the spiritual priest class, mudang shamans with a mixture of Confucianism and Buddhism, enjoying many luxuries and power in their caste high above most other species.

In the current day of the AU, generations after the former kings and caste systems were overthrown, the scars still remain (ex. Weasels thinking they are superior to smaller species and the squirrels needing to be reminded that they are allowed to join the soldier hedgehogs).

The White-Naped cranes spiritual practices, and preference towards the old caste system, have fallen out of favor with the general populace of Flower Hill. It is, however, very popular with the Weasels, who still hold that they are superior to the smaller animals. Many shaman leave Flower Hill to join the weasels to provide spiritual practices, something Flower Hill cannot stop due to migration permits.

Chongsu is based on a mudang shaman whose bloodline supposedly ties back the strongest to Sungmo, the mother of all shaman priestesses. Which makes her a sort of community elder despite her young age, as well as her constant mysterious illnesses.

She is a young crane, who lives in Flower Hill, too sickly to make the annual migration to Teikoku (Japan), like most of the White-Napes cranes. She and her followers assist in making medicine for the troops. Her biggest wish and command is for all species to get along with each other in harmony. What she does not realize, is that as the ‘supreme leader,’ this could possibly be misinterpreted as a command for her followers to reinstate the caste system, by any means possible, which could even mean teaming up with weasel, wolf, or tiger leaders, who also wish to return to the caste system and crush all underfoot.

In real life, white named cranes are unusual in that they primary live in the demilitarized zone of North Korea, but migrate to Japan. Shaman still exist in Korea to this day (participating in spiritual/healing leaders, fortune telling, and entertainment such as with the kisaeng), but are sometimes treated with suspicion, especially in North Korea, due to many of them, especially the kisaeng (who the Japanese troops found similar to geisha, apparently according to reports), siding with the Japanese during the invasions. As a result, the distrust and semi discrimination the Flower Hill commanders hold for Chongsu, is a hint that all is not absolutely perfect in Flower Hill.

[desognthinking]

im fascinated what is tomb guardians au i am immediately imagining ava trying to get (very serious about her job) bea to talk to her (t4t aka tomb for tomb communication) like “it’s because you’re always on that damn guarding the tomb” and bea staring at her like “oh (relevant semi-religious curse word/deity invocation), i HAVE to fuck her”

Hi 😄  tomb guardians au is exactly that! except a little weirder, i think. Because they arent the guards stalking the graveyard they are the inhumanly stone-and-metal-but-not-really guardians themselves ☺️it's like what if beatrice had two heads and stood watch over the sealed, entombed heart of a bloodline. And ava was the new, terrible protector of a clan of craftsmen on a hilltop, buried with chambers of generations of their art. And what if they were necropolis neighbors 😳

This is one chunk previously posted and this shorter thing is set a little later, during the wedding mentioned in the first part. i think it kind of matches this ask pretty well 🥺:

Weddings are just like funerals: they’re never safe. The procession overflows from the courtyard at the mouth of the tombhouse, and nobody turns their attention to the other side of the hill. That's Ava’s job. Beatrice, perched carefully atop her roof in a long line of others she can vaguely make out, stretched across the rim of the hills, can see her sway and duck through kitestrings and tree-hung lanterns blowing in the wind as she keeps vigil. 

There’s fire, and an uncoordinated symphony of chattering accompanying music, and colored smoke that drifts up and drenches the air in pinks and yellows. The party had started at the Salviuses’ inner city tombhall, and then wound its way through the cobbled streets to settle here sometime around midday. Now the sun has cooled from its boil and the clouds are dissipating in streaks leaving swatches of color overtop the trees.

Celebration mixes with ceremony in equal parts, and Ava’s soaking it in, so she told Beatrice herself. Amidst the rush of activity at the Silvas’, she’d found her way over yesterday, dangling her human legs over a particularly stubborn branch that tipped over a brass gate, lurching under her weight towards brown grass.

“And, if you want,” she’d said quickly, “the view from atop our central mausoleum is incomparable.” Following the parched trajectory of Beatrice’s traitorous eyes, Ava had reached up to hurriedly smooth out the colorful combs that had erupted from her crown as she blurted out the offer. “You could see the dances up close.” 

She paused, as Beatrice reached out, at first hesitantly, then bravely, to gently still Ava’s hands from patting down the sharp, fiery crests. It’s okay.

(I like them.)

“We’re close enough that you could still keep a lookout for things over here.” 

Proximity, of course, was in truth the last thing that Beatrice feared would compromise her duty, and she knew that Ava knew it too. 

They sat in silence, not uncomfortably. Hot plumes, from where the days-long feast was being prepared in great earthen pots and pits on the rolling green surrounding the Silva walls, thinned out as they passed through the trees to Beatrice’s clearing. 

Whispers of stews, and meats, and spices. Beatrice felt, suddenly, terribly hungry.

“Will you ask again tomorrow?” she chanced, finally. 

Ava, bright and shocked and delighted, laughed. In her relief she nearly fell backwards off the branch, taking with her Beatrice, who had joined her on the tree.

Razor-edged fronds sprung up again from the top of her sun-warmed head. “Horrible”, she joked. 

Beatrice disagreed, and let her know.

Now, the sky is dampening, and the wedding party, in dribs and drabs, pauses to refill its cups and light its candles. In this twilight Beatrice lets herself turn to the west.

It is not easy to see, but the creature on the Silva house is there, beyond the clasp of woods, and when Beatrice meets its eyes its form unfolds in magnificent, menacing span and its unmistakable, jagged tail rises, quick and high, as in warning or challenge. 

From this far away, and half-hidden by foliage, it is impossible to make out the details of that bolted, harsh surface, but Beatrice knows how it feels under her palm, fluttering and leathery and spiny and warm, just as she knows by a glance the towering shape of the display and the exaggerated, daring, silly invitation that it extends across the space between their roofs. 

Ridiculous. 

Ava – terrifying as she extinguishes the numerous wraiths that have already sought to take advantage of the guardian transition, serious as the new caretaker of an artistic legacy, and an achingly, brilliantly quick learner of that uncommon dialect spoken by Beatrice’s house – lifts off her roof in a dramatic jump, and lands with a shaking thud that sends shivers through the ground all the way over. 

\

Help arrives so quickly that Beatrice knows said help is going to give her a hard time. 

“Mary,” she greets, relieved all the same. “Are you sure you don’t mind keeping watch?”

“Yeah, don’t worry, Shannon's got it all handled back home,” Mary traces the perimeter easily, scanning the horizon in each direction and then feeling the hollows and convexities of the tombhouse in quick reappraisal. Beatrice stands aside as she smoothly pads across the surface of what she must have judged to be possible points of weakness, tests the robustness of a couple of Beatrice’s carefully constructed defenses, then nods, satisfied. 

A great-aunt, peeking out too to watch the celebrations, looks up, sees Mary, and waves. Mary sends her a bow. 

“You know, Bea, she’s right,” she hums, finally. “It’s not too far away, and you’ve always been focused when out visiting.”

The bait is not particularly subtle, and Beatrice narrows her eyes. 

“I just don’t think it’s safe to reduce any protections during a celebration when everyone’s guards are down.” She busies herself with cleaning up the place, tightening the wards and doing some final redundant sweeps and checks. “It’d be easy for someone or something to slip through, especially with so many unfamiliar faces.”

“Mm. And you’d be distracted.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” 

“Sure.” Mary circles, then sits down, settling in and getting comfortable. She uncoils and reaches out to nudge Beatrice gently where she’s examining the shifts in some stones very conscientiously. “And I promise not to look over.”

“Mary.”

“What?” She shrugs, casually puts out a strong claw and kicks Beatrice firmly off the parapet. “Time to go-o.”

There’s a shower of stone fragments as Beatrice shakes and gathers herself to snap and snarl halfheartedly and harmlessly up at her from the ground. 

Mary looks over the edge and shakes her head, grinning. “Oh, baby girl,” she tsks, “Don’t tell me you need me to teach you how to fuck her.”

“Mary!”

Mary’s laughter echoes as Beatrice turns and steals into the darkness, necks hot with embarrassment. “Now hurry up, Beatrice,” her call seeps, howling, into the roots. It warps with the topography of the earth into something deep and old, sinking its frigid teeth into Beatrice’s bones. But the shape of the wind whipping past Beatrice’s ears is fond and teasing in its turbulence as she tears through the thicket. “Your poor girl’s waiting for you.”

[froqpi-art]

new gen lore according to twitter (sorry wish i had a better source haha)

according to japanese fans, in the extra information in vol. 27, gen seems to have?? a rare condition in which the organs are reversed (visceral inversion).

[lycanthrop-ee]

I got a steam gift card this christmas and I am HEAVILY thinking about buying Disco Elysium specifically because of the posts you reblog, do you recommend I go through with it? Or is this the type of brain rot that you would not recommend?

GODDD. YOU SHOULD PLAY IT. but if possible you should torrent it bc the actual creators asked that you don't give money to the people the money goes to now [the studio split blah blah blah drama etc etc] I can send you the link to where I got it if you want :DD

[fakemagicjaye]

I HAVE FIVE PAGES. LEFT. TO DRAW.

[pink-pony-luv]

shout out to my last english essay in which i tried to invent the term "specialest princess effect" to describe that One Phenomenon of ppl truly & wholeheartedly believing they're right because they're the specialist princess and all their emotions are actual logical argeuements

[homunculus-argument]

I love those tumblr threads where the first person makes a vague post like "I am extremely sleep-deprived, should not be at work in this condition, and I will fuck technology itself. Behold man about to become a machine." And then someone replies something along the lines of "me when I am a simple engineer in [country that does not exist anymore] at [extremely specifically precise date] about to have a nice day at work."

And you gotta do some googling and find a wikipedia page about some poor fucker in like the 1800s who would not have gone down in history if it weren't for the way he got sucked into a horrible industrial machine dick first.

[doctor-peggy]

I almost forgot!!! Happy marmot day to everyone except this poor guy who does not seem to be enjoying himself. America, your gods are strange and interesting.

Also last year I wrote a poem about him while I was in a depressive haze and it ended up submitting it to a magazine so I did not post it. But! This year I will. Because it’s very silly and I’m proud of it for this reason. Not that I have an audience but I mean you know that’s not the point of tumblr anyhow.

Marmot; A short love letter to Phil

I wonder what he’s thinking when

They lift him up so high

You worship him, your god of spring

He’s just a little guy

He truly is just. A little guy. Thank you to my friend for reminding me that today is Groundhog Day.

[nyancrimew]

reblogs off since im tired of the dumb fucking discourse happening here, go read this long post and reblog it instead please.

ok so tumblr also really needs this reminder based on some posts ive seen around lately, the "babygirlification" of JSTOR is bad. like Bad Bad. did you all just collectively forget history? did you alll just forget they have blood on their hands? just because they publish science stuff in an ever so slightly more ethical way than springer and are a little silly on social media sometimes? JSTOR killed aaron swartz (wikipedia). in his fight for freedom of information he downloaded papers off of jstor (with acedemic access from MIT) to share and make freely accessible (as all information should be), for this he was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. he was facing up to 50 years in prison and a 1 million USD fee for a simple act of downloading files he lawfully had access to. with this court case the US government drove one of the most important online activists and programmers (he is behind so much stuff you all take for granted) into suicide in the name of JSTOR.

JSTOR isn't the cool girl on the block. this isnt a call to boycott them (though please learn how to use things such as sci-hub and fight for open science and freedom of information in general please <3), but please dont glorify them as some sort of cutesy platform.

[versegm]

I originally wanted to post this zine, which is a beginner-friendly introduction to what "intersex" means, but tumblr did that funny little thing where the post was invisible from dashboard, presumably because it was deemed nsfw. Sorry for using real words on my educational post instead of censoring myself I suppose.

So yeah. Instead you get this zine, which I made because I am pissed off that every single time I look up "intersex" anywhere I run into misconceptions that could be corrected by reading the wikipedia page on intersex people. Because I fucking guess "making a post about a group of people and actually looking up said group of people" is too much to ask.

And because this is the "piss on the poor" website: yes, I am well aware that most people are genuinely ignorant and don't mean any ill. Yes, I know it must feel really bad to see a post about a random person yelling at you about an issue you weren't aware of until now. This isn't about you. This is about me. This is for me, because every six months I make the blandest most sanded down "btw remember that intersex people exist :]" post and I feel like I'm yelling into the uncaring void. I am tired. I am so very tired of being the "friendly educational blogger who is understanding of everyone's circumstances." I'm more than that. I should be allowed to be more than that.

Anyways. Happy pride. Read up on every letter of the LGBTQIA+ acronym. At least the wikipedia page. Come on. Just the wikipedia page.

[autolenaphilia]

It's funny how clearly uninformed a lot of criticism of Mozilla and its browser Firefox is. Like people say "it's just another corporation, out to make profit, just like Google." And that ordinary users promoting Firefox are just giving them free advertising.

It's in basically any post criticizing Mozilla, including on this site. Like using tumblr search I quickly found a post that was largely positive, but argued that Mozilla operates "under capitalist incentives" And outside tumblr I found a blog post out on the interwebs that criticized Mozilla and outright wondered "I don't know if Mozilla's business model ever made sense, it makes a lot more sense if it's something closer to a nonprofit rather than a commercial entity."

Well, let's research the Mozilla Corporation, see what that business model actually is. Let's begin that research by going to the wikipedia article, and read the two introductory paragraphs. And it turns out that it's "a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation", which is a non-profit.

"The Mozilla Foundation will ultimately control the activities of the Mozilla Corporation and will retain its 100 percent ownership of the new subsidiary. Any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will be invested back into the Mozilla project. There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid. The Mozilla Corporation will not be floating on the stock market and it will be impossible for any company to take over or buy a stake in the subsidiary."

Turns out that it is not just "closer to a non-profit", it is literally a non-profit. Turns out you only needed two paragraphs on wikipedia to learn that, the most basic online research possible, which basically every post I found criticizing Mozilla failed to do.

This is entirely different from any other entity calling itself corporation, which is all about creating profit or money for its shareholders, the "capitalist incentives" spoken about earlier.

If you read further into that article, you will learn that the Mozilla corporation literally only exists separate from the foundation for tax and legal purposes, but it's still a non-profit operation.

This makes it reasonably immune from the enshittification process I've written about before. there is no incentive to fuck over the experience for end users for the sake of shareholder profits, like what tumblr is doing right now.

It means that Firefox is an exemption to the rule that "if something is free, you are the product", because there is no product to produce profits for shareholders, it's a charitable endeavour for a free and open internet, as laid out in the Mozilla manifesto.

This doesn't mean non-profits make corruption impossible, there is plenty of corruption in non-profit foundations. But unlike actual capitalist corporations, it doesn't have the greed and corruption built in. And if you are going to criticize Mozilla and Firefox, which it does sometimes deserve, you should have your basic facts straight before doing so, if you expect me to take you seriously.

[tinystepsforward]

autocrattic (more matt shenanigans, not tumblr this time)

I am almost definitely not the right person for this writeup, but I'm closer than most people on here, so here goes! This is all open-source tech drama, and I take my time laying out the context, but the short version is: Matt tried to extort another company, who immediately posted receipts, and now he's refusing to log off again. The long version is... long.

If you don't need software context, scroll down/find the "ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening" heading, or just go read the pink sections. Or look at this PDF.

the background

So. Matt's original Good Idea was starting WordPress with fellow developer Mike Little in 2003, which is free and open-source software (FOSS) that was originally just for blogging, but now powers lots of websites that do other things. In particular, Automattic acquired WooCommerce a long time ago, which is free online store software you can run on WordPress.

FOSS is... interesting. It's a world that ultimately is powered by people who believe deeply that information and resources should be free, but often have massive blind spots (for example, Wikipedia's consistently had issues with bias, since no amount of "anyone can edit" will overcome systemic bias in terms of who has time to edit or is not going to be driven away by the existing contributor culture). As with anything else that people spend thousands of hours doing online, there's drama. As with anything else that's technically free but can be monetized, there are:

Heaps of companies and solo developers who profit off WordPress themes, plugins, hosting, and other services;

Conflicts between volunteer contributors and for-profit contributors;

Annoying founders who get way too much credit for everything the project has become.

the WordPress ecosystem

A project as heavily used as WordPress (some double-digit percentage of the Internet uses WP. I refuse to believe it's the 43% that Matt claims it is, but it's a pretty large chunk) can't survive just on the spare hours of volunteers, especially in an increasingly monetised world where its users demand functional software, are less and less tech or FOSS literate, and its contributors have no fucking time to build things for that userbase.

Matt runs Automattic, which is a privately-traded, for-profit company. The free software is run by the WordPress Foundation, which is technically completely separate (wordpress.org). The main products Automattic offers are WordPress-related: WordPress.com, a host which was designed to be beginner-friendly; Jetpack, a suite of plugins which extend WordPress in a whole bunch of ways that may or may not make sense as one big product; WooCommerce, which I've already mentioned. There's also WordPress VIP, which is the fancy bespoke five-digit-plus option for enterprise customers. And there's Tumblr, if Matt ever succeeds in putting it on WordPress. (Every Tumblr or WordPress dev I know thinks that's fucking ridiculous and impossible. Automattic's hiring for it anyway.)

Automattic devotes a chunk of its employees toward developing Core, which is what people in the WordPress space call WordPress.org, the free software. This is part of an initiative called Five for the Future — 5% of your company's profits off WordPress should go back into making the project better. Many other companies don't do this.

There are lots of other companies in the space. GoDaddy, for example, barely gives back in any way (and also sucks). WP Engine is the company this drama is about. They don't really contribute to Core. They offer relatively expensive WordPress hosting, as well as providing a series of other WordPress-related products like LocalWP (local site development software), Advanced Custom Fields (the easiest way to set up advanced taxonomies and other fields when making new types of posts. If you don't know what this means don't worry about it), etc.

Anyway. Lots of strong personalities. Lots of for-profit companies. Lots of them getting invested in, or bought by, private equity firms.

Matt being Matt, tech being tech

As was said repeatedly when Matt was flipping out about Tumblr, all of the stuff happening at Automattic is pretty normal tech company behaviour. Shit gets worse. People get less for their money. WordPress.com used to be a really good place for people starting out with a website who didn't need "real" WordPress — for $48 a year on the Personal plan, you had really limited features (no plugins or other customisable extensions), but you had a simple website with good SEO that was pretty secure, relatively easy to use, and 24-hour access to Happiness Engineers (HEs for short. Bad job title. This was my job) who could walk you through everything no matter how bad at tech you were. Then Personal plan users got moved from chat to emails only. Emails started being responded to by contractors who didn't know as much as HEs did and certainly didn't get paid half as well. Then came AI, and the mandate for HEs to try to upsell everyone things they didn't necessarily need. (This is the point at which I quit.)

But as was said then as well, most tech CEOs don't publicly get into this kind of shitfight with their users. They're horrid tyrants, but they don't do it this publicly.

ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening

WordCamp US, one of the biggest WordPress industry events of the year, is the backdrop for all this. It just finished.

There are.... a lot of posts by Matt across multiple platforms because, as always, he can't log off. But here's the broad strokes.

Sep 17

Matt publishes a wanky blog post about companies that profit off open source without giving back. It targets a specific company, WP Engine.

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital. So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?

(It's worth noting here that Automattic is funded in part by BlackRock, who Wikipedia calls "the world's largest asset manager".)

Sep 20 (WCUS final day)

WP Engine puts out a blog post detailing their contributions to WordPress.

Matt devotes his keynote/closing speech to slamming WP Engine.

He also implies people inside WP Engine are sending him information.

For the people sending me stuff from inside companies, please do not do it on your work device. Use a personal phone, Signal with disappearing messages, etc. I have a bunch of journalists happy to connect you with as well. #wcus — Twitter I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support. — Tumblr

Matt also puts out an offer live at WordCamp US:

“If anyone of you gets in trouble for speaking up in favor of WordPress and/or open source, reach out to me. I’ll do my best to help you find a new job.” — source tweet, RTed by Matt

He also puts up a poll asking the community if WP Engine should be allowed back at WordCamps.

Sep 21

Matt writes a blog post on the WordPress.org blog (the official project blog!): WP Engine is not WordPress.

He opens this blog post by claiming his mom was confused and thought WP Engine was official.

The blog post goes on about how WP Engine disabled post revisions (which is a pretty normal thing to do when you need to free up some resources), therefore being not "real" WordPress. (As I said earlier, WordPress.com disables most features for Personal and Premium plans. Or whatever those plans are called, they've been renamed like 12 times in the last few years. But that's a different complaint.)

Sep 22: More bullshit on Twitter. Matt makes a Reddit post on r/Wordpress about WP Engine that promptly gets deleted. Writeups start to come out:

Search Engine Journal: WordPress Co-Founder Mullenweg Sparks Backlash

TechCrunch: Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a ‘cancer to WordPress’ and urges community to switch providers

Sep 23 onward

Okay, time zones mean I can't effectively sequence the rest of this.

Matt defends himself on Reddit, casually mentioning that WP Engine is now suing him.

Also here's a decent writeup from someone involved with the community that may be of interest.

WP Engine drops the full PDF of their cease and desist, which includes screenshots of Matt apparently threatening them via text.

Twitter link | Direct PDF link

This PDF includes some truly fucked texts where Matt appears to be trying to get WP Engine to pay him money unless they want him to tell his audience at WCUS that they're evil.

Matt, after saying he's been sued and can't talk about it, hosts a Twitter Space and talks about it for a couple hours.

He also continues to post on Reddit, Twitter, and on the Core contributor Slack.

Here's a comment where he says WP Engine could have avoided this by paying Automattic 8% of their revenue.

Another, 20 hours ago, where he says he's being downvoted by "trolls, probably WPE employees"

At some point, Matt updates the WordPress Foundation trademark policy. I am 90% sure this was him — it's not legalese and makes no fucking sense to single out WP Engine.

Old text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. New text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

Sep 25: Automattic puts up their own legal response.

anyway this fucking sucks

This is bigger than anything Matt's done before. I'm so worried about my friends who're still there. The internal ramifications have... been not great so far, including that Matt's naturally being extra gung-ho about "you're either for me or against me and if you're against me then don't bother working your two weeks".

Despite everything, I like WordPress. (If you dig into this, you'll see plenty of people commenting about blocks or Gutenberg or React other things they hate. Unlike many of the old FOSSheads, I actually also think Gutenberg/the block editor was a good idea, even if it was poorly implemented.)

I think that the original mission — to make it so anyone can spin up a website that's easy enough to use and blog with — is a good thing. I think, despite all the ways being part of FOSS communities since my early teens has led to all kinds of racist, homophobic and sexual harm for me and for many other people, that free and open-source software is important.

So many people were already burning out of the project. Matt has been doing this for so long that those with long memories can recite all the ways he's wrecked shit back a decade or more. Most of us are exhausted and need to make money to live. The world is worse than it ever was.

Social media sucks worse and worse, and this was a world in which people missed old webrings, old blogs, RSS readers, the world where you curated your own whimsical, unpaid corner of the Internet. I started actually actively using my own WordPress blog this year, and I've really enjoyed it.

And people don't want to deal with any of this.

The thing is, Matt's right about one thing: capital is ruining free open-source software. What he's wrong about is everything else: the idea that WordPress.com isn't enshittifying (or confusing) at a much higher rate than WP Engine, the idea that WP Engine or Silver Lake are the only big players in the field, the notion that he's part of the solution and not part of the problem.

But he's started a battle where there are no winners but the lawyers who get paid to duke it out, and all the volunteers who've survived this long in an ecosystem increasingly dominated by big money are giving up and leaving.

Anyway if you got this far, consider donating to someone on gazafunds.com. It'll take much less time than reading this did.

[eternityservedcold]

my guide to getting started on firefox is the only one you need

step 1: download firefox from the official website

step 2: import your passwords and such from your browser. this sounds complicated, but it should take no time at all

step 3: download ublock origin from the firefox add-on website

thats literally all you need to do in terms of out of the box setup. you may wish to do more, such as downloading more add-ons (see under the cut for some i recommend), but this is all that is needed for most people

my recommended add-ons:

sponsorblock & her sister dearrow. sponsorblock allows you to skip sponsors in youtube videos, dearrow changes clickbait titles and thumbnails

dark reader. forces all websites to have a dark mode

the wayback machines official extension. allows you to archive and see archived versions of websites with 2 clicks

right-click borescope. allows you to view and save images, even on websites that disable it

search by image. what it says on the tin, including like a billion different image search engines, and you can customize which ones it uses

ruffle. a new flash player that is supposedly safer?? idc i use it because i have nostalgia for flash

xkit rewritten, my beloved. a suite of tumblr features you can toggle on the fly, including one-click reblogs with tags, blocking entire posts, loading the vanilla versions of audio and video, and much, much more

dont accept webp. does what it says on the tin, kills webps FOREVER

wikipedia vector skin and old reddit redirect. forces the old, better layout for those two websites

tampermonkey. allows you to write and use scripts for any website

redirector. make websites redirect to any other website, like forcing fandom wikis to go to breezewiki, forcing youtube to display shorts as videos, or forcing tumblr to display images in full quality (plaintext of these rules)

[foone]

I hate the way people state "there's only two browsers" like it's an absolute fact. Yeah sure, most of what people think of as non-firefox browsers is just a Chrome/Chromium variant, but it's not true that there's only two.

There's lots of browsers! It's just that the only ones that are maintained and that you should even slightly consider using are Chrome or Firefox based.

Wikipedia lists four actively developed browser engines, and another 7 maintained engines.

And that's before you get into the really niche ones: Lynx, Dillo, etc.

And old browsers still exist! You shouldn't use them, but they can be used. I tried to load Tumblr on Internet Explorer 2 last week. (It didn't even start to work)

[ms-demeanor]

i’m curious what your opinion is on the finer points of the case mentioned in the JSTOR post you reblogged earlier. the two sources in the post say that JSTOR didn’t press charges against him and had already settled with him by the time he killed himself. from what i read on wikipedia, the concern seems to be that JSTOR complied with a subpoena, which i don’t believe they have a choice to ignore? if anything it seems like the us government had reason to want him dead for wikileaks and public court records reasons, so they took a terms of use violation and blew it up into a dozen federal crimes.

is there more context i should be aware of? i have no particular affection or malice for JSTOR but the sources i found don’t exactly implicate the database or its employees in murder.

That's from page 175 of this document. This line: "The activity noted is outright theft and may merit a call with university counsel, and even the local police, to ensure not only that the activity has stopped but that - e.g. the visiting scholar who left - isn't leaving with a hard drive containing our database" is where I think the culpability starts.

If someone is downloading 1000s of articles (what seems like reasonable threshold for us to take action), what's wrong with us - or the university in collaboration with us - alerting the cyber-crimes division of law enforcement and initiating an investigation, having cop search dorm room and try to retrieve any hard drive that contains our content, etc. Our content is extraordinarily valuable and hard to replicate by the sweat of one's brow, but can be duplicated by savvy hackers and who knows what they want to do with the content?

Page 379: "Does the university contact law enforcement? Would they be willing to do so in this instance?

From page 1296:

I think the important thing to note here is that JSTOR had worked with MIT and had plans in place to prevent future similar downloads, but remained focused on identifying the person responsible for the downloads and ensuring that their data was deleted.

"I might just be irked because I am up dealing with this person on a Sunday night, but I am starting to feel like they need to get a hold of this situation right away or we need to offer to send them some help (read FBI).

And there it is. Page 3093 of the document.

JSTOR can hem and haw about it all they want, but you can't un-call the cops.

MIT was working with JSTOR on preventing future incidents of pirating, but JSTOR repeatedly said that they weren't going to let it go, that it was unacceptable to drop the issue, that they were going to continue to pursue the pirate.

You can scroll through the document and see the JSTOR tech department and abuse team talking about Swartz as a script kiddie, and a hacker. You can see someone talking about how this was real theft - making the comparison to stealing books even while admitting that piracy doesn't close others out of access.

You can see the thread starts with a joke about punching someone in the face for hacking their system, and includes the tech team ominously considering whether they should threaten the MIT librarians with the FBI.

There's something really important to note here which I don't think that people who aren't PRETTY DEEP into hackery shit aren't aware of: US law enforcement is absolutely rabidly feral about prosecuting hackers. People may be more aware of this now because of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden (and perhaps a bit on tumblr because of maia arson crimew), but people who work in tech and who are in infosec - like the people joking about calling the FBI in these emails - would be aware of the bonkers disproportionate punishments faced by hackers. And knowing that, they kept pushing and pushing and pushing for identification of the hacker. They kept digging with MIT, they kept saying that simply preventing future incidents wasn't enough.

Early in the exchange someone from JSTOR asked "what's wrong with us - or the university in collaboration with us - alerting the cyber-crimes division of law enforcement and initiating an investigation, having cop search dorm room and try to retrieve any hard drive that contains our content, etc." and the answer is what happened to Aaron Swartz.

It is absolute bullshit for JSTOR to say "we arrived at a solution privately and didn't want to press charges" after law enforcement has gotten involved with a hacking case, especially one where they're talking about "real theft" and are attempting to quantify and emphasize the amount that was "stolen" from them.

The *public* may believe that private individuals or institutions are the ones who "press charges" but that's simply not the case. It's prosecutors who decide whether or not to go ahead with charges; they do it based on what cases they think they can win and what their office's perspective is on the crime. When you hear about people choosing to press charges it simply means that they decided to tell the prosecutor they wanted the case to go forward. It's up to the prosecutor whether or not that happens.

And the tech team at JSTOR had to know that law enforcement wasn't just going to wag a finger at an academic hacker.

There's a parallel here that happens sometimes when people have their identities stolen by their parents. If you mom takes out a credit card in your name, that's identity theft. That's fraud. That's illegal. If you reach the age of 25 and realize that your credit is ruined because your mom has been defaulting on cards in your name, you've got two choices to fix that: one is to accept the debt and pay it off and build up credit, and the other is to report the identity theft - which will end up with your mom in prison for a decade or so. Ruin your own personal finances, or your mom goes to jail for ruining your finances. So if you find out that your mom stole your identity you can't just call the cops to pressure her into transferring the debt to her name or something. That's not an option. The cops are not a threat to wave over people, they are not a way to get people to fall in line or act right. They aren't someone you can send to a college student's dorm room to retrieve a hard drive and have the matter drop.

When you call the cops on someone you are sending the full force of the law after them, and the full force of the law falls really heavily on hackers, and how heavy that blow can be is something that the JSTOR team must have been aware of when they were making snide comments about calling the FBI because they were frustrated with the noncommittal responses they were getting from librarians.

Ultimately it was the carceral state that killed Aaron Swartz, but they would not have been involved if JSTOR didn't think that what he did constituted theft.

Taking an *EVEN LARGER* step back from that, the idea that information can be owned and locked behind a paywall is what killed Aaron Swartz, someone who fought for information to be free.

Like. JSTOR is a licensing company. At the end of the day, cute social media posts and all, they're the same as the RIAA and ASCAB. They exist to extract a fee from people attempting to access information.

Aaron Swartz and all that he stood for are an existential threat to their core function.

Are JSTOR's hands as dirty as the federal prosecutors? Absolutely not. But they operate on a model that puts them in opposition to open information activists and it ended up with a hammer falling on Aaron Swartz that they dropped.