Links: Internet Times
There's an accidental theme of internet stuff going on here.
With the serial numbers filed off: The problem with trad pub fanfic. I don't think publishing fanfic is a problem. But there can be problems with publishing fanfic.
Where fanfic is famously queer, the normative biases of corporate publishers are clear to see in the ships and fandoms that make it to market.
Some lovely, thoughtful ideas in solarsocial: a quiet architecture for media and light.
I don't really want to read or talk or even think about AI but Bag of words, have mercy on us (via Sylvia) is great. My line on AI remains "It's not artificial and it's not intelligent."
Feeding your cyborg and brushing its hair from Sam of sam's internet house. Online experience check.
Don't let Web nostalgia obscure a positive Web future by Luke Davis is a lot of how I feel.
Jay Springett's Just Like Stuff and Not The Sort Of Person I Want To Be. From the latter:
I don’t want to be part of a negative Internet, so I choose not to add to it. I don’t see any value in doing cynicism as a service. There’s enough negativity out there without me piling on. Instead, I aim to post things that I think is going to be beneficial for both my readers and myself.
One of those things I now wonder I never wondered about: Why are hyperlinks blue? via Chris' blog.
Of mechanical compliance at Thinkings Space, about having to argue with a machine and what that does to us.
Dave Rupert asks Why would anyone start a website? and provides some wonderful answers.
Piranesi: The Birth of a New Prison on Miki's Blog:
This is the mechanism by which we as online subjects are fragmented and isolated into echo chambers. Nobody is watching – everything is watching.
I'm working on a feeds page, as described by Steve Dylan.
The myth of getting out the signal - we need to stop using 'exposing the bad guys' as a plot device. We have proved it doesn't work. It's only aspirational, the wish that we lived in a society where actual awful scandals brought the bad guys down. (The article uses Serenity as an example, and I feel similarly about Andor.)
I absolutely do not want to write iambic pentameter for money, on a deadline, but I love this.
Good conversations have lots of doorknobs is exactly how I have conversations, as a non-asker. I've been calling them offerings. I offer up a thing, to be discussed.
I've been looking through a lot of historical trade directories recently. Partly family history stuff, partly writing research, and partly a weird idea to do something similar.
I knew running a server off a compost heap must be a thing... And it is. From Compost to Code via The Aerobic Digest.