Every time I pop open the self-view when I start a video meeting, I look like I just came off a Sterno and methamphetamine bender.
Charles Stross: "They don't make readers like they used to"
Meaty, thought-provoking post on how the act of reading genre fiction has fundamentally changed since he and I were young.
… the public understanding of fiction itself is changing, and with it, the types of fiction which are commercially (or even socially) viable going forward.
Three fictive seeds germinated during the 1970s, and we’re now living in the fifty year old forest they gave rise to. Forests coevolve with ecosystems, and now we’re seeing the consequences.
Those seeds were: Dungeons and Dragons (which sparked the whole field of Role Playing Games, which constitute a wholly new mode of fiction in which the story emerges through a collaboration between the GM and the players–the GM provides guidelines and mediates between the player characters and their environment, but doesn’t dictate their lines): computer games (which are similarly interactive, but the map or procedural generative content is established before the players arrive): and the first of the big superhero movie franchises (notably the original Christopher Reeve Superman movies, which, starting from 1979, dragged Superman–and then the rest of the DC universe, with Marvel in its wake, out of the comic books and onto cinema and TV screens).
I was an English major in college in the early 1980s, and then it was breathtaking, revolutionary and controversial to suppose that the author was not the ultimate authority on their own work — that readers and authors were coequal creators. Only the greatest minds of literary analysis were capable of comprehending that rarified thought, and many considered it blasphemy.
Now, the idea is commonplace, and every 14-year-old fan is just as great an authority on the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Kevin Feige.
The transitions in the art of genre reading might go a long way to explaining why 99% of the sci-fi and fantasy being published today just bounces off me. Even the award-winning stories. Maybe even especially those. I fail to connect with them. And yet, when I was a teen, I consumed science fiction voraciously.
(Does anybody under 60 even remember Theodore Sturgeon anymore? Poul Anderson?)
The Harris-Walz tech policy platform is still bad
Mike Masnick at Techdirt:
It’s not batshit crazy, like the GOP plan, but it’s still generally bad. It’s the kind of thing that is going to lead to a lot of wasted time and effort as moral panic know-nothing “we must do something” types push out bad idea after bad idea, while people who actually understand how this stuff works have to do our best to educate against the nonsense.
The Arkansas Supreme Court upholds rejection of abortion rights petitions. Just keep digging, Republicans.
To infinity — and beyond! Nokia to extend 4G wireless to the Moon. My colleague Dan Jones reports.
After deciding he is the arbiter on who is truly Black, Trump now gets to decide who’s truly Jewish.
… history does not offer positive stories about political leaders who decide that they can evaluate the legitimacy of Jewish people and their families, suggesting that those who fail the evaluation should be cast out.
Trump is hosting a fundraiser for domestic terrorists who assaulted cops on Jan. 6
Michael Fanone, a former Washington, D.C., police officer who suffered a heart attack after being repeatedly tasered by one of Trump’s followers on Jan. 6, said Americans cannot afford to forget what happened that day. “Wake the fuck up, America,” he told HuffPost. “This is who Donald Trump is, a sick motherfucker who fetishizes violence committed on his behalf.”
I’d like to read Robert E. Howard. I sneered at those books and their fans during my prime teen science fiction and fantasy reading years. But I was so much older then — I’m younger than that now.
Also, today I learned that the Cimmerians were real.
… the business world has a well-worn playbook that they roll out whenever anything that might cause industry to behave even slightly less destructively is proposed. What’s more, we keep falling for it. Every time we try to have nice things, our bosses – and their well-paid Renfields – dust off their talking points from the last go-round, do a little madlibs-style search and replace, and bust it out again.
— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr, Corporate Bullshit
Court to cop: Someone observing all the laws is not “probable cause” for a search.. By Tim Cushing at Techdirt.
Tim Cushing at Techdirt: Age verification laws are just a path towards a full-on ban on porn, a proponent admits.
Mask bans disenfranchise millions of Americans with disabilities. Medical exemptions are nothing more than Band-aids
I’ve been masking consistently in public since 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic began, because I have a kidney transplant and will take immunosuppressant medication for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, my lifesaving medication also makes me more susceptible to infectious diseases like measles, the flu, and Covid-19. Even when people like me are vaccinated against the virus, we are at higher risk of being infected and are more likely to experience adverse health outcomes, including hospitalization and death.
The legislation in Nassau County and elsewhere primarily targets people who wear masks to hide their identity while committing crimes or during public protests, specifically against the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Masks are defined as any facial covering that disguises the face, and facial coverings worn for religious or health reasons are exempt. But people like me, who wear masks for health reasons, are disproportionally affected by these bans even when they include medical exemptions.
That’s because although the Nassau mask ban contains provisions for people who mask for medical reasons, it is up to the police to determine whether someone has a medical reason for masking if they are out in public. This means that enforcing the ban is subjective and will disproportionally impact Black people and people of color, who are more likely to be stopped by police and are also more likely to wear masks to prevent Covid. This is in part because Black and Latinx Americans are more cautious in their approach to the pandemic, reflecting the higher hospitalization and death rates in these communities. The Nassau mask ban as it is written is reminiscent of a “Stop and Frisk” law, which allows police to temporarily detain, question, and search people without a warrant.
This isn’t just localized to Nassau County; mask bans have been proposed or passed in multiple states, including North Carolina, Ohio, and California.
Mike Masnick at Techdirt: Ad revenue at Twitter is still in free fall two years into Musk’s reign.
Karl Bode at Techdirt: Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, streamers are “falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.”
Disney’s CFO says the company has “earned” the right to relentless price hikes.
Do you want piracy? Because that’s how you get piracy.
I just saw the GOP referred to as “period-tracking panty-sniffing ghouls” and that is perfect. No notes.
Where are you watching the Democratic National Convention? I’m looking for a TV station or streaming channel where the pundits don’t talk over the speakers.
“Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses’ insatiable horniness for enshittification.” — Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic
What Happened to Getting a Doctor’s Finger in Your Butt?
It’s a rite of passage for men. You’re in your 40s, you’re at your annual checkup, and suddenly you hear the snap of a rubber glove.
Why doctors are no longer doing the digital rectal exam (DRE).
You’ve got to hide your myopia away: John Lennon’s contact lenses
John Lennon’s eyeglasses became iconic, but before 1966 he was seldom seen in public wearing glasses. Instead, he wore rigid contact lenses that frequently fell out.
This is a wild article from the professional/scientific “Journal of the College of Optometrists.” It goes deep on medical terminology, attempting to diagnose Lennon’s prescription and explaining why he had such problems wearing contacts.
Nigel Walley, John’s childhood friend and manager of John’s first band ‘The Quarrymen’ (which evolved into The Beatles) recalled: ‘The thing with John though was that he was as blind as a bat—he had glasses but he would never wear them. He was very vain about that’ ‘He didn’t want to be seen out in them, and kept them in an inside pocket along with his mouth organ. He might slip them on to see something, but he’d whip them off again very quickly’.
In 1980, John himself explained that ‘I was just a suburban kid, imitating the rockers. But it was a big part of one’s life to look tough. I spent the whole of my childhood with shoulders up around the top of me head and me glasses off because glasses were sissy…’.
Paul McCartney recounted a story of John’s spectacle wearing habits from their teenage years in Liverpool. ‘He was pretty short-sighted, and it led to some funny occasions… Normally if there were girls around, he’d whip them off. He was a little bit shy with them, so if he was out and about, he’d just take them off… But he came down to my house, he lived about a mile or so away… We were writing some stuff and we got finished about midnight.
And so… he took off his glasses and walked home. The next day he said “…do you know those people on the corner of Booker Avenue?” I said ‘Yeah’. He said, ‘They’re crazy… at midnight when I left you, they were out on the porch of their house playing cards’. I said, ‘You’re kidding me’. So, I had to investigate. I went around and had a look… it was a nativity scene’.”