Linkdump

Linkdump for April 2nd through April 7th

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Sometime between April 2nd and April 7th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Custom Men’s High Tops: Custom printed pseudo-Chucks for $89 CAD (roughly $66 USD). Out of my budget now, but in the future….
  • Mastodon Is Like Twitter Without Nazis, So Why Are We Not Using It?: I'm @djwudi on mastodon.social, if you're over that way.
  • Joss Whedon’s Greatest…hits?: My new album, Joss Whedon Kind Of Really Sucks and Even Though I Have and May Continue to Enjoy Some of His Shows or Aspects of His Shows That Doesn’t Mean That I Don’t Need To Recognize How They Have A Lot of Problematic Elements, is coming out next week!
  • How to Make the Electoral College Work for Everyone: The Constitution asks us to elect a president of the United States, but what we get is a president of Ohio and Florida. There’s an easy way to fix that.
  • UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it: The information networks we’ve built are almost perfectly designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities to rumor. “Your brain tells you ‘Hey, I got this from three different sources,’ ” she says. “But you don’t realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people. If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn’t know how to vaccinate for it.”

Linkdump for March 31st through April 2nd

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Sometime between March 31st and April 2nd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Rosie’s Phenomenal Precision Insult Machine!: Don't reach for those old, tired gendered, ableist, or otherwise lazy and harmful insults. Trust the machine to help you find the perfect, targeted insult for your specific needs! (Does not contain gendered- genital-based insults, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, dis-ableism, body-shaming, slut-shaming. May contain peanuts.)
  • Joss Whedon’s obsession is not feminism: The problem is that at some point in his career, Joss became so intent on the masochistic fantasy of being hated by strong women for being a nerd that he spent a decade writing stories about violating those women to ensure they would hate him.
  • Of dwarves and gender: So one day a dwarf is talking to a human and finally realizes that when humans say woman, they generally mean “person who is theoretically capable of childbirth” because for whatever reason, humans assign social expectations based genital differences.
  • On Wm. Golding’s Lord of the Flies: Basically all the good Golding scholars agree that Lord of the Flies is intended as a condemnation specifically of western positivism and superiority, not a condemnation of human nature.  Golding believed that good societies were possible, but that he was not living in one.
  • What’s Wrong With Using The Word “Gypsy?”: TL;DR: It's racist. Here is a list of myths and realities about the Romani/Roma people.

Linkdump for March 30th from 13:25 to 16:32

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Sometime between 13:25 and 16:32 on March 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • The Male Power Fantasy (and why Mad Max and Captain Kirk don’t fit): This relates to a theory I have, which is that the archetypal Western Male Hero is James Bond, to the degree that people (Mainly straight white men) start to see every Western Male Hero as James Bond. Which is to say an aggressively masculine, quip-spitting, hyper violent womanizer. The ultimate Male Power Fantasy. A new supermodel love interest (or two) every film, a gun in his hand, and no consequences for his actions.
  • So many biological genders: If anyone tells you that there are 2-3 sexes in the world I want you to just go ahead and slap them.
  • Fight Club and toxic masculinity (with a side of Mad Max: Fury Road): Hold up – you mean there are people who watch Fight Club and don’t realise that Tyler Durden is meant to be full of shit?
  • Geisha FAQ: Please do not spread misconceptions about these hard-working women artists. They deserve respect and have persevered for centuries with women at the forefront of these professions.
  • Earth is dangerous: I really want a science fiction story where aliens come to invade earth and effortlessly wipe out humanity, only to be fought off by the wildlife.
  • Of privilege and nostalgia: The reality is, there was never a time when everyone could just enjoy things. To be able to say you had that time is to admit the privilege you had at not having to think about problematic behavior because it didn’t negatively affect your life.
  • To everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.: Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they don’t really understand.
  • Snarky but amusing and thorough Romeo and Juliet analysis: SUMMARY: Romeo and Juliet is a stunningly rich play that is mostly about how feuds fuck people over badly and how if you have to wait until YOUR KIDS OFF THEMSELVES to figure that out you deserve to lose your children. Romeo and Juliet are victims of the feud and its mindless death-lust, not perpetrators of death on others. They’re not supposed to be figures of ridicule OR representatives of True Love: they’re supposed to make the audience go “oh BABIES, no, you’re going to end so badly” and then be sad when they do.
  • The singular “they”: Next time someone complains about singular “they” I’ll point them to this 17th century rant against singular “you”.

Linkdumps are Back

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For quite a while in the past, I used the del.icio.us bookmarking service to save bookmarks, which were then automagically gathered and posted here as occasional “here’s what I found interesting recently” posts. Unfortunately, del.icio.us went through some changes a few years back, things fell over, I got distracted by other projects, and the whole thing fell apart.

I’ve been missing that aspect of my blog, though (along with the ability to quickly search through a list of bookmarks to find that thing I know I read a while back that I’d love to refer someone to while it’s on my mind), and have finally resurrected the system (with a few changes).

Rather than using the del.icio.us service again, I’m instead using Pinboard. It’s essentially the same thing that del.icio.us was “back in the day” — simple and fast saving of bookmarks, complete with a field for descriptions or excerpts, and tagging for categorization — with some extra niceties that either weren’t part of del.icio.us or that I just don’t remember, such as being able to designate particular links as “private”. Plus, there are a few iOS apps for easy mobile use of Pinboard, and after finding this review of a few, I’ve installed Pinner.

I’ve set up an IFTTT applet so that if I tag a link on Pinboard with the “.twitter” tag, that link will automatically get posted as a Tweet to my Twitter account for quick sharing that way.

Finally, I was quite happy to discover that Postalicious, the WordPress plugin I used to collect and post my del.icio.us links, still works (even though it hasn’t been updated in six years), and works fine with Pinboard.

So, as I find interesting stuff, I’ll toss links into Pinboard, and every so often (when there are at least five new links since the last time Postalicious checked), a Linkdump post will show up here on Eclecticism.

I’ve started off by tossing a few of the many Tumblr posts I’ve liked into Pinboard (both as a test of the new setup, and because there’s a lot of discussion on Tumblr that I’ve found and enjoyed over time, but which is nearly impossible to find again without something like Pinboard to keep track of them). More links will come as time goes by.

It’s not quite the same as if I were actually posting here as regularly as I used to (or that, ideally, I would like to), but at least it will get some movement here between my all-too-infrequent “real” posts.

Linkdump for March 30th from 11:01 to 11:37

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Sometime between , I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!