sun-reads

[sun-reads]

Also shout-out to the Swedes for just borrowing the French "adieu" into their vocabulary and just spelling it "adjö"

[sun-reads]

I hope every writer who sees this writes LOADS the next few months. Like freetime opens up, no writers block, the ability to focus, etc etc you're able to write loads & make lots of progress <3

[sun-reads]

[sun-reads]

This Blog Is Unrepentantly Pro- AO3!

This blogger remembers when we didn’t have AO3.

This blogger remembers when we had to put disclaimers at the head of our fics and pray that someone didn’t take it into their heads to sue us for what we created.

This blogger remembers brilliant artists and writers getting decades of work obliterated on LJ because someone who wanted to tell people what they were allowed to create went running to someone who wanted a profit, and told them the artists and writers had been naughty.

This blogger remembers just how hard the creators of AO3 worked to build the thing we all seem to take for granted now.

This blogger watched friends dive into the creation process so heartily and determinedly that they all but disappeared from the writing/gaming/artistic side of their fandom for YEARS while they worked to make the archive happen.

This blogger remembers the sense of giddy wonder that there would possibly be LAWYERS involved, willing to defend our right to create these works, and not leave us hanging at the mercy of corporate legal teams.

This blogger is aware that she reads between twenty to fifty books’ worth of material every year on AO3, and is never REQUIRED to pay a penny for the privilege of getting access.

This blogger is aware that she will not ever see advertisements on AO3, and that her personal data and reading preferences won’t be sold to advertisers in order to raise the money that AO3 needs to pay for the services they provide.

This blogger is aware that AO3 is, and has always been, a labor of love; by fans, for fans, and not for profiting off fans – and this is what makes it unique in the whole of the media universe.

This blogger has NEVER taken AO3 for granted, and has ALWAYS been damned glad to have access to it.  Even in years when this blogger didn’t have the means to support it financially.

#yes ao3

[sun-reads]

[sun-reads]

Daily reminder that we do not actually live in a dystopian movie put the apocalypse down and back away slowly. You know when your cleaning a room and you pull everything out of it's draws to sort through it and you're like "what the fuck have I done I'm never going to be able to tidy all of this" I think that's the stage we're at in the world. Thanks to social media we've pulled out all the messed up shit from the cupboards of the world, it was always there but now we can see it and we're going to have to sort it all out we made this mess and we can fix it. Falling to the floor sobbing will not clean a crusty room. A group of people working systematically (preferably with music in the background) will.

[sun-reads]

(insp.)

#hockey #hockey rpf

[sun-reads]

Sonia Lera Preston

[sun-reads]

some of you just cannot accept that “i just don’t like it” is a complete reason to not engage with media or a facet of media

[sun-reads]

pls reblog and put your answer/team in the tags i’m trying to see something

#hockey #okay but who is normal about sid

[sun-reads]

[sun-reads]

gentle reminder that crying is actually one of the best things you can do to relieve all that tension and emotion in your brain, and not to resist the impulse because it's 'weak' or 'unnecessary' or 'a plea for attention.' if you need to cry, do it, even if you don't always know the reason. your body does.

[sun-reads]

Celestial Guardian 💫

[sun-reads]

Have been thinking a lot lately about how, when a new technology emerges, people who were born after the shift have trouble picturing exactly what The Before was like (example, the fanfic writer who described the looping menu on a VHS tape), and even people who were there have a tendency to look back and go "Wow, that was... wild."

Today's topic: The landline. A lot of people still have them, but as it's not the only game in town, it's an entirely different thing now.

(Credit to @punk-de-l-escalier who I was talking to about this and made some contributions)

for most of the heyday of the landline, there was no caller ID of any kind. Then it was a premium service, and unless you had a phone with Caller ID capability-- and you didn't-- you had to buy a special box for it. (It was slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes.)

Starting in the early nineties, there WAS a way to get the last number dialed, and if desired, call it back. It cost 50 cents. I shit you not, the way you did it was dialing "*69". There's no way that was an accident.

If you moved, unless it was in the same city-- and in larger cities, the same PART of the city-- you had to change phone numbers.

As populations grew, it was often necessary to take a whole bunch of people and say "Guess what? You have a new area code now."

The older the house, the fewer phone jacks it had. When I was a kid, the average middle-class house had a phone jack in the kitchen, and one in the master bedroom. Putting in a new phone jack was expensive... but setting up a splitter and running a long phone cord under the carpet, through the basement or attic, or just along the wall and into the next room was actually pretty cheap.

Even so, long phone cords were pretty much a thing on every phone that could be conveniently picked up and carried.

The first cordless phones were incredibly stupid. Ask the cop from my hometown who was talking to his girlfriend on a cordless phone about the illegal shit he was doing, and his wife could hear the whole thing through her radio.

For most of the heyday of the landline, there was no contact list. Every number was dialed manually. Starting in the mid-eighties, you could get a phone with speed dial buttons, but I cannot stress how much they sucked, because you had to label them with a goddamn pencil, you only had ten or twenty numbers, reprogramming them was a bitch, and every once in a while would lose all of the number in its memory.

All of the phone numbers in your city or metro area were delivered to you once a year in The Phone Book, which was divided between the White Pages (Alphabetic), the Yellow Pages (Businesses, by type, then alphabetic), and the Blue Pages (any government offices in your calling area (which we will get to in a moment)).

Listing in the white pages was automatic; to get an unlisted number cost extra.

Since people would grab the yellow pages, find the service they need, and start calling down the list, a lot of local business names where chosen because they started with "A", and "Aardvark" was a popular name.

Yes, a fair chunk of the numbers in it were disconnected or changed between the time it was printed and it got to your door, much less when you actually looked it up.

One phone line per family was the norm.

Lots and lots and LOTS of kids got in trouble because their parents eavesdropped on the conversation by picking up another phone connected to the same line.

A fair number of boys with similar voices to their father got in trouble because one of their friends didn't realize who they were talking to.

And of course, there were the times where you couldn't leave the house, because you were expecting an important phone call.

Or when you were in a hotel and had to pay a dollar per call. (I imagine those charges haven't gone away, but who pays them?)

Since you can't do secondary bullet points, I'll break a couple of these items out to their own lists, starting with Answering Machines.

these precursors to voicemail were a fucking nightmare.

The first generation of consumer answering machines didn't reach the market until the mid-eighties. They recorded both the outgoing message and the incoming calls onto audio cassettes.

due to linear nature of the audio cassette, the only way to save an incoming call was to physically remove the cassette and replace it with a new one.

they were prone to spectacular malfunction; if the power went out, rather than simply fail to turn back on, they would often rewind the cassette for the incoming messages to the beginning, because it no longer knew where the messages were, or how many there were.

Another way they could go wrong was to start playing the last incoming call as the outgoing message.

Most people, rather than trying to remember to turn it on each time they went out and turn it off when they got back, would just leave it on, particularly when they discovered that you could screen incoming calls with it.

Rather a lot of people got themselves in trouble because they either didn't get to the phone before the answering machine, or picked up when they heard who was calling, and forgot that the answering machine was going-- thus recording some or all of the phone call.

Eventually the implemented a feature where you could call your answering machine, enter a code, and retrieve your messages. The problem was that most people couldn't figure out how to change their default code, and those that did didn't know it reset anytime the power went out. A guy I went to college with would call his ex-girlfriend's machine-- and her current boyfriend's-- and erase all the messages. He finally got busted when she skipped class and heard the call come in.

And, of course, there's the nightmare that was long-distance.

Calls within your local calling area were free. (Well, part of the monthly charge.) This usually meant the city you lived in and its suburbs. Anything outside this calling area was an extra per-minute charge.

This charge varied by time of day and day of the week, which made things extra fun when your friend on the west coast waited until 9pm for the lower charges, but you were on the east coast and it was midnight.

Depending on your phone company, and your long distance plan, the way your long distance work varied wildly. Usually in-state was cheaper-- with zones within the state that varied by price, and out of state had its own zones.

Your long distance plan came in lots and lots of distracting packages, and was billed to your phone bill.

At one point, when I was living in North Carolina, a scammer set themselves up as a long distance company and notified the phone company that a shitload of people had switched to their service. They got caught fairly quickly, but I was annoyed because they were actually charging less than AT&T.

"Would you like to change your long distance plan" was the 80's and 90's equivalent of "We have important news about your car insurance."

Had a friend who lived at the edge of a suburb in Birmingham, and for her to call her friend two miles down the street was long-distance, because the boundary of the calling area was right between them.

[sun-reads]

So ... one of the interesting things in this article is that there's already legal precedent in Johansson's favour here. Apparently, Bette Midler turned down an offer to do a Ford ad, and they got one of her backup singers, and the likeness was so close that a fair few people came to Midler and said they thought she'd done it.

Tom Waits? Same deal, but with Frito-Lay. The Midler precedent was cited.

This? When you add Altman's going on and on about creating the real-life version of an AI that Johansson played in Her on former-Twitter for weeks before it came out? He's going to get eaten alive in court.

Altman has fucked up. He said the quiet part loud. He put the spotlight on it in the worst possible way ... well, for the industries that want to skim people's voices to not pay voice actors etc, anyway. Because not only is it just going to be ... well, slop, honestly, but it's turned a spotlight on not only the issues with AI voices, but also the Midler precedent. Now just about anyone whose voice is approximated by an AI can cite the Midler precedent.

I'm never sure what to make of Johansson from one bit of star gossip to the next, but this time? SUE HIM INTO A FUCKING CRATER, SCARJO.

[sun-reads]

how the fuck does anyone have time to do anything

#by ignoring housework until i can no longer (faster in batch) and also using a meal service so i don't die of malnutrition or hunger

[sun-reads]

You think you're done with therapy but then get anxiety and start dreading doing a friend a favour because for some reason you were fully expecting some sort of backlash for trying to do the right thing. Scolded for not asking permission, for doing it wrong, for inconveniencing other people, just bracing yourself for The Consequences, with no idea what the fuck the consequences would even be, and then realise like wow. What the fuck was wrong with the people who raised me like this.