#decentralize publishing

[therainbowfishy]

Small Press Roundup!

As I was making my silly little 2022 book gift guide, I thought I’d round up some (teeny tiny, small, and medium) indie presses to go support this season and beyond. Small press books make especially great gifts since your book-loving friends and family are less likely to already have read them.

Enchanted Lion Books - Beautiful, unique, and translated picture books for kids and adults with more experimental sensibilities. I recommend the Chirri & Chirra books and Sato the Rabbit, A Sea of Tea.

Candlewick Press - If you’re a fan of Jon Klassen and the hat books (or Mac Barnett or Carson Ellis--the group behind the Picture Book Manifesto), you’ve already heard of this publisher, but they do make outstanding children’s books.

Small Beer Press - Speculative fiction fans, run over to Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant’s incredible, weird, magic book factory. I recommend In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan for the fantasy fans or anything by Elizabeth Hand.

Two Dollar Radio - Their books are cute in trim size and weird in content--the ideal combination. You can also join their tattoo club and get 10 free books. Their lobby/HQ/bookshop/cafe seems like a dream.

Hub City Press - Poetry, fiction, and nonfiction with a focus on promoting diverse stories and underrepresented voices in the South. Novels are more conventional and historical. Good, bleak poetry and thoughtful, specific nonfiction.

Night Boat Books - A bit more on the esoteric side. Their books would be great for academics and poets and anyone interested in queer studies or works in translation.

Wave Books - A poetry press with gorgeous books and lit crit. I recommend Bluets by Maggie Nelson (her other books are published by Graywolf, keep scrolling).

Dorothy - A tiny feminist publisher of fiction or about fiction founded by author Danielle Dutton (check out Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah Mark or The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington for some surreal, dreamlike times).

Feminist Press - Books with a focus on gender, sexuality, and marginalized voices. (Margot Atwell, publisher/editor, has a newletter On the Books, for publishing nerds out there who want to hear a fresh perspective on what’s up with this convoluted industry.)

Tin House - Eclectic--both literary and commercial. I recommend Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett.

Milkweed Editions - Nature lovers, these books are for you. Milkweed is also Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s publisher. I recommend Bright Dead Things and her newest collection, The Hurting Kind.

Graywolf Press - Want more Maggie Nelson? Or Carmen Maria Machado? Or experimental printing like Telephone by Percival Everett with its 3 versions? It’s all happening in the Minnesota literary world (I’m serious).

Coffee House Press - Also part of the Minnesota book group. Their books are on the experimental and readable side.

Catapult/Counterpoint/Soft Skull - These presses are sisters. You’ve definitely seen these books around--they do hit the bestseller list and are stacked in neat piles at all the best indie bookshops. Danielle Dutton’s (founder of Dorothy, mentioned above) book Margaret the First is published by Catapult.

50 Watts Books - Surreal reprints of older books in stunning colors; the curation of their bookshop is also impeccable and unique.

McSweeney’s - If you have a lowbrow/highbrow sense of humor and enjoy satire, these books are for you. They also publish the creative magazine for creative kids, Illustoria.

Nobrow Press/Flying Eye Books - UK based press for comic and bright color lovers of all ages. I recommend the Hilda series by Luke Pearson and Hicotea by Lorena Alvarez. Katie Harnett’s and Simona Ciraolo’s picture books are also wonderful.

Pioneer Works - This is the book intersection for art, tech, design, music, and science. I recommend Notes on My Dunce Cap by Jesse Ball for (arts) teachers or anyone interested in pedagogy.

#small press #independent press #books #publishing #small publishing #indie publishing #indie presses #reading #bibliophile #book recs #book gift guide #shop small #decentralize publishing #picture books #fiction #experimental fiction #speculative fiction #independent publisher #independent publishing

[she-is-ovarit]

It's concerning that this is now an LGB and women's issue now, but I really encourage people to begin purchasing USB drives or external hard drives and saving digital research on things such as gay & lesbian history, screenshots of tweets that might be important, homosexual and bisexual research, women's history, radical feminist books or PDFs, and really just anything that is at risk of being "corrected" by gender ideology or made inaccessible by academic publishers.

We need to save these things in a hard copy format as opposed to just using internet archive or taking Sci-hub for granted, because these organizations are experiencing heavy lawsuits. Additionally, it's becoming common for LGB and gender nonconformity history and research to be "rewritten" by gender ideologists. Actually, this is even true for past research and history on transvestism and transsexualism, too, in addition to things such as sex dysphoria, etc.

I bought three 64GB USBs for just $25. If you can't afford an external hardrive, buy some different colored USBs and start building your own library. We need to preserve this information and decentralize it as much as possible. It's worrisome enough that we rely on digital archives this much just generally, especially with the advent of AI and government and corporate attempts to eliminate data privacy and control.

This is a women's rights issue and an LGB issue now.

#human rights #LGB #LGBT #gay history #protect gay history #women's history #women's rights #LGBT history #gender critical #radical feminist #dataprotection #data protection #references #resources #activism #gay activism #lesbian culture #lesbian rights #lesbian history #gay rights #adult human female #feminism

[lambtrickster]

hey there, i'm currently working on a feminist website and i'm looking for the help of other women to give their feedback, their opinions, and advice/expertise. the site is not published yet but it is in the development stage, and i would really like as much help as i can get as i have big plans for it and what it sets out to accomplish.

this is a website that aims to promote activism, raise class consciousness, support women of all backgrounds, organize events, share resources, and build community. there is a serious lack of infrastructure in feminist spaces and having us all shouting into the void on social media is antithetical to true feminist action. this website aims to act as a hub for ALL the wonderful resources the women on here post on their blogs, for ease-of-access and the sake of decentralization. this website also seeks to mitigate the amount of discourse and in-fighting within the community in favor of encouraging direct action, change, and connection.

please interact with this post or send me a message if you:

are tired of social media interfaces and would be interested in meeting with other feminists, online and in-person

create feminist art, zines, music, media, graphics, etc.

would be interested in participating in or conducting a workshop for feminist consciousness raising or skill building

know back-end coding

would be interested in contributing whatever you can to a project like this

do not hesitate to ask questions about the project, and reblogs for visibility are very much appreciated.

thanks for reading!

#feminist action #radical feminist safe #radical feminism

[post-leffert]

Announcing Open Distro: A Site for DIY Anarchist Publishers!

From Open Distro

Open Distro is a full-service stop (ok, not really; we're not selling anything) for helping you with your new or on-going anarchist publishing project.

If you have been wondering what it would take to get started in book-making, or are looking for PDFs of some of the books you love, or have some of what you need and are stuck in the final stages of whatever, this is the place to come and get information from experienced people. Little Black Cart and Contagion Press started this exercise in decentralization (and will soon be joined by anarchist publishers near you!). LBC and CPress also have very different styles of production, which will benefit folks who want to learn from our differences and mistakes as well as from what has worked for us.

There are various ways that people can enter into this process (from being gifted a printing machine to having a copier hookup to wanting to handbind your own works, and so on), so the site will provide information on multiple options for each of the main tasks: printing, binding, and cutting. It also hosts PDFs of books that have been prepped for printing already. This site could be considered a combination of The Anarchist Library and Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, only made by and for anarchist publishers.

We hope and expect that other long-term DIY bookmaking folks will participate as well, either with their own PDFs, or with their experiences on various machines and workflows, or all of the above.

And the forums will be learning experiences for all of us, per usual.

Check it out! https://opendistro.net/

#distroing #distro #zines #zine #anarchy #anarchism

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Collective Intelligence Institute

History is written by the winners, which is why Luddite is a slur meaning “technophobe” and not a badge of honor meaning, “Person who goes beyond asking what technology does, to asking who it does it for and who it does it to.”

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/07/full-stack-luddites/#subsidiarity

Luddites weren’t anti-machine activists, they were pro-worker advocates, who believed that the spoils of automation shouldn’t automatically be allocated to the bosses who skimmed the profits from their labor and spent them on machines that put them out of a job. There is no empirical right answer about who should benefit from automation, only social contestation, which includes all the things that desperate people whose access to food, shelter and comfort are threatened might do, such as smashing looms and torching factories.

The question of who should benefit from automation is always urgent, and it’s also always up for grabs. Automation can deepen and reinforce unfair arrangements, or it can upend them. No one came off a mountain with two stone tablets reading “Thy machines shall condemn labor to the scrapheap of the history while capital amasses more wealth and power.” We get to choose.

Capital’s greatest weapon in this battle is inevitabilism, sometimes called “capitalist realism,” summed up with Frederic Jameson’s famous quote “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (often misattributed to Žižek). A simpler formulation can be found in the doctrine of Margaret Thatcher: “There Is No Alternative,” or even Dante’s “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

Hope — alternatives — lies in reviving our structural imagination, thinking through other ways of managing our collective future. Last May, Wired published a brilliant article that did just that, by Divya Siddarth, Danielle Allen and E. Glen Weyl:

https://www.wired.com/story/web3-blockchain-decentralization-governance/

That article, “The Web3 Decentralization Debate Is Focused on the Wrong Question,” set forth a taxonomy of decentralization, exploring ways that power could be distributed, checked, and shared. It went beyond blockchains and hyperspeculative, Ponzi-prone “mechanism design,” prompting me to subtitle my analysis “Not all who decentralize are bros”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/12/crypto-means-cryptography/#p2p-rides-again

That article was just one installment in a long, ongoing project by the authors. Now, Siddarth has teamed up with Saffron Huang to launch the Collective Intelligence project, “an incubator for new governance models for transformative technology.”

https://cip.org/whitepaper

The Collective Intelligence Project’s research focus is “collective intelligence capabilities: decision-making technologies, processes, and institutions that expand a group’s capacity to construct and cooperate towards shared goals.” That is, asking more than how automation works, but who it should work for.

Collective Intelligence institutions include “markets…nation-state democracy…global governance institutions and transnational corporations, standards-setting organizations and judicial courts, the decision structures of universities, startups, and nonprofits.” All of these institutions let two or more people collaborate, which is to say, it lets us do superhuman things — things that transcend the limitations of the lone individual.

Our institutions are failing us. Confidence in democracy is in decline, and democratic states have failed to coordinate to solve urgent crises, like the climate emergency. Markets are also failing us, “flatten[ing] complex values in favor of over-optimizing for cost, profit, or share price.”

Neither traditional voting systems nor speculative markets are up to the task of steering our emerging, transformative technologies — neither machine learning, nor bioengineering, nor labor automation. Hence the mission of CIP: “Humans created our current CI systems to help achieve collective goals. We can remake them.”

The plan to do this is in two phases:

Value elicitation: “ways to develop scalable processes for surfacing and combining group beliefs, goals, values, and preferences.” Think of tools like Pol.is, which Taiwan uses to identify ideas that have the broadest consensus, not just the most active engagement.

Remake technology institutions: “technology development beyond the existing options of non-profit, VC-funded startup, or academic project.” Practically, that’s developing tools and models for “decentralized governance and metagovernance, internet standards-setting,” and consortia.

The founders pose this as a solution to “The Transformative Technology Trilemma” — that is, the supposed need to trade off between participation, progress and safety.

This trilemma usually yields one of three unsatisfactory outcomes:

Capitalist Acceleration: “Sacrificing safety for progress while maintaining basic participation.” Think of private-sector geoengineering, CRISPR experimentation, or deployment of machine learning tools. AKA “bro shit.”

Authoritarian Technocracy: “Sacrificing participation for progress while maintaining basic safety.” Think of the vulnerable world hypothesis weirdos who advocate for universal, total surveillance to prevent “runaway AI,” or, of course, the Chinese technocratic system.

Shared Stagnation: “Sacrificing progress for participation while maintaining basic safety.” A drive for local control above transnational coordination, unwarranted skepticism of useful technologies (AKA “What the Luddites are unfairly accused of”).

The Institute’s goal is to chart a fourth path, which seeks out the best parts of all three outcomes, while leaving behind their flaws. This includes deliberative democracy tools like sortition and assemblies, backed by transparent machine learning tools that help surface broadly held views from within a community, not just the views held by the loudest participants.

This dovetails into creating new tech development institutions to replace the default, venture-backed startup for “societally-consequential, infrastructural projects,” including public benefit companies, focused research organizations, perpetual purpose trusts, co-ops, etc.

It’s a view I find compelling, personally, enough so that I have joined the organization as a volunteer advisor.

This vision resembles the watershed groups in Ruthanna Emrys’s spectacular “Half-Built Garden,” which was one of the most inspiring novels I read last year (a far better source of stfnal inspo than the technocratic fantasies of the “Golden Age”):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/26/aislands/#dead-ringers

And it revives the long-dormant, utterly necessary spirit of the Luddites, which you can learn a lot more about in Brian Merchant’s forthcoming, magesterial “Blood In the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech”:

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/

This week (Feb 8–17), I’ll be in Australia, touring my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’ll be in Brisbane tomorrow (Feb 8), and then we’re doing a remote event for NZ on Feb 9. Next are Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. I hope to see you!

[Image ID: An old Ace Double paperback. The cover illustration has been replaced with an 18th century illustration depicting a giant Ned Ludd leading an army of Luddites who have just torched a factory. The cover text reads: 'The Luddites. Smashing looms was their tactic, not their goal.']

#pluralistic #ai #artificial intelligence #b-corps #collective intelligence #full-stack luddism #full-stack luddites #governance #luddism #ml #sortition #subsidiarity

[cyberpunkonline]

What is a Cypherpunk?

The term "cypherpunk" refers to a movement and a community of activists advocating for the widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Emerging in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the cypherpunk movement is a confluence of libertarian political philosophy, hacker ethos, and cryptographic science.

The Core Traits of Cypherpunks

1. Advocacy for Privacy and Anonymity: Cypherpunks champion the right to privacy, emphasizing that individuals should have control over their personal information and digital footprints. This advocacy is often in direct opposition to government surveillance and corporate data collection practices.

2. Use of Cryptography: The cornerstone of the cypherpunk movement is the use of strong cryptography to secure communications and transactions. Cypherpunks believe that through cryptographic techniques, individuals can protect their privacy in the digital world.

3. Open Source and Decentralization: A significant trait among cypherpunks is the belief in open-source software and decentralized systems. This ethos promotes transparency, security, and resistance to censorship and control by central authorities.

Who are the Cypherpunks?

The cypherpunk community consists of programmers, activists, academics, and technologists. Notable figures include Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks; Jacob Appelbaum, a former spokesperson for the Tor Project; and Hal Finney, a pioneer in digital cash systems. The manifesto "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" by Eric Hughes (1993) [https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html] eloquently encapsulates the philosophy and ideals of this movement.

The Cypherpunk Movement

Cypherpunks are not a formal organization but rather a loosely associated group sharing common interests in cryptography and privacy. The movement's origins can be traced to the “Cypherpunks” mailing list, started in 1992 by Eric Hughes, Timothy C. May, and John Gilmore. This list served as a platform for discussing privacy, cryptography, and related political issues.

Relation to Cyberpunk Principles

While cypherpunks share some overlap with the cyberpunk genre of science fiction, they are distinct in their real-world activism. Cyberpunk literature, like William Gibson's "Neuromancer" (1984) [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6088006-neuromancer], often presents a dystopian future where technology is pervasive and oppressive. In contrast, cypherpunks aim to use technology, specifically cryptography, as a tool for empowerment and resistance against such dystopian futures.

Notable Contributions and Technologies

The cypherpunk movement has been instrumental in the development of technologies that emphasize privacy and security:

Tor (The Onion Router): A free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication [https://www.torproject.org/].

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP): A data encryption and decryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication [https://www.openpgp.org/].

Bitcoin: The creation of Bitcoin by an individual or group under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto was heavily influenced by the ideas of the cypherpunk movement. It embodies principles of decentralization and financial privacy [https://bitcoin.org/en/].

Wikileaks: Founded by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks is a multinational media organization that publishes news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources [https://wikileaks.org/].

Conclusion

The cypherpunk movement is a critical lens through which to view the ongoing dialogue about privacy, security, and freedom in the digital age. While not an organized group, the collective impact of cypherpunks on modern cryptography, internet privacy, and digital rights is profound. As digital technology continues to permeate every facet of our lives, the principles and contributions of the cypherpunk community remain more relevant than ever. - REV1.

#cyberpunk #cypherpunk #bitcoin #tumblr #tech #technology #history

[389]

Another feature that could spark more discussions: Instagram’s network isn’t starting from scratch. It will build on the company’s own network yes. But over time, Threads will also let you follow discussions on Mastodon and potentially other services that adopt ActivityPub. Tumblr and WordPress, which share a parent company, have both said they will support publishing on the protocol. In a year or two, then, you might read WordPress blog posts in Threads — or read Threads posts in your favorite Mastodon client. It’s an almost unthinkable reversal from Meta’s extremely lucrative walled-garden strategy, which it has employed for its entire history as a company. But Mosseri told me that decentralization is the future of social networks — even if it means that someday a disgruntled Threads user will be able to take the following they build in the app to another network, never to return. “There definitely are trade offs,” Mosseri said. “You're giving up some control. But there are benefits. I do think over time, it's going to be a more compelling value proposition that other apps are going to offer. And I think that should attract more creative talent over the long run.”

— Casey Newton, in a Platformer piece discussing Instagram’s new Twitter clone, quoting their chief Adam Mosseri

#threads #twitter #tumblr #wordpress #mastodon #meta #social media #instagram #network #social network #quote #quotes #q #casey newton #platform #adam mosseri #u

[genericpuff]

How am I supposed to find indie webcomics? I’m up-to-date on a handful of them and love them all but I’m just not sure how to find new ones. Most searches for webcomics lead you to the mainstream sites.

I mean mainstream sites are fine in and of themselves if you're following the series you like there (especially if the creators of those comics are trying to opt into things like Ad Rev), but if you're wanting to find stuff outside of Webtoons and Tapas, here are some other methods to do so:

Random Webcomic - About as unbiased as you can get, literally sends you to the website for a comic it pulls at random. All comics in the roulette are user-submitted so for the most part, they're all still active or at least have live sites. Sometimes you'll find the odd broken link tho ;0

Top Webcomics - A collective of webcomics competing for top spots. Offers plenty of ad space where people advertise their comics whether or not they make it to the top of the voting pool. And has genre listings you can browse if competitive listings aren't your thing.

The Webcomic List - A collection of webcomics submitted by users that are then crawled by the site's bots to check for new updates. It has a list for most recently updated, but also sorts by genre. Definitely one of the most "old school" listings to exist.

SpiderForest - A jury-picked collection of webcomics. Once every year or two they open submissions where people can pitch their new or ongoing comics - if they're picked, they get a special listing and features on the site, and can either have their existing website affiliated with SF branding or have a new site created for them by the staff. It's all non-profit and it mostly serves as a community of creators and readers, they are not a publisher, but they offer a wide variety of titles.

Hiveworks - Similar concept to SpiderForest except they're an actual publisher so they offer even more benefits to their selected creators including print deals and merchandising, but as such they're way harder to get into. Their submissions have been closed for a VERY long time but they offer a wide array of comics that typically appeal to general-audiences (i.e. there are no NSFW comics AFAIK).

GlobalComix - A platform that, while not new anymore, has been making strides in competing with platforms like Webtoons and Tapas. Has a lot of Western-style comics but their library variety has been growing and I'm pretty sure they're planning on releasing an app soon (if they haven't already).

ComicFury - The final frontier of old school early 2000's webcomic platforms. Run by one guy, this site allows for full HTML/CSS customization, domain hosting, and all those fun little things from an era long gone by. The front page sorting is set to "Recently updated" by default so there's no algorithm bullshit, no editors playing favorites, just classic 2000's era reading.

As a final note, the best part about browsing for comics that have their own sites is that they usually include listings of other comics that are similar to their own. Sites like Tamberlane will often have roulettes of other recommended comics that you can sift through.

There are plenty other comic aggregation sites out there too, of course, but these ones should help you get started if you're looking for other platforms and archives that aren't subject to corporate scrubbing or picky algorithms. It helps decentralize the Internet just a little bit more and rejuvenate what made webcomics so amazing in the first place - independent ownership, accessibility, and unapologetic existence.

Enjoy! <3

#comic reading #comic collection #webcomic advice #ama #ask me anything #anon ask me anything #anon ama

[brilokuloj]

Join me and take action in the Battle for Libraries

As you may know, I am a passionate lover of the Internet Archive. Through 2020, I ran a section on my ephemera blog where I talked about hits from the Wayback Machine; I am a contributor myself, to the extent that my free time allows; even a lot of the music I play on streams is from there.

Yesterday, the worst happened: the future of 4 million digital books on the Internet Archive is now at stake, as well as libraries everywhere in the USA. I learned that the methods being targeted in this lawsuit (CDL, Controlled Digital Lending) are not just unique to the Internet Archive, but apply to the way even libraries like the fucking Boston Public Library, one of the largest libraries in the United States. This is a threat to public libraries and accessibility. The alternative we are expected to follow is book bans.

How can I help?

Donate if you have the money, obviously. But I know that's hard.

Sign the petition and sign up for email updates at Battle for Libraries. Not just a change.org petition but an established group that is working on organizing rallies.

They have some freebie graphics you can put on your posts (above). I don't see the harm in it.

Subscribe to the Empowering Libraries newsletter.

Support your local library. Even just going there when you can counts, they need the numbers! Check out books, look at their equipment if they have a makerspace.

Now's a good time to make personal backups of things that you could not live without. There's no real hope of an Internet Archive Archive (more on why it's more difficult than you think), but decentralized backups are always a good thing.

Don't just take it for me. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!

How to argue with "But piracy..."

First off, don't argue with trolls. But if you have an acquaintance who really doesn't get it, here's some resources.

Bandcamp's stance on piracy: "It’s not like they’d slap their forehead and open their wallet. Instead, they’d just move on to some other site where those restrictions aren’t in place."

"But if they steal it – how can I make money?"

Small Publisher Embraces Controlled Digital Lending to Connect with New Readers: "I think in the end, it drives sales because you are finding readers you wouldn’t normally have. Those readers aren’t getting a copy that they keep forever — it’s a copy that’s going to lead them to want to own it."

In the hopefully-near future I will be publishing a list of online library catalogues; coincidentally, I was reading a decade-old book about digital libraries, so I've got a ton of links for you guys.

#internet archive #wayback machine #old web #support local libraries #battle for libraries

[fatehbaz]

[A] team of technicians [is] working under sub-contracts for the National Mapping Agency [of Indonesia] to draw squares and rectangles around vast swaths of building and property across the archipelago. [...] [They] draw a perimeter [...] on the island of Kalimantan, a region that has witnessed the world's fastest forest clearing rates since 2012, as the oil palm [plantation] sector has expanded across rural Indonesia. [...] Even if state agency scientists demand that every building is drawn, his supervisors are afraid that the technicians will interpret too much. [...] [Bureaucrats] shrugged [...], reasoning that maps are crucial for Indonesia’s “pembangunan” (development), an ever-shifting ideology that has haunted the nation since [...] the 1950s. [...]

---

The contract employing the technicians stemmed from an incident in December 2010, when former Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono compared two conflicting maps of Papua Island. The two forest maps, one published by the Ministry of Forestry and the other by the Ministry of Environment, were presented in a cabinet meeting regarding [...] nationwide [...] plantation permits in primary forests. Each map showed primary forests of different sizes and boundaries. [...] A scandal broke out, with environmentalists claiming that these discrepancies are an example of how corrupt officials manipulate maps and issue plantation permits on protected forest land. Earlier in 1998, Indonesia’s timber and oil palm industry became increasingly decentralized and privatized. [...] Under a 2016 Presidential Decree, Indonesia’s National Mapping Agency [...] accelerate[d] the remapping of Indonesia’s 18,309 islands. [...] The base map [...] [is] conventionally understood as a “ground truth” to physical reality [...].

Yet, senior bureaucrats of the National Mapping Agency have always been aware that maps could never represent the real world. The agency’s Deputy Director recently stated to the Indonesian press that data on palm oil plantation ownership is “secret.”

Herein lies a tension between desires to conceal deforestation and the official appearance of attempts to reveal what’s happening on the ground. The accuracy of forest maps [...] [and a] map’s legibility can also be understood as part of a measured and managed public revelation and the concurrent concealment of information, narratives, and images of the trees that still stand. [...]

---

[S]ocial orders are based on "public secrets": forms of knowledge that are generally known insofar as they must not be overtly acknowledged. Simply put, one has to know what not to know.

Public life, its discourse, and practice, then, depend upon the management of transgression.

In Indonesia, it was understood that forest maps contained inaccuracies. From the fixed borders that enabled industrial plantation expansion to the inconsistent mapping standards, state maps were dissimilar all the way down. [...]

The pursuit of different versions of correspondence between territory and map segregates who gets to see and who gets to know what makes a forest. [...]

---

Bureaucrats have advanced data science projects to automate the delineation of forest borders, to know the forest in precise ways that crowd out what for others is actually there. [...] [Previously, technicians] had spent hours determining what pixel makes the cut. Perhaps drawing in this green pixel matches the vegetation nearby; perhaps adding a brown pixel grants more property for the house owner. The blur in the images makes for a deliberation that also implicates his wrists and fingers that grow sore from his tactful eyes. [...] Indeed, “there are no straight lines” on the edges of Kalimantan’s forest; someone feels these borders into vision. [...]

Data science initiatives, on the other hand, draw borders without explanation to remove this interpretive labor. [This process maps land by taking satellite photos, and then letting the automated model predict the extent of forest, removing the human interpretation and confirmation.] [...] Points are converted into labeled pixels and fed into models that in turn label points anew: points feed points. Unlike the field survey, with data science, ground truth is found within the image, not in the forest.

---

Indonesia’s forests are seen and known by different techniques. [...] Yet in keeping with the public secret of how forests are seen and governed by the state, each of these techniques also cultivates a willful not knowing.

Against the backdrop of the decades-long expropriation of indigenous land by patronage networks between timber and palm oil firms and central and district officials, broader shifts to institute efficiency and automation in mapping enable bureaucrats to relinquish their knowledge of such inconvenient truths. These technical initiatives recast the mapping of Indonesia as a preemptive activity [...]. The task of knowing what not to know emerges not only from the discursive theater of public human affairs, but out of the contest between the design and deployment of various mapping systems [...].

Is it possible to capture the world without seeing it? Or, who’s watching when a tree falls? Perhaps it doesn’t matter who, but how that watching is designed into a system that preempts a forest [...].

---

Text by: Cindy Lin. "How to Make a Forest". e-flux Architecture (At the Border series). April 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[wachinyeya]

#good news #swiss #clean energy #green energy #decentralization #switzerland

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Kristine Harley

Published: Sep 5, 2022

There’s a saying: “Don’t think of a pink elephant.” In other words, what one resists can dominate and even control one’s mind, making the action a person wishes not to do the action that person ultimately does. Religious believers often use this accusation against atheists. We allegedly “resist” or “deny” a belief in God, therefore “proving” His existence or at least His importance to us, because believers see atheists as spitting in the wind like rebellious adolescents.

Of course, we know atheism is akin to democracy in that it rejects any supreme being or cosmic authority. Atheists observe a decentralized universe in which physical, chemical, and biological processes interact to evolve, not impose, reality. Democracy did not elect a new king, and likewise the god-concept is not a “pink elephant” to atheists. But unfortunately today, something else threatens to be.

“Racism” is the new “pink elephant,” with woke apologists invoking “whiteness” and “white supremacy” in an absurd downward spiral of resentment and retribution that will benefit no one (certainly not people of color). It has the ironic effect of feeding a white narcissism that apologizes for “white privilege” in the abstract, while punching down on working-class whites and regarding people of color as children, without agency, needing intervention and rescue.

Many atheists have adopted this dualistic, simplistic self-righteousness that mimics the good/evil, virgin/whore scriptures of religion! This has misled otherwise intelligent people into paradoxically adopting quasi-religious concepts: utopianism (or what I call the Racial Rapture), a past Golden Age (especially before the year 1619), Original Sin, retribution to be visited upon the sons and daughters of the guilty, and a perpetual payment of indulgences and/or personal flagellation without any forgiveness, human or divine. James Lindsey has already made these points.

However, I see a more subtle problem here: wokeness, especially as it combats “racism,” is not only a secular religion, it is a secular religion without a god. There is only the Devil: white oppressors. Cis-gendered white men, suburban white Karens, white toddlers in school being told they oppress students of color, etc. There is only perpetual complaint, perpetual grievance, and a pound-of-flesh philosophy that no longer believes in equality, let alone strives for it. Rather, to quote Ibram X. Kendi in How to Be an Anti-Racist, “Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.”

In other words, many atheists, seeking to fill a void that apparently did not disappear with their former belief in god(s) and religion, unfortunately embraced a radical 12-Step program of “anti-racism” without seeing the connections to the same religious dualism that characterizes the Twelve Steps for alcoholics.

(It’s interesting that Kendi describes the prioritizing of elderly people for the Covid-19 vaccine as a justification for racial discrimination, without also mentioning 1) being elderly is a biological realty, not a social construct or identity, 2) such a program would have been applied to all ethnicities, and 3) it was actually suggested that elderly people not get the vaccine, since they were largely “white” and not productive. Of course now we have the CDC’s recommendation that vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens be treated equally, showing why different treatment of demographics in the name of “social justice” becomes maladaptive over time.)

The Pound-of-Flesh Approach

This negative obsession with a manufactured Satan also characterized the inflammatory sermons of the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who denounced evil everywhere and focused on sin and biblical “inerrancy.” (Unfortunately, I had to listen to Falwell quite a bit while growing up.)

In contrast to other religious leaders, whose supernatural beliefs I also rejected but who at least focused on charity, forgiveness, repentance and growth, Falwell spread fear, accusation and paranoia even amongst his own flock and this same internal accusation, rather than a group effort toward positive change, has divided the atheist movement.

Internal accusation has spread throughout society. There is the Amanda Gorman affair, in which activists expressed hot outrage that a white Dutch woman would translate Gorman’s poems into, well, Dutch. A translator in Spain also had to step down as Gorman’s translator for having the wrong identity. (Apparently, only black people can translate black people’s poetry into European languages.)

The widely-publicized Minneapolis Teachers’ Union contract stipulates that if an “underrepresented” teacher of color is next in line to be laid off, that teacher should be retained and instead the next white teacher higher on the seniority list would be laid off instead.

Of course, this is completely illegal, a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but I have a question:

What benchmarks, if any, have been set for justice to be “restored” for these teachers from underrepresented groups, so that layoff decisions can revert to a seniority-only system that treats everyone equally under the U.S. Constitution? (In other words, how will the union know when it has succeeded?)

I doubt there are any metrics or even goals, because as with the Gorman debacle this just is more knee-jerk, irrational thinking justified by invoking “past harms” and real disparities. Yet even critics of the teachers’ contract miss a key point: the purpose is not really to achieve equality of outcome, undesirable as that is. The purpose of this stipulation, along with other gestures toward “equity,” is to satisfy an emotional, momentary need to “stick it to the man” (or in this case, the senior white colleague.) Setting workers against each other satisfies Kendi’s exhortation that we refrain from “being neutral” and turn away from equality as an ideal, instead resorting to petty squabbles over scraps in the name of making some supposedly “privileged” workers “uncomfortable.”

Here is my prediction for the future of this dubious equity initiative: the Minneapolis teachers’ union contract will unintentionally create yet another racial disparity, with newly-laid off white teachers departing for private school positions or leaving the profession entirely, and young teachers of color laboring valiantly in an increasingly anachronistic public education system while parents pull out their children and find alternatives, like magnet schools or learning pods. In ten years, as with automobile line workers and other blue collars laborers in the 1980s, and more recently service industry workers during the Covid-19 pandemic, teaching will remain a high-stress, low-paid, and increasingly outsourced job largely dominated by people of color (as auto workers were and service jobs now are), while the issues of teacher burnout, low pay, social passing, a national teacher shortage, out-of-touch administrators and disruptive, large classrooms remain unaddressed.

“Equity,” like religion, offers static solutions to dynamic problems. This is, essentially, a new form of mysticism, even creationism. Woke atheists should reconsider their embrace of a utopian future that requires a belief in a reconstituted Fall of Man (and in a new-fangled human exceptionalism, or soul-concept, in the form of gender identity extremism which estranges people from the natural, biological, sexual world of limits and consequences, which we fought to teach in science class).

CRT Proponentsists

Meanwhile, in the material world, a siege-mentality has taken over that treats resources like pie: one person must sacrifice for another person to get a fair share. Such a zero-sum game is hardly necessary (and we were assured it was a lie) but the real agenda here is a Marxist one. Equality is outdated, flawed; there must be a transfer of power from the “white supremacists” to the “oppressed” members, this time based on race, not class and owners/laborers.

This appeals to white progressives because it reinforces their controlling tendencies to solve everything and rescue everyone (paradoxically giving them a sense of power over other people), and it appeals to young, radicalized teachers who believe their success only comes from wrestling “privilege” out of the hands of someone else, even if that privilege is minute or imaginary. It is the struggle that is the goal, because all proponents are externalizing their behaviors.

If Black Lives Matter, anti-racism, and the call for “equity” have any kernels of truth they’re wrapped in thick layers of nonsense. Whatever facts they possess are derailed in an incoherent cry to 1) dismantle “systems of oppression” and 2) sacrifice certain individuals on a sinking ship. The second statement negates the first, and the first is a red herring. This adds up to a circular argument in which a “system that was never set up for black people” depends on white people to “address” the problem which breeds only patronization and dependency, a shallow and immature philosophy in the name of resistance.

(This is akin to the breathtakingly inane fallacy that anyone can confront their “inherent biases” in an unbiased way, or that teachers, being adults, should be teaching “equity” (Critical Race Theory) to children, as if children were more likely to be racist than adults.)

The New Soviet Bread Line

Suppose instead the Minneapolis Teachers’ Union wrote the contract so that instead of laying off the white teacher with the next least seniority, the teacher with the highest seniority – vested, guaranteed a pension, and likely close to retirement or able to find another job – would be asked, for the good of the membership, to step down, thus shifting all other teachers up in seniority. This would have achieved a new seniority balance voluntarily, without mentioning race, and without leaving the union vulnerable to lawsuits while still retaining younger teachers of color. But instead, a myopic rush to make the contract All About Race – even claiming it did not go far enough – resulted in at least one court challenge while still protecting those teachers at the top (who might have voted for a race-based contract knowing full well it would never affect them). Equity, indeed!

Mentally this is like being Soviets in a bread line, waiting to wrest a crumb from the Cassocks. A crumb taken from someone else is more desirable than a goal striven for by one’s own efforts, since that would only affirm capitalism and the meritocracy. And it is this—the tit-for-tat hacking away at “whiteness” rather than addressing the real issues (such as teacher burnout, which also disproportionately affects teachers of color), which is the real goal.

Other examples abound. A church in Illinois announced it was giving up the music of “white composers” for Lent. Did the marquee say, “We are celebrating the music of black and brown composers”? No—the church in Illinois announced it was “fasting from whiteness,” therefore ensuring everyone would be talking and thinking about whiteness. Real good hypocritical job there, First United Church of Oak Park.

(I certainly hope the pastor did not assume Aram Khachaturian or Clara Schumann were “white men,” and I wonder if Tchaikovsky, who was gay, merited an exception.)

By contrast, my childhood church’s choir, led by a black director, performed his grandmother’s Spiritual hymns, which were recorded and sold on cassette tape (this was the 1970s) to pay for the new church organ. Our director could play almost any instrument but he relished that organ, and would perform classics by memory, including the famous Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor.” The emphasis was on us learning the story of his grandmother’s journey to freedom, not divisive concepts about our “whiteness.”

The New Prohibition

So how did atheists go from presenting a united front on the fight against Intelligent Design to a splintered community arguing about racism, misogyny, identities and “white tears”? Why would those who promote science fall into racial essentialism and side with #ShutDownSTEM?

I don’t have a simple answer. But I would like my fellow “woke” atheists to consider one more fact:

In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries a lawyer from Illinois ran for President three times as a Democrat, representing the left-wing Populist Party. His second Presidential campaign specifically opposed American imperialism after the Spanish-American War. A gifted orator, he railed against the gold standard and eastern banking interests and won two elections to the House of Representatives. He became Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson but resigned to protest U.S. threats against Germany after the sinking of the Lusitania. He supported U.S. joining the League of Nations, the minimum wage and the eight-hour workday, the right of unions to strike, and women’s suffrage. He called for agricultural subsidies, a living wage, full public financing of political campaigns and government inspection of food, sanitation, and better housing conditions.

Sounds like a great guy, doesn’t he? And I’m sure he was if you knew him.

His name was William Jennings Bryan, and he was an ardent Prohibitionist. Of course, atheists mainly know him as the prosecutor in the case of The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, arguing against the teaching of evolution opposite Clarence Darrow, who defended John T. Scopes. Bryan took this stance against evolution because he feared it would lead to a tyranny of the strong against the weak and the destruction of his gentle, justice-oriented Christianity.

Bryan, an otherwise reasonable guy, found his devil and stood on the wrong side of history. Atheists should not.

#Kristine Harley #atheism #pink elephant #grievance culture #woke #wokeness #wokeism #cult of woke #woke atheists #wokeness as religion #religion is a mental illness

[bedtimestoriesforbrokengirls]

The Daily Dad — Feb 23, 2024

Things you might want to know:

Alan Cumming plays a character on Traitors, but season 2’s surprises snapped him back to reality ❝ "Do you mean you want it to be sort of like a James Bond villain?"

Here are the full dimensions of the 2024 iPad Air and iPad Pro 💭 A 12.9” iPad Air will be a very compelling device. I’d miss FaceID, and the iPad Pro’s Mini LED screen is frequently gorgeous, but other than that… a big-ass M3 Air with TouchID would be the sweet spot for a lot of people.

Vice Media to halt publishing to namesake site, cut 'several hundred' jobs in restructuring | CBC News ❝ The head of Vice Media Group has informed employees that the company will stop publishing content on Vice.com and will be cutting several hundred positions.

'Community' Movie Script Is 'Almost Done,' Says Dan Harmon (EXCLUSIVE) ❝ Show creator and the film's writer Dan Harmon confirmed to Variety that work on the "Community" film is "almost done."

Bluesky starts letting users host their own servers ❝ The decentralized social network is rolling out the initial phase of self-hosting, letting users host their own data and run their own servers on the AT Protocol.

Scheana Shay Granted Sole Ownership of New Home With Husband Brock Davies ❝ Scheana Shay's husband Brock Davies has agreed to grant Scheana with sole ownership of their new $2.5 million home.

90 Day Fiance's Mary Clarifies Colon Cancer Claim: 'I Made a Mistake' 💭 Even accounting for the language barrier, this is a bizarre “mistake”. But given Mary’s history of panic attacks, I can actually see her hearing “your colon” and immediately jumping to a cancerous conclusion. And her idiot husband would buy whatever she said without asking for details. So I can believe the whole thing was the work of two nervous nitwits, not a couple grifters.

A little US company makes history by landing on the Moon ❝ “We’re not dead yet."

'Drive-Away Dolls' Review: Ethan Coen's Queer Crime Joyride ❝ It's the first solo Coen film suffused with personality, thanks mostly to Margaret Qualley's free-spirited queer horndog.

Katy Perry's 'American Idol' Exit: Son of 84-Year-Old Vet Says Pop Star Should Be 'Run Out' of Showbiz as Vicious Court Battle Rages on 💭 It’s hard for me to give a shit when the 84-year old vet in question is a rich fucker whose kid is pissed that his drug-addled daddy sold a piece of his inheritance.

Avengers: The Kang Dynasty Reportedly Getting a New Title - IGN 💭 I have never understood why anyone liked Kang. The prize of my teenaged comic collection was Avengers #11 —I paid $10 for a tattered copy in 1981– which featured Kang as the villain, and I thought he was boring and pointless even at the height of my enthusiasm for such things. I get why Feige didn’t want to do Doom, Galactus, or Dark Phoenix at this point, especially when this whole phase has been devoted to establishing the norms of the multiverse. But still… Kang is a bad visual with zero gravitas.

Apple’s iMessage Is Getting Post-Quantum Encryption ❝ Useful quantum computers aren’t a reality—yet. But in one of the biggest deployments of post-quantum encryption so far, Apple is bringing the technology to iMessage.

Can I Tell You a Secret? review – this superb documentary perfectly evokes the horror of cyberstalking ❝ Detailed, personal, terrifying … this excellent two-parter follows a Guardian investigation into the recipient of the longest ever sentence for online stalking – by focusing on the victims

Frozen embryos are “children,” according to Alabama’s Supreme Court 💭 What I’ve learned from this: we’re all six to nine months older than we thought. And we’re going to have twenty-six year olds with baby teeth starting grade school. And Alabama is ruled by morons. (That last one isn’t a new observation.)

Signal will soon let you share a username instead of your phone number ❝ Signal is rolling out a new feature that will let you create and share a username to connect with other users in the app instead of revealing your phone number.

Another wall crumbles in the console exclusivity war: Sony is bringing official PSVR2 support to PC 💭 This is very interesting. Meta needs competition, and Sony needs a reason to manufacture more headsets.

Newly spotted black hole has mass of 17 billion Suns, adding another daily ❝ An accretion disk 7 light-years across powers an exceptionally bright galaxy.

The top streamed shows are almost all old. Why? 💭 For starters: twenty episode seasons. Continuity Lite. Old school filler scenes/episodes and the rhythms of dip-to-black breaks are actually as good for multitasking viewers as they were for pause-free households. And every single broadcast episode was an on-boarding opportunity, not a piece in a narrative puzzle.

Babs Reunites Crossed Creators Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows - IGN ❝ Crossed creators Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows are reuniting for Babs, a new series that puts an irreverent spin on sword and sorcery comics like Conan and Red Sonja.

Micheal Keaton Refused to Let 'Beetlejuice 2' Use Green Screens ❝ Michael Keaton said the only way to make 'Beetlejuice 2' was for it to be handmade and not rely on too much technology.

#news

[fairytalesandfandoms]

It feels like reading is a bit... higher-stakes than it used to be?

You have to read because all the articles say it's good for your mental health, your empathy, and your attention span. You have to read to keep up with what people are talking about, otherwise you'll be left out of the conversation (but you shouldn't just jump on any viral bestseller bandwagon). You have to read because a friend (or just some person online) recommended this book really enthusiastically, and you don't want to ignore them, do you? You have to read (preferably indie) to support authors, publishers, booksellers, and libraries. You have to read (specific authors/books/subgenres) to prioritise marginalised groups and decentre privileged ones. You have to read because suddenly you can't keep up with all the bookstagram/booktok/Goodreads people who get through 100+ books a year. You have to read to get through your TBR, because you must get through your TBR. You have to read because everyone should read these classics at least once in their life. And of course, you have to read so you can still say you read.

I'm not saying these are necessarily bad goals (some of them are very good and important). And I hope I don't come off as sounding like a whiny privileged person having a tantrum at being asked to think about things other than themselves. But having all these things in the back of my mind generates pressure and makes reading feel more like a demand than a fun activity.

#stuff in my life #huh. maybe it's to do with extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation etc #anyway i did not realise how much this sounds like the speech from barbie until i typed it out

[bonitalissa]

A How-To Guide for Mastodon!

What is Mastodon? - It is a social network that is decentralized and part of the Fedivese.

Okay, but what's the Fediverse? - The fediverse is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other.

Essentially, what "decentralized" means, is that each server in Mastodon (called "instances") is interconnected to be able to talk to each other on any instance but also each instance is a sort of micro-community of similar interests and/or values that can be managed as a smaller community within the Fediverse.

So, how do I use this? It sounds complicated! - It honestly does sound complicated and it's easy to get overwhelmed at first, but what new technology doesn't when you first look at it?

Let's take a look at signing up first! (long post I'm sorry, but I try to break things down as understandable as possible with pictures!)

*Note - this information is up-to-date for 4.0 version on Tuesday, November 15, 2022

So, first thing you might see when searching up how to join Mastodon is that there's tons of instances (or, servers) that you can create an account with. I'd recommend first looking at the official server page found here to see what kind of options you have! The biggest thing to keep in mind is that this list is absolutely NOT exhaustive and there are many, many more options than are listed. Ones that are even more exclusive to interests or cultures or other groups! You can search up your special interests in Google to see if there's a Mastodon server that is currently taking applications or are open to all account creations. Alternatively, you can use something like this instance helper in order to find an instance that is more geared towards your values and interests. Once you choose your instance and go to sign up, it'll look similar to this. As you can see, there's two links under the normal boxes for username and passwords and such.

Most, if not every, instance (worth their salt, I might add) has a list of rules and TOS that must be agreed to when you sign up. Please make sure you read these carefully as these instances are very serious about moderation.

Let me show you an example of what the rules list and terms look like from my instance (mastadon.lol)

This is all located on mastodon.lol About page. While your instance won't look exactly like this it may appear similar with the dropdown and explanation of everything you might need to know.

Now that you've read all the TOS and Rules, you're ready to click the "I agree" checkbox and create your account!

Now that we've created the account which is, arguably the hardest part, let's jump to see what your home page looks like and what all the buttons do!

Down the center of the page is your "home feed", in which anyone you are following, their posts will show up there, also anything that people you follow have boosted (boosted, in this case, means "reblogged" or "retweeted"). One of the biggest differences between Mastodon and other socials is that your Favourites (which are akin to "Likes") will never show up on other people's pages and do not affect any type of algorithm. It's just for you to Fav and the writer will see the notif you Faved their Toot (which is what we call the posts and yes, we know it's silly, but calling posts on Twitter "tweets" was also silly) and that's it (well, plus the little feel-goods that someone saw and liked it enough to favourite it!)

On the top left is the Search bar. That's one of the best ways to find people and topics you're interested in! Mastodon relies on a generous use of hashtags in your toots. You can also use the search in order to find people directly by their @ and server name!

Under the search bar, it's your handle and a quick dropdown under the three dots to ceartain pages (such as follower requests or editing your profile or muted words, etc).

Finally the last spot on the top left is box where you write your toots. Going clockwise from top left, there's where you start your toot, then ou've got your emoji picker on the top right of the box (including special, server-specific added emojis), bottom right is your character count which updates in realtime so you see how much more you can write, and then there's a slew of buttons on the bottom left: (from right to left as is clockwise) Language picker, Content Warning (creates a bar above your toot that you can explain what cw's there are), privacy levels (Public, Unlisted, Followers Only, and Mentioned People Only), Poll maker, and finally the Upload for pics/gifs/vids.

Now we focus on the right side of the screen:

We'll focus on the top portion in a minute.

At the bottom are the top 3 hashtags trending and roughly how many people (only in your instance) are talking about it.

Just above the trending section is your "Preferences" button. That will take you to your Preferences & Settings page which will have all the sliders and bells and whistles to customize your Mastodon experience to your liking. That might become another post but it is too much for this guide which is just an introduction.

Now we focus on the part that really seems to confuse people (including me when I started) - the whole top right section

(idk why it's not centering I'm sorry)

So at the top, is your Home button, as previously stated, this is the feed in which you'll see everything from people you follow and whatever toots they boost.

Underneath we have your Notifications tab where you can see who follows you, who favourites your toots, who boosts them, and any replies or mentions of you.

Then we have the Explore tab, as indicated by the little picture to the left of the word, this is where you can see what is going on. There are 4 tabs at the top of the page when you click it

Posts is all trending posts and boosted posts that are gaining traction on your instance. The Hashtags tab is similar but more like a top 10 of trending hashtags from all over Mastodon. News is what is being talked about by people on this and other servers of the decentralized network right now (kinda like Google News page which links to official news sources and websites). Finally, the For You is just a list of people who you might potentially want to check out and see if you want to follow!

Next we're going to talk about the following two tabs: Local and Federated. The Local tab will show you posts from just your instance you are on, it's a slightly more isolated feed of just people who share your interests. The Federated tab is a bit more of a free-for-all because it shows posts from all over the Fediverse, all different Mastodon servers will throw up posts as fast as it can (but don't worry, somewhere in preferences is an option for "slow mode", though with how many people are on Mastodon now, slow might still be too fast for some people).

Direct Message tab is pretty straight forward. It's where your private messages between other users go.

Favourites, Bookmarks, and Lists; all important all do different things. Favourites is the place where any post that you like goes to, as said before, it doesn't do anything to the algorithm, it doesn't mean your post will get shown to others when they get favourited, it's just a nice feel-good moment that someone showed appreciation to your post, that they vibe with you in that moment. Bookmarks are very different in that no one will ever be alerted when you bookmark a toot, they are there for you to refer back to when you need to so I would recommend being more selective about what you bookmark and periodically clean up your bookmarks tab. Lists are super important in that you can create lists for different categories of topics or users that you want to see at a given moment: have a Twitch list, an Art/Artist list, a Sex Worker list, etc! Lists will allow you to scroll through those feeds individually so you won't have things that don't pertain to what you want to check out at that moment.

AND THAT'S IT!

I have a whole slew of tips to give out but this post has gone long enough. I hope that this helped you and anyone you chose to share this with understand one of the biggest growing new social media on the internet right now.

You can always find me at this Tumblr, or on Mastodon at https://mastodon.lol/@bonitalissa or on Twitter (for however long it's around) @BonitaLissaTTV

Thank you for taking the time to read this!

#long post #Mastodon #guide #how to #social media

[thejewitches]

The History of Book of Shadows

As many practitioners, occultists & witches work to decentralize and remove Wicca from their practices, one element that often remains is the term “Book of Shadows”.

Because of the homogenization of Wicca & witchcraft, particularly within pop culture, the term BoS has become synonymized with witchcraft as a whole. But let’s look at the origins of the term & how it even made its way into Wicca.

Gerald Gardner, before his foray in ‘creating’ a religion, was a novelist. According to some, he merely published under the guise of fiction due to the laws regarding witchcraft at the time, however; Others believe a narrative more similar to that of L Ron Hubbard’s failed foray into fiction. His early novel serves as a crystallization of the evolution of his beliefs before Wicca and as such:  there is no trace of the term Book of Shadows. Doreen Valiente, who'd become a High Priestess of Wicca, illuminates why this is. Gardner only discovered the term in 1949 because of 'The Occult Observer'. Published within Volume I, Number 3 of the Occult Observer was Kashmiri palmist Mir Bashir’s article "The Book of Shadows"

His article delved into a Sanskrit text known as The Book of Shadows. The publisher of the magazine was the very same as the publisher of Gardner’s fiction. Advertised within the same magazine was Gardner’s novel, High Magic’s Aid, written under the pen name, Scire.

The Book of Shadows that Bashir writes of is a Sanskrit text that discusses divination using ones shadow and the article follows Bashir and a friend as they travel to visit a pundit who performs said divination using his duplicate of the original Book of Shadows .If you’re interested in reading about the Book of Shadows, you can find a PDF version of the Occult Observer here, where you can read Bashir’s account.

Soon after his novel is advertised in the same magazine that publishes the article on the BOS, Gardner names his book of rites and magic “The Book of Shadows”. Before this, Valiente notes it was very rarely referred to as “The Black Book” within his fiction, but never the a Book of Shadows.

Gardner’s own BoS, she notes, was filled with direct plagiarism from older magical grimoires, as well as the works of Crowley, Masonic rites, & more.  When confronted by Valiente regarding how much of his work was blatantly copied from Crowley, with whom Valiente looked upon with disdain, Gardner said, “well, if you think you can do any better, go ahead”—which she did. Her version erases much of Crowley's influence but takes influence from other writings.

Gardner’s BoS was not what we see today: a personal journal filled with knowledge and documentation of rituals specific to the practitioner, but belonged to the Coven, controlled by the High Priest/Priestess, from which members could at times copy, depending on the coven.

This distinct evolution into a personal journal is sharply divided open, as others conflate it with ‘grimoire’, a book of spells/magic. This evolution of what the term means has, in many ways, shifted how the term is viewed at all within spiritual spaces.

Many contemporary witches/pagans distinguish between the two by stating that a BoS is a personal journal while a grimoire is a textbook of descriptions, spells, rituals & the like, with no personal documentation/thoughts/etc. But this is seemingly subjectively used.

We can argue the 'definition' as provided by the dictionary, of course, but we must also acknowledge how genuine human use varies from dictionary definitions. Book of Shadows has become a term that people expect to hear from spiritualists--regardless of their background

The 'baseline' of Wicca & Wicca-based practices as the 'standard' of witchcraft means that even those who do not ever intend to interact with Wicca do so by immersion--simply being in modern 'witch' spaces means constant contact. And we are not guilt-free either--in the early days of Jewitches, in order to find stability within a community that was, and is, uncomfortable with our manner of magic, we infrequently used the term BoS, thinking it would be an easier way to communicate--but it was never right.

Read more: The Occult Observer, PDF version

 Doreen Valiente's The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989)

#book of shadows #witchcraft #wicca #wiccan #gardner #gerald gardner #witchy #witchblr #jewitch #jewitches #bos #grimoire #magick #magic #witch #witches