Notices by Leth (lethargilistic@kolektiva.social), page 2

Lady Chatterton's Lover enters the #publicdomain today. If you want to make some porn with your friends, there's no time like the present!

I find Mickey's entry into the public domain significant, but uninteresting, to be quite honest. Continuing to treat him as special and somehow still propertized by Disney is antithetical to open culture, and that seems to be most of the coverage.

This is why you shouldn't call it copyright "protection." Copyright restriction prevents you from expressing yourself within modern popular culture. You can always stand to respect copyright less. Stop making excuses for it.

#publicdomain

Happy Public Domain Day 1928!!! #publicdomain

Perhaps this one is simply practical, but the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is now in the #publicdomain. All of the etymological information inside it is now free to distribute.

Certainly the latest edition will have more and more accurate information, especially on obscurities, but the first edition is not nothing.

For everyone who wants to distance themselves from H.P. Lovecraft but enjoys the Ctulhu mythos, guess what? "The Call of Ctulhu" short story is #publicdomain today! Make your own!

"The Threepenny Opera" is an incredible story written to be an accessible critique of capitalism for the working class.

"You are about to hear an opera for beggars. Since this opera was intended to be as splendid as only beggars can imagine, and yet cheap enough for beggars to be able to watch, it is called the Threepenny Opera."

And it's #publicdomain today!

Which also means the song and character known as Mack the Knife enters the public domain today!

"All Quiet on the Western Front" enters the #publicdomain... which raises the question of why they released a film readaptation a year or two ago, to be honest. A last gasp of rentiership.

Virginia Woolf's "Orlando: A Biography" enters the #publicdomain today!

"By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life."

This year's #publicdomain Agatha Christie is "The Mystery of the Blue Train", a Poirot story in which an heiress is murdered on the titular bitchular train while fleeing her unhappy marriage.

This year also includes a #publicdomain update for Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Tarzan" stories. In "Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle", he encounters the descendants of medieval European Crusaders, who got lost and ended up in the African jungle. Presumably, this means Tarzan must bring his wits to some fights against people armed with swords and the bubonic plague.

@nyx @winter If people–including the person who prompts the AI—react to it at all, it's art by definition. It *is* a bullshit generator, but most art is bullshit anyway, so...

@nyx I'm not sure how? It's declarative.

A definition of art that centers and requires some kind of *objective* "creativity", "humanity," "originality," or whatever is essentially incomplete because it excludes art created via context. (For example, readymades and often collage.) It's also hostile to derivative works, which are also certainly art.

If your theory is so narrow that it excludes things people have worked on as art for generations, the problem is your theory.

@anarchopunk_girl What I am saying is that the argument "I need a car to address my mobility disability" is a PERSONAL argument for ONE individual to own car under their current circumstances. It is inappropriate to go from that to, "therefore, cars must continue to exist because they are necessary as mobility aids in general." The reason that I compare that to "I need my car to get to work" (or, for that matter, to commute rurally) is that those are problems in need of collective solutions for which people substitute individual cars because that is easy under current conditions, and so those arguments are rested upon to say that we must not discourage and (ideally, if unattainably) abolish cars generally.

These mobility issues should be solved with other solutions. The fact that someone under current conditions feels that they cannot get rid of their car for mobility disability reasons does not imply that cars are a solution for mobility disabilities. And, again, that is clear to the many people with mobility disabilities who do not have the option to use cars and are routinely ignored as people rush to defend cars supposedly on their behalf. Meanwhile, the continued existence of cars falls hardest on people with mobility disabilities generally because alternatives aren't invested in.

I am not trying to be condescending. I am very serious that it is a mistake to argue in favor of cars on the behalf of people who, as a group, are disadvantaged by their existence.

@anarchopunk_girl And, to be clear: if that IS claimed as a personal justification, I don't have a problem with that. But it's usually not and the tendency is to try to universalize it, as (with respect) you have demonstrated.

@anarchopunk_girl No, that's the comparison to using them for work. It is an individualized justification, not one based on cars' claimed status as a mobility device in general.

@darlingofinana Cars are not accessible mobility devices. Someone saying they need a car to address a disability is absolutely no different than someone else saying "I need a car to get to my job because it is far away." Which is obvious as soon as you look at the numbers of people with mobility disabilities who use cars: It is much lower than the abled baseline.

The problem urbanists are trying to solve is that a world designed for the car is fractically inaccessible for the vast majority of people and even worse for people with mobility disabilities. There is no need for centrism on this. A world that is not designed for the car is categorically better for people with disabilities.

The Federalist Papers have a reputation for being beautifully written yet very wrong because they were literally composed as a propaganda campaign to smooth over problems with the Constitution. (I've always thought the writing was overhyped, particularly because nerds want them to be canonical texts.)

The Anti-Federalist Papers were written... not so well. Pretty standard for the period, really. But they were profoundly correct about the Constitution being bullshit and how bad things would flow from it.

But the AFP consistently denounce anarchy, so who's to say if they're good or bad? (Which is extremely funny to me because they were literally an autonomous, disorganized tendency expressing themselves through zines.)

#BookThreads

"Great Dragon Shenron, please hear my wish! Make the one I love forgive me for the wrong I've done to her ."
"I cannot grant this wish."
"I'm not asking for her to love me. I just want a clean slate."
"No, I cannot grant this wish because she has already forgiven you and wants you to reach out because she doesn't know how either. You really should talk it out, y'know. You don't need space dragon magic to have a conversation."

@anarchopunk_girl Fucking lmao, I would not have guessed "HTML emails are bad because of the rendering time" in a million years. They are bad for data, but it's because they're several times larger than text emails (even before you get to images) and they add up because free email services trained people to not delete their mail. (See "how do we politically determine what 90% is?")

HTML emails are bad for a lot of reasons. They're bad for privacy because of image tricks that act as read receipts, they increase the efficacy of phishing, they're security holes, they interfere with listserv stuff and contributed to that whole ecosystem becoming unviable as utilities/social media, they're worse for accessibility in every conceivable way, blah blah blah.

@anarchopunk_girl HTML emails are and have always been bad, but I didn't see the post explaining why he thinks they are.

But, yeah, his posts about this were so much "Here's the problem. Here is a nuclear weapon I propose for a solution."