The Moonspeaker

New Thoughtpiece: Actual Thoughts on Steampunk

Sat, 7 Mar 2026 18:50:58 PST

Nearly seven years ago I wrote a piece called The Nineteenth Century Blahs, but never did get around writing much about one the stranger responses to the nineteenth century of the late twentieth and early twenty-first, steampunk. The great steampunk vogue came and went in the 2010's, running alongside the temporary mainstreaming of so-called "geek culture." For awhile there, every comic con or similar event had at least a solid steampunk-costumed contingent, if not a full track of sessions to complement a substantial number of vendors and products. Among speculative fiction writers, a very few tried their hand at writing counterfactual histories and alternate timelines that were really interesting. At the moment such writing is tragically blighted by the market hijacking and...

Random Site of the Week: Michael Hudson

Sat, 7 Mar 2026 18:49:16 PST

The anthropologist and historian of how societies have developed and organized their economies whose work informed and inspired aspects of the late David Graeber's writings on debt. Hudson is a remarkable and truly public-oriented scholar, president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, and a prolific author and speaker who strives to make his work as accessible as possible.

New Thoughtpiece: Revolt of the Tools?

Tue, 3 Mar 2026 12:50:56 PST

There is a farcical quality to how badly search engines perform today, even including the ones not designed or distorted into a poor cover for datamining and advertising. Even more hilarious is how suddenly it is all but impossible to roust up a search result to provide an online citation of any anthropologist or similar person who referenced at least in passing a Mayan or other story once easy to look up under a heading like "the revolt of the tools." I am well aware of the possible and if so dubious reframing of it into the revolt of the toys in the original pixar hit "Toy Story." There is a lot going on in the much earlier Mayan story, more than a person reading a transcription would necessarily pick up on, because they are often reading the story out of context. The question of who was telling it when must always be asked and preferably answered with stories featuring important social commentary. Nevertheless, even if advertising and datamining per se were not major issues of concern today, if there were nevertheless hucksters at large trying to sell magic "AI" to fill their pockets before the bubble pops, it would end up being difficult...

Random Site of the Week: European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter

Tue, 3 Mar 2026 12:48:53 PST

An important body currently led by renowned historian Ilan Pappé, centre members and adjunct scholars carry out and present important historical research and analysis of occupied palestine. They actively a secular, single-state solution and develop ideas and approaches to ending settler colonialism in a constructive and longterm manner.

New Thoughtpiece: What's Good for Extraction is Not Necessarily Best

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:36:03 PST

Until not so long ago, mainstream views about writing and literacy seemed pretty much set in stone (no pun intended). According to those views, there was only one true form of writing, a perfect and best means of representing words for people to read later. That form of writing was and is based on using a small number of symbols, about thirty usually, representing both vowels and consonants. Punctuation seems to be taken as basically optional, and accents or other diacritics completely sneered at as unnecessary. This writing must be for representing words, that is speech, unambiguously. No interpretation! From this we land in a first contradiction, that the letters are supposed to do all the representing, and neither punctuation nor accents count as the writing, even though they are necessary for the disambiguation part. Well, and they don't always work. And then there is the whole issue with spelling, which is most acute for french and english. But, anyway, still, common sense not long ago, and I suspect to this day still, is that alphabetic writing is the very peak of writing system development. Once an alphabet meant for representing words unambiguously is set up, there is nothing else to develop. After all, didn't the original phoenician abjad get superseded by the greek and then latin alphabets? And haven't even the slavic peoples who standardized at first on the cyrillic alphabet...

Random Site of the Week: Mother Tree Project

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:32:53 PST

Founded by the best selling author of Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard. If you had the dubious experience of watching Cameron's self-indulgent Pocahontas movie "Avatar," this site is an excellent starting point to learn about real mother trees and their mycorrhizal networks. Its resources include an excellent FAQ page and wonderful bibliographies of relevant publications to the Project and by its contributors.

New Thoughtpiece: Funny Thing About Those "Last Human" Stories

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:34:35 PST

To be fair, there are undoubtedly serious speculative fiction readers who could make serious arguments with many citations that in fact stories featuring last humans on Earth are more diverse than the small selection that contribute to my impressions about them. By nature trying to really dig into the concept and fan out from it into a story would be no mean challenge, since after all we humans are gregarious and are born into communities. Our survival depends on it. Hence, such "last human" stories must always feature adults. Even the hamfistedly secularized messiah backstory for the comic book character Superman reflects this. "Kal-El" is the last survivor of planet Krypton, sent off in a space capsule as an infant, but he is in some sort of suspended animation until he gets to Earth. My thoroughly nonrandom and not extensive knowledge of "last human" stories seem at first very logical in their premises. They agree that in order for there to be one human left on Earth all alone, some terrible disaster must have happened. The broad consensus...

Random Site of the Week: Spinwatch

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:32:42 PST

Founded by Public Interest Investigations to present the results of their examination of a range of activities by people engaged in the so-called "public relations industry" and their involvement in propaganda and undermining of democracy. Their topics include investigation of climate and environmental coverage, conflicts of interest as politicians and activists rotate between political and corporate jobs.

New Thoughtpiece: Phylogenetic Trees are Cool

Sun, 8 Feb 2026 16:14:48 PST

My first encounter with the method of mapping relationships between different species was in a class about dinosaurs. This was in the days when there was still considerable resistance to the idea of warm-blooded dinosaurs, or survival of dinosaurs in the form of birds. While I couldn't make head nor tail of the arguments for and against warm-bloodedness at first because of needing to learn more about the sorts of fossil evidence involved in it first, the idea of smaller dinosaurs surviving to the present in much altered and evolved forms made sense. After all, if mammals made it out first by being small and gregarious, then by evolving fur and other means to survive cold and wet conditions, then it didn't seem so ridiculous for similarly small, gregarious dinosaurs to do the same. It's toughest to make it through large change sin climate, even temporary ones, for larger creatures. They don't have much wiggle room to go hungry, have less ease in moving to more promising places, and may not be able to live in groups large enough to get the benefits of a herd or troop. Well, I say all this now. Back then I found dinosaurs simply too cool to agree something as...

Random Site of the Week: Darwin Online

Sun, 8 Feb 2026 16:12:57 PST

A project that grew from a small digitization effort to what has now grown to a massive digitization, transcription, and virtual library recreation project. The most recently completed section is of Darwin's library, in part with an aim to showing he was not a recluse cut off from the sceintific community.

New Thoughtpiece: Alien Disappointments

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 23:55:11 PST

Honestly, I don't get it. I don't get the apparent intense disappointment some people have in the absence of any aliens from outer space. After all, we have more than enough trouble to keep us busy here on Earth among ourselves without inviting trouble. Then again, perhaps I just have the wrong mindset to appreciate much of the excitement. After all, extraterrestrials seem to be where just about every version of supernatural explanation or event is attributed in hopes of making them real after all, somehow. The big ones people are a bit embarrassed to talk about are, understandably, the religious ones. The people who are sure they are wholly secular, but have decided the strange protestant extremist notion of the rapture will in fact involve special humans being spirited away from the dying Earth by aliens does come across at best awkwardly. (If you want to see the original source of the rapture nonsense, I understand the locus classicus is the annotations in the infamous scofield reference bible.) Then there are the people hoping aliens bring fancy technology to fix all our problems, which strikes me as an attempt to reframe a bowdlerized pantheon of deities. Of course, there are also the people utterly terrified that extraterrestrials will come to Earth...

Random Site of the Week: History of Parks Canada Electronic Library and Archive

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 23:55:06 PST

Oddly enough, this site appears to be a the brainchild and longterm digitization project of a u.s. citizen with an overarching interest in north american national parks. "Odd," because on average even most canadian citizens are not very interested in relatively obscure publications related to national parks and historical sites. The result is an often bilingual collection of resources, especially excellent for tracking down stubborn older references to archaeological reports and park brochures.

New Thoughtpiece: Misjudging Oratory

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 22:22:27 PST

Cognitive dissonance is more often unpleasant than a relief, but we can't help but run into it. Real life is too full of contradictions even if nobody is trying anything nefarious for it to be otherwise. Many of those contradictions then are of the sort that reveal we have misunderstood something about how some aspect of the physical world works, or how our social world works, to take just two very broad categories. European philosophers fell over themselves with excitement once they finally noticed contradictions indicated something useful and meaningful was going on, just have a look at the voluminous works of Georg Hegel and the many people besides philosophers who have taken up his ideas since. But you don't have to read philosophy or anything like that to end up puzzling over contradictions of course. Whenever we are provoked to wonder why, what, or how, chances are we have a contradiction provoking our attention....

Random Site of the Week: Spike Lives - A Biographical Database of the Lives of Workhouse Inmates

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 22:19:22 PST

Another site on the subject of english workhouses, this one another fine database and census analysis project used to try to throw a light on the lives of the people forced to live in one of them, in this case the former Guildford Union Workhouse. The workhouse is now a heritage museum running regular tours.

New Thoughtpiece: Employees are Not Children

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 16:55:33 PST

The place where management fads go to die is the excessively priced training circuit, where a few people make a great deal of money flogging outdated and vastly inappropriate "advice" for people who imagine themselves leaders and are barely competent as managers. The same trainers and deluded aspirants to managerhood eagerly snap up popular "business" books, which alas, are basically slightly padded internet listicles. It is not without reason that people like Kevin Kelly have a recommended reading program of real material demanding study and thought to understand and apply that is far cheaper than the now infamous "MBA," combined with trying to run a small (low overhead) business. One of the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) of the lucrative for the trainer but pernicious for trainees who take it seriously is the secularized christian "seven habits of highly effective people." What makes so much of this material so pernicious is the bits of genuinely good stuff, a bit like the swig of water to help a nastier pill go down, except you are not supposed to notice there is a pill at all. There are all...

Random Site of the Week: Theoi Texts Library

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 16:53:46 PST

A modest collection of translated greek and latin texts, good to start with if dipping into the Perseus Project is a bit too much to start from. It is a subsite of the Theoi Project, founded in 2000 to a trustworthy and referenced guide to greek mythology, including myth summaries, image galleries, and various catalogues of deities, beasts, and so on.

New Thoughtpiece: Main Character Syndrome is a Philosophical Problem?

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 19:19:24 PST

I wonder if there isn't a metric for when a particular pop culture notion has arrived along the lines of "when a philosopher trying to write for the general public writes about this topic," because that would actually be an interesting, even if trailing measure. Sort of like how dictionaries with definitions developed from word use in printed works tend to be at least a century or so behind day to day speech. (Perhaps rather less than a century now that computers are ubiquitous, but I doubt that.) In any case, awhile back I happened upon philosopher Anna Gotlib's article published on aeon.co, Main Character Syndrome. The editors at aeon.co did this article absolutely no favours at all by imposing the title they did, then adding an image suggesting that the primary people with "main character syndrome" are young, white women able to keep up with the latest styles. But then again, the name...

Random Site of the Week: Alpennia

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 19:15:59 PST

A surprisingly rare sort of website, for author Heather Rose Jones. She writes primarily fiction, typically historical, historical fantasy, and fantasy. Jones has also been writing, narrating, and producing a longrunning podcast on lesbian historic motifs alongside a major annotated bibliography of same. For the most part she has resisted the recent transmadness and makes minimal use of the slur term "queer."

New Living Memory Entry: Treaty Making With First Peoples Comes First

Wed, 7 Jan 2026 23:07:47 PST

The difficulty with common sense notions is that they are supposed to be what "everybody" knows, but the definition of "everybody" is neither constant nor universal. So it took some time before I fully appreciated many non-Indigenous canadians do not realize Métis are treaty people. This seems really strange before remembering most non-Indigenous canadians are unaware they are in fact treaty people. They take it as given their ancestors or at least some earlier group undertook and completed the dirty work of infiltration, invasion, military occupation, and conquest. Certainly the usual settler state propaganda presents a versions of purported history reproducing just such a story. But it doesn't take much practical thought or even research to realize this purported history makes no sense. If there had been no treaty making, just in effect a bridgehead and then creeping military invasion, how was this done when the majority of people shipped off to "the new world" via various forms of economic and legal coercion were poor as church mice, untrained and unequipped for military activity? Just because basically no european ever signed a treaty with Indigenous peoples they seriously intended to honour does not delete the reality and meaningfulness of treaties. For Métis in particular, since the land was already full and they needed to establish a place socially and economically in northern north america because they emerged there, treaties were never optional, and never ignorable. Without treaties...

New Thoughtpiece: It's Never Censorship Until It's You

Sat, 3 Jan 2026 20:20:36 PST

Believe me, I don't like it. I don't like it at all. But I have been forced to come to the conclusion that "censorship" is a meaningless political slur. I have been forced to conclude this, because somehow, somehow, it is never censorship until it's "you" for so many people, including people whom I respect as writers, scholars, or commentators. The word is as at least as badly mauled as the notion of "freedom of speech." This is obviously terrible, because we badly need to talk about what is often labelled as questions of censorship and free speech. More and more, I find myself using Betty McLellan's excellent explanation and framing of the issue in terms of fair speech, conceptually and partly analogous to fair trade, and intended to allow us to actually think through what speech and speaking means in social and political context. (Please note that I am not getting into the specifics of "fair speech" and its meaning here, so yes, when you get to the later parts of this thoughtpiece there will be parts not fully described.) Right now what we are reading and hearing in the mainstream media and much of what isn't is invocation of buzzwords and use of rhetorical cudgels. This is hardly new, and to be sure we have little chance of escaping such dishonest use of language in the real world. The difficulty is that at this stage, practically nobody seems to be taking what they say seriously...

Random Site of the Week: ArtHerstory

Sat, 3 Jan 2026 20:18:02 PST

A still growing site showcasing paintings by female artists, many of whose works are featuring in more shows and galleries than typical of the recent twentieth century. There is a modest and growing number of artist biographies, much emphasis on the postcard-sized reproductions on sale, and a blog averaging two to six posts per month.

New Thoughtpiece: Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction, and Women

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 23:10:07 PST

I must confess to not having followed the whole "speculative fiction" versus "science fiction" and "fantasy fiction" label bruhaha, which it seems to me both Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin commented on. Perhaps it is more Atwood I am remembering, because it seemed to surprise media types when she wrote novels that couldn't be neatly shoehorned into the book marketing bucket labelled "literary" nor the one labelled "popular." To this day there are certainly people who continue to have issues with the term speculative fiction, but I do rather like it, as it is less beholden to marketing and seems to capture something about the stories told that it can describe. It allows people to acknowledge openly that a great deal of both "science fiction" and "fantasy" is no more than obsessive retold colonization fantasies with their own special costumes and scene dressing. This does not mean they are necessarily "bad," unpleasant to read, or even (gasp) "simplistic." It does mean that when authors try to do something different while seeming to be producing a story to fit the usual mainstream anglophone versions of "science fiction" and "fantasy," the reception is often at best bewildered, and more often quite hostile. I can see authors looking to speculative fiction as...

Random Site of the Week: Stalin Digital Archive

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 23:08:05 PST

Stalin seems to be undergoing something of a revival of late, in part due to ongoing efforts to force soviet russia into the same box as nazi germany, but probably in main because the history of the ussr and Stalin's life are still so recent that the fog of propaganda is still almost thick enough to walk on. Hence as more documents and books are declassified and released, they are more and more often being promptly digitized and added to archives like this one. Unfortunately, based on the donor list, this archive will probably not help disperse the fog for most readers. Nevertheless, it can be useful to look at the primary source documents while taking the various interpretations with plenty of caution.

New Thoughtpiece: Not a Winning Strategy

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:10:45 PST

In preparation for this thoughtpiece, I went back to some of the bibliographies of books and papers accrued during my recent foray back into university to complete graduate studies in history. Immediately my vague impression about controversies over post-secondary education being new at least in the european-invaded americas was promptly debunked. Since such institutions are typically positioned as producers of a labour aristocracy, a professional managerial class, or just to train the offspring of the most successful gangsters, they are invariably fiercely fought over. Who will be allowed to attend, who will be allowed to teach, how they will be allowed to teach or learn, and what instructors will be allowed to teach all have associated clashes associated with them. Sometimes those clashes are literal and physical, with fighting in the streets or ruthless slaughter of faculty for political purposes. Other times the fighting is primarily via legislation and manipulation of degree-granting powers, who may be the president of the institution and so on. Post-secondary institutions differ in origin as well as focus, so we can find examples that began as religious seminaries, free publicly founded entities, and overdeveloped private and secular schools. In other words, they tend...

Random Site of the Week: Fungi Perfecti

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:09:01 PST

The somewhat conflicted website of Paul Stamets' business selling mushrooms, stock for growing mushrooms, educational materials, and other products. Stamets reasonably emphasizes how remarkable and important fungi are overall, with their remarkable ability to render toxic substances harmless, boost the immune system, and support ecosystem recovery after disaster. It's just that he happens to talk about this in terms of "resources" and "value" and other such capitalistic and exploitive terms at times.

New Thoughtpiece: Giving Up on the Web is Both Childish and Cowardly

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 01:10:32 PST

I wrote a series of thoughtpieces on what is wrong with the web and what is right with it between late 2015 and early 2016. My general conclusion was that the web is not irredeemable, and the elements that made it useful and accessible are still present. This is so despite the mighty efforts of such ever-worsening players as google and microsoft interfering with web standards, manipulating the web browser landscape, and misinforming people about how to make a website and how to post it. To this day, many of the people crying about the supposed death of the web and how there is nothing but crap on it are a narrow subset of people who use the internet or the web. From my definitely unscientific sample, they may be old or newcomers to the web, more or less familiar with computers, and definitely caught up in the hellscape of so-called "social media." Some have rediscovered static websites, and are a bit less inclined to try to proselytize for alternatives like the gemini protocol. The gemini protocol has a lot going for it, including development of its own niche. However, it gives up a lot of what makes html hypertext such a wonderful medium, even if the html page author deliberately sticks to text and images, with no javascript or extended css coding. It looks like gemini (and gopher) may be the best candidates for people who would like to run their own small server...

Random Site of the Week: Smarthistory

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 01:07:51 PST

An intriguing project focussed on developing Creative Commons-licensed, peer reviewed materials to support art history and general history related education. It has an impressive number of contributors, although still afflicted with over-representation of people based in northern north america and europe. This is slowly improving in line with their coverage of art, which is consciously multi-continental and extended deep in time.

New Thoughtpiece: So Close, So Far

Sat, 6 Dec 2025 19:42:28 PST

Like most writers, no matter how much time I spend typing on some computer keyboard or another, the majority of my notetaking and early drafting goes on in handwritten notebooks. Therefore I also am prone to picking up unusual examples of these wonderful tools for thinking with that need neith batteries nor a power cord. From there it is only a short step to becoming a connoisseur of specific pens and pencils best suited for drafting. I did used to think the fuss about writing utensils was a bit of silly fun, but have since learned to take it a bit more seriously due to a combination of repetitive stress injury avoidance and preserving records and resources. Like many of us, I am all too aware of the endless and dishonest push by many advertising corporations claiming to be technology companies and their publisher followers whose hatred of hard copy books seems to know no bounds. They claim this is about how wasteful and environmentally destructive it is to make "dead tree books" when what they are really panting after is forcing us to constantly pay them rent to write and to read. They especially want to do this by a method of "book production" that fundamentally has no limit, which hard copy books do. Only so many paper books will fit in even the largest libraries. Oh, and they don't...

Random Site of the Week: Lierre Keith

Sat, 6 Dec 2025 19:40:25 PST

A great starting point to get an overview of the work of this storied and busy radical ecofeminist activist who is also an extraordinary writer and public speaker. Keith is perhaps most famous and controversial for her book The Vegetarian Myth, which is a careful and compassionate exploration of why neither vegetarianism nor veganism can save the world, despite the earnest determination of so many who follow those diets.

New Thoughtpiece: A Dunk On "Canlit"

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 18:32:10 PST

Perhaps it is a bit too easy to dunk on the books flogged under the marketing term "canlit," but that is hardly a reason not to do it anyway. I say this because in an odd sort of way, it is both apparently easy to dunk on "canlit," and yet also difficult to say something useful about it. A major part of the difficulty is the nature of the term, that short form of "canadian literature" apparently meant to encourage sales to the people who are or wish to be seen as patriotic, and for the convenience of academics engaged in creating a specialty niche for themselves in some literature studies department. Truth be told, I don't begrudge anybody seeking to identify, read, and/or purchase canlit their doing so. After all, dunking is not equivalent to "don't let there be any of this sort of book/story/essay/anthology," or "nobody should like this stuff," nor is it intended to be. From what I can tell, having grown up far from the main publishing centres in canada, and therefore from the people who like to think they are cultural arbiters here, there...

Random Site of the Week: Gilbert Strang

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 18:30:09 PST

Home page of the revered mathematics professor, including links to his open course lectures and many ancillary documents to those courses. He is best known for his linear algebra courses, and today that is the area of mathematics with the most capitalist interest in it due to its use in building and calculating "language learning models" and what is often lazily marketed as "artificial intelligence."

New Living Memory Entry: Independent, Connected, Historical, Present: Île-à-Crosse

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 15:27:48 PST

Sometime in 1776, a montréal-based fur trader wrote down that Métis had founded a community at île-à-la-Crosse, northeast of cold lake, on the long-established trade and travel route of what settlers like to call the churchill river system. It's french name comes from early fur traders, who named it for the lacrosse game they witnessed locals playing on nearby Big Island. Placed in a region where Dene and Cree peoples have long lived together, its name in Cree is Sakitawak, and in Dene, Kwoen. When the mainstream historians still tried to conflate the Northwest Métis nation and the people's existence as a whole with Louis Riel, they focussed on île-à-la-Crosse for its Riel connections....

New Thoughtpiece: If A Site is Blank With Javascript Off

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 18:13:14 PST

Okay, I'll be blunt. I don't care what the hell your website is supposed to be about, or if your website was actually written and posted by people instead of being a pile of large language model generated slop. Even before considering those issues, if I land on your site somehow, and it comes up blank because I don't allow every unvetted javascript and plug-in known or unknown to even webmasters online, you are running a worse than mickey mouse outfit. You are running an outfit that can be silenced and blown offline at any time. This includes far too many websites of non-mainstream news websites with solid contributors and reasonable documentation to support checking their receipts. Over the years I have developed some workarounds to this sort of javascript mess, including turning off the site's default stylesheet and even viewing the page source instead. (Yes, really. I'm curmudgeonly about this but willing to work around annoyances for solid actual writing.) What finally drove me to write this thoughtpiece though, is the growing occurrence of websites with their entire content wrapped in javascript to the point that each page is parsed through the javascript and then parsed again by the web browser rendering engine. The only reason...

Random Site of the Week: Feminist International Network Against Artificial Reproduction, Gender Ideology, and Transhumanism

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 18:11:00 PST

In many ways a successor of FINRRAGE, with an updated descriptor to make explicit that the radical feminist activists are aware of the changes in efforts to develop and market various types of pharmaceuticals and genetic manipulations. They are deeply concerned now as FINRRAGE then, to oppose the patriarchal malestream obsession with necrotechnology and destruction of life.

New Thoughtpiece: Implications of Apple Logos

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 19:01:23 PST

Much to my annoyance, I cannot yet relocate the source of a critique of the apple computer logo as referring to the judeo-christian bible and the chapter according to which Eve ate a fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and thereby supposedly sentenced humanity to mortality and the need to work for a living, and women to agonizing childbirth. This story never made much sense to me and sounds suspiciously garbled, but as many of us have learned either passively by overhearing it or directly by somebody teaching it, supposedly the fruit in question was an apple. The reasons this was unlikely to be the fruit referenced by the original storyteller and the ongoing argument and efforts to trace how and why apples got dragged into it later on is outside of the remit of this thoughtpiece, though quite instructive about ancient fruit varieties, languages, and cultural warfare. Since apple computer is a united states corporation founded in a context where "the bible" and a sort of "greatest hits" subset of its most illustratable stories for puerile audiences are part of the cultural water everyone is swimming or drowning in, I can't see any plausible argument to counter the critique. Even though the critique also...

Random Site of the Week: Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 18:59:07 PST

This is primarily a historical record site of the radical feminist organization founded in 1985. It started and to this day is still an international coordinating organization for activism opposing the various so-called reproductive technologies and the accompanying forms of genetic manipulation. Its conferences rotated between countries and continents, and its members were so effective necrotech corporations and governments targeted it for interference by using bribes and police harassment.

New Thoughtpiece: The Warfare Nobody Talks About

Sat, 8 Nov 2025 22:13:00 PST

If you have not spent any time reading the finance blog naked capitalism, I can't help but think you are missing out, even if only by not checking to see whether it is a blog you would like to keep following. In this day and age it is hard to understate the importance of checking receipts for ourselves and making up our own minds. Yes, it is hard work sometimes, and it makes us undeniably responsible for what we know and what we do based on what we know. I don't see any other way to survive for those of us who have no means, ability, or inclination to try to construct and maintain a permanent bubble to fend off the rest of the real world -- a bubble that can't and won't protect when it is most needed anyway. Among the many topics besides narrowly financial that the team at naked capitalism covers has been the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. They have provided some of the best and most consistently sobre and evidence-based coverage available, including thoughtfully considered links...

Random Site of the Week: Tower of Babel, The - Evolution of Human Language Project

Sat, 8 Nov 2025 22:04:11 PST

A wonderful tribute to its founder Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin and now an ongoing online hub for the russian-based project. It includes numerous catalogues of words, languages, and mythological motifs, among many other excellent language study tools. There is also a collection of databases and free/libre software. They have an excellent FAQ detailing who the contributors are, the structure of the website, the nature of the software and databases, etc.

New Thoughtpiece: About Those AI Crawlers

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:49:01 PDT

Recently the Moonspeaker suffered the dubious distinction of its first DDoS attack. Based on my study of the server logs, this was by no means personal or even necessarily intended as a DDoS attack as such. Rather, it was the product of random misfortune combined with a script kiddie playing with a widely available python tutorial in how to write web crawlers. These semi-generic looking crawlers stood out sharply from the background mosquito scripts constantly trying to find unsecured wordpress and cpanel logins. The notable miscreant seemed to have some sort of bug, as it was apparently tuned to go through all the image files it could find, getting tangled up parsing the site's rss feed and then going into an infinite loop requesting the same handful of images again and again until it used up all the site's bandwidth and it went offline. That was bad enough. On further assessment, besides taking steps to block the script kiddies to the extent possible in this iteration of bad behaviour, I also began taking more aggressive steps to block so-called "AI" bots. These execrable pieces of crap code not only steal code and web pages without...

Random Site of the Week: Academia Prisca

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:46:38 PDT

A notionally international, spanish education company-funded project which is officially intended to spur the revival of the reconstructed proto-indo-european language (PIE). That sounds a bit silly. In reality they are doing an enormous service to linguists working on PIE and its derivatives by creating open access copies of important dictionaries and grammars.

New Thoughtpiece: That's Ironic

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 20:13:10 PDT

Not too many people look into Cornelius Agrippa's work these days, or necessarily realize why he is referenced by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's character Victor Frankenstein in his brief account of his undisciplined early reading. Even the version of her novel "Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds" released by MIT press for the two hundredth anniversary of the book has little to say about him. The editors see his introduction in the story as a marker of how Frankenstein's experiments and fascinations were not "modern" for the time, the early nineteenth century. Yet I can't help but wonder if Wollstonecraft Shelley had her tongue somewhat in cheek as she wrote Frankenstein's story, considering among his books is Declamatio de nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. I chased down the basics of Agrippa's biography and summaries of his books in order to make better sense of Frankenstein the novel, and left it at that until I stumbled upon an article in the online science magazine nautilus by literature professor Renée Bergland. The person whose job was to make an eye catching title did...

Random Site of the Week: Canada Files

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 20:10:25 PDT

A solid site covering canadian foreign policy and related government and military actions according to that policy. There are many longer read pieces including solid links to readings on related history and technical sources. I highly recommend these at minimum as a great source for search terms to look up detail.

New Thoughtpiece: Storied Comics

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 20:39:44 PDT

Among the casualties of the total consolidation of mainstream newspapers into corporate propaganda conglomerates is the original comics aka funnies page. The selection of comics, some more or less overtly political, ranging from Cathy Guisewhite's Cathy to Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury, others not so obviously political such as Charles Schultz's Peanuts and Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse. Some older favourites that didn't quite make it to the 2000s have had minor revivals more recently, including Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County and Gary Larson's The Far Side. Of course, none of these are particularly recent comic strips. The rogue's gallery today is quite different, including Betty which I admit to having no idea is the co-project of Gary Delainy and Gerry Rasmussen and the to me rather odd Baby Blues by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott. Times certainly change, with particularly successful comics often spawning minor entertainment industry branches. Apparently Peanuts is now a staple of ComicCon, and Lynne Johnston's For Better or For Worse is in multinational syndicated reruns. Indeed, it may be among the only such productions...

Random Site of the Week: Grover Furr's Home Page

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 20:37:29 PDT

Historian and former part-time tech support person at montclair state university in new jersey. Furr is currently probably most well-known for his ongoing research and writing about the stalin era of the soviet union, and he provides links to html and pdf versions of many of his articles on this page. He has also provided a collection of reproduced primary sources for mediaeval studies, among other gems.

New Thoughtpiece: More Adventures in Program Documentation

Sat, 4 Oct 2025 19:58:56 PDT

Look, I get it, I really do. Documentation is hard. It's a nightmare even for annoying modular furniture from stores like the infamous ikea with its strangely lunatic assembly booklets. (Somebody explain why, why, why the packets the ikea hardware comes in -- always multiple little packets -- are not printed consistently with the hardware item's identifier number? This didn't used to matter until they began to use several closely similarly sized versions of the same hardware piece, but I digress...) I am well aware the libreoffice suite's copious documentation is a truly heroic effort and an impressive achievement. It includes multiple thick manuals in multiple electronic formats and languages. If the most recent online version doesn't work properly for some reason, the previous version is usually close enough to answer basic questions at least for the word processor. Excellent stuff. Alas, it is still insanely difficult to figure out how to use much of the office suite unless following exactly the examples in the document, preferably in the windows versions because that is where most of the screen shots come from. Unfortunately...

Random Site of the Week: It's in the Blood

Sat, 4 Oct 2025 19:56:41 PDT

A site devoted to Linus Pauling's writing and research on hemoglobin, with many scans and other relevant media files. It is full of primary sources and presents an account of this element of Pauling's work. An apparently boring and not so interesting foreword includes an utterly extraordinary suggestion about how to handle reproduction by heterozygous sickle cell anemia gene carriers.

New Thoughtpiece: The Strange Life and Times of Grue

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 22:55:53 PDT

Back in the olden days, when we ran computers by having little dinosaurs run on treadmills to spin the motor wheels for our electricity generators, the real killer app on the command line was a cleverly designed text adventure game called Zork. It was among the earliest recreations of "choose your own adventure" books on computers, which I have the stubborn impression is related to some of the earliest non-business, non-military computer programming coming out of labs working with dialects of lisp. I suspect this has more to do with coincidence of timing and the excellent 2011 book Land of Lisp by Conrad Barski, which features a sample text adventure game as one of its major exercises which gradually becomes a framework to describe all of the major structures and concepts of common lisp. To this day I am not able to track down the version of a zork-inspired text adventure game playable in the terminal application of a much older computer of my experience where if the player perseveres long enough they will discover the virtual world they are exploring is a map of...

Random Site of the Week: Ursula K. Le Guin's Blog

Sat, 27 Sep 2025 22:53:55 PDT

In october 2010, Ursula K. Le Guin decided to try out writing a blog, in line with her long practice of writing in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction forms. The result was and is a wonderful archive of posts extending into 2017, now still maintained online by her literary estate.

New Contested Document: Quite A Coincidence

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 20:15:38 PDT

Probably it was inevitable the former fur trade-focussed concern known as the hudson's bay company (HBC) would meet its demise via one of the most popular of profiteering methods under decadent late capitalism: asset stripping. For those who observed the demise of eaton's, then toys 'r us, then sears, it was not difficult to recognize what was happening. The process always begins with a corporation that has lots of associated property, a widely recognizable "brand," and access to plenty of money to take over likely looking competitors or companies already successful in an area it hasn't already reached. The trick is to avoid overreach and failure to adapt to new conditions. The trick can't be pulled off forever...

New Thoughtpiece: The Illegal Immigration Problem

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 23:19:50 PDT

Never accept at face value a designation of a specific group of people as "a problem." This is not done as overtly as it used to be these days. Nobody in the media at least is so crass as to refer to "the Indian problem" or "the negro problem" or "the woman problem" or whichever group of people might be the focus of the speaker or writer's annoyance anymore. No, the capacity of english to obfuscate is now applied in full force, especially in the technique of nominalization. So today there is no "immigrant problem" or "illegal immigrant problem" or even "refugee problem." No indeed. Such terms are too obviously racist. Instead, the present term of art is "illegal immigration" and careful avoidance of that give away word "problem," at least at first. Maybe it creeps in anyway via the front of the sentence, as in "the problem of illegal immigration," but this is not ideal because the passive construction is too obvious and a bit too awkward. Yet it still does the trick of deflecting the unwary from asking the more important question of why people are leaving their homelands for other places so ill-equipped to receive them and help them take up dignified and safe lives again. This doesn't make sense. People don't just leave their homelands for no or frivolous reason, unless they...

Random Site of the Week: Special Interest Group for Computing, information, and Society

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 23:17:03 PDT

Founded in the 1980s, this a broad-based society created to support information sharing on the history, politics, and nature of computing hardware and software. Resources include syllabi and a modest collection of thematic websites and at least one full translation of a russian history of computing.

New Thoughtpiece: Interpretation Gone Sideways

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 15:59:16 PDT

In the course of researching for other writing, I happened upon Ana Deumert's diggit magazine piece from 2020, On Racism and How to Read Hannah Arendt. Unfortunately, being a brilliant philosopher is not a guarantee that said philosopher will necessarily apply their ideas consistently. Otherwise, no philosopher could or would be bedevilled by racism or any other form of prejudice. Philosophers in "western mainstream" cultures are often able to lean on the posthumous reputation of earlier practitioners to maintain a claim to being some form of conscience of society or challenger to the misbehaviour of the state. But at least so far as I know (after all I have certainly not read every philosopher or about every philosophy out there), no philosopher, let alone psychologist or even neurologist has come up with a foolproof way to catch when the supposedly "common sense" notions of a society are leading anybody, let alone professional thinking types like philosophers, astray. As Deumert observes, Arendt, like the vast majority of her social circle, took for granted the assumption that non-european racialized people were somehow lesser human beings who should accept the good that civilization was supposed to do for them. (They had basically the same attitude to the working class.) This includes an...

Random Site of the Week: Amber

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 15:55:23 PDT

One more on the archiving to curb linkrot theme, this time to a less broadly useful but still important free software project. Amber is a plug-in for the two main blog software platforms standing, wordpress and drupal, which allows a blogger to archive copies of external links on their own server. It appears that they also have less feature-full versions for apache and nginx servers. Like PermaLink, Amber is a project under the aegis of the berman klein centre at harvard university and keeps its code on github.

New Thoughtpiece: Say What?

Sun, 7 Sep 2025 23:21:12 PDT

As a general rule, I don't spend much time on reading the local newspaper, as it tends to not have much local news (I realize that sounds contradictory, but it is true). During forest fire season and similar it can be good for situation round ups, and sometimes a good fallback to check on the misbehaviour of planes and ferries on routes between the two major southern cities where I live. It used to be good for announcing the deaths of public figures and succesful artists besides celebrities, but this is no longer the case. I admit to occasionally giving in to the temptation to see what silly thing the editors chose to print in order to rile readers up and hopefully get more ad impressions or something. Occasionally, because by this means I am reminded why this is not my regular habit. What caught my eye the other day however, was an item bundled in with various COVID-19 half-baked follow up items however, was specifically something not intended to be provoking at all. Far from it, the person quoted and the reporter alike apparently presumed this comment was common sense. Thanks to COVID-19, the commercial real estate sector and those business owners who depend upon it are deeply bothered by persistent alterations in where people work and how many people are...

Random Site of the Week: PermaLink

Sun, 7 Sep 2025 23:17:48 PDT

It is possible if not probable if you have been participating in post-secondary education in some way, that you have encountered a link that points to a PermaLink archive copy due to the original vanishing from the web. This is a centralized service free to non-commercial, academic, and court users, with subscription options for others and for individuals who need more elaborate services.

New Thoughtpiece: So-Called "Hunter-Gatherers" Can't and Don't Just "Wander"

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 01:55:05 PDT

Having used the dread scare quotes in the title, any reader could ask why there should be any at all. A more hostile reader might just roll their eyes if they have noticed various Feminist posts or essays on the site already. Funny enough, while I do question use of the term "hunter-gatherer," it is not just about the presumed sex role stereotypes embedded in the term as composed in english. Over time I have come to seriously question both parts of it. "Gatherer" elides knowledge, experience, and repeatedly recorded and identified conscious practices of replanting, pruning, and calibrated harvest applied by peoples whose cultures and economies do not centre on mass monocrop agriculture. Bringing together the necessities of life requires extensive cooperation and longterm socio-cultural memory. In the long run...

Random Site of the Week: ArchiveBox

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 01:52:14 PDT

With the web being hollowed out so badly, many of us who have websites and many who don't are concerned about archiving important pages and sites in order to curb linkrot and preserve accurate copies of material that may be deleted for political reasons. ArchiveBox is a free/libre software approach for multiple platforms that is self-hosted, therefore also highly privacy compatible. For the moment the main concern is that the project is hosted on github, a dangerous choice to maintain since microsoft bought it. They may be forced into a hurried move to an alternative git host such as gitlab.

New Essay: Freedom Academy

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 22:16:53 PDT

These days it seems the notion of "academic freedom," whatever it may mean to the person or persons who invoke it, is honoured more in the breech than anything else. The baleful influence of greed and politicization has spurred a growing crisis of credibility across the sciences, having successfully attacked the humanities and social sciences for decades already. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, the various people invoking and arguing about academic freedom don't seem to share a definition of the concept. Without so much as a widely agreed upon draft definition, just about any researcher or academic can claim a violation of their academic freedom when faced with any challenge to their ability to publish, research, or teach.

New Thoughtpiece: Supposedly Invisible Mothers

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 14:26:33 PDT

One of the persistent pleasures of the actual web, as opposed to the advertising parasite that tries to overwhelm it, is reading genuine articles that draw together a series of related posts and articles elsewhere. An intriguing one recommended by an acquaintance is Ellen O'Connell Whittet's discussion of victorian-era "invisible mother" photographs. To be honest, I found the article itself a bit uneven, perhaps in part because it was edited down to fit a preferred length on the site. If so, this is certainly too bad, because there is clearly more to O'Connell Whittet's analysis of these older pictures and her own experiences of new motherhood and how in the present women are encouraged to keep themselves out of photographs of their children. This sort of thing is not actually universal even in english or british-derived cultures, and tends to follow who is considered the "natural" person to handle the camera. I was also utterly fascinated that O'Connell Whittet never bluntly states the obvious about these photographs, that far from making the mothers or the occasional father, or in wealthier families the nanny, invisible, it made them hyper-visible...

Random Site of the Week: Vintage Pens

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 14:24:39 PDT

Another fine fountain pen reference, this one founded and maintained by David Nishimura. There are a many additional resources, including for those who want to do such astonishing things as sell their fountain pens. Like the previous random site, its reference section includes well-written essays with illustrations to assist in refurbishing fountain pens, among other tasks.

New Living Memory Document: More Than a Colourful Character

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 23:31:09 PDT

Circa 2008, I read about a mysterious Métis woman in a prose-poem recounting historical women's lives by the late Sharron Proulx-Turner, she walks for days inside a thousand eyes. This mysterious woman was identified as "Madame Houle," who despite standing out in various colonial records, still had next to no information about her. For one thing, it seemed she had no name of her own, which is genuinely not a Métis thing. How does a person get famous enough to turn up in fur trade records, yet somehow remain all but a cipher, easily mixed up with the male François Houle, who worked from time to time as a fur trade interpreter and steersman...

New Thoughtpiece: A Quiet Signal Re-Boost

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 16:01:20 PDT

In light of the grave events of the past several years, including increasing levels of warfare, general social unrest, and the appalling necessity to find ways to counter the destructive impact of so many western governments revealing themselves to be authoritarian oligarchies, many people are worriedly discussing tactics. If the ballot box is not directly useful, if voting is not an effective influence on the people currently exercising a monopoly on force and control of the economy, what do we do instead? It never fails, as soon as the question of meaningful opposition comes up, people immediately leap to the real and virtual microphones to bleat that we must not be violent, we must never be violent, we must only use non-violence. To be blunt, the people saying this are either cowards or stupid. A person who fights back against an attacker is undeniably being violent, but self-defense is ethical and appropriate, and that can be extended to societies. Certain societies and governments are treated as having the right to self-defense all the time, no matter what they do, and others do not. It is also undeniably true that resorting to violence has many...

Random Site of the Week: Richard's Pens

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 15:58:05 PDT

A lovely site empty of javascript, full of reference information on fountain pens and their repair. Founded by Richard Binder and originally a part of his fountain pen refurbishing and repair business, the site's reference pages include extensive diagrams and photographs alongside a thorough catalogue of brands, filling mechanisms and the like.

New Thoughtpiece: The Military Would Really Like Us to Forget the Metadata Problem

Sat, 9 Aug 2025 21:09:59 PDT

Just because every effort has been taken to persuade us to forget about Edward Snowden and Wikileaks and all the other whistleblowers and indications of how much metadata about is collected and abused, does not make it harmless. If it were, there would not be a still burgeoning market for it and the ever more obvious folding of advertising corporations into the military industrial complex to get around laws meant to prevent governments from spying on citizens. Nor would there be a constant drum of cracking exploits against deliberately backdoored by the manufacturer microsoft systems to extract more specific data in hopes of selling the data to those hoping to use it for phishing campaigns and other nefarious purposes. But the latter is always going to be around in some form where a society has to use some form of shared secret to manage transactions, whether those transactions be of money, or goods, or sensitive information. Metadata is the special interest and trade item of spies and the strangely distorted minds of people engaged in the oxymoronic work of "military intelligence." In reality, the majority of metadata is collected with a view to manufacturing pretences for oppressing people. This is unfortunate, because there is a genuine role for metadata collection...

Random Site of the Week: Network Time Protocol Project

Sat, 9 Aug 2025 21:08:13 PDT

Home of documentation and the free/libre software package for the critically important timekeeping and synchronization software across the internet. Its documentation is reasonably detailed, although they do have a redirect to the current version that is automatic without indicating where the redirect goes to, so do cross-check that. The current documentation series is 4.2.8.

New Thoughtpiece: Stories That Haunt You

Sun, 3 Aug 2025 13:58:03 PDT

One of my great hopes is that in the near future there will be a full-on omnibus edition of Alice Sheldon aka James Tiptree, Jr. aka Racoona Sheldon's stories in one big book. (To my knowledge there is only one collection of 18 of her stories recently in print.) Sheldon lived a remarkable life, summarized in a brief JSTOR Daily article by Matthew Wills in july 2018, The Woman Behind James Tiptree, Jr. With no sense of irony or dissonance, Wills describes Sheldon's unconventional for a man but in fact quite conventional for many women career, including women who did not share Sheldon's feminist or adventurous leanings. For example, she earned her PhD in psychology after returning to post-secondary education in her forties. She worked at diverse jobs to make sure ends met, from her famous time in the united states cia and before that working in world war ii intelligence, to chicken farming and women's time-honoured and pioneered career of professional writing....

Random Site of the Week: RedSails.org

Sun, 3 Aug 2025 13:55:21 PDT

A site founded by several scholars of the genuine leftist sort, concerned with the problem of how to overcome and end a viciously exploitative capitalist economy. The contributors and compilers declare themselves "pro-Stalin (against historical nihilism, anarchism, etc.), pro-China (for their chosen road of Reform and Opening Up and against 'Maoism' and Sinophobia), and pro-'identity politics' (for a broad understanding of class and against the idealization of 'patriotic white workers' as the revolutionary subject, etc.)." If nothing else, it is good to read to see what they mean by these provocative claims and browse their translations of still poorly available works.

New Essay: Computers by Women: A Counterfactual Exploration

Sat, 2 Aug 2025 19:49:13 PDT

Contrary to popular belief, women were in at the start of the development of computers, from the early mechanical machines of the european industrial revolution to the electromechanical and then wholly electronic ones of the twentieth century. Women dealt with hardware and software alike, programming and loading the machines when the only way to do so was literally to change their wiring to when writing programs in assembly. Yet not only has computer science become either relentlessly hostile to women or dumbed down into something unrecognizable to everyone, men like to claim women can't cope with computers. What is going on here?

New Thoughtpiece: Some Festive Thoughts

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 16:12:48 PDT

For many understandable reasons, people in canada and the united states alike are deeply concerned about social cohesion, its apparent lack, and what we are going to do going into more difficult social and environmental conditions. I admit to being annoyed by many of the loudest, or at least most signal-boosted by the mendacious mainstream press when they sound off on the subject. These never fail to be the same people who insist that fundamentalist capitalism is the only way to run an economy, the only way to live, so people should just expect to move for work or starve, and they should pulling their own weight, not expecting assistance from their families. These are the same people who insist that the only good government spending is for the military and to subsidize costs for those supposedly oh so independent capitalists. Then they complain that women are not being forced out of the paid workforce to provide the basic reproductive labour of society somehow for free, while also insisting that all property should be private property. Pro tip on trying to somehow make a living "for free," it takes endless hard work and depends on access to the land in order to achieve some semblance of secure access to safe food and water. Another thing these most signal-boosted proponents...

Random Site of the Week: Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 16:11:05 PDT

Founded remarkably late, in 1998, but quite busy since. Among the society's regular activities is their three-times yearly journal usually featuring previously unpublished work and a series of member-only and open events. They also fundraised and built a formal memorial to Virginia Woolf in tavistock square.

New Thoughtpiece: Nice Try, No That's Not What Happened

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 23:45:58 PDT

When I began to hear the first rumblings of the latest google public relations debacle in the form of an "AI" image generator so tuned to be "diverse" it produced multiple images of racialized people as nazis, honestly I thought it couldn't be true. No, I was sure what had happened was a decontextualized portion of an article from The Onion or some other satirical publication was showing up in my news feeds. Not a few of the better of these do produce headlines and stories that end up being shockingly similar to the truth after a few months or years, but this just sounded too good to be an example. Besides showing up google, which should probably stop wasting time and money on the "AI" scam while it still has some credibility and real computer programmers left, it hit all the hot buttons of the moment. These include reasonable concerns about the ways in which "DEI" initiatives are abused in the workplace to create an appearance of improvement while actually making matters worse and poisoning the workplace. So I spent some time...

Random Site of the Week: University College of London Bloomsbury Project

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 23:43:41 PDT

Many people have heard of "Bloomsbury" in the context of the life and writing of Virginia Woolf, although like most parts of a city as old as london, Woolf's tenure there added to a lengthy history. In Bloomsbury's case specifically, it has a remarkable history of reframing and construction as an intellectual centre deliberately intended to ensure learning and literature were open to anyone of any class or sex.

New Thoughtpiece: Peculiar Resonances

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 12:42:50 PDT

Unfortunately, here is another thoughtpiece on the theme of less than desirable echoes of past events, actions, and ideas. I did not expect there to be another one, in spite of the events of the past several years, including proxy wars, heinously and deliberately mishandled pandemics, and canada's new and growing reputation for having quietly resurrected the notion of "life unworthy of life" via its "medical assistance in dying" program. (For a very brief introduction to that debacle, see David Moscrop's 2 may 2024 article in jacobin, The Canadian State Is Euthanizing Its Poor and Disabled.) No, that is not what I expected at all when finally getting to a collection of notes...

Random Site of the Week: Michigan Feminist Studies

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 12:40:40 PDT

An open archive of the papers published from 1974 -- 2010 in the four related university of michigan publications in feminist studies, occasional papers in women's studies, new occasional papers in women's studies, and papers in women's studies. Many classic articles were published in these journals, and the site itself is accessible without javascript.

New Thoughtpiece: On Supposed Space Travel

Sun, 6 Jul 2025 20:27:47 PDT

With the recent developments in the unexpectedly long functional life of the Voyager I space craft, which is apparently on the verge of being reprogrammed to work around corrupted memory sectors so that it can continue transmitting data back to Earth at least a little longer, interest in space travel has received another fillip. After all, aren't humans dealing with what is more and more undeniably at minimum highly disruptive and fast-moving climate change? And haven't humans explored the whole Earth? Space must be next! We must go to Mars, insist a curiously homogeneous group of hyper-rich men who I strongly suspect use "we" in a firmly exclusive sense. There seems to be a strong current of people who are scientists, authors of speculative fiction, or both, who in their reflections on the potential for space travel declare doing so an absolute necessity. Not a necessity to survive the changes on Earth, but in order to not have "limited lives" on Earth. This is the...

Random Site of the Week: Solon Law Archive

Sun, 6 Jul 2025 20:25:33 PDT

A truly old-style website in the sense of it being a passion/hobby project for a person seeking to improve a lack of accurate information online. This archive was founded and continues under the aegis of computer information specialist William F. Maton in 1994, it seems in relation to the first version of the ill-named "free trade agreement" between canada and the united states and its extension to include mexico.

New Thoughtpiece: A Humane Art

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 21:45:21 PDT

One of Virginia Woolf's last essay collections, The Death of the Moth, includes a brief essay reflecting on eighteenth century english politician Horace Walpole's letters, "The Humane Art." Brief though the essay is, it includes some wonderful turns of phrase, such as the observation that letters are "the humane art which owes its origin to the love of friends." She asks directly and indirectly important questions about the professionalization of writing and the subsequent effects on letter writing. "Was it, then, the growth of writing as a paid profession, and the change of focus brought with it that led, in the nineteenth century, to the decline of this humane art?" Woolf isn't just asking about letter writing, but also about the impact of the transformation of human relationship into a source of copy, and how what is left after all the other forms of media like newspapers and advertising...

Random Site of the Week: National Aboriginal Document Database

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 21:43:18 PDT

A remarkable survivor from circa 1999, and well worth looking through before it is finally caught up in a canadian federal server sweep and deleted or archived. The collection of documents was made, coded, and linked up by Six Nations GeoSystems with funding from the Aboriginal Digital Collections Program.

New Thoughtpiece: Troubled Techbros

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 22:48:11 PDT

In the process of cleaning up a collection of very old bookmarks, identifying them again, deleting the now superseded ones and so forth, I found a link to a book, Better Without AI by David Chapman. I have no real argument with the blunt claim of the title, and had intended to have a closer look at the arguments Chapman presents and for what he had in mind as alternatives. Rather to my surprise, this book comes across as a sort of intellectualized version of Elon Musk having an attention-getting tantrum in public about the risks of "AI." Even though Chapman intended to thoroughly puncture lots of silly scenarios, by spending so much time and text on them he undermines his own points there. Truth be told, I found his additional section Gradient Dissent better focussed and much more instructive in terms of arguments against what is being referred to as "AI," what this "AI," actually is, and proposals for better research paths and applications of computers to automation. The contrast was such that I found myself wondering, who the heck is this guy?...

Random Site of the Week: Midwestern Marx

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 22:45:54 PDT

A novel and intriguing project and organization in the united states with a genuine understanding of Marx's method of historical and economic analysis combined with a genuine respect for the working class. Their accompanying blog is also reasonably active and features substantial posts rather than the frustrating overviews so common online today.

New Thoughtpiece: More Thinking With Ursula K. Le Guin

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 16:47:44 PDT

As I come reluctantly to the final entries in Ursula K. Le Guin's blog, inevitably in the wonderful and bittersweet sense, I return to a special gem from february 2014. Not being a follower of asocial amplifiers, perhaps her remarkable eighty-second post made a great splash and I simply missed it. Somehow I doubt that though, in light of what has been going on since. This wonderful post is Belief in Belief, in which Le Guin firmly opposes the inappropriate conflation of the verbs "know" and "believe." She does this in the best of ways, the prickly sort of way that makes you wonder uneasily what the heck she is going to write next, but following her with the confidence gained from her previous work. Le Guin may make her readers uncomfortable from time to time, not gratuitously in anyway, but because she trusts the sense and honesty of her readers. She declares up front that she does not think that "the credibility of a scientific theory and the credibility of a religious scripture are comparable," and furthermore, "And I want to write about it because I agree with [Charles Blow] that issues of factual plausibility and spiritual belief or faith are being -- cynically or innocently -- confused, and need to be disentangled." It is extremely difficult not to quote too much, I went back several times snipping and clipping to avoid doing so. Please read the original...

Random Site of the Week: Canada's History

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 16:45:11 PDT

Set aside the dubious title taken up by this "charity" (most of its money comes from corporate sponsors including founder HBC, Molson, and TD Bank) that produces this physical and digital magazine, as it is an interesting window into mainstream ideas about what "canada's" history includes and how best to present it. They favour the pseudo "two nations" model of "canada," including pushing french and english over all other languages.

New Thoughtpiece: Reading Footnotes Can Be Rewarding

Mon, 9 Jun 2025 18:36:17 PDT

I have something of a love-hate relationship with footnotes. They are a clever invention, at their best when skillfully combined with endnotes. For instance, some of my favourite books have used endnotes for reference citations, while using a judicious smattering of footnotes to provide apparatus such as definitions or extra information which are not strictly necessary, but good to have easily at hand. In especially mad and wonderful cases, the author has fallen in with a wonderful book designer with whom they have used citation endnotes, informational footnotes, and outside margin comments and/or section summaries. Not many books receive such treatment, because even in the computer-based book design world, that is a lot of work in terms of layout, and authors and editors have to do quite a bit of work to find the balance that achieves genuine usefulness rather than self-indulgence. There aren't many writer-designers even who can manage to flirt with the edge of self-indulgence and get away with it. Edward Tufte is one. Unfortunately, especially...

Random Site of the Week: Ipperwash Inquiry

Mon, 9 Jun 2025 18:34:04 PDT

An important electronic version of the records from the 2003 -- 2006 inquiry into the ontario provincial police murder of Dudley George in 1995 during an attempt to drive peaceful Anishinabeg occupants from "Ipperwash Park." That provincially defined park was defined on top of lands the federal government had taken from the Anishinabeg and promised to return.

New Thoughtpiece: Ode to the Command Line

Sun, 1 Jun 2025 01:46:47 PDT

You could call this thoughtpiece a counterpart or even a counterpoint to a much older one in which I captured for posterity my delight in the apple macintosh before it vanished forever, Ode to the Old Mac. For those readers who have been following along for a good while, or who have delved into the thoughtpiece archives, I have reflected since at intervals on the extremely tragic trajectory of apple software and hardware alike since, and my days buying apple hardware ended well over ten years ago now. I am keeping a hopeful and interested eye on the helloOS system, which is a more active and promising reimplementation of apple's original human interface guidelines than even puredarwin (the latter may perk up, but hasn't in several years now). Both are nonproprietary. But much as I appreciated the old mac, and the first promise of the early macOSX days, I was remiss in not speaking up about the importance of the command line. To be sure, at first it was far from a tool I liked much, due to my original introduction to it in a distorted and heinous form...

Random Site of the Week: [British] Archaeology Data Service

Sun, 1 Jun 2025 01:43:37 PDT

One of the more sensible approaches to adapting computer programs and databases to uses outside of the military. In this case, to gathering archaeological records that the british authorities consider properly public heritage and that should be systematically preserved. A good example to start with is the records from the excavations at spitalfields.

New Essay: The Artists of the RCAP Report

Sun, 25 May 2025 18:46:42 PDT

Among the many publications of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in canada was an all-important executive summary of the five volume final report, titled People to People, Nation to Nation. It is represented on the publications canada website by a disgraceful greyscale pdf. This wreaks havoc on the legibility of the photographs, graphs, and carefully selected artwork used to illustrate it. Besides disrespecting the achievement of this publication, including its unusual respect for the non-technical reader, it at best muffles the co-narrative created by the images. That is, there are at least three composed co-narratives: the main text, its apparatus of tables and graphs, and the artwork. "Artwork" is the best term to cover the different types of image subsequently photographed and inserted into the text. This essay explores one interpretation of the artist's narrative.

New Thoughtpiece: What Is Speech?

Sat, 24 May 2025 23:26:55 PDT

I know, this seems at first read like one of those ridiculous, obvious questions. Paraphrasing my trusty OED, "speech" is when a person expresses their emotions and thoughts usually by means of sound made with the mouth and vocal cords. In lieu of the usual physical means to speak, a person may sign, or write out what they mean instead. Okay, so far so good. This seems to cover the major basic cases without de facto denying the expressive abilities of persons who are deaf or dumb, or who need to use other than their mouths and vocal cords to speak for temporary reasons. More often than not, "speech" comes into question when people in the united states are arguing about what they refer to as "freedom of speech," which I understand actually refers to "freedom from curtailment of speech by a government, especially a federal government." This leaves a genuinely uncomfortable field for private entities to strive to interfere with freedom of speech, most infamously the very rich striving to impose arbitrary limitations via...

Random Site of the Week: The People and the Text

Sat, 24 May 2025 23:24:33 PDT

A major project of documentation and bibliography of Indigenous authors and their works. Phase one covered materials published up to 1992, and phase two materials published up to 2012. The project is not restricted to fiction or works deemed to be fiction in mainstream terms, allowing it to engage with many historical and other books and articles often otherwise ignored, especially for the pre-1950 period.

New Thoughtpiece: Private Notions

Sat, 17 May 2025 14:42:27 PDT

The challenge of fending off the various hucksters claiming that "privacy is dead" and "you don't care about privacy unless you have something to hide" or "you don't really care about privacy or you wouldn't be using [X]." As is too typical of hucksters, they are full of babble intended to encourage our insecurities and spur us to a minor form of panic, which renders us into easy marks. In spite of myself, I occasionally find myself feeling frustrated by the waste of the real talents of these fast talkers on such miserable and socially destructive activity. Certainly I was prone to this in my younger days, thanks to less experience and not having much information for or against what they were saying, apart from recognizing the mannerisms and speech structures so typical of hucksters of all kinds. I suppose though, that in a backhanded sort of way a huckster can indicate something socially useful: what the latest authoritarian angle of attack is. Those attacks always start small and apparently unimportant, to see if we're asleep on a convenient topic. They...

Random Site of the Week: National Centre for Collaboration in Indigenous Education

Sat, 17 May 2025 14:40:18 PDT

An intriguing site with many useful links, publications, and information to connect with others involved in Indigenous education, especially language revitalization and history. The links in the resource library are prone to going stale, but so far most items are still available in archived form. Many instructors will be especially interested in the sample lesson plans.

Addition to Found Subjects in the Foreign Section: Pokorny's Proto-Indo-European Etymological Lexicon

Fri, 16 May 2025 00:04:06 PDT

In the course of researching the indo-european concept of the stone sky, I stumbled upon Academia Prisca and its at once fascinating and quixotic quest to reanimate proto-indo-european (PIE) in europe. This perhaps absurd quest has inspired considerable research, digitizing, and creative work, and it well worth the time to go to the main site and look around. As it happened, a digital version of Pokorny's PIE lexicon was one I very much hoped for and was delighted to find on the site. However, they ended up deleting the html single file version and falling back on a new format I found uncongenial to read and search. Luckily Pokorny's dictionary is now in the public domain and the Academia Prisca version is under a Creative Common license permitting copying provided due credit is provided and it is not altered into a derivative work.

New Essay: The Trouble With "Born This Way" Arguments

Mon, 12 May 2025 17:33:41 PDT

"Born this way" claims are among the most tempting and alas most dangerous claims any group of people can try to use. The dangers are of course quite different for people who are part of the oppressor class than for people they oppress. This makes the dangers very hard to see or take seriously, as can be observed in the case of many young lesbians, and remarkably, a growing number of heterosexual women. Disagreeing with claims of being "born this way" in terms of sexual orientation frequently evokes astonishing levels of hostility and attack from otherwise easy to get along and work with lesbians. So what is the trouble with this type of argument, and why might challenging it be considered such a threat?

New Thoughtpiece: Tone Deaf Messaging

Sat, 10 May 2025 12:01:49 PDT

These are in so many ways, excruciating times. When old certainties are shown up as nonsense and the last of zombie colonialism becomes impossible to ignore because the smell has overcome the undertaker's make up and preservatives, the result is anything but pleasant. I say this all too aware how very fortunate my circumstances are compared to so many others in the world. An awareness long far from academic. Matters have developed far enough now that even the grim process of how committed capitalists carve off more and more things and ideas to put a price and a marketing plan on them, especially if they could otherwise interfere with the colonial world they love best, now happens quickly and before our eyes. I did not appreciate at first what a warning the sneering term "social justice warrior" was of the beginnings of this very process as applied to genuinely useful and yes just action. Such terms are the bellwether of a cooptation exercise, in which providing an appearance of doing right is more important than actually producing meaningful change. In fact, it is deliberately encouraged in order to counter and prevent meaningful change. More than one keen eyed and sharp eared entrepreneur picked up on old attempts to shut down meaningful change by those claiming...

Random Site of the Week: Cat Specialist Group

Sat, 10 May 2025 11:59:37 PDT

A non-profit organization based in switzerland including many scientists engaged in work to conserve habitat and safe conditions for cat species around the world. Among their modest publication line up is the biannual Cat News and an free to read and regularly updated catalogue of cat species including excellent photographs and text. A basic membership costs 60 swiss francs annually.

New Essay: Gedit Snippets

Wed, 7 May 2025 22:55:23 PDT

Ironically the GNOME project has just deleted the snippet plug in as of gedit aka Text Edit 48, but the material pulled together in this brief essay remains applicable to earlier versions and Pluma on the MATE Desktop. Basically, I have set out some basics that were not wholly clear in the original documentation, a few annotated examples, and links to some original documentation.

New Thoughtpiece: The Meaning of What We Can't Or Won't Imagine

Sat, 3 May 2025 16:30:17 PDT

There is a poet who has been writing a poem almost every day, day on day, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is still not over, so he is still writing. He goes by "Z.M.L." and posts his now hundreds of poems on social media and the excellent website and blog Librarian Shipwreck. I did not encounter these wonderful, bittersweet encapsulations of these terrible times until somewhere around the eightieth week. They are short poems, some of which will inevitably stand up better in time than others, and I sincerely hope his circumstances allow a publication of these poems on paper as well as online, in their entirety. In so many ways, he has captured the feelings so many of us share I think, in a few powerful words. The shock, the disbelief, the horror of realizing that what many of us have believed, in our heart of hearts, that there were enough people in the world in the the right places and willing to act in meaningful ways to counter the people whose motivations are so vicious, so self-centred, they would ruin the world just to declaim proudly they alone did such terrible things, because they were the only ones bold enough to make the world perfect....

Random Site of the Week: On the Woman Question

Sat, 3 May 2025 16:28:33 PDT

A new blog founded by feminist scholars hoping to reinvigorate the strands of feminist theory and organization informed by the theoretical methods applied by Karl Marx, especially the method of historical materialism. It is still looking for additional contributors.

New Thoughtpiece: Anti-Intellectualism is Hardly a "Working Class" Position

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 17:56:29 PDT

One of the most frustrating, and frankly cruel parts of the way knowledge of their own history is denied to most people, is how this very denial can be manipulated to persuade them they "must believe" and "must be" certain things, no matter what. Take for instance the working class of any given place or time, who are so often declared invisible to history because they can't easily be reduced to a few sociopathic "heroes" as if it is a shame not to have such people running roughshod over the community. Let's consider a specific and yes easily accessible example, for those of us living in anglophone countries, the nineteenth century working class in england and its extensions into such colonies as canada, australia, and new zealand. (The united states is a related but pointedly different case due at least as much to the role of government-gangster attacks on unionizing and grassroots organization more broadly as its origins in secessionist british colonies.) An all too common canard is the claim and insistence that anti-intellectualism and being working class somehow go together, usually rationalized as "because the working class has no time r energy to read, let alone study." It is undeniable that time constraints...

Random Site of the Week: OpenETC - Free Range EdTech

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 17:53:37 PDT

The privacy-invading and otherwise vicious and authoritarian software imposed on students at almost all levels of education today beggars the imagination. This software is also proprietary and primarily designed to mine the victim's lives for data to sell. Principled educators want nothing to do with this, and are working on alternative free software, non-authoritarian, respectful alternatives, as in this project.

New Thoughtpiece: Chasing Pointers on Symbiosis

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 01:23:00 PDT

One of the pleasant tasks of a transition from the old to the new year, similar to completing a major writing project, is going through notes for posts and articles to see what tantalizing bits and pieces need at least some follow up. Caught up in my most recent collection was a note to the effect of "Lynn Margulis - Dorion Sagan - symbiosis - mitochondria used to be separate critters." This particular note is very old, it comes from a note slip tucked into a notebook pointing all the way back to a course I took as an undergraduate. By happy coincidence, Maria Popova at the marginalian undertook one of her signature annotated readings of Lynn Margulis' book Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution last year, so this note slip didn't just find its way to the recycling bin. Lynn Margulis was...

Random Site of the Week: Lesbian Home Movie Project

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 01:20:43 PDT

A united states-based project founded by lesbians who realized how remarkable it is that turn of the twentieth century lesbians have left both photographs and home movies to posterity. They were on the leading edge of technology adaptation. The kernel the project started from film maker and teacher Ruth Huntington Storm's (1888-1981) reels.

New Thoughtpiece: Outsourcing is a Cop Out

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 22:06:51 PDT

Admittedly I touched on this barely two thoughtpieces ago, but did not take up the point directly. Part of what inspired this thoughtpiece, besides the latest evidence of rampant censorship achieved via centralization, is the combination of an off-the-cuff blog post by Nico Carton, Keep Your Blog Simple! and a post he cross-referenced by Fabien Sanglard, All You May Need is HTML. Between the two of them, they encapsulate the core reasons a person who wants to have their own website is specifically not served by the software we are lured into using to make one and keep it running. Neither of them strictly rule out that some of the other more complicated options and add-ons may have utility, but they question assuming they must have utility because they are available and widely advertised as "easier" or somehow "necessary." However, at this point, it seems to me a person or business who seeks to delegate the very infrastructure of their website or anything else all to other people at a company pretending to do the job for free or for a moderate fee are simply copping out...

Random Site of the Week: Les faux amis

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 22:01:50 PDT

Pierre Igot's blog delving into the topic of "false friends," primarily between french and english. "False friends" are words spelled the same in both languages but that do not have the same meaning or usage. They are not exclusive to french and english, turning up among any pair of languages spoken by people who borrow words from one another and then develop word usage differently.

New Thoughtpiece: Presentism Strikes Again

Sat, 5 Apr 2025 22:33:51 PDT

I wrote a startlingly long time ago about "presentism" and its frustratingly vague common definition, one which continues to make it a slur more than a useful concept when invoked. In the title of this thoughtpiece it is intended to be a bit tongue in cheek, but also to refer to an example closer to what it seems to me "presentism" can be defined as. Perhaps there is in fact a better word applied to what I am suggesting here already. What I understand by "presentism" here, is the insistence that the only way to do things at any time, is the very way we are doing things now. The...

Random Site of the Week: WebODF

Sat, 5 Apr 2025 22:31:19 PDT

One of the follow on results of the recent move to open document formats with their basis in xml, is that it is possible now to produce javascript to enable these documents to be viewed in a web browser. Apparently one of the other possibilities now easy to manage via these formats is online editing in web applications, as usual by taking advantage of client computers to run the code. Part of what makes this especially interesting is its basis in open javascript.

New Thoughtpiece: A Self Cleaning House

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 21:44:41 PDT

One of my current research projects is a study looking into how women apply their capacity to invent new technologies and adapt those invented by others. Often forced to do the "shit work" and anything so long as it doesn't seem glamorous or otherwise potentially ego and status-boosting, women are not as likely to have either need or opportunity to apply their creativity to the challenges of weapon or propaganda dissemination design. It is not without reason a whole range of stories centring on men and their inventions feature them seeking to usurp divine powers in some way, usually epitomized by a search for absolute power over life and death of if not the world, at least one or a few people. Perhaps inevitably, after wading through far more writing...

Random Site of the Week: Open Document Format

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 21:42:04 PDT

One of the key places to learn about the open document formats, which are an important and necessary shift to overcome dangerous and insecure vendor lock in via the basic sorts of documents we have to use on computers every day. The pdf standard is already basically open, but regular styled text documents, spreadsheets, and slide presentations have only just reached that status. It's a bit fiddly to find the standard if you'd like to have a look, but they are kept online and up to date.

New Thoughtpiece: About Those App Stores

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 23:18:57 PDT

"Appstores" sound like a sensible solution to the challenge of helping software developers sell and distribute their software, provided we are not aware of how software was distributed and paid for before today's internet. That is, before the current pressure to reduce the web part of the internet to little more than a catalogue with a shopping cart and thousands of spy scripts attached to it, carved up among a few monopolistic corporations. If nothing else, this results in a considerable amount of centralization. What seems good about such centralization is the creation of a sort of consistent marketplace where smaller sellers don't have to set up and maintain their virtual storefronts, they just pay rent...

Random Site of the Week: EastmanReference

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 23:16:10 PDT

A hand-crafted, text-oriented site built up from pages of practical snippets too often buried in javascript- and css-overloaded pages by the various web consortia and linux players. From a pared down "just the facts" list of html5 tags to applescript key codes to dmg files under linux (this page too) and an introduction to http.

New Contested Document: Quite A Coincidence

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 23:37:07 PDT

These days most people in what is currently called canada are quietly aware that until very recently all Indigenous spiritual practices were treated as illegal by the colonial government. There were various levels of rationalization claimed for this right into the late twentieth century. I encountered more than one person who, no longer able to claim christianity should be the only religion allowed at all, and with Indigenous poverty too visible to allow sniping at supposed waste of goods and money, resorted to claims that Indigenous ceremonies mostly involved torture and mutilation. For many who have lived on the Plains, such people love to trot out what they think the Sundance entails. I have encountered individuals who strive for consistency, and so decry any practice for spiritual or other reasons than medical that require breaking the skin. This strikes me as a more reasoned position, although it does not actually get at the fundamental reasons colonizing governments ban Indigenous spiritual practices. Those governments are well aware...

New Thoughtpiece: That's Really Rich

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 21:54:38 PDT

By all accounts,the actual popular response to the ever rising levels of carbon dioxide is thoroughly unsatisfactory. Various people in high level government and non-government positions inveigh against poor take up of electric vehicles, so-called "smart meters" on electricity, single use plastic wrappers and containers, and always, always, against most people eating any meat whatsoever. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is still going up, the average temperature on Earth is going up, more weather-related disasters are happening and disproportionately impacting the poorest and often southern hemisphere populations. On top of that, more and more people who are outside of these groups of people scolding the majority of the world are declaring global warming nonsense because the climate naturally is always changing so piss off. I don't agree with this denial with denial that human driven carbon dioxide release and ecosystem destruction are pushing global warming and knock on climate alterations destructive to...

Random Site of the Week: 100 Rabbits

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 21:52:54 PDT

The website, blog, and general art project of Devine and Rekka, a pair of artist-programmers who live on a sail boat producing art, music, video games, and an ongoing guide to how to use computers without dependable internet or electricity. They have made a number of interesting choices and done some impressive hardware testing and documentation, including of the best day-to-day practical tools for non-computer tasks.

New Thoughtpiece: Monkeys Typing

Sat, 8 Mar 2025 02:12:07 PST

There is a sort of parable, intended originally I think to make a point about probability, in which an infinite number of monkeys whacking randomly on an infinite number of typewriters might eventually produce Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. I am deliberately providing my half-remembered rendition of the attempted parable, because this is usually how it is referenced, sometimes quite telegraphically. ("Monkeys, typewriters, Hamlet, you know.") A person with more mathematical expertise will recognize this as a rather colloquialized version of what is sometimes called the infinite monkey theorem, and there is ongoing argument about its origins. Jorge Luis Borges had...

Random Site of the Week: LAVA - Lesbian Action for Visibility in Aotorea

Sat, 8 Mar 2025 02:09:57 PST

An excellent site full of resources, from reports to relevant links, a pitch-perfect and often very funny FAQ, plus important news coverage and editorial pieces. It has been somewhat quiet recently, but the members for organization have been very busy preparing for their upcoming national census and elections.

New Thoughtpiece: Historical Cats

Sat, 1 Mar 2025 00:19:54 PST

The abiding human fascination with cats is incredibly old, and a ready source of jokes and teasing between friends. Nevertheless, it is by no means the bane of our present existence, a marketing phenomenon, nor its derivative, the "social media meme." Besides the often noted cat deities in ancient egypt, and the wonderful Maeki Neko japanese "beckoning cats" popular across much of asia and believed to bring good luck, there are distinctive cat breeds with evidence deep in the archaeological record wherever "domesticated" cats are found. There are plenty of practical reasons for the ancestors of those cats to throw their lot in with humans, not least the human propensity to create homes all too inviting for small rodents and other creatures small cats like to number among their prey. Contrary to what might be expected, house cats can be quite happy to eat beetles, so long as the beetles in question are not bad tasting and a reasonable challenge to catch. For a gently famous example, readers will be well served by having a look at the late Ursula K. Le Guin's blog...

Random Site of the Week: Julia Evans

Sat, 1 Mar 2025 00:16:59 PST

A surprisingly rare bird in the world of personal blogs still remaining online, one by a programmer who has a major sideline in producing educational zines. She has been blogging for approximately ten years so far, using a static website rather than a slow-loading database front end. If the index page seems slow, that is due to the external analytics javascript it loads -- the issue appears to be the externalness rather than code size.

New Thoughtpiece: Older Tone Deaf PR Campaigns

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 02:14:20 PST

Several thoughtpieces back, I wrote about projection and how I learnt about the notion of "elite panic" (see Military Projection). I commented very briefly on the wildly tone deaf and luckily withdrawn just in time "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters, one of a series of frankly stupid concepts for making the "poors" behave under stress. In the end I suspect the real reason the series was generally dropped came down to it making the total contempt of the rich for everyone else far too obvious. That aside though, it is interesting to take a second look at the rebirth of these old propaganda posters as memes and a capitalist profit centre. Obviously the statement on the poster as shown here is besides the point, nobody is paying much attention to that. So what is so pleasing about this...

Random Site of the Week: IndieWeb

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 02:11:28 PST

An interesting project intended to support people creating and maintaining personal websites, including enabling syndication and a sort of "social media-esque" connection framework. It is a sad indication of just how much setting up a personal website has been mystified in order to channel people into corporate silos where they will be crowdmilked. The organization, such as it is, has a "code of conduct" in the current style of these documents, so read carefully before joining up.

New Thoughtpiece: Whither the Web Browser?

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 20:29:43 PST

There is a core selection of programs the majority of us with the double-edged forces of working regularly with computers deal with on a regular basis. They include the standard office suite of word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program, a music and/or video player, email client, and a web browser. It's an astonishing thought, how many of us at any one time use less than ten programs to do almost all of our work from day to day. However, it seems there is an ambition among corporations selling software to reduce consumer computers to dumb terminals which run only a web browser, through which they will use "webapp" versions of those core applications. Quite apart from the blatant greed and obsession with control this ambition reveals, it is also an uncanny fun house mirror version of the emacs ethos. Emacs is of course the famous free/libre code editing program developed by Richard Stallman. He designed it with the ability to extend it using a dialect of lisp, and a default install has so many standard built in modules, including games, an email client, calendar generator and so on, that a person could effectively treat it as the user interface for their...

Random Site of the Week: hypercard.org

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 20:27:50 PST

A great site documenting the old hypercard format once a killer application and starter coding language on apple computers. Besides covering technical information and history, there are also options for making hypercard usable on modern macOSX systems. There are also a range of different clones to experiment with and use.

New Thoughtpiece: Unexpected Energy Sinks

Sun, 9 Feb 2025 18:38:01 PST

Energy usage is a fraught topic any time, although today because of the particular ways late stage capitalism demands energy waste while penalizing those who must strive to avoid wastage as much as possible because they can't afford it. Depending where we live and the options available, our big energy headaches may centre on gasoline for a vehicle, electricity in the household, natural gas in the furnace, heating oil or diesel. As more and more of us have rediscovered over the past decade or more, this is not just about the fuel source, it is also about the devices and machines we are seeking to fuel. Many of these have been redesigned to improve their efficiency at turning their fuel into whatever we hope and expect to get from them. More recently still, we can run again and again into devices designed to waste energy instead. And I do mean...

Random Site of the Week: Early Women Masters East & West

Sun, 9 Feb 2025 18:35:46 PST

A non-profit site focussed on women artists and spiritual leaders around the world. The site includes many photographs, transcriptions, scans, and an impressive number of references to additional works and accessible scholarly material. Based on references to it elsewhere, the site has been in development for at least ten years.

New Thoughtpiece: An Essay in Presentation or Persuasion?

Sat, 1 Feb 2025 20:46:02 PST

Perhaps this is written up in an obvious way somewhere, the various things the standard essay format we are taught in elementary school is for. Or rather, by standard essay format I mean the five paragraph essay, and by "we" I mean those of us who were taught how to write prose essays rather than bullet point presentations in the classes known under such labels as "english," and "language arts." My most recent teaching experiences suggest many young students no longer learn the five paragraph essay and hence the basic structure they can extend to any length they need to until their first year of college or university. It's not a difficult format, and certainly a very useful one. But it is not always obvious that it while it is eminently suited to presenting an argument to a conclusion, it is not intended at all as a means to describe a research plan. After all, the point of research is to study and synthesize data, not start with a predetermined answer and try to force the data to fit. But there is the rub, because the five paragraph essay...

Random Site of the Week: Persephone Books

Sat, 1 Feb 2025 20:43:49 PST

Founded by Nicola Beauman in 1999 to re-publish out-of-print books, with an office and store now located in bath, england, Persephone Books is a unique business. Being both a publisher and book seller is not so unique, but there practice of in-house end paper design and extension into fabric arts is. They have a modest amount of branded merchandise (all appropriate for a change!) and a free-electronically and modestly priced hardcopy magazine, Persephone Biannually.

New Thoughtpiece: Autodialers are Despicable

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 15:45:33 PST

For awhile I leaned toward declaring autodialers merely annoying, however, I have been forced to give up that leaning due to my observations of how often they call my office phone. According to the call log, bearing in mind autodialers are like spam emailers, they spoof their identification, my office has received over a hundred calls from different places in england, nearly as many from predominantly the southern united states, and around fifty pretending to come from three choice provinces in canada. They are not as bad for filling up voice mail boxes as they used to be, so now I rarely need to clear out snippets of immigration scammers trying to scare mandarin speakers from mainland china, tax scammers trying to convince me there is a warrant for my arrest for fraud, or the special subset who try to mimic credit card providers and banks. That said, the result for my regular office number is that it is all but unusable for incoming...

Random Site of the Week: The Lesbian Project

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 15:43:45 PST

Initiative founded by Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, and Martina Navratalova in march 2023 to contribute to the restoration of lesbian political and social representation and lesbian community. Their work includes research, lobbying, and leading lesbian events.

New Thoughtpiece: Competition is Destructive

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 01:24:52 PST

The title of this thoughtpiece was inspired by an especially ridiculous outcome I observed at my workplace recently, and would likely have faded away as lots of snap statements of this sort do. However, unlike the majority of cases in my experience, I found myself caught by an unexpected feeling of resistance to it. Unexpected, because while personally I am not terribly interested in competing with others if it can be avoided because regardless of who wins, bad feeling is a near impossible to avoid outcome, other people I respect insist competition is of great value, and there are competitive sports I enjoy. Well, at least there were what are usually considered competitive sports I used to enjoy, but like many others late stage corporatization has done damage to them. (Exhibit A, the utterly heinous state of the practice of calling games, because now the starting assumption is that nobody...

Random Site of the Week: Org Mode For Emacs

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 01:22:41 PST

An intriguing and well-appointed site detailing how to use the full features of the emacs org mode. This mode provides many features that other editors may achieve through a combination of hotkeys, local macros, and file extensions. Overall, an interesting approach and one some emacs users have successfully used to annotate electronic documents.

New Thoughtpiece: From Zork to Applescript - Thoughts on Computer Languages

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 20:50:50 PST

As far as I know, there are not too many younger programmers or gamers who spend much time with the text-only adventure games emulated in various ways from back in the days just post-dinosaurs of computers. That is, the computers the games were originally played on were not of the sort anyone was likely to have at home, but they could log into a mainframe on a university campus to run it. Those mainframes were still technically limited access, locked up the way servers typically are today. There was a brief interval when it was possible to peer at the "big machine" with the most RAM that programs with bigger datasets were sent to run on, but in those somewhat more innocent days they were perhaps not so interesting. After all, they were headless and easier to access by remote login anyway, provided you had the credentials. Fortunately, games like Zork and its many clones did not need much memory at all, and could be a great deal of fun, provided the player was able to figure out the game's vocabulary, which was not necessarily so simple. The...

Random Site of the Week: Mothers of the Resistance 1869–1870 - Red River Metis Genealogies

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 20:48:58 PST

Another or Norma Hall's extensive research and documentation projects. She seems to place these primarily under wordpress "free" hosting and then deactivate older versions periodicially, so it can be worth running a search on her name and that of the project to be sure to get the most recent version.

New Thoughtpiece: Writing By Computer

Sat, 4 Jan 2025 20:38:41 PST

While trying to solve a scripting puzzle in BBEdit recently, I happened upon the now fairly quiet macOSX software and hardware documentation oriented blog of Pierre Igot, Betalogue. Hopefully this blog is quiet because he is no longer experiencing any issues related to his computer set up, due to their being permanently resolved by happy means. If so, I am glad he has opted to keep the blog online, as his series of three posts (1, 2, 3) on scripting BBEdit to provide paragraph selection behaviour he preferred were most helpful in solving the issue I was working on. I also can't deny quietly enjoying a brief experience of the early-style web again, in the form of an information-rich, text-favouring blog post with no frills. While wandering about the blog archives, I happened upon a series of posts from 2016, the beginning of the dreadful era of the final destruction of the iWork suite, the pale reflection of the mighty ClarisWorks in even its best days. Today most people would have little nice to say about ClarisWorks, but I have mentioned in at least a very early thoughtpiece or two the extraordinary stability of that program, and how while it was not as fancy as today's office suites, it was brilliant at its job. It was ultimately...

Random Site of the Week: Zinn Education Project - Teaching People's History

Sat, 4 Jan 2025 20:36:29 PST

A rich site full of lesson plans and supporting materials for teaching either Howard Zinn's famous book A People's History of the United States and/or teaching united states history in the social history mode Zinn used in that book and his many other publications.

New Thoughtpiece: "Trauma" is Not a Get Out of Responsibility Card

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 16:00:13 PST

This strikes me as one of the strangest thoughtpieces ever to write, because on one hand it is about what I had understood was "commonsense," even though on the other hand I understood nevertheless that it was more commonsense in the honour than the breach. We all know, and this is one of those rare cases where it is genuinely possible to say, we all know numerous examples of people for whom there is simply no consequence for what they do in general. Those people are generally the richest men. In these grim times, male violence against women and children has been almost completely decriminalized worldwide, even as penalties for so-called "property crimes" are as draconian as ever if not worse. This is why formerly enslaved people and women generally have spent so much effort on winning and keeping respect for themselves as property owners who at least own their own bodies. If that can be held solid, then it is possible to enforce penalties against any person who attacks or injures them based on it being a property violation. I agree with any reader whose response to those last two sentences with...

Random Site of the Week: Rain and Thunder - A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 15:57:15 PST

Founded in 1998 and online since 2009, publishing articles by radical feminist women, and curating an important and extensive catalogue of resources both on and offline. They are entirely reader- and donor-supported, maintaining editorial independence. It is possible to order their back issues, which typically run around $7-10 u.s.

New Thoughtpiece: Thoughts on a Weird Argument

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 21:57:55 PST

While I can't claim to have ever had an argument with historical analysis based on material observations, nor Karl Mark and Friedrich Engels' critique of capitalism, which still holds up in its basics to this day, an element often repeated from their work has long bothered me. This element is at once very small, yet it gets trotted out again and again, especially by labour activists, and I have encountered people who look at me when I question it with real wonderment. How can I question it, and even a great many people who would consider themselves capitalists accept it, although they apparently take it in different directions. The element I am concerned with is Marx's description of the argument from the behaviour of bees versus the behaviour of humans. It is not wholly clear to me whether Marx firmly accepted this argument...

Random Site of the Week: History in the Margins

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 21:56:19 PST

Besides her own professional site, Pamela D. Toler also posts about a wide range of historical topics as part of her commitment to sharing her research with a broader audience. It is also quite clear that she is having a ball writing and sharing what she finds.

New Thoughtpiece: Tone Deaf Businesspeople

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 22:49:54 PST

There is an excellent biography of Cicely Hamilton at the We all have our moments when we fail to read the room, that is a frailty to which all of us are victim. But we are only victim a time or two, after that our amazing human capacity for pattern recognition and hopefully the assistance of colleagues, friends, and relatives corrects our misperception so that we do not repeat the mistake. At this point, I am seriously wondering about the businesspeople who are repeatedly given access to the media in order to whine about how hybrid work arrangements and teleworking are supposedly wrecking their businesses. One week it is the people who run businesses in downtown cores, next those who are in tourism ventures, next piss-poor managers whose idea of managing is constantly intruding on employees and glorying in their capacity to force people to come to "the office" whether it makes sense or not. The last group are unable to figure out why they have such horrific retention problems too. It shouldn't need...

Random Site of the Week: Alice E. Kober Papers at University of Texas at Austin

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 22:47:53 PST

I must confess to not being sure how a brooklyn university classicist's papers wended their way to the university of texas, but so they have. But for her early death from cancer in 1950, Kober would have continued playing an active part in the decipherment of Linear B, in which she had already demonstrated the Linear B inscriptions represented an inflected language. She did this it should be added, via a method combining linguistic analysis with hypothesis testing via hand cut and punched cards.

New Thoughtpiece: Feminist, Innovative Science Fiction Writer - Modernist?

Mon, 9 Dec 2024 18:56:32 PST

There is an excellent biography of Cicely Hamilton at the Time and Tide website. It touches on the major points of Hamilton's life and career as expected, from her early education in germany to her prolific writing and acting career, to her important work on the enforcement women's rights in general and women's suffrage in particular. The english National Portrait Gallery includes a wonderful charcoal study of her from probably the late 1940s, confirmed in her decision to refuse to marry and her feminism. The anonymously-written gallery text has an unfortunate tone. Luckily, the image is far more powerful than any half-hearted text would be. One thing that neither of these sources mention, which seems a bit strange, is that Hamilton wrote a powerful work of speculative fiction, such that she has an entry....

Random Site of the Week: (women) in Parenthesis

Mon, 9 Dec 2024 18:53:21 PST

The website portal into Drs. Clare Mac Cumhaill and Dr Rachael Wiseman's collaborative research project on the four philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch. This quartet is intriguing for more than their meeting during wwii and subsequent friendship: they actually founded an all-female philosophical school with considerable ongoing influence.

New Contested Document: Some Reflections on Indigenous Biography

Sun, 1 Dec 2024 01:26:58 PST

Somehow it is very telling that I have not been able to find any documentation of who E. Pauline Johnson was visiting stanley park with in 1904. For such a well-known author, the actual information about her life tends to the very sketchy, and most of the documentation available about her appears to be related to her professional life. Perhaps this is precisely as Johnson intended, since she does not seem to have left any longform, explicitly autobiographical writing. I have to hedge on this point because it is unclear what and how much of her papers her sister destroyed after her death, nor is it wholly clear whether this action itself followed Johnson's wishes. Yet I can't help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, there is far more we might someday learn via knowledge and records maintained at her home community of Six Nations on the Grand River. By this I don't mean...

New Thoughtpiece: A Stranger Tale

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 21:43:19 PST

Among the common books of my childhood were books of fairytales, by that time usually expurgated versions of those made famous by the Grimm brothers in beautiful hardcover editions with reproductions of painted illustrations that simply aren't printed anymore. One story always stuck in mind in apart from the others I had read, that usually referred to under the title The Pied Piper of Hamelin. The story had some magical elements, but it was really strange compared to the others in the collection I read it in. The other stories had talking animals, including the animals made temporarily into people in the famous story of Cinderella. But really, the story was not especially magical. The plague of rats were not say, sent by an insulted wizard or something, the way most misfortunes were in such stories. Somehow it just didn't seem to fit with the others, although I remember being quite impressed with the pied piper's clothes, and too young too understand "pied" referred to his clothes in the first place. In fact....

Random Site of the Week: Women's Declaration - USA

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 21:40:20 PST

The place to sign up for united states-specific Women's Declaration International webinars, as well as join campaigns and access resources specific to that country. Lesbian members have recently founded a caucus and written a remarkable and inspiring Bill of Lesbian Rights.

New Thoughtpiece: Such Slow Sites

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 01:28:01 PST

Perhaps this just reflects how long I have been working on and researching on the web, but I do remember a time when webmasters and web designers were seriously worried about page load speed and the legibility of their sites. They even chose to do daft things like have their sites rendered into the google-grift called "amp" lest their sites not appear in the carousel of gamed and thoroughly manipulated search results. This was supposed to fix the problem caused by their sites loading with too many huge images and built on the fly from grotesque databases of snippets plus plenty of javascript to inject insecure advertisements and intrusive pop ups demanding money or that the person use their even less secure "app" instead. At one time javascript was at least as much about trying to ease the load on early web servers as trying to spy on everyone with the temerity to visit a website, but at first the trade off did not seem ridiculous. It seemed....

Random Site of the Week: Adrienne Rich

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 01:26:08 PST

A fine site devoted to providing basic access to Adrienne Rich's extensive bibliography, including announcements of new posthumous editions and availability of video and audio recordings of Rich's many readings and performances throughout her career. It is also where to contact Adrienne Rich's literary estate to clear permissions and the like.

New Thoughtpiece: Desktop Design Philosophies

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 12:18:38 PST

At the moment I am facing the question of whether GNOME desktop has frustrated me enough to switch to one of the others I am already experienced with (my plan is to experiment with KDE on a non-daily driver this winter, as I haven't tried it yet). But it seems so damnably absurd that I am having an ongoing issue with how GNOME is handling application assignment to specific desktops so that they automatically move to their assigned desktop. Instead of this being built in the way it is in MATE or most BSD variants, it is necessary to use a not entirely dependable extension or research how to set it from the command line. I first used GNOME before the changes leading to the MATE fork, and so am aware that specific decisions were taken at GNOME on interface design....

Random Site of the Week: International Consortium for Female Sport

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 12:16:27 PST

An excellent new organization founded by female athletes to advocate for and maintain the integrity of female-only sports. They state up front, "Female athlete refers to a competitor who is biologically female at birth and who has not experienced male puberty."

New Thoughtpiece: Use-Awful Tech Forums

Sat, 9 Nov 2024 15:27:01 PST

I have been binge-listening to podcasts on gnu/linux lately, catching up on a backlog of episodes, and was fascinated to discover one discussing, albeit briefly, the state of gnu/linux user support. In general there is not much formal assistance out there, not unless a person has a personal subscription or works for a corporation that has a subscription with a company that provides gnu/linux support. The usual sources people are expected to turn to after the documentation are the various fora, which I had a dubious time exploring when trying to find a solution for implementing parallel columns in a document several years ago, an experience I described in...

Random Site of the Week: bitsavers.org

Sat, 9 Nov 2024 15:24:26 PST

An astounding archive of hand-scanned documents covering all aspects of computers and computing from materials in the site owner's collection. The scans and pdfs are of excellent quality, and both site mirroring and use of the documents in research are encouraged.

New Thoughtpiece: Why Read About That?

Tue, 5 Nov 2024 00:23:00 PST

An interesting question came up awhile ago, as to why anyone would bother reading books by people arguing that there are at minimum, other plausible candidates for the author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Besides the usual quotient of people who assume such arguments are only made by cranks and therefore it must be a waste of time, there are those who find it an odd and pointless thing to do. While nobody can win respect from another person with a closed mind and a belief that nobody who gives non-mainstream ideas a fair hearing deserves a hearing themselves, I have always found this apparent hostility to hearing the other ideas out puzzling. The bad ones really don't stand up to scrutiny, and the ones that seem to take off didn't do so merely because they were bad, but because they were taken up by nastily clever people who took advantage of a local societal tendency to groupthink in their time. We...

Random Site of the Week: Abacus - Mystery of the Bead

Tue, 5 Nov 2024 00:21:09 PST

An intriguing and long-lived site founded and maintained with continuing updates by Totten Hefflefinger and Gary Flom, of toronto and atlanta, respectively. The site indulges in no javascript or animations while providing extensive information, references, and an excellent selection of pdf documents. The proprietors provide little information about themselves, though it seems likely that they are teachers or historians.

New Thoughtpiece: It About Credit Where It's Due

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 00:12:22 PDT

By one of those wonderful accidents that happen when wandering around inside the stacks of a well-appointed library, as opposed to an imitation of a library with a coffee shop and a few banks of computers in it, is stumbling on older books that remain absolutely, but also sadly, relevant today. Among these is Dale Spender's entire published oeuvre, and her book Mothers of the Novel really ought to be in print. Heedless of its age, it is a veritable goldmine of references, and among the first to begin firmly giving credit where credit is due, instead of going along with false, sexist narratives. Part of what turned my attention back to this book was to see if Spender had included the Porter sisters...

Random Site of the Week: Susanne K. Langer Circle

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 00:09:30 PDT

A central site founded in 2020 for scholars studying and working with Susanne K. Langer's philosophical works, many of which focussed on the connections between aesthetics, emotions, and thought. Her first book, Philosophy in a New Key was and is enormously influential and a bestseller. Many, but by no means all. She was an important teacher and activist contributing to projects supporting world peace.

New Thoughtpiece: It Would be Anachronistic to Call it Trolling

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 22:10:08 PDT

In passing, a pair of commenters on a forum I occasionally visit got into an argument, quite a civil one all told. I had skipped over it to get to more interesting comments on the actual topic of the post, when part of the exchange caught my eye. One commenter asserted that perhaps the other might want to be more circumspect about the united states flag, since it was invented by the british east india company. Their counterpart did not challenge this, and it was such an intriguing idea I had to see if there was some real historical connections behind the claim. By this I don't mean any critique or claims about the united states flag as such. Flags don't give much room for diversity between size limitations, which colours stand up well to all weathers, and the sorts of symbolism desired. The various english and scots emigrants who led the founding of the united states were not unhappy to be english or scots. They were unhappy about what they deemed unacceptable interference in their efforts to make money and take over land in the americas. So it does make sense they would still want a flag referencing english or british history and commercialism. From an anachronistic perspective...

Random Site of the Week: GNUnet

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 22:07:20 PDT

A much-needed project to build a new network stack to support an internet that is not primarily oriented to military, surveillance, and propaganda uses. In other words, a network stack that is actually secure and privacy respecting, as well as resilient and suitable to real life needs. If the current malaise of the world wide web and other familiar parts of the internet are going to be overcome, this project is absolutely crucial.

New Thoughtpiece: More on Documentation

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 21:40:33 PDT

Last year a variety of experiences with unsatisfactory computer manuals and a well-used reference textbook led to a thoughtpiece called Documentation Woes. The major point I got to by the end of that exploration was an appreciation of how most computer manuals are two-headed monsters satisfactory to no one, and the probable reasons why. They often veer between such extremes as the equivalent of telling the reader how to hold a pencil, starting with reminding them such devices are usually held between the thumb and fingers of the dominant hand, and jargon and variable-filled explanations of how to load additional packages or set obscure variables to use a more arcane feature. One of the worst examples I have had to deal with was for setting up the compiler for a computer language I was learning. The details provided as to how to install the compiler and complete the basic set up were copious, repetitious, and utterly unnecessary. By the time a person has enough computer experience to add and configure compilers for relatively obscure older computer languages, they typically have such details down already. Where trouble ensued was...

Random Site of the Week: Old English Wordhord

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 21:36:24 PDT

A rather fun site by mediaevalist Hana Videen, based around her "Old English word of the day" series and her recently published book, titled logically enough, Word Hord, The: Daily Life in Old English. Truth be told I am not quite convinced about merely referring to "old english" instead of "anglo-saxon" as a means to "decolonize" and make the language and the period more welcome to more students. I think it would help far more to find or write more texts in the language besides the bible and christian poetry.

New Thoughtpiece: Not Just a Story

Sat, 5 Oct 2024 20:19:59 PDT

I don't remember when I first read or heard the welsh story of Cerridwen, her cauldron, or how the bard Taliesin came to have his skills in poetry, prophecy, and healing. (For something of a cole's notes version of the story and its associated meanings, see Judith Shaw at the Feminism and Religion blog, Cerridwen, Dark Goddess of Transformation, Inspiration and Knowledge, 30 october 2014.) Perhaps it was around the same time I was trying to look up more about the strange tangle of stories and imagery presented as "the story of the knights of the round table." It doesn't take much reading to find the "Arthurian legend" label has gradually been extended to cover a great many stories it shouldn't, primarily by more recent scholars and folklorists trying to arrange all the world's stories into one set of ur-stories. Tolkien was none too impressed by them as a whole, since he deemed them primarily french, the persistent celtic heritage of modern france notwithstanding. His suspicion that diverse materials...

Random Site of the Week: Betsy Damon

Sat, 5 Oct 2024 20:15:55 PDT

I first encountered Betsy Damon's work in a book by Elinor Gadon, who was discussing the imagery and symbolism of the performance piece, 7,000 Year Old Woman. Her work is always intriguing to think with alongside Judy Chicago's, because overall Damon tends to prefer a grittier, less polished finish with more evidence of the unruly unexpected. Damon is also a prolific author, with a brand new book out in 2022, Water Talks: Empowering Communities to Know, Restore, and Preserve Their Waters.

New Thoughtpiece: Another Interesting Literary Coincidence

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 22:27:45 PDT

Between the real world and literary world coincidences abound, not least because authors of novels shamelessly pillage what actually happened for scenarios to build their stories on. This is the nature of things, after all. In this case, while happily rambling through several different websites recounting the biographies of women in various fields and countries, I happened on the story of Williamina Fleming. For those who have convinced themselves that "single mothers" are a new phenomenon and all about supposedly irresponsible women who refuse to get married properly, Williamina Fleming's case probably won't change their minds. They are too committed to nonsense. Abandoned by her husband not long after her confirmed post-marriage pregnancy, Fleming did what many women in the late 1800s did when faced with such circumstances. Thrown on her own resources, she sought the most accessible "respectable" work for a single woman at the time, serving as a maid and housekeeper. This led her to an unexpected opportunity...

Random Site of the Week: Judy Chicago

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 22:24:57 PDT

Judy Chicago continues a vigorous and busy artistic practice ranging from installations, paintings, and performance pieces to writing, photography, and classes. Always controversial in the best and most thought provoking ways, her distinctive style and determination to overcome malestream attempts to dismiss her as only the artist from The Dinner Party continue to bear fruit.

New Thoughtpiece: Disturbing Evidence

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 22:34:00 PDT

The great challenge for propagandists everywhere, is to somehow create and maintain an effective means for censoring and deleting annoying evidence of previous propaganda lines that are no longer convenient. George Orwell created the now widely used term for this means in his novel 1984, the "memory hole." Many, many governments with more or less authoritarian pretensions have sought to achieve this. One of the most effective enactments of mass censorship of the local historical record looks to be that engaged in by the man who managed to install himself as the first roman emperor, Octavian. Stubborn evidence of his efforts at arranging the record to his benefit remain all the same, and he probably had the best conditions available for the portion of southern europe he controlled most directly of anyone then or since. Despite extraordinary eras of social change including deliberate attempts to destroy all earlier records in the americas and china, those efforts still did not succeed. This is quite amazing to think about, and it isn't just a product of human stubbornness and rebellion. It is also a product of the persistence and unexpected ways records are preserved in all manner of materials. Time after time, media...

Random Site of the Week: The Heretics

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 22:31:33 PDT

Website home of Joan Braderman's documentary film about the Feminist art movement, with a focus on the Heresies Collective, a significant participant in what was a worldwide drive contributed to by thousands of individual women and women's groups. All this it is worth noting, long before "the internet" and including extensive adaptation of newer visual techniques and performance modes. Don't miss the archive of the 27 issues of the Heresies journal.

New Thoughtpiece: That was a Surprise -- Not

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 14:35:21 PDT

A personal bugbear of mine, even though I do understand the reason the approach is so popular, is the penchant for reproducing the look and feel of microsoft windows in GNU/linux desktops. Due to the twists and turns of work opportunities, I have had to get familiar with and use very different desktops, from macOS in its powerPC and intel chip eras, Sparc unix boxes with something very like X-windows (that was over twenty years ago so the details are foggy), and far too many encounters with microsoft products. I have also gotten to know MATE, GNOME, and XFCE. A more recent, and very nice option I have seen turning up in installers is an option to choose layout style for the desktop, with the option to change it again later. Over the years I have also learnt how to make a desktop look very different using command line options and utilities. Well, except for in microsoft windows, in part because I have never had administrator privileges...

Random Site of the Week: Medieval Names Archive

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 14:33:13 PDT

Another partly society of creative anachronism inspired site, with a narrower focus on mediaeval naming practices. The site is still active and has at least sixty contributors building up pages of names based on language and culture as well as a notable anthology of articles. It is also well worth checking some of the resources on webmaster Ursula Georges' personal site, including an article that may also be mirrored on this archive, her guide on How to Read a Latin Dictionary.

New Thoughtpiece: Military Projection

Sun, 8 Sep 2024 00:27:07 PDT

One of the stranger sagas of the turn of the twenty-first century is the rediscovery and explosion into a meme of the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster, originally designed by the british government early in the second world war. Luckily this particular poster was never widely distributed, because it doesn't take much research into civilian records and the reports collated by mass observation to realize these posters would hardly have raised morale. They were more likely to have utterly infuriated people among whom were many survivors of the first world war fed up with the way their government and the military authorities insisted "the masses" would collapse into disorder and rioting in the event of any bombing campaign. The first world war had already shown the insulting projections from the reactions of male soldiers to bombardment and sexist stereotypes of women were so false that the government and military authorities should have been embarrassed but clearly were not and learned nothing. This does not make any claim against the bravery of...

Random Site of the Week: Viking Answer Lady

Sun, 8 Sep 2024 00:24:11 PDT

One of a number of fun sites partly inspired by participation in the society for creative anachronism in the united states, this one is of course focussed on the so-called viking age, roughly 800 - 1100 when people from the scandinavian countries decided to try getting rich quick by raiding much further afield. The site brings together an impressive amount of research, and its author and webmaster Christine Ward has also taken pains to make sure it works well without javascript.

Addition to the Moonspeaker Branch Edition of the Jargon File: Moo

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 18:34:33 PDT

According to the first edition of the UNIX Programmer's Manual (1971) by the unix hackers K. Thompson and D.M. Ritchie, moo is "a guessing game imported from England." As wonderfully laconic as this description is, rather more detail is desirable. According to version 7 of the UNIX manual, "Moo is a guessing game imported from England. The computer picks a number consisting of four distinct decimal digits. The player guesses four distinct digits being scored on each guess. A 'cow' is a correct digit in an incorrect position. A 'bull' is a correct digit in a correct position. The game continues until the player guesses the number (a score of four bulls)." In other words, this is the game "bulls and cows," and it has many implementations, including the version known as mastermind and the early shareware game Enigma.

New Thoughtpiece: More Modernity

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 19:46:22 PDT

Among the various thoughtpieces here are two from mid-2019 on the subject of rejecting "the modern," a strangely amorphous concept excellent for obfuscating reality. There didn't seem anything notable to add, especially after I had managed to put together some relatively sensible thoughts on the topic of the art movement known as "modernism." Then, quite unexpectedly in reading through the second, 2009 edition of Samir Amin's book Eurocentrism, I read yet another definition of modernity (on page 57 of the monthly review press version). According to Amin, "Modernity is based on the principle that humans create their own history, individually and collectively, and, as a result, they have the right to innovate and disregard tradition." I must admit that to me the two main parts of this definition are non sequiturs. Starting from the second part, which follows "as a result" is a truly strange thing to read. We are human beings living in a changing world and changing societies. Whether we mean to or want to, we will...

Random Site of the Week: Thomas Frank

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 19:44:17 PDT

Author of excellent studies of united states history, including an important debunking of the claim that populism is some sort of hideous evil. Besides his well-known books What's the Matter With Kansas, The People No and Listen, Liberal he is a founder editor of The Baffler which he worked on until 2010.

New Contested Document: Voting With Their Feet

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 19:09:01 PDT

Among the many books published on the theme of "hope in bad times" published between 2002 and 2005, one of the early bestsellers of the time came from the pen of Rebecca Solnit. This was the by turns poetic yet more often anodyne Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, which I read in a circa 2004 printing that seems to me must have been a paperback. But then again, I borrowed it from the public library, and public libraries lean towards hardcovers as they stand up to the rigours of cycles of borrow and return through slots and bins. In any case, I took note of a few specific snippets to follow up on, but hilariously, forgot to chase her footnotes in order to find details on the most interesting of them, the following two-sentence excerpt from page 126...

New Contested Document: Selective Hearing

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 23:14:15 PDT

There is a weary awfulness in the way mainstream media handles reporting on any events and consequences that are the outcome of deliberately destructive policies. In part because most of the people working in it seem to spend more time trawling "social media" for scandal and rubbing the more obvious parts of press releases off prior to reproducing them than investigating and writing up real reports. They are also fond of certain types of press conference, especially the ones held not too far from the central offices of the corporations they work for. Indigenous nations and organizations end up spending more time and effort than they would like on public relations to counter the sloppy racist memes and accusations the mainstream media mindlessly echoes in between bouts of performative apologies for amplifying racists over all others. It does not seem to be a corporate value to maintain basic coverage of complicated stories that must inevitably unfold over time, unless said story is something for capitalists to follow or sports. And these days, even sports are losing their...

New Living Memory Document: Were Métis Really Unwelcome?

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 19:33:43 PDT

From time to time in my research, I have encountered references or suggestions that Métis were unwelcome not only in settler towns but also in other Indigenous communities. Hence, these often 1980s-era accounts declaimed, unwelcome among both their mothers' people and their fathers', Métis were forced to become distinct people, trapped in-between, unable to succeed anywhere. This ridiculous and racist narrative is not seriously and overtly repeated anymore, but it does linger. Part of why it lingers, besides persistent racism, is that there seems to be a confused memory in back of the racist story. Like many Indigenous peoples with strong relationships to the plains and parklands, it was common for Métis to travel considerable distances in wide circuits over the course of a year. Portions and loops of this travel came of particular harvesting decisions for the year, visiting relatives and allies, and...

New Thoughtpiece: Destroy the Business Schools

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 14:23:20 PDT

Originally I was tempted to use a soft-pedalling title to this thoughtpiece, because I do have friends and acquaintances who are business majors of one type or another, and despite the socially destructive training business schools engage in, remained decent people. They are critical of the programs they completed, and a bit disappointed with its content even if they are pleased they were able to parlay the degree or certificate into a higher paying job. That acknowledged, I doubt many of them would agree with me about getting rid of the business schools all together. At one time Kevin Kelly, before Cool Tools fell over into a full-bore advertising outfit some years ago, had a post on a modest program of self-education instead of spending thousands of dollars on an "MBA." To be fair to Kelly and the latest version of the site, the 2008 post is still there...

Random Site of the Week: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 14:21:14 PDT

A leftist civil and political education organization founded in 1990, operating internationally. It produces a wide range of publications, brief articles, and multimedia presentations. Among the notable authors contributing to these are Barbara and John Ehrenreich, Nancy Folbre, and Walter Echo-Hawk.

New Thoughtpiece: The Tinkerbell Complex

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 23:19:04 PDT

Philosopher Susanne K. Langer's work is seeing a growing resurgence of interest, as is often the way of things in the field. Different arguments and analyses resonate with the challenges of a given time period. It may seem a bit strange at first to think of Langer in this context, even though her particular interest was in the connections between aesthetics, emotions, and thought. I am by no means well-versed in her work, but began to learn the rudiments of it via Emily Erwin Culpepper's theology dissertation, Philosophia in a Feminist Key: The Revolt of the Symbols. Culpepper provides a wonderful encapsulation of Langer's analysis and argument in Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, which "establishes symbolizing as a basic human need and constructive process of mind." Some time ago I encountered Langer's brief recounting of an unforgettable performance of "Peter Pan" in which the children in the audience were called upon to clap if they believed in fairies, thus saving Tinkerbell's life. The coercive element of this stuck in Langer's mind, and having had a similar experience at a different "children's performance" of another story, the basic outline of her anecdote stayed in my own memory. Yes, in both cases these are "just performances for children" but as the fierce conflicts over what is appropriate and reasonable to show and otherwise teach children, such performances...

Random Site of the Week: Monica Sjöö

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 23:16:40 PDT

The central site curated by Feminist artist, writer, and activist Sjöös family in her memory. It delves into the wider range of her many projects, from her central visual works to her books, including the best known, The Ancient Religion of the Great Cosmic Mother of All authored with scholar and poet Barbara Mor.

New Thoughtpiece: Narratives and Appearances

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 21:05:57 PDT

Some elements of our strange present are not terribly new, although the way "newness" and "individuality(TM)" are hogtied into media stories about how today is the pinacle of all time in anything and everything we can think of can deflect us from noticing it. For instance, the social conflict over the role of narratives and appearances is hardly a cutting edge argument. Ancient greek philosophical and artistic tradition found an important energy source in striving to determine the right balance between them. Their arguments for and against "noble lies" and on the question of whether what we now refer to as "fiction" in english can be harmful to individuals and subsequently to society at large are among the best known in the "western mainstream." They are hardly the only ones who added to a deep tradition of subtle thought and struggle over the meaning and ethics of valorizing appearance and narrative over practical considerations. Buddhists, Taoists, and other practitioners of explicitly meditative traditions have approached them from a different direction defined in part by encounters with what our minds are capable of when we strive to embody the paradox of consciously not thinking or meddle with experiments in sensory deprivation. Then...

Random Site of the Week: Monica Sjöö Art Online

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 20:58:56 PDT

An online gallery of a selection of Feminist artist and activist Monica Sjöö's visual art works. Prolific and hardworking, Sjöö produced hundreds of paintings and posters reflecting on women's rights and women's rites. This gallery was created and is maintained by her family.

New Thoughtpiece: Great Title, Troubled Execution

Mon, 5 Aug 2024 14:40:17 PDT

Nancy Leong is a law professor at the university of denver, and her book Identity Capitalists: The Powerful Insiders Who Exploit Diversity to Maintain Inequality reflects this as well it should. She brings together personal experience, legal analysis, some sociology, and even some very limited political analysis that she becomes very defensive about towards the end of the book. Her coinage of the terms "identity capitalist" and "identity capitalism" are apt, and they are well defined. There are many places where Leong's writing is laugh out loud funny, and her analyses, both legal and otherwise, often scintillating and a true joy to read. This is true even where I am inclined to disagree with her conclusions, because she generally sets out her arguments clearly and in a manner to encourage an honest and engaged reader regardless of the reader's personal views. Given my druthers, I would love to tell everyone to read this book with no caveats whatsoever. Alas that I cannot do that, and...

Random Site of the Week: Women'n Art

Mon, 5 Aug 2024 14:37:33 PDT

Natasha Mouran's site documenting the art and lives of women visual artists. So far many of her posts are for fairly recent artists, including many in current practice with their own websites. Moura is determined to keep this information available and to prevent these women artists from being lost to view at all or again, and so has licensed her site under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

New Thoughtpiece: There is No Marketplace of Ideas

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 00:42:55 PDT

One of the most corrosive and frankly stupid analogies ever made is the one between a marketplace and a free flowing discussion. At first it must have seemed harmless to most people, because they were diverted from its actual content by references to the ancient athenian agora. Never mind that the agora was a large, clear space used for public gatherings, among which were the gatherings for trading and selling, markets. The idea was to get us thinking about romanticized visions of political debates and of Socrates sounding off at his final trial about his principles and why athens should have pensioned him for life instead of giving him the death penalty. For now let's set aside the puzzling phenomenon of crediting athens in that period as having the most freedom and democracy anywhere when it was a slave state and precarious empire and the majority of the population had no right to participate in athenian politics at all. The idealized vision is undeniably inspiring, and a real goal to strive for: having and maintaining public debates where people strive together to come to a consensus on what to do about the issues affecting their lives. But all that has precisely...

Random Site of the Week: Projet Homère - Le site de la langue Grecque

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 00:40:41 PDT

A true tour de force by Hélène Kémiktsi in 2008 and in continuous development and diversification ever since. She includes an extraordinary number of verified resources for all dialects of the greek language, from grammars and dictionaries to translation tools and textbooks. She is also founder of a wonderful project to provide recordings of greek texts via librivox, including ancient greek texts using the reconstructed pronunciation.

New Thoughtpiece: Refusing Thought

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 06:03:46 PDT

Certainly there are times, places, and contexts in which nobody should have to think. Websites are a minor example, and these days not as widely experienced as they once were because so many newcomers to the internet have been misinformed that web applications are websites. There is a quick way to differentiate the two: if the web address takes you to a site that absolutely does not work without javascript turned on, even if you use the option to turn off the stylesheet in the web browser, chances are it's a web application. Still, I am less concerned here with the times, minor or major, when a person should not be expected to think and has every right to insist no thinking be required. Instead, I am more concerned with a persistent and growing phenomenon in which many people I know as well as strangers speaking in multiple venues angrily refuse to think and attack anyone or anything giving them pause such that they think. Many of the attacks are preceded by an angry invocation of an authority they insist has already told them what "the answer" is, and therefore no one has any right to think or question the authority. A moment before, or after they have calmed down, the same...

Random Site of the Week: Contra Chrome

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 06:01:46 PDT

A brilliant remix of a comic meant to announce a "new and improved" google chrome that unpacks what a surveillance and general privacy invasion nightmare it is alongside all of google's other products by Leah Elliott. It is currently available as an online series of pages or a 33 page pdf in english, german, and french, with more translations to come.

New Thoughtpiece: "You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think it Means What You Think it Means."

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 02:07:20 PDT

There are no doubt many other quotes from the 1987 cult hit movie The Princess Bride than the one featuring as the title of this thoughtpiece, but there are few so well known and so useful. The word, or strictly speaking, words, that brought this quote to mind again was the unfortunate "computer literacy." It has all the qualities of the most fatuous marketing-speak: tries to co-opt a real term to achieve a patina of authority, then uses the pseudo-authority to try to persuade people they should be anxious about something. From there of course the next step is to offer an expensive solution to the supposed problem conjured up to create the feeling of anxiety. Nevertheless, I am not unsympathetic to computer programmers who complained vociferously about computers and software aimed at a "consumer" market rather than exclusively at them. Not because I agree with such an attitude, but because many computer programmers despise mendacious market-speak, and in this they share a perspective with the majority of the world. This actually helps make some sense of the widely shared ire among many in the computer science crowd against apple, which by now is grudgingly recognized for its consistent advertising prowess. Yet this did not...

Random Site of the Week: Olympe de Gouges - English Translations of the Original French Texts

Sun, 14 Jul 2024 02:03:54 PDT

An ongoing translation project by Clarissa Palmer, herself a biographer and playwright. De Gouges was among the earliest bluntly feminist and highly effective female political activists in early modern france, and as is all too usual has been buried in obscurity under accusations of being a prostitute. She was in fact a bold theorist and social critic "whose vision is still so relevant today" as Palmer observes in her introduction to the site.

New Thoughtpiece: Unsurprisingly, Taylorism is Nonsense

Sat, 6 Jul 2024 17:02:44 PDT

To be honest, I am not convinced that there is such a thing as business philosophy, although I agree absolutely that there is plenty of philosophy relevant to business as much as to the rest of life. That acknowledged, that rare thing, a book dealing with "business philosophy" in a focussed and serious way is very much worth the read. I stumbled on Matthew Stewart's book while trying to find some more current secondary sources on the execrable Frederick Taylor, specifically some sources that talked about how he actually worked up his numbers. Somehow it did not surprise me at all to find critiques demonstrating that he faked his numbers, depending on the growing mystification of numbers and newfangled statistics in united states culture specifically. The blight of treating numbers as magic and beyond the reach of commonsense questions once arranged into a table or graph is a thoughtpiece for another day. For now, it is enough to say I traced a reference to Stewart because...

Random Site of the Week: Stuart McMillen

Sat, 6 Jul 2024 17:00:36 PDT

Australian non-fiction cartoonist with many intriguing long-form comics to his credit already, along with a series of shorter reflections on various issues that interest him. McMillen may be most famous so far for his Rat Park Drug Experiment comic and his trilogy (last part still pending) on the The Town Without Television.

The Moonspeaker

New Thoughtpiece: Actual Thoughts on Steampunk

Random Site of the Week: Michael Hudson

New Thoughtpiece: Revolt of the Tools?

Random Site of the Week: European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter

New Thoughtpiece: What's Good for Extraction is Not Necessarily Best

Random Site of the Week: Mother Tree Project

New Thoughtpiece: Funny Thing About Those "Last Human" Stories

Random Site of the Week: Spinwatch

New Thoughtpiece: Phylogenetic Trees are Cool

Random Site of the Week: Darwin Online

New Thoughtpiece: Alien Disappointments

Random Site of the Week: History of Parks Canada Electronic Library and Archive

New Thoughtpiece: Misjudging Oratory

Random Site of the Week: Spike Lives - A Biographical Database of the Lives of Workhouse Inmates

New Thoughtpiece: Employees are Not Children

Random Site of the Week: Theoi Texts Library

New Thoughtpiece: Main Character Syndrome is a Philosophical Problem?

Random Site of the Week: Alpennia

New Living Memory Entry: Treaty Making With First Peoples Comes *First*

New Thoughtpiece: It's Never Censorship Until It's *You*

Random Site of the Week: ArtHerstory

New Thoughtpiece: Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction, and Women

Random Site of the Week: Stalin Digital Archive

New Thoughtpiece: Not a Winning Strategy

Random Site of the Week: Fungi Perfecti

New Thoughtpiece: Giving Up on the Web is Both Childish and Cowardly

Random Site of the Week: Smarthistory

New Thoughtpiece: So Close, So Far

Random Site of the Week: Lierre Keith

New Thoughtpiece: A Dunk On "Canlit"

Random Site of the Week: Gilbert Strang

New Living Memory Entry: Independent, Connected, Historical, Present: Île-à-Crosse

New Thoughtpiece: If A Site is Blank With Javascript Off

Random Site of the Week: Feminist International Network Against Artificial Reproduction, Gender Ideology, and Transhumanism

New Thoughtpiece: Implications of Apple Logos

Random Site of the Week: Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering

New Thoughtpiece: The Warfare Nobody Talks About

Random Site of the Week: Tower of Babel, The - Evolution of Human Language Project

New Thoughtpiece: About Those AI Crawlers

Random Site of the Week: Academia Prisca

New Thoughtpiece: That's Ironic

Random Site of the Week: Canada Files

New Thoughtpiece: Storied Comics

Random Site of the Week: Grover Furr's Home Page

New Thoughtpiece: More Adventures in Program Documentation

Random Site of the Week: It's in the Blood

New Thoughtpiece: The Strange Life and Times of Grue

Random Site of the Week: Ursula K. Le Guin's Blog

New Contested Document: Quite A Coincidence

New Thoughtpiece: The Illegal Immigration Problem

Random Site of the Week: Special Interest Group for Computing, information, and Society

New Thoughtpiece: Interpretation Gone Sideways

Random Site of the Week: Amber

New Thoughtpiece: Say What?

Random Site of the Week: PermaLink

New Thoughtpiece: So-Called "Hunter-Gatherers" Can't and Don't Just "Wander"

Random Site of the Week: ArchiveBox

New Essay: Freedom Academy

New Thoughtpiece: Supposedly Invisible Mothers

Random Site of the Week: Vintage Pens

New Living Memory Document: More Than a Colourful Character

New Thoughtpiece: A Quiet Signal Re-Boost

Random Site of the Week: Richard's Pens

New Thoughtpiece: The Military Would Really Like Us to Forget the Metadata Problem

Random Site of the Week: Network Time Protocol Project

New Thoughtpiece: Stories That Haunt You

Random Site of the Week: RedSails.org

New Essay: Computers by Women: A Counterfactual Exploration

New Thoughtpiece: Some Festive Thoughts

Random Site of the Week: Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain

New Thoughtpiece: Nice Try, No That's Not What Happened

Random Site of the Week: University College of London Bloomsbury Project

New Thoughtpiece: Peculiar Resonances

Random Site of the Week: Michigan Feminist Studies

New Thoughtpiece: On Supposed Space Travel

Random Site of the Week: Solon Law Archive

New Thoughtpiece: A Humane Art

Random Site of the Week: National Aboriginal Document Database

New Thoughtpiece: Troubled Techbros

New Living Memory Entry: Treaty Making With First Peoples Comes First

New Thoughtpiece: It's Never Censorship Until It's You