With just days to go before my summer vacation, I find myself once again with a backlog of links that I didn't squeeze into the blog, and no hope of clearing them before I disappear into a hammock for two weeks, so it's time for my 21st linkdump - here's the other 20:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/29/pasticcio/#professor-at-large
1/
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/29/pasticcio/#professor-at-large
1/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/2
2/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/3
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues
One of the rewards for that campaign was a *very* special hardcover: a handmade, leather-bound edition of *Red Team Blues*, typeset by the typography legend John D. Berry:
https://johndberry.com/
3/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/4
https://www.demerrittstudios.com/
And printed by the master printer JaVae Berry:
https://www.jgraphicssf.com/
But this wasn't a merely beautiful, well made book - it had a *gimmick*. I had already completed a draft of *The Bezzle*, the second Hench novel, when I launched the Kickstarter for *Red Team Blues*. I had John Berry lay out a tiny edition of that early draft as a quarter-sized book, and then John DeMerritt hand-bound it in card.
4
j. graphics
j. graphicsCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/5
I offered three of these for sale through the Kickstarter, and the three backers were very patient as the team went back and forth on the book, getting everything *perfect*.
5/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/6
Look, I had high hopes for this book. I dote on beautiful books, my house is busting with them, and I used to work at a new/used science fiction store where we had a small but heartstoppingly great rare book selection. But these books are *fucking astounding*.
6/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/7
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720318331731/
As it happens, the next thing I'm going to do (after I finish this newsletter) is turn in the copyedited manuscript for the *third* Hench novel, *Picks and Shovels*, which comes out in Feb 2025.
7/
Limited edition Red Team Blues hardcover with nesting Bezzle
Cory Doctorow (Flickr)Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/8
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels
Of course, the majority of people who enjoy my books do not end up with one of these beautiful hardcovers - indeed, many of you consume my work exclusively as electronic media: ebooks and (of course) audiobooks.
8/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/9
But here's the thing: Audible refuses to carry my books, because they are DRM-free (which means that they aren't locked to Audible's approved players - you can play my audiobooks with *any* audiobook player).
9/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/10
https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff
Being excluded from Audible takes a huge bite out of my income - after all, they're a monopolist with a 90% market share.
10/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/11
This week, I discovered a new, amazing indie audiobook store called Storyfair, where the books are DRM-free and the authors get a *75% royalty* on every sale:
https://storyfair.net/helpstoryfairgrow/
11/
Help StoryFair Grow! - StoryFair Audiobooks
StoryFair AudiobooksCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/12
https://storyfair.net/search-for-audiobooks/?keyword=cory+doctorow&filter=any
These books are DRM-free, which means that no matter who you buy them from, you can play them in the same player as your other DRM-free audiobooks.
12/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/13
If you let your Storyfair audiobooks touch your Libro.fm audiobooks, they won't get cooties!
13/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/14
The fight for fair audiobooks is one place where the different parts of my professional life cross over: activism, digital media, art, writing the web, and breaking down complex technical subjects for a mass audience. I've just signed up to a six-year project to combine all those facets in a structured way, in collaboration with Cornell University.
14/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/15
https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/
15/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/16
16/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/17
Authorship has always been a political act, but never moreso than today, with waves of book-bans sweeping the country.
17/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/18
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/15/1169848627/scholastic-childrens-book-racism
18/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/19
https://www.authorsagainstbookbans.com/
Authors Against Book bans is looking for members! I signed up last week, within seconds of having Tokuda-Hall give me the pitch when we ran into each other in Oakland at the @Locusmag Awards.
19/
Authors Against Book Bans
Just another WordPress siteCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/20
Book bans affect us all. Even if you personally are never stymied when you visit your library and discover the book that you want to read has been removed by a swivel-eyed loon with terminal groomer-panic.
20/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/21
21/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/22
Americans are living through a multigenerational project of stamping out solidarity and insisting that we only ever view ourselves as individuals, with no stake in the plights of our neighbors.
22/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/23
The health system is a perfect example of how monopolization drives more monopolization, and how that comes to harm the public and workers.
23/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/24
24/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/25
https://harris.uchicago.edu/news-events/news/consolidation-hospital-sector-leading-higher-health-care-costs-study-finds?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template
The researchers investigated 1,164 acute-care hospital mergers, finding that while the FTC only challenged 1% of these, they could - and should - have challenged 20% of them, based on the agency's own criteria for merger scrutiny.
25/
Consolidation in Hospital Sector Leading to Higher Health Care Costs, Study Finds
The University of Chicago Harris School of Public PolicyCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/26
It's not just hospitals: the entire investor class is hell-bent on spending their way to monopoly.
26/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/27
https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-scaling-myths
Narayanan and Kapoor challenge the idea that throwing more data at large language models will make the better: "With LLMs, we may have a couple of orders of magnitude of scaling left, or we may already be done."
27/
AI scaling myths
Arvind Narayanan (AI Snake Oil)Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/28
They reserve their most skeptical take for "AGI" - LLMs are going to achieve consciousness. This is a fundamentally unserious idea, one that they unpack in detail in their forthcoming book:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691249131/ai-snake-oil
28/
AI Snake Oil
press.princeton.eduCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/29
29/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/30
https://prospect.org/justice/2024-06-29-whos-gonna-check-supreme-court-chevron-separation-powers/
But amidst all those gimmes to the rich and powerful, there was one notable exception: the SCOTUS ruling on the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy.
30/
Who’s Gonna Check the Supreme Court?
Hassan Ali Kanu (The American Prospect)Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/31
The Sacklers sold mountains of Oxy the old fashioned way: lying. The lied about its efficacy and about its safety, and helped kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. Eventually this caught up with them, and Purdue lost a bunch of court cases and was forced into bankruptcy.
31/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/32
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed
That judge was Robert Drain and the Sacklers were the blow-off to a long and shameful career in public "service."
32/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/33
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice
33/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/34
34/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/35
35/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/36
36/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/37
As ever, the best source of analysis and explanation for elite bankruptcy shenanigans is Adam Levitin of the Credit Slips blog:
https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2024/06/purdue-pharma-decision-a-big-win-for-mass-tort-victims.html
37/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/38
38/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/39
This has implications for other mass-murderers and corporate criminals, like Johnson and Johnson (who tricked women into dusting their vulvas with asbestos):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/01/j-and-j-jk/#risible-gambit
39/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/40
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/05/third-party-nonconsensual-releases/#au-recherche-du-pedos-perdue
Both J&J and BSA carved out nonconsensual third-party releases in the mold of the Sacklers' deal. and both briefed the Supreme Court, warning that if the Sacklers were forced to pay what they owed, J&J and BSA's victims would *also* be entitled to far larger sums. Go ahead and threaten us with a good time, why doncha?
40/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/41
A Microsoft engineer accidentally released the sourcecode to Playready, the company's flagship DRM product:
https://borncity.com/win/2024/06/26/microsoft-employee-accidentally-publishes-playready-code/
41/
Microsoft employee accidentally publishes PlayReady code
Born's Tech and Windows WorldCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/42
https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/30/msft-our-drm-licensing-is-there-to-eliminate-hobbyists-and-little-guys/
42/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/43
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/18/greetings-fellow-pirates/#arrrrrrrrrr
43/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/44
https://security-explorations.com/microsoft-playready.html
44/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/45
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32
This should be very fun - and funny - especially given how *little* I know about poker (I have been specifically selected on that basis, for the comedy value).
45/
Betting on Your Digital Rights: EFF Benefit Poker Tournament at DEF CON 32
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/46
I like to close these linkdumps with something fun and uplifting, and I'd planned to end with the poker-tournament, but then my pal Raph Koster announced that his game studio Playable Worlds had dropped its first announcement of Stars Reach, an open-world MMO like no other:
https://www.raphkoster.com/2024/06/28/announcing-stars-reach/
46/
Announcing Stars Reach
Raph's WebsiteCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/47
https://www.theoryoffun.com/
Stars Reach is *stupidly* ambitious. It consists of truly open worlds, modeled to an absurd degree of fidelity:
47/
A Theory of Fun for Game Design
www.theoryoffun.comCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/48
48/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/49
The game is fundamentally a climate story, whose lore has humanity seeded around the galaxy by a powerful alien race called the Old Ones, only to have humans bust through the planetary limits of every world they were given.
49/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/50
Because this is a Raph Koster game, it's got a bunch of extremely satisfying play dynamics:
> * A classless skill tree advancement system, where peaceful play matters just as much as combat
>
> * An intricate player-driven economy where players can craft their way to fame and fortune
50/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/51
>
> * In-world player housing that lets you build and customize your home and form towns… and enough room for everyone to have a house
>
> * A single shardless galaxy, with both space and ground gameplay… in fact, you can build that house on an asteroid, if you want
51/
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/52
Stars Reach is not playable yet, but the company's looking for gamers to give them feedback and steer the development:
https://starsreach.com/
OK, that wraps up the week's links. I'm gonna get one more edition out on Monday, god willin' and the crick don't rise, and then I'll be off for a couple weeks. Enjoy your summer!
52/
Stars Reach
Stars ReachCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/53
https://www.hope.net/talks.html
On July 20, I'm appearing at Chicago's Exile in Bookville:
https://exileinbookville.com/events/39808
--
Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!
https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388
53/
Authors on Tap: Cory Doctorow
exileinbookville.comCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/eof
James St John
https://flickr.com/photos/47445767@N05/40894047123
CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
eof/
Tholeiitic basalt dike with flow layering & peperite & basaltic lapillistone (Middle Tholeiitic Unit, Kidd-Munro Assemblage, Neoarchean, 2.711-2.719 Ga; just east of the Potter Mine, east of Timmins, Ontario, Canada) 10
FlickrAlex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/31
Cory Doctorowudostępnił to.
AMonkeyInSilk
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/11
Garden Variety Linguist
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/5
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/5
book!
Garden Variety Linguist
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/5
Garden Variety Linguist
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/5
Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/5
RockerDoc (Ricardo Ismach)
•Cory Doctorow
•