rare fruit, Hilma Af Klint, microchips

[tozka]

Good morning! Here's some neat-o stuff I've found recently:

California Rare Fruit Growers is a group of hardcore fruit enthusiasts. Check out their newsletters, plant sales, and available library!

Leupagus wrote a meta piece about fan interactions:

So it’s not always about cleaning up the filth for the benefit of any creators who might drop by—but I think in this day and age, with the fourth wall more porous than it’s ever been, that often creators are used (and use themselves) as a bludgeon. I remember recently someone bemoaning the lack of civility in their fandom by saying that the creator would be unhappy to know about some mean comments being flung around—to which another person responded by asking how the creator would feel about the RPF that fan had written about the creator. It can get very “I’M TELLING MOM” basically.

~50GB of cooking recipes built from plain text, ancient websites. Original-Directories is the original mirrored websites, Recipes is trimmed down to just recipes.

Who was Hilma Af Klint? tl;dr she was a Swedish abstract artist who started painting in that style way earlier than the "pioneers of abstraction" did.

São Paulo enacted a Clean City Law 13 years ago, where all advertising (e.g. billboards, big signs on business, posters, pamphlets) was banned on the city streets. Here's some of what that Law uncovered-- and it's not just empty building walls.

It's a little late for NaNoWriMo participants, but here are some pretty year-round word tracker spreadsheets, in a variety of colors.

The switching.social site has gone dark and the owner disappeared from social media. There's a mirror up now: switching.software.

If you'd like to explore self-hosted applications and network services, here's a list of free software to get you started.

Here's a company developing free/open source semiconductor manufacturing process standard, e.g. democratizing microchips.

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

Very interesting to see the results of the Sao Paolo project. I remember hearing about it but can hardly fathom it was so long ago already. One of the comments makes the most incisive point though, which is what has the removal of ads done to sales. If very little it is indeed an argument to remove advertising elsewhere. The London example is astonishing -- ugh!

Regarding the post about the purity police, I think there's a kernel there that's true. The more outside attention on a space you belong to, the more presentable you want it to be. However, I don't know as this sort of policing was really all that different in the early 2000s other than in scale and visibility. I mean, I look back at Buffy fandom in that time period and there were constant fights, not just about ships and how acceptable those were (which still goes on), but also about the content of works. There was plenty of argument about dark fics though a good deal of it focused on how well written it was rather than about the elements themselves. The difference was that the communities were small enough that everyone was 1 degree of removal from everyone else so it was harder to torch a neighborhood when you lived in it.

And from even earlier, I remember reading Rhiannon Bury's book about listserv X-Files fandom and she identified the central tension in the group to be about class differences, notably educational ones. (I should mention it was a discussion rather than fanworks group, but some of the issues were the same). So I really think that scale and separation has a lot more to do with it than the creator's involvement.

However I do think that it could be a preview of coming problems as more people from officialdom start mixing in fan spaces, not just in how fans treat other fans (which, again, has always happened in those contexts) but in how they skew it. I mean, we are already seeing a new version of the corporate con in which networks have launched their own fan conventions. I could see them in the future locking up actor and other professional appearances to their own events in contracts when they first start those jobs. The homegrown con with pro guests is already fading but I could see conventions becoming as Balkanized as streaming services are.