![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[sticky entry]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/entry/sticky_entry.png){kind=small}
Our Table of Contents has all the stories/essays. If you're curious about our blog's etiquette and filters, that is here, and you can check your filter status here. (The filter status post, like most of this blog, is locked; introduce yourself and ask to have access.) For everything else (including who we are and "how to Dreamwidth"), check our profile page!
( Stories, Essays, Comics and Zines up for grabs! )
Mindfulness and Nonlinear Time
Nov. 2nd, 2026 07:11 amRogan: I was reading a Buddhist book and suddenly had a thought. I always felt like Buddhism was never going to be my thing, because I “can’t meditate” and am terrible at “staying present,” but then I thought: could memory work be its own form of meditation and staying present, even if that present isn’t NOW, in a linear time sense?
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
LB Infographics
Oct. 30th, 2026 09:02 pmWhew. Okay. We were hoping to maybe try and HTML it, but HTMLing the four required pages and bug-testing it all proved beyond us, so: here is the LB Infographics pack! (If you want to toss us money for them, you can also grab them as pay-what-you-want from itch.io.)
These are all charts, graphs, timelines, family trees, etc. that we originally made for private use from 2008-2026. Eventually we realized that we had a load of them, threw them on the fan poll voting pile because if you got it, sell it, and it won the poll. (Y'all are nerds, bros, and so are we.)
This is also the first of our major experiments in alt-text as a form of poetry and informational transformation. It... is way easier to do that with art than it is to do with charts and graphs, turns out. At this point, you get pretty different experiences from the images versus the text, so we included all of it. We'll see how this experiment works out!
By layering these infographics, we hope to create a palimpsest of our own history, our own growth as a crew and as a craftsman. We hope you find them interesting!
.zip folder contains the following:
These are all charts, graphs, timelines, family trees, etc. that we originally made for private use from 2008-2026. Eventually we realized that we had a load of them, threw them on the fan poll voting pile because if you got it, sell it, and it won the poll. (Y'all are nerds, bros, and so are we.)
This is also the first of our major experiments in alt-text as a form of poetry and informational transformation. It... is way easier to do that with art than it is to do with charts and graphs, turns out. At this point, you get pretty different experiences from the images versus the text, so we included all of it. We'll see how this experiment works out!
By layering these infographics, we hope to create a palimpsest of our own history, our own growth as a crew and as a craftsman. We hope you find them interesting!
.zip folder contains the following:
- 3 folders, sorting the files: People, Places, and MIscellaneous, containing...
- ~20 info graphics, ranging from maps, memory work graphs, time lines, family trees, genograms, relationship webs, Venn diagrams, etc.
- 4 documents attempting to transform the graphics into plain text form.
Sneak: This was a weird, extremely inconvenient computer glitch I had that, due to it being extremely difficult to describe in ways that didn't conflate it with a much more common error, I couldn't find any documentation or solution for, so I am writing it down here in case anyone else encounters it and also for my own reference.
This is a glitch I've only experienced with Bluefin, which is currently running version 44.20261027, but it also affected the previous version, and it affects Document Scanner (aka simple-scan) v 50.0.
The glitch: when you can scan multiple images, all seems to go well. When you download the images to whatever directory you want, it claims to do so successfully. It is not until you open the folder itself that you discover the images have not saved; they are invisible (to Bluefin) files either with the extension "goutputstream" or the file name "xdp-whateveryounamedit.png-6digitalphanumericstring." These invisible files take up the exact amount of space the real images do, but they cannot be opened by themselves.
( Read more... )
This is a glitch I've only experienced with Bluefin, which is currently running version 44.20261027, but it also affected the previous version, and it affects Document Scanner (aka simple-scan) v 50.0.
The glitch: when you can scan multiple images, all seems to go well. When you download the images to whatever directory you want, it claims to do so successfully. It is not until you open the folder itself that you discover the images have not saved; they are invisible (to Bluefin) files either with the extension "goutputstream" or the file name "xdp-whateveryounamedit.png-6digitalphanumericstring." These invisible files take up the exact amount of space the real images do, but they cannot be opened by themselves.
( Read more... )
LB's Info Design Reading Recs
Oct. 27th, 2026 10:01 pmHello, friends! Do you too ponder the secret language and structure beneath various types of art and communication, and wonder how it all works, why sometimes it works and sometimes it really, really doesn't? Do you wanna read books and watch videos about it?
I have stuff about it! ( Fun stuff to read, watch, and ponder! )
Rogan: ugh. Puppy Linux’s light browser can’t do the captchas DuckDuckGo, Google, and Bing throw at me now. Looks like I’m using Yandex or weird small search engines for now and making peace with that.
A friend tells me that weird old hardware and OS probably look like bots now. Annoying!
Well, this is why we have the potato comp.
A friend tells me that weird old hardware and OS probably look like bots now. Annoying!
Well, this is why we have the potato comp.
Multi Temporality
Oct. 26th, 2026 08:58 amRogan: for months now, me and Sneak have been gradually crunching our way through Rosenberg and Grafton’s Cartographies of Time: a History of the Timeline. I fully accept that to many people, that surely sounds like the most boring book on earth, but our slowness isn’t from boredom, but the density of information involved.
( Cripping Time )
( Cripping Time )
Touch Grass? No: Touch GRAPHS!
Oct. 25th, 2026 07:01 pmRogan: well, of course I said I wanted to try alt text poetry on the month the graphs, charts, maps, and genograms won the fan poll! Why start on easy mode?
It’s maddening, because I can imagine how I’d translate these things tactiley. I would sculpt the maps, make roads and trails you follow with your fingers, use lines of texture to note escape routes. I’d make a relationship map connecting headmates with different types of thread to express the different kinds of relationships—barbed wire for antagonism, common string for lineage, fluffy art yarn for friendliness. I would show bad a room, a house is with hostile, progressively spikier textures. I would make graphs with stacks of blocks or lines of thread or SOMETHING, and maybe I’d do a dogshit job, but that’s how you learn.
It would be so fun. It would be so satisfying. I want to do that because it FEELS right. And there is absolutely no way to convey that over the Internet, except by taking a photo and alt texting THAT, which negates the whole point.
( a dialogue between Sneak and Rogan about cripping info design, infographics, and wanting to make something society doesn’t recognize. This is possibly one of the nerdiest art talk posts we’ve ever made. )
It’s maddening, because I can imagine how I’d translate these things tactiley. I would sculpt the maps, make roads and trails you follow with your fingers, use lines of texture to note escape routes. I’d make a relationship map connecting headmates with different types of thread to express the different kinds of relationships—barbed wire for antagonism, common string for lineage, fluffy art yarn for friendliness. I would show bad a room, a house is with hostile, progressively spikier textures. I would make graphs with stacks of blocks or lines of thread or SOMETHING, and maybe I’d do a dogshit job, but that’s how you learn.
It would be so fun. It would be so satisfying. I want to do that because it FEELS right. And there is absolutely no way to convey that over the Internet, except by taking a photo and alt texting THAT, which negates the whole point.
( a dialogue between Sneak and Rogan about cripping info design, infographics, and wanting to make something society doesn’t recognize. This is possibly one of the nerdiest art talk posts we’ve ever made. )
Jewelle Gomez
Oct. 24th, 2026 04:16 pmRogan: A young person came into the sci-fi library who was super into vampires in general, black vampires in particular, and when I brought out the Jewelle Gomez books, you have never seen someone so hand-flappingly excited.
This is one of those librarian moments I live for, because I SPECIFICALLY have been working to get more Gomez into our collection, because she is great and before I came around, we had only like... two short stories by her in two big different anthologies. (Also maybe a couple essays, but we're overwhelmingly a FICTION library, and Gomez mostly writes FICTION.) Now I've added another anthology with a short story by her, plus two of her books, and I am so pleased to see my efforts bearing fruit, especially since I was wondering whether I was getting anywhere when we are FLOODED with so much Norton, Lackey, McCaffrey and such. Knowing that I made this young person's day, that because of me, we have books they really want, just feels great.
(Jewelle Gomez has a BUNCH of related short stories that as far as I know, nobody has collated into a book. You have The Gilda Stories, which is a full book, but then you have at least seven OTHER Gilda stories that have never been collected, so to get everything you have to trawl a bunch of anthologies, many of which are out of print and came from small publishers. As far as I can tell, NOBODY has ever even pointed out that the non-Gilda works "Lynx and Strand" and "Be Three" are story and sequel, never mind put them together under one cover, even though "Be Three" is borderline incomprehensible without the context of "Lynx and Strand"! It makes me want to chew on my arm, because I'm sure more people would love this author and buy her work if her stuff was just TOGETHER and FINDABLE! The Gilda Stories has been continually in print for thirty years, why hasn't anyone done a Gilda II? With at least seven stories and a screenplay, surely there's enough material to make a book, right?)
This is one of those librarian moments I live for, because I SPECIFICALLY have been working to get more Gomez into our collection, because she is great and before I came around, we had only like... two short stories by her in two big different anthologies. (Also maybe a couple essays, but we're overwhelmingly a FICTION library, and Gomez mostly writes FICTION.) Now I've added another anthology with a short story by her, plus two of her books, and I am so pleased to see my efforts bearing fruit, especially since I was wondering whether I was getting anywhere when we are FLOODED with so much Norton, Lackey, McCaffrey and such. Knowing that I made this young person's day, that because of me, we have books they really want, just feels great.
(Jewelle Gomez has a BUNCH of related short stories that as far as I know, nobody has collated into a book. You have The Gilda Stories, which is a full book, but then you have at least seven OTHER Gilda stories that have never been collected, so to get everything you have to trawl a bunch of anthologies, many of which are out of print and came from small publishers. As far as I can tell, NOBODY has ever even pointed out that the non-Gilda works "Lynx and Strand" and "Be Three" are story and sequel, never mind put them together under one cover, even though "Be Three" is borderline incomprehensible without the context of "Lynx and Strand"! It makes me want to chew on my arm, because I'm sure more people would love this author and buy her work if her stuff was just TOGETHER and FINDABLE! The Gilda Stories has been continually in print for thirty years, why hasn't anyone done a Gilda II? With at least seven stories and a screenplay, surely there's enough material to make a book, right?)
In Praise of Badness, In Insult of Fakery
Oct. 19th, 2026 02:23 pmRogan: I went to bed mad about the botslop books, woke up mad, asked myself WHY I was so damn mad, and now I’m making it all y’all’s problem. ...and also possibly finding my way into a deep strange spambot farm.
( Rogan, no. Rogan, stop looking into that styrofoam abyss. ROGAN NO STOP IT ROGAN )
( Rogan, no. Rogan, stop looking into that styrofoam abyss. ROGAN NO STOP IT ROGAN )
390Slop Comes to the Sci-Fi Library
Oct. 18th, 2026 05:30 pmRogan: I mean, it was bound to happen eventually. But today, I encountered my first donation of slop books, books so bad I refuse to put them on the shelves.
It's funny. We have a LOT of crap on the shelves. We have a hundred Perry Rhodans and Doc Savages, each. We have Gor and Piers Anthony and endless pulp schlock churned out by guys paid by the yard. We have self-published crap--I know, I wrote some of it! And I have a weakness for scrappy self-pubbers doing their best, because I am one, and so are a bunch of my friends and colleagues. I will go to bat for Brendan and the Beast, for Bouquet Bound, for the Book of Autonomancy, because often it's those very same scrappy self-pubbers who are making the work I enjoy, the work I want more of and which I cannot find elsewhere. I am probably seen by my fellow sci-fi librarians as someone with poor taste, the one who puts all the gay robots on the shelf.
But today was the first time I got books that were so bad I am not putting them on the shelf.
( I don't know what to do with them. I can't imagine anyone CHOOSING to read them on purpose; they're that poorly formatted. They were probably made by predictive text bots, but that is subsidiary to them being borderline unreadable. )
It's funny. We have a LOT of crap on the shelves. We have a hundred Perry Rhodans and Doc Savages, each. We have Gor and Piers Anthony and endless pulp schlock churned out by guys paid by the yard. We have self-published crap--I know, I wrote some of it! And I have a weakness for scrappy self-pubbers doing their best, because I am one, and so are a bunch of my friends and colleagues. I will go to bat for Brendan and the Beast, for Bouquet Bound, for the Book of Autonomancy, because often it's those very same scrappy self-pubbers who are making the work I enjoy, the work I want more of and which I cannot find elsewhere. I am probably seen by my fellow sci-fi librarians as someone with poor taste, the one who puts all the gay robots on the shelf.
But today was the first time I got books that were so bad I am not putting them on the shelf.
( I don't know what to do with them. I can't imagine anyone CHOOSING to read them on purpose; they're that poorly formatted. They were probably made by predictive text bots, but that is subsidiary to them being borderline unreadable. )
Crazy Boys, Ch. 4: Crazy Boys Come Out
Oct. 18th, 2026 04:28 pmCrazy Boys Come Out
Series: Crazy Boys, Ch. 4
Summary: D meets Sneak. Oops.
Word Count: 6800
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month! To support work like this and get double weight for your poll votes, pay us via LiberaPay or Patreon! Also, although Sneak uses “ze” pronouns these days, ze didn’t back then, and so we are using zer old pronouns, with zer permission.
Spring, Junior Year: Rogan
It’s storming, I’m out waiting for D, and I’m freezing wet. If I have any raingear, it’s wrapped around my all-important school stuff, and by the time he arrives, I look like a half-drowned rat.
“We need a pick-up place with a roof,” he says as I slosh my way in. “Let’s get you home.”
Home. That’s his apartment now. “When I get there,” I declare, dropping my sodden backpack, “I’m taking the hottest shower.”
D winces with his whole face. “Hot water’s out.”
“Ugh. Then I’m stealing your blanket.”
“That’s fair.”
( Read more... )
Series: Crazy Boys, Ch. 4
Summary: D meets Sneak. Oops.
Word Count: 6800
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month! To support work like this and get double weight for your poll votes, pay us via LiberaPay or Patreon! Also, although Sneak uses “ze” pronouns these days, ze didn’t back then, and so we are using zer old pronouns, with zer permission.
Content warnings: click to view
consensual teen sexuality, triggers, plus (separately) body horror, walking corpse syndrome, self-loathing, homophobia, and accidental coming out.Spring, Junior Year: Rogan
It’s storming, I’m out waiting for D, and I’m freezing wet. If I have any raingear, it’s wrapped around my all-important school stuff, and by the time he arrives, I look like a half-drowned rat.
“We need a pick-up place with a roof,” he says as I slosh my way in. “Let’s get you home.”
Home. That’s his apartment now. “When I get there,” I declare, dropping my sodden backpack, “I’m taking the hottest shower.”
D winces with his whole face. “Hot water’s out.”
“Ugh. Then I’m stealing your blanket.”
“That’s fair.”
( Read more... )
Alt-Text Poetry
Oct. 17th, 2026 09:58 am(This post is entirely thanks to the essays of John Lee Clark, especially Against Access)
Rogan: a couple years back, I was at an artist panel at Arisia, and because I’m me (and also because I have the friends I do) I talked about the importance of alt-texting... only to learn from my fellow panelists that they did not alt-text their art, out of concern that copybots would use it to make sloppy copies of their work and push them out of business.
It’s hard to express how mad it made me.
( Read more... )
Rogan: a couple years back, I was at an artist panel at Arisia, and because I’m me (and also because I have the friends I do) I talked about the importance of alt-texting... only to learn from my fellow panelists that they did not alt-text their art, out of concern that copybots would use it to make sloppy copies of their work and push them out of business.
It’s hard to express how mad it made me.
( Read more... )
(This post will use the terms Harriet Wilson used for herself and her work, which are no longer appropriate in the present day. Nevertheless, they are her words, and since I'm quoting her, I'm going to use her words as they are.)
Harriet E. Wilson, sometimes written as Hattie E. Wilson and H. E. Wilson, was the first published black author in the States, with her 1859 novel, Our Nig (which I haven't been able to read yet). She was of African-American, Irish-American, and Native American ancestry, and by 1867/5/25, she was a Spiritualist trance medium, which I only found out thanks to Kevin Young when I was refreshing my memory digging through his book Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News for Cross-Ethnic Headmates II.
Naturally, I was deeply fascinated. The stereotype of the Spiritualist medium is overwhelmingly white women, but Wilson was apparently a trance medium for twenty years! That's usually a pretty multi thing! Did any records of her medium work survive? Are any of her words written down?
So I decided to do the drudge work of digging through the (many, many) back-issues of The Banner of Light trying to scrape every piece of data I could find on the lady. ( Read more... )
Harriet E. Wilson, sometimes written as Hattie E. Wilson and H. E. Wilson, was the first published black author in the States, with her 1859 novel, Our Nig (which I haven't been able to read yet). She was of African-American, Irish-American, and Native American ancestry, and by 1867/5/25, she was a Spiritualist trance medium, which I only found out thanks to Kevin Young when I was refreshing my memory digging through his book Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News for Cross-Ethnic Headmates II.
Naturally, I was deeply fascinated. The stereotype of the Spiritualist medium is overwhelmingly white women, but Wilson was apparently a trance medium for twenty years! That's usually a pretty multi thing! Did any records of her medium work survive? Are any of her words written down?
So I decided to do the drudge work of digging through the (many, many) back-issues of The Banner of Light trying to scrape every piece of data I could find on the lady. ( Read more... )
The Arc of Art Pleasurability
Oct. 13th, 2026 08:16 amRogan: We started writing stories in a “serious” manner in 2000. We made our first comic, MPD for You and Me in 2007.
( Artistic self-actualization is being able to read your own shit for fun. )
( Artistic self-actualization is being able to read your own shit for fun. )
Relationship Book Covers
Oct. 9th, 2026 11:15 amMac: I’m not one of the artists here, but yesterday I got to thinking about book covers, specifically the kind for romance, porn, or any kind of book where close relationships between people is the point (queer history, Spirit Marriage, sex ed manuals...)
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
Banned from Ebay
Oct. 8th, 2026 10:02 pmRogan: Also, on top of the rest of it... today I got permanently suspended from Ebay. I have no idea why. (EDIT: apparently this just happens to people and there's not really a way to fight it that's worth it to me. Bye, Ebay!)
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
RIP, Nancy
Oct. 8th, 2026 09:36 pmRogan: We didn't have time to mention it because I was cramming for the lecture, but one of my fellow sci-fi librarians, Nancy Shapiro, died on Tuesday evening of pancreatic cancer. We got to see her in hospice the day before, and creek willing and the god don't rise, we'll attend her funeral on Sunday.
I'm glad I got to see her in hospice, the day before she died. I'm glad I got to say via card how much I appreciated everything she taught me library-wise, and I hope to be as patient with new librarians as she was with me, though I don't think I will ever be quite as meticulous and thorough as she was.
This year has been a deathful one. Ny died in March, Granny died in July (or at least, I heard about it in July), and now Nancy. There wasn't much we could do regarding Granny, but we were at least able to help with Ny's estate, and we will definitely be helping with Nancy's books, which she has donated to the sci-fi library. That's okay. Death is hard, and death is sad, but it is not bad.
EDIT: ah, son of a bitch, her funeral is on the rail, and I have the option of either being 1.5 hours early or 40 minutes late. Dammit. Wonder if I can hitch a ride with someone...
I'm glad I got to see her in hospice, the day before she died. I'm glad I got to say via card how much I appreciated everything she taught me library-wise, and I hope to be as patient with new librarians as she was with me, though I don't think I will ever be quite as meticulous and thorough as she was.
This year has been a deathful one. Ny died in March, Granny died in July (or at least, I heard about it in July), and now Nancy. There wasn't much we could do regarding Granny, but we were at least able to help with Ny's estate, and we will definitely be helping with Nancy's books, which she has donated to the sci-fi library. That's okay. Death is hard, and death is sad, but it is not bad.
EDIT: ah, son of a bitch, her funeral is on the rail, and I have the option of either being 1.5 hours early or 40 minutes late. Dammit. Wonder if I can hitch a ride with someone...
(normal blog readers, y'all ignore this, this is a bibliography for a lecture I'm giving tomorrow and it's easiest to just throw the "want more info? read these!" here on the ol' blog)
Sources and More To Read
Comics Code Authority. Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America, Inc. October 26, 1954. Retrieved from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Comic_book_code_of_1954
Elder, Will. “The Night Before Christmas.” Panic, December 1953. Retrieved from https://www.hillmanweb.com/xmas/comics/05.html
Evon, Dan. “Did Superman Advocate Respecting Diversity in the 1950s?” Snopes.com. Retrieved from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/superman-1950-poster-diversity/
Feldstein, Al and Joe Orlando. “Judgment Day” and “the Reformers.” Judgment Day and other stories. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2014
Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare And How It Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
Puaca, Brian. The Comic Book Burnings Project. Retrieved from https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7deec3e3e8da4517907d266faccd2323
Sergi, Joe. "Tales from the Code: How Much Did Things Change After the the Enactment of the Comics Code of 1954?" Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, 2012. Retrieved from https://cbldf.org/2012/08/tales-from-the-code-how-much-did-things-change-after-the-enactment-of-the-comics-code-of-1954/
Sterling North Society. “Sterling and His Family.” Retrieved from https://sterlingnorthsociety.com/sterlings-family/
Unknown. “David Pace Wigransky,” A Crisis of Innocence, accessed October 7, 2026, http://crisisofinnocence.library.torontomu.ca/items/show/130.
Unknown (but definitely not Alvin Hollingsworth). “Forever Yours.” Negro Romance #2. New York: Fawcett, 1950. Retrieved from https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?dlid=34287
Sources and More To Read
Comics Code Authority. Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America, Inc. October 26, 1954. Retrieved from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Comic_book_code_of_1954
Elder, Will. “The Night Before Christmas.” Panic, December 1953. Retrieved from https://www.hillmanweb.com/xmas/comics/05.html
Evon, Dan. “Did Superman Advocate Respecting Diversity in the 1950s?” Snopes.com. Retrieved from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/superman-1950-poster-diversity/
Feldstein, Al and Joe Orlando. “Judgment Day” and “the Reformers.” Judgment Day and other stories. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2014
Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare And How It Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
Puaca, Brian. The Comic Book Burnings Project. Retrieved from https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7deec3e3e8da4517907d266faccd2323
Sergi, Joe. "Tales from the Code: How Much Did Things Change After the the Enactment of the Comics Code of 1954?" Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, 2012. Retrieved from https://cbldf.org/2012/08/tales-from-the-code-how-much-did-things-change-after-the-enactment-of-the-comics-code-of-1954/
Sterling North Society. “Sterling and His Family.” Retrieved from https://sterlingnorthsociety.com/sterlings-family/
Unknown. “David Pace Wigransky,” A Crisis of Innocence, accessed October 7, 2026, http://crisisofinnocence.library.torontomu.ca/items/show/130.
Unknown (but definitely not Alvin Hollingsworth). “Forever Yours.” Negro Romance #2. New York: Fawcett, 1950. Retrieved from https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?dlid=34287
Another reason to hate the scraperbot boom
Oct. 6th, 2026 09:04 amWe have been blocked from the Wayback Machine because they’ve been getting slammed with greedy scraperbots and I got mistaken for one of them. -_- Fixing is in process, but we now can’t use WBM to archive ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
pluralstories, do research, or go through old plural website archives... a big part of our work. We use this site all the time (Sneak marked it as one of our most-needed a couple months back, we regularly tithe to them) and now greedy dirtbags are screwing us over.
We suspect this is happening because we are using a Linux distro popular with “AI” developers. Thanks a lot, assholes. Now I can’t even use a site I PAID MONEY TO.
EDIT: emailed with them and got it sorted. But eesh, do I hate this. I also have to do a Captcha every time I use my public library catalog, even if I'm at the public library doing it, because I guess scraper bots just hog it otherwise? WHY.
pluralstories, do research, or go through old plural website archives... a big part of our work. We use this site all the time (Sneak marked it as one of our most-needed a couple months back, we regularly tithe to them) and now greedy dirtbags are screwing us over.We suspect this is happening because we are using a Linux distro popular with “AI” developers. Thanks a lot, assholes. Now I can’t even use a site I PAID MONEY TO.
EDIT: emailed with them and got it sorted. But eesh, do I hate this. I also have to do a Captcha every time I use my public library catalog, even if I'm at the public library doing it, because I guess scraper bots just hog it otherwise? WHY.
Touch the Future, by John Lee Clark
Oct. 6th, 2026 08:00 amRogan: guys, I found a book at the library and I’m only a few chapters in but I am so into it that I need to tell y’all about it right now: John Lee Clark’s Touch the Future: A Manifesto in Essays. I knew I wanted this book when I read the first line: “Welcome, welcome. Steady, friend. Here’s a nice textured wall.” I wanted that textured wall! GIVE ME THE TEXTURED WALL.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
