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Total funding amounts to $125.3M.

riesenfeldcenter · 2 years

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A manicule, but make it a unicorn. A unicornicule?

This wonderful little surprise appeared in the margins of a 1505 book of English canon law.

#unicorn #marginalia #margin mondays #annotation #16th century #English law #legal history #canon law #latin #rare books #old books #riesenfeld center #umn law #university of minnesota #law library

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sarah-yyy · 10 months

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mr r, a transactional lawyer who deals largely with corporate clients: a client just THREATENED to KILL ME me, who is on the receiving end of threats at least ten times a week from people who are actually in prison over the things they are threatening to do to me: mm hmm mr r: i am FEARFUL for my LIFE me: m'kay mr r: is no-one concerned about me?????

#listen some days we're bffs #other days i just like it better when he's not at the office #like friday/monday were hell because of the workload but AT LEAST i was left alone to Fix Problems #today the workload is marginally better BUT mr r is a problem in itself :)#sarah talks about herself #work stories

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oldtvandcomics · 9 months

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Happy Queer Media Monday!

Today: The Margin Street Zeroes series by Robin Banks

Absolutely random, small series, but it was the one that got me reading again.

(The series thumbnail from Amazon, showing the first three books: Ye Gods and Little Wishes, God Riddance, and Godlings. The two others not featured on the picture are Demiurges and Margin Street Stories.)

The Margin Street Zeros is an independently published series of five books - four for the actual story and one that is a collection of short stories set after the canon - detailing the adventures of three very broke university students and their accidental falling in with gods. Gio, Frankie and Ben are three friends trying to gain their independence amidst financial and mental health struggles. Discovering that gods exist and occasionally gift people with magical abilities only adds to their problems.

All three of them are queer, as is their fourth friend, AK, who moves in with them in the third book. Gio and Frankie are both nonbinary and in a relationship with each other, while Ben discovers his asexuality in the third book, ending up in a nonsexual relationship with AK. The four of them form a close found family, and support each other through their struggles with identities and that one god stalking Frankie. From a disabled point of view, it is worth noting how neither of them gets “healed” of whatever problems are caused by their neurodiversity. Instead, they help each other by virtue of their brains cancelling each other out (Gio’s anxiety and Frankie’s ADHD being the most obvious examples).

You can find the whole series on Amazon. On a different note, the same author has written a series of guides for neurodivergent people, with a focus on ADHD. Those are under a different name, Ash Banks.

Queer Media Monday is an action I started to talk about some important and/or interesting parts of our queer heritage, that people, especially young people who are only just beginning to discover the wealth of stories out there, should be aware of. Please feel free to join in on the fun and make your own posts about things you personally find important!

#it's funny how this turned out #I was fully planning on posting this series today because of #disabled pride month #and I like the way this series treats #neurodiversity #but then I started reading Loveless too #so now it is like:#'I really hate coming of age stories about university students...'#'anyway here is a book series about university students!'#books #Margin Street Zeroes #queer books #book rec #Queer Media Monday

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aedelia · 8 months

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I just finished a book today.

I've been reading almost exclusively fanfiction for so long that it was a bit of a struggle to get started. It helped that I had read a different book a few weeks ago that I struggled to put down.

I love reading fanfiction and exploring all the ways that things could have been, but there is something nice about reading a finished book that made it through publication. It has a good ending that feels finished and very satisfying. That won't be true of every book, but this one I am very glad to have read.

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every-tome · 1 year

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STOP MAKING HER CRYYYY IM GONNA CRY TOO

I'M SORRYYY

but i promise it gets better! just..

just give it uhhh

around two more weeks...?

#this shot is so hard to go through she's hurting!!!#but come monday it's a new shot and it'll be marginally easier #m-marginally..#mod posts #anonymous

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luimagines · 2 years

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Hey~

Don't worry about not posting or answering asks, exams can be stressfull. Good luck!

AW! Thank you N!

I'll get to the few that I have at some point. I just want to be able to answer them properly and share my thoughts instead of just... a two sentence reply and throw the whole idea into the void to forget about it.

It doesn't feel right to do that.

But I see you guys! I'll to answer some today when I finish the work I've set out.

#pinky replies #last week of school!!!!!#and then the last test on Monday #I'll be home free #to both write more and be marginally more active #:D

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niveditaabaidya · 10 months

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youtube

Ukraine Made Marginal Advances On Monday. #bakhmut #wagner #ukraine #bel...

#youtube #Ukraine Made Marginal Advances On Monday. bakhmut wagner ukraine belarus nato news poland norway germany The Institute for the Study of War

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months

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“Brand safety” killed Jezebel

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library this Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Progressives: if you want to lose to conservatives, all you need to do is reflexively praise and support everything conservatives turn into a culture-war issue, without considering whether they might be right. Because sometimes…they're right.

Remember early in the Trump presidency, when conservatives all woke up and discovered that America's spy agencies – excuse me, "the intelligence community" – were dirty-tricking psychos who run amok, lawlessly sabotaging democracy? Progressives have been shouting this ever since Hoover's FBI tried to blackmail MLK into killing himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter

But millions of progressives forgot about COINTELPRO, CIA dirty tricks and CIA mass spying when this "intelligence community" temporarily set out to wrong-foot Trump. Remember James Comey votive candles?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/30/james-comey-fbi-memo-leaks-trump-inspector-general-report-column/2157705001/

Anthropologists have a name for this phenomenon, in which one side reverses its positions because their sworn enemies have done so. It's called schizmogenesis, and it goes like this: "If they hate it, we love it":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Schizmogenesis is an equal-opportunity delusion. Within living memory, white evangelicals supported abortion, because their sworn enemies – Catholics – opposed it. Some of those white Boomer women who voted Trump because abortion was literally the only issue they cared about held the opposite position on abortion not so long ago – and completely forgot about it:

https://text.npr.org/734303135

The main purpose of the culture war isn't immiserating marginalized people – that's its effect, but its purpose is to distract low-information turkeys (working people) so they'll vote for Christmas (the ongoing seizure of power by American oligarchs). For the funders of conservative movement politics, the cruelty isn't the point, it's merely the tactic. The point is power:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

Which brings me to "woke capitalism." Conservative string-pullers have whipped up their base about the threat of companies embracing social causes. They (erroneously) claim that corporations have progressive values, and that big business is thumbing the scales for causes they despise. The purpose here isn't to sow distrust of capitalism per se. Rather, it's to stampede talk-radio-addled supporters into backing the oligarchy's agenda. Remember when culture war leaders told their base to support being gouged on credit-card junk fees "to own the libs?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

That's schizmogenesis working against the conservative rank-and-file, tricking them into taking the side of a cartel of wildly profitable payment processors who are making billions by picking their pockets (credit card fees are up 40% since the covid lockdowns), because (checks notes), Target pays these profiteers a lot to process its payments, and Target sells Pride merch (no, really):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

It's easy to point and laugh at conservative dopes when they're tricked into shooting themselves in the balls to own the libs. This is not a hypothetical example:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers

But progressives do it, too, particularly when they embrace monopolies as a force for positive social change. Remember 2019, when people got excited about playing loud pop music at Nazi rallies in the hopes that the monopoly video platforms' copyright filters would make any video from that rally impossible to post?

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/

I warned then that if this tactic worked, it would be used by cops to prevent you from recording them when they're macing you or splitting your skull with a billyclub, and yup, within a couple years, cops were blaring Taylor Swift music in hopes of preventing the public from posting videos of their illegal conduct:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas

Conservatives are (partially) right about woke capitalism. It is a threat to democracy. Concentrating the power to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say into the hands of five or six corporations, mostly run by mediocre billionaires, is bad for society. The moderation decisions of giant platforms are a form of (commercial) censorship, even these don't violate the First Amendment:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

(The progressive delusion that censorship only occurs when the First Amendment is violated is a wild own-goal, one that excuses, for example, the decision by school book-fair monopolist Scholastic to remove books about queers and Black and brown people from its offerings as a purely private matter without consequences for free speech):

https://www.themarysue.com/scholastic-response-to-authors-and-illustrators-on-diverse-books/

Conservatives are only partially right about woke capitalism, though. Here's what they're wrong about: corporations don't have values. Target isn't selling Pride tees because they support progressive causes, they're selling them because it seems like a good way to increase returns to their shareholders. Individuals – even top executives – at Target might endorse the cause, but the company will only durably support the cause if that endorsement is profitable, which means that when it stops being profitable, the company will stop supporting the cause:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/business/target-lgbtq-merchandise/index.html

The idea that corporations have values isn't merely stupid, it's very dangerous. The Hobby Lobby decision – which allows corporations to deny basic health-care expenses for women on the basis that a Bronze Age mystic wouldn't approve of an IUD – rests on the ideological foundation that corporate personhood includes corporate values:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,_Inc.

Citizens United – the idea that corporations should be allowed to funnel unlimited funds to politicians who'll sell out the public good in favor of investor profits – also depends on a form of corporate personhood that includes values:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

There are undeniably instances in which corporate monopoly power benefits progressive causes, but these are side-effects of corporate power's main purpose, namely: taking money and power away from working people and giving it to rich people. That is what monopoly power is for.

Which brings me to ad-tech, "brand safety," and the demise of Jezebel, the 16 year old feminist website whose shuttering was just announced by its latest owner, G/O Media:

https://www.metafilter.com/201349/This-is-the-end-of-Jezebel-and-that-feels-really-really-bad

Jezebel's demise is the direct result of monopoly power. Jezebel writes about current affairs – sex, politics, abortion, and other important issues of great moment and significance. When we talk about journalism as a public good, necessary for a healthy civic life, this is what we mean. But unfortunately for Jezebel – and any other news outlet covering current events – there are vast, invisible forces that exist solely to starve this kind of coverage of advertising revenue.

Writing for the independent news site 404 Media, reporter Emanuel Maiberg and former Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler go deep on the "brand safety" industry, whose mission is to assist corporations in blocking their ads from showing up alongside real news:

https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/

Maiberg and Koebler explain how industry associations like the World Federation of Marketers' Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) promulgate "frameworks" to help advertisers automatically detect and exclude real news from consideration when their ads are placed:

https://www.peer39.com/blog/garm-standards

This boycott makes use of scammy "AI" technology like "sentiment and emotional analysis" to determine whether an article is suitable for monetization. These parameters are then fed to the ad-tech duopoly's ad auction system, so Google and Meta (who control the vast majority of online advertising) can ensure that real news is starved of cash.

But reality is not brand-safe, and high quality, reputable journalistic outlets are concerned with reality, which means that the "brand safe" outlets that attract the most revenue are garbage websites that haven't yet been blacklisted by the ad-safety cartel, leading to major brands' ads showing up alongside notorious internet gross-out images like "goatse":

https://www.404media.co/sqword-game-dev-sneaks-goatse-onto-a-dozen-sites-that-stole-his-game/

More than a fifth of "brand safe" ad placements end up on "made for advertising" sites, which 404 Media describe as "trash websites that plagiarize content, are literally spam, pay for fake traffic, or are autogenerated websites that serve no other purpose than capturing ad dollars":

https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/rr-2023-06-ana-programmatic-transparency-first-look

Despite all this, many progressives have become cheerleaders for "brand safety," as a countervailing force to the drawdown of trust and safety at online platforms, which led to the re-platforming of Nazis, QAnon conspiratorialists, TERFs, and other overt elements of the reactionary movement's vanguard on Twitter and Facebook. Articles about ads for major brands showing up alongside Nazi content on Twitter are now a staple of progressive reporting, presented as evidence of Elon Musk's lack of business acumen. The message of these stories is "Musk is bad at business because he's allowing Nazis on his platform, which will send advertisers bolting for the exits to avoid brand-safety crises."

This isn't wrong. Musk is a bad businessman (he's a good scam artist, though). Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisers, notwithstanding the desperate (and easily debunked) stats-juking its "CEO," Linda Yaccarino, floats onstage at tech conferences:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/11/math-problem-for-linda-yaccarino-if-90-of-the-top-advertisers-have-come-back-but-are-only-spending-10-of-what-they-used-to-how-screwed-are-you/

But progressives are out of their minds if they think the primary effect of the brand safety industry is punishing Elon Musk for secretly loving Nazis. The primary effect of brand safety is killing reality-based coverage of the news of the day, and since reality has a well-known anti-conservative bias, anything that works against the reality-based community is ultimately good for oligarchy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

We can't afford to let schizmogenesis stampede us into loving things just because conservative culture warriors have been momentarily tricked into hating them as part of oligarchs' turkeys-voting-for-Christmas project. "Swivel-eyed loons hate it, so it must be good," is a worse-than-useless heuristic for navigating complex issues:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

A much better rule of thumb is "If oligarchs love something, it's probably bad." Almost without exception, things that are good for oligarchs are bad for the rest of us. I mean, this whole shuttering of Jezebel starts with an oligarch imposing his will on millions of other people. Jezebel began life as a Gawker Media site, beloved of millions of readers, destroyed when FBI informant Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the publisher in a successful bid to put them out of business to retaliate for their unfavorable coverage of Thiel:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/

This, in turn, put Jezebel under the ownership of G/O Media, who are unwilling to pay for a human salesforce that would – for example – sell advertising space on Jezebel to sex-toy companies or pro-abortion groups. G/O has been on a killing spree, shuttering beloved news outlets like Deadspin:

https://deadspin.com/this-is-how-things-work-now-at-g-o-media-1836908201

G/O's top exec, an oligarch named Jim Spanfeller who answers to the private equity looters at Great Hill Partners, is bent on ending reality-based coverage in favor of "letting robots shit out brand safe AI-assisted articles about generic topics":

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ai-articles-disinformation-future-g-o-media-rcna95944

Three quarters of a century ago, Orwell coined a term to describe this kind of news: duckspeak,

It was not the man’s brain that was speaking it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words but it was not speech in true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness like the quacking of a duck.

When investors and analysts speak of "content" (rather than, say, "journalism"), this is what they mean – a warm slurry of platitudes, purged of any jagged-edged fragments to render it a perfectly suitable carrier for commercial messages targeted based on surveillance data about the "consumer" whose eyeballs are upon it.

This aversion to reality has been present among corporate decisionmakers since the earliest days, but the consolidation of power among large firms – ad-tech firms, online platforms, and "brands" themselves – makes corporate realityphobia much easier to turn into, well, reality, giving advertisers the fine-grained power to put Jezebel and every site like it out of business.

As Koebler and Maiberg's headliine so aptly puts it, "Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist."

The reason to deplore Nazis on Twitter is because they are Nazis, not because their content isn't brand-safe. The short-term wins progressives gain by legitimizing a corporate veto over what we see online are vastly overshadowed by the most important consequence of brand safety: the mass extinction of reality-based reporting. Reality isn't brand safe. If you're in the reality based community, brand safety should be your sworn enemy, even if they help you temporarily get a couple of Nazis kicked off Twitter.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/#brand-safety

#pluralistic #jezebel #publishing #brand safety #adjacency #adtech #media theory #censorship #surveillance advertising #dynamic ad placement #quackspeak #Global Alliance for Responsible Media #garm #debated sensitive social issue #Third Party Safety and suitability #schizmogenesis #woke capitalism #duckspeak

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sanctus-ingenium · 9 months

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we need to talk about Inprnt.com

Following a really good post with more screenshots and evidence by @dynasoar5 i'm going to talk about my own experiences with @inprnt and why I am about to put my shop on indefinite hiatus from Monday the 14th of August.

First of all I'll say that since starting my print shop last year it has been a significant help to me financially - I was able to not worry about affording car insurance or motor tax (together commonly over a thousand euro) when I bought my first car, for example. I am immeasurably grateful to anyone who chose to buy one and I treasure all the pictures I've been sent of my prints hanging up on people's walls. Right now they are displayed in a real (if small) art exhibition in my home town.

(top right print is not from inprnt though)

They're great prints. Never had any complaints about them. But here's what's going on behind the scenes.

Earlier this year, around March or April, Inprnt sales started increasing in regularity. I'd made as much as $600 a week during previous sales when I made proper promo posts here, but with this increase in regularity, I felt that I couldn't make promo posts every single week. And then one day, I'm not sure when tbh, the sale just never ended. It just didn't stop having that "Ending soon! 15% off your order" banner at the top of the site. Right now it says "Final Hours: $5 Worldwide shipping and save up to 35% off your order!" and not even for a second do I believe in this final hours bullshit. It's been 'final hours' for weeks now. Months, even.

Why is this a problem? Well, how tf am I meant to make a promo post for a sale that is always "ending soon!!" and then never ends. One week it'll say "this weekend only!!" and then when the weekend is over, the sale banner just changes its wording and the sale doesn't end. I can't promo this, it makes me look like a liar and a skeevy salesman by association! It makes the site look like it's 1 week from crashing and burning, and the site owners are just scrabbling to suck as much money from artists as possible before they drown.

And they are sucking money from us. To peel back the curtain, Inprnt money can only be transferred to my paypal account 30 days after the sale is made, just in case the order is cancelled and refunded. This means I used to make one withdrawal every couple of months, when there was enough build-up of money to make it worthwhile. It also forbids withdrawing any sum under $50 btw. I would make a withdrawal request and then, after a 10 business day wait, it would reach my Paypal account.

Not anymore! The past few withdrawals have taken over a month to complete. They are straight up keeping my earnings from me for longer the agreed period. This was my last fulfilled withdrawal:

Note the date.

Almost two months.

And here is the latest withdrawal request that still has not been fulfilled.

It's coming up on 1 month and if the pattern continues, it could literally be November or December by the time I fully clear all sales.

So what's going to happen to my print shop? Because my art is currently being exhibited with a QR code linking to the shop, I can't close the shop this week. Instead I will close it on Monday the 14th of August, next week. That means that on the 14th of September, I can withdraw all of the remaining money without having any left over. My account balance will go to 0 and stay there. Although I'll de-list my prints I will leave my account there, because at the end of the day I don't want to leave Inprnt. It still offers the best artist margins and as I'm now unemployed after graduating, the additional support is such a load off my mind. So this is a chance to wait and see - if they improve their services, I'll happily re-open.

It's a big deal to me because selling prints is sort of my ideal life as an artist. I never had the attention span or self-discipline for commission work and I found that it left me creatively stagnant. I always want to try new things, new concepts and ideas, and being able to think "yeah, people will like this as a print" while I experiment is honestly very reassuring. And I know that in going on hiatus, it'll break a lot of "buy a print" links in my circulating posts. Oh well lmao. If you want to buy a print right now - go ahead, it might be your last opportunity. Another way to support me would be to check out my ko-fi for once-off donations or some nice sketchbooks/comics/book samples you can buy, or subscribing to my Patreon.

As of right now, Inprnt owes me $381 (the unfulfilled request submitted above for $186.60 and my current standing balance of $194.80 which takes 30 days from each transaction to clear).

#it's so god damn insulting u know. even redbubble threw its shitty payouts directly into my paypal asap #inprnt

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