Once more into the breach | Queer | 34 | nsfw/18+ only please
If you’re wondering why my blog is the way it is, it’s probably because I use this less as a social media platform and more like a fucked up rss feed.
This also means that everything is in one blog; personal thoughts, shitposts, horny posts, aesthetic posts, landscapes, cat videos, and straight up porn are all mixed together. Now let me emphasize that last bit, there will be pornographic material occasionally, please do not follow if you are under the age of majority or if such things would make you uncomfortable. Please use your best judgement.
Dinosaurs: A Fantastic New View of a Lost Era (1981), by William Stout, is the first in what would become a series of books and sketchbooks by the famed artist. Unlike The Flight of Dragons, the foundation of this book was real, cutting-edge paleontology of the day that was radically changing the way scientists viewed dinosaurs. But, either by design or coincidence, the book fits into the wider web of Larkin’s white books and their imitators — it’s a complete field guide, covering behavior, social group, various types of dinosaurs and prehistoric lizards and the physiological features that made each unique, accompanied by a near-decadent amount of Stout’s artwork and wrapped in a, well, beige cover, but it sits next to the white dust jackets just fine.
Stout’s art is phenomenal. His dinos tend to be a bit gaunt and knobby, often emphasizing a kind of monstrousness. I’ve no idea how plausible his designs are, but they convey a lot of personality, as well as size and power, which is maybe just as important as accuracy — these guys are more alive than the ones in the Princeton field guides. Stout balances this with a design sense that leans heavily into Art Nouveau conventions, which subverts that monstrousness. It’s an interesting, exciting choice.
I was ga-ga about dinosaurs when I was a kid and I am genuinely a little bit annoyed I only got this book for the first time a couple years ago. My annoyance is assuaged somewhat by the fact that my second-hand copy happened to be signed and accompanied by a sketch of a brontosaurus! (Brontosaurus forever!)
Samantha: This town has a weird smell that you're all probably used to…but I'm not.
Mrs Krabappel: It'll take you about six weeks, dear.
-The Simpsons, "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," S3E23, May 7, 1992
We are living through weird times, and they've persisted for so long that you probably don't even notice it. But these times are not normal.
Now, I realize that this covers a lot of ground, and without detracting from all the other ways in which the world is weird and bad, I want to focus on one specific and pervasive and awful way in which this world is not normal, in part because this abnormality has a defined cause, a precise start date, and an obvious, actionable remedy.
6 years, 5 months and 22 days after Fox aired "Bart's Friend Falls in Love," Bill Clinton signed a new bill into law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).
Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, it's a felony to modify your own property in ways that the manufacturer disapproves of, even if your modifications accomplish some totally innocuous, legal, and socially beneficial goal. Not a little felony, either: DMCA 1201 provides for a five year sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.
Back when the DMCA was being debated, its proponents insisted that their critics were overreacting. They pointed to the legal barriers to invoking DMCA 1201, and insisted that these new restrictions would only apply to a few marginal products in narrow ways that the average person would never even notice.
But that was obvious nonsense, obvious even in 1998, and far more obvious today, more than a quarter-century on. In order for a manufacturer to criminalize modifications to your own property, they have to satisfy two criteria: first, they must sell you a device with a computer in it; and second, they must design that computer with an "access control" that you have to work around in order to make a modification.
For example, say your toaster requires that you scan your bread before it will toast it, to make sure that you're only using a special, expensive kind of bread that kicks back a royalty to the manufacturer. If the embedded computer that does the scanning ships from the factory with a program that is supposed to prevent you from turning off the scanning step, then it is a felony to modify your toaster to work with "unauthorized bread":
If this sounds outlandish, then a) You definitely didn't walk the floor at CES last week, where there were a zillion "cooking robots" that required proprietary feedstock; and b) You haven't really thought hard about your iPhone (which will not allow you to install software of your choosing):
But back in 1998, computers – even the kind of low-powered computers that you'd embed in an appliance – were expensive and relatively rare. No longer! Today, manufacturers source powerful "System on a Chip" (SoC) processors at prices ranging from $0.25 to $8. These are full-fledged computers, easily capable of running an "access control" that satisfies DMCA 1201.
Likewise, in 1998, "access controls" (also called "DRM," "technical protection measures," etc) were a rarity in the field. That was because computer scientists broadly viewed these measures as useless. A determined adversary could always find a way around an access control, and they could package up that break as a software tool and costlessly, instantaneously distribute it over the internet to everyone in the world who wanted to do something that an access control impeded. Access controls were a stupid waste of engineering resources and a source of needless complexity and brittleness:
But – as critics pointed out in 1998 – chips were obviously going to get much cheaper, and if the US Congress made it a felony to bypass an access control, then every kind of manufacturer would be tempted to add some cheap SoCs to their products so they could add access controls and thereby felonize any uses of their products that cut into their profits. Basically, the DMCA offered manufacturers a bargain: add a dollar or two to the bill of materials for your product, and in return, the US government will imprison any competitors who offer your customers a "complementary good" that improves on it.
It's even worse than this: another thing that was obvious in 1998 was that once a manufacturer added a chip to a device, they would probably also figure out a way to connect it to the internet. Once that device is connected to the internet, the manufacturer can push software updates to it at will, which will be installed without user intervention. What's more, by using an access control in connection with that over-the-air update mechanism, the manufacturer can make it a felony to block its updates.
Which means that a manufacturer can sell you a device and then mandatorily update it at a later date to take away its functionality, and then sell that functionality back to you as a "subscription":
Absolutely resisting the urge to just burn the internet and getting tired that I have to go so far out of my way to hold onto anything that isn't full of computerized crap.
I'm the same as the person above and go out of my way to avoid as much internet connected Thingies as possible.
I love ruined castles so much we should build a bunch of castles for no reason and then hit them with hammers to ruin them up a bit. Put a chest with a rusty shortsword in a few. For hikers to enjoy
I love ruined castles so much we should build a bunch of castles for no reason and then hit them with hammers to ruin them up a bit. Put a chest with a rusty shortsword in a few. For hikers to enjoy
Claiming it to be one of the most dramatic and visible signs of climate change to date, researchers said Monday that receding polar ice caps have revealed nearly 200 clandestine lairs once buried deep beneath hundreds of feet of Arctic ice.
“We always assumed there would be some secret lairs here and there, but the sheer number now being exposed is indeed troubling,” said noted climatologist Anders Lorenzen, who claimed that the Arctic ice caps have shrunk at the alarming rate of 41,000 square miles per year. “In August alone we discovered 44 mad scientist laboratories, three highly classified military compounds, and seven reanimated and very confused cavemen. That’s more than twice the number we had found in the previous three decades combined.”
I love thinking I'm a hater and then meeting a real hater and going wow that does not look fun actually. Going back to my lukewarm hater ways. Performative haterdom. I couldn't name five hater bands.
