you know that gag where there’s a character who’s falling off a ledge to their death and they’re all teary and the music swells as their hand slips and then the shot zooms out to show they fell like. two feet. that’s what answering important emails feels like.
If you can, please donate to the Internet archive, links in the description. The loss of the archive would be devastating for dozens of reasons.
I know the Library of Alexandria comment sounds like an exaggeration. It absolutely is not. As of May 7, 2022, the Internet Archive holds over 35 million books and texts, 7.9 million movies, videos and TV shows, 842 thousand software programs, 14 million audio files, 4 million images, 2.4 million TV clips, 237 thousand concerts, and over 682 billion web pages in the Wayback Machine. It’s been operating since 1996, the loss of knowledge would be impossible to ever completely come back from.
The lawsuit from Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley Sons, and Penguin Random House alleges there have been significant revenue losses because of their controlled digital lending program. For context, most libraries in the US also use CDL to distribute books to their patrons wherever they are but those programs are run through for profit companies and the libraries are often paying a very high fee to so their patrons can have access to digital books. The Internet Archive’s program is completely free but they have a policy of not digitizing and lending anything less than 5 years old.
The lawsuit goes on to note that authors often own larger shares of their revenue of digital vs. print copies of their books. So the publishing companies, seeing that they’re underpaying their authors, are essentially blaming a library for being free instead of bumping up what authors earn on print copies. The Internet Archive’s 5 year policy is designed to protect authors anyway as that’s when books typically make the most money.
Hey by the way The Internet Archive is also one of the most cited places on Wikipedia. If it goes down a good chunk of Wikipedia will go back to “citation needed” or citations will lead to dead links.
I just realized my Satmeals are but a pale attempt at Denethor’s eating scene from Return of the King.
Terms and phrases that live in my brain for mundane things I do:
Dreambreaker (realizing the dream from my half-awake state is not real and waking up for realsies)
Podwalk (listening to podcasts any time I’m walking anywhere, “I’m making record time on this podwalk” etc.)
Train of thought (commuting on a train, which is mostly reading time and some portable video games)
Good bagel (eat a bagel on the walk to the office)
Ensalat (pronounced en-suh-lot, eat a salad for lunch)
Nightwatch (most evenings, dedicated to catching up on movies and TV)
Satmeal (Saturday dinner when I indulge more than the other six days a week)
Sundown (taking Sunday to come down from indulgence and reacclimate to an average day)
Carmageddon (the one day a month when I rent a car and schedule out a madman’s worth of errands and stuff to do while having a car)
Bro how can you be bored when there’s birds? They’re just flying around, all kinds! Look at em go!
How can someone feel disdain towards drywall? And yet I do.
ALT
