punk 101, star trek web clique, business borg

Hi, happy Friday! Here’s some interesting links that have been lurking in my tab collection (some of them since MAY):

Here’s a bookmarklet for copying IMDB info for quick updates or review posts or what have you. It ends up looking like this:

🎬 Cold Comfort Farm: Directed by John Schlesinger. With Eileen Atkins, Kate Beckinsale, Sheila Burrell, Stephen Fry. A recently orphaned young woman goes to live with eccentric relatives in Sussex, where she sets about improving their gloomy lives. 🔗

Cute!

National Parks Travelers Club is for people who love visiting US nat’l parks! They have meet-ups and stuff too, super fun!

Punk 101 Masterlist which links to various things that may interest punks (or those who admire punk ethics), including zines!

I’ve never eaten acorns and haven’t particularly thought of doing so before, but if you’re in the right part of the world you can apparently do just that. Here’s a guide for collecting and processing edible acorns from Edgewood Nursery.

Wikimedia Commons has a photo competition ongoing through July 31st. Basically they’re looking for photos of natural protected areas from various countries (full list on the site) and you can win a bit of money if your photo is chosen as the best.

I really enjoy Sacha Judd’s newsletter, “what you love matters,” which focuses on online culture– but the fun stuff! Basically it’s just a collection of interesting links and fun personal updates. It’s hosted on Buttondown, so if you don’t want another email coming to your inbox you can sub via RSS (which is what I did).

Here’s a Star Trek-themed web clique to join if you have a personal website! It doesn’t have to be a Star Trek website.

An excellent article about AI’s impact on culture: Generative AI and the Business Borg aesthetic by Tracy Durnell:

‘Why am I naming this after the Borg? Like Star Trek’s Borg, this is an aesthetic rooted in extractive consumption, assimilationist dominance, neo-colonial expansionism, self-righteous conviction, reductionist thinking, and proclamations of inevitability. It idolizes technology, often inspired by older science-fiction, and draws on cyberpunk aesthetics. The Silicon Valley Collective values groupthink and believes themselves superior to “the other.”’

This short documentary from Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson via the New York Times has been making the rounds lately: Did the Camera Ever Tell the Truth? | Death of a Fantastic Machine which sounds like it’s a history of the camera but is really about how we interact with media (including AI images).

Need more stuff to read? I’ve compiled all previous linkspam posts here on my website, or you can explore the linkspam tag to find more.

5 things is a post

1. Had an awful dream about my gums/teeth where basically I would need surgery to fix whatever was wrong– I never have medical stress dreams EXCEPT about my teeth, which is very annoying because it’s always some exaggeration of something that could legit go wrong. I think my main issue right now is gum recession, probably because I keep sleeping with my mouth open which dries my gums out. So I’m going to find some mouth tape and see if that helps.

2. I found some great conductor POV train videos in the UK on Youtube. These are (I think) tourist train routes, so the focus is on beautiful landscapes and such which is more interesting than the warehouse views you usually see.

3. I also really like watching “walk around town” videos, especially in tourist destinations. It gives me more of an idea of what a place is like and whether I’d actually enjoy visiting it, or if it’s way too crowded and chaotic and I’d rather just avoid it. Like, Capri is beautiful but it’s practically wall-to-wall tourists so idk if it’ll be on my to-visit list.

4. My old iPod battery is finally kicking the dirt, as it’s charging but not showing that it’s charging. I’ve resisted opening it and replacing things because a) it’s hard to crack this one open and b) I’d want to replace the harddrive as well and that costs $$, so I’m hoping it can hang on for a bit longer so I can maybe source some discounted parts on eBay.

5. Currently reading the second book in KD Edwards’ Tarot Sequence and really enjoying it, though it DOES have a lot of (mostly off-page) trauma happening to a lot of characters, including the protagonist, which is tough to read. But I like the mix of fantasy and mystery (with a bit of romance) and the writing is very good. And it’s queer! Yay!

trying out something new

So I’ve made a (WordPress) blog subdomain for my personal site (Pixietails Club) and I’ve installed @alisx’ JournalPress plugin to connect it to my Dreamwidth account. I should now be able to post entries on my personal URL which’ll crosspost automatically to my DW account, including friends-only posts! Yay!

The reason I wanted to do this is partly because I’d like greater control over my data, and it’s easier to do that when it’s on your own webspace. Obviously I really like Dreamwidth for the community aspect, so I’d like to keep posting there (here) and this seemed like a good solution.

Other positives: I find it much easier to write and format posts in WordPress (maybe just because I’ve been using it for like 15 years idk); I can make drafts and save them for later a little easier; I can scooch myself a little more into the small web/indie web space and use my blog domain for webmentions and other fun stuff; and I can upload/host my own photos without worrying about overloading the DW storage.

The only downside is I can’t figure out what to do for access-locked posts on the WordPress side of things. I think I’d have to make a membership…thing? And that would involve handling people’s data which is a whole other kettle of fish I don’t want to deal with.

So for now access-locked posts will only be available for reading on my Dreamwidth account (and then only if you’re on the list, obviously).

Next problem is figuring out how to import all my old posts over to my blog URL…I should be able to do it with this tool but I can’t figure out how to get the XML import running. 😔