A bunch of things I read while on vacation.
- BBC: What your earwax can reveal about your health. Apparently quite a bit.
- MSSV: We’re All Going to the Conclave Larp. I’d do a Conclave LARP in a heartbeat, especially after my experiences doing a similar LARP as an undergrad in a Chinese history class.
- NY Times: Penske Shakes Up Leadership of South by Southwest. I didn’t realize Penske had bought it, but that happened after we left Austin. Sounds like this is the actual end of pre-pandemic SXSW.
- Graphic Policy: Alliance Entertainment Submits Complaint Against Diamond Claiming Fraud and Deception. Diamond, formerly the biggest comics distributor, now in bankruptcy and meant to be purchased by Alliance, apparently didn’t tell Alliance they’d been dumped by Wizards of the Coast (the D&D folks) before the purchase. This may force Diamond to move from Chapter 11 bankruptcy to Chapter 7.
- Vogue: Hear Me Out: What If Gen Xers Are Actually the Cool Ones? If we are, it’s because we don’t care whether we’re cool or cringe.
- Hearing Things: How to Quit Streaming. Our streaming is Apple Music (comes with our bundle) but honestly other than “artist essentials”, we don’t use a lot of the streaming other than by-album anyway.
- Splinter: Plagiarizing Independent Journalists Is Part of Mainstream Media’s Business. With a recent example.
- Teen Vogue: “LinkedIn Catfish” Aliyah Jones Created a Fake Profile to Expose Racial Inequity in Hiring. Unsurprisingly, the white profile with the same skillsets got a lot more interest and callbacks than the Black profile.
- Smithsonian Magazine: When a Historian Saw This Haunting Photograph of a Nameless Native Girl, She Decided She Had to Identify Her. Her name is Sophie Mousseau.
- Guardian: ‘It’s out of control’: the fight against US ‘tip-creep’. I feel this on a deep and personal level every time I see a tip screen wanting 25% at a place where I picked my own baked good out and nobody even warmed it for me. Just pay people.
- Flytrap: Can the American Secular Movement Listen to Its Better Angels? I have a lot of feelings about this because my ex was one of those atheists (you know the ones, proselytizing and aggressive) and this story is all about how the Center For Inquiry and the old school skeptical movement is very white, very straight, and very cisnormative to the point of transphobia. It’s framed through the work of one queer activist attorney and their travails with secular groups that are more interested in hanging on to CFI than to working with queer and pro-queer young secular activists. I’m going to be thinking about this for a while and not just in an “I was right to be creeped by those guys” way.
- History News Network: These Are Words Scholars Should No Longer Use to Describe Slavery and the Civil War. It’s not just slaveowners & slaves vs enslavers & enslaved people. It’s also the “Appeasement of 1850” and “labor camps”. I’d refer to the places formerly known as plantations as something that tied them to prison farms, myself.
- Matthew Newstrom: The history of album art. Today I learned, and saw a lot of great album covers from the 1940s onward that illustrated the story.