soberscientistlife

whatbigotspost

Always nice when math helps make it all the more clear how ridiculously reasonable the worker demands are.

This is what the studios have brought everything to a grinding halt for.

mostlysignssomeportents

My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it’s a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me — because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

Amazon owns Audible, the monopoly audiobook platform that controls >90% of the audio market. They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon’s monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.

That’s a hell of a lot of leverage to hand to any company, let alone a rapacious monopoly that ran a program targeting small publishers called “Project Gazelle,” where execs were ordered to attack indie publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”:

https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10

Keep reading

falloutnewvegastransedmygender

DRM ON FUCKING BOOKS???

magess

The publishing industry 100% loves DRM on books. Like the publishers themselves will often insist upon it because they think it stops piracy.

foobar137

The only media industry that doesn’t 100% love DRM is the music industry, and that’s because they released digital content without DRM before they realized they might need it. (You might have heard of it - it’s called the Compact Disc.)

(I’ll put a cut here, this got long.)

Keep reading

davetheinverted

For a while, I was de-DRMing my Kindle books specifically so Amazon couldn’t spontaneously decide to just…take them all back. I should probably look at doing that more.

wilwheaton

I love it when Cory does this.

maybeasunflower

Aside on How People Defeated The Music Industry With a Felt-Tip Pen/Sharpie.

CDs, like records before them, store their data in a long spiral track. Music CDs go from the inside out; data CDs go from the outside in. This prevents your CD player get confused/ruined by trying to play a data CD - it will look at the middle, see nothing, and go “nothing for me here!”. This is good.

When you put a CD in a computer’s CD player, it will check the outside first (assuming it’s more likely to be a data CD), then check the inside (so it can still play your tunes / rip them).

So a music exec came up with a dastardly plan: put something that ‘looks’ like a small data file on the outside of music CDs. CD players will still be fine (they will start from the inside), but computers will think it’s a data CD and ignore the music! No ripping possible!

… except people realized you could just do a quick line around the outside with your favourite black pen. The computer wouldn’t be able to read the data file on the outside, so would then (correctly) think it’s a music CD.

The ‘small file on the outside of music CDs’ thing died very quickly after that.

mostlysignssomeportents

“Last year, Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav made $246.6 million; Disney’s Bob Iger made $45.9 million; and Paramount Global CEO’s Bob Bakish made $32 million. These individuals make more money per year than almost any entertainment executive before them. Just a small portion of each major CEO’s annual salary could cover the cost of the guilds’ reasonable structural and financial demands, and yet, they say it’s not possible. How could that be? Because it’s not about the money. It’s about power and perception. Almost none of these CEOs built the companies they run. We are not negotiating with Jack Warner or Walt Disney. We’re not even negotiating with the people who enriched these companies, like producer Robert Evans at Paramount in the 1970s. These CEOs are basically people who just work there—and who have contracts that allow them very large amounts of money. And right now, they don’t want anyone to know that. They don’t want anyone to know that they don’t actually build anything. They don’t want anyone to see them capitulate and bend the knee to any degree by making a deal with the writers and actors who build the product they fund and distribute. They don’t want to reasonably negotiate with these artists, because they think it will make them look weak. They think it will make them look like chumps, make them look simply like the employees of these companies that they are.”

— Justine Bateman on the Destruction of the Film Business (via wilwheaton)

dduane

This is absolutely it. All this crap is about nothing but the perceived power that comes with having a big fat paycheck, and (the fear of) losing face.:/

only-tiktoks

unashamedly-enthusiastic

The girls are exeeerrrcising

rebellum

Tags by @doberbutts

wild-saber1337

MY GOD WHAT HAVE I FOUND XD

I'm not sorry for having you know this exists XD

elodieunderglass

My sibling sent this to me with no explanation it’s how we communicate

deniselavestal

You gotta write for funsies sometimes. Everything doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. Like. Who cares if it’s a little silly it is made out of love

romanceyourdemons

i genuinely think we should have more cross-gender acting in film. i think cis female actors should play cis male characters and vice versa without the characters’ masculinity or femininity being a joke and i think this ought to happen enough that it isn’t a big deal at all. cast timothee chalamet as marie antoinette he can pull it off. let gong li play an emperor. this will be good for everyone, especially me

animentality

akajustmerry

Ask a community organiser: can you organise with Fran Drescher as president of SAG-AFTRA even though she's an antivaxxer? On broad based organising versus issue based organising.

itstimetomotivate

willypetegk