not in kansas anymore

Good afternoon, happy Tuesday! I finally spotted the morning doves again-- well, actually, one of the landed on the back porch and made eye contact with me through the sliding glass door, and then another dove dive-bombed the first one and they both flew off. Fun!

Got some links for y'all here! I'm experimenting with formatting this time. Is this easier to read, or worse?


siderea did an informal poll about some of the differences in educational systems in the US, with regards specifically to when civics was taught.

I did most of my schooling in Maryland and I took a civics class in 9th or 10th grade, but I'm pretty sure we went over some stuff before then in elementary school/middle school. We had mock presidential elections, for instance, so I'm sure we at least went over the stuff about voting.

I also remember seeing the Schoolhouse Rock video about how bills are passed, but I honestly can't remember where along my educational timeline it happened. I AM fairly certain a teacher showed it to us, though!

( More links under here )
Need more stuff to read? I've compiled all previous linkspam posts here on my website or of course you can explore the linkspam tag below.

me: "why is my computer running so slow"

me: "oh I have too many tabs open in my browser, I should go through them and either bookmark them or close them"

me: *looks at one tab which has 10 interesting links which then get opened into their own tabs*

me: "why is my computer running so slow"

later

me: "there's too many tabs in this window, and I can't do anything, I'll open another window and then I won't get overwhelmed"

me: *opens 20 more tabs in the new window*

computer: *desperately trying to give browser more processing power*

computer fan: *loud as fuck*

me: "why is this computer so shitty"

even later

me: "there's too many browser windows open on this desktop. I'll move some to a second desktop."

computer: *screaming for help*

And that's how I currently have 7 browser windows with 160 tabs open across 3 desktops 💀

Link: Welcome to Garbagetown (author Catherynne M. Valente's Substack) (2022)

I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again. Like the poison wants us specifically. Like it knows we will always make its favorite food: vulnerability, connection, difference. I’m so tired of lunch photos and fanfic and stupid jokes and keeping in touch with family across time zones and making friends and starting cottage industries and pursuing hobbies and meeting soulmates and expressing thoughts and creating identities and loving TV shows and reading books and getting to know a few of your heroes and raising kids and making bookshelves and knitting and painting and fixing sinks and first dates and homemade jam and, yes, figuring out what Buffy characters we are, listening and learning and hoping and just fucking talking to each other weaponized against us. Having our enthusiasm over the smallest joys of everyday life invaded by people who long ago forgot their value and turned into fodder for the death of thought, the burial of love.

These were our spaces, little people who just wanted to connect. And one by one, they get turned into battlefields where we have to fight just as hard to exist as we do in the real world. And every time a few more people you never thought the Absorbaloff of hatred and gleeful sadism would slurp up don’t come along to the next safe place, and start trying to take it away before anyone can get there.

How dare they? How dare they take everyday life and load it into a cannon just to fire it back in our faces?

This was written back in 2022 but is still relevant today, tbh. Tumblr...sigh.

And ironically (maybe) Substack is definitely on the path to ruining its own community-- it's luring in writers and users and trying to get them to form communities and maybe in a year or two they'll start charging for stuff or increasing fees or whatever. Anyway.

Added to my Commonplace Notebook April 19, 2025

I'm determined to keep up with this, so here's a month of Thursdays, more or less...original Community Thursday info/idea here, with thanks to the creator! Basically, I'm going to be doing "community stuff" (posting, commenting, linking) throughout the week and then tallying it here, plus linking to any new-to-me interesting communities I find.

Commented at recthething with two Reservoir Dogs fic recs

Commented at 1word1day for Ogival (fantastic word)

Commented at smallweb about some site updates I've been working on

Commented on the weekly booknook reading Wednesday post plus responded to other commenters

New-to-me Communities
ginnhale -- a community for fans of author Ginn Hale!
all_worlds_of_mccaffrey -- a community for fans of author Anne McCaffrey! (and another senmut community that I stumbled upon randomly ;D )

Hello, happy Wednesday! I saw a family of quail come out from some shrubbery earlier and I've been floating on a high of bird-happiness all day.

Citrus Con is a free online BL/queer fan convention happening June 20-22, 2025! Grab your ticket before June 19, 2025.

Tumblr (or rather its parent company Automattic) is having some recent troubles (also here) and laid off 16% of its staff.

A few new guides posted to newcomers recently:
soc_puppet wrote a guide to mood themes, how to back up your Tumblr account and alternatives to talking in the tags

ysabetwordsmith wrote about how to post fiction or other writing-- a really good resource for people who are used to only posting on AO3 or other similar websites-- and how to find your Tumblr friends on DW

I've really been enjoying rachelmanija's book review posts, and have added several of them to my wishlist/TBR list. (She writes really good books herself, too!)

Here's a few recent releases on Project Gutenberg that're available for free download:
1. The intelligent woman's guide to socialism and capitalism by (George) Bernard Shaw, yes that GBS. Here's the Wikipedia article about the book.
2. "This was a man" : A comedy in three acts by Noël Coward
3. A doctor enjoys Sherlock Holmes by Edward J. Van Liere
Isis Unveiled by H. P. Blavatsky (Helena Petrovna Blavatsky) Volume 1 and Volume 2 (Wikipedia entry here)

A few AI-related links:
erinptah posted a great LLM (AI) news roundup from the past few months.

From Bloomberg: The AI Romance Factory, about an AI startup trying to flood the romance book market with dreck. (h/t The Rec Center)

You can fight AI in indie publishing by leaving reviews from hazeldomain (h/t dduane)

And an article from Ars Technica: AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt:

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It's not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an "infinite maze" of static files with no exit links, where they "get stuck" and "thrash around" for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That's likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.

A few RSS feeds I've added to my reader this week:
r/Frugal
r/Composting
Low-Tech Magazine (English feed)

Interested in more links? I've compiled all previous linkspam posts here on my website.

I found this post on MetaFilter about telecommunication culture and habits and it had a little questionnaire that I thought it'd be fun to answer over here:

Demographics: late 30s white person, mostly grew up on the East Coast and now technically living on the West Coast (albeit as a full-time traveling catsitter at the moment).

1. Do you text before calling?
I even always text someone a "hey I'm going to call you" before doing it; I never just call someone, not even my own family.

2. Do you avoid phone calls in general?
Yes, in general, but it was much worse when I was younger, where I was almost too anxious to actually do it. Then I was forced to make calls as part of my job (library calling people to come pick up their holds) so I got used to ignoring the anxiety.

Now I can do it without stressing as much, and I'll even call (local) businesses if I think I can get a quicker answer than an email.

In specific: I do schedule regular phone calls with my parents, and my brother calls me twice a year (we do text a lot between). I also do phone calls with pet owners, but otherwise all my other friends just use chat apps or texting to keep in touch.

3. Do you do phone calls in public settings?
Yes, but it's not my favorite and I try to find a quiet place to talk. I once had a phone call on a bus (10 years ago) and felt self-conscious the whole time, and haven't repeated the experience.

I despise hearing other people's conversations, despite being a fairly nosy person in general. It feels invasive, especially when they put it to speakerphone and don't tell the person on the other end that everyone can hear them.

4. Do you let calls or texts interrupt in-person conversations?
Not normally, no. I usually have my phone on silent anyway when I'm having a conversation with someone.

On the other hand, if the other person is on their phone the whole time then I'll be on mine, too. (My family has a bad habit of this.)

5. Do you refrain from calling or texting during certain hours?
I don't text people enough to need to restrict it to certain hours. On the other hand, I much prefer making phone calls in the morning vs. afternoon or evening. I'll try to schedule calls for earlier in the day if possible.

6. Do you turn off your texting or voice call sounds / notifications at certain hours?
My phone is set to go to silent/do not disturb mode automatically at 7pm and turn off at 7am. However, I do still text after 7pm (if I feel like it) I just don't have the sound going off.

To extend on this: I also have it set to silence incoming calls from people not on my contacts lists, which means all spammers are silenced and unfortunately so is everyone else. But I do check my voicemail somewhat regularly so I can catch people who aren't spammers.

7. Do you have a land line, smart phone or dumb phone? Do you use them differently?
I only have a smart phone. I had a land line as a child into young adulthood, but my parents go rid of that soon after cell phones became more popular. Maybe 2008?

As for email: I'd like people to email me more but I can't get anyone to respond to me IN my email. If I email my mother she'll respond in text. If I email my brother he responds on Discord. etc. etc.

Some indie web bloggers have a "respond by email" link on their posts and I'm thisclose to actually doing it. I think it just feels so formal that there's an intimidation factor to actually doing it, vs. just responding on social media or something.