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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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It’s been twenty years since my Microsoft DRM talk

On THURSDAY (June 20) I'm live onstage in LOS ANGELES for a recording of the GO FACT YOURSELF podcast. On FRIDAY (June 21) I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On SATURDAY (June 22) I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel and a keynote at the LOCUS AWARDS.

This week on my podcast,This week on my podcast, I read my June 17, 2004 Microsoft Research speech about DRM, a talk that went viral two decades ago, and reassess its legacy:

https://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

It's been 20 years (and one day) since I gave that talk. It wasn't my first talk like that, but at the time, it was the most successful talk I'd ever given. I was still learning how to deliver a talk at the time, tinkering with different prose and delivery styles (to my eye, there's a lot of Bruce Sterling in that one, something that's still true today).

I learned to give talks by attending sf conventions and watching keynotes and panel presentations and taking mental notes. I was especially impressed with the oratory style of Harlan Ellison, whom I heard speak on numerous occasions, and by Judith Merril, who was a wonderful mentor to me and many other writers:

https://locusmag.com/2021/09/cory-doctorow-breaking-in/

I was also influenced by the speakers I'd heard at the many political rallies I'd attended and helped organize; from the speakers at the annual Labour Day parade to the anti-nuclear proliferation and pro-abortion rights marches I was very involved with. I also have vivid memories of the speeches that Helen Caldicott gave in Toronto when I was growing up, where I volunteered as an usher:

https://www.helencaldicott.com/

When I helped found a dotcom startup in the late 1990s, my partners and I decided that I'd do the onstage talking; we paid for a couple hours of speaker training from an expensive consultant in San Francisco. The only thing I remember from that session was the advice to look into the audience as much as possible, rather than reading from notes with my head down. Good advice, but kinda obvious.

The impetus for that training was my onstage presentation at the first O'Reilly P2P conference in 2001. I don't quite remember what I said there, but I remember that it made an impression on Tim O'Reilly, which meant a lot to me then (and now):

https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/844

I don't remember who invited me to give the talk at Microsoft Research that day, but I think it was probably Marc Smith, who was researching social media at the time by data-mining Usenet archives to understand social graphs. I think I timed the gig so that I could kill three birds with one stone: in addition to that talk, I attended (and maybe spoke at?) that year's Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, and attended an early preview of the soon-to-launch Sci Fi Museum (now the Museum of Pop Culture). I got to meet Nichelle Nichols (and promptly embarrassed myself by getting tongue-tied and telling her how much I loved the vocals she did on her recording of the Star Wars theme, something I'm still hot around the ears over, though she was a pro and gently corrected me, "I think you mean Star *Trek"):

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=4IiJUQSsxNw&list=OLAK5uy_lHUn58fbpceC3PrK2Xu9smBNBjR_-mAHQ

But the start of that trip was the talk at Microsoft Research; I'd been on the Microsoft campus before. That startup I did? Microsoft tried to buy us, which prompted our asshole VCs to cram the founders and steal our equity, which created so much acrimony that the Microsoft deal fell through. I was pretty bitter at the time, but in retrospect, I really dodged a bullet – for one thing, the deal involved my going to work for Microsoft as a DRM evangelist. I mean, talk about the road not taken!

This was my first time back at Microsoft as an EFF employee. There was some pre-show meet-and-greet-type stuff, and then I was shown into a packed conference room where I gave my talk and had a lively (and generally friendly) Q&A. MSR was – and is – the woolier side of Microsoft, where all kinds of interesting people did all kinds of great research.

Indeed, almost every Microsoft employee I've ever met was a good and talented person doing the best work they could. The fact that Microsoft produces such a consistent stream of garbage products and crooked business practices is an important testament to the way that a rotten organization can be so much less than the sum of its parts.

I'm a fully paid up subscriber to Ronald Coase's "Theory of the Firm" (not so much his other views):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

Coase says the reason institutions exist is to enable people to work together with lowered "coordination costs." In other words, if you and I are going to knit a sweater together, we're going to need to figure out how to make sure that we're not both making the left sleeve. Creating an institution – the Mafia, the Catholic Church, Microsoft, a company, a co-op, a committee that puts on a regional science fiction con – is all about minimizing those costs.

As Yochai Benkler pointed out in 2002, the coolest and most transformative thing about the internet is that it let us do more complex collective work with smaller and less structured institutions:

https://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.PDF

That was the initial prompt for my novel Walkaway, which asked, "What if we could build luxury hotels and even space programs with the kind of (relatively) lightweight institutional overheads associated with Wikipedia and the Linux kernel?"

https://crookedtimber.org/2017/05/10/coases-spectre/

So the structure of institutions is really important. At the same time, I'm skeptical of the idea that there are "good companies" and "bad companies." Small businesses, family businesses, and other firms that aren't exposed to the finance sector can reflect their leaders' personalities, but it's a huge mistake to ascribe personalities to the companies themselves.

That's how you get foolish ideas like "Apple is a good company because they embrace paid service and Google is a bad company because they make money from surveillance." Apple will spy on you, too, if they can:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Disney and Fox weren't Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers making goo-goo eyes at each other across the table at MPA meetings. They were two giant public companies, and any differences between them were irrelevancies and marketing myths:

https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interoperability/

I think senior management's personalities do matter (see, for example, the destruction of Boeing after it was colonized by sociopaths from McDonnell Douglas), but the influence of those personalities is much less important than the constraints that competition and regulation impose on companies. In other words, an asshole can run a company that delivers good products at fair prices under ethical conditions – provided that failing to do so will cost more in lost business and fines than they stand to make by cheating:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

Microsoft is a company founded and run by colossal assholes. Bill Gates is a monster and he surrounded himself with monsters, and they hired monsters to fill out the courts of their corporate palaces:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/14/patch-tuesday/#fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again

To the extent that good things come out of Microsoft – some of its games products, the odd piece of hardware, important papers from MSR – it's in spite of the leadership; it's the result of constraints imposed by competition and regulation – and that's why Microsoft pursued such an aggressive program of extinguishing its competitors and capturing its regulators.

In retrospect, I think one of my goals in that talk was to convince those people doing good work for a rotten institution to go elsewhere and do other things. Certainly, that's one of the goals I pursue in the talks I give today. At the time, some of Microsoft's highest-profile technologists were publicly resigning over the company's war on free/open source software, so it wasn't an unrealistic goal:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030214215639/http://synthesist.net/writing/onleavingms.html

What I did not expect what that publishing the talk on my site and blogging it on Boing Boing would spark a wave of public interest that would get its message in front of several orders of magnitude more people than I spoke to at Microsoft that day. Partly, that was because I released the talk into the public domain, using the brand-new Creative Commons Public Domain Declaration (which was later replaced with the CC0 mark, due to legal issues withBu its drafting):

https://web.archive.org/web/20100223035835/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/

Some mix of the content of the speech, the spirit of the moment, and the novelty of that wide open license sparked a ton of interest. Jason Kottke recorded an audio version that Andy Baio hosted:

https://kottke.org/04/06/cory-drm-talk

My brutalist ASCII transcript was quickly converted to beautiful HTML by Matt Haughey and Anil Dash:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040622235333/http://www.dashes.com/anil/stuff/doctorow-drm-ms.html

For people who needed a hardcopy, there was Patrick Berry's printer-friendly stylesheet:

https://patandkat.com/pat/weblog/mirror/cory-drm/doctorow-drm-ms.html

Multiple people recorded (and sold!) audio versions, and then there were all the fan translations, into Danish, French, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (both EU and Brazilian), Spanish and Swedish. I stayed in touch with some of those translators, and they helped me translate the position papers I wrote for UN WIPO meetings. Those papers were so effective that ratfuckers from the copyright lobby started to steal them and hide them in the UN toilets (!):

https://web.archive.org/web/20041119132831/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/002117.php

Re-reading the speech for my podcast on Sunday, I expected to be struck by the anachronisms in it, and there were a few of those to be sure. But far more clear was the common thread running from this talk to other talks I gave that took on a significant life of their own, like my 2011 "War On General Purpose Computing" talk for CCC:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

And my work on Adversarial Interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

And my most recent work, on enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

In other words, I've been saying the same thing – in different ways – for more than 20 years. That could be depressing, but I actually found it uplifting. Two decades ago, I was radicalized by a fear that the internet would be seized by corporations and governments and transformed into a system of surveillance and control. I found my way into a job at EFF, where I worked with colleagues across multiple disciplines – coders, lawyers and activists – to fight this force.

At the time, this was a fringe cause. Most of the traditional activists I'd come up with in the feminist, antiwar, antiracist, environmental and labour movement viewed digital rights as a distraction and dismissed its partisans as sad, self-obsessed nerds who mistook fights over the management of Star Trek message boards for civil rights struggles:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell

I thought I was right then, and I think history has borne me out. The point of waging these fights – both in the wide public sphere and within political movements – is to get people activated before it's too late. Every day that goes by is a day when the internet becomes more inhospitable to political organizing for a better world – more surveillant, more controlling. I believed then – and believe today – that the internet isn't more important that the other fights I waged as a young activist, but I think that the internet is fundamental to those fights.

Saving the planet, smashing patriarchy, overthrowing tyranny and freeing labor are all fights that will be coordinated – Coase style – on the internet. Without a free, fair and open internet, those fights are infinitely harder to win.

The project of getting people to understand, care about, and fight for digital rights is a marathon, not a sprint. When I joined EFF, it was already 12 years old. There were six people in the org then (I was the seventh). Today, there's more than a hundred of us, and we're stretched so thin! The 30+ year old idea that internet policy will intersect with every part of every fight has been utterly vindicated.

Back in 2004, I asked Microsoft why they were willing to fight the US government to the death over antitrust enforcement, but were such wimps when confronted with the entertainment industry's demands for DRM. 20 years later, I think I know the answer: Microsoft understood that DRM would let them usurp the relationship between creative workers, entertainment industry companies, and audiences. Their perfect instincts for seeking out and capitalizing on opportunities to seize monopoly power drove them to make deliberately defective products, in the belief that their market power would let them cram those products down our throats:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/01/27/protect-your-investment-buy-open/

Here's a link to the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2024/06/16/my-2004-microsoft-drm-talk/

And here's direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your stuff for free forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_470/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_470_-_My_2004_Microsoft_DRM_Talk.mp3

And here's the RSS feed for my podcast:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/18/greetings-fellow-pirates/#arrrrrrrrrr

#pluralistic #drm #enshittification #microsoft #microsoft research #podcasts #mp3s #history #trusted computing #ngscb #retrospectives

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steveyockey · 11 months

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this is the most comprehensive piece on the ongoing #BlocktheBoat protest (first in Oakland, now in Tacoma where the boat has stopped to load cargo) I have come across,

The Cape Orlando is part of the US Maritime Administration’s Ready Reserve Force [RRF], auxiliary supply and service ships kept mothballed until needed to supply US strategic needs. Ships like the Cape Orlando are quasi-civilian, crewed by a civilian company and used only by the US government, usually for military purposes. The Orlando is one of two RRF ships currently lay-berthed at the Port of Oakland and was actively used during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Organizers told this reporter that they had reliable information that the ship was likely being mobilized in the US’s military aid for the government of Israel during its current decimation of Gaza. The Oakland Observer has confirmed with relative certainty that the Orlando’s ultimate destination was Israel as of Friday through another confidential source.

The Cape Orlando finally arrived at port in Tacoma on Monday morning, and as of this writing, protesters are using Block the Boat picketing tactics to block the loading of cargo on to the boat—that includes forming a picket with the goal of prompting local union workers to decline to cross for any number of reasons in ILWU policy. As of this writing, it's unclear whether the tactic is working, but it does seem as if workers have not been able to load the ship.

If you are in Tacoma, Washington, the Block the Boat protest organizers are asking you to show up so the blockade can continue for as long as possible and protestors can rest in shifts

#Palestine #I need to be in Tacoma so bad #the one thing this piece doesn’t have is that apparently one crew member is being reported as walking off

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captainsophiestark · 9 months

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Parents Weekend

Platonic!Percy Jackson x Reader

Masterlist - Join My Taglist!

Written for my personal fic writing challenge for 2024, Sophie's Year of Fic! Featuring a new fic being posted every Friday, all year long :)

Fandom: Percy Jackson

Summary: Percy's clear-sighted mortal cousin on his mom's side flies out to California to visit Percy for his first parents weekend away from home, at New Rome University.

Word Count: 2,166

Category: Fluff

A/N: This is full of spoilers for every book that features Percy Jackson, so if you're a new fan brought in by the show, welcome! But this fic might not be for you, unless you really don't mind spoilers. Also, it is loosely related to this other platonic Percy fic I wrote, but you don't need to read one to understand the other

Putting work into an AI program without permission is illegal. You do not have my permission. Do not do it.

"HALT! Not another step without approval!"

I jumped backwards as a talking statue appeared in front of me out of nowhere, stopping me right on the threshold of the city of New Rome. Of all the things I'd seen as a clear-sighted mortal, this ranked among the weirdest for sure.

"Who are you, and on what authority are you here?"

"Uh... I'm Percy Jackson's cousin, and I'm here to visit him at college?"

The statue narrowed his eyes at me.

"Percy Jackson's cousin, hm? I know him well. He spent quite a lot of time when he first got here disobeying and disrespecting my rules. But we killed a giant together, and he defended Rome honorably. So as long as you are not armed...?"

The statue raised an eyebrow at me, and I quickly held out my hands and shook my head to show him I didn't have anything on me. He narrowed his eyes, then nodded curtly.

"Then you may enter. Tell him hello, and to get a haircut."

"Yes sir."

The statue nodded, clearly pleased, as I walked past him and into the city of New Rome. Percy had told me all about his adventures whenever we caught up with each other, and I felt fairly confident that I'd just met Terminus, the Roman boundary god. He was even more uptight than Percy had said.

It was a beautiful fall day in California, the sun lighting up the Oakland hills and creating just the right amount of warmth. I stared around in awe at the city before me, which practically sparkled in the sun.

Percy had told me all about it, and I'd even seen a few pictures. But nothing quite compared to seeing it in person.

I joined the crowds moving through the city, laughing and talking with one another. Luckily for me, a very easy to find street sign pointed me in the direction of New Rome U, and I started heading in that direction.

Percy had just started college this fall, moving all the way across the country just when I'd finally settled for the long haul in New York. I gave him a bit of teasing for that, but I knew how happy he was to be going here (especially with Annabeth) and how hard he'd worked to get in, so I really was happy for him. I'd just made him promise to visit New York often, which I knew he would do for more family members than just me.

What I hadn't told him was that I also intended to visit him. This weekend was officially "parents' weekend" at NRU. Sally and Paul couldn't come, since Estelle was still a baby, but I had no such limitations. I'd booked a flight the second Sally had told me the date, and now, I was finally here.

Percy had no idea. As far as he knew, he had nothing special happening this weekend. I couldn't wait to see his face when I surprised him.

My head was on a swivel the minute I set foot on campus, looking for my favorite cousin. He wasn't short, so I hoped he'd be easily visible over the heads of people in the crowd, but I wandered between buildings and students with no luck. I needed a better plan.

It didn't take me long to come up with one, thankfully. A big, beautiful fountain sat in the middle of a cluster of university buildings, so I headed right for it and hopped up on the ledge, standing tall and scouting the crowds from my new vantage point. After a minute, I heard a surprised voice from behind me.

"Y/N?"

I whipped around to find Percy standing at the top of some stairs, apparently just coming from class in the building. He was hand in hand with his girlfriend Annabeth, which always made me happy to see. I beamed at him and waved like a maniac before hopping down and heading his direction.

"What are you doing here?" he called, momentarily dropping Annabeth's hand to race towards me, meeting me halfway across the square. I laughed as he picked me up in a tight hug and spun me around.

"It's parents' weekend for New Rome University, isn't it?" I asked, once my feet were back on the ground. "I might not be your parent, but I'm pretty sure the event has changed to mean 'family weekend' by this point."

"Why didn't you tell me you were coming!" he cried, laughing a little as he apparently didn't quite believe I was really here. Annabeth joined us, a smile on her face to match mine and Percy's.

"Because I wanted to surprise you, duh!" I laughed and pulled Annabeth into a tight hug, which she returned. "It's so good to see you both! Oh, and Percy, Terminus said you need to get a haircut."

Percy groaned and shook his head while Annabeth laughed.

"You met Terminus? How did you even get in here?"

"I name-dropped you for street cred with Terminus, obviously," I teased. Percy rolled his eyes, but he was still smiling. "And I might have found a way to reach out to a friend you mentioned had some power here. Frank Zhang was very nice when a total stranger appeared through a very shaky Iris message asking him to let me into his camp."

Percy and Annabeth both laughed at that, sharing a smile.

"I'll have to remember to thank Frank for the assist," said Percy.

"I actually have some of your mom's cookies with me for that exact purpose."

Percy's mouth dropped open in outrage. "And you didn't bring any for me?"

"Did I say that?"

I turned and reached into my bag, then pulled out a tupperware container of Sally's famous blue chocolate chip cookies.

"These are for you. I ate mine on the plane, and I have a batch of purple ones for Frank, since that's Camp Jupiter's colors."

"My mom is amazing," Percy breathed, the box of cookies already opened with one in his hand.

"Yeah. Yeah, she is. Now come on, I flew all the way out here from New York to hang out with you. I want to see your new school and hear about all your classes and everything else. Just tell me where we're going first."

Percy grinned. "I know the perfect spot."

My cousin didn't disappoint. Annabeth had to do a bit of work to prepare for the coming week, so after getting a promise from her to meet us later, Percy and I hiked to the top of a beautiful hill overlooking the entirety of Camp Jupiter, apparently called the Garden of Bacchus. With the sun shining and a slight breeze blowing, I quite literally couldn't have imagined anything more perfect.

"You know, I love New York. But I could stand living somewhere with more weather like this," I mused. Percy laughed.

"Yeah, it's a perk. I do miss the city sometimes though."

"Of course. But you'll be home for the break, right?"

"Yup. Annabeth's coming with me. I can't wait to see my mom, and Paul and Estelle. And we'll probably visit camp, which will be nice."

"I'm sure everyone will be excited to see you. Just don't forget to come visit your favorite cousin in fun places I can actually get to," I said, nudging him in the shoulder a little as I teased him. He grinned right back at me.

"Never."

"Good. Because otherwise I'll have to come track you down, and based on what you've told me about Camp Half-Blood, I'd have a hell of a time getting into that place."

"If any mortal could pull it off, I bet it'd be you."

I grinned, and Percy smiled. We paused for a minute, taking in the gentle breeze and bustling city below us, then I spoke up again.

"Alright, so catch me up. How's everything? Classes? Annabeth? Being on the West Coast? Any more of the Olympians trying to give you trouble?"

Percy frowned at the mention of the Olympians, which seemed incredibly fair to me.

"Thankfully no, at least for now. Otherwise, things have been good. It's still a little weird to be here, and I miss a lot of people back home, but I have a lot of friends here too. Mostly I'm just happy to finally have some normal life time with Annabeth."

"I can't think of two people who deserve it more." Percy huffed in agreement as I continued. "And one of the hardest parts of college is leaving behind people you love to go do what you need to do out in the world. But like you said, there's a lot of people you love and who love you here, too. And you know me and Sally and everyone else in New York will always leave our doors open for whenever you want to come back."

Percy gave me a small smile.

"I know. And I'll always be happy to see you visiting me here, or wherever else I might go. Especially if you keep bringing my mom's cookies with you."

I laughed. "Yeah, that makes sense. I think her cookies could open most doors for me, honestly."

"For sure."

We took a moment, smiling and laughing and breathing in the fresh air. Then finally, I sighed and stood, facing Percy with my hands on my hips.

"Alright, I've gotten the bird's eye view and I'm finally warm again after New York got that early cold snap. Now let's see what else this Roman camp has to offer."

The more we walked around, the more my jaw dropped. It looked just like the pictures I'd seen of Rome and Italy as a whole, places I'd always dreamed about visiting. Only bright, shiny, new, and right here in front of me, where I could reach out and touch it.

As we walked around and Percy gave me the full campus tour, we found more and more people who knew him, smiling and calling out hellos as we passed each other. I beamed every time, happy to see my little cousin doing so well. He'd been through hell, but he seemed at peace here. Settled, in a way I hadn't really seen him before.

"The camp itself has pegasi stables and stuff, but we'd need to get special permission to visit them," Percy explained as we walked into the plaza where I'd first found him, headed for 'the best coffee shop this side of the Mississippi'. The basic tour was completed, so we were on our way to meet Annabeth. "I can ask Frank about that, maybe. How long are you here?"

"I'm staying for the whole parents' weekend, so hopefully that means I get to see the pegasi! The day I met Blackjack might still be my best day ever."

Percy laughed as we walked through the door, a bell jingling happily over our heads. Annabeth waved to us from a table near the window, and we headed her direction.

"I think Blackjack enjoyed that day, too. He always likes to be appreciated."

"He's a flying horse. Who the hell isn't appreciating him?"

Percy just shrugged as we joined Annabeth at her table. She grinned and slid two drinks our way, one for each of us.

"Percy told me your order. Hopefully they got it right."

"I'm sure they did," I said, taking a careful sip. My jaw would've dropped, if I weren't incredibly determined not to let a single drop go to waste. "That is... actually maybe the best thing I've ever had."

"Right?" Percy grinned as he sipped his own drink.

"So, what did the two of you get up to?" asked Annabeth.

"Percy gave me the whole campus tour," I said, smiling as I leaned back in my seat, leisurely sipping my drink. The sun coming through the windows gently warmed my face, and I could've stayed right there for the rest of the day and been perfectly happy. "We hiked up to the Garden of Bacchus too, and I got a bird's eye of this whole place. I know I'll probably never get to see Camp Half-Blood to compare, but... this place is stunning."

"It really is."

Annabeth and Percy shared a smile, and he took her hand across the table. I beamed. I loved Annabeth, and I loved the two of them together. I'd never met somebody other than Annabeth who got such an immediate, unanimous family seal of approval.

"So, I got the tour of campus. I heard there are pegasi stables, which I will not be leaving without seeing. But what else is a can't-miss?"

"Don't worry," said Annabeth with a grin. "I had enough time after homework to make the perfect plan."

"Athena always has a plan," said Percy. He and Annabeth shared another smile, and I couldn't help smiling with them.

"Well good. Because I'm here all weekend, and this seems like a city I don't want to miss."

****************

Everything Taglist: @rosecentury @kmc1989

Percy Jackson Taglist: @valkyriepirate

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rivetgoth · 7 days

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Friday the 13th New Dark Music!!

Insane day for alt music. We got:

TR/ST's Performance, the 5th studio album by TR/ST and already one of my no contest top favorite albums of the year.

Lower Tar's "Rat King," the newest single (second of the year) of local LA underground industrial techno legends.

So Below's In Hell, new very fun and well mixed EP from pop/dark electronic act So Below.

Bill Leeb's Model Kollapse, new solo album from Bill Leeb of EBM act Front Line Assembly featuring members of darkwave band Actors on a couple of tracks!

Sacred Skin's Born in Fire, punchy danceable second studio album of local darkwave/synthpop act Sacred Skin.

This is off the heels of August and early September bringing us new albums from modern dark acts IAMX, Geneva Jacuzzi, and Cold Gawd along with new singles from Cold Cave, Madeline Goldstein, and Pixel Grip, new single from Xeno & Oaklander alongside an album announcement, a PIG EP announcement, and the release of the first single from new Boy Harsher side project Safe Mind.

We are in a dark alternative renaissance right now.

#goth #industrial #dark electronic #alternative music

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bikinikillarchives · 2 years

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Le Tigre announce 2023 tour!!! touring for the first time since 2005. tickets on sale on Friday the 27th at 9AM PST/ noon EST. link to tix & new merch.

photo by Leeta Harding, 2004.

05-27 Philadelphia, PA - Union Transfer

06-01 Barcelona, Spain - Primavera Sound Barcelona

06-03 London, England - Troxy

06-05 Manchester, England - Albert Hall

06-06 Glasgow, Scotland - Barrowland Ballroom

06-08 Madrid, Spain - Primavera Sound Madrid

06-09 Porto, Portugal - Nos Primavera Sound Porto

06-11 Paris, France - Le Trianon

06-14 Amsterdam, Netherlands - Paradiso

06-16 Berlin, Germany - Huxleys Neue Welt

06-17 Hamburg, Germany - Markthalle

07-01 Oakland, CA - Mosswood Meltdown Festival

07-03 Vancouver, British Columbia - Commodore Ballroom

07-06 Seattle, WA - Paramount Theatre

07-07 Portland, OR - Roseland Theater

07-09 Los Angeles, CA - The Greek Theatre

07-15 Chicago, IL - The Salt Shed

07-17 Cleveland, OH - Agora Theatre

07-18 Millvale, PA - Mr. Smalls Theatre

07-19 Baltimore, MD - Baltimore Soundstage

07-21 Toronto, Ontario - History

07-22 Montreal, Québec - L’Olympia

07-24 Boston, MA - Royale

07-28 New York, NY - Brooklyn Steel

#kathleen hanna #jd samson #johanna fateman #le tigre #2023

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briarridgerp · 28 days

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HURRICANE HAX CRASHES BRIAR RIDGE SUMMER MUSIC FEST

On Sunday afternoon, gale-force winds and torrential rain abruptly brought the Summer Music Fest to a halt. Unfortunately, Kacey Musgraves, as the headlining act, wasn't able to get a flight to Briar Ridge in time, due to the weather. With a hurricane warning issued, first responders swiftly shut down the event, urging everyone to seek immediate shelter at Oakland Elementary and Middle School. Upon arrival, everyone was sent to the gymnasium as their gathering point to wait out the storm. First responders assigned various tasks to volunteers to help keep things organized and to divide up the work needed to make sure everyone stayed safe.

OOC DETAILS

Okay, so here's the thing, this is rp. And therefore we are taking some creative liberties with how realistic this will be. So please keep that in mind. If you have experience with hurricanes and any part of this is wildly unrealistic, please bear with us! lol

With that being said, please do not start hurricane threads or reference the hurricane in threads before Friday, Aug 30th. We're posting now so that people have time to plot in advance, but we also wanted to ensure that everyone had time to start just festival related threads first.

Since it is hurricane season in South Carolina, the town has long set out plans for hurricane warnings and the school has been prepared to be the gathering point in cases like this where large amounts of the Briar Ridge population aren't at home and can't get home easily. Therefore, the school is stocked up on supplies and tools to help secure the building and keep Briar Ridge citizens safe.

If you would like to say that your character was injured in the rush to get to the school, or becomes sick during the time that they are stuck in the school because of getting drenched by the cold rain, please run your idea by the admin team by sending an IM to the main! We can't have everyone incapacitated lol We also ask that you take into consideration your character's task (described in the next point & assigned in the discord server) before deciding on the extent of the injury, so as to avoid making it impossible for them to finish their task (I.e. please don't give your character a broken leg if they're going to have to walk around the whole school boarding up windows lol). Once we have approved your character being sick or injured, please make sure to use appropriate trigger warnings.

Every character will be paired up with one other character and given a task once they arrive at the school. Your character(s) can still interact with other people in the school, but we ask that each pairing give priority to and at least begin their task thread while the event is still ongoing.

These tasks can be as detailed as you would like to make them, we've listed some examples in the server of things your characters could do, but you don't strictly need to do that. If you think of something else within your assigned task category, please feel free to write it out instead!

Your task threads don't have to be long or last throughout the entire time everyone's stuck in the school. This is just a chance to get random characters to interact and hopefully get threads going with new writers!

The festival goers will be stuck at the school for 24 hours from when the hurricane warning was issued (unbeknownst to them of course!). If your character has family members, pets, etc. at home, feel free to include anxiety over their safety in your characters threads, but maybe there's someone else already taking care of them? We don't want to create REAL issues for your characters' loved ones!

After having been at the school for several hours, the electricity will go off at 10pm and won't come back on until mid morning the next day, a few hours before they're all allowed to go back home.

Please feel free to get creative with this! We're excited for this as we think it's a fun opportunity to pair up characters who might not have interacted otherwise even outside of the tasks!

If you have any questions, please direct them to the event channel in the discord server!

#briar ridge: event #br summer music fest

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brettesims · 3 months

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Drink & Draw BTS

Thanx to everyone who came out to my first Drink & Draw event! I had so much fun and an epic First Friday adventure after! Can’t wait until next First Friday yee ✍🏾✨🥂

~ B

#artbybrette #art #quotes #artist #quote #women #illustrations #illustration #consciousness #drawings #Oakland #Oakland first Friday #Oakland art events #Oakland events #Oakland galleries #Oakland gallery #first Friday Oakland #Bay Area events

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wonderdave · 2 months

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🌟 Hello Friends and Fans of Wonder Dave! Hope you’re all having hot fun in the summertime. We’ve got some hot takes from amazing comics coming your way real soon! Here’s what’s on the horizon:

🌈 Safe Words Comedy Showcase presents: UNICORN COMEDY 🦄 🗓 When: Wednesday, July 24th, 7 PM doors 7:30 show 📍 Where: The SF Eagle Bar, San Francisco 🎟 Tickets & Info: Get your tickets here 📸 Follow: @safewordscomedy

Enjoy a night filled with humor that's as queer as it is funny! This month we’re celebrating the bi/pan ladies we love! Headliner Emily Van Dyke returns to the Safe Words stage for the first time in over a year. She’s joined by the hilarious Adrianna McCain, Ashley Monique, Ivy Vasquez, and Natasha Vinik!

Also stay tuned as we’ve got an exciting all trans line up with headliner Nina Nguyen coming Wednesday Aug 28th. Nina rocked our stage at SF Sketchfest this year and we’re excited to be bringing her back to the city by the bay. 🌉 Tickets are available now.

🧠 Mental Health Comedy Hour at All Out Comedy Theater

🗓 When: Every 2nd Friday at 8pm Next show is August 9th 📍 Where: All Out Comedy Theater 2550 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, CA 94612 🎟 Tickets & Info:here 📸 Follow: @mhcomedyhour

🏳️‍🌈 DeAnne Smith is Queer, as in Funny ➕ 2nd date added!

🗓 When: Saturday Sept 21st & Sunday Sept 22nd, 7:30 doors 8pm show 📍 Where: The Lost Church 988 Columbus Ave, San Francisco, CA 94133 🎟 Tickets & Info: here 📸 Follow: @safewordscomedy on instagram We’re excited to announce we’re adding a 2nd date to DeAnne Smith’s San Francisco stop. DeAnne will now be erforming at the Lost Church on Saturday Sept 21st AND Sunday Sept 22nd. Get ready to meet DeAnne Smith. While you’ve likely already heard of them; They recently were featured in Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda on Netflix, opening for Hannah shortly after at the Fox Theater in Oakland. They’ve been on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Comedians of the World, Last Comic Standing, and more. However, this is the first time you’ll be able to see them headline their own show in the Bay Area. Joining DeAnne and Wonder Dave on the show will be special guest Rea Kapur!

🎭 The Ruckus Revival 🗓 When: Every 2nd Thursday of the month Doors at 7 PM, Show at 8 PM ⏭️Next Show: August 8th 📍Where: Continental Club, Oakland 🎟 Tickets & Info: Join the chaos 📸Follow: @theruckusrevival

Hosted by Jamie DeWolf and Wonder Dave, enjoy an evening of circus, aerial, burlesque, and comedy! California’s largest and longest running variety show has been called "The Fight Club of Underground Art" by the Huffington Post.

🎤 Hysteria Comedy Open Mic

🗓 When: Every 2nd (and 5th) Wednesday of the month.

⏭️ Next Show: July 31st 7pm 📍 Where: SF Eagle, San Francisco 📸 Follow: @hysteriacomedy 🎟 Register for free

This month is the rare 5th Wednesday we means we’ve got a bonus Hysteria Open Mics on the way. Join us for an open mic night focused on empowering women and queer voices in comedy. Free entry. Enjoy the Queer Comedy Stars of tomorrow TODAY!

Hope to make you laugh in the near future. Also stay tuned to @teamwonderdave on social media for exciting announcements about upcoming NEW projects! We’ve got some exciting things coming your way real soon.

Excelsior! -Wonder Dave

#DeAnne Smith #Oakland #San Francisco #Wonder Dave #LGBTQ+#queer #bisexual #stand up #stand up comedy

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wwwdlabrie · 2 years

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Thanx Back History Month Bandcamp Friday.next 3/3 We encourage people to make effort to Buy our Music today. Artists receive 100 percent of Sales -1st Fridays. Thank you for buying DLabrie music and merch on Bandcamp Fridays Click here to purchase Music and Merch from DLabrie Bandcamp Click here to purchase Music and Merch from DLabrie…

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codewitch · 3 months

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Trying to find out what neighborhoods lesbians hang out in a new city is a difficult task. If you try to search an article about it you’ll only get results for gay men. All of autostraddle’s queer girl city guides are from the 2010s. There needs to be resources for where to find us if we’re moving or visiting somewhere new. So I’ll start:

In the San Francisco Bay Area, lesbians live in:

Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco (generally NOT in the Castro, more often the Mission, Bernal Heights, Richmond/Sunset, and other northern/central neighborhoods)

Lesbians hang out in:

Bars: Mother Bar, El Rio (especially during the Mango dance party), Jolene’s (club atmosphere, controversial but seems to have improved in recent years), White Horse, Oakland Queer First Fridays, Queer Magic

Sports: Outloud Sports she/they kickball and dodgeball leagues, Queer Crush at any climbing gym, variety of queer hiking groups

Other: Sour Cherry Comics (queer comic book store with many events like gay gundam night), Dolores Park, any other city park

Feel free to add if I forgot anything!

#lesbian #lesbian city guide #wlw #sapphic #queer women #if anyone has deets on Denver or Boulder lmk

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months

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Uplinkchump Linkdump

On June 20, I'm keynoting the LOCUS AWARDS in OAKLAND.

It's Linkdump Saturday! This is the day on which I clear the giant backlog of links from the previous week that I haven't managed to post in my newsletter's "Hey look at this" sections. This is my 19th linkdump; here's the previous 18 dumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Let's start with some fun and games. Liam is a high-schooler who created "Bad Plumbing," a Jenga-style boardgame using a variety of 3D printed shapes; the game was a smash hit at his local game-jam, so now he's kickstarting it:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/liamclift/bad-plumbing

The shapes are delightful and Seussian, and there's a very ingenious game dynamic that's not just "make the pile bigger." You can pre-order for $30, and for $100, you'll get a version with a custom-designed shape of your specification. I backed!

It's lovely to see something that's both excellent and delightful, but to be honest, the majority of this week's links are excellent and enraging. Most of these links from The American Prospect, which has, under David Dayen's executive leadership, gone from "a magazine I really like" to "the first thing I read every day."

This week saw a the Prospect publish a stunning series of articles on prices, a sacred object for neoliberal economists, who see them as the carriers of the information that allows society to order itself for maximum efficiency and broadest benefit. Unfortunately for these economists, the love-affair with prices is one-sided: they may love prices, but prices hate neoliberalism.

The dogma that says that any government interference in pricing will destroy the economy by "distorting" prices does not survive contact with reality. The instant the government steps away from regulating monopoly, and its handmaiden, fraud, prices go batshit crazy.

This week's Pluralistic newsletters were dominated by this brilliant series in the Prospect. On Wednesday, I wrote about the Prospect's investigations into algorithmic and surveillance pricing:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

And yesterday, it was the epidemic of junk fees:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

There's more than I could fit into the newsletter, though, like Friday's excellent piece on the scourge of surge pricing by Sarah Jaffe:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-07-urge-to-surge/

Jaffe's piece was especially interesting given economist Ramsi Woodcock's compelling case that surge pricing is a per se violation of antitrust law:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#pure-transfer

The Prospect series was so timely. After decades of pricing orthodoxy, economists like Isabella Weber are making huge waves (and attracting a tsunami of abuse). Weber's interview with Vass Bednar on the Globe and Mail's Lately podcast this week is a must-listen:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-the-millennial-economist-who-took-on-the-world/

(Though if you get your econ ideas from the New York Times, you'd miss this whole revolution, as the Grey Lady's views on prices remain mired in the Reagan era:)

https://twitter.com/HalSinger/status/1798849195664916648

Few prices are more important than the price of the roof over your head – after all, "shelter" is only second to "food" in the hierarchy of needs. Dayen's Friday story for the Prospect in NIMBYism gets to the crux of the cost-of-living crisis: people who own houses want houses to be expensive, and will go to enormous lengths to make sure that shelter costs as much as possible:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-06-07-homeowners-want-housing-prices-to-go-up/

Dayen attributes this to "the wealth effect" – that is, most people would like to be richer, and the minority of Americans who have a positive net worth owe that status to rising house prices, and the plurality of Americans who have a negative net worth thanks to a mortgage are counting on rising house prices to flip them into the black.

When America threw off the Gilded Age, we charted two courses to prosperity for working people: labor unions and home ownership. The ruling class cannily convinced us to rely solely on the latter. The housing emergency raging across the country is the inevitable result of that decision:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

The Prospect's consistent brilliance isn't merely an editorial matter, of course. The magazine features a recurring cast of some of the best muckraking writers in the field, and the absolute peak of that impressive pile is Maureen Tkacik. Tkacik's work on Boeing is stunning:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/01/boeing-boeing/#mrsa

Her labor coverage is second to none:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets

And no one writes better than her about private equity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

I am in pure awe of Tkacik's prolific and expert work. So when I read her piece on Long Covid in the Prospect this week, I was stunned to learn that she has been severely disabled by this heavily downplayed – but rampant – chronic illness:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-06-06-nih-perpetuating-long-covid-denial/

The fact that Tkacik is doing this career-defining, high-frequency work while being randomly smashed by a series of acute Long Covid incidents makes her achievements nothing sort of heroic. But Tkacik's Long Covid coverage isn't a lament for her personal situation – it's a characteristically brilliant investigative story about the systematic cover-up of Long Covid by the NIH, which has a long history of dismissing inconvenient illnesses as psychosomatic, from black lung to chronic fatigue.

Tkacik's Long Covid coverage adds yet another subject where I'm learning more from the Prospect than from other sources – part of a host of issues where the magazine leads the pack. An issue far more squarely in its wheelhouse is antitrust, especially the intersection of antitrust and labor rights.

This week, I eagerly devoured Luke Goldstein's story about the latest in a series of lies that Amazon executives were caught making to the US government:

https://prospect.org/labor/2024-06-06-senators-allege-amazon-lied-delivery-drivers/

You may recall when Jeff Bezos lied to Congress, claiming that the company didn't spy on its sellers and clone their best products:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58961836

Or when Amazon posted a lying rebuttal to a Congressman who objected to its drivers being forced to pee in bottles in order to meet its punishing schedules:

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/our-recent-response-to-representative-pocan

The latest lie: Jeff Bezos and CEO Andy Jassy lied to the Senate about the company's relationship to its drivers, whom it insists are "independent contractors" because they are hired through cutouts called "Delivery Service Providers":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

These drivers work for Amazon. It dictates their working conditions. It installs cameras that watch their eyeballs while they drive. It enforces an illegal "no poach" system that fixes their wages. And it lies about all this. To the Senate.

You know what they say, it's not the crime, it's the cover-up. Tech barons go through life in a warm bath of their own bullshit, surrounded by lackeys who are contractually prohibited from calling them on it. They forget that there are people out there in the world who won't offer them this deference – including lawmakers and regulators.

That's why Facebook lied to the FCC when they bought Instagram, withholding key information in order to secure regulatory permission for the merger:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ftc-claims-facebook-withheld-information-152834983.html

After decades of inattention, the world's governments have discovered a newfound energy for busting trusts and smashing corporate power. Five years ago, it looked like maybe this was a fixup by Big Cable or Big Content to take Big Tech off the board so they could claim more dominion over our lives:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/04/why-is-there-so-much-antitrust-energy-for-big-tech-but-not-for-big-telco/

Today, every sector is coming in for antitrust scrutiny, and the tempo is only increasing. Just this week, the FTC and DOJ opened investigations into Microsoft, Openai, and Nvidia:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/6/24172868/ftc-doj-antitrust-openai-microsoft-nvidia-investigations

Yeah, there's still a lot of policy focus on tech, but that's because tech has extended its tendrils into every area of policy. That's the end-point of a decades-long process of tech going from sitting alongside important policy questions to being inseparable from them. I've had a front-row seat for that transformation, through my work with EFF, whose brief just keeps expanding as tech infuses every aspect of our lives and rights.

The latest example; EFF's "Surveillance Defense for Campus Protests" by Rory Mir, Thorin Klosowski and Christian Romero:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/surveillance-defense-campus-protests

The military has gone all-in on electronic surveillance, and campuses have gone all-in on militarized policing, so campuses are now sites of electronic warfare, and protesters are vastly overmatched. This is an excellent and timely guide.

Well, this is where this week's linkdump comes to an end. It only falls to me to send you off with one last week: Libro.fm's buy-one/get-one sale on DRM-free audiobooks, with a share of each sale going to an indie bookstore of your choosing! This is a heckin deal, and a great way to start weaning yourself off of the Audible monopoly (also, my latest novel The Bezzle, is in the sale):

https://libro.fm/bogo

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/08/medley/#the-prospect

Image: Cjp24 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Automobiles_in_a_french_junkyard.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic

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