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I’ve long disliked the term “culture war,” partly because it’s tossed around in a way that trivializes the issues and partly because “War on whatever” framing tends to confuse the issues.

But I keep thinking of a line in Cat Valente’s novel Space Opera about what war is. And when it comes down to it, what we’ve got now is a war: It’s about who gets to be treated as a person, and who doesn’t:

But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you’ll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat?

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I really wish GNOME’s “Oh No! Something went wrong!” screen would let me restart just the crashed components instead of forcing me to log out completely. Or let me decide if I’m willing to continue without whatever crashed. If the audio broke, and I’m not doing anything that needs sound right now, it shouldn’t block me! — just like if the extension I’m

Heck, I’d even settle for just being able to interact with the applications that are still running. I can see them on the overview, and the thumbnails still update! Fortunately I haven’t had it happen while I was editing something, but I’d sure like to be able to click on “save” if I need to!

When I first started using Linux, it was a lot less stable than it is today, but when something broke, I always felt like I could fix it. Even if a window manager crashed, I could relaunch it and pick up where I left off.

I keep coming back to GNOME, but it has an infurating tendency to weld the hood shut on things that “just work” most of the time, because you should never need to fix that issue! (See also: Geary not offering manual sync, GNOME Software wanting to reboot the system when you update Firefox, etc.)

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Automattic has announced that they are “realigning” their contributions to WordPress due to fending off “attacks” from the “community” and WP-Engine.

Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress.

In the interest of, as you put it, “secur[ing] the future of WordPress for generations to come,” I trust you’ll be releasing the WordPress trademark, core project management and the infrastructure at WordPress.org, (the latter of which which CEO Matt Mullenweg has repeatedly pointed out that he owns personally) over to the community so you can “focus on for-profit projects within Automattic” without the distraction of the wider WordPress ecosystem.

Either that, or you’ve just told the entire WordPress community — excuse me, “community,” I forgot to include the scare quotes you so meticulously included throughout your article — that we should never trust you to have the community’s interests at heart, only your own.

I suppose this means I should start looking for alternatives to the handful of Automattic-built plugins I’m still using, as it sounds like I shouldn’t anticipate them continuing to be maintained.

Update January 10: It gets worse. Mullenweg just deactivated the accounts of several high-profile people at WordPress-adjacent companies who dared to question his leadership, in a post that goes increasingly off the rails.

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Looking straight up a central gallery with alternating straight and curved railings. The top is a circle surrounded by concentric ovals, resembling a giant eye looking down at the camera. Nordstrom can be read on the lowest visible railing.

In downtown San Francisco, there’s a multi-level shopping mall with an atrium and a skylight. If you stand in the dead center of the atrium and look up, it resembles an eye, looking down at you through a giant microscope.

This was taken during WonderCon 2009. Years later, I posted it for a February 2015 photo challenge on the theme “Symmetry.”

I was recently reminded of the view while reading author Annalee Newitz’ latest newsletter, Inside the Dying Malls of San Francisco. Continue reading →

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Humble Bundle is offering 30 books* by Ursula K. Le Guin supporting Literary Arts, including all of Earthsea, several Hainish novels, Catwings, short stories, Gifts/Voices/Powers, nonfiction writing…

I’ve read the Earthsea series (good-to-great) and most of the Hainish novels (some great, some good, some OK), plus Lathe of Heaven (great), and I’ve got copies of several more on my to-read pile, but I’m totally grabbing this for the nonfiction and short stories. Plus I get another format for my Earthsea reread that’s not the giant collected hardcover tome or my old fragile paperbacks.

I’m going to have a lot of reading material next year.

*As ebooks through Kobo

Update: Unfortunately they aren’t DRM-Free. Kobo does have some of her books without DRM, but as far as I can tell, the only one in this bundle is The Unreal and the Real.

The others I’ve found just now are: Worlds of Exile and Illusion, The Eye of the Heron, The Word for World is Forest, and The Beginning Place. Tor seems to be big on requesting non-DRM formats. These may be all of them currently available without DRM: eBooks.com, where I previously bought Forest, has a filter on their search for DRM-Free, and only turns up the same four books.

It seems kind of ironic to sell The Dispossessed (of all books!) encumbered with DRM.