alyaza [they/she] @ alyaza @beehaw.org

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people.

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this thread has been cleaned of a bunch of unproductive commenters and uncivil comments; carry on

almost certainly yeah

i do suspect the publications with a niche like Pitchfork are basically goners without a change--actual newspapers can at least pretend to limp along in a severely gutted fashion for years (because large swathes of the industry are doing that right now, especially smaller papers acquired by hedge funds) but you can't... really do that with a publication that prides itself on having contrarian views and an independent tone of voice. something like Pitchfork completely rides or dies by the quality of its writers. G/O Media gutting its unique voices are why i don't read Deadspin despite having religiously done so when it was under the first iteration of Gawker, and why i support Defector now.

i'd argue the issue is less with music and more with journalism--although Pitchfork is probably in a worse situation than the typical journalistic outlet--because we're a month into 2024 and layoffs have badly decimated Sports Illustrated, the LA Times, TIME, and a bunch of other publications. and outside of the separately unionized websites (of which Pitchfork is one) Conde Nast's website portfolio just went on a one-day strike to protest the cuts they're proposing (5%) to the workforce.

i think it's very clear now that the lack of unionization in the gaming industry will need to change, or every year or two or whatever arbitrary interval we'll see an astronomical number of people losing their jobs all at once in this way.

for a variety of reasons:

• we don't have a rule against what is effectively posting cringe and i am opposed to a rule of that sort on principle
• what is considered cringe is a completely subjective and arbitrary judgement that, if we made it a rule to not post cringe, would lead to a lot more bickering about sourcing. it'd also almost certainly make this place a lot less interesting, a lot more ideologically homogeneous, and a lot more prone to confirmation bias
• personally, i am just not all that interested in trying to parse "trustworthy" and "untrustworthy" sources beyond the absolute minimum "is this a crank blog or self promotion", especially when media is not heterogeneously trustworthy on every possible issue. i don't think most of our mod team is interested in trying to parse such a thing either
• we generally trust our userbase to be discerning
• we generally trust our userbase to be self-regulating etc.

as i recall, the leadership of Israel has also ruled out an independent Palestinian state and a two-state solution, so i'm not sure why it's news to the Times of Israel that Hamas doesn't want one either. it's clearly not advantageous to either party

from actual beginning of strike to end took less than one calendar day, which is pretty funny. the union compromised on a couple of demands as far as i can tell, but is getting a much better overall deal than what they would have taking the initial offer from CSU.

Good news today: We've reestablished contact with the #MarsHelicopter after instructing @NASAPersevere to perform long-duration listening sessions for Ingenuity’s signal. The team is reviewing the new data to better understand the unexpected comms dropout during Flight 72. ?

Arbitrary Lines is a good, basic primer to the subject and has a bunch of examples/case studies to this end. a lot of modern city zoning--although this might not be true in this case--is just a vast accumulation of exemptions and changes to accommodate one specific property or building with no particular rhyme or reason other than "this was needed to fulfill the intended development at the time"

the timing of serving the charges would also seem to strongly imply this is an Authority thing more than an "upholding the law" thing--there's no way these people didn't think optically about how it'd look to do this on New Years Day, or around that time of year generally

now that i've read a bit more this week: The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins is an early contender for my book of the year and the first to get 5 stars this year from me (although i'm a generous reviewer)

Alyaza what have been your favorite/most interesting book among the four?

the majority of my reading list would not make for particularly comfortable reading so i'll just point you to the fairly normal pick from last year, which is I'm Glad My Mom Died

if all goes well--by which i mean if the DEA doesn't do something stupid--this should lead to marijuana being moved to schedule III (the same schedule category as anabolic steroids and ketamine) later this year.

As much as that writing style is rather unique and interesting, it is dreadfully difficult to follow.

that's the Defector special

the Texas GOP is basically a fascist party and has been for awhile, and this permeates even its upper echelons. its members even meet with fascists like Nick Fuentes at this point

i am aware of what a mod is and literally used it at you in reply--what you call them, however, has no relevance at all to my point. you've earned the thread's first 3 day ban for your unnecessarily weird attitude about this.

ask any old-timer fanfiction writer about this. "fan work" as a whole--including mods--is a gigantic gray space in current copyright law and IP holders are almost certainly within their technical legal rights to prohibit any works like Revolution on a blanket basis. the current arrangement where most rightsholders look the other way and/or accept the existence of such fan works is a largely informal one, and there's nothing codifying it being that way. it could arbitrarily change (or just be fucked up by a court case) at pretty much any time--and, indeed, occasionally rightsholders still do try and enforce their IP quite aggressively.

i guess this is a bit opaque but: pretty much any (formal or informal) mod action or guidance that isn't completely self-evident (i.e. spam removal, approving users, pinning threads) has been seen by at least two or three other mods, usually more depending on who's around. that includes this informal correction from me upthread. the site-wide mod team is aware of what i said because we have a chat for vibe checking stuff like this--and straightforwardly, if they disagreed with how i responded or the substance of what i said, then the posts would not still be up because i'd delete or amend them.