Lady @Lady@cat.family

video games?

@Satsuma the point is that the R·S·S feed tried to fetch it just BEFORE the new domain went live so the cache was fresh at the transition and will not expire for a while

@Satsuma no i was on cellular

realizing my R·S·S feed reader constantly checking for new content is probably to blame for this taking so long to update on our home internet connection

hoisted

Ladys Weblogs New Groove: https://blog.ladys.computer/N木/0010/

(when·ever the new domain name record propagates to your internet)

me, sowing: [re·using the u·r·l for my blog]

me, reaping: [D·N·S still resolving to the old address]

@gaditb My second qualm is with your statement that « there were tradeoffs, and that the friction introduced by formal structures to interface with the cataloging technologies that we have agreed as a society are important, was too much of a price weighed against the ability to publish and distribute these more ad-hoc publications, and the latter was prioritized ». I disagree that we should accept these tradeoffs as given. There are many, many things that technological systems could do to increase the cataloguability and citability of fanworks that do not increase the level of effort for the average fanwork author or curator at all.

I get that this is in reply to a post in which I said « you need five people to do it right », and I do believe that is true, but I would not personally characterize this as “friction” or a “tradeoff”. It takes three people to roleplay a pokémon battle, because you need two participants and a referee, but there are no tradeoffs being made here. That is just the number of people that the activity takes. Pokémon battle roleplay happens anyway, because there are more than three people who value it and they organize together to make it happen.

There are issues in fandom on both the “valuing” and “organizing” halves of the equation when it comes to fanwork archives. I think one of our primary disagreements is in our analysis of a community that holds strongly to concepts of authorship, canonicity, and citability, but does not value the kinds of labour that facilitates engagement with those concepts. You may argue that the community is correct in its valuations of what kinds of labour are most important, and should disregard these concepts from “outside” that do not align with its actual practice. I argue that the community is correct in its conceptualization, but lacks the depth of understanding necessary to transform those concepts into the values and forms of labour that would uphold them.

@gaditb I disagree on a few points.

First, I think your diagnosis of zines developing “in parallel” to library sciences oversimplifies some notable conceptual differences between zines as a medium and the types of resources that libraries typically catalog. Zine culture grew out of a kind of remix culture that largely did not recognize any conceptualization of canonicity. As zines proliferated thru post and fax, there was an understanding and expectation that each copy operation might have involved additions, subtractions, re·arranging, reformating, and other various forms of editorial oversight. Differences between editions was an inherent quality of the lofi photocopy medium that zinemakers embraced; the same zine distributed by two different people (or the same person at two different times) certainly would have different copy artefacts, and might have different contents.

So it is not simply that the people engaged in zines were building an alternative method of knowledge‐distribution to academia (and consequently their own methods of cataloguing), but that zines as a medium were ephemeral and experiential pieces which did not mesh well with the goals of academic cataloguing in general (namely attribution, canonicity, and citeability). We have catalogues of zines today, but it is with the understanding that these catalogues are fixed snapshots of what was essentially a fluid and transient medium. It is an incomplete and imperfect record that we nevertheless cling to because, as it happens, some zines did have lasting impacts on us and we want to be able to cite and talk about them to what·ever extent we can.

You are correct that historically, fandom developed out of the same cultural currents that zines developed out of, but I think it is a false equivalence because fanworks do not share in this quality. Fandom has an ⹐extremely⹑ strong concept of canonicity, not only for the works that fandom references but within fanworks themselves. I would be willing to bet that the idea of a fanfiction changing in transit is abhorrent to 90% of fannish authors. Concepts of attribution and citeability are likewise deeply embedded in how fans engage with fannish media today. So I think the needs of a zine archive and a fanfiction archive are necessarily different, because the mediums of zines and fanfiction are necessarily different. I think the medium of fanfiction is actually much closer to that of traditional publishing than that of zines, even if it historically it grew more out of a zine‐based community than a traditionally‐published one.

so anyway, last night i was sleeping, and i was dreaming, and in my dream i was reading a book of strange stories written for children. interestingly, the book i was reading had chosen to typeset apostrophes as broken bars similar to how i do in real life. even more interesting, the broken bar glyph that they chose looked completely unlike any glyph i had ever imagined for it: it placed two dots, one at baseline and one at midline, and extended vertical bars upwards until the lower bar touched the upper dot.

this actually looked pretty good in practice! but things got even more interesting: my dream‐typesetter decided that the shape of the glyph should change when the punctuation which immediately followed was an exclamation point or a question mark. that is, the first broken bar in ‹ whomst¦d¦ve. ›, ‹ whomst¦d¦ve? ›, and ‹ whomst¦d¦ve! › was always the same, but the second one varied in shape.

i have attached an image of me trying to recreate these alternatives this morning after i woke up:

what you may not realize is that in handwriting, i do not write this character the way it looks on the screen. i actually write a lightning‐bolt character (like ⚡️ but reversed), ostensibly because it allows me to write the character with·out picking up my pen. the horizontal line in the lightning‐bolt indicates the “break” while the vertical components indicate the top and bottom portions of the “bar”.

compare U+A746 ꝇ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER BROKEN L and its lowercase equivalent.

so i use U+00A6 ¦ BROKEN BAR. this character has a number of desirable properties:

• the top half of it looks like a straight apostrophe

• it is narrow and fairly unobtrusive

• its visual effect of dividing a word into two components, but doing so incompletely, reflects the apostrophes role of indicating omission or contraction

• it is a character with virtually universal support in fonts and computer systems despite having no existing practical usage

so those who follow me here probably have noticed that i use U+00A6 ¦ BROKEN BAR as my apostrophe character.

it is probably not surprising that this ultimately derives from a beef with Unicode. the Unicode Standard believes that the correct character for the apostrophe is U+2019 ’ RIGHT QUOTATION MARK. this is problematic because that is obviously the character that we use in English to close single‐quoted text. an apostrophe has a different function than closing a quote, so it stands to reason that it should have a different character. you could argue that this is a flaw in the English typesetting tradition and not in Unicode, but the point remains.

i am not alone in thinking this. many Internet publications which otherwise use curly quotes still use U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE as their apostrophe character, distinguishing it from the close‐quote character in text. Unicode however does not recommend using U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE if you can possibly avoid it.