Re: Friday tidbits

1

Libby has a great selection of stories about Swedish people murdering each other.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 7:46 AM
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And back in the 70s, kids just drank from puddles. Or at least nobody carried around water like today.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 7:48 AM
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Robert Darnton has been advocating for a national digital library for ages. So there's at least one person to defer to for the details.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 7:58 AM
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The number of people carrying around water these days is a little ridiculous. Even before COVID, nobody was using water fountains.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 8:13 AM
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1: But that's the thing - Libby doesn't seem to have a national catalog. It depends on which local library you're sourcing Libby through.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 8:43 AM
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I recall recently seeing a clickbait headline, "Everything you think you know about hydration is wrong" so I'm assuming that liquid is completely unnecessary for human survival.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 8:46 AM
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I didn't know that, but you do need to log in with your local library card.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 8:46 AM
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6: Turtles actually use plastic straws for purposes of actuality sexual gratification.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 8:48 AM
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As a kid in the 1970s, I hardly ever drank water, but I did drink a lot of Coke. I can't ever decide if I should conclude this kind of reminiscence with, "And I turned out all right!" or "Children! Do not do what I have done!"


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 8:50 AM
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Everyone interested is reading Eve's Hollywood right? I'll have time next weekend to participate in discussion, will put together some thoughts to get the ball rolling.

While the book is chronological, it lends itself fine to skipping around or cherry picking, no narrative dependence from chapter to chapter (ie no commitment to read a whole memoir). To 1. in the OP, Pirated pdf available at the usual places. I'm paying attention to whether she ever helped anyone-- kindness to a sick friend, sharing a place to stay, whatever.

Economics of authorship and publishing, not just a consequence of capitalism I think. Anne Trubek (who runs Belt Publishing) goes into public detail about costs and logistical problems. Academic publishing has many of the same issues except for the expectation that writers are paid from publishing-- Arxiv and BioArxiv really are changing how knowledge gets disseminated.
I think many writers and few readers is a base reality that's independent of financing models.


Posted by: lw | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 9:03 AM
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Last paragraph is not really coherent, I'm very interested in the topic but hurried atm


Posted by: lw | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 9:04 AM
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Eve's Hollywood is not on Libby. At least not for me.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 9:09 AM
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https://booksc.xyz/book/3320365/f6ac1b


Posted by: | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 9:10 AM
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Economics of authorship and publishing, not just a consequence of capitalism I think.

That brought to mind this Elvis Costello couplet.

Even in a perfect world where everyone was equal
I'd still own the film rights and be working on the sequel


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 9:11 AM
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If the author of "Eve's Hollywood" didn't want me to imagine it as a parody of "Lyra's Oxford" they should have picked a different title.


Posted by: Todd | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 9:12 AM
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14. Yes, fan fiction or deviantart are excellent illustrations of the problem, maybe DJ sets and remixes also. The real issue is curation, evolved rough solutions exist for some avenues of production but not for others.


Posted by: lw | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 9:22 AM
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"And I turned out all right!"

I can't use this one with my kids because of the obvious retort.


Posted by: politicalfootball | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 9:42 AM
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Wait, is the NY library e-book selection better than LA's? I thought LA's was pretty good, even if it doesn't get a lot of very recent releases. I was able to get Eve's Hollywood from the LAPL's e-book library.

Re: Eve's Hollywood, her prose is pretty engaging, and it's fun to read about and recognize bits of old LA, but in general the crazed breathlessness of her perspective is too much for me.

But occasionally, her observations really nail a thing to the wall. This, about talking to guys in the bar at the Troubadour, made me laugh: "[S]ometimes people sit and try to top each other on how much more ugly and forsaken and dependent upon music for any interest whatsoever in their lives they were than the other. The implication is that they can talk about it now since they are past all that, having achieved the security and positively unshakable position of where they are now. Like Einstein joking about flunking math. Only with these guys, their position now depends on who their friends are -- and their friends, sitting across the table from them -- are telling them how ugly and stupid they used to be before they sat down at this table in the Troubador."


Posted by: jms | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 9:55 AM
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Yes, her perception of and descriptions of social hierarchies and people's rank are fantastic. Her perceptions of other things (her actions particularly) less so. My hope for a voice from the foreign land of the past from this book so far has been most fulfilled in the Pachuco chapter. The Watts chapter is something else.


Posted by: lw | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 10:04 AM
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18.2 Yes. I also am exhausted now trying to keep track of of which times she says "he" and I should know from four paragraphs back who "he" is and which times there is absolutely no antecedent, just a floating "he." She's all over the place.


Posted by: chill | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 10:21 AM
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Water is definitely overrated.


Posted by: Opinionated Anti-Urination League | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 10:22 AM
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A few weeks ago the NYT had two pieces in the Well section - on the same day! - one quoting an "expert" repeating the 8-glasses-a-day thing and one quoting "experts" saying that was silly and you should drink when and if you're thirsty. I should check if they ever allowed my comment suggesting that some enterprising reporter get both sets of experts on the same call and report on the result.


Posted by: Nathan Williams | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 11:31 AM
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Wellness and exercise writing are an area where there are definitely more readers than writers, also no clear metrics for junk (people love reading it no matter how bad if the production values are high) and the outcome is horrible.


Posted by: lw | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 11:36 AM
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I spent several years of my childhood obsessed with "Spiderweb for Two." I don't remember the orange, though. What sticks with me is the first book, "The Saturdays," in which one character spends his Saturday going to a Wagner opera and another, daringly, gets her hair bobbed.


Posted by: s | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 11:38 AM
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I spent several years of my childhood obsessed with "Spiderweb for Two." I don't remember the orange, though. What sticks with me is the first book, "The Saturdays," in which one character spends his Saturday going to a Wagner opera and another, daringly, gets her hair bobbed.


Posted by: s | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 11:38 AM
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I think The Saturdays may be my favorite book of them all, if only because they're still in the city. I was a little sad when they moved to the country. But the books are still incredibly charming.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 11:39 AM
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I drove through Libby in the 1970s. Don't remember drinking any of the water, which, given that it's a superfund site, was probably for the better.


Posted by: CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 1:57 PM
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18 last -- here's some soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_o7lFHgIwA


Posted by: CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 2:09 PM
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I'm pretty sure Libby is just an app, not a subscription service itself. And I'm not even sure if the vendor behind it, OverDrive, offers a subscription library either. But I'm not as familiar with the public library ebook world as I was about a decade ago. The last time I learned about how it worked, public libraries did something more analogous to purchasing licensing titles as if they were physical books* than to subscribing to a database of ebooks. Academic libraries are sort of the opposite where ebooks have historically been part of big journal+book database subscriptions.

But back to public libraries. I think you get different selection in different public libraries because, as they do with paper books, public libraries develop their collections around serving their local communities. Different constituencies have different reading interests and needs. As a regular person who may have similar tastes to your friends, you might not be aware of how much the overall community your library serves differs from your friends' libraries across the country. With limited budgets, this is going to affect the selection in each of those systems. Maybe one system has more books in a wide set of languages while the other has more children's lit, with the result being that they have less budget left over for certain other reading areas. I don't know - I'm just speculating.

But I'm pretty sure there's no national library selection because it's all just individual library systems negotiating their own licensing agreements with publishers, either directly or via an intermediary. Publishers have been fairly strict around DRM requirements, but don't want to build their own individual apps and content systems, and libraries have either been too underfunded or too uninterested in building their own DRM and content-hosting systems either. So companies like OverDrive, which has few competitors, have stepped into that gap with their own platforms and apps, like Libby. A publicly supported digital public library - even just a publicly supported platform for ebook delivery - would be a huge improvement over quasi-monopolistic vendor systems. I say this as someone who thinks Libby is pretty good as apps go.

Robert Darnton has been advocating for a national digital library for ages. So there's at least one person to defer to for the details.

There is an organization called the Digital Public Library of America**, founded in part through the advocacy of Darnton and others with a utopian vision of a universal digital library that would bring together the collections of all US libraries in a single place and interface. Despite "public" in the name, the DPLA is a private, non-profit corporation, and an example of contemporary America's shitty record at building actual public goods.

The DPLA's original vision turned out to be unworkable and got scaled back, leaving some of their partners in the library world feeling burned. There was some talk of "pivoting" to ebooks, but I don't know what that would have meant. Some of their public statements at the time of the pivot - when they laid off a bunch of staff on short notice - made me wonder if they were going to orient themselves towards for-profit initiatives, if not turn into a for-profit themselves. I'm glad to see from the front page of their website that they don't appear to have gone all the way down that road. But I stopped paying close attention to them after their layoffs. I could read their website about page but I'm not going to do that right now. The Wikipedia article on them is remarkably outdated.

* Sometimes the analogy to physical books gets taken to an absurd level. Did you know some some publishers were so concerned about losing revenue because ebooks can't get physically worn out that they set up licensing agreements where libraries have to re-"buy" a book after a set number of checkouts? The idea, you see, is that when a physical book gets so worn out that it falls apart, as happens with popular public library books, the library will generally buy another copy. Publishers didn't want to lose that extra revenue on ebooks, so they made up artificial timelines to approximate re-purchases.

** If you're wondering about the presidential naming convention on this comment, it's because some of this topic is a little too close to areas I've worked in, though I have no inside knowledge of DPLA.


Posted by: herbert putnam | Link to this comment | 10- 1-21 10:23 PM
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Merck's new COVID drug looks pretty amazing, and the name is kind of fun for people who think pharma names are generally silly. Molnupiravir is named for Thor's hammer, Mjollnir.


Posted by: ydnew | Link to this comment | 10- 2-21 7:23 AM
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Oranges can slake one's thirst, maybe. Not long ago I was thirsty in the middle of a long hike and could have used either a bottle of water or a sliced up orange, both of which were in my car, 1900 feet higher and 3 miles away.


Posted by: bill | Link to this comment | 10- 2-21 2:09 PM
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Not sure who 29 goes, but as someone who has been intermittently interested in this space (shocker!):

1- Yes, Libby is just an app, the newer, hipper version of Overdrive, the monopoly library ebook app;
2- Yes, that means every library will have different books available through Libby. Even I, in KaKania, have my own KaKanian Libby/Overdrive ebook selection! Somewhat different, and more KaKania-focused, I guess, than my mother's Southborough, MA, Libby selection.
3- How this all works out, in terms of who actually gets money, is complicated and is differs in different countries, and I have no idea beyond that. When there's something I want to read, trying to be a "good citizen", I "check it out" for the minimal duration on Libby, then remove the DRM and send it to Kindle for me or Iberian Fury to read. If you don't know how to do this, email me, or just fucking google it (I'm drunk).
4- I had to look this up, but fucking 17 years ago, a Harvard professor named Wil/Liam Fis/her III, with a website that looks like someone with a "III" who wrote a book 17 years ago, would have, wrote a book, "Promises to Keep", that I think was basically: "Fuck it, copyright assholes, let's just fucking let everyone download everything, have some more or less accurate sense of who downloads what, and then pay them off, how hard would that be?" -- n.b., I never read it, who has the time -- and it was basically ignored. But he's got tenure, because he's a IIIrd, and I just DL everything scholarly through LibGen, so it's all good.

ANYWAY. Because it's been many years since I've been crusading about Intellectual Property, and because my main antagonist at the time, Halford, after giving Iberian Fury and I the experience of our life experiencing a VIP Veronica Mars screening and meeting the cast at LA, has for understandable reasons of health disappeared from here, I will now state the updated, late-2021 edition, rules-of-thumb for moral behavior with regards to "intellectual property":

- Think about your annual income, think about your consumption of "culture", and subscribe to / pay directly to producers of culture in some basically reasonable proportion thereof. Try to weight your support in terms of local news, books that have no real market, etc.
- Download the fuck of whatever else you want in terms of books/movies/music
- That's it, there is no #3

You'll notice this list is remarkably consistent with my own personal desires! Funny how that happens!


Posted by: x. trapnel | Link to this comment | 10- 2-21 3:29 PM
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I admit that I read books in the Libby app instead of putting on my Kindle. I guess I've never been drunk enough to figure it out.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10- 2-21 3:49 PM
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Oranges hydrate you at least a little as evidenced by the fact that your hands get sticky when you peel them. Plus they're squirty when you bite in. I estimate 30mL/orange


Posted by: torque | Link to this comment | 10- 2-21 6:28 PM
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The people with the grapefruit are the ones you want to watch.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10- 2-21 8:19 PM
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When there's something I want to read, trying to be a "good citizen", I "check it out" for the minimal duration on Libby, then remove the DRM and send it to Kindle for me or Iberian Fury to read. If you don't know how to do this, email me, or just fucking google it (I'm drunk).

This never occurred to me.

after giving Iberian Fury and I the experience of our life experiencing a VIP Veronica Mars screening and meeting the cast at LA,

I can't remember if I already knew this, but how is it that we were at the same event and didn't know it at the time? And had previously met each other in person and knew what each other looked like? And both our attendance was via participation on this very website?


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 10- 3-21 8:52 AM
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Not to mention that the night before, I had dinner with the LA contingent, which included Halford (and jms! and text! as well as Airdale) so I would have thought it would come up.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 10- 3-21 9:26 AM
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I'm glad you said something. I was having a real Mandela effect thing.


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 10- 3-21 10:47 AM
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Are you guys sure Halford didn't just have a party where he told you guys that everyone else was a celebrity?


Posted by: Eggplant | Link to this comment | 10- 3-21 10:50 AM
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I remember knowing about X.Trapnel and IF going to the VM thing at the time, but I don't remember it intersecting with Heebie's VM thing. Were there two different parties? Halford was raising money for (was it a homelessness charity?) through Unfogged, and that got the tix he gave to X.Trapnel. I don't remember how Airedale got her tix -- being a Kickstarter funder? -- but not through anything Unfogged related, she just came to Unfogged to find a plus one who would really appreciate it.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 3-21 12:53 PM
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http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2014_02_23.html#013549

That's the thread where Halford was raising money.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 3-21 1:00 PM
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29: Oh yeah, I remember now being confused how Darnton thought it would work without legislation or public investment.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 10- 3-21 4:46 PM
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According to the Herman Cain Awards, some poor person lost their llama because they couldn't get Ivormectin to treat it.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 10- 3-21 6:15 PM
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I was also wondering if there could have been two different VM events. I think mine was in the spring of 2014.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 10- 4-21 7:15 AM
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