It's pretty cool though I prefer H. W. Bush's feature with the Geto Boys [1] and in terms of presidential rap, Bill isn't the best Clinton [2]
271 karma · joined June 27, 2018
It's an interesting situation because it's obviously meant to honour the authors but in doing so it's speaking for them. It relies on the idea that these authors were women who took pseudonyms because of the society they were in rather than fully by choice.
The description of George Sand stood out to me
> Amantine Aurore Dupin, the 19th-century author better known as George Sand, who famously scandalised society by wearing male clothing and smoking cigars in public.
Wouldn't using a masculine name and wearing masculine clothing be grounds to consider her in fact a him, a transgender man? Today, Marsha P. Johnson is considered to be a trans woman rather than a gay man yet she never used the term. Admittedly, Johnson also used feminine pronouns but so have many other gay men.
It reminds me of Foone's Don’t Deadname the Dead https://foone.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/dont-deadname-the-dea...
"Life itself is a sea full of reefs and maelstroms that a human being takes the greatest care and caution to avoid; he uses all his efforts and ingenuity to wend his way through, while knowing that even if he is successful, every step brings him closer to the greatest, the total, the inescapable and irreparable shipwreck, and in fact steers him right up to it, - to death: this is the final goal of the miserable journey and worse for him that all the reefs he managed to avoid."
I don't consider Gimp to have radically worse UX either. I've got a couple of minor gripes but nothing major.
We're a pretty perverse society that random acts of harassment is being viewed with the television lens of "cancellation". That is a risk with the social medium.
Another irony of the situation is that, with the primary center being Twitter, the transgressions have to be minor. Accounts that break the rules (i.e. are racist) are routinely and correctly banned and as such have all their transgressions erased.
A slightly lower contrast may look nicer (and be more accurate to printed text) but often sites are excessive with it. It may not even be exactly the designer's fault since their monitor's gamma and contrast will probably be better than the average visitor.
Another related problem is that of font weight. Fonts too thin can also hamper readability but the weight on-screen will be variable with the user's font settings and how exactly it's set up with aliasing, shaping etc. To add to that some digital fonts are displayed at the wrong weight because they were designed with bleed in mind.
Pretty average for HN then ;)
It can't because any change or evolution keeps the name.
The only way to end it would be to revert back to a pre-capitalist economy that's not been retroactively deemed one (either by fans or detractors).
With books, I mostly read based on individual recommendations (or references). It's more natural to me than going with what's popular though it doesn't exclude it. It has the bonus of being an imperfect quality filter which mixes the good (as determined by people I trust) with the unusual.
To be honest, when I have read books based specifically on popularity I've been thoroughly disappointed. Reading Thinking Fast and Slow was mostly challenging with a mixture of bad examples and bad terminology ("systems 1 and 2"). I enjoyed the book a whole lot more near the end when it was discussing the incompleteness of/problems with economics. Some of my distaste for the earlier parts possibly comes from exposure to critics beforehand (e.g. Gerd Gigerenzer) and to the optical illusions. Similarly Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman! can be amusing but a lot of the stories boil down to "aren't I clever?".
How do you choose books to read or topics to study? Sincere question
According to Wikipedia[0], "[t]he placeholder text is taken from parts of the first book's discourse on hedonism." The first book being the first book of Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_finibus_bonorum_et_malorum
We could keep playing this game forever. Really you'd want a self-hosted site running from an anonymous VPS paid using a cryptocurrency like Monero (these exist) and your domain would use a similar service (say Njalla) or be TOR-exclusive. Alternatively you could go a more classic route and host with SDF (à la http://voidnull.sdf.org/).
Or, if you're really paranoid, you'd give up on the whole thing. Maybe you'd still write but you'd keep it to yourself. As I see it, any interaction is a risk of exposure even if very small.
You could schedule posts so times will not correlate. Tumblr has a queue which you can use to post at regular intervals throughout the day.
Yes, older members of Gen Z have already been enjoying Shrek "post-ironically" for years. Younger members of the generation are editing together clips of teenagers from the 00s as though it were some bygone halcyon era. Whether we like it or not the trends of reference and farce seem to be accelerating.