Monthly library update: January 2025
Date published: 2025.03.09
Yes, yes, this one’s a bit late. We had it all written in Obsidian on time (otherwise we would not remember anything anymore), just needed to throw it into the code template.
It’s not like it was hard, we just really couldn’t stand looking at HTML for a while.
As always, the attempts to make the entries cleaner, better-looking, more interesting also make updating them more and more of a chore. I’m not smart enough to be able to automate the process somehow; beyond turning my previous entries into a template & then copy-pasting chunks of markdown-to-HTML code into that template, I don’t know how to simplify it. The more visual stuff I add, like website favicons next to the links, album covers preview, etc., the more of a mind-numbing pain in the ass it is to get things going.
And here’s the thing: I’m not backing down on that stuff. I’m not going to make the website uglier just to have an easier time updating it. Too much of a perfectionist for that.
So yeah, sorry for the wait. Lol
Articles and essays 📰
Cohost and the "caricature problem"
❝ the internet is so enclosed and so algorithmically captured that it punishes expressing the totalities and complexities of ourselves. to stand out we must exaggerate or flatten ourselves—become caricatures of who we are—into digestible, predictable personalities for consumption.
TERFs, Trans Mascs, and Two Steve Feminism
❝ The idea that the transmasculine person is a failed feminist is deeply embedded in particular strains of feminist theory.
The Ghosts in the Machine. Spotify’s plot against musicians
❝ By comparing streaming data against documents retrieved from the Swedish copyright collection society STIM, the newspaper revealed that around twenty songwriters were behind the work of more than five hundred “artists,” and that thousands of their tracks were on Spotify and had been streamed millions of times.
Chopin Museum in Warsaw adds rare music manuscript to collection
!!!! Yayyy
Music 🎵
By The Tree, The Bards… – TOONALEAVES
A Chinese folk album. Based on the sound of celtic folk, but sung in Chinese. Super good find. Wish I could get my hands on the lyrics though because I don’t really trust myself to transcribe them well from hearing, but I can’t find them written down anywhere (a shame). There’s also another album by them, so if you like this one, check that one too. Favourite song:
古國來客.
林泉吟 / Melodies of forest and springs – Raflum
A gem I found by looking through TOONALEAVES’ album’s tags. This one is a very high quality album that mixes the instrumentals with sounds of nature (birds singing, water flowing) to create a really calming sound.
Abstract Lights – David Cordero
A very nice ambient album. Yeah that’s all I have to say. It’s just neat.
Books 📘
You might notice I’ve started linking you to Bookwyrm.social instead of Goodreads – it’s because I’ve become aware of its existence only this month, lol. It’s a good alternative. I like it for what it is.
Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology – Michael Dillon
❝ And let us not congratulate ourselves that we are so very much more enlightened.
Reading books like this one helps realize how far we've come in just a century, honestly. It helps believe that more good change can and will happen in our lifetimes.
As a word of obligatory content warning: this book is from 1946 and it’s a product of its time. It might be a piece of trans history, for sure, but that doesn’t mean some of its contents aren’t… well. 1946. There’s some bigotry there too.
Games 🎮
I’ll be honest I’ve just been no-life’ing GW2 this month to forget the pain of existence
Other things we’d like to share
A nice little add-on to make creating new flashcards easier.
Yeah, this one’s a gamechanger. It is difficult to figure out at first, but after you have – it’s just so fucking helpful. I wish I had set this up earlier instead of constantly manually copy-pasting new songs to my phone, for example. Using Syncthing for Obsidian makes me feel way more secure than using Dropbox for syncing files too (even though I made sure to have them encrypted).
Anyway. Corporations want us to struggle with finding & setting up software that would help us function without using their products and giving them our data. Here’s a video that helped me understand what the fuck I was supposed to do.
Here’s the app I use on my Android phone (and it works great). You can do it!!!
(Also: here’s a fun little CSS snippet that might help you transfer your favourite fonts to the mobile Obsidian app. That’s helpful since I made Syncthing sync my entire Obsidian folder, settings and plugins included. ^_^)
Polish stuff
Nowa era konfliktu USA vs UE wokół Big Techów
❝ To prawda – Unia Europejska od pewnego czasu zaczęła prowadzić względem amerykańskich firm agresywne działania regulacyjne, przede wszystkim dlatego, że zawiodła wcześniejsza wiara w samoregulację i deklaracje koncernów dotyczące walki z zagrożeniami na platformach cyfrowych, takimi jak np. dezinformacja czy aktywność grup terrorystycznych.
Japonki celowo popełniają przestępstwa, by trafić do więzienia. Narasta niepokojące zjawisko
❝ Skazana za drobną kradzież kobieta przyznała, że życie w więzieniu daje jej to, czego brakuje na zewnątrz – stałe posiłki, dach nad głową i poczucie wspólnoty. „To może być dla mnie najstabilniejsze życie” – powiedziała, opowiadając stacji o swoich doświadczeniach.
Brought to you with love pure raging hatred for coding by: Iri 🌫️, I don’t give a fuck about masking rn, I deserve credit for getting the website going again