Jeffrey David Marraccini @jdmarraccini@penguicon.social

After last night's reading, this feels especially true. One of my favorite songwriters, Josh Ritter, wrote this jewel of a line in a song from his 'Hello, Starling' album: "I'm singing for the love of it. Have mercy on the man who sings to be adored." It's easy to apply that to any art (or thing) we do that's fueled by love.

To the readers, Linda Addison, Charlie Jane Anders, C.S.E. Cooney, Maria Dong, Carlos Hernandez, Michael W Lucas, Patty Templeton, LaShawn M. Wanak, Martha Wells: salud ❤️

The #devotionAndCorrosion Kickstarter is supposed to launch tomorrow, and run until 10 PM EST 2/28.

Tomorrow looks super busy, though. I might launch it late tonight just to get it out of the way.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mwlucas/devotion-and-corrosion

It’s such an accidental godsend that the two people who developed the podcast RSS standard were completely uninterested in profits and monetization. It was one weird old hippie with fuck you amounts of tech industry money and a former music tv host burned by that industry so they made it open and free and accessible and resilient for listeners, with nothing set aside for ads and metrics and subscriptions.

19yrs later, we’re so lucky it turned out that way.

Pro tip: you don’t have to have a fully written and finished talk if you want to submit one for a conference’s CFP. Having a good idea of your intended audience, title, and outline is enough to go ahead and start submitting. You can write and tweak the talk if and when your submission is accepted. #speaking #conference #cfp

#OpenDnD #OGL #TTRPG
Holy moly! I did not expect this. It turns out that each of our tiny insignificant voices can rise to be a choir singing in enough harmony that even large transnational corporations have no choice but to listen. #Hasbro and #WizardsOfTheCoast have announced today that the plans to scrap OGL 1.0(a) have been scrapped and that the entire SRD 5.1 has been entered into the Creative Commons.

This is huge, and a great step in restoring the trust which they had done so much damage to.

Personally, I am not coming back to the fold just yet, but I am a lot more optimistic than I was before that I eventually might.

Bravo!

At the moment there's a bug in Mastodon's Edit feature which means you can't directly add or edit image descriptions. This will be fixed in the next update.

However, there is a workaround which *does* let you add or edit alt texts right now:

1. Click edit on the post
2. Delete the attached file
3. Attach the same file again
4. Add/edit the description
5. Publish the edited post

#Mastodon

A new episode of the Fluidity #audiobook #podcast: "The Purpose Of Meaning"

https://fluidity.libsyn.com/the-purpose-of-meaning

Peculiar features of language make sense as tools to enable collaboration, rather than to express objective truths. https://metarationality.com/purpose-of-meaning You can support the podcast and get episodes a week early, by supporting the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/fluidityaudiobooks If you like the show, consider buying me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mattarnold

With so many places having done layoffs lately, I wanted to mention the US Digital Service is hiring. It's a wild place to work, but also you get to work on legitimately meaningful projects that affect a lot of people (in 2022, we made it easier for transgender ppl to get passports, helped low-income families buy food, and I got to help identify disadvantage communities for environmental funding). I'm happy to talk about USDS if you're on the fence. http://ow.ly/LpqJ50LVnPV #fedihire #fedijobs

Maniac Mansion exists because Gary and I were too stupid to know it couldn't be done. As I get older and more experienced I am losing the ability to be too stupid to know things can't be done. Experience can be a curse.

Tordotcom has released the cover art for System Collapse, the next Murderbot book coming out in November. The cover art is by Jaime Jones: https://www.tor.com/2023/01/24/cover-reveal-murderbot-system-collapse-by-martha-wells/ #book #books #booktodon

"We need 30 days to review your SFWA application."

Four hours later: "approved, welcome!"

I'd like to say that my application was so blatantly qualified that they waved me in, but the truth is the whole "30 days" thing is because SWFA knows writers are wrecks. Every one of us.

PSA: take some time in 2023 to back up your/your family's CD-Rs (and other recordable media) full of memories you threw into storage 10+ years ago; there's a decent chance they've started to rot!

the tenuously thin layer of dyes/adhesives holding the data *will* break down over time, rapidly so if their environment is uncontrolled, the surface was previously nicked/contaminated, or they were cheap ones to begin with

After months of hard work, we are happy to announce that new version ▶️3.2.0◀️of the G'MIC image processing framework is finally out!
▶️ Changelog: https://discuss.pixls.us/t/release-of-gmic-3-2
▶️ Download: https://gmic.eu/download.html

Enjoy! 🍻😍

Finland has closely watched the Russian troll factory's efforts to create chaos in free democracies. We now educate our children to recognize #misinformation and rank #1 in our ability to resist it.

I wish the Americans would do the same.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/world/europe/finland-misinformation-classes.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqIhkSVUaAybKWsIjolqLmOLI2LF7iH74KCGTRXNHzv8UBYaH4ULEeatkYZ442z2AX9Jadr8zQfg4hsluA3tQcSj66J2VhMZCZCwvtYO4Wm5x1smXBO5nqDKvYjbndKIileKy-huKO2n1UPDY1nZ3JV1np5pkZkjqjSJTvtrNFuF-3dV83f4zVNstFXpbOn7877S_AA5-Od6Hchjf9gE0PupbUj3RltSXgKkSJEQQURmVCSMivhtvrY9UK9gVP6zgLhY_e8eYgrwZDmVgLofBFIS5pvO9ZV-vudr4BKbnXCby