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dontpanic

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hubskier for: 2985 days

recent comments, posts, and shares:
dontpanic  ·  2985 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 162nd Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately" Thread

Can't get enough of this at the moment:

Steven Wilson - No Part of Me

I love the tightness and the control in the instrumentation, and the huge feeling of space I get from the contrast. Melancholy/Progressive/Ambient, bit of a rocky riff starting at about 3:20. The whole album is gold.

dontpanic  ·  2985 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pirate Bay for Science!

Considering that neither the authors nor the reviewers are making money from the peer-review publication process, any paywalling whatsoever amounts to nothing more than profiteering. It is simply a way for private companies to extort vast sums from publicly-funded institutions, just as we see with private contractors who take government tenders in infrastructure, healthcare etc. As she rightly says:

    [The academic publication model] is very different from the music or movie industry, where creators receive money from each copy sold

As someone embedded in the academic "publish-or-perish" working environment, I welcome this, though I am skeptical of how long it will last. Download while you can, I guess.

dontpanic  ·  2985 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The secret "anti-languages" you're not supposed to know

This is more applicable than ever online. If we examine (and I'm sorry for this) chan-speak, it is designed not only to confuse outsiders but to repulse them as well. The repeated use of homophobic and racist slurs seems partly there to put off the people called "normies" in their language, as well as simply being an in-joke. This might be an added layer of secrecy, thus causing people not in the know to dismiss them all as foul-mouthed bigots (which it is of course entirely possible that they are).