basically post it notes

(Please keep in mind these points only cover accessibility for autism. Of course I believe that we should make all spaces as accessible for everyone as possible, but please make your own post if you wish to write about another disability to help keep this one to the point!)

Use LED lights instead of fluorescent lights. Hypersensitive autistic people can often see them flickering and/or hear them humming and it can be extremely overwhelming. Try to keep lighting even and the actual lights themselves away from eye level. Fix flickering lights as soon as possible. I've personally had panic attacks JUST from flickering lights.

Have a consistent, average room temperature. Making your business extra hot or extra cold can be really overstimulating.

Don't play music. Having loud music, or any music at all, can be really distracting and overwhelming. If you must play music, keep it quiet, but loud enough to hear the lyrics clearly. A distant, quiet, incomprehensible noise can be just as distracting as a really loud noise.

Train employees to be tolerant and understanding of non-verbal forms of communication. Even teaching basic, work-related sign language can be helpful! (For the autistic and deaf community!) Provide each counter/worker with a note pad and pen for just-in-case.

Ensure that each item only has one price tag. Having multiple, overlaying price tags can be extremely distracting.

Make price tags clear and direct. Often I notice that price tags will use abbreviations or shortened (or lengthened!) versions of the product name on the tag. This can be really confusing. Keeping it as close to the name on the product as possible is much more helpful. It could even be helpful to have a small photograph of the item on the tag.

Have automatic doors if possible. Many autistic people struggle with co-ordination and having an automatic door can be really helpful.

Avoid bright and distracting colours when possible. Bright colours (such as neon, or fire-truck red) can be extremely overwhelming for autistic people.

Make click + collect an option for your store. If you do this please ensure to keep it updated to keep house-bound people in the loop! Be sure to also not upcharge items simply for being click and collect.

If you make your own products, please try to ensure that packaging and usage is easy and accessible. Many autistic people struggle with fine motor-co-ordination, or have hypermobility, which can make opening packages and other items difficult.

Have hand sanitiser and sanitising wipes available for use.

Have benches or a seat in your store incase anyone gets tired/needs a rest before they continue shopping.

Have clear directions on purchase instructions. Many restaurants, for example, do not directly state if they take your order at your seat, or if you order at the counter. Having these things directly written on a sign, AND on your website, can be extremely helpful to autistic people. We often research stores/restaurants before going and having as many clear directions as possible on there would be a massive help.

Have a clear map in your store of where the nearest toilet and emergency exits are. Autistic people often have trouble asking strangers for help and having this information accessible at all times can be really helpful. Ideally you would have this at your door or your counter!

Keep aisles wide and clear. Autistic people can often have social anxiety/phobia and giving people extra room to browse can be helpful.

Avoid having any loud beeping or loud alarms in your store.

Put yellow tape on the edge of stairs/steps/changes in floor depth. Autistic people often miss stairs/get unbalanced more easily than neurotypicals.

Always have a member of staff present, but don't force greetings. Allow customers to come to you first. Forcing a greeting on an autistic person is usually a sure-fire way to get them to leave the store as quickly as possible. If you must do customer greetings, please keep them short and don't try to sell anything. We can get confused or forget what we were doing if we get too distracted.

Have your available forms of payment written directly at your door/counter.

Have a number limit of people in the store, and enforce a 1.5m distance rule. We are still in a pandemic, afterall.

Have clear signs for where different products are, and a guide for where to find more specific products. Autistic people can often see different connections for items and categories and we may get lost. (ie- when looking for spices we may think it could be in the international food aisle, or the cooking basics aisle).

If you can think of anymore autism-related accessibility points, please add them!

What do some English common names teach us about a creature? Names are powerful. These are things that I often contemplate together in relation to each other: “folk” taxonomy, animal naming conventions, erasure of local environmental knowledge, the theft and extraction of Indigenous language and knowledge, and rare and endemic species with specific microhabitat preferences.

—

You might come to find that a creature, like a frog in the tropical Andes, is named for a museum curator in London who had never visited the Andes, or the frog is named after an eighteenth century plantation owner who contracted the European land surveyors to map the area.

There are so many creatures named after racists, eugenicists, violent colonizers. Of course, Linnaean taxonomic naming conventions were being established alongside the height of European maritime dominance, plantation slavery, and colonization of the American hemisphere, Australia, South Asia, the tropics.

A frog might be named after an imperial British adventurer who recorded the creature for audiences at European museums. They called “dibs” on the frog, despite the fact that local Indigenous communities may have had an ongoing relationship with the creature for centuries. So instead I’m interested in trying to learn a “folk” name for the creature, or instead I would apply a new name for an animal based on the geographic area, ecoregion, plant community, or ecocultural region that the creature was most closely associated with.

—

Here’s a situation:

There is a relatively little-known salamander species. It is superlative. The terrestrial adults are enormous, and can be purple-ish in color, marked with gold speckles that seem to glow like glitter. They’re one of the only salamanders on the planet that can vocalize. They live in habitat alongside grizzly bears, mountain lion, wolverine, moose, unique lichen-eating mountain caribou, land snails, big ferns. The aquatic larvae can reach lengths of over 30 centimeters (1 foot), and they live not in still water like ponds and lakes as most other salamander larvae, but instead they swim around in fast-flowing streams.

It’s an endemic species. It lives in just a few small rivers’ watersheds, mostly in small, fast-flowing, cold, clear mountain streams in temperate rainforest ecosystems in the Columbia Mountains of the Northern Rockies, almost entirely within the arbitrary political borders of the US state of “Idaho,” on the traditional land of Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) people and Schitsu’umsh (Skitswish/Coeur d’Alene) people.

And it’s official common name: “Idaho giant salamander.” Not cool. Does the salamander have a meaningful reciprocal relationship with a political entity less than 200 years old, or does the salamander have a relationship with the ancient cedars of the rainforest? Which has existed longer: the arbitrary political entity of Idaho, or the Nimiipuu people? What do some English common names teach us about a creature? Names are powerful. Is the salamander named after the streams, the source of its life? Is it named after the temperate rainforest ecoregion, this safe harbor of fertile vegetation? Does its name refer to the endemic tailed frogs or other aquatic creatures that it relies on for food? Does the name reference the Nimiipuu, who have known the amphibian for centuries? Even the region’s name (”Columbia Mountains”) is a reference to one of history’s most notorious celebrities.

—

Here’s something from Robin Wall Kimmerer:

In the English language, if we want to speak of that sugar maple or that salamander, the only grammar that we have to do so is to call those beings an “it.” […] In Potawatomi, the cases that we have are animate and inanimate, and it is impossible in our language to speak of other living beings as “it”s. […] [W]hen we name something, often with a scientific name, this name becomes almost an end to inquiry. We sort of say, well, we know it now. We’re able to systematize it […]. It’s such a mechanical, wooden representation of what a plant really is. And we reduce them tremendously if we just think about them [solely] as physical elements of the ecosystem. […] This comes back to what I think of as the innocent or childlike way of knowing. Actually, that’s a terrible thing to call  it. We say it’s an innocent way of knowing, and, in fact, it’s a very worldly and wise way of knowing. That kind of deep attention that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim, because attention is that doorway to gratitude, the  doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity.

Words of Robin Wall Kimmerer. Interviewed by Krista Tippett. “On Being with Krista   Tippett - Robin Wall Kimmerer: The Intelligence in All Kinds of Life.”   February 2016.

—

It’s also important to me to clarify that, when referencing an Indigenous name or term for landmarks, places, plants, animals, etc. I only really feel comfortable doing so if the name is explicitly used by and/or confirmed to be accurate by speakers, researchers, knowledge-holders, etc. from that Indigenous community. And I also don’t want to use/share a name/term if the name/term was “collected” (appropriated, extracted) by a chauvinistic white academic or paternalistic Euro-American “ethnologist” or reproduced in a 1950s ethnobotany book or something. I especially don’t like relying on the testimony of, like, Euro-American missionaries or “traders’ who recorded terms in their personal journal in the 1750s or something.

How were those terms encountered?

How were they “extracted”?

Under duress?

Were these names, this environmental knowledge, willingly shared?

What ethical implications are there, of accepting secondhand information from an invading “pioneer”?

Many times, I’ll be reading a paper, maybe a “contempoary” paper from the past 10 years, and see references to a cool-sounding place-name or alternative name for a creature, and I’ve thought “wow, the connotations of the name sound really interesting, I wonder where this was learned,” and I’ll check the bibliography, and the “Indigenous name” was taken from a 1965 academic article, which itself was taken from a 1922 ethnology article sponsored by the F0rd Motor Company in pursuit of stealing local plant knowledge and land titles for rubber plantations or something, and that info itself was taken from an 1874 report from settler-colonial surveyors interviewing “locals” while traveling in company with an ex-government employee “cowboy” who had previously murdered at least 5 of the “locals.” So that, often in Euro-American “Knowledge” or “Science”, when trying to determine the Source Of A Fact, there is this blatant lineage of theft and violence and roundabout superficial self-referencing.

Even in relatively modern academic journals. Let’s say, in the 1990s, a European academic does “field research” in Amazonia. Maybe they record an “accurate” term, and I read about it in a paper. The academic says that they have a “profound respect” for “the culture”. Does this make it OK to “take” their terms? Does this make it more acceptable to “extract” a language as if it were a resource, a possession? Does it change the fact that the sponsoring academic institution or the publishing journal are both entangled with corporate extraction and ongoing (neo)colonial financialization, dispossession, debt, etc.?

So (1) you’re presented with names/terms which are probably inaccurate and which you have no way of confirming because of the convoluted way the term was passed down through settler-colonial knowledge-systematization institutions; and/or (2) more importantly, you’re presented with names/terms stolen, often at threat of violence; or (3) even in “good” scenarios with an accurate term and a so-called self-professed “respectful observer”, you’re presented with names/terms which have great power, connected to a specific culture and landscape, which should be treated with reverence and deep care, but which can easily be stolen and appropriated by popular media, wielding the power of the name in contexts where it doesn’t belong, a betrayal to the people, place, and/or creature.

—

Names imply or explicitly reveal the life of a creature or place, and also imply the connections between the creature/place being named, and the other worlds and relationships it influences and interacts with.

If i am not from the community that conceived the term/language, (1) it doesn’t feel honorable appropriating their language for myself, especially if I don’t have ongoing personal connection to people, places; (2) it doesn’t feel honorable, or all that reliable, to accept at face value the accuracy of a language/term if it’s being reported secondhand by a Euro-American academic intermediary, especially if that language was recorded during periods when Euro-American observers were actively engaged in colonization; and (3) it doesn’t feel honorable to use what might even be accurate Indigenous language/terminology if it was recorded/learned/stolen/promoted by Euro-American observers, unless there is explicit permission from native speakers to use the word, or unless native speakers actively encourage the acknowledgement of the words, maybe for purposes like language revitalization.

There is power and knowledge in a name. using a name involves serious responsibility. i feel that some names aren’t for me to invoke.

—

I think that maybe no name can do justice to the entire rich existence of a creature, but we can really do better than some English common names, especially in those cases when an animal is named after a lone individual human. And so, in naming, there might be a difficult decision to make. Do you name a creature for its behavior, its location, its appearance, its season of activity, its prefered habitat, its companion species? Maybe you have your own, personal, relationship with the creature. A living thing has so many interweaved relationships with others. Maybe its “meaning” changes with context or season or emotional state of the human observer. Maybe I will sometimes call the  “Idaho giant salamander” something more fitting. Maybe I’ll call it “the cedar salamander” or the “guardian of the waterfall pools” or “the giant of the stream” or “moss dragon” or whatever. Depends on the mood, context, whatever.

Antidepressants are supposed to work by fixing a chemical imbalance, specifically, a lack of serotonin in the brain. Indeed, their supposed effectiveness is the primary evidence for the chemical imbalance theory. But analyses of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect. Some antidepressants increase serotonin levels, some decrease it, and some have no effect at all on serotonin. Nevertheless, they all show the same therapeutic benefit. Even the small statistical difference between antidepressants and placebos may be an enhanced placebo effect, due to the fact that most patients and doctors in clinical trials successfully break blind. The serotonin theory is as close as any theory in the history of science to having been proved wrong. Instead of curing depression, popular antidepressants may induce a biological vulnerability making people more likely to become depressed in the future.

Irving Kirsch. 2015. “Antidepressants and the Placebo Effect”. Zeitschrift für Psychologie 222 (3): 128–134. PMCID: PMC4172306. https://doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000176.

⁂

A decade ago, we published an article in PLoS Medicine about the serotonin deficiency theory of depression (Lacasse & Leo, 2005). We transposed the psychiatric literature on serotonin and depression with what pharmaceutical companies had been claiming in their consumer advertisements for years—that a chemical imbalance (serotonin deficiency) caused depression and this imbalance was corrected by selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) drugs. For instance, advertisements for fluoxetine (Prozac) had stated:

When you’re clinically depressed, one thing that can happen is the level of serotonin (a chemical in your body) may drop. So you may have trouble sleeping. Feel unusually sad or irritable. Find it hard to concentrate. Lose your appetite. Lack energy. Or have trouble feeling pleasure…to help bring serotonin levels closer to normal, the medicine doctors now prescribe most often is Prozac® (Eli Lilly, 1998)

We knew that such advertisements did not accurately reflect the scientific status of the serotonin theory in the psychiatric research community (see Table 1; we have modified the original table to integrate new material that came to our attention since 2005). Some advertisements were more tentative or clever in their wording than others, but it seemed obvious that the drug companies were at least pushing the boundaries. We thought several of them were going over the line, in plain sight of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which ostensibly regulates direct-to-consumer advertising. Our goal was to illustrate the clear disconnect between the existing psychiatric science and what the public was being told in these advertisements, and we argued that the FDA should issue warning letters to pharmaceutical companies (Lacasse, 2005; Lacasse & Leo, 2005). Of course, there were ramifications for clinicians—if it was illegal to claim this in advertisements, wasn’t it also an unacceptable thing to be telling vulnerable clients?

After the publication of the paper, we were interviewed by numerous journalists. Several of them thought our work was provocative and that we were “attacking” a well-accepted theory. If it was an attack, it was an inside job, as our sources included NIMH-funded scientists, an award-winning biological psychiatrist, and a popular psychiatric textbook. Anyone familiar with the history of serotonin research would find our argument unremarkable (e.g., Healy, 1997, 2004; Moncrieff, 2008; Valenstein, 1998). In the United Kingdom, psychiatrist David Healy has been making this point for decades (e.g., Healy, 1987, 1997, 2004, 2012, 2015). But the questions from journalists reminded us that the enormous marketing campaigns promoting SSRI drugs (and surely many of the physicians prescribing them) had convinced the U.S. public that the serotonin theory of depression was firmly grounded in science. This wasn’t just an issue of misleading advertising. Instead, the incredulity seemed fueled by the significant number of mental health clients who had heard the chemical imbalance explanation from their prescribers.

link to Lacasse and Leo 2005 added. Jeffrey R. Lacasse and Jonathan Leo. 2015. “Antidepressants and the Chemical Imbalance Theory of Depression: A Reflection and Update on the Discourse”, with rejoinders by Ronald Pies and Daniel Carlat. the Behavior Therapist 38 (7): 206–213.

⁂

Biomedical causal explanations of depression, principally the “chemical imbalance” theory, have been vigorously promoted in recent decades to reduce public stigma and facilitate pharmacotherapy (Lacasse & Leo, 2005). As a result, the chemical imbalance theory has become the dominant cultural understanding of depression in the United States (France, Lysaker, & Robinson, 2007). Anti-stigma initiatives by the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) portray depression as a “chronic medical illness” (NAMI, 2013). Characterizing depression in biomedical terms is assumed to reduce stigma according to attribution theory, which predicts that attributing a mental disorder to an uncontrollable cause reduces blame among observers (Corrigan, 2000). However, increased public endorsement of the chemical imbalance explanation has not resulted in improved attitudes toward depressed individuals (Pescosolido et al., 2010). Indeed, research findings suggest that biomedical causal explanations for depression do not reliably reduce blame and may worsen perceptions of dangerousness and unpredictability (Kvaale, Gottdiener, & Haslem, 2013).

Biomedical explanations for mental disorders may produce essentialist thinking, in which biological causes suggest inherent differences in the nature of sufferers (Boysen & Gabreski, 2012; Haslam, 2000, 2011; Phelan, 2005). An essentialist perspective views biologically-based mental disorders as deep-seated, immutable defects which make an individual categorically distinct from others. One predicted consequence of this perspective is prognostic pessimism, the belief that the problem is unlikely to respond to remedial action (Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2011; Haslam, 2011). In studies of public attitudes toward individuals with mental disorders, prognostic pessimism appears to be worsened by biomedical causal explanations (e.g., Bennett, Thirlaway, & Murray, 2008; Phelan, 2005; Phelan, Yang, & Cruz-Rojas, 2006). Although studies of the attitudes of laypersons are necessary to inform efforts to reduce public stigma, such research does not address a question of critical importance to clinicians: how do biomedical causal explanations affect how individuals with mental disorders view their own symptoms?

as Kemp, Lickel, and Deacon state in the abstract:

This experiment examined the impact of chemical imbalance test feedback on perceptions of stigma, prognosis, negative mood regulation expectancies, and treatment credibility and expectancy. Participants endorsing a past or current depressive episode received results of a bogus but credible biological test demonstrating their depressive symptoms to be caused, or not caused, by a chemical imbalance in the brain. Results showed that chemical imbalance test feedback failed to reduce self-blame, elicited worse prognostic pessimism and negative mood regulation expectancies, and led participants to view pharmacotherapy as more credible and effective than psychotherapy. The present findings add to a growing literature highlighting the unhelpful and potentially iatrogenic effects of attributing depressive symptoms to a chemical imbalance.

Have you ever read Andrew Chumbley’s works on dreams ? I know, I know, Chumbley is chumbleyesque. But as far as I am aware he is the one who coined the term « oneiric sabbat » and his practice places a lot of emphasis on altered states of consciousness, among which sleep is a cornerstone. That said, it is not just about any quality of sleep. Hypnagogia characterizes as you may have seen that mental space you are in just right before loosing consciousness, in-between sleep and wakefulness. It is a threshold proper whereas one reaches a state of particular lucidity which encompasses visions, spirits encounters, imparting of otherworldly gifts, messages and knowledge, and so on. It is a liminal place of hallucinations, the first step towards lucid dreaming. You will want to find the best ways for you to reach that state and then progress onto holding your mind and spirit there for longer periods of times which can ultimately culminate in lucid dreamings and other oneiric works such as dreamwalking, hedgecrossing, or hagriding. It’s an extremely useful set of skills to develop. Now, you either have a knack for it or you don’t, and if you don’t then it will require work - experimentation, trials, and errors - and possible assistance. Conducting research into what helps facilitate this slide out of your body is a personal matter - some need to do it outside their own bed, some need drugs, some need sleep deprivation, some need music... Luckily this is one of the most heavily documented subject matter of spirit work, shamanism, and; for that matter, witchcraft - the secrets of the witch’s flight were puzzled over by countless practitioners and academicians alike. There is an abundance of source material, both from scholars and occultists, that is all yours to peruse.

It is difficult for me to tell you exactly how I do it. I can tell you I do not need mind-altering substances and that if anything I find music distracting. I have used artefacts - my stang, a hagstone... - but at the best of time I do not particularly need anything. My mind enters a state of passive awareness where sounds, smells and physical sensations, both merge and disappear. It is all woven together to form the fabric of the dream to come. In that regard I suppose it is not unlike meditation in that it both empties and fills me out. I think being an insomniac for many years helped me in that it let me acutely aware of my own internal clock. I am now getting good at weaving the fabric of the dream myself because I have good sensory memory, meaning I can start the dream where I please and « simulate » the conditions I am seeking - a creek on the sea-side, wet grass under winter wind, the top of a mountain, the bottom of a lake. I can select locations I have been to as a sort of « background », or create some new places as I intend to. I would say that your mind needs to be disciplined in selective vacancy and that this is where the training proper happens. You can start by booking a long trip via train and stare out of the window for as long as you can without getting bored. This is why for some people, music is easier : it alters your perception of time, but it does so by coloring your thoughts a certain way, and can trigger emotional responses too close to memories for me to be able to focus properly with it. It tends to keep me anchored. I find the silent company of my own unaltered thoughts to be more effective, generally speaking, to succeed in this exercise. To hold that mental place long enough that you loose track of time, is what you are aiming at. If you think about it, I am sure you have already reached this stage at least once. I can’t think of anyone I know having never experienced those short transes. Light and movement will work to - smoke, fire, water, are all excellent conduits.

Now, the gold ring you may remember from my adventures with a certain headless gentleman. Despite my best efforts as I learnt that gold is the one thing he fears, I never managed to take my gold ring with me on the other side. I have successfully taken many objects - spiritual weapons, and in particular ritual knives for example. But this simple gold ring ? Never. There is a reason for that, but it is for me to know ;) So, how does one start training oneself in moving with equipments ? Well I would be hard pressed to recommend anything else than visualization - think imagination, but stronger. Things exist in various planes at once simultaneously. When I was very young, I read this book by French author Bernard Werber called Le Livre du Voyage (The Book of Travel) and it opened my mind to its own possibilities the way few books have done so over the years - with an emphasis on expanding your mind, and your mental possibilities. In particular I remember it encouraging you to build what is now humorously referred to as « mind palace » or sometimes even « inner temple » - a mental locus where one can return to at will. Make no mistake - such constructions are tangible things. A friend of mine has a tower they even perform entire rituals in, and this tower has been seen, perceived, and entered by outside visitors quite unaware of its existence beforehand. Now, I don’t know that this book exists in English, I am not even sure it is that good a book, but it is one that made quite the impression on young impressionable Briar. Some techniques I have learned from this book and applied to my own needs afterwards. But really, and this is the book lover talking - any book will do. The reason why video games or movies do not work as well is because they present you with the end result which means should you wish to work from it you need to rely on a memory. A book does not - a book requires you to be your own architect. So, read. Read many different things, stories in different worlds, times, spaces. But read. I promise it helps - profoundly so.

(Just some thoughts, not meant to be comprehensive, barely even coherent)

Incantatory magic to me is an elegant simplicity of words strung together in order to commend oneself to the protection and favor of divinity. The appeal to the spirits is a call to come forth, to guard the petitioner. The words themselves build around the caster as an armor - the words tell a story and, in the telling of it, makes story come to life by mimicking the events in the present time; a sort of microcosm, macrocosm effect. By telling the stories of the spirits (Christian or not), the speaker is viewed literally as calling down the essences, the spirits, of those same stories - seen as very real and independent beings with their own agency and arsenal - to enact upon themselves. Therefore, if the gods hold divine weapons and armor, the petitioner calls upon the gods to loan them the use or power of such instruments of fortitude and protection.

Healing magics by way of incantation weave similar stories to different effect. A charm might tell the story of an injury and how a god or spirit (often a saint) cured it. In this instance, the caster is asking to be loaned the same ability - essentially letting that spirit guide their hands to undertake the healing in the same way that spirit once did. Another form uses the stories of magical items, similar to the lorica (breastplate). The item's story is told and mimicking actions may take place during the recitation to pull on the power of the item itself and its history.

Incantatory storytelling is also used to drive out spirits that may be harmful, banishing them. In this case, the caster uses scenarios in their story that are either "impossible" or hearken to specific realms of spirits, place locations. Either way, it serves the purpose of sending it back or sending it away to a place that either doesn't exist or that cannot be escaped from (the impossibility, the non-existence, creates a perfect trap). By impossibility, it's not just a place that does not exist but also specific scenarios that would never happen. For example, in order for that spirit to be released a condition would need to be met that could never be met. It would be released on a date that would never occur, or under a circumstance that could never happen.

The storytelling aspect of incantation lends history and credence, adding weight to the words. Naming the gods or spirits involved is an immediate way to connect to them, to garner their interest, to appeal for their aid, and to put some of their power to the words being spoken and it's intended effect - if they decide to assist, that is.

"Apportioning" by incantation was used in similar fashion as the method of banishing I've described above, but by driving out the spirit of a sickness or the evil eye using a combination of various locations and repetition. The incantations would describe sending away the illness or spirit causing illness/misfortune to various places - a portion to the mountains, a portion to the rocks, a portion to the hills, a portion to the sea, and so on. By doing this, the purpose was to divide up the affliction or spirit and the "pieces" would be so many and so scattered, the malevolence would have no hope of ever reforming itself.

The shells of walnuts are used as tiny boats with little candle inside and people let them float in a water basin. Watch what will happen if it…

• stays at the shore – do not expect any changes in the next year

• sinks immediately – you will most likely die

• touches another sailing boats – expect love and friendship

• makes a circle with others – mutual coexistence, respect, friendship and tolerance

• finds itself in the middle of the others – you will need a protection

• finds itself outside the circle – you will leave the family

• spins in a circle – you don’t know what you want in your life

• the flame of candle goes out – complicated emotional relationship is expected

• floats to the other side of a basin – you get what you want

If you’ve ever had to deal with an abusive person in your life - like an abusive parent or partner - you’ve probably wondered what made them treat you that way. If you understand why abuse is happening, the thinking goes, you might be able to figure out how to make it stop. 

So why do abusers do what they do? Do they have anger issues? Drinking problems? Past trauma? Personality disorders? Do they just need to get in touch with their feelings and learn how to communicate better?

Nope. 

Abusive behaviours come from abusive beliefs. Abusers - whether consciously or unconsciously - hold specific beliefs about relationships that drive their behaviour and allow them to justify the horrible things they do. Even if your abuser has never put their beliefs into words, you’ll probably recognize a lot of these abusive beliefs:

You are responsible for my emotions. It is never my responsibility to reflect on my emotional reactions or learn better coping skills - it’s your responsibility to stop doing things that make me angry or upset.

I must act on my emotions. If I am angry, I am going to lash out. You have no right to criticize me for that, and it’s not my responsibility to learn to manage my  emotions - you have to stop making me lash out at you. Asking me not to act on my emotions is controlling and wrong.

You will always be responsible for my emotions. Even if the relationship ends, you will continue to be responsible for my emotions, and I will expect you to continue to prioritize my feelings.

If I have feelings about something, it’s my business. If something you do or think causes an emotional reaction in me, then I have a right to get involved or tell you what to do. My feelings must be the priority. You don’t have the right to tell me that it’s none of my business. 

You must judge me on my intentions, not my actions. If I didn’t mean to hurt you or scare you, then you don’t have the right to be hurt or scared. No one has the right to try to hold me accountable unless I meant to hurt someone.

I get to decide what your intentions were. If you hurt me, you meant to hurt me. If you make me jealous, you meant to make me jealous. Nothing you do is ever accidental or unintended - everything you do is intentional and malicious, even if it was a response to something I did.

My feelings are genuine; your feelings are manipulation. If I’m upset, my feelings are real and important. If you are upset, you have an ulterior motive - you’re just trying to be manipulative and get attention or sympathy for yourself.

You have freedoms because I allow you to. Every freedom you have in your life - like wearing what you want - it’s because I generously allow it. I expect you to be grateful to me for that. I have the right to take those freedoms away whenever I want, and I expect you to obey.

If you set boundaries with me, you are mistreating me. If you really loved me, you wouldn’t set boundaries with me. You are doing this to intentionally hurt me, which means I don’t have to respect those boundaries.

You holding me accountable for hurting you is worse than me hurting you. My pain at being called out is worse than your pain at being mistreated. If I feel bad about something I did, I have already been punished enough. You trying to discuss the issue or hold me accountable is just your way of abusing me.

If I apologized for something, you have to forgive me. If the relationship has ended, you have to reconcile with me. You don’t get to ask for more time apart or more discussion of the issue - once I’ve apologized, the matter is closed for good.

The relationship is not over until I say it is over. So long as I want a relationship with you, you must have a relationship with me. Your feelings are irrelevant. Even if we have broken up, you must remain available to me so we can get back together in the future. Not wanting a relationship with me means you are mistreating me or being immature. 

I am the authority in this relationship. I am smarter and more perceptive than you. I know what is best for both of us. My version of events is always the correct one. I have superior judgement, taste and opinions. If you question me or disagree with me after I’ve given you the correct answer, you are disrespecting and mistreating me, or you are simply immature and incapable of knowing what’s good for you.

I have the right to control you. It is my absolute right to decide what you do and who you associate with. You have no right to disobey me. I am owed obedience and control; if you don’t give me those things, you are wronging me and cheating me out of the relationship I deserve. 

If you resist my control, I am allowed to do whatever I think is necessary to get it back. Once you’ve resisted me, I am justified in whatever I do to regain control of you. I am not responsible for my actions when you resist my control; you forced me to do it, and it’s your own fault. 

I should be your main focus. Everything else in your life comes secondary to me. When you make decisions, my feelings should be your first consideration. You are expected to make sacrifices for me and put me at the center of your life; I am not obligated to do the same for you. 

If I spend money on you or do something for you, you are in debt to me. You spending money on me or doing things for me does not erase your debt to me, and I am never in debt to you. You are indebted to me for as long as I decide. I may decide that your belongings and earnings also belong to me, since I allow you to have them. I may also decide at any time that you owe me for gifts I gave you, even if they were meant to be gifts.

I am not abusive, and you are not allowed to tell me otherwise. I know what abuse is, and real abusers are significantly worse than me. If our relationship has ever had any good times or positive moments, it can’t possibly be abusive. If you accuse me of being abusive, you are the one abusing me, or you have been led astray by bad influences. 

Relationships should be effortless (for me). I am owed a relationship that is peaceful and requires no real effort from me. It is your job to make sure we have that kind of relationship. If there is any tension or conflict in the relationship, it is your fault, and you are depriving me of the relationship I deserve to have. 

Abusers and victims alike often buy into the narrative that abuse is rooted in anger issues - after all, abusers are frequently angry, and anger is an issue that can be treated. But this narrative just isn’t true. Abusers aren’t abusive because they are angry. Abusers are angry because they are abusive. 

A non-abusive partner is not someone who has learned how to control their rage whenever you spend time with your friends or get home 15 minutes late from work. A non-abusive partner just doesn’t feel any rage in those situations. An abuser’s rage is firmly rooted in their beliefs about relationships - they feel entitled to a relationship that meets their impossible expectations, and when they inevitably don’t get it, they bubble over with fury. Whether they know it or not, they have firmly entrenched beliefs about how relationships should be, and those beliefs are at the heart of their abuse. 

It's been a good year over at Fiat Lingua, the once-monthly conlang journal that's been posting steadily since September, 2011. I created Fiat Lingua over ten years ago with the idea that it could be something like the Rutgers Optimality Archive: A place where conlangers could post work that either they wanted to showcase, or work that was in progress. We've had tons of contributors over the years, and some standout work I'm really proud of.

Behind the scenes, we have a number of metrics available to us, and one of them allows us to know what the top posts are over a given amount of time. So, for fun, here are the top 10 visited posts for this year (though, note, the numbers for the December post will be down a little bit, since it didn't have a full month. Still, though, it's incredible, so if you get a chance, take a look at this full novel Jim Hopkins wrote in his language Itlani).

NUMBER 10

We have a tie...

"Moya Abugida" (June, 2022) by Carl Buck: A detailed description of how to write the unique abugida of the Moya language.

"Die Wichtigkeit von Conlangs in Medien" (November, 2021) by Jonah Behring: A German language article on the importance of using authentically created conlangs in films and television shows.

NUMBER 9

"Wóxtjanato: A grammar" (January, 2022) by Jessie Sams: A conlang by the amazing @quothalinguist about a culture whose planet has suddenly and unexpectedly acquired a second moon.

NUMBER 7

We have a tie...

"Names Aren't Neutral: David J. Peterson on Creating a Fantasy Language" (March, 2019) by David J. Peterson: This was an article I wrote for an online magazine, but then the magazine went under, so I reclaimed it and put it up on Fiat Lingua. It's about why coming with "random" names for sff can often prove problematic.

"Tone for Conlangers: A Basic Introduction" (April, 2018) by Aidan Aannestad: A lot of conlangers are interested in having tone in their language, but don't really know how to go about it, and this is a great introduction.

NUMBER 6

"Afrihili: An African Interlanguage" (April, 2014) by William S. Annis: Afrihili is an a posteriori auxlang from the late 60s that uses Bantu languages as its source, and it is fascinating! One of my all-time favorite auxlangs, and William provides a wonderful introduction.

NUMBER 5

"An Itlani Wedding Blessing" (August, 2014) by James E. Hopkins: A lovely wedding blessing Jim wrote for, if I remember right, a friend's daughter who was getting married.

NUMBER 4

"Dothraki & the Nostratic Super Family" (February, 2015) by Charlotte Peak: For her MA thesis, Charlotte wrote a paper on how Dothraki could fit into the theoretical Nostratic super family. A fun read!

NUMBER 3

"Patterns of Allophony" (April, 2015) by William S. Annis: Definitely one of the most popular papers on Fiat Lingua, William illustrates graphically a number of very common sound changes.

NUMBER 2

"Slides for Linguistics 183: The Linguistics of Game of Thrones and the Art of Language Invention" (September, 2018) by David J. Peterson: In the summer of 2017 I taught a class on language creation at UC Berkeley. I uploaded all the slides I used in that course as one massive .pdf to Fiat Lingua.

And now for the top viewed article for 2022 on Fiat Lingua...

NUMBER 1

"A Conlanger's Thesaurus" (September, 2014) by William S. Annis: This is consistently the most accessed article on Fiat Lingua, and I don't expect that to change. The article is relatively short, compared to the information and use you can get out of it. William Annis details ways in which languages relate words to other similar words. For conlangers who struggle either with coming up with words that are different from English in meaning, or who struggle with coming up with words at all, this reference article should prove very useful. Using the word maps in this article, you might be able to come up with words you never dreamt of before, but words which could exist in some language. A great resource for conlangers who are desperately trying to break out of the influence of their L1 or L2!

* * * * *

instead of “defund the police,” say “invest in community safety” and emphasize things like participatory budgeting giving you power over where YOUR taxes go and reallocating funds to after-school programs, social services, and food pantries

instead of “abolish ice,” say “immigration reform” and “create a new agency for immigration and citizenship services” 

instead of “medicare for all,” say “universal health care” or even just really harp on making healthcare affordable and accessible to everyone

instead of “the green new deal” (which was a great piece of messaging in the first place before it became inextricably tied up with aoc’s theatrics), talk about what an effective piece of climate legislation will create, not what it will destroy. when you say “ban fracking” or “ban fossil fuels” or “reduce methane emissions in agriculture” people go “YOU WON’T TAKE MY JOB OR MY FARTING COWS.” climate is really an area where being able to reframe it through the language of capitalism helps. say “let’s give tax breaks to farmers, especially small family farms who are already being squeezed out by the big guys, so they can invest in the future of their business” and other noise-shaped air stuff like that. instead of “ban fracking” talk about the jobs that renewable energy will create in communities that have been left behind by our reliance on foreign oil. i mean, fuck, the phrase “climate change” can be a real problem when you’re talking to the whole country because of how effective the “climate and weather are the same things” and “climate change is a hoax” disinfo campaigns have been over the past 20 years or so - but when you talk about “conserving our natural resources” and all that teddy roosevelt, ranger rick shit, it just comes across different. 

instead of “abortion rights”…. listen, you know i hate equivocating about abortion but at the end of the day, when you’re talking to people who are probably anti-abortion for religious reasons but will still vote democrat because they’re not a single-issue anti-abortion voter, don’t say “abortion (on demand without apology etc),” say “the constitutional right to privacy” or “the right to make personal medical decisions without the government intervening.” fearmonger about attacks on abortion the way sarah palin fearmongered about how obamacare would lead to “death panels” deciding whether your grandma would live or die! and if you’re talking to someone who just doesn’t feel that strongly about abortion because yada yada roe is settled who cares, talk about how “empowering women to decide when they start a family fuels economic growth and leads to more wanted children growing up in stable, happy two-parent homes” and so on. 

inversely, instead of “abolish the death penalty,” talk about “saving the lives of the innocent” and “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” if you’re talking to a christian and honestly just look at the libertarian arguments against the death penalty and ape some of those - cost to the taxpayer, high wrongful conviction rates as a reflection of government incompetence. honestly, the libertarian right is frequently aligned with the left on criminal justice issues and i know we all love to dunk on libertarians but the language they use is pretty appealing to moderates who might be coming from a more conservative background or region where it’s just normal

instead of “democratic socialism,” just talk about, like, values - ending poverty and hunger, living wages and better educational opportunities, creating jobs and protecting ordinary working people and families and putting money back in their pockets and creating a stable economy. people really do vote based on kitchen table issues and you can really make a moral appeal on the rest.

instead of “tax the rich,” say “cut taxes.” period. never talk about raising taxes. not on the rich, not on the middle class, not for any reason whatsoever, even if you’re saying “if we raise taxes on billionaires we can give everyone a pony.” i don’t care how much you want to tax billionaires, don’t fucking bring it up. i hate bezos as much as everyone but we live in america, where everyone is simply a temporarily embarrassed billionaire and convinced that taxing the ultra-rich will somehow hurt them too. don’t expect middle-of-the-road normies to get on board with the “i’ll pay more taxes if it means other people have health care” thing you see from avowed liberals and lefties, because they will not, i’m sorry. frankly *****i***** have no interest in paying more taxes because nyc already taxes you out the nose regardless of where you are on the socioeconomic scale and if someone suggested i should pay more, even if it meant paying less on private services in the long run, i would simply be like, “nope!” so like, yeah, obviously the goal is to eliminate corporate tax loopholes and tax the ultra-rich at a higher rate while cutting tax burdens on everyone else, but what you want to say is stuff like “small business owners shouldn’t pay more in taxes than the companies like apple and amazon that are already squeezing them out” and “we’ll cut taxes and frivolous government spending,” period, no embellishment. “making american companies pay american taxes” is a succinct catchphrase i like to use. 

instead of “defund/spend less on the military,” say “why is the government spending so much on building outdated outdated tanks and submarines from 50 years ago and so little on services for veterans? we need to revitalize our military spending so that we can spend less on safer, more modern equipment, preserve those manufacturing jobs, and make sure that veterans get the health care and job opportunities they deserve.” get it? like, republicans have been selling the “cut waste, cut taxes, cut spending” line for decades because it sounds good and people really respond to it. unfortunately, one of the many cursed legacies of ronald reagan is that most people still think that balancing a government budget is like balancing a checkbook, and obviously that’s not true but it lends a lot of familiar comparisons and metaphors, so like… use them.

don’t equivocate on “black lives matter” - it’s too important and too urgent - instead, give the non-activist liberals you already know the accessible language they can use to help normalize the phrase “black lives matter” in their own lives and encourage them to do so. they won’t convert the full-on blue lives matter cult members and other assorted balls-to-the-wall racists, but there are people in the middle who just need to hear a targeted explanation of why that isn’t a combative or controversial statement, and that totally depends on the individual… there’s the very basic 101-logicky “if saying ‘save the whales’ doesn’t mean you think dolphins can kick rocks, or if saying ‘spinach is a vegetable’ doesn’t mean that you think lettuce isn’t, why does ‘black lives matter’ imply that other lives don’t?” and i saw someone in the christians against trump group cite a brene brown quote they said (“In order for slavery to work, in order for us to buy, sell, beat, and trade people like animals, Americans had to completely dehumanize slaves. And whether we directly participated in that or were simply a member of a culture that at one time normalized that behavior, it shaped us. We can’t undo that level of dehumanizing in one or two generations. I believe Black Lives Matter is a movement to rehumanize black citizens. All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psychological process of demonizing and being made less than human so we could justify the inhumane practice of slavery.”) that made it click for them and they like to use to make it click for others, and there’s also this example that i think is probably pretty resonant for christians:

the point is, as with all the rest of this, that there are a lot of people out there who are alienated by the language (because there has been a billion-dollar media propaganda machine working overtime to make the language as alienating as possible) but not by the content of the argument. the right is SO good at messaging to its base by speaking their language, dog whistles and all. but because the democratic party is a coalition of moderates and liberals and leftists, you really have to be strategic about your messaging in a way that the right doesn’t. frankly, that’s why joe biden won - he made those same broad appeals to morality and civility and unity and prosperity that people want to hear. 

See: critical race theory

Critical race theory is actually a law school level class about how legal systems can disadvantage people of color in the United States. It’s been around for forty years.

Republicans have conflated it with “indoctrinating children to think being white is bad and hating America.” Moral panic ensues.

The Affordable Care Act becomes “Government takeover of Healthcare.” Etc etc etc

In Bezos’s original plan, the company called “Amazon” was called “Relentless,” due to its ambition to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” Today, Amazon is an enshittified endless scroll of paid results, where winning depends on ad budgets, not quality.

Writing in Jeff Bezos’s newspaper The Washington Post, veteran tech reporter Geoffrey Fowler reports on the state of his boss’s “relentless” commitment to customer service. The state is grim.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/amazon-shopping-ads/

Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads. One of them is an ad for a dog carrier, which Amazon itself manufactures and sells, competing with the other sellers who bought that placement.

Scroll down one screen and you get some “organic” results — that is, results that represent Amazon’s best guess at the best products for your query. Scroll once more and yup, another entire screen of ads, these ones labeled “Highly rated.” One more scroll, and another screenful of ads, one for a dog product.

Keep scrolling, you’ll keep seeing ads, including ads you’ve already scrolled past. “On these first five screens, more than 50 percent of the space was dedicated to ads and Amazon touting its own products.” Amazon is a cesspit of ads: twice as many as Target, four times as many as Walmart.

How did we get here? We always knew that Amazon didn’t care about its suppliers, but being an Amazon customer has historically been a great deal — lots of selection, low prices, and a generous returns policy. How could “Earth’s most customer-centric” company become such a bad place to shop?

The answer is in Amazon’s $31b “ad” business. Amazon touts this widely, and analysts repeat it without any critical interrogation, proclaiming that Amazon is catching up with the Googbook ad-tech duopoly. But nearly all of that “ad” business isn’t ads at all — it’s payola.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/not-an-ad/#shakedowns

Amazon charges its sellers billions of dollars a year through a gladiatorial combat where they compete to outspend each other to see who’ll get to the top of the search results. May the most margin-immolating, deep-pocketed spender win!

Why would sellers be willing to light billions of dollars on fire to get to the top of the Amazon search results?

Prime.

Most of us have Amazon Prime. Seriously — 82% of American households! Prime users only shop on Amazon. Seriously. More than 90% of Prime members start their search on Amazon, and if they find what they’re looking for, they stop there, too.

If you are a seller, you have to be on Amazon, otherwise no one will find your stuff and that means they won’t buy it. This is called a monopsony, the obscure inverse of monopoly, where a buyer has power over sellers.

But monopoly and monopsony are closely related phenomena. Monopsonies use control over buyers — the fact that we all have Prime — to exert control over sellers. This lets them force unfavorable terms onto sellers, like deeper discounts. In theory, this is good for use consumers, because prices go down. In practice, though…

Back in June 2021, DC Attorney General Karl Racine filed an antitrust suit against Amazon, because the company had used its monopoly over customers to force such unfavorable terms on sellers that prices were being driven up everywhere, not just on Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#prime-facie

Here’s how that works: one of the unfavorable terms Amazon forces on sellers is “most favored nation” status (MFN), which means that Amazon sellers have to offer their lowest price on Amazon — they can’t sell more cheaply anywhere else.

Then Amazon hits sellers with fees. Lots of fees:

Fees to be listed on Prime (without which, your search result is buried at the bottom of an endless scroll):

Fees for Amazon warehouse fulfillment (without which, your search result is buried at the bottom of an endless scroll)

And finally, there’s payola — the “ads” you have to buy to outcompete the other people who are buying ads to outcompete you.

All told, these fees add up to 45% of the price you pay Amazon — sometimes more. Companies just don’t have 45% margins, because they exist in competitive markets. If I’m selling a bottle of detergent at a 45% markup, my rival will sell it at 40%, and then I have to drop to 35%, and so on.

But everyone has to sell on Amazon, and Amazon takes their 45% cut, which means that all these sellers have to raise prices. And, thanks to MFN, the sellers then have to charge the same price at Walmart, Target, and your local mom-and-pop shop.

Amazon’s monopoly (control over buyers) gives it a monopsony (control over sellers), which lets it raise prices everywhere, at Amazon and at every other retailer, even as it drives the companies that supply it into bankruptcy.

Amazon is no longer a place where a scrappy independent seller can find an audience for its products. In order to navigate the minefield Amazon lays for its sellers (who have no choice but to sell there), these indie companies are forced to sell out to gators (aggregators), which are now multi-billion-dollar businesses in their own right:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#gator-ade

This brings me back to the enshittification of Amazon search, AKA late-stage (platform) capitalism. Amazon’s dominance means that many products are now solely available on the platform. With the collapse of both physical and online retail, Prime isn’t so much a choice as a necessity.

Amazon has produced a planned economy run as capriciously as a Soviet smelting plant, but Party Secretary Bezos doesn’t even pretend to be a servant of the people. From his lordly seat aboard his penis-rocket, Bezos decides which products live and which ones die.

Remember that one of those search-results for a cat-bed was a product for dogs? Remember that Amazon made that dog product? How did that end up there? Well, if you’re a seller trying to make a living from cat-beds, your ad-spending is limited by your profit margin. Guess how much it costs Amazon to advertise on Amazon? Amazon is playing with its own chips, and it can always outbid the other players at the table.

Those Amazon own-brand products? They didn’t come out of a vacuum. Amazon monitors its own sellers’ performance, and creams off the best of them, cloning them and then putting its knockoffs above of the original product in search results (Bezos lied to Congress about this, then admitted it was true):

https://nypost.com/2021/10/18/jeff-bezos-may-have-lied-to-congress-about-amazon-practices-reps/

If you’ve read Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin’s and my new book about market concentration in the entertainment industry, this story will be a familiar one. You’ll recall that Amazon actually boasts about this process, calling it “the flywheel”:

https://twitter.com/rgibli/status/1561761732108107777

Everything that Amazon is doing to platform sellers, other platforms are doing to creators. You know how Amazon knocks off its sellers’ best products and then replaces them with its clones? That’s exactly what Spotify does to the ambient artists in its most popular playlists, replacing them with work-for-hire soundalikes who aren’t entitled to royalties.

You can learn more about how Spotify rips off its performers in the Chokepoint Capitalism chapter on Spotify; we made the audiobook version of that chapter a Spotify exclusive (it’s the only part of the book you can get on Spotify):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Entertainment and tech companies all want to be the only game in town for their creative labor force, because that lets them turn the screws to those workers, moving value from labor to shareholders.

Amazon is also the poster-child for this dynamic. For example, its Audible audiobook monopoly means that audiobook creators must sell on Audible, even though the #AudibleGate scandal revealed that the company has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from these creators. (Our chapter on Audiblegate is the only part of our audiobook on Audible!)

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

Then there’s its Twitch division, where the company just admitted that it had been secretly paying its A-listers 70% of the total take for their streams. The company declared this to be unfair when the plebs were having half their wages clawed back by Amazon, so they fixed it by cutting the A-listers’ pay.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/22/amazon-vs-amazon/#pray-i-dont-alter-it-further

Twitch blamed the cut on the high cost of bandwidth for streaming. If that sounds reasonable to you, remember: Twitch buys its bandwidth from Amazon. As Sam Biddle wrote, “Amazon is charging Amazon so much money to run the business via Amazon that it has no choice but to take more money from streamers.”

https://twitter.com/samfbiddle/status/1572667269284777984

As Bezos suns himself aboard his yacht-so-big-it-has-a-smaller-yacht, we ask him to referee a game where he also owns one of the teams. Over and over again, he proves that he is not up to the task. Either his “relentless” customer focus was a sham, or the benefits of cheating are too tempting to ignore.

Historically, we understood that businesses couldn’t be trusted to be on both sides of a transaction. The “structural separation” doctrine is one of the vital pieces of policy we’ve lost over 40 years of antitrust neglect. It says that important platforms can’t compete with their users.

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

For example, banks couldn’t own businesses that competed with their commercial borrowers. If you own Joe’s Pizza and your competitor is Citibank Pizza and you both have a hard month and can’t make your payment, will you trust that Citi called in your loan but not Citibank Pizza’s because they had a more promising business?

Today, all kinds of businesses have been credibly accused of self-preferencing: Google and Apple via their App Stores, Spotify via its playlists, consoles via their game stores, etc. Legislators have decided that the best way to fix this isn’t structural separation, but rather, rules against self-preferencing.

Under these rules, companies will have to put “the best” results at the top of their listings. This is doomed. When Apple says it put its own ebook store ahead of Bookshop.org’s app because it sincerely believes Apple Books is “better,” how will we argue with this? Maybe Apple really does believe that. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it does, but only because of motivated reasoning (“It is difficult to get a product manager to understand something, when their bonus depends on them not understanding it”).

The irony here is that these companies’ own lawyers know that a sincere promise of fairness is no assurance that your counterparty will act honorably. If the judge in Apple v. Epic was a major shareholder in Epic, or the brother-in-law of Epic’s CEO, Apple’s lawyers would bring down the roof demanding a new judge — even if the judge promised really sincerely to be neutral.

https://marker.medium.com/moral-hazard-and-monopoly-42e30eb159a8

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if Amazon’s enshittification is because Bezos was a cynic or because he sold out. Once Amazon could make more money by screwing its customers, that screw-job became a fait accompli. That’s why it’s so important that the FTC win its bid to block the Activision-Microsoft merger:

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/23/exclusive-feds-likely-to-challenge-microsofts-69-billion-activision-takeover-00070787

The best time to prevent monopoly formation was 40 years ago. The second best time is now.

Anti-monopoly measures are slow and ponderous tools, but when it comes to tech companies, we have faster, more nimble ones. If we want to make it easy to compete with Amazon, we could — for example — use Adversarial Interoperability to turn it into a dumb pipe:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/01/dumb-pipes/#original-asin

That is, we could let local merchants use Amazon’s ASIN system to tag their own inventory and produce a realtime database. Customers could browse Amazon to find the things they wanted, with a browser plugin that turned “Buy It Now” into “Buy It Now at Joe’s Hardware”:

https://doctorow.medium.com/view-a-sku-32721d623aee

But this only works to the extent that Amazon’s search isn’t totally enshittified. To that end, Fowler has a few modest proposals of his own, like requiring that at least 50% of the first six screens be given over to real results, not ads.

I made a book! It's my first time printing out a fanfiction and and binding it together and I think it came out really well. It's even got a ribbon.

The fanfiction is Hell Or High Water by @mottlemoth which an amazing post canon Our Flag Means Death fanfic. It's currently sitting at 190k words and 31 chapters.

I printed and bound chapters 15-23 (which is why I've got the part 2 in the title). For those familiar with the fic it starts with Stede finding Ed and ends with the scene in Badminton's ship. The reason I cut it there was partly becaues I wanted to start with the smaller part (part i is 11 signatures, part ii only 8). My printer only prints on one side so I had to hand feed each sheet in. I only messed up once which is not bad for 48 pages (front and back). I didn't do part iiii becaues, well, chapter 31 hadn't been published when I started this and now that feels like a nice stopping point for that part. I might do that next so I can stare at chapter 28 (bed rest) for ever.

*

To print the book I used the instructions here

How to Make a Book from an AO3 Page @armoredsuperheavy

To bind the book I used Sea Lemons instructions here

DIY Text Block: Case Bookbinding Tutorial

The cover material was an old wallpaper sample that I kept (for reasons, I've got a bunch of them)

I definitely learned a lot from this first book I made and I want to print out more fanfiction. Think I'll get some off white paper first, bright white paper and pitch black ink is a bit much. I'll also think about how I want to put a title on this thing. And finally, I'm not wild about the font choices I made the for the quotes at the start of the page.

For a long time I didn’t trim my book edges at all, because I’d tried using a box cutter and that sucked and I tried a chisel and that tore my book up and so I decided it’s fine, I’ll live with rough edges rather than imperfectly trimmed ones.

But then a fellow @renegadepublishing​ person at Havencon told me they used an electric sander and showed me the amazing results.  (Forgive me because I cannot remember your handle…)

I keep telling people about this so thought I’d make a post with all the info to point at.  So here is how I sand my edges. 

SAFETY WARNINGS:

Wear a mask while sanding to keep from inhaling paper dust. And you probably want to wear eye protection as well.  Keep your hands away from the sanding surface while in use (cause finger on electric sander doesn’t feel good I can attest.)  These pictures are taken indoors in a crafting space because it was raining but its best to do this in the open air due to dust, although the sander does capture a lot of it. 

After you’ve sewn your textblock and glued your spine (or before if you want to trim the foreedge before rounding), you need to clamp the textblock in place.  For this example I have already rounded the spine and glued it because I like the look of the uneven foreedge for antique style bindings (and also I forgot and went ahead and rounded it.)

So I’m just sanding top and bottom edges.  So I’m using a 12″ wooden hand clamp from the hardware store.  This is pretty much the perfect size for the top and bottom.  (I intend to modify this clamp into a better approximation of a finishing press but haven’t yet.)  But you can also just use two boards and some clamps, which works great. 

Clamp the text block as tightly as you can.  Here I have some spare book board on either side, but I ended up taking that out because the text block was slipping inside the boards and without the board it stayed in place better.  And since this textblock has waste papers on the outside I’m not worried about marking it. 

Here’s my sander.  You can see all the fine paper dust in the filter.  You will need an assortment of sandpaper grits to fit your model.  I recommend something around 100 grit, and something around 600 grit.  You can also do a third stage of 220 grit in the middle if you want but honestly I find it’s not that important and I’m lazy so I stopped doing that.

In case you don’t know sanders, lower number is rougher and will take off more material.  So you start with the low number paper and sand the edge until most of what you want to take off is gone and the edges are even. 

I have this narrow cardboard box (that a pillow came in) that I rest this clamp on that leaves room for the book.  If you’re using boards and clamps hopefully there’s room for your book to hang down or you’ll have to prop them up on bricks or something. 

After a pass with the rough paper, switch it out for the finer stuff.  The 600 grit is really just a final polish so if you have more to take off stick with the larger grit. 

Hey y’all! In this tutorial, I’m going to explain the basics on how I make my custom covers for your books like the ones shown above. The amazing thing about the fanbinding community is that there’s no singular way to do something. I have seen a lot of people ask how custom covers are made (in general) and don’t mind throwing some of my brain knowledge your way. 

You do not have to be an illustrator or “good at design” to do this! This is nowhere near a comprehensive guide to designing covers, and definitely more of a nudge into directions where to start. 

But please note: this is heavily geared towards using design software. You are going to have to put some effort into learning how it works on your own. There may be some lingo you aren’t familiar with. 

This tutorial is long and going to be divided into software, resources, designing, printing, and applying.

If you want to learn how to make books, then I recommend @armoredsuperheavy​’s post on making books here, @renegadepublishing​‘s resources, and DAS Bookbinding.

There is also a Google Doc version of this that is more up to date.

A few months ago, a friend asked if I could make her a book. I love her dearly, but fanfic is not her thing. She is deeply, endlessly fascinated by what her friends are passionate about though, and has heard about my new obsession with fanbinding as it’s evolved. Her “fandoms” include beekeeping, knitting, and environmental activism. Her request? A long article on climate change, so she could read it offline.

The end result was ninety pages, using an assortment of reused and repurposed material. 

The text ornament images are all from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The links all became footnotes. Did I regret my choices halfway through? Maybe. 

The binding is in Coptic stitch, and was the project where I figured out what I’d been doing wrong attaching the second cover. Success!

The cover material is some of my wife’s cast-off pieces of gel plate printing, acrylic paint on paper and tissue. The text block paper is 30% recycled copier paper, the boards are scavenged out of discarded library books that were headed for recycling. The thread was some cotton remnants from a project I was working on at the weaver’s guild.

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Book pictured here with Algernon

Process images and notes under the cut!