any recommendations/personal favourites from the image collections to print out and make a wall collage out of? (extra love if it’s not artstor, my uni doesnt have a subscription to that)
I love this question! It very much depends on your personal vibe, but here's a list of every collection designated as open to get you started:
Folger Shakespeare Library
Images from the History of Medicine
Museum of New Zealand - Te Papa Tongarewa
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Science Museum Group
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Statens Museum for Kunst-National Gallery of Denmark
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After someone in a server I was formerly in brought up a point about how many of those against AI for fanworks often use it for fic covers (which I doubt to some extent…) I thought I’d put together this resource for anyone who wants images to play with through Open Source or Creative Commons non-AI means. Feel free and please do add to this list. These are the ones that came to me off the top of my head and with the help of a few friends.
Archive.org
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine
You can use an Advanced Search function to find Out of Copyright and Creative Commons licensed images using the date fields like so:
National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Art
Getty Museum
Free images of public domain art in Getty's collections.
Cleveland Museum of Art
The Cleveland Museum of Art is proud to be an open access institution, offering the public the ability to download, share, collaborate, remi
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Data about The Met collection, including over 492,000 images of public-domain artworks, available for free and unrestricted use.
The Smithsonian
Learn more about Smithsonian Open Access
Creative Commons Images:
Pexels.com
Pexels used to be a go-to source for stock photos licensed via Creative Commons but it is absolutely overrun with AI images at this point. If you find something with some digging, however, you can check the posting date and correlate whether it might be a more recent AI image or not.
Please do add to this list if you like because I know I’m missing things. One good tactic if you want to find Open Source images is to just do a search engine query for “open source” along with the name of the institution you’re interested in.
I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).
As per the uje, I've arrived upon a Saturday with a backlog of links that I have not managed to squeeze into the week's newsletters/blogs, so it's time for another linkdump, 22nd in an erratic series. Here's the previous 21:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
Let's start with some seasonal material, and by "seasonal," I of course mean Hallowe'en. Yes, August is the official start of Spooky Season, and yes, I am a monster for insisting on this, but being a monster is the point of Spooky Season (which is what differentiates Spooky Season pushers like me from the creeps who insist that you need to start prepping for Xmas in late September – they're monsters, too, but Yule Monsters are bad) (with the exception of Krampus).
I was a monster kid and now I'm a monster adult. It all started when I was bitten by a radioactive Haunted Mansion at the age of six:
I am a sucker for all things monstrous, and so I was intrigued when I got a book of "creepy-cute" stickers in the mail from a publicist at Simon & Schuster:
"Creepy-Cute" turns out to be an official designation, embraced by the illustrator GaynorCarradice, who has created several books on these lines, featuring her chibi/monster crossover creations, which do exactly what it says on the tin, by which I mean, there's some genuinely creepy stuff in the mix, along with the cute.
It's when the cute pastels rub up against the gore, skulls, eyeballs and other visceral viscera that these illustrations really kick off some heat – I've rounded up a few of my favorites here:
https://craphound.com/images/creepycute.jpg
One of the surefire signs that Spooky Season is upon us is that the (sometimes NSFW) Tumblr account Halloweenlandmotherfucker emerges from dormancy with a stream of images of vintage Hallowe'en cards (these were a thing!), photos of people in costume and other delightful visual novelties:
https://www.tumblr.com/halloweenlandmotherfucker
Monster culture isn't just for Hallowe'en, of course. The ancient and noble tradition of compiling and publishing bestiaries is alive and well, thanks to RPGs. In the beginning, there was the D&D Boxed Set, with its Monsters and Treasure booklet:
Then came the Monster Manual, the first hardcover D&D book, succeeded by the Fiend Folio, which featured Charlie Stross creations like the githzerai and slaad, Indeed, there was a whole, iconic library of hardcovers that fit perfectly in an oversized backpack that I dragged everywhere so that I could obsessively read and re-read them.
Eventually, these gave way to new hardcovers with new rules as well as new corporate owners (Wizards of the Coast, then Hasbro), culminating in the release of the Open Gaming License, an "open content" license that was a) grossly defective; b) largely irrelevant; and c) hugely controversial in 2023, when Hasbro terminated it:
The Open Gaming License purported to license out game elements that weren't copyrightable (rules, tables, etc), as well as material that you could likely use under copyright exceptions like fair use:
And worst of all, it was revocable, so games publishers who tooled up to publish supplements and sourcebooks based on the OGL could have the rug yanked out from under them at any time (that time turned out to be early 2023).
Hasbro's OGL rug-pull had three salutary effects:
I. It gave gamers a crash-course in what was – and wasn't – copyrightable in an RPG design;
It encouraged game developers to look beyond D&D's OGL rules and into truly open (and often superior) alternatives; and
It inflicted so much reputational harm on Hasbro that, 20 months later, they announced that they would release a new set of D&D rules under the Creative Commons Attribution Only 4.0 license:
Now, CC BY 4.0 is a real-ass license. Notably, it corrects a defect in the earlier versions of the CC licenses that gave rise to a class of predatory copyleft trolls like the odious Pixsy:
It's wild to think that tabletop RPGs are now a cutting-edge way to learn about digital policy, but on the other hand, D&D arrived in my home around the same time as my Apple ][+, which was also around the time I first heard the name Ronald Reagan (rest in piss).
The legacies of the 80s – RPGs, digital technology and Reaganomics – cast a long shadow. Last month, many of us discovered the hard way that Reaganomics – specifically, the embrace of monopolies as "efficient" – has produced a world of unimaginable brittleness. Millions of people around the world found themselves cut off from ATM cash, flights, hospital care, and many other essentials thanks to the Crowdstrike Blue Screen of Death outage. While many of the explainers have focused on how Crowdstrike fatfingered a software update that crashed all those computers, there's been a lot less commentary about how it is that one company had it in its power to do so much harm.
Writing last week for EFF's Deeplinks blog, my colleague Rory Mir tackled that (far more important) issue:
Market concentration – monopoly – is the common thread wound around so many of our daily horribles. Think of the tech billionaires who threw in their lot with Trump last month. How did they get to be billionaires? Monopoly power. Remember back in 2017, that notorious photo of the tech industry meeting at the top of Trump Tower, with Peter Thiel at Trump's left hand?
People were appalled that this group of corporate leaders, who between them controlled virtually all the technology in our lives, would debase themselves by paying fealty to this buffoonish would-be dictator.
But far more consequential was the fact that you could fit everyone who controlled all of our technology around a single table. Once everyone important to an industry can fit around a single table, it's only a matter of time until they find a table to sit around, and that's when it all starts to go wrong. As the Communist firebrand Adam Smith once wrote, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Enshittification starts with market concentration. This is a subject I'm going to be going very deep on next Saturday, when I give my Defcon keynote, "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":
https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861
When I give that talk – and afterwards at my book signing – I will be wearing an N95 mask, just as I did last year. Why am I wearing a mask? Two reasons: first, Long Covid is a horror. One of the best writers I know – a living legend – recently told me that their book-writing days are likely done because of Long Covid brain fog.
A new Lancet article gets deep into the science of Long Covid:
In particular, Greenhalgh describes why some people don't get Long Covid, and some people do – and, most important, explains why the fact that you didn't get Long Covid last time doesn't mean you won't get it next time:
The study shows that wearing any mask, even without knowing how to fit it well, offers substantial protection against both contracting and transmitting covid. Even better: wearing an N95 (even without paying attention to correct fit) offers "near perfect" protection against covid:
I didn't get covid at Defcon last year, and I didn't get it at HOPE, and I didn't get it on our family vacation in July – all events where friends got sick. The difference? I wore a mask. Which works.
OK, I need to go work on my Defcon speech some more, so I'm gonna sign off, but I will leave you with just one more link, the wonderful new public domain image search tool, Public Work, which crawls and indexes the Met, the NYPL, and other sources:
https://public.work/
I rely on public domain, CC and other freely usable clip art to make the collages that accompany this newsletter/blog's stories. While I have very little talent in the visual arts, I'm getting steadily better. I mean, look at this amazing image I womped up for last week's story on Bitcoin bros' election campaign finance fraud:
Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.
For those of you who saw the previous post but don’t know where to go, here’s the link to the open content on JSTOR. Academic articles are a good way to research ideas, learn about history, and learn fun things. Don’t be intimidated! Once you get used to the flow of academic article they’re exciting reads.
For those who might be intimidated, I listed some starting points that I thought were fun below:
Here’s a beautiful article on floriography.
This article about dinosaur tracks from 1922.
An article about the color of the stars in the orion nebula.
A beautifully extra article about The Limoges Exhibition of 1886.
And A Description of Some Thermometers for Particular Uses. By the Right Honourable the Lord Charles Cavendish, V. P. R. S. published in the 1700s.
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Fictional Products II: Dryguarde’s Ice Cream Truck In A Box
Yes, we’re doing one of these again, though this time it’s a bit different! This time, it involves one product that is actually multiple products!
The Ice Cream Truck In A Box was the result of a confluence of factors thanks to the machinations of one Sullivan Straub. Straub was the CEO of the Dryguarde Ice Cream Company
He’d been involved as a designer for many years and was only appointed as an emergency measure, thanks to the disastrous previous secretly-criminal CEO getting caught using the business as his personal money-laundering ring as he had his others, in a tale too sordid to tell right now, leaving them with quite a few burdens that the previous CEO had acquired as a means of further .
They had deals with a bunch of obscure foreign firms to distribute their products; far too many to effectively market/compete for shelf space, had bought up a previously competitive rival that was now a shambles due to mismanagement before they’d bought it, having produced legions of flops, and there was their own legion of flops produced more to keep funneling money through than to actually sell.
It’s said that Straub came up with the idea for fixing all of this one sunny day while an ice cream truck was rolling down the block. He went to get some, but he’d found out that they’d stocked it with all their old flavors due to how much they were clogging up store shelves and needed to find some way to get rid of them, and he saw the kids.
Though, really, he says that idea happened several eyars before he’d entered the position, but it had been bouncing around in his head for a whilte bouncing around in his head for a while, and now he wanted to apply it to solve his troubles...
He marketed all these brands in one, high-profile package, a box shaped like an Ice Cream Truck with randomly-inserted ice creams and put out a marketing blitz for it, under the idea of “Now you don't have to chase the truck anymore!”. Though the advertizing, which featured bitter; out of work ice cream men lamenting how they couldn't compete with the Truck and their (ineffectual) attempts to sabotage it, rankled some of their distributors, it was a hit!
While the fact that it was relatively underpriced compared to other ice-cream products thanks to the bulk selection, it helped that they'd had a boost in the form of a very prominent stand-up comedian of the time use it as the centerpiece of an act. Granted, that act was mainly “What in god's name is this bullshit?!” at some of the odder flavors, but publicity is publicity, and it ended up working to their advantage!
And so, it ended up as their flagship product, able to keep them afloat for years while they slowly climbed their way back up; even allowing to test some of their newer flavors that became hits. While there's enough flavors for a second post; not even counting the recent test-marketed revival(s), here's a few of the more notable ones:
Fatty Boy P- The lasting evidence of the previous CEO's dickery, being an equivalent almost to a The Producers-type scheme, this “thick, rich” whitish-pink strawberry-vanilla flavored pop purportedly originally had as its gimmick that it was much thicker and longer than the other brands, the pop looked nothing so much as a penis, and consumers rejected it outright.
The truck, however, did give it a second chance at life, given that people began to realize the taste was actually really delicious, and there was even a second attempt at marketing it outside the truck (Though that failed)
Squash Soda: An attempt at translating the soda flavoring by the Breulen Brothers to sherbert, in the form of a flavorless ice-slurry where kids applied their own flavors; it did not do well due to the relative obscurity of the tie-in and the fact that the flavors often were somewhat off due to production difficulties.
To cut costs, they used generic soda syrup instead of the elaborate flavor-compounds the Breulens' made for the versions produced for the Truck, but this actually worked far better taste-wise than the originals; even the Breulens agreed.
Hell Appels- A Japanese brand thought previously un-distributable in the US thanks to the Satanic imagery in its design, albeit bizarre and abstract in its usage, the gimmick was it was an apple-flavored popsicle shaped like a golden-colored apple, and at the center there was a rolled-up comic, a small plastic scroll with a comic printed on it ala a somewhat larger Bazooka Joe comic with demons, which resembled nothing so much as a short-length bizarro-world bizarrely violent satanic Chick-tract in aesthetics and tone, albeit replacing fundamentalist christianity with anime insanity, usually untranslated in US releases which actually didn't end up making them much more nonsensical than they already were
The comics have ended up as cult classics, though they actually came from a pre-existing work and their story is much longer and much weirder in Japan than in the US, and there's a nice book you can find on the history thereof on AliExpress, if you know where to look.
Blackheads- Always really considered duds, these were small packages of Mochi with a lemon ice-cream center and a black licquorich “cap” on the top, meant to resemble a zit as a part of the gross-out craze of when it was produced. The public then demonstrated that it did have its limits there and even kids did not want to eat the pus of a zit, though, the frankly disgusting mascot design didn't help matters, along with the relatively mediocre taste. Even amongst fans of The Truck, this flavor was quite notoriously a dud, and you never wanted to see a Truck with a bunch of them in there.
Redd Skeletons- Named after the comedian but with a slight naming-tweak, these were still sued out of existence by the man himself over trademark law; only saved by the fact that the Truck's peculiar identity allowed them to get around it, these were relatively simple, vanilla ice cream dyed red between two layers of red velvet-cake flavored cookie, in the shape of a skull.
Simple, disticntive, and what immediately came to mind for most people when you mentioned The Truck.
Beef Roast- A very old brand, as evidenced by the bizarre name, this was simply a very rich “rolled” looking chocolate pop fortified with various “nutrients” and having a hint of odd umami taste, which had its fans but also had its not-fond-of-at-alls.
Spokas- Of course, nobody would defend this flavor, a Mexico-originating chile-flavored thing with a cartoon ghost mascot; despised even in its own country, with a taste that was not only unpleasantly dissonant but also always tasted weirdly like it was contaminated with something even though no tests ever showed it.
Kids always learned to fear “The Ghost,” as it was nicknamed, and reportedly even in its home country it was loathed; only staying afloat thanks to some apparently shady dealings by the proprietor.
Do-Nutz- A flavor that bombed the first time thanks to the deeply unpleasant mascot, who has been described as “sounding like he's coming on to you even when he's not,” the flavor is considered one of the best, something like an ice cream sandwich but with doughnut material; with there being glazed doughnut and cake doughnut varieities, in place of the usual cookie and a flavor combination that most folks say hasn't been replicated ever.
There are many more where that came from, but then that leaves one to ask, what happened to a product that was so popular it even acquired the common nickname of simply “The Truck” in casual conversation?
Simply put, it outlived its use. Despite consistently high sales, the varieties of ice cream they could find to acquire cheaply to put in The Truck was dwindling; people were tiring of the usual flavors; and there's only so many things you can test market through such a thing. And, by the time it became unprofitable to maintain it? They had other, better products, and its creator was long gone from the company by then.
So, they axed it. There were a few test-marketed attempts at bringing it back, but they were deemed either unprofitable or met with lukewarm consumer response. Though, Mr Straub has made waves with a few indications at his new company, there may be a true successor coming, simply known by that old nickname The Truck...
Thank you all so much for reading, apologies for being late! Fun fact, this choice of topic for this week was chosen by my five-dollar backers answering a poll on my Patreon!
So if you wanna get involved in producing these too, feel free to join, where you can get previews, polls, and even commission-y work at the higher tiers!
Every dollar counts, and I appreciate even the smallest donations, so thank you either way!
And, as per usual, feel free to use this fictional product and its history however you’d like, as long as you credit me, Thomas F. Johnson, somewhere as its creator somewhere when ya do!
So some of you knew that there were these musical instruments (aerophone-lip-vibrated horns, technically) called "serpents"? And what, you were just going to wait until we ran into them while whiling away time on the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection on JSTOR (which includes nearly half a million open access images for everyone, btw)?
We don't even care what they sound like, we love them.
