We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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I don’t want to shell out the cash for an ebook reader either.
I listen to ebooks using a free text to speech software called Naturalvoice.
And it actually is pretty natural sounding. Not perfect but good enough that you don’t notice the slight mechanical quality much.
Its great for listening to books downloaded online but the only ebook I actually payed to get has DRM on it that makes it impossible to copy into a text to speech reader.
So I’m wary of buying ebooks now. Even at a dollar I won’t buy any unless they’re DRM free.
I have sort of been ignoring the DRM argument, even though I’m vehemently against DRM. That’s another thing I would find rather irritating about eBooks.
I think unless I get rich I’ll likely hold off buying an ebook reader just like I held off on buying an mp3 player. I’ll wait until the competition has really flared up and prices go down. More products to choose from. Course, I waited on mp3 players because I didn’t like the iPod and I wanted there to be something better. And now I have something better than an iPod!
Everything is better than an iPod. My USB pen is better than an iPod.
And the BBC is advertising on your blog?!?! *eyeballs explode* Nice going. :p
Yup, BBC America is apparently advertising on my blog. Not sure why. That’s a cue for everyone to click the hell out of it so they stick around. And buy their stuff, cause it’s the BBC and they have cool stuff. Plus it’s good for the economy!