january link roundup, art & images edition

* i'm on a backgrounds/architecture kick, and yoshida seji is known for some fantastic artbooks on the topic. what i didn't know is he has a lovely free-to-see collection of video redlining/"corrections" while he corrects artwork submitted by other people. enormously helpful to see what he thinks are some common beginner's mistakes with backgrounds.

*  given a mix of events & twitter, it felt prurient to post this guide to handling traumatizing video/images. (the person who wrote this is dreamwidth's founder and one of the most respected T&S leaders around.)

* ellen ullman wrote this lovely 'i'm getting off of windows and onto linux' paeon in 1998, and it felt strikingly evergreen given how many people are jumping ship right now from win11. warms the cockles of my machine heart but also some food for thought.

* posted in my doujin circle, "Gen Z Puritanism, Millennial Cultural Decadence, and Why We All Fucking Suck" was an interesting article. my candid reaction I posted in the server below: 

> krad: imo i would kinda quibble with millennial = excess (don't really remember a whole lot of excess in my circles and i didn't have it bad....), but in its place, i would say millennial=> escapism. the metaphor still works for the most part, but escaping thru to online life, video games, and then for those who did have excess, escaping through that.
>> "You cannot build cultures that reward endurance, exposure, and ideological flexibility and then act shocked when the next generation wants armor."
> krad: I actually agree with this line with the escapism online bit, especially.
> krad: i know my generation loves to say they were fine with unfettered internet and i uh, still.... partially agree with that. because a lot of us were older when we first got on  (generally at least early teens at absolute earliest, if not mid/late teens)
> krad: but the actual people who were five years old getting on... it is different.


( * brief discussion of historical milfetish art below the cut for the last link )

(no subject)

there's a half written essay in my mind that i feel like """accessibility"" has been a trojan horse for 'increasing engagement' by less discerning types who are not plugged into what strict slices of disabled people need and who use it as a way to shoehorn in ways of 'we need Moar users' without asking whether or not those users are actually wanted. (because true accessibility-for-disabled-folks is hard to implement properly on a larger scale and requires focus testing groups, money, and time.)

and the third leg to all of this is that friction is desired to keep online places healthy which is a hard pill to swallow for said accessibility/(growth)-first people (all of my favorite places to actually talk with nuance have some comparatively extreme roadblocks to keep the bad actors & spammers out; invite-only servers, hand-coding personal sites & talking only over emails, dreamwidth due to its nature of being text heavy and hardcore privacy filters...)

i'd probably title this essay 'effort is not the enemy'

idk i saw a discussion on the indie web that word for word was 'we need more accessibility' and i'm over here violently shaking my head no which is an irony considering how many levels of 'visibly disabled' i am, lol.

like i really don't think the effort needed to create a personal site as it stands is a bad thing. there's plenty of education out there for those who want it, way more than in the 00's. and it being a thing you pay for a nominal amount probably helps keeps the spam & bad actors lower than it would be otherwise. and at some point you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.