RE: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/117412877326355268

This, from Emily Bender, is the lesson we REALLY have to learn. This is part of a larger thread, which you should read.

Hello, friends,

The *Journal of Electronic Publishing* is calling for abstracts for a Special Issue on Accessibility in Digital Publishing.

Deadline for abstracts is in just a couple of weeks: October 1st, 2026

Thinking about this topic? Write to us! Got a colleague who's thinking about this? Write to them !

Details at:

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/news/253/

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/117175456866088305

This is very cool... click through and see the clever, brave, awesome artworks.

Some straight-up news. Please spread this around. This is somehow still not common knowledge!

Climate change made Canadian wildfires in N.W.T. and Ontario roughly twice as likely, analysis finds | CBC News
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/wwa-study-climate-change-wildfires-9.7297131

I read a long PDF; made many annotations. Then I wanted to copy all those annotations out... turns out to be frickin difficult (by design) in Adobe, also in Apple Preview.

Solution: Zotero. Pull the annotated PDF into Zotero, and Zotero recognizes all the annotations as objects. Copy em all, paste wherever.

Have I mentioned recently how I solved all my Cloud Storage/Backup quandaries by running NextCloud on Reclaim (you could do the same on any commodity hosting).

NextCloud is DAMN GOOD. It's simpler, faster, and Omigod SO MUCH more trustworthy than DropBox, OneDrive, and other nonsense.

In the excellent new issue of JEP on open humanities research, you will find our latest:

- scholarly publishing as a version of prototyping in the humanities;
- the Renaissance-era roots of that;
- and how we've lost the plot.

Check it: https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/article/id/7837/

Both Dropbox and Sync.com have become crappier (performance-wise) over time. I have relied on these services to keep my working files in order, but they both basically suck now.

Anyone have any good recommendations for a file-sync service that JUST SYNCS FILES? And just works?

My 'books read' log for 2025. https://imaginarytext.ca/reading/booksread-2025/ And FWIW, I have no overlap with @jessamyn at all. 🙂

Does anyone else think that automatic software updates are a bomb waiting to explode? I get the idea of always having the latest, most secure version of something. But what if it isn't?

Damn. Porter Anderson was such a sweet guy. I remember him from the Books in Browsers conferences back in the day.

Solnit today:
https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/epstein-is-only-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-the-trump-protection-machine-and-the-epidemic-of-violence-against-women/

"One of the reasons the epidemic of violence against women is so unacknowledged is because cases like these are talked about individually, and often treated as though they are shocking aberrations rather than part of a pervasive pattern that operates at all levels of society. These tycoons had the capacity to pay a lot of other people to facilitate their crimes and then help them cover them up and then lawyer up when that didn't work; in other words they had a lot of help."

Oh Ozzy!

Solnit's newsletter today:

> The great scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes (in her highly recommended newsletter Lucid), "The real problem, for the Trump regime in the making, is that Americans are turning out in large numbers to defend the vulnerable by exercising their right to free assembly and protest. Authoritarianism depends on breaking the horizontal bonds of solidarity and empathy that lead people to risk their safety to protest injustices against others. The massive and exaggerated deployment of state security personnel and the display of arms and uniforms is designed to frighten people into hiding. There is nothing stronger than solidarity shown publicly, which is why the state responds with outsized threat and violent acts."

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/the-heart-of-the-matter/?ref=meditations-in-an-emergency-newsletter

And completely forgot the link:

https://archive.reclaim.tv/w/et7gfYT3tzXxoovCMKnnKc

Geez, @jimgroom conversation with @kfitz today was fabulous!

Future historians of the present should take note of this as a narraative index to the history of the web.

Today's Solnit --
The Nature of Our Power: A Conversation with political scientist Erica Chenoweth
https://meditations-in-an-emergency.ghost.io/the-nature-of-our-power-a-conversation-with-political-scientist-erica-chenoweth/

"If you don’t defend the rule of law, you lose it, and the terrain becomes much more uncertain and treacherous. Most urgently, this means filing suit against every move that appears to be illegal and/or unconstitutional."

I installed NextCloud last week (on my Reclaim Hosting), and am moving large quantities of stuff out of my Dropbox and GDrives.

NextCloud works like a hot damn... nicely evolved software; open source; easily deployed; nice desktop and mobile clients.

Further to our Masters Program in Publishing, here's some info on the planned evolution of our MPub degree over the coming year -- making it more accessible, more flexible:

https://www.sfu.ca/publishing/news/news-announcements/MPub-2025-McGregor-Explains-Program-New-Direction.html

Come do a Masters degree in Publishing, in Vancouver!

Applications for our Sept 2025 cohort are invited to Feb 1st.

For details, see: https://www.sfu.ca/publishing/master-of-publishing/MPub-Admissions.html