iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

This is relevant only to Facebook, but I’ve seen people posting misleading stuff about it on Bsky, so figured it was worth posting here. Regarding Facebook limiting the number of links you can post per month: Turns out that the limit applies only to “Pages,” and maybe not all Pages. 1/2

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(I’m not clear on whether you can get it if you don’t have insurance, nor on how much it costs in that situation.)

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FluMist® (Influenza Vaccine Live, Intranasal) | Nasal Spray Flu Vaccine

FluMist: “a vaccine that is sprayed into the nose to help protect against influenza in people ages 2 through 49 years.” You can order it online and administer it to yourself at home. (Available in “all 48 mainland [US] states and the District of Columbia.”) www.flumist.com

flumist.com

Discover FluMist® (Influenza Vaccine Live, Intranasal) – a needle-free nasal spray flu vaccine that helps protect against seasonal influenza. Learn how it works and who it's for.

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“We are looking for brave stories of triumph, despair, hope and love. We want the weird, the humorous, the dark, and the uncanny. […] We do require that all stories have Black main character and not center whiteness” 1k-5k words, payment 6¢-8¢/word. 6/6

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“Prompt: Write a story set in a world with a dying sun. Or where light is a scarce resource.” 5/6

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“Fiction submissions for _They Swallow the Sun_ will open once we reach our third stretch goal! […] To submit you must identify as a person from the African Diaspora and be eighteen years of age or older.” 4/6

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www.kickstarter.com/projects/the... The Kickstarter page also includes a call for submissions, though that part isn’t open yet: 3/6

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“This anthology is us snatching back our narrative. Inside these pages you’ll find fantasy, horror, sci-fi, dark romance, Blackfuturism, Afropunk, and stories that don’t fit neatly into any box. There is rage. Joy. Magic. Grief. Resistance. Rest. And the greatest of all, love.” 2/6

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Kickstarter for _They Swallowed the Sun_: “a Black speculative fiction anthology set in a multiverse where suns fade, light is scarce, and societies sit on the edge of collapse. In these stories, survival isn’t promised.” 1/6

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(My dictionary also implies that _technical_ is related to _text_, but the connection isn’t as direct.)

But I’m also intrigued to see a pre-WWW connection between the word _web_ and technological mass communication (I knew that meaning of _web_ but hadn’t heard it in a while), and to see (in my dictionary) that _text_ and _textile_ derive from Latin _texere_, “to weave.” 7/7

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I am amused from my vantage point here in 2026, where the words _web_, _net_, and _matrix_ in technical and sfnal contexts have very different connotations (“charges”?) than they did in 1974. 6/7

“…‘web,’ rendering it a text. All the uses of the words ‘web,’ ‘weave,’ ‘net,’ ‘matrix,’ and more, by this circular ‘etymology’ become entrance points into a _textus_, which is ordered from all language and language-functions, and upon which the text itself is embedded.” 5/7

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“Text and _textus_ in science fiction? Text, of course, comes from the Latin _textus_, which means ‘web.’ In modern printing, the ‘web’ is that great ribbon of paper which [threads] from roller to roller throughout the huge machine that embeds ranked rows of inked graphemes upon the… 4/7

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And then a bit later, section 38 (which is not explicitly connected to section 36) starts out like this: 3/7

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“[…] my explanation would have been nonsense two hundred years ago. It isn’t today. The episteme has changed so entirely, so completely, the words bear entirely different charges, even though the meanings are more or less what they would have been […]” 2/7

In Delany’s mosaic essay “Shadows” (written 1973-1974), section 36 (“Omitted pages from an s-f novel”) includes this bit of dialogue: 1/7

:) :) …This also reminds me of when I learned that there’s a real-life place called Earth City in Missouri. Doesn’t that sound like the name of a starport in a 1940s YA SF novel?

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—from “Midcentury: An Essay in Contextualization” (2003), by Samuel R. Delany, in _The Jewel-Hinged Jaw_ 4/4

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“…But the marches and Freedom Rides of the sixties would have been impossible without these earlier marches and the rides and the buses that left from my aunt’s suburban front yard and many front yards like hers as models.” 3/4

“…to these marches. In the sixties, such marches would grow to eighty thousand, a hundred-twenty thousand—and would be reported on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, so that the phrase ‘March on Washington’ is associated with the sixties’ civil rights movement, not the fifties. 2/4

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“My suburban [aunt and uncle] in Montclair, New Jersey, were organizing marches on Washington, D.C., to protest racial segregation, which, in busloads, left from her front yard as early as 1954. Buses from all sorts of places brought a thousand, three thousand, five thousand people… 1/4

Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Reposted by Jed Hartman

Earlier this week, I agreed to interviews with two USA Today journalists. They wrote fantastic articles about the Cornell case that I'm proud to have been a part of. What I did not know is that their employer considers interviews to proprietary and opens up recordings to be used by any journalist.

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If you’re working directly with the author, you can ask them. But if the author is unavailable or no longer alive, and if there isn’t any other available evidence (such as a manuscript or a different edition of the book), sometimes you have to just make a decision. 7/7

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But sometimes, it’s not clear whether the hyphen should be retained or not. Some words or phrases can be written either with or without a hyphen. Sometimes older books use hyphens in places where modern books don’t. Sometimes writers have idiosyncratic hyphenation preferences. And so on. 6/7

In most cases, good digitizing software can make a good guess as to whether you want to retain the hyphen or not, by consulting a dictionary. 5/7

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But sometimes, a hyphen at the end of the line is *intended* to be there in the joined version. For example, if a line ends with “world-” and the next line starts with “weary,” you probably want that to be digitized to “world-weary” instead of “worldweary.” 4/7

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Like if a line ends with “neighbor-” and the next line starts with “hood”, your software may digitize that to “neighbor-hood” or to “neighborhood.” 3/7

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When you scan a page or otherwise digitize it, depending on your digitizing software, those hyphens may or may not be retained in places where they shouldn’t be. 2/7

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Occurs to me to mention one tiny specific subtype of typo that can be created by digitizing a printed book: The extra hyphen. In most printed books, there are a bunch of hyphenated words at the ends of lines. 1/7

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For over a decade, Mari Ness has been pointing out major accessibility problems at major speculative fiction conventions, including Worldcons. The problems don’t get fixed. The conventions promise accessibility, and then don’t follow through. Here’s Mari’s post about this year’s Worldcon.

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A psychologist explains the limits of human compassion

We call it pseudo-inefficacy because it happens to people who actually can make a difference. They don't act because it doesn't feel worthwhile, or they don't think it's worthwhile. " www.vox.com/explainers/2... 4/4

vox.com

Why do we ignore mass atrocities? It has to do with something called “psychic numbing.”

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We have an experiment of helping a starving child. A certain percentage of people [donate money]. Then we have another condition with a different group, same child, same situation, except we put the numbers of the statistics of starvation next to her picture, and the donations dropped in half. 3/4

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That’s [the feeling] what you're doing just won't matter. That is influenced by the fact that you're only helping a portion of the problem. There are many people that you're not helping, and that sends bad feelings. […] 2/4

"Even partial solutions save whole lives." Vox article from 2017 that’s now paywalled. But here’s a quote of one part I found especially interesting: " The second [obstacle] is a false sense of inefficacy. 1/4

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* They don’t mention any other factors besides AI. For example, that period is also the period when certain major news venues shifted away from opposition to the Trump regime. I don’t know how big the drop in readership has been from that, but I suspect it’s been one contributing factor. 3/4

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* The y axis of their graph doesn’t start at 0. The plummet is from an unusual peak of about 70m to a low of about 45m visits, over the course of about two years. That’s a big drop! But it’s not a drop to near-zero, which is what the graph makes it look like. 2/4

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Meanwhile, “Traffic to news sites is plummeting in the U.S. as tech giants steer people away from search and toward AI.” …A couple of caveats about this article: 1/4

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“Microsoft knew about OpenAI’s use of LibGen [a repository of pirated books] as early as April 2019 and in 2022 through an effort called Project Clear, OpenAI deleted its LibGen files.” 8/8

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“‘…disruption.’ He wrote that the world would soon experience ‘the death of the reader’ as ‘machines creat[ed] slop for more machines.’” 7/8

OpenAI’s Tarun Gogineni “was aware of authors’ complaints that the ‘datasets are stolen’ and that authors were losing work to AI-generated competition. Nevertheless [Gogineni] did not find those complaints ‘all that sympathetic’ and instead viewed them as ‘acceptable economic… 6/8

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OpenAI policy director Jack Clark “acknowledged that […] ‘there will be a point where a bunch of artists express worry about what we’re doing here and we’ll likely ignore their concerns and release anyway.’” 5/8

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“One Open AI note of August 2019 states bluntly: ‘We trained GPT-3 on pirated stuff! No sharing that!’” 4/8

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“executives knew they were illegally training their products on copyrighted books and that AI generated books would likely displace human-authored books in the market. Moreover, executive comments also suggested that some publishing industry employees will lose their jobs.” 3/8

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