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Reading Wednesday
Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction, edited by Sonia Sulaiman. Somehow I missed this coming out last year despite—I thought, anyway—being on some kind of list from the editor. Anyway. It's quite excellent. Stories range from the hauntingly beautiful "The Third or Fourth Casualty" by Ziyad Saadi, about a group of children swimming and drowning, to the gorgeously defiant "Gaza Luna" by Samah Serour Fadil, to the absolute ugly-cry of "The Generation Chip" by Nadia Afifi. It's hard to pick a favourite—there are a lot of bangers in this collection. Anyway, you should read it.
Currently reading: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams. I would probably never read this if Mark Zuckerberg hadn't tried to have it banned, so good job with the Streisand Effect. It's pretty entertaining, though. The author pitches a job that doesn't exist to Facebook because she's naïvely convinced that the company is going to change the world in a good way (ha. ha. ha.) and then gets progressively more disillusioned when it turns out she works for the worst people. Also she almost got eaten by a shark when she was 13, which is a metaphor. But also she almost did get eaten by a shark when she was 13.
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Interesting Links for 20-08-2025
- 1. Study: Giving cash to mothers in Kenya cut infant deaths in half
- (tags:kenya money death babies )
- 2. Regina Valkenborgh's 8-Year-Long Photo Captures the Sun's Movement Through the Sky
- (tags:viaSwampers sun photography )
- 3. Spreadshirt to artists: We're taking your designs for AI
- (tags:clothes ai )
- 4. Map Of European Cultural Superiority
- (tags:maps Europe society )
- 5. Why scientists are rethinking the immune effects of SARS-CoV-2
- (tags:Pandemic immune_system doom )
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Admin: Patreon: What fresh hell #728, #729 [Patreon]
Last thing first. Investigating the other thing, I discovered this. I'll just cut and paste what I submitted as a ticket to Patreon:
I took a break of a few months, and when I came back my fees spiked. What gives?I have received no response.
I just did a month (July 2025) that extremely similar to last January (2025): similar revenues (466.19 vs 458.50), similar patrons (160 vs 162). According to my "Insights > Earnings" page, my total fees went up from 11.4% to the astounding 14.6%. Drilling down, most of that is an eye-watering 3% increase of the payment fees (5.8% to 8.8%). There was also a minor increase of Patreon's platform fee from 5.6% to 5.8%.
That represents a FIFTY-TWO PERCENT INCREASE in processing fees, and a 28% increase in fees over all.
Care to explain? Was there some announced change in payment structure or payment processor fees I missed?
But the other thing is this: Patreon has dropped my business model.
Apparently by accident.
When I went to Patreon to create the Patreon post for my latest Siderea Post at the end of July, I was confronted with a recent UI update. In and of itself it wouldn't have been a problem, but, as usual, they screwed something up.
They removed the affordance for a post to Patreon to both be public and paid. The new UI conflated access and payment, such that it was no longer possible to post something world-accessible and still charge patrons for it.
I found a kludge to get around it so I could get paid at all, and I fired off a support ticket asking if it was possible but unobvious, or just not possible, and if it was not possible, whether that was a policy or a mistake. I have received very apologetic reply back from Patreon support which seemed to suggest (but not actually affirm) it was an unintentional:
From what we've seen so far, the option to make a post publicly accessible while still charging members for it isn't possible in the new editor. Content within a paid post will only be available to those with paid access, and it won't show up for the public.So it's not like the reply was, "Oh, yes, it was announced that we wouldn't be supporting that feature any more," suggesting, contrarily, they didn't realize they were removing a feature at all.
Other creators have reported this same issue, and I want to reassure you that I've already shared this feedback with our team. If anything changes or if this feature is brought back, I'll be sure to keep you in mind and let you know right away.
The support person I was corresponding with encouraged me to write back with any further questions or issues, so I did:
Hi, [REDACTED], thanks for getting back to me. I have both some more questions and feedback.I got this response:
1) Question: Am I understanding correctly, that the new UI's failure to support having publicly accessible paid posts was an oversight, and not a policy decision to no longer support that business model? Like, there's not an announcement this was going away that I missed? As a blogger who often writes about Patreon itself, I'd like to be able to clarify the situation for my readers.
2) Question: Do you have any news to share whether Patreon intends to restore this functionality? Is fixing this being put on a development roadmap, or should those of us who relied on this functionality just start making other plans? Again: my readers want to know, too.
3) Suggestion: If Patreon intends to restore this functionality, given the way the new UI is organized, the way to add the functionality back in is under "Free Access > More options" there should also be a "charge for this post" button, which then ungrays more options for charging a subset of patrons, defaulting to "charge all patrons".
4) Feedback: The affordance that was removed, of being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content, was my whole business model. I'm not the only one, as I gather you already have discovered. In case Patreon were corporately unaware, this is the business model of creators using Patreon to fund public goods, such as journalism, activism, and open source software. My patrons aren't paying me to give them something; my patrons are paying me to give something to the world. Please pass this along to whomever it's news.
5) Feedback: This is the sort of gaffe which suggests to creators that Patreon is out of touch with its users and doesn't appreciate the full breadth of how creators use Patreon. It is the latest in a long line of incidents that suggests to creators that Patreon is not a platform for creators, Patreon is a platform for music video creators, and everybody else is a red-headed stepchild whom Patreon corporately feels should be grateful they are allowed to use the platform at all. It makes those of us who are not music video creators feel unwelcome on Patreon.
6) Feedback: Being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content is one of a small and dwindling list of features that differentiated Patreon from cheaper competitors. Just sayin'.
7) Feedback: I thought you should know: my user experience has become that when I open Patreon to make a post, I have no idea whether I will be able to. I have to schedule an hour to engage with the Patreon new post workflow because I won't know what will be changed, what will be broken, etc. It would be nice if Patreon worked reliably. My experience as a creator-user of your site is NOT, "Oh, I don't like the choices available to me", it's that the site is unstable, flaky, unpredictable, unreliable.
Hi Siderea,Several observations:
Thank you so much for your thoughtful follow-up and for sharing your questions and feedback in such detail.
To address your first question, I can’t speak to whether this change was an oversight or a deliberate policy decision, but I can confirm there hasn’t been any official announcement about removing the ability to charge members for world-accessible posts. If anything changes or if we receive more clarity from our product team, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.
At this time, I also don’t have any news to share about whether this functionality will be restored or if it’s on the development roadmap.
I know that’s not the most satisfying answer, but I want to reassure you that your feedback and suggestions are being shared directly with the relevant teams. The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better.
Thank you as well for your suggestion about how this could be reintroduced in the UI—I’ll make sure to pass that along, along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods. Your perspective is incredibly valuable, and I just want to truly thank you for taking the time to lay it all out so clearly.
If you have any more thoughts, questions, or ideas, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to take a further look. I appreciate your patience and your willingness to advocate for the creator community.
All the best,
[REDACTED]
0) Whoa.
1) That is the best customer service response letter I've ever gotten, for reasons I will perhaps break down at some other junction. But it both does and does not read like it was written by an AI. I didn't quite know what to make of it, until someone mentioned to me the phenomenon of customer service agents at another org using AI to generate letters, and then I was like, oooooooh, maybe that's what this is. Or maybe not. Hard to say.
2) Though [REDACTED] could not confirm or deny, it sure sounds like an accident, but one that impacts such an uninteresting-to-Patreon set of creators that they can't be arsed to fix it, either in a timely way or at all.
3) "The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better." is a hell of a sentence. Especially in conjunction with "...along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods.". Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like the support people have been inundated by a little wave of outraged/anguished public-good posters, and the support people, or at least this support person, is entirely on the creators' side against higher ups brushing them off. Could be a pose, of course, but, dayum.
So that's what I know from Patreon's side.
The kludge I came up with for the post I made at the end of July is that I used another new feature – the ability to drop a cut line across a Patreon post where above it is world readable and below it is paid access only – to make a paid-access only post where 100% of the post contents are above the cut line.
Please let me know if it's not working as intended. This unfortunately has the gross effect of putting a button on my new post saying "Join to unlock".
So.
In any event, I strongly encourage those of you following me as unpaid subscribers over on Patreon to make sure you're following me, instead, here on Dreamwidth, because Patreon is flaky.
I will make a separate post with instructions as to all the ways to do that. You can get email notifications of my posts (either all or just the Siderea Posts), follow RSS and Atom feeds, get DM inbox notifications, and, of course, just follow me on your DW reading page, all on/through Dreamwidth, anonymously and completely free.
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Photo cross-post
I've not been out this late since Gideon was born, but when my
music-obsessive photographer friend Kenny told me I had to come see
Fantastic Negrito at the Fringe I decided to make an exception.
The support band (Megan Black) was better than most support acts. The
main act, on the other hand, is just, well, fantastic. Maybe even
worth missing the kids bedtime for.
Original
is here on Pixelfed.scot.
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Interesting Links for 19-08-2025
- 1. This story about how a parent's love grows for their child rang true for me, even if it was written about adoption
- (tags:love children parenting adoption )
- 2. An alternative to LASIK—without the lasers (melt your eyes, mould them into a new shape, let them resolidify)
- (tags:eyes eyesight )
- 3. Trump helped Netanyahu's cyber chief evade child sex crime charges
- (tags:Israel USA Child_abuse OhForFucksSake law )
- 4. On the recognition of Palestine - and its legality
- (tags:law palestine )
- 5. Tennessee woman denied prenatal care for being unmarried
- (tags:women healthcare USA OhForFucksSake marriage society )
- 6. Covid and Our Arteries
- (tags:pandemic blood health doom )
- 7. 97% of Edinburgh Airbnb-style flat plans refused
- (tags:edinburgh housing )
- 8. The Church Is Moving!
- (tags:church transport sweden )
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you asked for my Hugo opinions
You can see the list of finalists here and the list of winners (with stats and such) here.
Overall impressions: People have good taste. Most of the winners, as you’ll see, weren’t that surprising to me, and I had a high degree of agreement in the categories I cared about. I was particularly happy to see three Indigenous winners.
I’m very much a prose person and it shows; I am interested in most of the other categories, but my time is limited, so while I tried to check out as many of the finalists as possible, I didn’t get to everything. If I hadn't read/watched/listen to most of a category, I didn't vote in it. I focused my time on novels, novellas, and short stories and care most about those.
It’s a ranked ballot so I voted for multiple works in many categories, but to avoid this going forever, I’ve only talked about my top choices.
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- ai,
- boardgames,
- echr,
- europe,
- funny,
- goodnews,
- harrypotter,
- history,
- law,
- lgbt,
- links,
- lotr,
- maps,
- music,
- quiz,
- rights,
- satire,
- tea,
- transgender,
- tv,
- uk,
- viapatrickhadfield,
- viaswampers,
- video
Interesting Links for 18-08-2025
- 1. Harry Potter board game creators to donate profits to trans charities
- (tags:harrypotter transgender boardgames GoodNews LGBT viaPatrickHadfield )
- 2. Europe Divided Into Areas With An Economy Equal In Size To London (this would make everyone happy, of course)
- (tags:maps funny Europe viaSwampers )
- 3. What does a proper British diet look like?
- (tags:tea satire video funny )
- 4. Happy 20th anniversary to "They're taking the hobbits to Isengard!"
- (tags:history music funny lotr video )
- 5. Britain's first transgender judge takes UK to European court over Supreme Court ruling on biological sex
- (tags:law echr rights transgender uk lgbt )
- 6. Ranking AIs by how well they score in Only Connect
- (tags:tv ai quiz )
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Happy Birthday, Ratties!
Currently 3.7K kilometres away, I am very thankful to Kate R., for looking after the rats in my absence. Delightfully, she provided them a little bit of cupcake for their birthday, complete with a candle. Meanwhile, at the top-end, Lara D. has purchased some Banksy-rat decals for our apartment, MrBlueSky, which we installed this evening in honour of Mayday and Mayhem. Further, because it must be mentioned, a few days ago the Australian water rat, the Rakali (Hydromys chrysogaster) won the ABC award for Australia's under-rated animal as part of National Science Week (I give honourable mention to the marsupial mole). Common in Melbourne's waterway, I derive a great deal of delight watching rakali, especially as they swim at speed, their white-tipped tail hoisted like a flag.
My advocacy for rats can now be measured in decades, and I like to think this has had some effect on their reputation and welfare. There is an excellent essay from Aeon ("Rats are Us") which highly the juxtaposition between the rat and animal welfare laws (essentially non-existent in the United States, it can be harrowing reading) and the scientific evidence that I have raised many times over the decades; they are social animals with communication, they are capable of past memories and future prediction, they are dreamers, they have a highly developed sense of empathy (even for strangers), they love to play, they like to learn (even driving rat-sized cars). With their sentience ("sentus", to feel) certain, and their sapience ("to know") evident, what of their consciousness ("shared knowledge")? The rat is us.
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People
(I was watching a Barbra movie recently in fact... ) Anyway ...
Having not seen or talked with anyone in ages S came to visit on Thursday and stuffed lots of my mum's stuff into rubbish bags for chucking. Because I haven't been able to bring myself to do it, basically. It's all so final.
Then Friday evening I get a totally unexpected phone call from my former London neighbour so caught up on everything for well over an hour. Hopefully we will meet for lunch one day as she comes in this general direction to go horse riding.
I almost feel human again. *Almost*
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This was a draft but I don't know from what date. Still valid though
I don't understand.
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Photo cross-post
The Flying Bubble Show was great fun. Kids thoroughly entertained.
Original
is here on Pixelfed.scot.
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(no subject)
It feels like in the rush of enthusiasm for all things AI that I’m ending up having to fight spellcheck/auto-suggestions more than in the past. They obviously aren’t training it on stuff written by dyslexics!
The suggestions seem to be more business-y now too
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- africa,
- doom,
- economics,
- evolution,
- housing,
- immigration,
- links,
- maps,
- population,
- psychology,
- short_story,
- uk
Interesting Links for 17-08-2025
- 1. What's your answer to the UK's population implosion?
- (tags:UK population immigration doom )
- 2. African Union urges adoption of world map showing continent's true size
- (tags:africa maps )
- 3. People (wrongly) don't believe that building homes helps with the cost of housing.
- (tags:housing economics psychology )
- 4. Snow White, various dwarves, and convergent evolution with butterflies
- (tags:short_story evolution )
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- advice,
- bigotry,
- china,
- comic,
- community,
- diplomacy,
- doom,
- economics,
- equality,
- europe,
- facebook,
- fiction,
- fire,
- friendship,
- funny,
- hs2,
- infrastructure,
- investment,
- lgbt,
- links,
- lotr,
- photos,
- plastic,
- pollution,
- polyamory,
- power,
- psychology,
- satire,
- scifi,
- short_story,
- society,
- switzerland,
- unions,
- video
Interesting Links for 16-08-2025
- 1. This is how the Swiss would have done HS2
- (tags:Switzerland infrastructure hs2 investment )
- 2. The ease of collective action induces more egalitarian behavior by individuals in a position of power and makes those without power less willing to accept unfairness.
- (tags:unions community society equality power psychology )
- 3. Meta appoints anti-LGBTQ+ figure Robby Starbuck as AI bias advisor
- (tags:facebook bigotry lgbt )
- 4. Photos: Wildfires Rage Across Southern Europe (CW: burned animal about 20 pictures down)
- (tags:fire europe photos )
- 5. Are you ready for polyaninmosity in your life?
- (tags:polyamory satire video funny )
- 6. There's something I love about stories that take a very simple concept and push it a far as they can
- (tags:scifi video fiction short_story )
- 7. Sauron the Economist
- (tags:lotr comic economics funny )
- 8. Chinese economists recruit Ray Dalio and MMT in their battle over deficit spending
- (tags:economics china )
- 9. The Electric Fence Stopped Working Years Ago - A metaphor for friendship
- (tags:advice friendship )
- 10. Once Again, Oil States Thwart Agreement on Plastics
- (tags:plastic pollution doom diplomacy )
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Darwin Visit
There are nominal household matters to sort out, but it is a convenient time for the Darwin Festival. I have a lifelong interest in aesthetics, which I have to grudgingly accord myself a modest analytical ability. From metaphor, referentiality, creativity, technique, persistence, and connections, I must also confess some apparent predictive skill when evaluating the future success of self-proclaimed artists. Darwin's contribution to the fine arts is not exactly famous, being small and distant, but there are plenty of opportunities in the programme which will receive a fair review in the week to come.
In the meantime, I was blessed yesterday with a second opportunity to visit to the Menzies School of Health Research (Charles Darwin University) (not to be confused with the Menzies Institute for Medical Research (University of Tasmania), let alone the Menzies Research Centre of the Liberal Party. The Darwin Menzies centre particularly interests me as they have a small high performance computing system, which has a few file system and management issues, but nevertheless great to see that it's there! I was hosted by Anto Trimarsanto, a medical researcher in malaria (specifically Plasmodium vivax), who also dutifully informed me that Menzies has an outpost in Timor-Leste. My brain is now working on how to combine these multiple interests.
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podcast friday
* Don't.
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Interesting Links for 15-08-2025
- 1. ADHD drugs reduce the risk of substance misuse, suicidal behaviour, transport accidents and criminality
- (tags:adhd medication drugs )
- 2. Scotland's population tops 5.5m for the first time
- (tags:scotland population )
- 3. Brilliant illustrations bring this 1976 Soviet edition of 'The Hobbit' to life
- (tags:TheHobbit illustration russia )
- 4. Dedicated volunteer exposes "single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia's history"
- (tags:wikipedia )
- 5. How To Get Internet Feedback Without Going Insane
- (tags:mentalhealth advice )
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2025/128: A Memoir of my Former Self — Hilary Mantel
You can control and censor a child’s reading, but you can’t control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself and evolve inside the darkness of a child’s heart. [loc. 5001]
A selection of Mantel's short non-fiction, ranging from book reviews (originally published in the New York Review of Books) and film reviews (originally published in the Spectator), through articles about writing and reading, to a delightful review of perfumes and a piece about stationery. ('...comrades, the hard-spined notebook is death to free thought. Pocket-size or desk-size, it drives the narrative in one direction, one only, and its relentless linearity oppresses you, so you seal off your narrative options early.' [loc. 5349]... I, with my plethora of discbound notebooks, wholeheartedly agree.)
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2025/127: The Haunting of Hill House — Shirley Jackson
“I could say,” Eleanor put in, smiling, “‘All three of you are in my imagination; none of this is real.’”
“If I thought you could really believe that,” the doctor said gravely, “I would turn you out of Hill House this morning. You would be venturing far too close to the state of mind which would welcome the perils of Hill House with a kind of sisterly embrace.” [loc. 1870]
Reread, for comparison to A Haunting on the Hill: my original review from 2016 is here.
( Read more... )