anansi133

apod_feed

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260413.html

The clouds may look like an oyster, and the stars like pearls, but look beyond.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260413.html

questionable_content_feed

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5807

glowey...

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5807

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3232/

Anyone who is caught counting 'three ... two ... one ... zero ... GO!' will be punished with a lifetime of eating only ISO standard food samples.

https://xkcd.com/3232/

apod_feed

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260412.html

Comet R3 is brightening rapidly -- will it survive?

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260412.html

questionable_content_feed

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5806

better than the actinides, anyway

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=5806

apod_feed

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260411.html

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

firecat

This is an ~30-minute episode of a Vox podcast called “Today Explained.” There is a transcript.

”How fan fiction went mainstream: The community that underpins Heated Rivalry, explained” by Danielle Hewitt and Noel King

It’s a pretty good intro to fanfic and how it’s become something publishers and creators of TV/movies pay attention to. They interview Francesca Kappa, a co-founder of the Organization for Transformative Works, which created AO3.

Things I learned and some bits I liked:

AO3 was created in part to prevent commodification of fanfiction and the social connections it facilitates.
“one of the projects that I worked on in the early days of the OTW organization for transformative works was that we were being contacted by women in their 70s and 80s who were like having to move in with their kids or going into nursing homes and they had like 3,000 fan fiction zines.”
It was claimed that AO3 is “much bigger than Wikipedia.” I’m not sure what metrics they’re using to come up with that.
[AO3 is] “structurally unenshittifiable” because “we don’t have customers and we’re not a business.”
(Discussing copyright) “it would have been terrible if Shakespeare had to, like, negotiate with Netflix for the right to Hamlet and then didn't get it. Like, that's the world we live in, right? We're like, Netflix owns Hamlet, it has a five-year option, Shakespeare really has a great idea for it, but like, no, I'm really sorry because JJ. Abrams is going to do Hamlet.”
(I need to know which circle of Hell shows JJ Abrams’s Hamlet on repeat, because I really want to avoid it.)