Gli insetti stan morendo, lo dicono i numeri, lo confermano gli scienziati, lo vediamo nei nostri giardini, sempre più silenziosi e “vuoti”. Il fenomeno colpisce anche le aree protette che dovrebbero essere al riparo dal nostro impatto. E le conseguenze si riflettono su tutta la rete della vita: gli uccelli che dipendono dagli insetti per nutrirsi stanno diminuendo e con loro molti altri #animali che compongono l’equilibrio fragile della biodiversità.
Gli insetti stanno morendo, lo dicono i numeri, lo confermano gli scienziati, lo vediamo – se siamo abbastanza attenti – nei nostri giardini, sempre più silenziosi e "vuoti".
For a moment, vapes were as stylish of an accessory as a Telfar bag. It was hard to walk downtown without getting caught in a cloud of blueberry vapor. Now the conversation around vaping has shifted from begrudging acceptance to vocal disgust.
Did you know it's possible to cut a hole in a cube such that an identical cube can fit inside it? Really! It's called "Rupert's Property." *All Platonic solids are Rupert!* Except one new shape, which *cannot* fit inside itself. This eldritch polygon is called a Noperthedron!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"Noperthedron" is the best coinage I've heard in months, which makes it a natural to open this week's linkdump, a collection of the links that piled up this week without making it into my newsletter. This is my 33d Saturday linkdump - here's the previous 32 editions:
Speaking of eldritch geometry? Perhaps you've heard that Donald Trump plans to add a 90,000 sqft ballroom to the (55,000 sqft) White House. As Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner writes for *The Nation*, this is a totally bullshit story floated by Trump and a notorious reactionary starchitect, and to call it a "plan" is to do unforgiveable violence to the noble art of planning:
Wagner is both my favorite architecture critic and the only architecture critic I read. That's because she's every bit as talented a writer as she is a perspicacious architecture critic. What's more, she's a *versatile* writer. She doesn't just write these sober-but-scathing, erudite pieces for *The Nation*; she has, for many years, *invented* the genre of snarky Zillow annotations, which are *convulsively* funny and trenchant:
Knowing that I'm part of this stuff helps me get through tough times - but I'm also so glad that we get to step in and defend brilliant writers like Wagner, as we did a few years ago, when Zillow tried to use legal bullying tactics to make her stop being mean to their shitty houses:
If this kind of stuff excites you as much as it excites me and you're in the Bay Area, get thee to the EFF Awards (or tune into the livestream) and watch us honor this year's winners: Just Futures Law, Erie Meyer, and the Software Freedom Law Center, India:
So much of the activity that EFF defends involves *writing*. The web was written into existence, after all, both by the coders who hacked it together and the writers who filled it up.
For over 35 years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has presented awards recognizing key leaders and organizations advancing innovation and championing digital rights.
I've always wanted to be a writer, since I was six years old, and I'm so lucky to have grown up through an era is which the significance of the written word has continuously expanded.
I was equally lucky to have writing teachers who permanently, profoundly shaped my relationship with the written word.
I've had many of those, but none were so foundational as Harriet Wolff, the longest-serving English teacher at Toronto's first alternative school, SEED School, whence I graduated after a mere seven years of instruction.
Harriet was a big part of why I spent seven years getting a four year diploma. She was such a brilliant English teacher, and presided over such an excellent writing workshop, that I felt like I still had so much to learn from high school, even after I'd amassed enough credits to graduate, so I just *stuck around*.
We hadn't spoken much over the past decade, though she did come to my wedding and was every bit as charming and wonderful as I'd remembered her. Despite not having spoken to her in many years, hardly a day went by without my thinking of her and the many lessons she imparted to me.
Harriet took a very broad view of what could be good writing. Though she wasn't much of a sf fan, she always took my sf stories seriously - as seriously as she took the more "literary" fiction and poetry submitted by my peers. She kept a filing cabinet full of mimoeos and photocopies, each excellent examples of various forms of writing. Over the years, she handed me everything from Joan Didion essays to especially sharp op-eds from Time Magazine, along with *tons* of fiction.
Harriet taught me how to criticize fiction, as a means of improving my understand of what *I* was doing with my writing, and as a way of exposing other writers to new ways of squeezing their big, numinous, irreducible feelings out of their fingertips and onto the page. She was the first person I called when I sold my first story, at 17, and I still remember standing on my parents' lawn, cordless phone in one hand and acceptance letter in the other, and basking in her approval.
Harriet was a tough critiquer. Like many of the writers in her workshop, I had what you might call "glibness privilege" - a facility with words that I could use to paper over poor characterization or plotting. Whenever I'd do this, she'd fix me with her stare and say, "Cory, this is *merely clever.*" I have used that phrase countless times - both in relation to my own work and into the work of my students.
Though Harriet was unsparing in her critiques, they never stung, because she always treated the writers in her workshop as her peers in a lifelong journey to improve our craft. She'd come out for cigarettes with us, and she came to every house party I invited her to, bringing a good, inexpensive bottle of wine and finding a sofa to sit on and discuss writing an literature.
She invited me to Christmas dinner one year when I was alone for the holidays and introduced me to Yorkshire pudding, still one of my favorite dishes (though none has ever matched the pleasure of eating that first one from her oven).
Harriet apparently told her family that she didn't want a memorial, though from emails with her former students, I know that there might end up being *something* planned in Toronto.
After all, memorials are for the living as much as for the dead. It's unlikely I'll be home for that one, but the best way to memorialize Harriet is in writing.
For Harriet, writing was a big, big church, and every kind of writing was worth serious attention. I always thought of the web as a very Wolffian innovation, because it exposed so many kinds of audiences to so many kinds of writers. There's Kate Wagner's acerbic Zillow annotations, of course, but also so much more.
One of the web writers I've followed since the start is Kevin Kelly, who went from *The Whole Earth Review* to serving as *Wired*'s first executive editor. Over the years, Kevin has blazed new trails for those of us who write in public, publishing many seminal pieces online.
But Kevin was and is a *print* guy, who has blazed new trails in self-publishing, producing books that are both brilliant *and* beautifully wrought artifacts, like his giant, three-volume set of photos of "Vanishing Asia":
This essay is also available on my Substack. Subscribe here: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/ In my professional life, I’ve had several bestselling books published by New York publishers, as well as many other titles that sold modestly.
t's a long, thoughtful, and *very practical* guide that's full of advice on everything from printing to promo. I've self-published several volumes, and I learned a *lot*.
One very important writer who's trying something new this summer - to wonderful effect - is Hilary J Allen, a business law professor at American University. During the first cryptocurrency bubble, Allen wrote some of the sharpest critiques of fintech, dubbing it "Shadow Banking 2.0":
Allen also coined the term "driverless finance," a devastatingly apt description of the crypto bro's desire for a financial system with no governance, which she expounded upon in a critical book:
This summer, Allen has serialized "FinTech Dystopia," which she called "A summer beach read about Silicon Valley ruining things." Chapter 9 dropped this week, "Let’s Get Skeptical":
It's a tremendous read, and while it mostly concerns itself with summarizing her arguments against the claims of fintech boosters, there's an absolutely jaw-dropped section on Neom, the doomed Saudi megaproject to build a massive "linear city" in the desert:
> More than 21,000 workers (primarily from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal) are reported to have died working on NEOM and related projects in Saudi Arabia since 2017, with more than 20,000 indigenous people reported to have been forcibly displaced to make room for the development.
Allen offers these statistics as part of her critique of the "Abundance agenda," which focuses on overregulation as the main impediment to a better world.
Like Allen, I'm not afraid to criticize *bad* regulation, but also like Allen, I'm keenly aware of the terrible harms that arise out of a totally unregulated system.
The same goes for technology, of course. There's plenty of ways to use technology that is harmful, wasteful and/or cruel, but that isn't a brief *against technology itself* There are many ways that technology has been used (and can be used) to make things better.
One of the pioneers of technology for good is Jim Fruchterman, founder of the venerable tech nonprofit Benetech, for which he was awarded a Macarthur "Genius" award. Fruchterman has just published his first book, with MIT Press, in which he sums up a lifetime's experience in finding ways to improve the world with technology. Appropriately enough, it's called *Technology For Good*:
After all, technology is so marvelously flexible that there's always a countertechnology, for every abusive tech. Every 10-foot digital wall implies an 11-foot digital ladder. Last month, I wrote about Echelon, a company that makes digitally connected exercise bikes, who had pushed a mandatory update to their customers' bikes that took away functionality they got for free and sold it back to them in inferior form:
Repair hero Louis Rossman - who is running a new, direct action right to repair group named Fulu - offered a $20,000 bounty to anyone who could crack the firmware on an Echelon bike and create a disenshittified software stack that restored the original functionality:
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
In short order, app engineer Ricky Witherspoon, cracked it, and had a way to continue to use SyncSpin, his popular app for Echelon bikes, which was shut out by Echelon's enshittification. However, as Witherspoon told 404 Media's Jason Koebler, he won't release his code, not even for a $20,000 bounty, because doing so would make him liable to a *$500,000* fine, *and* a five-year prison sentence, under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:
Developer Unlocks Newly Enshittified Echelon Exercise Bikes But Can't Legally Release His Software
An app developer has jailbroken Echelon exercise bikes to restore functionality that the company put behind a paywall last month, but copyright laws prevent him from being allowed to legally release it.
Last month, Peloton competitor Echelon pushed a firmware update to its exercise equipment that forces its machines to connect to the company’s servers in order to work properly. Echelon was popular in part because it was possible to connect Echelon bikes, treadmills, and rowing machines to free or cheap third-party apps and collect information like pedaling power, distance traveled, and other basic functionality that one might want from a piece of exercise equipment. With the new firmware update, the machines work only with constant internet access and getting anything beyond extremely basic functionality requires an Echelon subscription, which can cost hundreds of dollars a year.
In the immediate aftermath of this decision, right to repair advocate and popular YouTuber Louis Rossmann announced a $20,000 bounty through his new organization, the Fulu Foundation, to anyone who was able to jailbreak and unlock Echelon equipment: “I’m tired of this shit,” Rossmann said in a video announcing the bounty. “Fulu Foundation is going to offer a bounty of $20,000 to the first person who repairs this issue. And I call this a repair because I believe that the firmware update that they pushed out breaks your bike.” youtube.com/embed/2zayHD4kfcA?… App engineer Ricky Witherspoon, who makes an app called SyncSpin that used to work with Echelon bikes, told 404 Media that he successfully restored offline functionality to Echelon equipment and won the Fulu Foundation bounty. But he and the foundation said that he cannot open source or release it because doing so would run afoul of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the wide-ranging copyright law that in part governs reverse engineering. There are various exemptions to Section 1201, but most of them allow for jailbreaks like the one Witherspoon developed to only be used for personal use.
“It’s like picking a lock, and it’s a lock that I own in my own house. I bought this bike, it was unlocked when I bought it, why can’t I distribute this to people who don’t have the technical expertise I do?” Witherspoon told 404 Media. “It would be one thing if they sold the bike with this limitation up front, but that’s not the case. They reached into my house and forced this update on me without users knowing. It’s just really unfortunate.”
Kevin O’Reilly, who works with Rossmann on the Fulu Foundation and is a longtime right to repair advocate, told 404 Media that the foundation has paid out Witherspoon’s bounty.
“A lot of people chose Echelon’s ecosystem because they didn’t want to be locked into using Echelon’s app. There was this third-party ecosystem. That was their draw to the bike in the first place,” O’Reilly said. “But now, if the manufacturer can come in and push a firmware update that requires you to pay for subscription features that you used to have on a device you bought in the first place, well, you don’t really own it.”
“I think this is part of the broader trend of enshittification, right?,” O’Reilly added. “Consumers are feeling this across the board, whether it’s devices we bought or apps we use—it’s clear that what we thought we were getting is not continuing to be provided to us.”
Witherspoon says that, basically, Echelon added an authentication layer to its products, where the piece of exercise equipment checks to make sure that it is online and connected to Echelon’s servers before it begins to send information from the equipment to an app over Bluetooth. “There’s this precondition where the bike offers an authentication challenge before it will stream those values. It is like a true digital lock,” he said. “Once you give the bike the key, it works like it used to. I had to insert this [authentication layer] into the code of my app, and now it works.”
Witherspoon has now essentially restored functionality that he used to have to his own bike, which he said he bought in the first place because of its ability to work offline and its ability to connect to third-party apps. But others will only be able to do it if they design similar software, or if they never update the bike’s firmware. Witherspoon said that he made the old version of his SyncSpin app free and has plastered it with a warning urging people to not open the official Echelon app, because it will update the firmware on their equipment and will break functionality. Roberto Viola, the developer of a popular third-party exercise app called QZ, wrote extensively about how Echelon has broken his popular app: “Without warning, Echelon pushed a firmware update. It didn’t just upgrade features—it locked down the entire device. From now on, bikes, treadmills, and rowers must connect to Echelon’s servers just to boot,” he wrote. “No internet? No workout. Even basic offline usage is impossible. If Echelon ever shuts down its servers (it happens!), your expensive bike becomes just metal. If you care about device freedom, offline workouts, or open compatibility: Avoid all firmware updates. Disable automatic updates. Stay alert.”
Witherspoon told me that he is willing to talk to other developers about how he did this, but that he is not willing to release the jailbreak on his own: “I don’t feel like going down a legal rabbit hole, so for now it’s just about spreading awareness that this is possible, and that there’s another example of egregious behavior from a company like this […] if one day releasing this was made legal, I would absolutely open source this. I can legally talk about how I did this to a certain degree, and if someone else wants to do this, they can open source it if they want to.”
Echelon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
By Roberto Viola, creator of QZ On September 10, 2020, I began building QZ (qdomyos-zwift), an app born from a simple idea: open up closed fitness hardware and make it work with the platforms people actually love—Zwift, Peloton, Kinomap, and more.
Fulu paid Witherspoon anyway (they're good eggs). Witherspoon told Koebler:
> For now it’s just about spreading awareness that this is possible, and that there’s another example of egregious behavior from a company like this […] if one day releasing this was made legal, I would absolutely open source this. I can legally talk about how I did this to a certain degree, and if someone else wants to do this, they can open source it if they want to.
Free/open source software is a powerful tonic against enshittification, and it has the alchemical property of transforming the products of bad companies into *good* utilities that everyone benefits from.
One example of this is Whisper, an open source audio transcription model released by Openai. Since Whisper's release, free software hackers have made steady - even remarkable - improvements to it.
I discovered Whisper this summer, when I couldn't locate a quote I'd heard on a podcast that I wanted to reference in a column. I installed Whisper on my laptop and fed it the last 30+ hours of podcasts I'd listened to. An hour later, it had fully transcribed all of them, with timecode, and had put so little load on my laptop that the fan didn't even turn on. I was able to search all that text, locate the quote, and use the timecode to find the clip and check the transcription.
Whisper has turned extremely accurate transcription into a utility, something that can just be added to any program or operating system for free. I think this is going to be quietly revolutionary, bringing full-text search and captioning to audio and video as something we can just take for granted.
That's already happening! FFMpeg is the gold-standard free software tool for converting, encoding and re-encoding video, and now the latest version integrates Whisper, allowing FFMpeg to subtitle your videos on the fly:
Whisper is an example of the "residue" that will be left behind when the AI bubble pops. All bubbles pop, after all, but not all bubbles leave behind a useful residue.
When crypto dies, its residue will be a few programmers who've developed secure coding habits in Rust, but besides that, all that will be left behind is terrible Austrian economics and worse monkey JPEGs:
But the free/open source code generated by stupid and/or evil projects often lives on long after those projects are forgotten. And lots (most) of free/open code is written for *good* purposes.
Take Madeline, a platform for tracking loans made by co-operatives, produced by the Seed Commons, which is now used by financial co-ops around the world, as they make "non-extractive investments in worker and community-owned businesses on the ground":
At Seed Commons our goal is to distribute economic and financial power to communities—so we built a software system that mirrors that social logic in code.
Madeline (and Seed Commons) are one of those bright lights that are easy to miss in these brutal and terrifying times. And if that's not enough, there's always booze. If you're thinking of drowning your sorrows, you could do worse than to pour your brown liquor out of a decanter shaped like a giant Atari CX-10 joystick:
This glass decanter is modeled after the CX-10 Atari joystick and is perfect for whiskey or your favorite spirit. It is sure to be a showpiece in your collection. Paired with two Atari whiskey glasses and a controller display tray.
The most enshittification-proof way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do an end-run around the Amazon/Audible audiobook monopoly and disenshittify your audiobook experience in the process:
naturally, this only works in that same ideal/purely theoretical sense (ask any carpenter or mechanic) in which all cows are orbs for Physicists. =)
It's not that Mathematicians don't have a sense of humor, it's just that most of it is not perceivable by humans, such as - say - that of Astrophysicists.
A small correction to this description— this new polyhedron is convex, not platonic. All platonics ARE Rupert; this new solid disproves the conjecture that all CONVEX 3d polyhedra are Rupert.
And I agree, Noperthedron is a great name for it. I wouldn’t have noticed the name if you hadn’t pointed it out.
Rupert’s property is that an identical cube can •pass through• the hole, not •fit inside• it.
(The latter would is trivially true if we read it as “at least some of it can fit inside the hole” — just remove any point on the surface — and would clearly be impossible if we read it as “fitting fully inside the hole” unless we allow the “hole” to consist of the entire polyhedron’s volume.)
The more formal definition of Rupert’s property is that there there are two different isometric 2D projections of a cube such that one of the resulting 2D shapes is a subset of the other.
Thanks to the Miccosukee tribe and determined environmental activists who got this atrocity shut down. Litigation continues, but the facility apparently is being emptied out.
🚨 A MSF water truck marked with humanitarian logos was hit by gunfire in Gaza’s Khan Younis, injuring civilians including a child. Water distribution, already scarce, has been suspended amid escalating violence. Access to water is a critical, life-saving need that must be protected. 💧 #Gaza #HumanitarianAid #MSFdoctorswithoutborders.ca/pales… #newz
A young girl was shot in the ribs and a man in the hand while waiting for water at a clearly marked MSF truck in Khan Younis, Gaza. MSF denounces the pervasive disregard for human life as people risk death to access essential supplies.
Das Video zeigt eine ruhige und friedliche Szene in einer natürlichen Umgebung, wahrscheinlich am Strand. Im Vordergrund sind die langen, feinen Blätter einer Palme zu sehen, die sanft im Wind wehen. Die Blätter sind in verschiedenen Grüntönen und haben einige braune Spitzen, was auf die natürliche Alterung hinweist. Im Hintergrund sind weitere Bäume und ein Stück des Himmels zu sehen, der blau ist und von der Sonne beleuchtet wird. Der Boden ist mit Gras und Steinen bedeckt, und es gibt eine steinerne Struktur, die auf eine natürliche Umgebung hinweist. Die Szene ist ruhig und friedlich, mit dem Wind, der die Palmenblätter sanft bewegt.
Bereitgestellt von @altbot, privat und lokal generiert mit Ovis2-8B
Nel 2025 Kinmen ospiterà un nuovo e straordinario evento culturale: il “Kinmen Island Life Festival” 金門島嶼生活節.
Il governo della contea ha tenuto lo scorso 29 agosto 2025 una conferenza stampa presieduta dal segretario generale Zhang Ruixin. Durante il suo discorso, Zhang ha sottolineato che si tratta del primo grande festival artistico interdisciplinare mai organizzato a Kinmen. L’evento si svolgerà da ottobre di quest’anno fino a febbraio del prossimo, coinvolgendo i cinque distretti della contea. Sarà un’esplosione di musica, arte, gastronomia, mercatini e cultura locale, trasformando Kinmen in un’“isola che respira” e offrendo ai visitatori un’esperienza profonda e inedita.
Il direttore dell’Ufficio del Turismo, Xu Jixin, ha dichiarato che il magistrato Chen Fuhai ha da tempo a cuore lo sviluppo culturale, musicale e ricreativo della regione, e ha incaricato il team di pianificare il festival con i principi di “interdisciplinarità, innovazione e radicamento locale”. L’obiettivo è mostrare la ricchezza culturale e il fascino contemporaneo di Kinmen, attirando non solo l’attenzione di Taiwan, ma anche dei turisti internazionali, promuovendo il turismo e l’economia locale.
Il festival prevede tre tipi di eventi principali:
10 concerti
10 mercatini
10 cosiddette “esperienze inebrianti”
Per la musica, si esibiranno gruppi di idol e cantanti famosi da Taiwan e Corea, insieme ad artisti locali, creando un palcoscenico di scambio internazionale. I mercatini offriranno piatti creativi a base di sorgo, cocktail artigianali e prodotti artistici locali, creando un’atmosfera unica e rilassata. Le installazioni artistiche immersive saranno realizzate da artisti internazionali e locali. Tra le opere più attese c’è “Dream Cloud” dell’artista giapponese Yosuke Yamauchi, ispirata alla lontra eurasiatica e all’upupa euroasiatica: di giorno sarà uno spazio per rilassarsi guardando il cielo, di notte si trasformerà in una nuvola luminosa che si fonde con le stelle, regalando una sensazione “inebriante anche senza bere il famoso liquore locale Gaoliang / Kaoliang”.
L’evento inaugurale si terrà il 5 ottobre presso il lago 莒光湖 – Juguang a Jincheng, con una performance spettacolare che vedrà la partecipazione di star internazionali:
Il gruppo idol coreano 13Found
Il gruppo giovanile taiwanese Ozone
Il “principe delle ballate” Bii
L’attore e cantante premiato ai Golden Horse Awards Xin Gan
La nuova promessa dei Golden Melody Awards Chen Yongxi
La cantante Chen Peiyin
Il cantautore Huang Shaogu
Inoltre sarà presente un gruppo di amatissime cheerleader, che apriranno lo spettacolo con energia e fascino!
Le cheerleader, come sa chi vive a Taiwan, Giappone, Corea, sono parte integrante delle manifestazioni sportive di altro livello, a partire da baseball e pallacanestro, e sono state dunque invitate a partecipare per come collegamento alla cultura sportiva locale. Inoltre, la presenza di gruppi idol coreani rafforza lo scambio culturale tra le due sponde dello Stretto e diventa un punto di attrazione per il turismo internazionale.
Il festival si svolgerà nei cinque distretti di Kinmen, con location che spaziano dal lago Juguang alle piazze cittadine, spiagge e porti. Sarà collegato ad altri eventi annuali come il Capodanno 2026, la Festa delle Lanterne e la Maratona di Kinmen, creando un’atmosfera festiva che intreccia sport, cultura e turismo. L’inizio coincide con le vacanze di metà autunno e la “settimana d’oro” cinese, sfruttando la popolarità delle band coreane per attirare visitatori da tutta l’Asia.
Il governo locale spera che il “Festival della Vita sull’Isola” diventi un marchio turistico stagionale, invitando i viaggiatori a riscoprire Kinmen attraverso musica, arte, gastronomia e uno stile di vita lento. L’evento è organizzato dal governo della contea di Kinmen, con il supporto dell’Ufficio del Turismo e la sponsorizzazione di aziende come Kinmen Kaoliang Liquor Inc. e l’hotel Jinhu. Tutti i turisti, locali e internazionali, sono calorosamente invitati a partecipare e vivere un’indimenticabile stagione autunnale e invernale immersi in musica e arte.
Thank a hard working, #bluecollar, #union worker this #laborday weekend! Without the labor movement, the rights we have today would never have come, and we'd still be ruled by robber barons... Oh, wait, have we come full circle? Not yet, though #workersrights and unions are under attack. Supporting labor and unions is supporting a healthy #democracy!
Mauro Zanella* Andiamo con ordine. Dopo gli incontri in Alaska e a Washington ci sarà la pace in Ucraina, una vera pace, intendo? No. Si stanno facendo t
“More people are being held by the United States in immigration detention than ever before, with many facilities housing more individuals than they were built to contain,. Reports of mistreatment have been widespread and have included disturbing details of overcrowding, food shortages, lack of adequate medical care, and unsanitary conditions.”
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
L’evento si svolgerà da ottobre di quest’anno fino a febbraio del prossimo.
Nel 2025 Kinmen ospiterà un nuovo e straordinario evento culturale: il “Kinmen Island Life Festival” 金門島嶼生活節.
Il governo della contea ha tenuto lo scorso 29 agosto 2025 una conferenza stampa presieduta dal segretario generale Zhang Ruixin. Durante il suo discorso, Zhang ha sottolineato che si tratta del primo grande festival artistico interdisciplinare mai organizzato a Kinmen. L’evento si svolgerà da ottobre di quest’anno fino a febbraio del prossimo, coinvolgendo i cinque distretti della contea. Sarà un’esplosione di musica, arte, gastronomia, mercatini e cultura locale, trasformando Kinmen in un’“isola che respira” e offrendo ai visitatori un’esperienza profonda e inedita.
Il direttore dell’Ufficio del Turismo, Xu Jixin, ha dichiarato che il magistrato Chen Fuhai ha da tempo a cuore lo sviluppo culturale, musicale e ricreativo della regione, e ha incaricato il team di pianificare il festival con i principi di “interdisciplinarità, innovazione e radicamento locale”. L’obiettivo è mostrare la ricchezza culturale e il fascino contemporaneo di Kinmen, attirando non solo l’attenzione di Taiwan, ma anche dei turisti internazionali, promuovendo il turismo e l’economia locale.
Il festival prevede tre tipi di eventi principali:
10 concerti
10 mercatini
10 cosiddette “esperienze inebrianti”
Per la musica, si esibiranno gruppi di idol e cantanti famosi da Taiwan e Corea, insieme ad artisti locali, creando un palcoscenico di scambio internazionale. I mercatini offriranno piatti creativi a base di sorgo, cocktail artigianali e prodotti artistici locali, creando un’atmosfera unica e rilassata. Le installazioni artistiche immersive saranno realizzate da artisti internazionali e locali. Tra le opere più attese c’è “Dream Cloud” dell’artista giapponese Yosuke Yamauchi, ispirata alla lontra eurasiatica e all’upupa euroasiatica: di giorno sarà uno spazio per rilassarsi guardando il cielo, di notte si trasformerà in una nuvola luminosa che si fonde con le stelle, regalando una sensazione “inebriante anche senza bere il famoso liquore locale Gaoliang / Kaoliang”.
L’evento inaugurale si terrà il 5 ottobre presso il lago 莒光湖 – Juguang a Jincheng, con una performance spettacolare che vedrà la partecipazione di star internazionali:
Il gruppo idol coreano 13Found
Il gruppo giovanile taiwanese Ozone
Il “principe delle ballate” Bii
L’attore e cantante premiato ai Golden Horse Awards Xin Gan
La nuova promessa dei Golden Melody Awards Chen Yongxi
La cantante Chen Peiyin
Il cantautore Huang Shaogu
Inoltre sarà presente un gruppo di amatissime cheerleader, che apriranno lo spettacolo con energia e fascino!
Le cheerleader, come sa chi vive a Taiwan, Giappone, Corea, sono parte integrante delle manifestazioni sportive di altro livello, a partire da baseball e pallacanestro, e sono state dunque invitate a partecipare per come collegamento alla cultura sportiva locale. Inoltre, la presenza di gruppi idol coreani rafforza lo scambio culturale tra le due sponde dello Stretto e diventa un punto di attrazione per il turismo internazionale.
Il festival si svolgerà nei cinque distretti di Kinmen, con location che spaziano dal lago Juguang alle piazze cittadine, spiagge e porti. Sarà collegato ad altri eventi annuali come il Capodanno 2026, la Festa delle Lanterne e la Maratona di Kinmen, creando un’atmosfera festiva che intreccia sport, cultura e turismo. L’inizio coincide con le vacanze di metà autunno e la “settimana d’oro” cinese, sfruttando la popolarità delle band coreane per attirare visitatori da tutta l’Asia.
Il governo locale spera che il “Festival della Vita sull’Isola” diventi un marchio turistico stagionale, invitando i viaggiatori a riscoprire Kinmen attraverso musica, arte, gastronomia e uno stile di vita lento. L’evento è organizzato dal governo della contea di Kinmen, con il supporto dell’Ufficio del Turismo e la sponsorizzazione di aziende come Kinmen Kaoliang Liquor Inc. e l’hotel Jinhu. Tutti i turisti, locali e internazionali, sono calorosamente invitati a partecipare e vivere un’indimenticabile stagione autunnale e invernale immersi in musica e arte.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
"Noperthedron" is the best coinage I've heard in months, which makes it a natural to open this week's linkdump, a collection of the links that piled up this week without making it into my newsletter. This is my 33d Saturday linkdump - here's the previous 32 editions:
pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
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linkdump – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Speaking of eldritch geometry? Perhaps you've heard that Donald Trump plans to add a 90,000 sqft ballroom to the (55,000 sqft) White House. As Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner writes for *The Nation*, this is a totally bullshit story floated by Trump and a notorious reactionary starchitect, and to call it a "plan" is to do unforgiveable violence to the noble art of planning:
thenation.com/article/culture/…
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No, the White House Is Not Getting a 90,000-Foot Extension | The Nation
The NationCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Wagner is both my favorite architecture critic and the only architecture critic I read. That's because she's every bit as talented a writer as she is a perspicacious architecture critic. What's more, she's a *versatile* writer. She doesn't just write these sober-but-scathing, erudite pieces for *The Nation*; she has, for many years, *invented* the genre of snarky Zillow annotations, which are *convulsively* funny and trenchant:
mcmansionhell.com/
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McMansion Hell
TumblrCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
At the EFF, we often find ourselves at the center of in big political legal fights; for example, we were the first group to sue Musk and DOGE:
eff.org/press/releases/eff-sue…
Knowing that I'm part of this stuff helps me get through tough times - but I'm also so glad that we get to step in and defend brilliant writers like Wagner, as we did a few years ago, when Zillow tried to use legal bullying tactics to make her stop being mean to their shitty houses:
eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/mcma…
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EFF Sues OPM, DOGE and Musk for Endangering the Privacy of Millions
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If this kind of stuff excites you as much as it excites me and you're in the Bay Area, get thee to the EFF Awards (or tune into the livestream) and watch us honor this year's winners: Just Futures Law, Erie Meyer, and the Software Freedom Law Center, India:
eff.org/deeplinks/2025/08/join…
So much of the activity that EFF defends involves *writing*. The web was written into existence, after all, both by the coders who hacked it together and the writers who filled it up.
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Join Your Fellow Digital Rights Supporters for the EFF Awards on September 10!
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I've always wanted to be a writer, since I was six years old, and I'm so lucky to have grown up through an era is which the significance of the written word has continuously expanded.
I was equally lucky to have writing teachers who permanently, profoundly shaped my relationship with the written word.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I've had many of those, but none were so foundational as Harriet Wolff, the longest-serving English teacher at Toronto's first alternative school, SEED School, whence I graduated after a mere seven years of instruction.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Harriet was a big part of why I spent seven years getting a four year diploma. She was such a brilliant English teacher, and presided over such an excellent writing workshop, that I felt like I still had so much to learn from high school, even after I'd amassed enough credits to graduate, so I just *stuck around*.
Harriet died this summer:
obituaries.thestar.com/obituar…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
We hadn't spoken much over the past decade, though she did come to my wedding and was every bit as charming and wonderful as I'd remembered her. Despite not having spoken to her in many years, hardly a day went by without my thinking of her and the many lessons she imparted to me.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Harriet took a very broad view of what could be good writing. Though she wasn't much of a sf fan, she always took my sf stories seriously - as seriously as she took the more "literary" fiction and poetry submitted by my peers. She kept a filing cabinet full of mimoeos and photocopies, each excellent examples of various forms of writing. Over the years, she handed me everything from Joan Didion essays to especially sharp op-eds from Time Magazine, along with *tons* of fiction.
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Cory Doctorow
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Harriet taught me how to criticize fiction, as a means of improving my understand of what *I* was doing with my writing, and as a way of exposing other writers to new ways of squeezing their big, numinous, irreducible feelings out of their fingertips and onto the page. She was the first person I called when I sold my first story, at 17, and I still remember standing on my parents' lawn, cordless phone in one hand and acceptance letter in the other, and basking in her approval.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Harriet was a tough critiquer. Like many of the writers in her workshop, I had what you might call "glibness privilege" - a facility with words that I could use to paper over poor characterization or plotting. Whenever I'd do this, she'd fix me with her stare and say, "Cory, this is *merely clever.*" I have used that phrase countless times - both in relation to my own work and into the work of my students.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Though Harriet was unsparing in her critiques, they never stung, because she always treated the writers in her workshop as her peers in a lifelong journey to improve our craft. She'd come out for cigarettes with us, and she came to every house party I invited her to, bringing a good, inexpensive bottle of wine and finding a sofa to sit on and discuss writing an literature.
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Cory Doctorow
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She invited me to Christmas dinner one year when I was alone for the holidays and introduced me to Yorkshire pudding, still one of my favorite dishes (though none has ever matched the pleasure of eating that first one from her oven).
Harriet apparently told her family that she didn't want a memorial, though from emails with her former students, I know that there might end up being *something* planned in Toronto.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
After all, memorials are for the living as much as for the dead. It's unlikely I'll be home for that one, but the best way to memorialize Harriet is in writing.
For Harriet, writing was a big, big church, and every kind of writing was worth serious attention. I always thought of the web as a very Wolffian innovation, because it exposed so many kinds of audiences to so many kinds of writers. There's Kate Wagner's acerbic Zillow annotations, of course, but also so much more.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
One of the web writers I've followed since the start is Kevin Kelly, who went from *The Whole Earth Review* to serving as *Wired*'s first executive editor. Over the years, Kevin has blazed new trails for those of us who write in public, publishing many seminal pieces online.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But Kevin was and is a *print* guy, who has blazed new trails in self-publishing, producing books that are both brilliant *and* beautifully wrought artifacts, like his giant, three-volume set of photos of "Vanishing Asia":
vanishing.asia/the-making-of-v…
This week, Kelly published one of his famous soup-to-nuts guides to a subject: "Everything I Know about Self-Publishing":
kk.org/thetechnium/everything-…
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Everything I Know about Self-Publishing
The TechniumCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
t's a long, thoughtful, and *very practical* guide that's full of advice on everything from printing to promo. I've self-published several volumes, and I learned a *lot*.
One very important writer who's trying something new this summer - to wonderful effect - is Hilary J Allen, a business law professor at American University. During the first cryptocurrency bubble, Allen wrote some of the sharpest critiques of fintech, dubbing it "Shadow Banking 2.0":
pluralistic.net/2022/03/02/sha…
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Pluralistic: 02 Mar 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Allen also coined the term "driverless finance," a devastatingly apt description of the crypto bro's desire for a financial system with no governance, which she expounded upon in a critical book:
driverlessfinancebook.com/
This summer, Allen has serialized "FinTech Dystopia," which she called "A summer beach read about Silicon Valley ruining things." Chapter 9 dropped this week, "Let’s Get Skeptical":
fintechdystopia.com/chapters/c…
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Driverless Finance
driverlessfinancebook.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's a tremendous read, and while it mostly concerns itself with summarizing her arguments against the claims of fintech boosters, there's an absolutely jaw-dropped section on Neom, the doomed Saudi megaproject to build a massive "linear city" in the desert:
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Cory Doctorow
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> More than 21,000 workers (primarily from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal) are reported to have died working on NEOM and related projects in Saudi Arabia since 2017, with more than 20,000 indigenous people reported to have been forcibly displaced to make room for the development.
Allen offers these statistics as part of her critique of the "Abundance agenda," which focuses on overregulation as the main impediment to a better world.
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Cory Doctorow
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Like Allen, I'm not afraid to criticize *bad* regulation, but also like Allen, I'm keenly aware of the terrible harms that arise out of a totally unregulated system.
The same goes for technology, of course. There's plenty of ways to use technology that is harmful, wasteful and/or cruel, but that isn't a brief *against technology itself* There are many ways that technology has been used (and can be used) to make things better.
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Cory Doctorow
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One of the pioneers of technology for good is Jim Fruchterman, founder of the venerable tech nonprofit Benetech, for which he was awarded a Macarthur "Genius" award. Fruchterman has just published his first book, with MIT Press, in which he sums up a lifetime's experience in finding ways to improve the world with technology. Appropriately enough, it's called *Technology For Good*:
mitpress.mit.edu/9780262050975…
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Book Details - MIT Press
The MIT Press, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
After all, technology is so marvelously flexible that there's always a countertechnology, for every abusive tech. Every 10-foot digital wall implies an 11-foot digital ladder. Last month, I wrote about Echelon, a company that makes digitally connected exercise bikes, who had pushed a mandatory update to their customers' bikes that took away functionality they got for free and sold it back to them in inferior form:
pluralistic.net/2025/07/26/man…
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Pluralistic: Iranian brickwork, arbitrated pillows, smothered comics, and aerogel desalination (26 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Repair hero Louis Rossman - who is running a new, direct action right to repair group named Fulu - offered a $20,000 bounty to anyone who could crack the firmware on an Echelon bike and create a disenshittified software stack that restored the original functionality:
youtube.com/watch?v=2zayHD4kfc…
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- YouTube
www.youtube.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
In short order, app engineer Ricky Witherspoon, cracked it, and had a way to continue to use SyncSpin, his popular app for Echelon bikes, which was shut out by Echelon's enshittification. However, as Witherspoon told 404 Media's Jason Koebler, he won't release his code, not even for a $20,000 bounty, because doing so would make him liable to a *$500,000* fine, *and* a five-year prison sentence, under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:
404media.co/developer-unlocks-…
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404 Media
2025-08-27 20:22:43
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Fulu paid Witherspoon anyway (they're good eggs). Witherspoon told Koebler:
> For now it’s just about spreading awareness that this is possible, and that there’s another example of egregious behavior from a company like this […] if one day releasing this was made legal, I would absolutely open source this. I can legally talk about how I did this to a certain degree, and if someone else wants to do this, they can open source it if they want to.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Free/open source software is a powerful tonic against enshittification, and it has the alchemical property of transforming the products of bad companies into *good* utilities that everyone benefits from.
One example of this is Whisper, an open source audio transcription model released by Openai. Since Whisper's release, free software hackers have made steady - even remarkable - improvements to it.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I discovered Whisper this summer, when I couldn't locate a quote I'd heard on a podcast that I wanted to reference in a column. I installed Whisper on my laptop and fed it the last 30+ hours of podcasts I'd listened to. An hour later, it had fully transcribed all of them, with timecode, and had put so little load on my laptop that the fan didn't even turn on. I was able to search all that text, locate the quote, and use the timecode to find the clip and check the transcription.
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Cory Doctorow
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Whisper has turned extremely accurate transcription into a utility, something that can just be added to any program or operating system for free. I think this is going to be quietly revolutionary, bringing full-text search and captioning to audio and video as something we can just take for granted.
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Cory Doctorow
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That's already happening! FFMpeg is the gold-standard free software tool for converting, encoding and re-encoding video, and now the latest version integrates Whisper, allowing FFMpeg to subtitle your videos on the fly:
theregister.com/2025/08/28/ffm…
Whisper is an example of the "residue" that will be left behind when the AI bubble pops. All bubbles pop, after all, but not all bubbles leave behind a useful residue.
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Whisper it: FFmpeg 8 can now subtitle your videos on the fly
Liam Proven (The Register)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
When crypto dies, its residue will be a few programmers who've developed secure coding habits in Rust, but besides that, all that will be left behind is terrible Austrian economics and worse monkey JPEGs:
pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bub…
But the free/open source code generated by stupid and/or evil projects often lives on long after those projects are forgotten. And lots (most) of free/open code is written for *good* purposes.
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Pluralistic: What kind of bubble is AI? (19 Dec 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Take Madeline, a platform for tracking loans made by co-operatives, produced by the Seed Commons, which is now used by financial co-ops around the world, as they make "non-extractive investments in worker and community-owned businesses on the ground":
seedcommons.org/posts/digital-…
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Digital infrastructure for a non-extractive economy: The story of Madeline | Seed Commons
Seed Commons | A Community Wealth CooperativeCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Madeline (and Seed Commons) are one of those bright lights that are easy to miss in these brutal and terrifying times. And if that's not enough, there's always booze. If you're thinking of drowning your sorrows, you could do worse than to pour your brown liquor out of a decanter shaped like a giant Atari CX-10 joystick:
atari.com/products/atari-joyst…
That's the kind of brand necrophilia that could really enhance a night's drinking.
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Atari Joystick Decanter Set
Atari®Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The most enshittification-proof way to get the Enshittification audiobook, ebook and hardcover is to pre-order them on my Kickstarter! Help me do an end-run around the Amazon/Audible audiobook monopoly and disenshittify your audiobook experience in the process:
disenshittification.org
eof/
Molly White
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Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Cory Doctorow
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Viss
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Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Faraiwe
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •naturally, this only works in that same ideal/purely theoretical sense (ask any carpenter or mechanic) in which all cows are orbs for Physicists. =)
It's not that Mathematicians don't have a sense of humor, it's just that most of it is not perceivable by humans, such as - say - that of Astrophysicists.
traverso
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Matt Diamond
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •A small correction to this description— this new polyhedron is convex, not platonic. All platonics ARE Rupert; this new solid disproves the conjecture that all CONVEX 3d polyhedra are Rupert.
And I agree, Noperthedron is a great name for it. I wouldn’t have noticed the name if you hadn’t pointed it out.
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Cory Doctorow e GhostOnTheHalfShell reshared this.
Paul Cantrell
in reply to Matt Diamond • • •@matt_diamond A second correction (sorry):
Rupert’s property is that an identical cube can •pass through• the hole, not •fit inside• it.
(The latter would is trivially true if we read it as “at least some of it can fit inside the hole” — just remove any point on the surface — and would clearly be impossible if we read it as “fitting fully inside the hole” unless we allow the “hole” to consist of the entire polyhedron’s volume.)
The more formal definition of Rupert’s property is that there there are two different isometric 2D projections of a cube such that one of the resulting 2D shapes is a subset of the other.
GhostOnTheHalfShell
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Radio Free Trumpistan
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Oh good heavens, now we know: the Gallifreyans got their physics from Rupert. Who knew. Who knew?