L. Rhodes @lrhodes@merveilles.town

#introduction

Hi, Merveilles! I'm L., soon-to-be-former admin of the https://humanities.one instance.

I'm primarily a writer, as well as an incorrigible reader. I've mostly stopped freelancing, so much of what I write on a day-to-day basis shows up at http://lrhodes.net, if you're curious. Interests include #philosophy, #history, #politics, #religion, #arts, etc.

#introductions

cf. my previous post about masochism.

The good news is that, having learned my lesson in the past, I *do* have backups. But getting the database server running again is kind of a hassle. Gonna leave it for the night, I think.

May have just inadvertently deleted my database server.

me: god, more people griping about inbox zero! how hard is to just go down the list and clear out the stuff that doesn't matter?

also, me: *opens read later list with 7,000 unread items*

The major obstacle to a wider adoption of open source software is that most people just don't have a sufficient commitment to the masochism it takes to get all of this stuff working.

As part of an effort to ensure that 85% of residents are within half a mile of fresh food by 2021, Atlanta is creating the nation's largest community food forest: https://www.wabe.org/atlanta-is-creating-the-nations-largest-community-food-forest/

Eternal gratitude to whomever figures out how to get RSS feeds for only the Open Access material on Taylor & Francis journals, tandfonline.com

Cambridge has a smart model, profit-wise at least. They have feeds for articles that start Open Access, but revert to paid after a month or so. That lets astute non-subscribers read the work and incorporate it into their own work. Which is smart because the long-term value of a scholarly work is tied to the number and breadth of works that cite it. Each of those citations point another potential buyer back to the journal.

I suspect that it isn't possible, btw. From a for-profit POV, the point of Open Access is to draw people in so that they see pay-per-view content in hopes that they'll be interested enough to pay for some. Building your site so that the only available syndication mixes OA with PPV material is a way of ensuring that repeat visitors see both.

Naturally, there's a Journal of Tolkien Studies: https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch

There's an entire journal dedicated to exploring (or maybe demonstrating) Animal Sentience: https://animalstudiesrepository.org/animsent/

Here's a fun one: Word Ways, the journal of word play studies.
https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/announcements.html

One thing that makes them easier to find, though, is boilerplate page elements in popular online distribution platforms. For example, if you search "Receive Email Notices or RSS" + the topic you're interested in, that'll surface most everything that's relevant from the Digital Commons platform.

Downsides:

1. They're hard as hell to find;

2. It takes a lot longer to get a feel for whether the content is worthwhile;

3. PDFs. Oh god, so many PDFs.

Two cool things about using RSS to follow Open Sources academic journals:

1. There's a journal for practically everything (e.g. scorpiology);

2. They only publish 1-4 times per year, so they don't monopolize your feed.

Kicks Condor builds a Muxtape-like app for Beaker in order to test out the current state of Dat: https://www.kickscondor.com/on-dat