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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32434 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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An update to a post I made after Christmas lamenting the state of children's books, and all their on the nose, "current year" agenda pushing nonsense. Specifically an update in reply to this comment.

This is why we only have classic little golden books and some innocuous stuff from the 80s and 90s on our bookshelf. Also Roald Dahl, he's great. As others have said, there's no reason to buy modern propaganda children's books. Not only are they proselytizing, but they're mostly objectively ugly.

Roald Dahl goes PC in a world where no one is 'fat' and the Oompa-Loompas are gender neutral

archive link

The publisher, Puffin, has made hundreds of changes to the original text, removing many of Dahl’s colourful descriptions and making his characters less grotesque.

The review of Dahl’s language was undertaken to ensure that the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, Puffin said.

You can read the litany of changes for yourself. I guess I missed the boat on stocking up on Roald Dahl children's books. As is feeling increasingly typical these days, there can be no escape from current year. Fuck me I guess.

I've just downloaded the full collection as ebooks.

My kids can have kindles full of samizdat.

Got a link? I used to love Dahl's books as a kid, and this especially disappoints me.

I just want to second that if there was an online library with PDFs/kindle files/whatever of uncorrected works like these, I would want access to it.

In unrelated news: https://torrentfreak.com/z-library-returns-on-the-clearnet-in-full-hydra-mode-230213/

It's an underappreciated fact, possibly explaining to some extent the geopolitical and racial animus too, that very much of the world's piratical freedom is created and maintained by Russians. Not the old Cypherpunk part that's mostly reserved to the highly technical (Freenet, i2p, obscure IRCs...) but the publicly accessible freedom. I think this owes both to Communism and to its opposition in the form of Samizdat – and of course to older cultural traditions of coping with an effectively unbeatable but not highly competent power.

Libgen, Sci-Hub (well, to the extent that Elbakyan is Russian, but culturally she totally is), Z-lib, Tornado Cash and other parts of crypto infrastructure, Telegram, Vkontakte (back when it was owned by Durov), Hydra marketplace until Germans took it down; and that's only the explicit tip of the iceberg, when you start digging you find much more. Collaborating with Westerners on this kind of stuff, however, can give you the Aaron Swartz experience, with your project ending up gutted and mothballed, with parts repurposed for political ends.

It's ironic that I often have an easier time finding some Western author in Russian. E.g. here's Dahl – Flibusta is nearly flawless as a prose repository. Who knows, maybe it'll make more sense to do back-translations from there than hope for Amazon availability of old versions. @hydroacetylene knock yourself out.

Oh right, here's a better plan. https://www.btdig.com/search?q=roald+dahl+books

«BTDigg was founded by Nina Evseenko in January 2011.» Figures.

Hint: anal pain

Those random search suggestions never fail to make me smile.

I'm not sure what the relation with https://bt4g.org is. It has a nicer interface.

…After we are done with, I wonder if Hajnalis will figure out how to make these things accessible to more than the small circle of cranky snobbish Electrical Engineering grads, or if their… conscience will get the better of them and tip the scales in favor of regulation, surveillance and omnipotent woke schoolmarms.

This btdig thing is great. I think it's trying to tell me something

/images/16769142718173819.webp

My feelings towards Russia carry a number of ambiguities, but I will say I feel a definite sense of approval toward its existence as the global cultural counterweight to America, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Describing it as Samizdat in the form of a modern cultural "black market" (at least for westerners) is an interesting framing and lines up nicely with a lot of my more nebulous ideas of where the global powers sit.

How is Z-lib compared to libgen? I've always used the latter, but their search is pretty bad and there's a lot of low quality dupes of everything.

In my experience libgen has slightly higher quality, but Zlib has books that are not on libgen.

How do you know whether a given torrent is safe from viruses?

..how would a torrent spread viruses ? I'm curious. Unless you torrent an unknown executable or script and execute it, I don't really see a way.

More comments

Libgen and z-lib have direct download, no torrent required.

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