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@deeisace / deeisace.tumblr.com

Hi, I'm Eddie. Autistic, agender, aromantic. he/him. queer Liverpool via Ceredigion (and a lot of other places). 28. redbubble: birddee-art ko-fi: L3L3CI4Q art blog: deeisart
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wild how like PCOS, endometriosis, vaginismus & hell, even frequent yeast infections are “mysterious” with no well known cause and little to no decent treatment, but we have tons of supposedly well researched body fat removal methods, about 20 different kinds of breast implants, laser hair removal, and 100 different dermatologist recommended anti aging creams. we sure had the money and brainpower to cure those “diseases”

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i hope that in 2025 u get to take more walks, read more books, connect with more people whom u love and who love u, achieve ur goals (even if ur goals are having no goals and just living in the moment), exercise fun hobbies, move from a place of self-direction, and weave together a beguiling assortment of beautiful little moments. remember that no feeling lasts forever. love u

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johannesviii

Diictodon, who survived the most brutal extinction event on Earth, is happy to see you made it to the other side of that year. Eat well and rest for a bit, you deserved it

Diictodon is happy to see you made it again, to the other side of 2021 this time! And look, the ginko is regrowing! Eat well and rest for a bit, you deserved it

Hey! Diictodon is happy to see you made it to the other side of 2022! Here’s a nice tuber for you. Eat well and rest for a bit, you deserved it

Times are hard and the ginko has been damaged by fire again… but Diictodon is really happy to see you also made it to the other side of 2023! Eat well and rest for a bit, you deserved it

Diictodon and its new roommate are so proud of you for making it to the other side of 2024. No matter what happens next, the world has a lot for us to see. Please accept this nice tuber and stick around. And also rest for a bit, you deserved it

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Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

In 1976, Congress set fire to the country's libraries; in 1998, they did it again. Today, in 2024, the flames have died down, and out of the ashes a new public domain is growing. Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate!

For most of US history, copyright was something you had to ask for. To copyright a work, you'd send a copy to the Library of Congress and they'd issue you a copyright. Not only did that let you display a copyright mark on your work – so people would know they weren't allowed to copy it without your permission – but if anyone wanted to figure out who to ask in order to get permission to copy or adapt a work, they could just go look up the paperwork at the LoC.

In 1976, Congress amended the Copyright Act to eliminate the "formality" of copyright registration. Now, all creative works of human authorship were copyrighted "at the moment of fixation" – the instant you drew, typed, wrote, filmed, or recorded them. From a toddler's nursery-school finger-painting to a graffiti mural on a subway car, every creative act suddenly became an article of property.

But whose property? That was on you to figure out, before you could copy, publish, perform, or preserve the work, because without registration, permissions had to start with a scavenger hunt for the person who could grant it. Congress simultaneously enacted a massive expansion of property rights, while abolishing the title registry that spelled out who owned what. As though this wasn't enough, Congress reached back in time and plopped an extra 20 years' onto the copyrights of existing works, even ones whose authors were unknown and unlocatable.

For the next 20 years, creative workers, archivists, educators and fans struggled in the face of this regime of unknowable property rights. After decades of well-documented problems, Congress acted again: they made it worse.

In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, AKA the Mickey Mouse Preservation Act, AKA the Copyright Term Extension Act. The 1998 Act tacked another 20 years onto copyright terms, but not just for works that were still in copyright. At the insistence of Disney, Congress actually yanked works out of the public domain – works that had been anthologized, adapted and re-issued – and put them back into copyright for two more decades. Copyright stretched to the century-plus "life plus 70 years" term. Nothing entered the public domain for the next 20 years.

So many of my comrades in the fight for the public domain were certain that this would happen again in 2018. In 2010, e-book inventor and Project Gutenberg founder Michael S Hart and I got into a friendly email argument because he was positive that in 2018, Congress would set fire to the public domain again. When I insisted that there was no way this could happen given the public bitterness over the 1998 Act, he told me I was being naive, but said he hoped that I was right.

Michael didn't live to see it, but in 2019, the public domain opened again. It was an incredible day:

No one has done a better job of chronicling the fortunes of our fragile, beautiful, bounteous public domain than Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Every year from 2010-2019, Boyle and Jenkins chronicled the works that weren't entering the public domain because of the 1998 Act, making sure we knew what had been stolen from our cultural commons. In so many cases, these works disappeared before their copyrights expired, for example, the majority of silent films are lost forever.

Then, in 2019, Jenkins and Boyle got to start cataloging the works that were entering the public domain, most of them from 1923 (copyright is complicated, so not everything that entered the public domain in 2019 was from that year):

Every year since, they've celebrated a new bumper crop. Last year, we got Mickey Mouse!

In addition to numerous other works – by Woolf, Hemingway, Doyle, Christie, Proust, Hesse, Milne, DuBois, Frost, Chaplin, Escher, and more:

Now, 2024 was a fantastic year for the public domain, but – as you'll see in the 2025 edition of the Public Domain Day post – 2025 is even better:

So what's entering the public domain this year? Well, for one thing, there's more of the stuff from last year, which makes sense: if Hemingway's first books entered the PD last year, then this year, we'll the books he wrote next (and this will continue every year until we catch up with Hemingway's tragic death).

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deadendstyle
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aquietwhyme

And it's sickening because so much of the development of HIV medicine has been publicly funded. We fucking paid for this research dozens of times over; without that public funding there would be almost nothing new for pharmaceutical companies to ransom I mean sell in the first place.

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At that stage where I want to shave, but also I'm going to my dad's next week, and if I shave now then there's more chance he won't correct the carer when she calls me his daughter. In my head. Idk

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petalpetal

HEY IF YOU ARE READING THIS DO ME A FAVOR

go into another room and pick up a random object and look at it!!

like really look at it!!!

SOMEONE designed that!!

a real life living person set time aside to design that

you will probably never know their name but you should thank them and all the other designers who make the mundane things in your life because otherwise life would be boring with out them

reminds me of this

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teaboot

On one hand I understand not teaching cursive in school anymore, because it actually is slower than regular handwriting and almost everything is typed on a keyboard now anyways.

On the other hand, so much of our (even recent!) history was written in cursive, and having a whole generation of kids who can't read letters written by their grandparents, momentos saved by their great-grandparents, or even photo albums from theur immediate family seems like a dangerously quick way to detach us from previous generations.

And on the third, related but slightly malformed hand, I feel bad that yet another form of small, everyday art that brings joy in the middle of mundane tasks, which celebrates personality and individual style and self-expression, is about to fade into obscurity because it wasn't efficient enough for today's world to put up with.

Like... if we continue to whittle away the small arts out of every day life, what's going to be left except stark, ruthless pragmatism?

Maybe writing a grocery list is less mundane when you get to feel elegant for a moment. Maybe you're a little more proud of what you write when you see it flow together like a painting

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