My favorite podcasts of 2025 (uncategorized):
Thank you to all the podcast creators I enjoyed this year. It’s not easy to make podcasts so I appreciate you making my life more entertaining and informed. You da real MVP.
I am finishing up a book I am working on. I’ve been faltering in finishing up this one for about six months. I wound up not really having much to say, or at least the bravery to say what I really wanted to say, so I am winding it up and shipping the MVP. I will try and put a boaw on top this wrekend and post to IA in the next few weeks. You van check it out on my codeberg (https://codeberg.org/96d7af)
I taught myself Swedish when I was 24. I could read young adult books after a couple of years of study. Had I not had a mental illness, I might have even moved to Lindsborg, KS. I was unemployed for a few years following the 2008 great recession, so I spent it learning Swedish. I have never spent a cent to study Swedish, except for the $25 I spent buying the three Girl With the Dragon Tattoo books in Swedish from someone on Craigslist. I have been extremely frugal in my pursuit of learning Swedish. But that was the great recession, and now it’s almost 18 years later. What would happen if I threw some money at this hobby?
I have not been reading Swedish for probably 15 years. My skills have faltered, and I have forgotten much of my vocabulary. However, the ebook ecosystem is so much more robust than it was in 2009, and now I have e-ink ereaders and public domain Swedish books (from Project Gutenberg or Project Runeberg) in modern Swedish without antiquated spellings. There are probably Creative Commons Swedish ebooks too. I was not into ebooks in 2009. My “ereader” was an OLPC back then. Now I have ipads, kindles, booxes, and Apple TV. I am loaded to the hilt with powerful foreign language learning hardware. This should be like a renaissance for me, coming back to a language I once had reading competency in, 18 years later with more edtech hardware and ereading technology. Let’s this time, out of lack of necessity, pump a little money into my project (though still not a ton!)
The first thing I bought was a VPN. PIA specifically, on Black Friday, three years of a VPN for $2 a month. This will allow me to connect to a Swedish IP on my ipad and Apple TV, which should give me free reign to SVT (Sverige Television) without geofencing. I should be able to watch the same state TV as Swedes (for free). Ihave never had a VPN before, so this will be an exciting feature. I watched SVT a ton in 2009, but the only international show was the daily news. I would obviously like to watch other types of media. I might start with children’s shows until my vocabulary increases, because kids shows are kind of annoying to watch as an adult, but eventually I would like to spend my evenings watching SVT after work.
The second purchase was Anki for iOS. This was a pretty big purchase, as iOS Anki costs $25, but desktop Anki is open source and iOS purchases support overall Anki development. So I consider it a contribution and investment in humanity. And Anki on the iPad is a great user experience, it is a fantastic app. I don’t always like Anki on the laptop, but iOS Anki is fun because you can walk around the house or on a treadmill while studying. So here I am with a clean copy of iOS Anki and half a dozen Swedish decks. I will use my iPad for dedicated Swedish study. I hardly use my iPad at all these days, now that I have e-ink ereaders, so when I use my iPad I will probably be studying Swedish. I have heard there is a lack of scientific proof behind Anki’s spaced repetition (I think Cal Newport said so much), and that you really can’t learn a language through Anki alone, but I have always (since high school) reached my studying goals through flash cards, so I would not want to skip on flash cards. Anki is a clean experience with a fantastic database of free decks, so I am happy to have made this investment.
Next up is books. If I could, I would read Swedish children’s books full time, working my way up to young adult books, then to adult books and then finally to academic texts. This is a multiyear if not multidecade process, so I need to see if there is are any book subscription services for all age groups of ebooks. The main problem with that is I have never had a VPN before. So Storytel was completely in English and didn’t offer Swedish books in my geofence. I just signed up for Storytel on my Swedish VPN IP and now I’m seeing Swedish books! I can turn on “kids mode” and see children’s-difficulty books from age 0 to 12. Hopefully that represents a decade worth of learning, right there. There are even audio and ebooks you can read simultaneously. Unfortunately Storytel is expensive – $18 a month for 100 hours credit and $28 a month for unlimited hours. I think I would probably get a better deal out of finding my own Swedish children’s books on Project Gutenberg or Project Runeberg. Right now I have signed up for a three month trial of Storytel, at the 100 hours/month level. I’m not even sure I have 100 hours of free time outside of work each month, so this is a sufficient tier. I will work my way up from ages 0-3, to 3-6, to 6-9, to 9-12, up to YA, up to adult. I just signed up for their 3 month/30 hour trial, so this is a completely new product I’ve never used before, but now can read read-aloud ebooks with accompanying audiobook tracks. This is how I learned to read English at my public library as a kid – read along books with accompanying audiotapes. I’ll just have to work my way up the ranks for a new language. This is obviously another huge investment – $18 a month is expensive! But I’m working and there’s no equivalent of this learning opportunity (with ebook + audiobook simultaneously), so I am excited to spend a little hard earned dough to try a new approach to learning a language. Plus I have basically infinite books at any difficulty level! If I create an endowment using the 4% rule ($18/month * 12 mos * 25 = $5400), I could have Swedish read aloud books for the rest of my life! This is how I would most like to experience my Swedish language skills — reading along with Swedish books to their audio track. So what an exciting service to purchase! All the way across the pond. Something that didn’t exist 18 years ago, to be sure! It’s expensive, no doubt, but without access to a Swedish public library I’ll just never have access to free Swedish books, unless they’re in the public domain! As I learn over the next few years shat services work, and which aren’t worth the money, I’ll streamline my subscriptions.
It’s worth noting that accessibility has improved so much over the past few decades that Apple TV natively supports Swedish closed captions, so as I watch SVT on my VPN I will be able to read along with the television programs with pretranscribed closed captions. It too will be like reading an ebook with an audio track. It used to be very difficult to find Swedish television programs with instantaneous closed captions, so 18 years later it’s a much better world for a beginning Swedish learner!
Note: After using Storytel for a couple of hours, it looks like 0-3 år is actually grade K-3, not age 0-3 years. These books are pretty complicated for a three year old! But it’s actually for third graders, and I am doing fine. I was hoping for stupidly simple books, to build my vocabulary from, but this’ll do fine too. I was able to install Google translate on my iPad, which means I can translate whole sentences from the book. And I installed the Swedish-English dictionary on my iPad dictionaries, which means I can translate single words. So I can build vocabulary flashcards for Anki without even leaving the Storytel app. Win for iPad! Fantastic edtech! Ebooks, if you don’t love them already, get on board!
Finally, I installed a Swedish TTS voice under Apple a11y features (Siri Voice 2). I will be able to read texts aloud on Project Runeberg by using “Listen to Page” under the Safari Reader Mode menu. Another way to get read aloud Swedish texts, this time for free! I will see if long term this isn’t a worthy replacement to Storytel, especially since Storytel is so expensive. The hard part about Project Runeberg is there is no “children’s” category, all the books are mixed together, so you have to do a lot of work to discover which books have easier vocabulary. Jack London is a well translated, reoccurring favorite. I will need to find some other easy books that can be read through the browser with “Listen to Page.”
I would like to find some bilingual translations, such as split column Swedish-English books, but those are rare because they’re so labor-intensive. We’ll see what else I discover the next few years.
I have so many hobbies! I still want to get back into music and filmmaking. It’s a joyous world to have so many hobbies — reading, writing, art, music, learning languages. And make no mincemeat that the current political climate is expediting the need for a “safety” country, far away from America but where I still can read the language. Who knows what will happen with the collapse of the American empire. I know I am firmly on team social democracy, and that’s why I’m learning Nordic languages. Finnish is next!
It’s not a bad idea to throw some money at language learning. Spending zero dollars only get you so far. Getting a nice ebook subscription is probably worth the cost of admission. I am so happy to be getting back into Swedish, and participating in an actually civilized culture. I’d much rather be learning Swedish than reading the current American news. I will probably try and move to Sweden once my parents die. I am promising to stay in Topeka until their passage through life is complete, so that I can help them age. I have so much privilege, I am less scared to be in America during a fascist regime, than my sister, for example, who moved to France.
Take care, all! Find an ebook subscription service in the language you prefer! And get to reading kids books! The day and age of droughts to find children’s ebooks where you can translate in-app using Apple features are over!
I recently set up a homelab (this WordPress blog is running on it, right next to my room), for around $800. I bought an Optiplex 7060, loaded it with 64gb memory, a 2TB NVMe, and this month will purchase dual 14TB HDDs for a raid 1 array for cold storage. I have already installed Jellyfin on this NAS, and am able to watch my archive of Mister Rogers videos (acquired on Internet Archive) on my Apple TV using the app SwiftFin. I now just need to find apps for my phone and tablet that will sync with my Jellyfin hoard.
I plan to use Jellyfin to datahoard Creative Commons works. There are many documentaries and short films that are CC. I plan on downloading them and watching them all. There are many musicians on bandcamp and IA that are CC. I plan on acquiring as much as I can, then streaming it through my HiFi and listening to it all. Jellyfin even does books, but I doubt I’d get much use out of that compared to my e-ink Boox tablet.
Nonetheless, I want to datahoard Creative Commons media. See if I can live an entertaining life simply from free CC works, media borrowed from my library, and public domain works. I equally expect to use this datahoard as source material for sampling in the creation process of my own music and videos. I can remix open domain works by nature of their CC or PD status, and I intend to do just that as a hobby.
In a way, a CC Jellyfin hoard would fuel a lifetime of doing my hobbies – making music, art, videos, films, and writing. This would provide thousands of hours of entertainment and source material. Nothing would inspire me to create than having a hoard of freely remixable source material. Even curating this hoard, let alone sitting down and watching it, would be quite an entertaining hobby. I fully intend to dive into my CC Jellyfin hoard.
I would suggest to anyone else they spend a chunk of change on setting up their own Jellyfin instance. When CC material is acquired through IA, bandcamp, and YouTube, there is nothing illegal in your datahoard. Having a CC and PD datahoard would serve as entertainment and source material for sampling. Getting to intimately know the source material would be a wellspring of creativity. I see no downside in maintaining this new hobby. IN fact, I could promote what I find by editing wikipedia to have exhaustive information on what documentaries and music are CC. I could make web pages on this site related to my datahoard (which would be completely legal, afterall).
Just the process of curating and acting as lead librarian/archivist makes me excited. All this is possible through a $800 investment in compute and learning how to set up a homelab (I am running proxmox with an instance of YUNOHost and a separate VM for docker running on Debian to do nginx reverse proxy, Jellyfin, and my RSS feed (I can’t recommend enough getting an RSS reader. It is life changing).
Jellyfin presents a fantastic opportunity to learn even more about contemporary CC artists and works. There is hardly no downside to consuming CC art compared to copyright art. My #1 artist last year on Apple Music was Chris Zabriskie, just because I like his music so much. And his CC BY music is freely available on Internet Archive. I will still keep my Apple Music account, for streaming in the car and while out running, so I can listen to pretty much anything for entertainment! But can hoard CC works on my own server for in-home use (which I obviously can’t do with Apple Music). Apple Music is the only subscription I pay for (besides open access/nonprofit magazines and substacks).
Public access is so important. That is one reason why I’m so eager to proofread the 1500 now-public-domain Little Blue Books on Distributed Proofreaders. even though these books are 100 years old, you can still glean a lot of entertainment and education from reading all 1500, ignoring the historical significance of having a complete epub archive. There is hardly any reason to pay for a subscription unless it is open access or nonprofit. Apple Music is my only exception to this rule. Because there is so much CC work created, and this archive grows faster and faster each year. Hell, I can entertain myself most of the time I’m not reading a (free) library book by reading OER found on Open Textbook Library or Open Access journals found on DOAJ. My “entertainment” quota has been met by CC works, and I continue to believe I will not need to spend more than $200 a year for education /for the rest of my life./ My education and entertainment is a done deal. I don’t need to pay for anything for the rest of my life, except $200 to experiment with new edtech. That $200 is endowed by $3500 worth of index funds, which at 4% withdrawals will pay for my $200 education budget for the rest of my life.
Similarly, $800 in a homelab will hopefully last a decade worth of entertainment. I will get to know CC and PD artists, find new favorite songs and movies, and be able to remix and sample until my heart’s content. Homelab is the solution to “How do I acquire CC and PD works and store them, while also keeping them accessibly viewable?” Jellyfin is the answer to this problem that to which before today I did not have a solution. Now I do, and a new hobby is unfolding.
I highly suggest if you are the littlest bit technology inclined to set up a Creative Commons Jellyfin hoard and consume it on your Apple TV. The up front cost is small for years of entertainment value. You can learn how to be a digital archivist and server admin, all while curated 100% legal-to-download art, music, and movies.
I always assumed I would be a writer. In fifth grade I decided I would be a writer. So I wrote. Throughout middle school, throughout high school, and into college. One of my biggest regrets was not doing the student newspaper. I love journalism and journalists, and when combined with a weekly quota, achieves some epic ends. Instead I loved art and reading nonfiction books. I assumed I would write books about art and whatever else caught my fancy for the rest of my life.
In college I developed schizophrenia. I wasn’t diagnosed until after I graduated. Instead, I spent five strenuous years trying to hone my craft of writing while having my writings skills (of clarity, comprehensibility, cogency, and affect) deteriorate while my brain turned against itself. Instead of becoming a better writer and researcher in college, my professors wound up thinking I couldn’t write worth a damn. “Demonstrative of a disturbed mind” was one feedback I got on my junior qual.
I wanted to be a writer, a scientist, an artist, and so on and so on and instead of improving my skills disappeared. My professors rightfully thought I was an idiot, or lazy, or unqualified to be a PhD candidate. Because my grades were so dismal because of my undiagnosed schizophrenia, one professor wrote me that I needed to figure out what I wanted to do in life because the possibility of getting a PhD was so remote.
For better or worse, even today on invega sustenna I still struggle to write comprehensible prose. I write long convoluted sentences that twist in on themselves into incomprehensibility. I turn readers away due to my exhaustiveness in dense prose. I read all the time, yet write so infrequently that I am not in the habit of conveying ideas cogently. Nor doing proper research. Indeed, perhaps I never will be a writer. But I love books and want to create them.
I love books so much. There are few things that are so perfectly sized to entertain you with zero electricity. I can take a book off grid and still, as long as I can carry its heft, get some value out of it while it’s still light. In books, I love that I have to plan. I have to make sure I can fit it somewhere I can carry, without making the bag be so heavy as to be burdensome, and then find a way to provide lighting so that I can read it at night (usually the first opportunity after work to sit down and get some reading done). A book is, in itself, gamified. A book is, in itself, a fun video game. As someone who gets excited about lighting technology (I’ve been vying for LED lighting since 2003), I love trying to figure out how best to light a room for reading, or how much lighting costs, or how to make it cheaper or use less fossil fuels, or make it portable, etc.
Books are a fun subculture. You can be snobbish about reading because so few do it, yet you also want reading to be so commonplace that everyone in the world reads every day. There is pride in having saved up enough money to purchase a book. There is pride in having a bookshelf at home, a weighty and burdensome resource that takes up a lot of your space and makes moving difficult. There are people who spent all their god given money on books, and there are people who are always on the lookout for frugal deals. There are people who read for pleasure, and there are some people who every opportunity are searching for self embetterment by studying textbooks and vocational education. There is no set formula for being a reader. Just that you live a quiet enough life (maybe facilitated by noise canceling headphones!) that you are able to sit quietly and think and dream while looking at sheets of paper. It’s remarkable how few people are able to organize and prioritize quiet and solitude and creativity in the age of computers and on-demand streaming (new and improved television, as I call it). People have many hobbies, me included, that aren’t reading, but doing no reading without screens with nothing but a page and text, not reading any books per year, it truly unimaginable to me. I find reading a book to be a thrilling experience. Movie studios spend billions of dollars trying to make exciting movies, yet I find reading to be so much more exciting. For the cost of a ticket, I could probably buy ten books from my used book store. I get more excitement from reading than anything movie producers can create. I love sitting quietly (facilitated by noise canceling headphones), producing and consuming no noise, yet being neck deep in fantasy and adventure and excitement and creativity and seeing an author’s work of art unfolding whole doing nothing more than sitting in a chair reading the written word. No electricity beyond my ambient light, no unionized actors charging millions of dollars for star power, just a little simple stack of papers that fits in my hand and is bound together with some glue. It’s a real fuck you to everyone that says you must fork over gobs of money in order to be considered cool. My $2 book gives me eleven hours of entertainment and I don’t even have to leave my room. And the characters are totally unique to me, existing only inside my brain. There is no canon, just creativity.
Books are fantastic because they require that you cultivate focus. It turns out that focusing is what gives life import. When you are focused on a task you are indistractable and more creative. You accomplish things and feel accomplishment. You achieve goals that you set out for yourself. You realize who you want to be in moments of focus. Without focus, a day is a waste and depression starts to creep in on you. Focus can be achieved in many things that don’t require reading, bit it is a tautology that reading requires focus. By expanding your focusing power by reading, you are exercising your focus like a muscle. I might not be in an impressive body, but I have cultivated a reading hobby akin to a world class weight lifter by exercising and daily “working out.” It might not be exteriorably visible, but that focus muscle is expandable to work, art, chores, friendships and conversations, empathy, and crafting my life and meeting my goals and helping others reach their goals. I would like to think that when somebody talks to me, they are getting an experience unlike anything else i. the world. Just like running a workout with Usain Bolt would be an eye opening experience, I want working and studying with me to be eye opening. Not for my own aggrandizement (I have nothing left to accomplish), but for fulfilling other people’s goals and dreams. The best tactic for this, for that level of empathy, is frequent reading coupled with frequent conversations with people.
I want to be a little dweeb that reads a lot and has fun conversations with my friends. I don’t care how I dress (though I have fashion goals like androgyny), how much money I have (though I have financial goals like saving frugally for retirement), how I look (though I have health goals like exercising everyday), or even how “cool” I am (though I have social goals like having a smart group of friends I hang out with weekly). These values I have learned through books, I am willing to confess. If I am burned at the stake, it will because of what I learned in books (and zines). I am a better friend because of what I have learned i. books. I am a better partner because of what I have learned in books. I am a better family member or coworker because of what I have learned in books. Not for my own sake, but because I want to help others achieve their goals. Even knowing that I want to help people accomplish their dreams is because of what I have learned in books. Without books, I would be far worse as a humanist than my shortcomings even now. In the training and preparation for life’s work, books are truly the instruction manual. I hardly ever regret having read for a certain time, just like I hardly ever regret having just ran or exercised for a while. Some things are so fulfilling, so CORE to what gives life meaning, that you really do have no other descriptor than love. I love books (as an object). I love reading (as a dialogue with an author). I love talking about books and what I’ve learned in books with friends, and receiving their imbibed wisdom too. So much happiness and life fulfillment has come from these little books that the entire eleusian mystery of them can only be described as a deep love. I don’t expect you to understand all my loves, but they make me who I am. And I want to talk about it (“shout from the rooftops”). Touch grass has been a bitter war the past few years. But it’s 100% valid as a guiding principle. Spend as little time as possible on a computer. Use it only to write or acquire ebooks that you can read on an e-ink screenreader. “Touch a book” would be advice that, bitterness aside, would reflect an equally valid guiding principle for life. “Take a look, it’s in a book” to quote Reading Rainbow. To teach people with empathy that “touching grass” isn’t a slur but a nudge towards healthy habits. To read is to self-fulfill. To actualize your dreams. Without reading (an all the equally valid forms it can take: paper, ereader, audiobook, magazine, zine, newspaper, rss feed), you handicap yourself just a bit. A bit that might just MATTER. How will you know if it matters? Well, if you find yourself spending a lot of time on a computer versus reading or making art, then I would say it matters. In life, maximize reading and making art, and minimize computing. Compute only as a means to write and acquire ebooks. Anything else should be spent touching grass or taking a look in a book. I promise you it will make you happier. Cultivate your garden [curate your book shelf]. We are not doing this for any extrinsic reward, simply intrinsic goals like being the best human you can be on your ephemeral time on a welcoming earth in an optimized solar system.
I wanted to be a writer but an illness took a big chunk of that offline. Straight up kneecapped. But I can still make books with the resources I have (even at just my public library), and I intend to do just that. I find books and art even more emboldening when they are delivered with a Creative Commons license. It allows me to talk about books without the guilt that a friend will have to spend $15 if they want to share in the experience. I can share my epub, my pdf, my mp3s without feeling like a criminal for wanting to talk about art with friends. It removes the boot off our necks, the police state running rampant with the belief that any threat to profits is unadulterated terrorism. That critiquing or appreciating art doesn’t require not meeting your retirement goals. To allow that class doesn’t determine whether your imagination is full of exuberant art, creative music, and thrilling plots compared to the homogenous blue-grey monotony of decades of social media posts. To allow people to work less while still having a fantastic art life, the internal growth from experiencing art for free either at a museum, public library, or at home with a Creative Commons work. Removing class from deciding whether you can have a fulfilling internal art world is one of the most important projects of modern humanity. And we can do that by embracing open access, using these computers for public access to CC art and artists. We need to get people off computers and into the realm of experiencing and creating Creative Commons art. No other project is as important as eliminating class from the art world. Public access means more affordable reading and art appreciation to you. More time to focus and daydream while reading or looking at art, without costing you anything. When art becomes about how affordable it is to humanity, as inexpensive as possible, then art will have reached its eschatology. Instead art seems to be about profit, and that’s to everyone’s disadvantage. When we celebrate people who make affordable public access art, then we will have grown as a society into what’s truly important. Creative Commons permits copying and remixing so that it is not a crime. Iy also makes it free. What’s more important to a group of friends than reading the same book, seeing the same art together, at no cost. It’s the bread and (vegan) butter of life. Let’s make art copyable and shareable for all groups of friends by releasing our works with Creative Commons. The purpose of life is not profit (especially if you already have enough).
I love reading and one of my life goals is to promote literacy far and wide. If you do not read, treat it like exercising, starting small and increasing a bit in duration each day. Then increase the effort required by reading harder works. In time, you’ll be able to read complicated works. And hopefully with libraries, used book stores, $2 bookshop.org deals, Creative Commons works, and public domain works, you’ll find the hobby inexpensive. No matter what your primary hobby, reading a bit each day cultivates your focus to further improve your ability to craft or execute that hobby. And that focus is what I call love. I love that I can be alone a bit each day, my only interaction being the artwork produced by an author.
And then after that, back to hanging out with friends!
Have a happy new year! May you become a bit more the person you want to be.
Today I read an article about how important affordable entertainment was to older American culture [https://prospect.org/2025/12/01/historic-reversal-of-cultural-affordability/]. It used the example that many cheap entertainments came to be referred to by their price — penny papers, the penny arcades, the nickelodeons, the dime museums. “Coinage” in the neologistic sense. These were media neither in the public domain nor open domain (which had yet to be invented). They were copyrighted. But there was a belief that the best way to broadcast entertainment was through affordable venues so that as many people and families could watch them. As in the case for Little Blue Books, price them at 5 cents but sell half a billion of them. It was entertainment for literally everyone, all classes, “public access” and not a burden to anyone. Guilt free and stress free.
This eventually culminated into free radio stations and television broadcasts over the airwaves. And then public libraries and the internet. Affordable books and movies and records and free public media were so important to entertaining the working and middle classes, that they reveled in how cheap they were. It was copyrighted but not sold at any premium. That was a fantastic culture.
But I want to emphasize the phenomenon of naming the beloved entertainment by its (associated affordable) cost. I see that today in the word “FOSS” (Free and Open Source Software). The F stands for “free.” The price is right there in the acronym – FREE! Not a nickel, not a dollar, but free. You see this elsewhere in “2 buck chuck.” The product, beloved for its affordability, gets translated into a catchy name that reflects its cost. See: the $1.50 Costco hotdog. The “dollar movie” of my childhood. 99 cent cyclone-of-the-day from Vista hamburgers here in Topeka. If something is a deal, someone will find a way to canonize its price point in its nickname. This is the ultimate compliment for any media or product.
I’m not sure if people understand that “open” has an inherent pricepoint – free, too! Perhaps we should start calling it Free and Open Educational Resources (FOER) or Free and Open Education (FOE) or Free and Open Access (FOA). The “free” isn’t going away with FOSS, so let’s learn from the success of the word FOSS and put free in front of other “open” stuff.
I use the term “open domain” to refer to both the public domain and Creative Commons works, inclusive. Perhaps I should start calling it the Free and Open Domain (FOD). Creative Commons works are free, and public domain works are free. So it’s an honest descriptor, both as in beer and as in speech.
You similar see this in “Z degrees” (zero textbook cost departmental degree curricula in uni) or “ZTC” (zero textbook cost college class). I’m realizing the best branding includes the cost, inflation be damned. “Free” is impervious to inflation.
I love Bookshop.org’s <=$4 ebook sales. I’ve picked up over fifty $2 ebooks the past year. I love these random-ass (good) books. What can we call these? “The $4 Score”?
Maybe OER (FOER?) should be called “The FOER dollar scholar.” Maybe open access should be “No Pay OA!”
Maybe I need to reflect less on rhymes (“nickelodeon” doesn’t rhyme!). But the point is obvious: Feel free to refer to the fixed cost in your name for your open, public access good. That might be both good advertising, or the entire point of “open.” What good is hearing the word “open” if you don’t know that it also means free? Let’s confuse people less. This isn’t about the nuances of copyright law in the age of the internet first and foremost, it’s about producing affordable entertainment for literally everybody! That’s a great hype train. We want affordable media, available to all classes, not just the rich who can afford a premium. Does “open” imply that it is useable and useful to the working class? Most likely not. But “Free and Open” explains it a lot better! Come for the free, stay for the open.
Ae need to embed affordability into our culture. We need to name things for the price of it at a certain point in time. Nothing makes someone want to inflate the price less than breaking the bond of “two buck” or “$1.50.” We need to emphasize the importance of affordability in America. Media shouldn’t be priced for only the elite. We have 350 million people in America. Sell 350 million copies to everyone, because they all can afford it. High to low, old to young. Let’s do less premium subscriptions, exclusive versioning, exclusive packaging, and limited editions, and more penny presses, dime museums, and free and open domain.