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arbieroo

Arbie's Unoriginally Titled Book Blog

It's a blog! Mainly of book reviews.

Currently reading

Station Zero
Philip Reeve
Progress: 220/282 pages
The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition
Ursula K. Le Guin, Charles Vess
Progress: 749/997 pages
The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry
Robert Chandler
The Uncertain Land and Other Poems
Patrick O'Brian
Progress: 8/160 pages
The Heptameron (Penguin Classics)
Marguerite de Navarre
Progress: 152/544 pages
The Poems and Plays of John Masefield
John Masefield
Progress: 78/534 pages
Poems Selected
Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes
Progress: 4/50 pages
Selected Poems
U A Fanthorpe
Progress: 18/160 pages
The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse
Mick Imlah, Robert Crawford
Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 2
Ursula K. Le Guin
Progress: 133/789 pages

Off-Topic, GR Reader

OFF-TOPIC: The Story of an Internet Revolt by G.R. Reader - G.R. Reader

What happened next? (September 2013 feels like a long time ago.)

 

A backlash against protest activity started.
Protestors eventually left or ceased protesting.
Occassional stories of further deletions surfaced in the ensuing months, after significant protest activity had ceased.
Some people who had left the site returned. Most did not.
Entire rival websites arose and died.
A major re-vamp of the site's basic appearance rendered the site useless for the purposes of those who wanted a social network of readers. Only aggressive use of AdBlocker allowed restoration of a useful service. So aggressive as to almost entirely remove all the changes that had been made, making the changes ineffectual. Amazon never realised that the point of Goodreads was that people would find friends whose opinions they trust and their reviews would drive book sales. Adverts and algorithmic recommendations are exactly what users want to avoid.
The corporate grip on the internet tightened. People's data were commodified even further. Privacy and security stopped being a joke and instead just stopped existing.
Over-population and climate change run rampant. Nobody attempts signifcant change. Or stops having children.
Trump was elected POTUS and the rule of sanity in human affairs entirely evaporated.
Some guy called Otis sits in obscurity, still counting his ill-gotten gains.
Meanwhile, the surest sign of the existance of extra-terrestrial intelligence remains that they have not attempted to contact us, as Bill Watterson pointed out.