Today marks a significant milestone for me. All ten of my academic monographs are now – or will be when published – openly accessible and free to download. The books that are not yet out have advance contracts that stipulate open access.

By necessity, the bibliography to [my book on Warez](https://punctumbooks.com/titles/warez-the-infrastructure-and-aesthetics-of-piracy/) must cite a number of unconventional works that are not covered by standard style manuals. In particular, I need to make reference to NFO files that contain ASCII art and other iNFOrmation about the Warez Scene.

tl;dr: use the node.js module [html-pdf-chrome](https://www.npmjs.com/package/html-pdf-chrome) to print programmatically, not Chrome's built-in virtual-time-budget. See my [print.js file](https://github.com/MartinPaulEve/eprintsToCV/blob/master/print.js) for an example. [My CV](https://eve.gd/c-v/Eve-CV.pdf) is generated automatically from Birkbeck's online repository.

We are at an exciting moment for open-access books. UKRI has announced a forthcoming funding mandate, kicking off in 2024. Plan S funders are deciding what to do about books. And much (if not all) of the dissent around the idea of OA monographs has gone quieter. It seems, at least to me, that more and more people are persuaded that OA books are a good concept… so long as the route by which we get there is equitable.

I was reflecting this morning on the following propositions: * Higher-tier (high prestige, high exclusivity) journals, to which most academics submit their work first, often have extremely high thresholds for admission. They require three peer reviewers to agree to publication and they also set exacting (and sometimes flawed) criteria for novelty.

This morning marked the culmination of a long period of work for the chapter on the history of digital whitespace [in my forthcoming book, _Paper Thin_](https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/31744/). The chapter ranges across a variety of subjects, from the history of paper coloration, through visual display unit technologies, before eventually settling on musical (silent) seriality as the best metaphor for how whitespace is encoded and

I asked on Twitter for [where to start on considering programming languages _as languages_](https://twitter.com/martin_eve/status/1429415082199502852). Here are some of the best recommendations: * Binder, Jeffrey M., ‘Romantic Disciplinarity and the Rise of the Algorithm’, _Critical Inquiry_, 46.4 (2020), 813–34 * Chartier, Roger, ‘Languages, Books, and Reading from the Printed Word to the Digital Text’, trans.

This week, I decided that I should move my VPN system that I run on all my devices to use the new Wireguard protocol, replacing the OpenVPN setup. To do this, I used [NetMaker](https://github.com/gravitl/netmaker) for the configuration and setup and I have to say that it is superb. It works a treat on systems that have Wireguard easily installed and you then get a really neat web interface for administering clients.

I asked, [yesterday on Twitter](https://twitter.com/martin_eve/status/1428438157712842756), whether anybody had written about one of the most prominent verbal tics in humanistic academic discourse: "I am interested in". This phrase is used to justify critical attention to almost any object while also placing the idea of such scrutiny beyond any challenge. Why should we _care_ that you are _interested_ in something?

One of the core plot devices (in so far as there is a plot) in Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel, _Gravity's Rainbow_, is the S-Gerät: the Schwarzgerät or "black device", made from the plastic Imipolex G. While working on another project (on the history of television), I found a curious set of projects from the war, designated Y-Gerät and X-Gerät, which are part of the so-called [Battle of the Beams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams)

Some incomplete notes on the introduction to Gaskill, Nicholas, _Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), [originally a Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/martin_eve/status/1422458629555433487). This morning, I am kicking off by reading Nicholas Gaskill's "Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color". Amusingly, I'm reading it on an e-reading