Some things we do in life happen once; the first time will be the only and last time. Our births and deaths, of course, are the two key ones. CONTENT WARNING: this post discusses suicide, death, and dying. I am a member of the Swiss organization, Dignitas, which is most well known for its assisted suicide clinic.

One of the basic tenets of digital philosophy is that downloads are non-rivalrous. When I download something it remains accessible to other users to download. But what if this isn't actually true and what if there is a strong disutility premise at work? Bitcoin has not done much for the world, but it does provide a useful reference point for thinking about this.

2021 was another pretty bad pandemic year, in many ways. For those of us with immune system compromise it was alarming to see a near-wholesale return to "normality" among the general population when our lives remained under extreme threat.

In the world of OA publishing, there have been further (not-so)shock waves reverberating this week as Knowledge Unlatched was sold to Wiley.

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.