People always say the same thing about tattoos – File this under: everything old is new again. A brief history, not of tattooing, but of reactions to tattoos, from shocked to scandalized to excited. As Matt Lodder explains, the reputation tattoos have as being associated with certain groups of people is one created by the media, and not by the actual history of tattoo wearing. There are some great old newspaper pieces and photos, along with an interesting commentary from Lodder.
The story – that tattooing has “entered the mainstream” – is just one of a number of tattoo tropes recycled relentlessly over the decades, suggests Dr Matt Lodder, art historian and tattoo expert at the University of Essex.
Others include:
Everybody seems to be getting tattooed, should we not be concerned?
Surprise at women, the young or the old getting a tattoo
The pain during a tattoo
The issue of regret at having a tattoo
–BBC News
Security Notice and LibraryThing Password Reset – In November 2011, LibraryThing suffered a security breach, and is requiring all members to change their passwords (link in the article). They describe the breach as “narrow” and indicate that no names were taken, and that a “minority” of accounts were affected. However, email addresses and passwords were included in the breach, which was somehow accomplished through a weakness in WordPress. (Note: this is why Dear Author no longer allows subscribers to the blog. We preserve no private information other than possible the email address attached to a comment).
All evidence points to this being an email-hacking attack. We have every reason to believe no other LibraryThing data was taken, not even user names. The intent was probably to grab the emails for spam, and break the password hashes, if possible. When broken, the passwords could be used against members who used the same password for their email, or email-based services, as they used on LibraryThing. Using the same password across many services is bad practice, but not uncommon. No financial data could have been taken. We do not get or store credit card numbers or any other financial information.
–The LibraryThing Blog
Adobe: We Didn’t Mean to Use DRM to Break Your eBook Readers – If this were a game of chicken, I’m not sure who’d win. Although I know I’m still shopping at Amazon for my digital books.
After receiving feedback from customers and webinar attendees, Adobe has revised the migration timetable for customers. “Adobe does not plan to stop support for ACS 4 or RMSDK 9. ACS 5 books will be delivered to the older RMSDK 9 based readers”, according to Shameer Ayyappan, Senior Product Manager at Adobe. “We will let our resellers and publishers decide when they wish to set the DRM flag on ACS 5, thus enforcing the need for RMSDK 10 based readers.”
–The Digital Reader
Compiling as a Creative Act: What Duke Ellington’s Remixing Reveals about Plagiarism and Innovation – Apparently Ellington had a practice of purchasing songs from other musicians for $25 and then basically using them to make his “own” song, which would become a very profitable hit. Some musicians sued him, but most did not, and much of his reputation as innovative came from his willingness and ability to effectively “steal” from others and work those bits into hits. Very interesting article on the relationship between creative theft and adaptive genius.
In the altogether fantastic Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (public library) — one of the best biographies and memoirs of 2013 — Terry Teachout reveals that for the beloved composer, who was already a man of curious paradoxes, this creative duality was as palpable as the line between plagiarism and originality was blurred. Ellington, it turns out, made a regular habit of “borrowing” melodic fragments composed by the soloists in his famed orchestra, then transforming them into hit songs — without credit, creative or financial, to the originators
–Brain Pickings