Where The Maidan is going

The street-fights are over for now, while the war tourism has started. In the famous Maidan Square where a hundred protesters were shot dead in the February struggles, the paramilitary camp tents are still standing. Rubber tyres are piled in long, tall, ugly barricades, and the revolutionary militia are sitting on stools inside their tents and bomb shelters, chain-smoking and brewing coffee on campfires of scrap wood. However, the ex-President Yanukovych has fled for Russian sanctuary, and the stands of tourist attractions have arrived.

Jasmina Tesanovic who wrote these words for Boing Boing and her own blog is a well traveled author, filmmaker, performer and blogger (or blogress these days we supppose). Since 2005 she has been married to science fiction author Bruce Sterling one of who's favorite book of ours we recently compared to a nearly equally estimated one of Pynchon's and who according to the credits took the photographs (regrettably we can see only 2 of them in the published version and none in the blog post). They live in Belgrade and - at least in 2009 - had trouble with US immigration people in Vermont from which Mr. Doctorow tried to save them with the help of forms and photographs. Now, it seems, the 2 of them mostly hang out in Belgrade.

CC BY-SA / Cory Doctorow

About Boing Boing to which we link with no fee whatsoever received

In a way here at the tiny headquarters we consider Boing Boing as a kind of sister thing because they started out as a "critical" printed 'zine and switched to "web distribution only" even before us. There are large differences though. tinytalk is a lot more liberal in its handling as well of its own materials as also the way readers (and, ahem, readresses) may contribute. . We can do this mainly because all of our authors but 1 are long enough dead and not sueable and the rest of us are very well protected by the wits of Dogbert D. Adams. And while in September 2003 Boing Boing removed their Quicktopics user-comment feature without warning or explanation while, provided a challengeable identity of 1 pretty and 3 quite anonymous kinds, haha, and only having undergone a thorough screening by our technical stuff at login time, every single member of our audience can still directly praise and blame at their own discretion. (Public discussion has been restored at Boing Boing in the mean time and in a billboard separated from articles like in the ORF.at Network and some others beside.)

Boing Boing has also been accused of censorship while nobody, not even Zitterwolf, has ever tried to make that claim for tinytalk. It is all due to dependencies. We depend on the good will of p3k and botic, have responsibility for roughly 50 readers at a time and no more than a couple of thousands over time and they have millions of fools and a couple of medium spenders to cope with. Still Boing Boing then and again remains a quite viable experiment as a multi author blogging platform, we believe. They have to pay the prices for professionalism and success though, just as everyone else.

The Multi Section: Music Video

The piece also contains a video in which Jasmina sings a song for Anna Politkovskaja. 'S got nothing close to do with the topic of the article and most probably due to editorial politics but is nice never the less. All in all we highly recommend reading the whole article.

ANTSCD: For those of you who have not already - and we're convinced most of you geekish male readers have - and for those of you who like rereading but not googling, here are the links to the 2 famous written language slashdot interviews in 2013 with Chairman Bruce and the meanwhile overwhelmed by his methods but then still very sound and funny Neal "Protagonist" Stephenson in 2004.