John Bull Profile picture
28 Oct, 8 tweets, 3 min read
This is outrageous and basically fucks any amateur historian trying to do stuff like, say, WW1 survivor research that isn't about one particular person in their family.
I have zero problem with paying a subscription to services that provide access to records and do the legwork of digitising.

I pay for a whole bunch - from ancestor searches, to war record stuff, to newspaper archives.
I pay that, for 12 months every year, when in reality I'm not doing searches every single day. And I don't MIND that, because implicit in it is an expectation that what my money is going towards is FUTURE digitisation.

You don't get to charge me twice for that.
Our picture of history isn't just expanded by academics (who themselves are going to be screwed by this). It's expanded by people, like me, who put a lot of graft and our own money into finding and telling stories to try and connect, or reconnect people with our past.
90% of my history threads are based on fishing expeditions - finding that one snippet in a book, or archive, then having to investigate around it on sites like @findmypast.

By pricing the 1921 census as extra PER RECORD, they fuck me and others who do that.
It's unfair, and it's exploitative. Either have a subscription model, or have a pay model. You don't get to dip into both income streams.

A model like this makes it very much about finding ONE PERSON's past. It's an admission that their tools are selfish, not about society.
I mean this is LITERALLY a testimony on @findmypast's 1921 census page to try and increase hype.

Good fucking luck Kathryn. Hope you've got deep pockets for all those individual records you're about to be charged for, on top of your regular subscription.

#noFishingAllowed Screen grab of a testimony. Kathryn Burtinshaw saying "
And let's not let National Archives off the hook for this either. They'll have known full well this is what was planned. They're literally getting royalties out of it.

Open access to our history my arse.

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More from @garius

29 Oct
Zuckerberg out there pretending the Metaverse is gonna be people doing complex AR Art and avatars.

When, in reality, you're just going to log on and be surrounded by a million versions of this:
Because sure. Your mum and dad are gonna spend hours working out how to sort their Blender meshes out properly before logging on to the Metaverse.
Metaverse is just going to be the Nextdoor version of Minority Report.
Read 7 tweets
29 Oct
A quick message for everyone who donated to the charity walk for MND we're doing tomorrow, from Jose (Clara's widower).

Many thanks from me too. And my particular personal thanks to the anonymous donor who made a big donation.

Still time to donate here justgiving.com/fundraising/cl…
This place can be rubbish at times. Really rubbish. But I've also always believed that you have to try and make Twitter the space you'd like it to be.

Over the last week, you lot have donated over £1,500 in memory of someone you never met just because I asked.

You're wonderful.
OBVIOUSLY I still don't believe any of you are real people. You're all bots and AI scripts.

But you're very nice bots. You helped make a widower (who doesn't quite understand why you did this) happy, and helped Clara's family make a difference for others with MND in her memory.
Read 5 tweets
28 Oct
New phone time, so a reminder that this is what my home screen looks like.

This is it. Everything. It only shows things I ACTIVELY interact with at a given time. All passive apps are hidden and accessed via notifications.

Better for mental health. Zero distractions. Simple list of apps on big white text on black background.
To be on the list, something needs to be an app that i choose to click to achieve something on a regular basis.

Items are added temporarily to that list as required (e.g. airline check in app if i'm flying that day etc. Teams if i need to watch it on my phone for a bit)
Adding an item temporarily, or removing one i've stopped using, requires simply clicking the black space and then, when the list of EVERYTHING installed on the phone pops up, checking or unchecking it's check box.
Read 11 tweets
28 Oct
This. My main memory, as someone who was born in 1980 in small town England, was the novelty of trying to get one of the new atlases/textbooks in geography class that 'Commonwealth of Independent States' in it, rather than USSR.
I do remember the Berlin Wall coming down though.

Mostly because my dad made me watch it, as he said it would be important for me to be able to remember it happening one day.

He was right.
IRA was a constant thing though in our heads.

Multiple school evacuations due to suspect packages. Plus I was 'blown up' once. Was on the bridge when the Stevenage rail bomb went off in 1994.

Trips down to London always had a hint of danger, especially Docklands.
Read 6 tweets
28 Oct
Okay, because @findmypast's ridiculously lazy PAYG approach to 1921 census access pricing has triggered both my historian AND Digital Strategist anger:

Here is a better system designed in under 10min.

Let's start with our audiences

1) Ancestor Hunter
2) Fisher
3) Institution
ANCESTOR HUNTER

Who: General public
Wants: Looking for specific family members.
Behaviour: Intermittent user. May sub for month then accidentally roll over. Will micro-pay for a few personal records.
Model: PAYG per record as per published model.
FISHER

Who: Amateur historians/Battle guides etc.
Wants: Fishing expeditions. Shallow-but-wide access
Behaviour: Maintains 12 month sub or uses in bursts. Prone to cancel/renew behaviour.
Model: Standard subscription grants 5 1921 creds per month. More can be bought as a bundle.
Read 6 tweets
27 Oct
Right. As requested. A thread on how a randy Italian Admiral had his reputation saved by the reveal that Bletchley existed.

Includes golf, sexy spies, post-war beef between German/Italian armed forces and the almost-forgotten work of Bletchley's female codebreakers /1
1941. The Mediterranean. Adm Cunningham is pulling a Sneaky McSneak on the Italian fleet, who think (at this stage) that radar and night battles are for losers.

They think his big ships are still in port, because he made the Japanese ambassador think he was off golfing.

Wrong.
The result: Cape Matapan, a running naval battle that culminates in battleships Barham, Valiant, and Warspite sneaking up on the Italians in the dark.

Prince Philip then turns on the lights and Cunningham hits them with the last, full point-blank broadside in naval warfare.
Read 27 tweets

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