Otter 841 has become a celebrity after a month of stealing surfboards at a popular beach in Santa Cruz. Authorities are trying to catch her, but the otter's fans want her to be left alone in the wild.
(Image credit: Laird Henkel/California Department of Fish and Wildlife)
Hovertext: You can of course remove the last name, but then you're causing less damage to a larger group. Figuring out how to maximize damage is left as an exercise for the reader.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A few months ago, the developers behind the Wii/GameCube emulator Dolphin said they were indefinitely postponing a planned Steam release, after Steam-maker Valve received a request from Nintendo to take down the emulator's "coming soon" page. This week, after consulting with a lawyer, the team says it has decided to abandon its Steam distribution plans altogether. "Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it," the team wrote in a blog post on Thursday. "In the end, Valve is the one running the Steam storefront, and they have the right to allow or disallow anything they want on said storefront for any reason."
The Dolphin team also takes pains to note that this decision was not the result of an official DMCA notice sent by Nintendo. Instead, Valve reached out to Nintendo to ask about the planned Dolphin release, at which point a Nintendo lawyer cited the DMCA in asking Valve to take down the page. At that point, the Dolphin team says, Valve "told us that we had to come to an agreement with Nintendo in order to release on Steam... But given Nintendo's long-held stance on emulation, we find Valve's requirement for us to get approval from Nintendo for a Steam release to be impossible. Unfortunately, that's that." "As for Nintendo, this incident just continues their existing stance towards emulation," the post continues. "We don't think that this incident should change anyone's view of either company."
Despite the disappointing result for the Steam release, the Dolphin team is adamant that "we do not believe that Dolphin is in any legal danger." That's despite the emulator's inclusion of the Wii Common Key, which could run afoul of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. The Dolphin Team notes that the Wii Common Key has been freely shared across the Internet since its initial discovery and publication in 2008. And while that key has been in the Dolphin code base since 2009, "no one has really cared," the team writes. [...] With what they believe is a firm legal footing, the team writes that Dolphin development will continue away from Steam, but including a number of UI and quality of life features originally designed for the Steam release. Meanwhile, emulators like RetroArch and the innovative 3dSen continue to be available on Steam, with no immediate sign of a further crackdown from Valve or Nintendo.
A tornado in North Carolina ripped through a Pfizer pharmaceutical facility that produces nearly 25% of all sterile injectable medicines used in U.S. hospitals, sparking concerns about worsening drug shortages. What do you think?
“The recent challenges regarding Dr. McElroy have made it clear to me that I must retire immediately,” Banks wrote in her resignation letter. “The negative press is a distraction from the wonderful work being done here.”
Good morning. Houston’s last truly extreme drought came during the torrid summer of 2011. Not only was that summertime period exceptionally hot, the months leading into the warmest time of the year were very dry. During the first six months of 2011, Houston received just 7.88 inches of rain. It was the driest January through June in city history. By the end of June, 2011, the vast majority of Texas was under “exceptional” drought conditions, and that was before the heat hit.
Fortunately, this year, we started summer in a good posture. At the end of May, pretty much the entirety of the eastern half of Texas was drought free after a spring of moderate temperatures and healthy rains. That began to change pretty quickly in June, of course, and July has been the same through its first three weeks; very hot and, for the most part, very dry in terms of rainfall. As a result of this, a “moderate” drought has reemerged for coastal Texas, including Galveston and Brazoria counties, as well as part of southeastern Harris County. In the absence of substantial rainfall, we can expect this drought to worsen in the coming weeks. Any rains this weekend, of course, will help.
A comparison of drought conditions at the end of May with today. Use the slider to compare. (US Drought Monitor)
Friday
Today will be very hot and sunny, much as the rest of this week has gone. Expect high temperatures of around 100 degrees, very high humidity, and only very light winds from the south. Temperatures on Friday night will, again, only drop down to around 80 degrees.
Saturday
Change is on the way for the weekend, as high pressure shifts westward and opens our region up to precipitation from atmospheric disturbances and the sea breeze. This means our best chance for rain will come during the afternoon hours. For Saturday, I’ll peg rain chances at 30 percent, with the possibility of a few areas seeing decently strong thunderstorms. Rain chances look highest on Saturday north of Interstate 10. Otherwise, skies will be mostly sunny with high temperatures near 100 degrees.
Sunday
This day will probably offer our region its best chance of rainfall for awhile, with perhaps as much as 60 percent of the Houston metro area seeing light to moderate rainfall. Don’t expect a soaking, as briefly heavy thunderstorms will likely be fairly isolated. Most of Houston should only receive a tenth of an inch of rain, or two. When it’s not raining, it should be mostly sunny and hot, with highs at least in the upper 90s. Note that I cannot rule out more widespread, heavier rainfall on Sunday at this point. If the forecast changes, I’ll provide a brief update this weekend.
Next week will still be very hot in Texas, but it should not be extremely so for the Houston area. (Pivotal Weather)
Next week
Rain chances in the vicinity of 30 percent, daily, will hold on during the early part of next week. We will see a few more clouds next week, and some slightly drier air this should help bring down the heat index just a bit. So while temperatures will still be in the upper 90s to 100 degrees, it should feel a little bit less hot during the daytime.
“The recent challenges regarding Dr. McElroy have made it clear to me that I must retire immediately,” Banks wrote in her resignation letter. “The negative press is a distraction from the wonderful work being done here.”
BOSTON—As part of an ongoing rebuilding effort to make the team younger and cheaper, the Boston Red Sox reportedly announced Friday they were trading the aging Fenway Park to the New York Yankees for several highly touted blueprints. “While it’s never easy to say goodbye to a stadium that has served the team well…
This week on my podcast, I read "Let the Platforms Burn," a recent Medium column making the case that we should focus more on making it easier for people to leave platforms, rather than making the platforms less terrible places to be:
The platforms used to be a source of online stability, and many argued that by consolidating the wide and woolly web into a few "curated" silos, the platforms were replacing chaos with good stewardship. If we wanted to make the internet hospitable to normies, we were told, we had to accept that Apple and Facebook's tightly managed "simplicity" were the only way to get there.
But today, all the platforms are on fire, all the time. They are rocked by scandals every bit as awful as the failures of the smaller sites of yesteryear, but while harms of a Geocities or Livejournal moderation failure were confined to a small group of specialized users, failures in the big silos reach hundreds of millions or even billions of people.
What should we do about the rolling crisis of the platforms? The default response – beloved of Big Tech's boosters and critics alike – is to impose rules on the platforms to make them more hospitable places for the billions they've engulfed. But I think that will fail. Instead, I think we should make the platforms less important places by freeing those billions.
That's the argument of the column.
Think of California's wildfires. While climate change has increased the intensity and frequency of our fires, climate (and neglect by PG&E) is merely part of the story. The other part of the story is fire-debt.
For millennia, the original people of California practiced controlled burns of the forests they lived, hunted, and played in. These burns cleared out sick and dying trees, scoured the forest floor of tinder, and opened spaces in the canopy that gave rise to new growth. Forests need fire – literally: the California redwood can't reproduce without it:
But this ended centuries ago, when settlers stole the land and declared an end to "cultural burning" by the indigenous people they expropriated, imprisoned, and killed. They established permanent settlements within the fire zone, and embarked on a journey of escalating measures to keep that smouldering fire zone from igniting.
These heroic measures continue today, and they've set up a vicious cycle: fire suppression creates the illusion that it's safe to live at the wildlife urban interface. Taken in by this illusion, more people move to the fire zone – and their presence creates political pressure for even more heroic measures.
The thing is, fire suppression doesn't mean no fires – it means wildfires. The fire debt mounts and mounts, and without an orderly bankruptcy – controlled burns – we get chaotic defaults, the kind of fire that wipes out whole towns.
Eventually, we will have to change tacks: rather than making it safe to stay in the fire zone, we're going to have to make it easy to leave, so that we can return to those controlled burns and pay down those fire-debts.
And that's what we need to do with the platforms.
For most of the history of consumer tech and digital networks, fire was the norm. New platforms – PC companies, operating systems, online services – would spring up and grow with incredible speed, only to collapse, seemingly without warning.
To get to the bottom of this phenomenon, you need to understand two concepts: network effects and switching costs.
Network effects: A service enjoys network effects if it increases in value as more people use it. AOL Instant Messenger grows in usefulness every time someone signs up for it, and so does Facebook. The more users, the more reasons to join. The more people who join, the more people will join.
Switching costs: The things you have to give up when you leave a product or service. When you quit Audible, you have to throw away all your audiobooks (they will only play on Audible-approved players). When you leave Facebook, you have to say goodbye to all the friends, family, communities and customers that brought you there.
Tech has historically enjoyed enormous network effects, which propelled explosive growth. But it also enjoyed low switching costs, which underpinned implosive contraction. Because digital systems are universal (all computers can run all programs; all nodes on the network can connect to one another), it was historically very easy to switch from one service to another.
Someone building a new messenger service or social media platform could import your list of contacts, or even use bots to fetch the messages left for you on the old service and put them in the inbox on the new one, and then push your replies back to the people you left behind. Likewise, when Apple made its iWork office suite, it could reverse-engineer the Microsoft Office file formats so you could take all your data with you if you quit Windows and switched to MacOS:
This dynamic – network effects growth and low switching costs contraction – is why we think of tech as so dynamic. It's why companies like DEC were able to turn out minicomputers that shattered the dominance of mainframes. But it's also why DEC was brought so low that a PC company, Compaq, was able to buy it for pennies on the dollar. Compaq – a company that built an empire by making interoperable IBM PC clones – was itself "disrupted" a few years later, and HP bought it for spare change found in the sofa cushions.
But HP didn't fall to Compaq's fate. It survived – as did IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook. Somehow, the cycle of "good fire" that kept any company from growing too powerful was interrupted.
Today's tech giants run "walled gardens" that are actually walled prisons that entrap their billions of users by imposing high switching costs on them. How did that happen? How did tech become "five giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four?"
The answer lies in the fact that tech was born as antitrust was dying. Reagan hit the campaign trail the same year the Apple ][+ hit shelves. With every presidency since, tech has grown more powerful and antitrust has grown weaker (the Biden administration has halted this decay, but it must repair 40 years' worth of sabotage).
This allowed tech to "merge to monopoly." Google built a single successful product – a search engine – and then conquered the web by buying other peoples' companies, even as their own internal product development process produced a nearly unbroken string of flops. Apple buys 90 companies a year – Tim Cook brings home a new company more often than you bring home a bag of groceries:
When Facebook was threatened by an upstart called Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg sent a middle-of-the-night email to his CFO defending his plan to pay $1b for the then-tiny company, insisting that the only way to secure eternal dominance was to eliminate competitors – by buying them out, not by being better than them. As Zuckerberg says, "It is better to buy than compete":
As tech consolidated into a cozy oligopoly whose execs hopped from one company to another, they rigged the game. They colluded on a criminal "no-poach" deal to suppress their workers' wages:
This collusion is the inevitable result of market concentration. 100 squabbling tech companies will be at each others' throats, unable to agree on catering for their annual meeting much less a common lobbying agenda. But boil those companies down to a bare handful and they'll quickly converge on a single hymn and twine their voices in eerie harmony:
Eliminating antitrust enforcement – letting companies buy and merge with competitors, permitting predatory pricing and other exclusionary tactics – was the first step towards unsustainable fire suppression. But, as on the California wildland-urban interface, this measure quickly gave way to ever-more-extreme ones as the fire debt mounted.
The tech's oligarchs have spent decades both suppressing laws that would limit their extractive profits (there's a reason there's no US federal privacy law!), and, crucially, getting new law made to limit anyone from "disrupting" them as they disrupted their forebears.
Today, a thicket of laws and rules – patent, copyright, anti-circumvention, tortious interference, trade secrecy, noncompete, etc – have been fashioned into a legal superweapon that tech companies can use to control the conduct of their competitors, critics and customers, and prevent them from making or using interoperable tools to reduce their switching costs and leave their walled gardens:
Today, these laws are being bolstered with new ones that make it even more difficult for users to leave the platforms. These new laws purport to protect users from each other, but they leave them even more at the platforms' mercy.
So we get rules requiring platforms to spy on their users in the name of preventing harassment, rather than laws requiring platforms to stand up APIs that let users leave the platform and seek out a new online home that values their wellbeing:
The platforms insist – with some justification – that we can't ask them to both control their users and give their users more freedom. If we want a platform to detect and block "bad content," we can't also require the platform to let third party interoperators plug into the system and exchange messages with it.
They're right – but that doesn't mean we should defend them. The problem with the platforms isn't merely that they're bad at defending their users' interests. The problem is that they can't defend those interests. Mark Zuckerberg isn't merely monumentally, personally unsuited to serving as the unelected, unaacountable social media czar for billions of people in hundreds of countries, speaking thousands of languages. No one should have that job.
We don't need a better Mark Zuckerberg. We need no Mark Zuckerbergs. We don't need to perfect Zuck – we need to abolish Zuck.
Rather than pouring our resources into making life in the smoldering wildlife-urban interface safe, we should help people leave that combustible zone, with policies that make migration easy.
This month, we got an example of how just easy that migration could be. Meta launched Threads, a social media platform that used your list of Instagram followers and followees to get you set up. Those low switching costs made it easy for Instagram users to become Threads users – and the network effects meant it happened fast, with 30m signups in the first morning:
Meta says it was able to do this because it owns both Insta and Threads. But Meta doesn't own the list of accounts that you trust and value enough to follow, or the people who feel the same way about you. That's yours. We could and should force Meta to let you have it.
But that's not enough. Meta claims that it will someday integrate Threads into the Fediverse, the collection of services based on the ActivityPub standard, whose most popular app is Mastodon. On Mastodon, you not only get to export your list of followers and followees with one click, but you can import those followers and followees to a new server with one click.
Threads looks incredibly stupid, a "Twitter alternative you would order from Brookstone," but there are already tens of millions of people establishing relationships with each other there:
When they get tired of "brand-safe vaporposting," they'll have to either give up those relationships, or resign themselves to being trapped inside another walled-garden-cum-prison operated by a mediocre tech warlord:
But what if, instead of trying to force Zuck to be a better emperor-for-life, we passed rules requiring him to let his subjects flee his tyrannical reign? We could require Threads to stand up a Fediverse gateway that let users leave the service and set up on any other Fediverse servers (we could apply this rule to all Fediverse servers, preventing petty dictators from tormenting their users, too):
This is the thing platforms fear the most. Network effects work in both directions: if your service grows quickly because people value one another, then it will shrink quickly when the people your users care about leave. As danah boyd recounts, this is what happened when Myspace imploded:
When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
Platforms collapse "slowly, then all at once." The only way to prevent sudden platform collapse syndrome is to block interoperability so users can't escape the harms of your walled garden without giving up the benefits they give to each other.
We should stop trying to make the platforms good. We should make them gone. We should restore the "good fire" that ended with the growth of financialized Big Tech empires. We should aim for soft landings for users, and stop pretending that there's any safe way to life in the fire zone.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech, Verso, September 2023
The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
Reading through the increasing number of Techdirt articles about AI, the overwhelming impression is that many people think AI is bad, and needs to be reined in before it destroys journalism/creativity/society/humanity (delete as applicable). To see an interesting new phase of an old technology attacked in this way is rather depressing, since it seems to prejudge and limit its applications. Against that background, it’s good to be reminded that AI does have applications that are immediately useful, and largely unproblematic, as shown by this collaboration between Project Gutenberg and Microsoft.
Project Gutenberg was started back in 1971 by the visionary Michael Hart, who sadly died at the age of 64 in 2011. His vision of providing digital versions of the world’s greatest literature has come a long way since Hart typed the text of the US Declaration of Independence into a Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University of Illinois. Today there are over 70,000 free ebooks on the Project Gutenberg site. There are also a few audiobook versions of titles in the collection. But producing them using volunteers has proved a slow process. That’s unfortunate at a time when more and more people are listening to audiobooks rather than reading texts. Microsoft saw an opportunity to help here by applying some of its AI technology:
A team from Microsoft approached Project Gutenberg about a collaboration to produce thousands of high-quality audiobooks using an AI-driven solution and then give them back to the Project Gutenberg community. These new audio recordings have made Project Gutenberg’s books more accessible to a wider audience of people around the world, including those facing accessibility challenges.
The capability turns the text of each book into audio using advanced human-like voices that can even convey emotion. “This is an AI innovation that reads text in a lifelike voice,” [Director and CEO of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation] Newby explains. “The voices are trained to mimic humans in order to sound natural, and the result is convincing—a big upgrade over older versions of text to speech.”
There are currently nearly 5,000 AI-voiced audiobooks, which can be accessed from a number of streaming services, via the Internet Archive, and directly. Listening to them, it is evident that they are a step up from previous computer-generated audiobooks, with a reasonably lifelike voice and some human-like inflections. But the AI system struggles to convey the meaning of complex texts — for example, the dense, subtly rhythmic poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, or anything knotty by Shakespeare. The Microsoft post about the project says that some of the audiobooks incorporate several voices, but the ones I listened to did not, which makes listening to Shakespeare plays rather dull.
However, against those limitations can be set the fact that converting a Project Gutenberg text into an audiobook takes just 30 seconds per title. That opens up the possibility of converting thousands of books, and not just in English. Doing so will clearly be a huge boon for the visually impaired, or those who struggle with reading texts for whatever reason. It will also provide a ready supply of world literature to people who just like listening to audiobooks.
Some will doubtless raise the usual concerns that AI might be taking work away from those who earn a living from producing audiobooks. But the new Microsoft project shows why that is not (yet) a real threat. There is a still a huge difference between the AI-generated versions and those from skilled human readers. The former are great for Project Gutenberg, which depends on volunteers and can’t afford to pay for professionals. But anyone wanting a high-quality audiobook version of titles will still need to turn to trained humans who are paid to produce them.
That is also true of other domains. Texts produced by generative AI systems “in the style” of a writer, or musician, are simply not substitutes for those writers or musicians. Arguably, they increase the value of the “real” thing. Their ability to produce endless quantities of bland and similar outputs serves to emphasize that what we most value in human productions is that unique, hard-to-define quality conspicuous by its absence in AI-generated works. As the technology advances, the gap between what computers and people can produce is likely to narrow. Whether it will ever be closed goes to the heart of the question of what it means to be human.
CINCINNATI—Expanding the range of its offerings to fit modern consumer needs, period-product manufacturer Always announced Thursday it would begin selling a new off-roading maxi pad with up to 40% more shock absorption. “This spring-assisted, all-terrain sanitary pad offers more shock-absorbing power than the leading…
An American soldier who was facing disciplinary action bolted across the demarcation line into North Korea, effectively handing himself over to the regime run by Kim Jong-un and creating a fresh crisis for Washington in its dealings with the nuclear-armed state. What do you think?
“Dan Jian’s drawings are meditations on the act of looking; her work reminds us that our stories are constantly evolving. In The Bow Whispers to the Arrow, motifs, scenes, and topographies flow ambiguously, leading the viewer to imagine a narrative of place both familiar and distant.
Jian constructs work mainly using dust. Charcoal dust and burned ashes are first mixed and fixed on translucent paper; the process allows the medium to form gravitational washes, similar to the effect of ink. Then, through an incremental process, she uses scissors, an Exacto knife, and glue to create introverted landscapes filled with imaginary narratives and symbols. The result is her interpretation of an inner world of images on the dusted ground.”
ADMIT ONE, organized by Flats
2. Admit One
The DeLuxe Theater, organized by FLATS (Houston)
July 21, 6-11 p.m.
From FLATS:
“FLATS and Houston Cinema Arts Society proudly present our collaborative event, Admit One, where we invite you to journey back to the golden age of film. Mark your calendars for Friday, July 21st as we showcase the extraordinary works of Texas filmmakers, captured through the captivating lens of analog, at the historic DeLuxe Theater. The resurgence of celluloid in major motion pictures has reignited the magic, and we’re here to honor the traditional formats that laid the foundation. ”
“The San Benito Cultural Arts Department continues to work with regional artists to bring quality programming to the City of San Benito and the surrounding areas. Recent Works by nationally renowned artist Danville Chadbourne is a colorful exhibition inspired by nature. It explores how the artist transforms organic materials, found objects and woodwork into poetic, and mesmerizing works of art. The exhibit bridges ecology and art, and is in dialogue with the Rio Grande Valley’s biodiversity and natural resources. One of our continued missions for the San Benito Cultural Arts Department is to create a collaborative environment that promotes, encourages, and shares the narratives of our region. Danville Chadbourne’s work adds to the conversation and inspires us to be more curious, and observant of the natural world around us – perhaps it will reveal aspects of ourselves.”
“Artist Statement: I did it to myself, a solo exhibition, featuring new installation based work by Mark Anthony Martinez. The installation grapples with the idea of ‘the end of the world’ and how the concept has just become a casual conversation point online, works of fiction and geopolitical circles — most especially post-pandemic. It is a conversation most dramatically foregrounded by the unceasing ‘doom scroll,’ perniciously provided by algorithms across social media platforms. The work will employ the use of text, sculpture and original multimedia works to convey the tensions present within the artists day to day.”
T.C. Oliver, “Prisoner of Love,” 2023 acrylic on carved wood.
“T.C. Oliver is a Denton-based educator and artist. With a firmly low-brow approach, he is as comfortable showing his work in off-beat and commercial, as well as gallery settings. He has illustrated for bands and businesses, vended at markets throughout DFW, and recently released a line of merchandise through Everything Ellum. His work fuses a love of vintage music iconographies, cartoons, and tattooing as a way of connecting his present creative output to his childhood interests. Oliver has participated in group shows in various spaces, including Plush Gallery and at the Texas Art Education Association Member Showcase.
For his first solo show, T.C. will show playful illustrative works made by cutting, carving, and painting ordinary construction grade wood. In this series, the artist explores his own identity through images which unite his adult interests with youthful experience. This premier solo exhibition builds upon the illustrative woodworking he has been showing locally over the past two years.”
Frank X. Tolbert 2, a Texas artist known for his depictions of regional birds, died on Thursday, July 13, 2023 at the age of 77.
Installation view, left: Frank X. Tolbert, Chicken Hawk, 2015, Oilstick and graphite on paper, 60 x 44 in.; right: Frank X. Tolbert, High Island Rookery, 2015, oil on paper, 80 x 140 in.
Perhaps best known for his Texas Bird Project series, a decade-long project depicting native Texas birds, Mr. Tolbert’s artistic career stretched over 50 years. He began the Texas Bird Project in 2014, when the Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking commissioned him to create eight etchings of birds. This print project expanded to include drawings and paintings of a wide range of birds, including egrets, crows, herons, jays, and pelicans.
Frank X. Tolbert 2. Photo courtesy of Flatbed Press & Gallery.
In a recent announcement, Flatbed shared about their work with Mr. Tolbert 2: “A great artist and friend to Flatbed, Frank brought his magical way of interpreting the world into the printmaking sphere. We got to know and love him during his many projects at Flatbed. As a painter, he stepped out of his comfort zone into a fishbowl of printmaking zeal and then shook it for all it was worth when he created his Texas Bird Suite of eight large color etchings 2015-2018.”
Frank X. Tolbert 2. Photo by and courtesy of Ann Stautberg.
Mr. Tolbert 2 was born in Washington D.C. on December 17, 1945 to Frank X. and Kathleen (Kay) Tolbert. At the time, his father was a journalist and a Marine, stationed as a guard at the White House. When Mr. Tolbert 2 was young, the family moved to Lubbock and then Dallas, where his father was a longtime columnist for the Dallas Morning News. At the age of nine, Mr. Tolbert 2 joined his father on a road trip around the perimeter of Texas, which was his first experience of the diversity of the state’s ecosystems.
The following year, Mr. Tolbert 2 took art lessons with Otis Dozier at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the Dallas Museum of Art) when it was located at Fair Park. Throughout his life, his art continued to be inspired by Mr. Dozier and the other Dallas-based regionalist artists known as the Dallas Nine, among other influences.
In a 2018 interview with Texas Highways Tolbert explained his connection with the state: “I’ve lived all of my life in Texas, and I feel like my art is sort of a visual diary where the folklore of Texas and my personal life are inseparably intertwined. But I’ve also traveled a lot in Mexico, and I see my work as kind of a combination of Otis Dozier’s Wild West heroism and Rufino Tamayo’s magical realism.”
Mr. Tolbert 2 attended Thomas Jefferson High School in Dallas and then went on to study art at Texas Tech University in Lubbock from 1964 to 1969 and at North Texas State (now the University of North Texas) in Denton from 1969 to 1970. During the 1970s, Mr. Tolbert 2 exhibited his work at various galleries in Dallas, where he and his father launched the family business, Tolbert’s Chili Parlor. In 1975, through mutual friends, he met his future wife, artist Ann Stautberg, who was also living in Dallas at the time. The pair married in 1978, and that same year they exhibited their work together at DW Gallery in Dallas. The couple later moved to Houston, where they have been important figures in the local art scene.
Ann Stautberg and Frank X. Tolbert 2. Photo courtesy Ann Stautberg.
Mr. Tolbert 2’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at galleries and venues throughout the state, including William Campbell Gallery in Fort Worth; Kirk Hopper Fine Art, the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, and Eugene Binder Gallery in Dallas; Moody Gallery in Houston; the Galveston Arts Center; and beyond. Additionally, Mr. Tolbert 2’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Witte Museum in San Antonio, the University of Texas at Austin, and Texas Tech University in Lubbock.
Mr. Tolbert 2’s most recent solo presentation, Live Wire, was presented by William Campbell Gallery; the exhibition showcased the artist’s depictions of grackles. Recently, Mr. Tolbert 2 and Mrs. Stautberg exhibited their work together for the first time since 1978. The show, Ann Stautberg – Frank X. Tolbert 2, was presented by Andrew Durham Gallery in Houston and closed at the end of April.
Mr. Durham told Glasstire, “Frank was part of the pulse of the Texas art scene; he was a phenomenal story teller both verbally and through his work. His use of graphite and oil stick combining raw, sometimes erratic yet meaningful lines blended seamlessly with the bright and dark colors of his work. He was a sponge, always absorbing the world surrounding him, and giving it his X2 twist filled with humor and ambiguity. He was a fearless artist who would take risks in the pursuit of expressing himself through his work.”
In lieu of flowers, Mrs. Stautberg has asked that donations in memory of Mr. Tolbert 2 be made to Glasstire.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. Annual conference gives the exact same speaker gift every year — how do I decline?
Every year I speak at a national conference in my industry. This is one of my favorite annual speaking events because I find the audience and their questions so insightful, and I consider this opportunity critical to combatting my imposter syndrome.
This conference does not offer an honorarium to speakers but instead gives each speaker a gift bag at the end of their presentation. Every single year the bag has contained the exact same items: a water bottle and notebook each emblazoned with the conference’s logo. This is my sixth year speaking and I always give two presentations, which means that I am given two gift bags, resulting in a veritable hoard of water bottles and notebooks that I do not need and are resigned forevermore to my junk drawer.
Most charities in my area don’t accept branded items to avoid being overrun with people’s old summer camp or 5K t-shirts so I can’t donate the gifts, and I would feel insincere re-gifting them. Additionally, the layout of the venue makes it near impossible for me to “accidentally forget” the gift since event staff are always around and would notice and flag me down. I suppose I could decline the gift via email when I accept the speaking invite, but part of the run-of-show is for a participant to stand up, thank me, recap the highlights of my presentation, and offer me the gift, so there’s no way for me to tactfully decline in front of the entire audience.
While I’m happy to graciously accept the repetitive gifts because I so enjoy this speaking engagement, a peer commented that it’s rude and unprofessional for the conference organizers to order the same exact speaker gifts every single year while knowingly inviting me and several other repeat speakers year after year. My peer says that if they aren’t going to pay us an honorarium, they should at least offer a sincere gift or take the time to flip through the merch catalogue to order something different but comparable in price, like a mug or tote bag.
At the end of the day, I don’t feel like this issue is worth raising with the conference organizers, but is my peer correct? If I were to decline the gift in-person or via email, how would I do so without seeming ungrateful or rude? Additionally, I sometimes help organize similar events for my employer and wouldn’t want to make the same mistake that repeat speakers would consider rude or thoughtless. Are speaker gifts really that deep or am I totally overthinking this entire thing?
Eh, branded merchandise is so common in situations like that … although it does come across as pretty thoughtless for them to keep giving you the same thing year after year (and twice per conference, at that). It’s not a big deal, but it would be better for them to mix it up. The fact that they haven’t bothered to does make it seem like they aren’t putting any thought into speaker recognition. Again, not a huge deal, but if you were the organizer I’d recommend changing it up.
I was going to suggest you just say “oh, no thank you, I’ve already got lots of these” the next time they hand you a gift bag, but since it’s part of a public presentation, that could look ungracious. But you could email them ahead of the next conference and say, “I’ve presented so often for you that I have a ton of your branded water bottles and notebooks, so you can skip me for gifts this year” … but chances are good that someone’s going to hand you a gift bag anyway because it’s part of their not-terribly-personal process. So you could just discreetly leave it on a conference table when no one is watching (a lot of conference gift bags end up abandoned that way).
2. Someone replaced my note with a ruder note
This is a minor issue but strange, and I’m curious what you think. We’ve had issues with properly handling equipment at work, so I left a note on the shelf that read: “Please wash the brushes before you put them away– It is much harder to clean once the dirt is dried on. Thanks.”
I didnt sign the note, but several people saw me do it and I mentioned it out loud. The next day, my manager asked me if I’d left the note by the brushes. I said yes, and he said it came across kind of rude. Then I saw the note he was pointing at, which now read: “STOP putting your dirty brushes back on the shelf it is DISGUSTING for everyone else WE KNOW WHO IS DOING IT”
He did believe me when I said that wasn’t my note, but now I’m just confused. Obviously this isn’t the biggest issue in the world, but is there anything I could have done about it? Asked around to find the mysterious note-fixer? Left a third note, explaining that I am not responsible for the second note?
Nah — you cleared it up, your boss knows it isn’t yours, and it’s not your job to track down whoever wrote it. If your boss cares enough, he can try to do that, but I suspect it’s not a huge deal to him (he can just take the note down, after all).
3. Coworker is threatening to quit if she doesn’t absorb my salary
I just put in my notice (yay!). Within an hour, my coworker had already spoken to our boss and threatened to leave if she didn’t absorb my salary entirely, almost doubling her pay. An important note is that my boss specifically asked me to not transition any of my workload to her. Now, she’s asking me to be her friend and transfer my tasks to her so that her salary negotiation will be better, especially since it looks like the CEO is going to call her bluff. I’m leaving, so there’s no impact to me, but I don’t know if it’s a very friendly thing to use my resignation as a bargaining chip. Should I help her in negotiations by boosting her task list?
No! Your boss explicitly instructed you not to. It would reflect really badly on you to do it anyway after you’d clearly been told you shouldn’t.
Also, it’s not really the point, but it’s highly unlikely that your employer going to add your salary to your coworker’s. At most she might get some kind of bump, but employers don’t generally add two salaries together for one position, even if she took over all your work. So she’s being really unrealistic! In any case, though, none of this is your problem. Just tell her, “Sorry, Jane told me not to.”
4. Should I return to talk with HR after I’ve already left my job?
I made the decision to leave my company. This all started around five months ago with a situation involving sexism and scapegoating that led to me having to open an HR complaint. Since then, my situation at work has been getting steadily worse. They took away part of the responsibilities of my job — ones I really liked. I wound up in the middle of a fight over something I did which was clearly part of my job description, but which upper management decided to attack me over to the level that I couldn’t effectively do my job anymore. Most recently, I was told not to talk about something extremely relevant to my job to anyone other than my boss, even though working out details of it with other people is clearly part of my job.
That last was enough. I gave notice. I sent a mail to the HR person who ran my investigation, and he forwarded me on to the person who handles departures. She wants to speak with me. However, she’s out of town until my last day. She wonders if I’d be available to meet the week after my employment ends.
People around me are saying not to do it, that it’s risky, or that if I do, I should bring a lawyer. Should I be worried? I’m second guessing my decision to talk to her at all now.
Well, first, you absolutely don’t need to talk to her at all if you don’t want to. You don’t work there anymore, and you have no obligation to participate in exit interviews or investigations after you leave. If you prefer to wash your hands of it, you can decline.
However, it sounds like it would be worth talking to a lawyer before you decide anything. What you described sounds very much like it could be illegal retaliation (it’s illegal to retaliate against someone for making a good faith complaint of discrimination, even if the original complaint turned out to be unfounded) and a lawyer could look at all the facts in your situation and lay out your options. That might include advising you not to talk to HR at this point, or it could include talking to them with the lawyer present or guiding you from behind the scenes, or all sorts of other things. But everything you described screams that a conversation with a lawyer would be a good next step. (To be clear, the lawyer would be because your workplace did something wrong, not because you did — which I note because your question “should I be worried?” implies that the opposite. Getting a lawyer involved would mostly be because it sounds like they mishandled this, not you.)
5. My employer won’t allow married couples to take the same weekend off together
Is it illegal to not allow a married couple who work in the same place a weekend off together?
It is not illegal. That’s one reason (of many) why it can be tricky for married couples to work for the same employer, particularly if it’s a small, coverage-based team.
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