What is an accident?

Larry: For the sake of your viewers who can’t see this, I’m showing you I always have a flashlight in my pocket. That’s what I walk around with. A good prop person always has a a flashlight, and it’s there so that you can shine it down the barrel and check for that. If you don’t have a flashlight, don’t go on set. And so that’s yet another step along this horrible chain of events that leads to these incidences. And I do want to point something out. You said it once or twice, Liz, but you notice I have not once used the word accident.

Lizzie: Yeah.

Larry: Right? Because an accident implies that there’s nobody to blame. Oh, it was an accident. It was an act of God. No. The Crow and all these other high-profile things There’s people to blame. There’s enough blame to go around. If you don’t do your job correctly and it leads to an injury or a fatality, you’re to blame. It’s not an accident. An accident is when you do everything you can possibly do to prevent it and something still goes wrong. That’s an accident. These are not accidents. You know what I mean?

Emphasis mine.

From Larry Zanoff, an armorer who works on films. He’s talking about the role of an armorer and their importance in keeping everyone safe on set.

From What Went Wrong, a podcast about movies, and how it’s nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one.

Episode link on podcastindex.org

The future of knowledge is yours to protect. #Wikipedia25

I am really proud of this video my colleagues made to celebrate the 25th birthday of #Wikipedia. It’s a really stressful time in the free knowledge world and this celebration is a much needed reminder that there are amazing people behind all this and it’s stunning what they have accomplished over the last quarter century. Here’s to another 25 and beyond!

Fun behind-the-scenes fact. All media in the video is under a free license. As such, we have to provide attribution. For all 650+ assets. Here it is as one honking table. 🤯

Wikimedia Commons Vanity Stats

I made a thing. It allows you to see how many media requests your files have received on Wikimedia Commons. It’s a vanity project and the numbers don’t mean much without more context. 🙂

It’s a small python script that allows you to provide a username, date range, and a number of files to check. It then uses the MedaiWiki and mediarequests APIs to create a .csv file of how many media requests those files have received. I did this for my own ego, so a literal vanity project!

If this sounds interesting, I’d appreciate any constructive feedback. Not sure I’ll work on it more than I have, but thought I’d share.

https://github.com/ckoerner/Wikimedia-Commons-Vanity-Stats

I went a’ protesting

Spent a few hours in the pouring rain last week protesting with about 120 other folks down at City Hall.

One guy came up and was reading our signs. He said he was an immigrant to the US for 10 years and in his entire time of being here he’s never seen something so “insane”. He couldn’t believe what is happening in the White House and thanked us for showing up.

Another gentleman was a military veteran who spent the entire two hours walking with his partner from corner to corner with a large visible sign. He was very stoic, yet friendly, individual.

A lot of horn honk and thumbs up including one from a school bus and a firetruck, which was very amazing. I’m pretty sure the firetruck wasn’t supposed to be doing that. 🙂

It felt good to get out of the house and be around other people. To do something other than doom scroll and read sarcasm and defeat on social media.

A++ would protest again.