One day I want to be cool and know what cons to go to before I just hear about it after the fact. I knew about ROFLcon long long ago and mostly wrote it off. I was clearly greatly mistaken and now the “golden years” are most likely over and next year will suck (I have yet to go to a con where “last year was better” isn’t the number one thing people say). I’m so bitter I should move to Pennsylvania.
What was I posting about? Oh yeah this talk about Internet Fame is an awesome critique of internet culture as a whole as well as how celebrity has changed over the years. I love that it’s all in a .txt file.
“I want to create a new taxonomy of modern internet fame. This is important because otherwise we end up lumping gothic fetish models and Michael Arrington in the same bucket. Which is gross.”
NYTimes.com hand-codes its HTML. Why in the world is this so news worthy? I hear the Times also pays writers for stories and the sky is blue.
My best guess is that this might be the crossover moment for non web organizations. To date when most people think of web designers they think of dreamweaver. Perhaps now companies will start demanding hand coding designers. But who knows.
A great if albeit sexist named article about testing the new Ubuntu on a beginner. I would say it mirrors my over all feeling that for the most part the OS works great but it’s biggest problem seems to be the programs and how the OS interacts with them. Finding linux programs needs to be easier, Installing needs to be easier and help with where the program went after installing could be better as well.
at the very least I would like to. Ubuntu 8 is pretty hot and seems to have a lot polish that makes it feel really complete and solid. The fact that I can install it on windows as an app is just amazing.
so far these are the things that are keeping me from switching completely:
- Photoshop
- all the music players suck… I still don’t love winamp but it does the job the best for me.
- FireFox also still displays ass on linux.
- I wish Wine worked better.
But hopefully these things will be able to be fixed in the next couple years and I can make the full jump over.
The new 3d buildings in google earth is amazing. Where is the wiki like project to render the entire earth in a 1:1 3d model? With sketch up it would be kinda fun for everyone.
This would have been great if some of it was in Michael Moore file Sicko as it got so much publicity. I’m no expert on medicine but it seem pretty obvious our entire health system is pretty messed up. So it’s no too surprising that birth has the same problems.
It’s even so ingrained that in the book Egalia’s Daughters: A Satire of the Sexes, which tried to reverse all gender stereotypes, the women still had births in a hospital instead of with a midwife.
I’m now putting Books I Am Reading in to Beta. I was going to try an attempt to do this with some fanfair but think I’ll just go for a quiet beta. Hopfully everything goes well or I might just drop it back to Alpha.
Currently the site works well for my needs but I do know there is alot more stuff to add. Things like comments, reordering of lists and possibly some better way to keep track of friends are the directions I would like to go.
Great interview over at toonzone with Bryan Konietzko and Mike DiMartino. Although they says they are extremely involved in the Avatar movie I still have my doubts… esp about live action. But they also announced the possibility of a new Avatar Project:
TZN: Can you say if [the new project is] Avatar-related, or is it something new?
DIMARTINO: Yeah. It’s a new incarnation of the Avatar story.
Hopefully this will be all new story and just not a retelling of Avatar in some other format. This is such good news after hearing the show was ending.
Dev finally revealed to the world the great RSS Remixer that he himself had been using for weeks now. It’s a really great way to avoid the repetitive need to compile this myself while also avoiding punishing people by putting it all directly in my rss feed.
- omg Avatar is ending… *tears* (sat apr 19, 11pm)
- Sarah Marshal was awesome (sat apr 19, 11pm)
- the sitcoms I like these days are so different that watching seinfeild really feels like going back in time (sat apr 19, 4pm)
- check out my new region select menu next to the logo.. I think it’s awesome: http://flugpo.com (fri apr 18, 8pm)
- fuck you vista… you broke camstudio too… no audio my ass (fri apr 18, 12am)
- Currently Reading: Starcross: A Stirring Adventure of Spies, Time Travel and Curious Hats
J.K. Rowling is in an interesting situation and creative commons is the answer. The Harry Potter Lexicon wants to publish a reference book. No big deal but it seems all they want to print is (to simplify the situation) an alphabetized list of characters and magic spells.
There is a long history of letting people publish reference books but the key seems to be that the book add enough original content to justify a “transformative work” or one way to say they are not just reprinting J.K. Rowlings words. The argument is that the Harry Potter Lexicon is adding no original work and so should not be printed. Most people in the know see that as the reason that Rowling will win. Most of the critics saying she will lose seemed to have missed the fact that there is “no new work” in the Lexicon that they have planned to print.
The trouble is the law see no difference between the web and a printed book. And if the Lexicon breaks the law in a book then they also break the law online. If Rowling loses because she did not enforce her copyright while the Lexicon was in the digital format then she now has to go after all the harry potter infringement going on online that she has happily left alone. Fan fiction and bands will quickly have cease and desist coming at them killing one of the most vital fandoms on the net. But even if Rowling wins she is still trying to make the copyright law do something it was not meant to do. This was a law suit that could have easily been avoided with a creative commons license.
With a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license it would be very clear what can and can not be made money on. Fans could continue to create songs, write fan fiction, and even compile reference books as long as they make no money on it and allow other to continue to modify their work as well. Any one who wanted to make money could strike a deal with Rowling to get a license where they could make money.
This license might create some situations that the publishers might not like but there is no reason to worry. For example people would be free to share the text of the book for free. There is no reason to fear a wildly available ebook though as one has existed since before the book came out and had no impact on sales.
Other possible problems could be that Wizard Rock bands might not be able to sell CDs but the great part about Creative Commons as opposed to Copyright is that it’s easy to extend extra rights to who every you want. Rowling could grant CD sale rights to all bands.
Copyright is not doing want J.K. Rowling wants it to do. It would be easy to make Creative Commons do whatever she needed it to do. So why does Creative Commons continue to be so controversial when it’s fits so great in to letting a fan base grow while keeping the right to make money in the authors hands.
Two Minutes and 42 Seconds in Heaven says no song should be longer then 2:42 (muxtape). A quick look at my collection and out of 14 songs I only think two are really amazing. “Leave The Biker” by Fountains of Wayne and “Love Like Her” by The Candy Butchers. But in general I agree with the sentiment and think the power pop I love does tend to be on the short side.
This is the best explanation of the housing crisis I’ve seen anywhere. Definitely give it a look.
Awesome article on why superman sucks. I’ve never liked him as a character but this expresses the frustration really well.
I quit metafilter because every time I post they just make me sad.
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