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This failure to understand basic design principles gives the site a totally amateurish look. The low-quality graphics don't help at all, nor does the fact this web programmer doesn't know how to do domain masking. At least the site's navigation is easy to follow, or I'd have nothing nice to say at all.
I don't think I could revisit this site for awhile because of its embarrassing ugliness. And if I could be a little critical where I just cut some slack, not everything about the navigation is functional. What about that copycat slideshow box so common on many other news sites? It even has a playbutton - that does nothing at all. Oh wow, clicking on the arrow makes it so I don't have to move my mouse 2 centimeters to the right! Holy shit!
To the webdesigner for the D&C: Slideshow boxes are supposed to seamlessly flash through stories. And behave like, you know, a slideshow. Take a gander at The Onion, and don't be afraid to steal. If you just don't know how to code it, you need to drop some money on some books and classes. Good luck!
So, I made this yesterday because I like to use the internet to ruin people's sexdrives. Keeps people away from internet porn and all. It got posted on lolgrims by Diesel Sweeties creator rstevens. Hurray! cyb3rw3b famez0r.
I just tried explaining the concept of internet memes to a roomful of people who'd never heard of a lolcat (perish the thought!) and it is really better to just say, "you don't want to know."
What: A gathering of photographers and photo-enthusiasts. Bring a 4x6 framed photo to trade if you wish!
Where: in my shoes' place (check out the discussion for directions, or just ask moi)
When: Wed 17 October @ 7 PM
So? Celebrate one year of Rochestarians getting together via flickr. All are welcome, not just members of the site. BYOB. Snacks will be provided!
(hey flickr people, i don't mean any malicious intent by remixing your logo. if i'm infringing on a copyright, please tell me to take it down and I'll gladly comply. geez I'm paranoid about copyright laws ever since the LeGuin/Doctorow feud.)
vs. 
I am so torn up about the recent clash between Cory Doctorow and Ursula K. Le Guin. The former being a newly-discovered favourite author of mine; the latter being a staple in my inundated-by-scifi upbringing. A few months ago, Doctorow posted a paragraph Le Guin had written to the fanzine Ansible, operating under the Creative Commons assumption that
reproducing, for the purposes of commentary, a single paragraph originally published in a noncommercial venue, was fair use under 17USC, the American copyright statute.
The paragraph by Ms. Le Guin is a deliciously snarky short story in her own lyrical voice, and was written in response to this particular comment from a review posted on Ansible in May 2007:
'Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.' Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007)
I won't post the paragraph here, obviously, but here's a little taste:
Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs -- somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly ... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green.
Basically, Doctorow posted the whole paragraph and felt he had the right to do so under fair use. I'm with him. Le Guin posted the paragraph to her blog and she doesn't appear to charge her online readership for access to her posts. The letter of the law states "single paragraph," which happened to be the entirety of that particular work. At least Doctorow wasn't an ass about it. He could have posted everything but the last sentence or something along those lines.
From what I understand, this became an issue after the San Francisco Chronicle printed the entire work without permission from Le Guin, possibly because Doctorow's post on BoingBoing skewed the intent of the copyright on Le Guin's site. You can read Le Guin's recount of the conflict here, and Doctorow's apology to her here. Doctorow's been criticized for being self-serving even in his apology, but to me, Le Guin comes off the worst. I understand she feels cheated out of $200 or whatever, much less by some upstart young blogger-activist-SF hack with a penchant for Disney World and Digital Rights. So I won't criticize her for her condescending online rebuke of Doctorow. But I will ask, was it entirely necessary for her to turn into a 13-year-old with that last sentence there? "This letter is not copyrighted and may be excerpted or copied entire."
Really?
I dunno, I'm just a disappointed fan here.
(Photo of Cory by Scott Beale; Photo of Ursula by Marion Wood Kolisch.)
The other day, this post about shot-up polos from Attus Apparel made me think of a great book called Feed, by M.T. Anderson. It's a YA sci-fi novel, but don't let its genre deter you. Feed is smartly written and an entertaining read, even if you're an old-ish adult or don't typically enjoy sci-fi. Told through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy who thinks visiting the moon "completely sucks" and would rather watch the show Oh? Wow! Thing!, Anderson's narrative paints the internet (the feed) as the ultimate marketing tool for corporations. Cultures and subcultures are easily profiled and sculpted to consumerist perfection due to constant interaction with and observation by the feed. For a more in-depth review, follow this link.
A common motif in Feed is the constantly changing trends that get more and more ridiculous every week. One of the fads is remarkably prescient of this concept by Attus Apparel:
When we got there, Calista and Loga were getting out of Calista's car, and it was like, Whoa, because they were wearing all torn-up clothes. They were walking normal, but they looked like they'd been burned up and hit with stuff...
"Yuh," said Loga. "It's Riot Gear. It's retro. It's beat up to look like one of the big twentieth-century riots. It's been big since earlier this week."
- Feed, pp 158-9
Maybe those Attus Apparel guys read Anderson's novel? NOTCOT speculates all this violent pre-distressing of clothing is a response to society's obsession with crime dramas like Law & Order or CSI. I'm thinking it has more to do with conditioning our youth to get used to war, especially since this little vid by the company mentions that one guy's dad used to be a marine...Either way, this fashion statement's straddling some yellow cautionary tape between amusingly ironic and blatantly distasteful. They're not charging a hundred bucks for bullet-holes. I found it interesting that the little logos flashed at the end seem to call out to a number of different youth subsets - the jock, the frat boy, the punk, the xtreme sports lover...it's all a bit too clever.
Before the reign of the almighty Google commenced, when someone stole something from you, you'd file a police report.
Now of course, you bitch about it on your blog.
Chris H. has gone one step further into the sea of asshattery and has started a blog just to defame Win Butler of Arcade Fire for allegedly stealing his basketball. The blog's address is http://arcadefirestolemybasketball.blogspot.com/ . It has just two posts. First, Chris H.'s surly account of what he claims happened at the Cal Berkely gym, and the second asking Win to make restitution for the $40 basketball and the 10 bucks he had to pay to get into the gym that day.
Arcade Fire pointed out on their blog that it's incredibly easy to make something up these days if you've got a computer hooked up to the internet. Without video documentation or a police report, I'm inclined to agree. Something else is also telling me that this is so.
What really irks me about this is that for the next 6 months at least, the band is going to get asked why they steal basketballs by everyone they do an interview with. Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that someone at MTV2 paid that dude to start that blog?
Edit: The blog's offline now, as is "Arcade Fire Didn't Steal Dude's Basketball." Bummer. Anyone get any screenshots? It's kinda disappointing this didn't go on for longer since most people won't understand why I made this post at all, but I'm glad 'cuz Arcade Fire will probably be spared a lot of annoying questions at interviews this year.
Who: Tech-savvy Rochestarians
What: Ad-hoc gathering of like-minded people interested in technology and its impact on our future. A day of discussions, demos, learning, and sharing from all those present.
Where: B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences (Google Map) - 70-2400, 2455, and 2690
When: Saturday, 12 May 2007. 10 am - til you can no longer stand it. ;-)
The possibilities in web 2.0 have launched us into a new phase of communication, interaction, and of course, consumerism. Even though many of the nastier kinks in society can be attributed to consumerism, I see this as the beginning of a great thing. There's been too much emphasis in the last century placed in selling selling SELLING. What we actually needed was largely ignored while they shouted and stripped for us to show us what we wanted. Now, with applications like VisualDNA, it looks like a new communication is being opened with the market. We can return to a more personalized consumerism by showing the market what we want and need. Fighting fire with fire, basically. Like all great ideas, I wonder why no one thought of this one before!
So, what's VisualDNA? It's an online profile of you that's more visually appealing than either myspace or facebook, and probably gives a more accurate depiction of "what you're like". VisualDNA forms a personality analysis based on your age, where you live, and the selections you make from a series of photographs linked to questions about your feelings on music, love, excitement, etc. The result is a little notebook that shows the breakdown of which personality groups you fall under, exploring "mood," "fun," "habits" and "love". I can see this causing unease in some people, because, groan, "Here I am being lumped into a subgroup once again..." This is true to an extent, but it's definitely a step in moving away from that. The description you get for each of your personality components is more tailored to you - from what I can tell, it looks like age and location are definite factors in this profile, but I have a hunch the total sum of the four facets has an influence on the overall result as well.
I see a lot of promise in this project. Right now, once you've established your profile, you can see how your answers compared to others', and you can see the users who most closely resemble you. You can add a photo of yourself, message others on the site, and you get a neat-looking widget to share with your friends and invite them to the network! Even cooler, you can customize the widget to explain the pics you chose! Other aspects of this project are still being worked out...you've got messy-looking URLs, there's no actual private messaging through the site (it's an email form), and when I first attempted to assess my VisualDNA in the Mac browser Camino, it almost crashed (worked fine in Safari though!). Still, this is a cool thing.
According to the Imagini vision, they've realized that businesses spend a ridiculous amount every year on market research, and even more to advertise and entice us to be in the market. The people behind Imagini say that's all bunk now, and they're looking for ways to suit people's needs rather than exploit them. Imagini sees the internet as a medium for facilitating the communication between all people, by showing others both what we want and need. This is already in the beginning stages of implementation, as the other project they've got going is a recommendation of travel sites based on your profile. Neat!
From the Imagini blog:
Our view...is to open up a completely new method of communication - a language that everyone who can see can interact with and understand - a language of images that enables people to understand each other in a different way.
The reason we have chosen images as a way of doing this is because about 90% of the way we all communicate is non-verbal. This 90% is made up of all sorts of different components that include many visual aspects such as who we look, act and behave.
This is definitely an insightful use of the new communications technologies we've been seeing in the past couple years. You can check out my VisualDNA profile widget after the jump. Thanks to the lovely Johanna for linking me to this!
"It's nice weather inside the metro!" - Made in 1976, the first ad campaign for the Montreal Metro entices commuters with song, dance, and the prospect of scoring hot dates. "Peux-tu en dire autant dans ton auto?" (Can you say the same of your car?) Non, absolument non! Ha, I love the jingle they came up with for this. I feel like it could be very easily turned into the anthem for a fascist state. Just substitute "l'métro" with "prison camps" and you're well on your way!
[youtube vid] via [Montreal lj]
Il fait beau dans l'métro
Tout le monde est gai tout le monde a le coeur au soleil
Il fait beau dans l'métro
Plus ça va vite plus il fait beau dans nos oreilles
Il fait beau dans l'métro
Y'a du ciel bleu dans les yeux contents de tout le monde
Il fait beau dans l'métro
Car aujourd'hui notre métro c'est le plus beau du monde
Il fait beau dans l'métro
Et dans l'autobus c'est son p'tit frère
Il fait beau dans l'métro
et l'autobus
Peux-tu en dire autant dans ton auto?
Ah ah ah ah ah
Il fait beau dans l'métro
Notre métro c'est le plus joyeux
et comme il chante c'est tant mieux
Vive le métro
Oui
Il fait beau dans l'métro
I know shades of purple don't look that great in browser windows, especially not as background colors for blogs. I know this from a livejournal layout I kept up for a year. It looked like webpuke. You'd think after I changed the layout to nicer colors I'd learn to stay away from the purple. But purple is my favorite color! And I wanted "Silence is Orange" to be my favorite weblog! I decided that since I'm a cooler person than I was 3 years ago, SIO would be innately cooler than my livejournal ever was, so even if I used the same awful color scheme, it would look awesome.
That was a lie I kept telling myself because I was too lazy to find colors that actually looked pretty without ripping off anyone else's lovely color scheme. But one day I discovered I couldn't stand looking at my own page. I knew there had to be a change.
So I played around with colors. Downloaded some helpful widgets, experimented in photoshop, and after a bit found a combination of colors I really liked! Voila! C'est absolument parfait!
This morning I realized something. No, I'm not a design genius. My 45 minutes of painstaking color evaluation did not produce a unique phenomena of color no living eye has ever seen.
Say hello to my MacBook, keyboard protector, and neoprene sleeve:
They've been a part of my life the past 6 months. tee-hee. =S
Around Christmastime, I did a websearch for cool alarm clocks. I was staying up 'til 3 AM every night talking to the love of my life, so getting up for class at 9 AM tended to...not happen sometimes, and my mom suggested buying me a new alarm clock for Christmas. In my search, I came across the Industorious Clock , which is not an alarm clock at all. It's a clock application that syncs to your computer's clock and displays the date and time down to the last second, all using animation of a hand drawing and erasing each number.
Why? Why would anyone do this? Ha, besides being plain cool, this thing really has no function. But I visited the creator Yugo Nakamura's website and found a whole bunch of interactive digital art projects coded using motion logic. Nakamura uses simple shapes that move in beautifully hypnotic ways, but in these compositions, you are also part of the creation process. By interacting with the images onscreen, you affect the neverending construction of the piece. The cleverest part is that it's all based on algorithms of kinetic energy. The project is not all up to you, but is not possible without you, the artist, and the laws of physics. I could spend hours playing with this stuff! Try 1, 3, and 6 on for size.
One of the best things about 2007 for me so far is that I finished all three of Cory Doctorow's novels, and he is now one of my favourite authors. I've been a boingboing reader for the past year, but for some silly reason it never occurred to me to read any of his books. But once I picked up Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, I couldn't put it down. In fact I read six chapters sitting stark naked in my living room because its lovely bright green cover caught my eye on the way to the shower! I had to hide the damn thing under a pillow.
The book is basically about a guy, Jules, who is a "castmember" of Walt Disney World - he lives there and is part of a faction that takes care of part of the park. He loves the Haunted Mansion ride because of its human performers as well as the very clever illusions provided by age-old mechanical tricks - ropes, smoke and mirrors, acoustics. Unfortunately, a faction that got big overseas is moving in with newer, cooler technology that's completely revolutionizing the way rides work in the Magic Kingdom. You know, digital/brain interfacing, better robots. But Jules is convinced that what looks better in theory is not actually what's best for the park. He starts a grassroots movement, involving the castmembers and fans to save the true spirit of Disney World from becoming just another thing you can buy out of a box. The story is brilliant, told in witty, beguiling narrative that will make you want to go out and tell all your friends to read it too! After finishing it, I immediately bought it and his other two novels. He's that good.
Because Cory is so awesome and believes in fair use and all that good stuff, you can see for yourself and download the entire novel right here, in a variety of formats. You can read it on your cell phone, smart phone, palm pilot, etc. Or just right in your web browser. You can even sign up to read it in installments through email!
This video is strangely compelling in its randomness, and consistent zoom-in-on-each-frame alongside the soft rock ballad sung in Japanese. I suggest watching the whole thing, and then expanding the explanation on the side. I found it on youtube searching for "giraffes."
I would just like to point out that if you do a web search for "vermicelli" on Google Images, you will encounter this image. And if you click on the thumbnail provided by Google Images, you will be taken to this archive of artist Chris Goodwin's work. Bestiality, bondage, and donkeys abound. BIZARRE. (NSFW, probably!)
One day I decided to keep a blog. For posterity (but not necessarily for the children [too immediate a posterity]), for liberty (of expression!), and for America. Alright, not exactly for America. But you can't make up a list of reasons with just two things, have you noticed that? It sounds awkward to us. Our minds think in threes. A list with four things starts sounding too long right when you start off saying the fourth part, and, pfft. To just leave it at one? (Which arguably I should have done, since the other two reasons are a stretch. Actually, the second reason is the only sincere reason I've listed as to why I've started this blog. I mean, I'm all about posterity, and America (Make an informed decision on November 7th! Please!!), but they are not reasons motivating me to blog. Oh heck, why do I even need a reason? Everyone has one! (At this time, I'd link to RuPaul's blog to prove my point, but I don't really want to be held responsible for ruining anyone's day.)
So, without further ado (or parentheses), I have begun my blog. I kept waiting for my future self to show up and write a brilliantly insightful first post for me, but I guess my future self doesn't share my present sentiments that writing a blog post for one's past self is a noble use of time-travel resources.
