My best-laid plans

Filed under: Humour, Internet and Media

Well, to the mildly obsessive-compulsive amongst you, or to the pop-culture archaeologists, I am so, so sorry to do this:

TV Tropes is the biggest timesink I have ever encountered. I recommend starting with shout outs or Jossed or, perhaps, a favourite show.

I’ve done just about nothing in the last two days but read this damned site. It even references Girl Genius!

Another straw (or two)

Filed under: Internet and Media

Following up on my previous musings:

Toys R Us has tramp stamps

Where has all the pubic hair gone?

Musings on the Modern Modus Operandi

Filed under: General Thoughts, Internet and Media

This is a bit of a catch-all posting; I’ve been entertained by a few of the things I’ve seen recently, enraged by others, and figured I would pass on a few tidbits.

Seen on thursday evening in a restaurant: A little boy, probably a bit over one year old, starts to do that high-pitched attention-getter crying bit, and after a token effort at calming him by his father, the mother pulls out a portable DVD player and sets it up on the table so that he can watch a TV show and shut the hell up.

Overheard this morning in a Starbucks: A couple having coffee together, both looking modern, professional, and stereotypically ‘starbucky’… Talking about playing online RPGs, power-leveling, and gold farming.

In the news: A film, Fitna, that is — as do so many things these days — enraging the religious of the eastern world to the point of sputtering threats. Please note, “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

I’ll bet Santorum likes underdogs

Filed under: General Thoughts, Media and Science

Okay, that title bears little, if any, relation to the content of this post. This post consists mainly of a pointer to this wonderful critique of the underdog narrative in science journalism, found by way of Slashdot.

I’ve never given it the attention it deserves, obviously, but science reporting in the popular media — from the news outlets to the movies — is pretty bad. Cinema is especially guilty of portraying the scientific establishment as a repressive overmind bent on quashing any threat to some imagined orthodoxy, and popular science writing isn’t a lot better.

I hope you enjoy the article.

A Rabbit Hole

Filed under: Internet and Media

If you want to while away a few hours, and find out more about one of the more unnerving celebrity-sponsored cults out there, I recommend checking out Operation Clambake when you have some time to spare.

What I get out of this is a low-level sense of fear that the reportage we get on the subject of scientology — or the lack thereof, more accurately — is a reflection of a more thorough penetration of the media by this very media-savvy organization.

And then I accuse myself of being paranoid and move on… but never completely without a care.

Scientology is the one and only thing that makes me glad it is impossible to be elected in the US or Canada without professing to some christian belief system.

This post brought to you as a tiny, tiny shot from the Internet’s side of Scientology vs. The Internet.

Southward

Filed under: General Thoughts and Media

I’ve been keeping an eye on the southern neighbor these days; the election coming up down there will have regrettably far-reaching consequences for not only the US but for us, too. I’ve seen more than a few things that bother me, not least of which is the fact that there is literally not one candidate for any party that strikes me as anything other than an opportunistic, grasping, myopic shell of a human being. I wouldn’t move to the US right now if someone paid me.

Okay, well, maybe if they paid me a lot.

It’s the last epithet that concerns me, though; I expect grasping, and opportunistic is synonymous with ‘career politician’. The persistent failure of vision, however, is scary; they can’t see past their clawing to the top to acknowledge the wounds they’re inflicting on themselves in the process. And Bob forfend that we suggest that the process is flawed, that’s frankly unamerican.

I know, I know, I devote too much thought to this for someone who doesn’t even live within the borders, let alone have a right to vote there, but the US elections are merely a logical endpoint (not the only logical endpoint, mind) of the particular form of representative democracy that is so widely believed to be the one, true way. I know I’m going a bit off-message for myself here, but I blame a combination of my usual bugbear (the unending manipulable and moronic voting public) and a new beast: Corporate finance.

I’m a devoted supporter of freedom of expression, so this is hard for me, but I believe more and more that allowing corporate freedom of expression is suppressing individual freedom of expression too much. I know that there’s a good argument to be made that corporations’ speech is just a collective expression of individual freedom to speak, but I’m no longer convinced that it’s a valid defence. I’m arguing ethics from consequences here, which is not always a safe path to tread. Here, however, the consequences look increasingly dire.

Still, in the end, it’s the people who keep putting this system over themselves.

What’s a libertarian to do?

She sued him for WHAT?

Filed under: Internet, Media and Rants

Well, by this time I’m sure that all of us have heard of, and been outraged by, the story of Sandra Bergen, the Saskatchewan woman who sued her dealer when the methamphetamines that she overdosed on left her in a coma.

(She’s got a website, by the way: Meth Today. Very… irritating web design, leaving aside any other cause for complaint.)

My initial reaction was a resigned disgust so intense that I couldn’t even get disgusted by it. I saw the headline, blinked once, and went on with my day, secure in the fact that at least I am not so pathetically stupid nor incapable of taking responsibility for my actions. Nor, in the main, has that sentiment changed; this sad individual made bad choices that led her to pain. However, I’ve questioned this a bit today, enroute to that final conclusion, and I thought I’d share my thoughts, such as they are.

There’s a lot of questions about addiction and its position as an illness; whether an addict is responsible for their actions, or if they should be treated as being sick and preyed upon. I fall on the former side of the fence, and have for most — if not all — of my adult life. Coming from the other side in this, however, is the argument that there are already criminal responsibilities in this matter, and that this woman was guilty of those crimes, but that the civil responsibility should be shared between her and her procurer.

So, I thought about this for a while… in fact, I was thinking about it as I started this post and even then I was waffling in the other direction — until I started framing it as responsibility in the second paragraph. It’s seductive, though, this idea that the blame for this kind of choice can be ‘shared’ somehow, as though we’re not really in control and so how can anyone really point a finger at us if we do something catastrophically stupid. But that seductive call is a siren, luring one onto some metaphorical rocks… (here I stop with the attempted classical metaphors). The sad truth of the matter is that, irrespective of the criminal acts being perpetrated, Sandra is no less responsible for her actions than any other person that harms themselves in the pursuit of pleasure. If I jump out of a plane and injure myself, I’m not going to blame the pilot of the plane, nor will I blame the instructor who ‘gave me my first hit.’

And that’s what’s happening here. And it shouldn’t.

Brand New

Filed under: Internet, Media and Science

Well, thank you, Stewart Brand, for doing a fine job of saying something that I’ve held to be true for a good long time: Good old stuff sucks.

This is part of the EDGE questions for 2008; “What did you change your mind about in 2007?” This is a web thing, I suppose, but some fine thinkers are involved, and their responses run the gamut from predictable (Sam Harris) to interesting (Richard Dawkins).

I recommend checking the rest of them out from the provided links. I’m on my way to work, but I think that this evening I’ll try to add my own “What did I change my mind about in 2007?” to it; if I can find one

Rights? You don’t want those.

Filed under: Events, Internet and Media

Buried under the avalanche of holiday-related product placements that hit once every year for about, oh, three months, a major change in Canadian copyright legislation is about to take place, and — despite Minister of Industry Jim Prentice’s claim that this change will “put consumers first,” there’s little enough of that to be seen in the proposed legislation.

Now, I’m not going to parrot the analysis here, because one of the biggest friends that this type of law has is an uninformed populace. What I’d ask instead is that you (the two of you still reading this after my long silence) spend a morning informing yourself about the way laws like this will affect your freedom to consume and produce art in the Canada we’ll live in for the foreseeable future. If you need a starting point, as I’m sure that you do, I can offer a couple:

If you want a great video showing you what is happening in the US — whose DMCA is the template for the act that will be introduced in Canada sometime in the next week and a half — then I recommend Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk: How Creativity is Being Strangled By the Law. It’s 20 minutes, but it’s well worthwhile.

If you’re more inclined for a local perspective, you can do far worse than Michael Geist’s Canadian DMCA articles. Geist is a lawyer specializing in the internet — specifically issues with respect to privacy and e-Commerce, and he’s one of our best early-warning systems for dangerous copyright legislation.

And, in the end, if you come to the end of these links — and please at least skim them — and you want to do something, there’s an article on what you can do, too. I, for one, am going to be contacting Laurie Hawn and Jim Prentice. Hopefully on some level they listen.

Update

I just sent this to Jim Prentice

Good day, Mr. Prentice;

I am not one of your constituents in the strictest sense, being from Edmonton. I do live in Laurie Hawn’s constituency, and I am a Conservative voter in both the capital- and small-c- senses. It is in the latter capacity — as a philosophical conservative — that I write you today.

I believe that Canada’s future as a vibrant culture and an economic powerhouse can be better assured by removing barriers to innovation and reducing the challenges with which creative persons must contend to produce their art. Coming into the earlier parts of the 21st century we have an unparalleled opportunity to take the fruits of our technological process at this early stage of their development and use them to broaden our collective horizons in ways that you and I cannot possibly imagine at this time. This will not, however, happen if we as a nation do not protect the freedoms necessary to create new art from old, a process which has been ongoing for almost all of human history, with a lull only in the early parts of the 20th century when the costs to create new media prevented all but the largest corporations from participating. That imbalance has now righted itself, and the technology of creativity is now democratically available again. The question is, with what will these newly-enabled artists create? What will be their raw material? Moreover, how will others see their work? The restrictive legislation that is to be tabled later this month lacks critical provisions for fair use and for reverse engineering, both of which are driving forces of invention.

Make no mistake, I am not a ‘copyleft’ fanatic; I am a software developer by trade and I make my living on copyright and the protections it provides. I do not wish to see a regime wherein my work is freely available without compensation to any Tom, Dick, or Harry who decides that they want it. Moreover, my friends who are artists run the gamut from the “give it away” to the “it’s mine and I should be paid for it” on the spectrum. What is true, however, is that the legislation that you are expected to introduce this month will hurt all of us in ways that are eminently predictable, since we have the immediate example of the United States to see.

In conclusion, I ask that you reconsider your stance on consumer consultation before introducing this bill. When creating content has become so trivial (witness YouTube, although perhaps you’ll share my sense of disappointment with most of that content) it’s important to realize that the only difference between a ‘consumer’ and a ‘creator’ in this century is likely to be in the size of their wallet.

Thank you for your time.

Plaudits

Filed under: Media

I don’t normally toot my family’s horn in this space (they’re as gifted as I am at that themselves, for the most part) but my Granddad is widely regarded as a great man.

I’m sure that Char will comment on this soon enough.