Seriously, WTF.

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!

Toys R Us has tramp stamps

Where has all the pubic hair gone?

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.”

Sex, Sexuality, and Erotism

No idea how long it’ll be online, but I’ve already seen some interesting and well-shot erotica on it. Also, while it’s mostly images of women, there’s a gallery of well-formed nude men in it too; a nice sidelight for the ladies. There may be more in the archive, and I imagine it’d be fun going hunting

Hey, Crackhead

Cement Block, $1

Thank You Donkey Porn

$772,000 a year, and still lonely (mirrored on Jezebel because it was deleted)

I Have a Hot Tub

Why Doesn’t He Want Me

Of course you could just read the original Metafilter thread…

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.

(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.

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

ReadMe

This is a wiki collecting a significant fraction of the Ask Metafilter questions pertaining to suggested books.

I fear this list… It means I’ll be nose-deep in books soon. I’ve been expanding my reading tastes a bit lately, and this is only going to push that harder.

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.

The universal spam solution critique

Your company advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down! 

I’m just going to let these speak for themselves.

Found via MetaFilter.

Thank you, MetaFilter.

If you’re an internet forum reader of any kind, watch it to the end.