text:
Monday, September 24, 2007

Digital Stories

On the website I write for, CinCity2000, we're making the move to having a Video Game Week starting today. Normally, we're a cinema website run by a small cult of film geeks, so taking on video games is branching out for us: my first piece for the week is up, Fighting Purple Tentacles: A Wasted Youth Playing Adventure Games.

The fundamental difference between film and video games is in the interaction. When we talk about film, we're talking about a story that exists the same in static form no matter who is viewing it: while viewers bring different knowledge into a film and a different interpretation out of it, the film itself is unaffected. Video games change to the player: the order of events and even the outcome can change depending on the player's approach and skill. Talking about the experience of a video game, then, becomes more personal: a player might remember spending hours trying to "beyond the pail" in Companions of Xanth [the final solution involves a catapult] or finally consulting a hint book to find out where a hidden key is concealed.

I remember all the games I grew up with in context of the time: when I go back to play these games now, it's far from the same experience. I'm not living with the parents who used to be my companions in adventure. I feel like I'm slower with the puzzles than I used to be, as if the logic that I used to rely upon for those types of journeys went rusty when I started higher education and started taking in too much literary theory. Still, there's the same sense of accomplishment in figuring out a puzzle to get butter from a butterfly or save the world from a rampaging purple tentacle.

Meanwhile, the face of games is changing, and the adventure game's almost disappeared into obscurity while games like the latest iteration of Halo [reviewed by my colleague Big Ross] transform gaming from a hobby for geeks in their basement to one for frat boys and normal folk, kindof like film itself.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Mirages of Cuisine

I've got an article up on CinCity today: The Culinary Arts: A Gourmet's Appreciation For Film. Writing that piece, I've been doing a lot of thinking on how food is presented to us in media: the Internet's even made it so online ordering from restaurants and the grocery store ala PeaPod can allow for the coveting of food through a virtual image right through delivery. Seems to me there's something lost from the experience of going to a grocery store--or better yet, a farmer's market--and selecting the perfect parts from which to craft a meal. I won't be surrendering my food purchases to a clickable shopping system anytime soon.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Tribal Warfare + MMOs

There's a great article over at Gamasutra, "The Academics Speak: Is There Life After World of Warcraft", with some interesting folks discussing the question of how players end up in different virtual world. World of Warcraft is clear king of the MMO jungle right now, but many players choose to spend their time on far less populated worlds. Some choose games like Guild Wars that offer the lure of a one time investment, others stick with the community of Second Life, and a stubborn few continue to play MMOs or even MUDs that put graphics on the back burner in favor of other qualities. One of my own friends recently migrated to World of Warcraft after sticking with Asheron's Call for over seven years [the game launched in 1999!]. The move was traumatic for him: it's abandoning a world that had become a second home. I was a long time resident of Asheron's Call myself, and I could return to that game today and still comfortably manuver the land of Dereth.

When I migrated gaming worlds, as I've done repeatedly, I took a core of fellow gamers with me--my extended family. I only stayed in contact with a few other players who'd switched worlds in a deliberate sense, but I did find commonality in running into other players discussing the worlds left behind. But if my family didn't play Warcraft, would I have stayed with the hard core tribe of Asheron's Call or migrated on with the rest of the coolseekers to newer and graphically improved realms? Probably the former. Once comfortable within a virtual world, I don't feel the same pull to move to a new environment--the same reasoning, perhaps, that makes old school adventure games still feel more appealing to me with their relaxed and cartoonished environs than their "realistic 3-D" counterparts.

So what will be the next big game? I've read the previews and heard the hype for the next generation of MMOs. Star Wars Galaxies was supposed to move the world away from fantasy games, but couldn't get over the problem of too many heroes in a world that needed ordinary folk. Lord of the Rings seems fit to suffer from the same problems--not everyone, after all, can be wizard or ringbearer. World of Warcraft is particularly suited to networks of social tribes as the entire world is at war, and a concept for heroes and allegiences exists in every faction. Players can build their groups within sets of avatars that share a language, race, and appearance and advertise their loyalties with proudly worn tabards. Even my students in my Cyberspace class had their own guild--they dubbed it the "Fluffy Wuffy Friends," as I recall, much to my dismay. These common ties and rituals can migrate to another game--but I think it will take more than slightly better graphics and a license tie in to draw the hordes.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Did you know that the building we're taking this class in used to house a brothel? I came across this interesting little fact today, from some of my other classmates. I was considering the implications, and it got me to thinking. There's some strange artifacts on the apartment door where I live--what's that all about? Then there's a house in my parents' neighborhood that was raided for a big drug operation, or so "they" say. I wonder if the people who live there now know about the night the helicopters showed up. This leads me to my concept for an online service.

If you look into figuring out a building history right now, there are a few resources for you online. On "WikiHow" they point you to a few basic steps: inspecting building materials, going to the local library and deed office, things of that nature. Search on building history in general, and you'll find a lot of local listings for places that expect you to drive out and engage in physical research. Clearly, it's time for some consolidation.

There's a website called "Where's George?" that's based on the US serial numbers of dollar bills--someone registers them, and lists the site on the bill before spending it. The next curious person who picks up the bill might go online and list the location and new facts about the bill--a tear, in what shop it was received as change, that sort of thing. What I envision is a similar service from houses that draws on the power of the web to track features of addresses: relevant news reports, building information, change of residence, anything that can be listed. Then, take it one step further and allow specific reporting, perhaps with a verification of address step to keep total chaos from ruling but generally relying on a Wikipedia style of information buildup. Eventually, this could become the Facebook for houses: profile pictures, a list of murders, arrests, and bad breakups that happened right here on this spot, strange rumors and unsolved mysteries--and that leaky faucet on the third floor that no one's been able to fix. Perhaps a crossover with GoogleMaps satellite imaging features could link these profiles to the current state of events. Local legends and ghost sightings would be right next to the information someone looking into house ownership, or even apartment rental, is most curious to know.

And, of course, life changing information like the fact our classroom was once a house of ill repute. I checked, by the way, that URL isn't even taken.

Readings in Digital

I’ve gathered the resources I intend to return to first in the writing of my paper on Virtual Worlds and Virtual Romance this semester. This is a very brief annotated bibliography of the first books I’m looking at with this topic in mind; many of them are particularly useful works in virtual worlds studies. I hope this might be helpful to others as a resource for looking offline for respectable sources for virtual world studies; I've found that when reading articles online on topics like the virtual economy or interactive narrative much of the same surface impression appears repeatedly, and these are some works that get beneath that surface.

Digital Texts / Digital Worlds

Castronova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds.
Edward Castronova approaches the new concerns of virtual worlds not from a social perspective but from an economic one. With the monopolies and mercenaries of Second Life and the still thriving trade in virtual gold and avatars virtual worlds must be considered as places where people go not only to play but to profit. Castronova considers the implications of the various economic factors affecting virtual worlds, including the use of cheap labor for “goldfarming” and the profitability and contract inherent within the subscription model still in use by most MMOs today.

Crawford, Chris. On Interactive Storytelling.
In On Interactive Storytelling, Chris Crawford begins by determining what makes a story, particularly for the purposes of storytelling in games. There is an expectation on the part of gamers that Crawford notes allows games to escape the actual confines of storytelling: “Games have never paid much attention to the many structural requirements imposed on stories…players don’t complain when games jerk them through wild dramatic gyrations because they don’t expect games to follow the protocols of storytelling” (14). However, this doesn’t mean that games should be limited by this historical trend, and Crawford goes on to address how the future of games might address the diametrically opposed demands of interaction and narrative.

Juul, Jesper. Half-real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds.
Jesper Juul writes particularly compellingly when he is discussing the relationship between computer systems themselves and the playing of games; essentially he points out that there is no more appropriate use for both to be put towards. At the heart of game design is the creation of the rules that will govern someone’s play; without rules, a game cannot exist.

King, Brad and John Borland. Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture.
In Dungeons and Dreamers, Brad King and John Borland offer a history of developments in the last thirty plus years of computer gaming. They begin their account before the first computer games emerged, as they pinpoint two origin concepts and discuss the rest of the history of gaming in those terms. Both occurred in 1972: the first is the creation of the paper based gaming system Dungeons & Dragons, the second the craze surrounding arcade video games. This offers a familiar duality of storytelling based gaming, where almost everything was left to the imagination of the players, and the electronic based action and reflex gaming of the arcade. In surveying the developments in computer gaming, Borland and King begin with these earlier forms, noting the origin roots that would have a strong influence on the computer games of today. If you’ve ever read a comic in Penny Arcade and not gotten the joke, then it’s likely you weren’t as thoroughly immersed in computer game geek culture as a few of us were in the late 80s and early 90s—Borland and King can catch you up on what you missed while seeing the outdoors or going on dates.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage.
Marshall McLuhan has been heralded as a prophet, named the patron saint of Wired Magazine, and even made a cameo in a Woody Allen film--all this from a man who didn’t want his own grandchildren watching television. McLuhan looked at media with a brilliant nonlinearity that has made him infinitely quotable, so I’ll let him explain himself: “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, pyschological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty--psychic or physical.”

Meadows, Mark Stephen. Pause & Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative.
Everything from CYOA books to MMOs fall under what Meadows refers to in his work Pause & Effect as interactive narrative: “An ‘interactive narrative’ is a form of narrative that allows someone other than the author to affect, choose, or change the events of the plot” (238). While a narrative is being offered, it is always secondary to the demands of interactivity, as the user is confronted not with a written linear text but with a screen, an interface, a host of characters and a perspective that differs from game to game. Most importantly, a game must be playable. Often the criticism is leveled at computer games that the stories are not “literary.” However, this misses the point: these stories must be designed to work as part of a whole subject to interactions of the user, not as a master story to be “read.” Balance varies across the genre: greater openness comes at expense of the planned story, while a planned story requires the limiting of user freedom.

Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages.
In Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages, Montfort explains the literary connection between interactive fiction and the riddle: “the most direct counterpart to interactive fiction in oral and written literature is seen in the riddle…by presenting a metaphorical system that the listener or reader must inhabit and figure out in order to fully experience, and in order to answer correctly, the riddle offers its way of thinking and engages its audience as no other work of literature does” (4). This metaphor of the riddle offers Montfort the opportunity to draw a comparison that declared that riddles and interactive fiction “both have a systematic world, are something to be solved, present challenge and appropriate difficulty, and join the literary and the puzzling” (43). The ability of a riddle such as one by Swift to remain literature while existing as a challenge for the reader reveals that “the literary and puzzling aspects of the form are hardly inherently antagonistic, but rather must work together for the effect of certain IF works to be achieved” (63).

Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. MIT Press: Boston, 1998.
In Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck, the holodeck mentioned in the title remains now a construction of a media fiction, in particular the Star Trek universe. The Star Trek vision of the holodeck is of a space where anything can be projected and interacted with on the same level as reality—people, food, and scenery. Janet Murray describes the seduction of the holodeck: “The Star Trek holodeck is a universal fantasy machine, open to individual programming: a vision of the computer as a kind of storytelling genie in the lamp” (15). However, like the genie that fulfills wishes in sometimes disastrous ways, there may be a dark side to the holodeck story world—“If we could someday make holographic adventures as compelling as Lucy Davenport, would the power of such a vividly realized fantasy world destroy our grip on the actual world? Will the increasingly alluring narratives spun out for us by the new digital technologies be as benign and responsible as a nineteenth-century novel or as dangerous and debilitating as a hallucinogenic drug?” (17).

Poole, Steven. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. Arcade Publishing: New York, 2000.
In Trigger Happy, Steven Poole does not set out to tell of a videogame revolution to come in the future: he is instead a chronicler, exposing the revolution that he has already seen happening around him. It is not a matter of whether the videogame will become an art form; instead, it is a matter of how the videogame already is an art form and what the next steps of its evolution will be: “…when videogames are at their best, what you’re doing is something vastly more creatively challenging than watching a docusoap or a quiz show…that hunk of molded plastic, that PlayStation or Dreamcast, is a magic box that allows you to play with fire. A Prometheus engine” (206). The examples Poole offers, the PlayStation and Dreamcast, are two previously popular gaming platforms allowing for the playing of games on the television set that have now been superseded by newer systems. Poole gives these systems and by extension their more recent counterparts a mythical significance, fire being the gift of Prometheus from gods to man, a life saving tool and potential destructive force.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 2001.
In Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Electronic Media, Marie-Laure Ryan takes the concept of Virtual Reality as a technical construct and uses it to create a framework for discussing different experiences of text. She first defines “Virtual Reality” as “a computer-generated three-dimensional landscape in which we would experience an expansion of our physical and sensory powers; leave our bodies and see ourselves from the outside; adopt new identities; apprehend immaterial objects through many senses, including touch; become able to modify the environment through either verbal commands or physical gestures; and see creative thoughts instantly realized without going through the process of having them physically materialized” (1). At the time Ryan is writing, 2001, this virtual reality remains mostly a construct in progress; five years later this remains the case.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Teddy Ruxpin

When I was little, I grew up on stories of Teddy Ruxpin. He was a teddy bear with his own world and stories of quests for crystals and fights against evil. Thanks to YouTube, you can see him again [or for the first time, if you weren't a child of the late 80s].

Teddy wasn't just a show. He's not a distant animated character on a TV screen. Teddy was a robotic bear. His lips moved when he told me stories. His eyes opened and closed. It doesn't sound like much now, but to me it was as good as him being alive. I cycled through story tape after story tape, reading along in the little picture books and imagining rainbow waterfalls and magical airships across fantastical lands.

But one day, Teddy stopped talking to me. It wasn't just his battery: he was dead. My parents couldn't afford to replace him. I cried over a teddy bear that wouldn't talk to me anymore. For years he sat up on the shelf, looking down with open, still eyes. He wasn't even very huggable now that his life had drained: the bulky plastic cassette mechanism stuck out of his back and the padded clothing over it couldn't disguise the harsh edges.

Teddy Ruxpin is back for the current generation: his newest incarnation is hopefully more durable. Doesn't look likely--he only comes with a 90 day warranty. I'm tempted to bring him home and see if a talking bear can still bring to life a peaceful world--but I suppose it's too late for me. When I was growing up, a talking bear was a revelation. Now Furby has brought to life the "emo-tronic" friend who learns its name and thrives on attention. Giga pets forced school children to interrupt their class schedule to remember to feed and care for their tiny on screen friends. Catz and Dogz inhabit the desktop.

In A.I, a robotic child is the new generation of the emo-tronic pet: he carries around the old style, a teddy who can only walk about stiffly and speak in a halting voice. Each older generation of animatronic companion is discarded as we ask for more features, more responsiveness, more love. I'd settle for my old Teddy Ruxpin back, and perhaps a bit of that childish joy that allowed him to be, for me, real.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Comic Relief

There's a charming bit of generational web humor in Doonesbury this weekend. I read it in print through that archaic method of home delivery, but of course now it's one click away online. Second Life enterprenuership is apparently alive and well, and Jeff Redfern is doing well for himself. Everything I need to learn about American political and social history of the last few decades I learned reading my mother's Doonesbury collection. I've followed the iconic representations of presidents and watched Zonker convince a gullible reporter that the next generation is following a national trend of casual drug use.

I still love my daily dose of Doonesbury, but now it's accompanied on my reading list by dozens of other comics, none of which are found in the appalling selection of the local paper. The newsprint comics have remained stagnant and inoffensive: even when some well meaning editor trys to get rid of Peanuts reruns or Family Circus, there's a protest among the older set who don't want they're comfortable status quo challenged. Thus to find socially intriguing comics today I look beyond print and end up squarely on the web.

There are many great moments of twisted social commentary going on around the web today. My personal favorite is Something Positive, Randy Milholland's dysfunctional twenty-something strip. There are also fabulous niche strips, like PhD Comics for all of us grad students and PvP and Penny Arcade for the gaming geeks.

There's a new exhibit opening up in New York at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art that'll have several of these webcomic artists featured. The exhibit is called Infinite Canvas. The name Infinite Canvas is a reference to a concept of the web as providing an unending space for a comic to fill: with paper, comics are always limited to the presentable surface, but online a comic can transcend these boundaries. The last course I designed over at the Corcoran was in Sequential Art, and we ended with looking at Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics, his graphic work exploring the potential future for comics within this infinite canvas world.

Scott McCloud envisions possibilities for graphic novels online that break the traditional frames of the page. One of these, "The Right Number", uses a framework of continually embedded images to create a different order for a story: the panels are linear in their construction, but they are within eachother, not next to eachother. McCloud also created the idea of linear panels that don't take into account the monitor size: instead, you scroll down the document to follow the images further and further, as in his further essays on comics, "I Can't Stop Thinking!"

McCloud's ideas offer the notion of a place for webcomics that transcends the traditional boundaries of the page. However, the comics I mentioned previously and those that will be featured at this upcoming exhibit don't have any of the excitement of design that McCloud envisioned. These traditional web comics work just as well printed onto paper as they do on the screen: they follow the same general format of what you'd see in a graphic novel or the newspaper.

Thus, we have a form with all this amazing potential--and a few experimental works trying to take advantage of that potential--but even in the artistic world of the museum, all that's being recognized is the same traditional style of encapsulated panels...

Sunday, September 9, 2007

Warcrafting for the Whole Family?

When I started out playing my first Massive Multiplayer Online Game, Asheron's Call, my immediate family bought three copies: I was in high school at the time, and my parents and I decided to move from Diabloesque games where only the three of us or visiting friends played to a larger scale. We weren't alone: my cousin, uncle, and aunt all joined up too. We occasionally joined up with other players, people who weren't members of the Salter clan, but mostly these games became our family pasttime. They live in Florida, so actually seeing them often would have been quite a feat while a weekly or more night of Asheron's Call--and later Asheron's Call 2, Anarchy Online, and now World of Warcraft--is much easier to arrange.

I was reading Laura's blog about some of the fears for isolating effects of virtual worlds: the lack of refined manners and conversation out in the real world, the tendency to substitute virtual contact for "real" ones, the problems that can arise from spending too much time interfacing with the world through a screen rather than through physical closeness. There are so many ways too meet people in virtual space, and all of them filled with that looming risk a person might not be who they claim to be. I've met many people in my life that way, and several have stayed important to me, and many of whom--such as my fellow writers on CinCity2k--provide me with communities of knowledge and interest I would not otherwise have.

This virtual connections can be meaningful, but mostly the Internet is indispensable to me for keeping me in touch with people who are geographically distant. When I was younger I lost my connections with the friends I grew up with in California when I moved back to Maryland, and the plans to be "pen-pals" seemed doomed to fall through. Now I've found some of them again on Facebook. I don't live near my extended family, but I can play Warcraft with them or send out a quick email whenever the thought crosses my mind. This seems to me to be the essence of the new structure: not that it makes new connections possible, but that it makes sustaining connections easier.

This brings me, in a roundabout fashion, to the virtual world sexcapades I'd like to address this semester. Consider again the question of virtual adultery. Say a married man enters a world, Second Life for simplicity's sake, and meets a lady there. There's conversation, drinks in a fully equipped bar, and fully animated connection. Nothing real has happened in such an encounter that can be documented. It's an affair with an on-screen set of pixels and words. Is that an affair at all? Is it any different from playing a game--Monkey Island, say--where the player leads the avatar of Guybrush Threepwood on his continual attempts to win the heart of Governor Marley? It's all just text and pixels after all.

Change one detail: say the man meets a lady at a real bar. They exchange avatar names finding they share a passion for Second Life. Now the encounter is entirely in-game, but there's a face and a remembered connection behind the pixels. Is this more real? Would any wife be satisfied with the explanation "It's just a game?"

Here, the line seems clear to draw: no one's going to be happy with any flirting with girls met in bars, even if it does all go to the Internet. But it's not a long step from the first fully online lady to this level. Would an emailed exchange of photos [even if the lady's image is probably pulled from someone else's myspace page...] make the lady real enough to be a threat? How about a switch from text-only chat to voice over IP?

When, in short, is a connection "real"?

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Second Life: The New Economy

Graziella pointed me to this tidbit of Second Life industry, answering the immortal question, "Where do baby unicorns come from?" The author of this particular article is somewhat appalled; for a [slightly] less one-sided view, the Second Life Herald has an article on the new trend that mentions a few more of the creations going on these days. Apparently, virtual statues can be a bit more threatening than they first appear.

So while CNet may be informing us that business in virtual worlds is going bust, there's a thriving market for services IBM and co aren't accounting for...

Friday, September 7, 2007

Garage Gaming

Booting up Rise of the Dragon for the first time my parents and I huddled around our tiny new computer and spent hours just trying to get out of the first screen: a static, comic book style image of an apartment room where our avatar “Blade Hunter” was preparing himself for his task of saving the world from horrible death by mutation. Most of all I remember the death scenes – comic sequences where we took a drink from the water fountain and ended up mutated and dead, or shot in an alley, or otherwise eliminated, over and over again.

Now I log on to World of Warcraft – still cartoon graphics, but now 3D, beautifully realized, huge worlds where my avatar is no longer alone and thanks to the web we have whole communities of elves and trolls and gnomes running around killing each other. The progress the industry and the Web have made in just over ten years is absolutely breathtaking, as now games with the same quality of Rise of the Dragon can be produced by a teenager working on their computer in the basement, and developing tools that were once for the elite of design teams and companies are now accessible to the general web user. With the constant improvements in creation technology allowing for literally the “garage Kubrik” and digital media being, at least for the moment, just as much in the hands of the individual as the commercial studios, the future of digital works is yet to be determined.

My own interest in independent digital creation is focused on the adventure game genre, which in itself is now a fairly antiquated genre--adventure games are driven by story and puzzles, and generally contain no major violence, so naturally most publishers have abandoned them as unprofitable when presented to a general audience of attention span lacking teenage males. The number of adventure titles released by computer gaming companies has dwindled and even when projects are announced they are quickly cancelled with a few impressive exceptions such as the recent Sam and Max revival. However, the form is being kept alive in a fan maintained world of independently created computer games. Using fan created software tools that allow for the mimicking of classic game interfaces, fans are creating both sequels to classic games and their own orignal works. These intensive processes of creation are embarked upon not with the hope of financial reward, but for personal satisfaction and the opportunity to make something a popular success within a discriminating niche market.

In theory, people entering the realm of independent game design in this nature are limited in their storytelling only by their own imagination. On the website for one popular 2D adventure game design program, AGS or Adventure Game Studio, there are games listed that don't generally live up to that hope. Many are parodies, some clever, others are simply exercises in escaping a puzzle house [or castle, or island...]. But the occasional moments of brillance make up for the general lack of innovation. A fantasy story, A Tale of Two Kingdoms, bring's back the King's Quest era with an original, if slightly Tolkeinesque, fairy tale. Cirque du Zale starts with a story of a young man brought to save a fantasy princess--who starts a circus instead.

These are not the games you'll find reviewed in the latest Computer Games magazine. They owe their existence to digital distribution: the ability to freely make available large files of creative efforts without vying for shelf space. The closest parallel to these endeavors in pre-Internet society was the zine movement, when the photocopier allowed for the home "publication" and mailed distribution of fan writing and news to groups of subscribers. The digital distribution of these games seven suffers from some of the same limitations: they are unlikely to reach the attention of anyone who doesn't know where to look.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

If a tree falls...

The internet is a vast world of opportunity where anyone can put out their voice and reach out to the world. Did you know that? I think I heard it somewhere once or twice. I think I believed it when I was younger: I started a blog once before, in the 90s, then retreated to the comfort of LiveJournal where pretensions of granduer could be abandoned in favor of quiet talk among friends.

What I find most amazing about the Internet isn't those moments where one voice gets through and reaches multitudes, whether it's through a frightful video on YouTube or the rising fame of a webcomic or a well-timed political sex scandal blog.

No, what amazes me is the number of voices that ring out on the Internet and reach...silence. Every second people post to Livejournal or blogs or forums or fanfiction websites with work that will go virtually, if you'll pardon the pun, unnoticed. This post, for instance, can hope for at best the casual gaze of a few class members in a small graduate course. Anyone else reading it might have stumbled in and can just as quickly stumble out. The voices that get heard remaind the loudest: those powered by the money to create good site design, advertising, and presence. Everything else is an exception, not the rule. Yet people continue to make all this content, devoting hours of their time to everything from Mummies Alive fansites to passionate political tirades, all with the knowledge that only a few people will read it and even fewer will care.

It's not particularly meaningful that younger folks can no longer name the big 4 TV networks, as they once might have been able to with ease. It simply means there are other outlets competing for their attention--and quite often, those outlets are just part of the same old picture, with most of secondary television and many major sites on the 'net following under the control of one or another big media powers.

The Internet is not yet the promised land of any to many communication. It offers the potential for great things, but not the follow through. And let's face it, in an unedited world, there are a million things on any topic not worth reading waiting for Google to find. With so much noise, it's a wonder any of the great ones break through at all. But it's even more a wonder that so many voices continue to reach out when there is so little to expect in return.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Miles to go before I sleep...

So I'm returning this evening after a rather disappointing foray out into the city--the city being in this case Arlington, VA by way of DC, and frankly there's nothing I hate more in the world of driving than adventures through that particular area. I was intending to attend a talk on Usability standards, but ended up spending about an extra hour on the drive and getting lost. When it got to the point where the talk would have been half over, I surrendered and drove home. All in all not a profitable evening. My technology failed me, first through its absence: for journeys like this I usually borrow my boyfriend's GPS, this time I didn't manage to acquire it. Even worse, the Mapquest directions I copied down [the printer in the new apartment isn't connected yet] were vague and unhelpful, leaving me to spend my time looping back and forth from 50 to Arlington Blvd to 395 to Washington Blvd to Ridge Rd and so on. I'm now very familiar with the names of roads in that area, though I still can't tell you where that lecture was held.

So I'm afraid I don't have any insights on usability to post tonight. Instead, I'd like to muse a bit about a sense of direction. I am well known for not having one: give me an inch, and I'll end up in the wrong state. Missing this lecture is just the latest in an ongoing series of navigational mistakes that have defined my life. Technology has yet to fix that for me. Nothing short of a GPS shouting "Recalculating" at me over and over again can keep me on a proper route--MapQuest and GooogleMaps are just placeholders, digital versions of an old trick. I remember when I was younger and every year for Christmas my family took a drive down to Florida. Before we left, I'd go with my mother to the AAA where we got a TripTik. For those of you unfamiliar, a TripTik is a bound roadmap for a journey that moves from map to map that one of the specialists at AAA creates based on your itinerary. This is old school MapQuest: they even mark construction and similar concerns and give you a "best route" of sorts. On that long drive to Disney I used to look at it and try to visualize how many hours of books on tape each page of miles represented.

Now MapQuest can bring all this up for you instantly on demand and give a guess as to how long the trip will take you, but it still doesn't take into account all the variables en route. I'd like to be able to input my actual travel times into Mapquest and get something back from it, have it improve its estimates based on reality and not its idealized system--all its estimates of travel time to and from DC would certainly change once the reality of the beltway gets factored in. Maybe as the GPS becomes more ubiquitous the technology will start to track the results of people's travel, and realistic suggestions and times for a commute will be compiled.

Of course, keeping track of how much time we all waste on the road might make this whole commuting idea sound even worse than it already does...

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Shaking the Internet: Virtual Sex Worlds

"The Internet, Dude. Shake it hard enough and you can get anything to fall out of it."
-Brent, PvP Animation Episode 7

Sex on the 'net hits the news at regular intervals, as one big event or another falls in the hands of a news outlet and everyone is briefly fascinated by this brave new world. Right now, Second Life is at the top of the list for mainstream interest. With major companies invested in the Second Life mainframe and real money and--perhaps?--real hearts at stake in the intricacies of this virtual realm, everyone is as interested as they've been since LambdaMOO became home of the first cyberspace rape.

Virtual sex worlds have been around in one way or another since the Internet emerged. Erotica-esque writer Susie Bright wrote a book in 1993, Sexual Reality: A Virtual Sex World Reader, that began to chronicle the enticement of these realities as they became especially appealing as concerns about AIDS and other STDs mounted and virtual space became a world where the viruses were much less life-threatening: while continual pop-ups from adult web sites may be annoying, they have much easier to come by cures.

Getting things going in one of these environments--whether its a dedicated sex world or the romantic side of Second Life--takes a bit of getting used to, according to Bonnie Ruberg writing for the Village Voice. In Click Me: Getting Started with Sex in Second Life Ruberg describes the typical Second Life virtual sex experience: "Second Life sex is a combination of the visual and the verbal. Players strip their avatars down to their cyber skin, use pose balls (those floating orbs placed in romantic areas throughout the virtual world) to animate them into various sex acts, and keep up with the whole thing in IM" (par 3).

The pose balls are only the beginning--players who make money off designing for the game have created sex beds dedicated to allowing wide ranges of sex acts that the Linden Labs designers didn't account for. In the last month there's been a Second Life scandal turned lawsuit as the creator of one of the best sex beds in Second Life has seen his invention stolen and copied, sold on the cheap by a virtual patent infringer. The drama has even hit ABC News: 'Second Life' Sex Machine Spawns Suit.

This is only one of the virtual moral and legal dilemmas to emerge on the Second Life sex scene. The virtual nature of sex connection can lead to actions others find disconcerting, chief among them "age play." Second Life separates teenagers from adults on their world grids, and acts presumably to prevent actual children from entering the virtual sex scene, although with the distancing factor of a keyboard and a parental account anything is technically possible. Child avatars are definitely present, and thus "virtual child" sexual actions take place within the world. It's not really virtual child pornography in no actual child is involved, but it does lead to moral concerns. CNET has an article, Phony kids, virtual sex, addressing some of the outcry. There's a clear problem with the game trying to police such actions, which is why no attempt has yet been made: if no real children are being hurt, where's the victim in sexual roleplaying by consenting adults?

Of course, even actions between consenting adults on Second Life can have their real world consequences. MSNBC has an article by Kristin Kalning addressing one of the social implications of virtual sex world relationships, Is a virtual affair real-world infidelity?. The same question has been posed by Janet Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck, but Murray's discussion takes into account future developments in technology: sure, current technology might only allow for a virtual world affair to consist of animated pre-programmed "sex" and dialogue through a text box, but if technological progression leads towards the Star Trek esque holodeck, at what level of "realism" in the virtual does it become genuine infidelity? Kristin Kalning tackles the issue differently: she discusses some effects these virtual affairs have had on real couples, leading to the conclusion that the very need for a virtual affair suggests something lacking in a real relationship.

Second Life is the current hot world for the mainstream to take a look at. Time Magazine sent sex world novice Joel Stein in to chronicle his experiences finding his first penis [in Second Life, nothing comes free] in My So-Called Second Life. Wired Magazine has taken a more ambitious scope: Regina Lynn has taken a look in on Sociolotron and Jewel of Indra, two far smaller worlds that attract a more specialized user: Real Sex, Virtual Worlds. For a historical perspective--in terms of Internet time, at least--Daniel Terdiman wrote in 2004 on Red Light World, a virtual world game based on Amsterdam's red light district: Virtual City of Smut Now Online

I propose to maintain for the course of this Fall a blog as prelude to a final paper looking each week at developments beyone what the mainstream press is catching and particularly in terms of forbidden sexual subcultures. What are the implications for virtual morality when we leave the mores of "normal society" and try to construct a new morality that understands how real the virtual can be? The philosophical turn to moral particularism gives us a balance for considering moral questions in a virtual space, meaning essentially that we have to take questions like "What is adultery?" and recast them in light of the particular situation these virtual worlds present.

In short, are the sex beds of Second Life becoming the new forum for the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, or are we looking at a new era for Philosophy in the Bedroom?

Monday, September 3, 2007

More on 3D Printing is home to a fascinating diy movement dedicated to allowing anyone with the tech know-how to "print" in 3D. The home creation of 3d knick knacks is interesting, but generally the replicas are without any great function. Finally, there's a practical use for these toys: Candy Fab chronicles a printer that makes candy, fueled with sugar as its raw material. How far can we be from the dream Neal Stephenson presented in Diamond Age of the matter compiler, which like its Star Trek counterpart functioned as an easy way to create objects and food programmed to the user's immediate desire? It's not quite the era of the transporter, but it's a start...

[As a sidenote, with Halloween only a few months away, isn't it time to start decorating ala Evil Legos?]


Content-Type: application/http; msgtype=response

WARC-Identified-Payload-Type: text/html

WARC-Truncated: length

WARC-Type: response

text:
Travels in Japan 2015 [Part 1: It’s been a while]

By | August 20, 2015

As you may have noticed, I haven’t been very active on this blog for several weeks. Fortunately, this isn’t because I was slacking off on my Japanese practice – rather the opposite. I just came back from an extensive 2-week long vacation to Japan with my family, where we toured all over Japan while jumping between 6 different hotels.

For someone who spends a large portion of my time on Japan and Japanese-related things, this is only the third time I’ve been to Japan and 8 years since my last visit. I think the distance, cost, and other difficulties (long flight, etc.) in visiting Japan are one of the reason it’s culture still attracts me after all these years. If Japan happened to be close enough to visit via a quick 1 hour boat ride I’d likely not be into it’s culture nearly as much.

Our first priority on this trip was to see some relatives there and we spent much time on that in first half our our trip, saving the second half for exploring and enjoying all Japan has to ofter (including Japan’s famous onsens, for which I’ll write a detailed review of).

Due to the amount of *traveling* on this trip (both on foot and other means of transportation) it was quite an effort both physically and mentally, but it was totally worth it. I got to learn more about Japan’s culture, cities, countryside, and get some needed Japanese language practice by speaking with a few of the natives there. Regardless of how many TV dramas you watch or Manga books you read, there are things you can only pick up by interacting with the people of Japan.

I’ve decided to dedicate a series of posts to this trip, focusing on things I found especially interesting, or things I feel might help  others considering visiting Japan. I’ll also try to include some relevant Japanese terms or phrases when applicable. We took over 2000 pictures and a few short videos, and I’ll try to post a few of these as well.

(Featured Image: Part of a building at the Toushouguu (東照宮）temple in Nikkou)

(Visited 297 times, 1 visits today)

3 thoughts on “Travels in Japan 2015 [Part 1: It’s been a while]

  1. Pingback: Travels in Japan 2015: Overview [series of articles] | Self Taught Japanese

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

warcinfo:
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-149-109-157.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-05
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf


text:
Price My Home
Carla Martin - Lyon Real Estate

Carla Martin

I love working in real estate. It's a very rewarding career, and I'm so grateful to be a REALTOR®. I thoroughly enjoy taking care of my clients, and love the connections we forge during the home buying and selling process. I strive to be positive, patient, and persistent in all aspects of life, especially business. I will work hard for you, and hope to make your real estate experience a wonderful one.

I'm a Southern California transplant, but I've been here over 15 years, so Sacramento is now officially my home, and I love it. I'll be the first to admit that it took me a while to get settled here, but now I couldn't imagine living anywhere else. I love the people, the pace of life, and the way that Sacramento has such a small town feel, with full access to anything one could need. I especially love the weird dichotomy of urban-suburban-rural life. I'm also very grateful for our music and theatre scene here. I'm thankful everyday for the decision we made to live here, and love it more, the longer I live here.

Now that you know a little about me, I'd love to hear about you! Feel free to send me a quick message to say "Hi!" Also, please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions you may have regarding the current market, even if you're just curious about your future possibilities.

My Listings

Mobile App Mobile App

Don't have a mobile device handy? Simply enter a phone number below and a text message will be sent to your phone with a link to Lyon Real Estate's mobile download page.

Learn more
Market Snapshot Market Snapshot

Use our market snapshot to receive real-time market data around a specific address--your home, an investment property, a school, or a property or community you are interested in. Receive email...

Learn More

10 Local Sacramento Places Worthy of Cheating on...

First things first, we want you to know we completely support your resolution to embrace a healthier diet. We even rounded up 10 of the Best Healthy Restaurants in the Sacramento Area and created Your Guide to Being Gluten-Free in the Sacramento Area. But we also think you’ve earned a cheat day (or two). To...

View all blog posts


WARC-Identified-Payload-Type: application/xhtml+xml

text:
Friday, January 19, 2007

Spot on!

For many years I've said the world will become a smaller place and peace will break out. It's hard to have wars when everybody can see the truth. Despite the best efforts of American media to keep the population brain washed. Bush though was just what America needed. Somebody so corrupt that people feel the need to start writing blogs and looking past the fabrications on the news channel to get to the real truths:

Americans are increasingly using the internet as their primary source of political news, a study has found.

The report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project also found that more people are contributing to political debate via their own blogs.

No comments:


text:
jeudi 24 novembre 2011

Vanessa Lake and tentacle

Picture for one of my favourite alternative model, Vanessa Lake.
Yes, I know, tentacles again ...
Once again, I was very inspired by my friend David "Loopydave" Dunstan for the shapes.
I found very good refs of Vanessa, especially for her tattoos, on different websites:

Done with Photoshop.

mardi 22 novembre 2011

New website !

I'm a lucky man, I'm living with an incredible webdesigner :)
Chloé did my new website and it kicks ass' !
Her website:
You can contact her here:

vendredi 21 octobre 2011

Tomato from hell

Another picture for Halloween :)
I think I will do more cartoon characters like this one, it's very funny to do ...
And yes, it's a tomato not a pumpkin ... I've got an excuse, I'm french :p
Done with Photoshop.

Prints available here:

mardi 11 octobre 2011

Halloween party poster

Part of the poster for our halloween party.
You can use it for your own party if you want ;)
Done with Photoshop.

mercredi 7 septembre 2011

LOVG Album cover

Cover of the last album of La Oreja de Van Gogh (spanish band).
A very, very long work with a lot of characters and a lot of ... men ^^
I spent a lot of time on Leire's face because I didn't use direct photo references for her.
I already told it but I will tell it again ... all the members of the band were very kind and it was a pleasure to work with them :)
Done with Photoshop.

You can pre-order the album here :
I did the design of the special edition too and there are some steps of the painting of Leire's face within ;)
It will available September 13th.

mercredi 10 août 2011

VAN DE CRAMPS website :)

Picture for the website we done, Chloé and me:
We will create a lot of stuff like posters and tshirts :)
The site will be updated soon ...

You can download the wallpaper on our FBpage here :

Done with Photoshop

The last tutorial of my "Bambi" serie is available now ;)

mardi 26 juillet 2011

LOVG - Single cover

Cover of the last single of the spanish band "La oreja de Van Gogh". it was a harsh work, I've done it in very short time. Hopefully, the members of the band were very kind and very helpful.
Done with Photoshop.

The song is available here :um/la-nina-que-llora-en-tus-fiestas/id450460304

mercredi 13 juillet 2011

Space Bambi

My last picture of Bambi, The character I created for 2DArtist mag ( The tutoriel will be available in the August issue :)
Done with Photoshop.

dimanche 3 juillet 2011

Warlock kitsch fan art

Fan art of the 80's german metal band Warlock and their singer, Doro Pesch. I tried to mimic the 80's album cover and poster of heavy metal :)
You kow what I mean : too satured colors, chrome, thunder, fire, leather, spike, etc ... ^^
I use to listen more ... brutal bands than Warlock and Doro but she was the first "pin up" I tacked up on the walls of my room when I was a teenager. She was the ultimate metal girl with her incredible long hair and her leather clothes. I saw one of her show few weeks ago and she's still beautiful :)
Done with Photoshop and Flash (for the logo).

You can find some steps on my FB page :

mardi 21 juin 2011

Heavy Metal Bambi

A kitsch picture of Bambi, the character I created for 2DArtist mag ( A totally 80's picture with chrome, leather and lightnings :)
I was very inspired by Doro Pesch, the ex-singer of Warlock, an old school (and hairy) metal band.
I use a font which looks like the Iron Maiden band's logo.
The tutorial will be available in the July issue of the magazine.
Done with Photoshop.

dimanche 5 juin 2011

Poker Pin up 1

Picture done for a poker website ( I tried to emalute the "Playboy" photos light. It was a harsh job because the picture is very, very big and there a lot of details.
The bills were a real nightmares ^^'
You can won some tshirts with this picture here :

mardi 24 mai 2011

lundi 9 mai 2011

Miss Holly Cakes

Mascotte for the roller derby team of my town (
Thx a lot to the lovely, beautiful and so kind Miss Holly Cakes ( be my model for this one ♥
You can find some wallpapers on the website :)

FB Roller Derby Team Toulouse :
FB Miss Holly Cakes :

vendredi 15 avril 2011

jeudi 24 mars 2011

Steampunk Wonder Woman

A fan art of one of my favorite character ... :)
My first idea was to make a picture of Lynda Carter but my wife was not agree ... So once again, Chloé was my model ^^
I think someone at DC have already done a steampunk version of some of their heroes but I'm not sure. I like the idea of a "tesla lasso" even if it would be totally useless ...
I was very inspired by Sir Thomas Lawrence, one of my favourite painter. I tried to have a more "painting-like" renderinf this time.
Done with Photoshop, on a single layer ^^'
Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Martson and the property of DC.

vendredi 18 mars 2011

Martini Bambi

Bambi is a character I created for 2DArtist magazine
I will do four pin up tutorials with her. Here's the second one ...

The serie will start in May ;)
Done with Photoshop.

dimanche 13 mars 2011

Caricature of Skin, the singer of Skunk Anansie <3
A very good exercice for ... skin texture :)

mercredi 9 mars 2011

Gong Li and tentacle

A caricature of Gong Li (for me the most beautiful woman of the world ^^).
It wasn't easy for me, I don't do this kind of lighting very often.
I was very inspired by the tones (blue/green) of my talented friend Denis Zilber .
I used a photo reference for her face.
Done (with Photoshop) for an exhibition in Paris and Montreal this summer.

And no, I have no problems with tentacles :p

jeudi 17 février 2011

My piece for the pin-up exhibition in Paris and Montréal (28th April/12th May ... more details here :
A little "caricature" of the young, talented and cute Maly Siri (
There are only two prints of this picture, the first one is for Maly herself and the other one will be on sale.
It's a very big print (A1 format, 594 x 841 mm) and it will be signed ;)
I did another picture (and not a digital one this time), I will show it to you soon.
Maly did a blog for the exhibition ( There will be a lot of great pin up artists :)


text:
5 Tips about movies You Can Use Today

There is no question or discussion that movies are the most effective Leisure materials we've been acquainted of so far. Apart from remaining entertained, we learn numerous essential issues from movies. Movies are the most effective ways to portrait an object, to tell a Tale, or to coach on a subject.

Most of these websites seem to be scheme to receive you to definitely click on a movie to Engage in it, a pop up will occur up and after that it tries to get you to click on that. I consider there are actually viruses/Trojans/and so forth. Would steer obvious.

Highschool scholar Kurosaki Ichigo is contrary to any standard child. Why? For the reason that he can see ghosts. Ever because a youthful age, he is been in a position to see spirits from the afterlife. Ichigo's existence wholly alterations at some point when he and his two sisters are attacked by an evil, hungry and tormented spirit generally known as a Hollow.

Thanks for outstanding checklist. I think youtube is the greatest internet site for watch movies online. It's also possible to Verify this new & promising internet site Databases is just not so potent nonetheless but New movies additional day by day.

You can also learn what are the very best places to watch free of charge Television on the web so You do not miss out on out on any of your favorite exhibits. If you are doing subscribe to your streaming provider like Netflix or Hulu, I've all the main points on sharing passwords.

FilmFM is of the highest visited movie streaming website around the net for movies stream on line As outlined by the latest Alexa stats.This movie web-site present All Kind of entertainment flicks like motion,thriller,sci-fi and so forth.

To discover which Club's Dwell games are unavailable to you thru MLB.Television as a consequence of blackout limits, enter the zip code of the realm the place you're going to be watching under and click Submit:

we received’t be responsible for almost any mis-going on we have been reviewing internet sites listed here on consumer desire we not advertising and performing almost any affiliate Using these Internet site.if incase you've got anything you wish to share with us then you should generate us in under remark or go to Get hold of us page.

Even though you download something by blunder it is not issue just do not install it if You aren't confident what it is actually. This usually are advertisements that inquire you to obtain one thing, if you prefer yow will discover some excellent ad-blocker and you ought to be even safer.

Magnificent record, Some really superior web-sites here. A different web site I use is. They have lots of older films but its all authorized.

This website has huge collection of newest movies and television series since the read more make any difference of The very fact they supply Full High definition movie watching on the internet and various other movie formats which any one needs.Hope you will provide a make an effort to this Web page and luxuriate in you popcorn watching newest movie below at no cost.

here is a nice Web page -World-Movies, haves all The brand new movies and you simply don`t have to check a url record , it haves its possess participant , and its update every single day . I like it a good deal

Within this article we're going to share some best movie streaming web-sites which can not merely let you watch movies on the internet free of charge but additionally offers you use of thousand of movies which you'll watch on-line without the need of signing up on you smartphones,tablets or laptops.

An incredible Local community Web page that also features a chat where we assistance new folks understand how to watch movies on the internet. We have been generally one of the 1st Sites with New Releases. Back links up-to-date quickly and We satisfy end users requests swiftly.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


text:
Levels league positions

24/04/2015 13:50

Apologies to anyone for the confusion over the results of the bottom division. I managed to miss off one line so the table didnt make sense. It does now as I have corrected the omission. Another match has been played in the last week and we will be putting the amended tables up as soon as possible.


text:
Really, Kwik Sew?

Kwik Sew just released a new pattern for a casserole carrier.  Here's a link to their pattern.

Something about it looks SO familiar... oh yes... SewBaby has an almost identical casserole carrier pattern that has been out since 2000!  It's been in all of the major quilting catalogs, and is currently sold nationwide at Joann.  Here is our pattern:

Ours is better!  Let's compare- theirs- $11.99, ours- $8.95.  Theirs makes you sew bias binding on the straps, which is really tedious, and ours doesn't.
Plus, you get the bonus that ours doesn't come with the not so fashionable apron!
This is just bad business.  We have been a Kwik Sew dealer for 14 years, but no more.  You've lost a supporter and ally.  Shame on you, Kwik Sew!

1 comment

  1. Stay strong Sewbaby! Don't let those big companies push you around!

Thanks for visiting my blog! I would love to hear your opinions! Please share your comments here.


text:
Sunday, August 17, 2008

lazy daisy barrettes

These are not hard to make but, require some time- tracing, sewing (by machine and hand), cutting, wet felting. I just like the sound of that word....lazy and the way it sounds with daisy.

He loves me

He loves me not

He loves me a lot!

I couldn't resist.

Amelia Plum said...

very cute barrettes! but it doesn't sound like a lazy activity in the least, in fact it sounds pretty time consuming. are those for you or one of the two stores you have stuff in?

sew nancy said...

yes, in fact it was time consuming.
i'm going to try them out at mackey blue and see how they do.

beki said...

Those are great!

carrie said...

super cute, nancy!

Jennifer said...


text:
Some years ago I found myself in the definition of the American Dream, if such a thing still exists. I was living in a beautiful ocean view, white-picket fenced Malibu home, with a husband who adored me, and Irish twin boys. I had adequate help with housework and childcare, yet I was terribly depressed. Even as I experienced some artistic and career milestones (I was flown to New York to test for SNL based on many character short films I produced and acted in, started a popular blog, and published by first book) I was on multiple psych meds and often paralyzed with dread. As my storybook marriage unraveled, I became aware that an awakening was about to take place.

For years I had a knack and a propensity to be able to read people’s sexual proclivities just by looking at them. It was something I viewed as normal, until I found out it wasn’t and gave it a name – Sexual Intuitive®. Within my marriage I often tuned out my “gift” so it didn’t get me into trouble. At that time, I had a mounting instinct that something was missing from my life—drastically, painfully missing—but I had no idea what it was, even though I was also in therapy and a dedicated spiritual seeker. For years my saving grace was humor (I was a stand-up comedian who worked all over the world) but stand-up was still somewhat unsatisfying. As I became more attuned to my own sexual, sensual and relationship needs and the Sexual Intuitive ability has become even more uncanny, I realized that I needed to combine these abilities into one calling…

Let’s say there was someone who could look inside the deepest, dustiest corners of your heart and see what is hiding there. Just witness it. Then empathically help you figure out how to get those needs met in real life. Maybe you already know what you are “into” and you just need to find like-minded people to get up to those good, fun, filthy things with. Maybe you are in a wonderful, loving relationship, but you have an idea that sexually things could be so much better. Maybe you are just where I was – something is missing and you don’t know what it is, but it is scratching away at the edges of your consciousness like sandpaper. Sometimes it takes a person who doesn’t have a stake in the outcome to show you what you already know on a soul level. I am confident that together we can overcome whatever issues, challenges, or shame barriers are ready to be discarded in favor of a more fully expressed you. What I offer is not “sex work” but “help you have the sex of your wildest dreams” work, and I could not be more excited to go on that journey with you.

I’m available for one-one-one Skype sessions, in-home appointments with couples, parties, and larger events, either on stage or as roaming entertainment. For a free consult, or for media appearances, please take a moment to email me right now. You can see just some of my testimonials HERE.


text:
Thursday, September 10, 2015

The Traitor - Seth Dickinson

The Traitor (“The Traitor Baru Cormorant” in the US) is Seth Dickinson’s debut novel. It’s a complex piece, which can be viewed from several angles. It’s the tale of Baru Cormorant, an island girl taken into the service of the Mask Empire. A savant, she quickly becomes useful to them – but her goal is to bring down their system from within. There’s a strand of narrative about her personal growth, and the moral quandaries she finds both internally and externally as she strives to shatter the Imperial system. But there’s also duels, and lovingly rendered large scale battles. There’s discussions on utilitarian morality, wrapped up in Baru’s own relationships. There’s cut-throat (possibly literally) politics, and some fascinating discussion of economics. And then there’s wider themes – about choice, about the impact of colonialism, about humanity – the heights and depths which people will allow themselves, and the way both are screened by institutions.

The world Dickinson presents is one spread over geographical locales, with distinct cultures to suit. There’s the island culture which is the origin of our protagonist. It’s defined in broad strokes, a polyamorous paradise, a culture with stylised conflict and a straightforwardly bucolic lifestyle. It’s defined more closely by the contrast it makes with the Empire of the Mask.

The Mask is a growing Imperial power, it’s civil servants cloaked by masks when on duty. The sense of conformity that this induces – both in those servants, and in the reader – seems quite intentional.  Dickinson does a masterclass in depersonalisation and separation – the members of the Mask that we run into are uniformly competent, and typically quite terrifying in one form or another. There’s a conflict for the reader between the inhumanity of their role and the humanity of the individuals behind the masks. This is exacerbated by a seemingly deliberate tension between  political policies which allow citizens freedom – economically, and largely socially – and the brutal psychological conditioning that the Empire inflicts on those it thinks are living outside of accepted norms.

Dickinson’s done well here, creating a system which is, in many ways, beneficial to the ruled – whilst also providing enough policies guaranteed to draw horrors from the reader to induce conflict. That conflict, that narrative mirror between the reader and the increasingly torn Baru, is marvellous.
Then there’s the battleground. The Empire works on a series of fragmented duchies which cannot be ruled. The cool, green trees of this space are in contrast to the distant mechanism of the Mask, or the warmth of Baru’s homeland. An area soaked in mist and conflict, it’s the centre of much of the book. It’s to the author’s credit that these duchies begin, after a while, to feel real. It’s possible that there are too many of them – the reader doesn’t get the room to explore them all, as much as we’d like to. However, there’s enough of a sense of national solidarity to allow us to draw a feeling of character, and how the Mask is encroaching upon it.

This is one of those areas where Dickinson’s interest in colonialism, and in the issue of identity, becomes obvious. One of the others is more personally focused, being our protagonist, Baru. Torn between the Mask, which has shaped her for a task, and her homeland, she’s flung into a political battlefield, unsure of who or what she is. The Mask’s presence in the duchies mirrors this confusion. Members of the Duchies are absorbing social attitudes from their governors. At the same time, the new ruling elite exist alongside an older lineage, and are picking up distinctly new habits – as when the Mask governor goes hunting with one of the Dukes. There’s some wonderful subtext here, of absorption of cultural attitude on both sides, and of the subtle realignments that take place due to this – and it’s a joy to read.

From a character standpoint, there’s quite a lot going on. Our protagonist is Baru, one-time conquest, now a member of the Mask elite. Her character is a wonderful example of the duality seen throughout the novel – on the one hand, she’s determined to break down the regime of the Mask, to break it’s hold on her homeland, and entirely if possible. On the other, she’s determined to collaborate, to do the best that she can for the Mask, in order to climb ever higher echelons of the system that she’s now bound to. It’s a fascinating examination of the psyche of the conquered. She acknowledges the superiority of the system, in part, but is determined to overthrow it – but, paradoxically, feels there is no choice but to make it stronger. That her own social proclivities are likely to draw down the attention of the Mask’s terrifyingly named ‘hygienists’ is a fabulous means of adding personal terror and investment to an already aching sense of dread.

Baru is a complex beast. There’s a great deal here which happens out  in the open, where Baru acknowledges who and what she is, to herself. But there’s a great deal more which passes in subtext, in unspoken asides in dialogue, in broken off sentences, in understandings of facial expression, which the reader is left to interpret. There’s enough in the top layer to make for a good, even a great book, but delving into the detail, into the small asides and the broken promises, builds a character which is thoroughly compelling – impossible not to read, tied up in Baru’s twists of fortune.  Her compromises, her reactions to misadventure and success, her vices (several) and her virtues (visible) are a complex mix, and are what craft this character into a person.

Delightfully, the ensemble cast here is given a fair bit of room to manoeuvre. They’re all eclipsed by Baru’s coruscating brilliance, but it’s almost accidental. The duchess with whom Baru discusses economic warfare. The governor whom she reports to on arrival. The naval lieutenant who assists her with delicate problems. They have enough depth, even in a self-centred narrative, that they feel like the stars of their own books, intersecting Baru’s for a moment. She overshadows them, because this is her story, but they have the complexity, the sense of things hidden beneath the surface, to feel like starts of a story of their own.

The plot…well, this is an instance where there are multiple ways to spoil it, so I’ll contain myself. It is, however, exactly as convoluted as you might imagine. There are red herrings strewn through the narrative with great abandon. Dickinson has the skill to pull off a lengthy discussion of warfare-through-economics, several times, and make it as tense and intriguing as any stand-up duel – and there’s more than a few fight scenes here as well. As Baru wends her way through a space filled with conflicting loyalties, personal, political and national, the reader is dragged with her – through every choice and every error, through every repercussion, and every triumph. It’s perfectly pitched, perfectly paced, and wonderfully done ; Dickinson has managed to produce a pitch perfect, complex novel, with multiple levels, and some great things to say across the themes it approaches and with the characters it uses to do so. Absolutely worth the read.

No comments:

Post a Comment


text:
“Rocky Horror” Preview

Sean Gonzalez and Isa Williams

Junior PASJ with a dance concentration major and Senior PASJ with a theatre concentration

What do you do as the show’s directors?

IW: It is Sean’s and my job to cast and direct and guide our performers into highlighting their own talent and the vision of the show itself. For Rocky Horror, we work hard to keep the show and creative process inclusive and supportive of our actors so they can embody and share the over dramatic, wild and empowering feel of the show. As it is a shadow play, we direct them to act like the original cast, while adding their own character to their role and the choreography given to them.

Why did you want to be the director?

SG: This show has a lot of meaning for me, personally. It helped me to discover who I was, and was an essential piece of art when it came to the process of me coming out as a gay transman. Seeing the defiance of gender normativity and the expression of queer sexuality and romance was so important to me when I saw it portrayed in this film. It helped me to feel comfortable chopping off my hair and dressing masculinely, just thinking of Frank’s words the entire time–“Don’t dream it, be it.” Isa and I share a very specific aesthetic and vision for the show, and we wanted to be able to work together to bring that vision to life.

What was the first time you saw “Rocky Horror?”

IW:  I honestly can’t remember when I first saw Rocky Horror. I think my dad showed it to my brother and I in our early high school years. I was very confused, but Tim Curry is a legend and the music is very catchy so I still liked it. It wasn’t until my freshman year of college that I had my first  theatre experience with “Rocky Horror” as a shadow show. It was crazy and a bit uncomfortable, as I am an introvert. However, as time continues, I’ve gained a lot of confidence while being in a show focused on personal and sexual empowerment.

Who’s your favorite character?

IW:  I guess this may sound a bit like a cop out, but I can’t decide on a favorite character. All the characters are flawed; even the aliens [Magenta, Riff Raff and Frank N. Furter] are human. Even so, they are still appealing, especially Frank N. Furter.

SG: Dr. Frank-N-Furter, as he embodies my need to defy gender normativity as well as my sass.

Troy Harper

Junior Media Studies Major

What’s your role in “Rocky Horror?”

I play Frank N. Furter.

Why did you try out for Rocky Horror?

My best friend [Isa Williams] is one of the directors, and I thought it’d be fun to hang out more.

What’s the best thing about your character?

He’s kind of the opposite of who I am. Frank is very sexual with everyone and loves exposing himself. I get to be different from how I usually am for a couple of hours.

When was the first time you saw “Rocky Horror?

After I got cast.

What’s your favorite part of the show?

When I get introduced. I come in with a robe and I reveal all of this. It’s a fun intro. I also love “Eddie’s Teddy,” because I get to sit down the whole time. It’s one of the few numbers where I don’t have to do anything.

Priyanka Panda

Senior Psychology Major

What’s your role in “Rocky Horror?”

I play Riff Raff.

What’s the best thing about your character?

I’m the only unsexy one on stage, and it’s honestly really fun. Riff Raff is kind of a special snowflake, no one really gets him, until the end. In the end, he gets his big moment, and it feels so good to act it.

What was the first time you saw “Rocky Horror?

Early high school, or middle school. I loved it, it was a little bit of a gay awakening.

What’s your favorite part of the show?

I love the floor show at the end, when Riff kills everybody. It’s my shining moment, it’s the best.

Why did you try out for Rocky Horror?

It’s my senior year, and I never really had the confidence to do theater before. I always wanted to so I thought, “f—k it let’s do it,” it was unplanned and on a whim. I wasn’t expecting to get a lead, but I did and it’s been awesome!

Photos by Claudia Sanchez/ Foghorn

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here


text:
Friday, June 26, 2009

Free Gift at Coach Stores
Click the link, fill out the form, print the next page and bring it in store.
Valid only in Coach full price retail stores
Click to locate a store near you.

For more Freebies and Coupon Match-ups: Click here

No comments:

Post a Comment


text:
Please wait Checking if you're not a robot... Error. Please refresh this page. saws Skip this ad

Ad blocker detected :(

Please support the link publisher with ad revenue by disabling ad blocker for this domain:

Adblock Plus


text:
Monday, 20 August 2012

Woodoaks Farm

Woodoaks Farm before work today; Red Kite, Green Woodpecker, Little Owl (1 adult and 1 juv)
The adult Little Owl started off here.
Then flew a short distance to here.
The juv Little Owl was some distance away (poor pic sorry!)

Then briefly at the Withey Beds a Great-spotted Woodpecker showed well.

No comments:

Post a Comment


text:
Shallow Thoughts : : Nov

Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.

Sat, 29 Nov 2008

Upheaval Dome: New research confirms impact theory

Kurt Fisher wrote to draw my attention to the latest Lunar Photo Of the Day (LPOD), a lovely shot he made of one of my favorite places anywhere, Upheaval Dome in Utah's Canyonlands National Park.

Upheaval Dome has long been strongly suspected to be a massive, eroded impact crater, but the LPOD highlights a study that finally puts this (non-)controversy to rest, Elmar Buchner and Thomas Kenkmann's Upheaval Dome, Utah, USA: Impact origin confirmed, documenting shocked quartz grains in the Kayenta sandstone of Upheaval's outer ring.

[Upheaval Dome] It's about time -- it's been pretty clear for many years that this structure was an impact formation, not a collapsed salt dome (the relative lack of salt in the core might have been a clue) but the park service doesn't seem to have gotten the message, giving equal weight to the salt-dome theory in all its Canyonlands literature and signs. Perhaps the Buchner and Kenkmann paper will finally convince them.

Reading about this gave me the push I needed to update my own Upheaval Dome page, adding links to the latest research and to the excellent Upheaval Dome Bibliography Kurt has put together. My page also badly needed a bigger view of the crater itself, so I stitched together a quick panorama of the view from the rim that I'd shot on a trip several years ago but never assembled.

Tags: , , ,
[ 13:15 Nov 29, 2008    More science/geology | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Wed, 26 Nov 2008

Software brightness control in X11

I love my new monitor. The colors are great, it's sharp, the angles are good. Only one problem: it's really really bright.

It has the usual baffling "push buttons at random trying to figure out how to navigate the menu system" brightness control -- which dims the monitor's perceived brightness by about .003% if I take it all the way to the bottom of the scale. (This is apparently a bug that some of these Dells have and others don't.)

It has contrast, too -- but the monitor won't change contrast when running through the DVI cable (this is even documented in the monitor's manual). I have no idea why. It makes me wonder whether there's normally a way of changing brightness over a DVI cable; but lots of googling hasn't brought enlightenment on that score.

I tried the VGA cable. The display was very noticeably less sharp, though pressing the monitor's "auto adjust" improved it a lot. Contrast adjustment did work (and helped) using the VGA cable, but it also turned everything green. I was able to improve the color cast a bit with
xgamma -ggamma .75 -bgamma .9
but this was all looking like quite a hassle. I wanted an easier way to change brightness. xgamma wasn't it: it works well for fine-tuning but its brightness curve is way off if you try to depart by much from full brightness.

Enter xbrightness and xbrightness-gui (Mikael Magnusson to the rescue again! He knew about these excellent programs, and perhaps equally important, he had a copy of xbrightness-gui, which seems to have vanished from the web.)

xbrightness is an excellent little command-line program that sets the X gamma curve to appropriate values. Just run xbrightness BRIGHTNESS passing it a value between 0 and 65535. xbrightness-gui is an interactive program that lets you drag curves around for each of the three color curves, or the combined image, with a user interface very similar to GIMP's Curves tool. You can even save and load curves.

xbrightness-gui's coolness notwithstanding, the simple xbrightness was really all I needed. It does a fine job of adjusting the monitor brightness while keeping colors neutral. The version I was using was Mikael's version, to which he'd added the ability to adjust colors too (much like xgamma does, but using more useful curves). It turns out I don't need the color correction, but it's nice to know it's there.

But what I did need was a way to query the current brightness, and, more important, a way to bump the brightness a little bit up and down. So I added those features. Getting the current brightness isn't actually something you can do, since the whole gamma curve for the three channels is what you perceive as brightness. I didn't try to estimate perceived brightness based on the whole curve; I just took the value of the highest value for each color, and their average or maximum.

Then I tied my new increment/decrement into key bindings in Openbox. I bound W-F5 (the Windows key plus F5) to xbrightness -2560, and W-F6 to xbrightness +2560, so I can go up or down in brightness by pressing keys without having to type any five-digit numbers.

I've made available the old xbrightness-gui, since it's no longer available anywhere else; a patch that integrates my changes and Mika's into xbrightness-0.3; and the patched xbrightness tarball. They're all at

One other fun thing about using X gamma settings to adjust brightness. The first night I used it, I noticed at some point that my cursor looked very different -- it had become blindingly white. It turns out that the cursor is implemented at a lower level and doesn't go through the X gamma system. So turning the brightness down via gamma curves doesn't affect the cursor, which remains always at full brightness. It's quite a nice side effect -- the cursor is much more visible than it normally is.

Tags: , ,
[ 12:37 Nov 26, 2008    More linux | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Thu, 20 Nov 2008

Handling Long URLs in Firefox

I have a new Firefox Tips article up on Linux Planet: The Plague of Ridiculously Long URLs (note I didn't choose the title). It discussees how to handle long URLs broken over several lines, of the sort we so often see in email messages.

Tags: , ,
[ 10:43 Nov 20, 2008    More writing | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Sun, 16 Nov 2008

Cleaning up the edges of Moonroot's transparent images

[moonroot] I wrote moonroot more to figure out how to do it than to run it myself. But on the new monitor I have so much screen real estate that I've started using it -- but the quality of the images was such an embarrassment that I couldn't stand it. So I took a few minutes and cleaned up the images and made a moonroot 0.6 release.

Turned out there was a trick I'd missed when I originally made the images, years ago. XPM apparently only allows 1-bit transparency. When I was editing the RGB image and removing the outside edge of the circle, some of the pixels ended up semi-transparent, and when I saved the file as .xpm, they ended up looking very different (much darker) from what I had edited.

Here are two ways to solve that in GIMP:

  1. Use the "Hard edge" option on the eraser tool (and a hard-edged brush, of course, not a fuzzy one).
  2. Convert the image to indexed, in which case GIMP will only allow one bit's worth of transparency. (That doesn't help for full-color images, but for a greyscale image like the moon, there's no loss of color since even RGB images can only have 8 bits per channel.)

Either way, the way to edit a transparent image where you're trying to make the edges look clean is to add a solid-color background layer (I usually use white, but of course it depends on how you're going to use the image) underneath the layer you're trying to edit. (In the layers dialog, click the New button, chose White for the new layer, click the down-arrow button to move it below the original layer, then click on the original layer so your editing will all happen there.)

Once you're editing a circle with sharp edges, you'll probably need to adjust the colors for some of the edge pixels too. Unfortunately the Smudge tool doesn't seem to work on indexed images, so you'll probably spend a lot of time alternating between the Color Picker and the Pencil tool, picking pixel colors then dabbing them onto other pixels. Key bindings are the best way to do that: o activates the Color Picker, N the Pencil, P the Paintbrush. Even if you don't normally use those shortcuts it's worth learning them for the duration of this sort of operation.

Or use the Clone tool, where the only keyboard shortcut you have to remember is Ctrl to pick a new source pixel. (I didn't think of that until I was already finished, but it works fine.)

Tags: , ,
[ 15:48 Nov 16, 2008    More gimp | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Sat, 15 Nov 2008

Using (or not) an Apple Cinema Display on a non-Apple

Dave and I recently acquired a lovely trinket from a Mac-using friend: an old 20-inch Apple Cinema Display.

I know what you're thinking (if you're not a Mac user): surely Akkana's not lustful of Apple's vastly overpriced monitors when brand-new monitors that size are selling for under $200!

Indeed, I thought that until fairly recently. But there actually is a reason the Apple Cinema displays cost so much more than seemingly equivalent monitors -- and it's not the color and shape of the bezel.

The difference is that Apple cinema displays are a technology called S-IPS, while normal consumer LCD monitors -- those ones you see at Fry's going for around $200 for a 22-inch 1680x1050 -- are a technology called TN. (There's a third technology in between the two called S-PVA, but it's rare.)

The main differences are color range and viewing angle. The TN monitors can't display full color: they're only 6 bits per channel. They simulate colors outside that range by cycling very rapidly between two similar colors (this is called "dithering" but it's not the usual use of the term). Modern TN monitors are astoundingly fast, so they can do this dithering faster than the eye can follow, but many people say they can still see the color difference. S-IPS monitors show a true 8 bits per color channel.

The viewing angle difference is much easier to see. The published numbers are similar, something like 160 degrees for TN monitors versus 180 degrees for S-IPS, but that doesn't begin to tell the story. Align yourself in front of a TN monitor, so the colors look right. Now stand up, if you're sitting down, or squat down if you're standing. See how the image suddenly goes all inverse-video, like a photographic negative only worse? Try that with an S-IPS monitor, and no matter where you stand, all that happens is that the image gets a little less bright.

(For those wanting more background, read TN Film, MVA, PVA and IPS – Which one's for you?, the articles on TFT Central, and the wikipedia article on LCD technology.)

Now, the comparison isn't entirely one-sided. TN monitors have their advantages too. They're outrageously inexpensive. They're blindingly fast -- gamers like them because they don't leave "ghosts" behind fast-moving images. And they're very power efficient (S-IPS monitors, are only a little better than a CRT). But clearly, if you spend a lot of time editing photos and an S-IPS monitor falls into your possession, it's worth at least trying out.

But how? The old Apple Cinema display has a nonstandard connector, called ADC, which provides video, power and USB1 all at once. It turns out the only adaptor from a PC video card with DVI output (forget about using an older card that supports only VGA) to an ADC monitor is the $99 adaptor from the Apple store. It comes with a power brick and USB plug.

Okay, that's a lot for an adaptor, but it's the only game in town, so off I went to the Apple store, and a very short time later I had the monitor plugged in to my machine and showing an image. (On Ubuntu Hardy, simply removing xorg.conf was all I needed, and X automatically detected the correct resolution. But eventually I put back one section from my old xorg.conf, the keyboard section that specifies "XkbOptions" to be "ctrl:nocaps".)

And oh, the image was beautiful. So sharp, clear, bright and colorful. And I got it working so easily!

Of course, things weren't as good as they seemed (they never are, with computers, are they?) Over the next few days I collected a list of things that weren't working quite right:

The brightness problem was the easiest. A little web searching led me to acdcontrol, a commandline program to control brightness on Apple monitors. It turns out that it works via the USB plug of the ADC connector, which I initially hadn't connected (having not much use for another USB 1.1 hub). Naturally, Ubuntu's udev/hal setup created the device in a nonstandard place and with permissions that only worked for root, so I had to figure out that I needed to edit /etc/udev/rules.d/20-names.rules and change the hiddev line to read:

KERNEL=="hiddev[0-9]*", NAME="usb/%k", GROUP="video", MODE="0660"
That did the trick, and after that acdcontrol worked beautifully.

On the second problem, I never did figure out why suspending with the Apple monitor always locked up the machine, either during suspend or resume. I guess I could live without suspend on a desktop, though I sure like having it.

The third problem was the killer. Big deal, who needs text consoles, right? Well, I use them for debugging, but what was more important, also broken were the grub screen (I could no longer choose kernels or boot options) and the BIOS screen (not something I need very often, but when you need it you really need it).

In fact, the text console itself wasn't a problem. It turns out the problem is that the Apple display won't take a 640x480 signal. I tried building a kernel with framebuffer enabled, and indeed, that gave me back my boot messages and text consoles (at 1280x1024), but still no grub or BIOS screens. It might be possible to hack a grub that could display at 1280x1024. But never being able to change BIOS parameters would be a drag.

The problems were mounting up. Some had solutions; some required further hacking; some didn't have solutions at all. Was this monitor worth the hassle? But the display was so beautiful ...

That was when Dave discovered TFT Central's search page -- and we learned that the Dell 2005FPW uses the exact same Philips tube as the Apple, and there are lots of them for sale used,. That sealed it -- Dave took the Apple monitor (he has a Mac, though he'll need a solution for his Linux box too) and I bought a Dell. Its image is just as beautiful as the Apple (and the bezel is nicer) and it works with DVI or VGA, works at resolutions down to 640x480 and even has a powered speaker bar attached.

Maybe it's possible to make an old Apple Cinema display work on a Mac. But it's way too much work. On a PC, the Dell is a much better bet.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
[ 21:57 Nov 15, 2008    More tech | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Fri, 14 Nov 2008

Great Advertising

Usually I just delete spam after seeing the subject line. But I couldn't resist one that arrived this morning:
Subject: You'll be saying WOW every time with ShamWow

Wondering whether the seller was familiar with the meaning of the word "sham", I just had to take a look.

[ Funny shamWOW ad ] I couldn't tell anything from the text -- it was all just random verbiage to try to fool Baysian filters. But the mail also attached two images, img001.png and img002.png. The first was a big grey starburst thing; the second, at 348Kb, was the actual ad (click on it to get the full-sized version; the thumbnail here doesn't do it justice).

There are just so many things to love about this ad, starting with the name "ShamWow" itself. I love the mixture of fonts and bright colors, with the slightly lopsided hourglass shape of the ShamWow! logo. I love the "AS SEEN ON TV" bug -- a charming image that hasn't changed a whit since the 60's, maybe even the 50's. I love the unidentifiable grey and yellow flat things with unreadable text on them -- they look like file folders and folded papers, but they're probably two different colors and sizes of ShamWow -- covered with a square announcing "10 Year [unreadable]", which made me wonder if they were selling auto loans or securities. But if you magnify it you find that the third word is probably "Warranty". I love the presumption that you'll think that 20x the weight of a small cloth object is a lot of water (is it? I have no idea, let me grab a paper towel and a gram scale). I love the blurry red and white "CLICK FOR DETAILS" button.

But what I like best about this image is that it's a PNG but it's full of JPG artifacts. Now, I'm not very picky about jpeg artifacts. (You'd think I would be, as a de-facto GIMP expert, but I'm really not.) I shoot DSLR photos in jpeg rather than raw mode because most of the time the difference just isn't enough for me to care about. I use jpeg for most of the icons on my web site if they don't need transparency, and I lower the jpeg quality level to make them load faster. I'm not a PNG snob (actually, I'm more likely to use GIF than PNG for web icons). But really -- this ad image is a wonderful example of jpeg artifacts and why you can't just turn the quality down arbitrarily far.

I could even understand using extreme jpeg compression because they were sending out a hundred quotillion spam messages and wanted to reduce bandwidth. But they're not sending a jpeg -- they've converted the low-quality JPG back to a 348Kb PNG before sending the spam.

All I can figure is that someone designed the ad and saved it as JPG, making it really small. And then someone in the business saw lbrandy's great cartoon on JPG vs. PNG -- and said "Oh, no! We'd better use PNG instead! And loaded up the JPG and saved it as a PNG with default settings.

(For further reading on PNG vs. JPEG and image file size optimization, you can get an overview of formats at my Image Formats for the Web and some detailed tutorials at the Bandwidth Conservation Society; or chapters 2 and 8 in my GIMP book, soon to be out in its second edition.)

Tags: , ,
[ 11:54 Nov 14, 2008    More humor | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Wed, 12 Nov 2008

Spamassassin false positives: obsolete rules on Etch

I checked my Spam Assassin "probably" folder for the first time in too long, and discovered that I was getting tons of false positives, perfectly legitimate messages that were being filed as spam.

A little analysis of the X-Spam-Status: headers showed that all of the misfiled messages (and lots of messages that didn't quite make it over the threshold) were hitting a rule called DNS_FROM_SECURITYSAGE.

It turned out that this rule is obsolete and has been removed from Spam Assassin, but it hasn't yet been removed from Debian, at least not from Etch.

So I filed a Debian bug. Or at least I think I did -- I got an email acknowledgement from but it didn't include a bug number and Debian's HyperEstraier based search engine linked off the bug page doesn't find it (I used reportbug).

Anyway, if you're getting lots of SECURITYSAGE false hits, edit /usr/share/spamassassin/ and comment out the lines for DNS_FROM_SECURITYSAGE and, while you're at it, the lines for RCVD_IN_DSBL, which is also obsolete. Just to be safe, you might also want to add
in your .spamassassin/user_prefs (or equivalent systemwide file) as well.

Now if only I could figure out why it was setting FORGED_RCVD_HELO and UNPARSEABLE_RELAY on messages from what seems to be perfectly legitimate senders ...

Tags: , ,
[ 22:54 Nov 12, 2008    More linux | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Sun, 09 Nov 2008

Pho 0.9.6 finally released!

[pho image viewer] Pho 0.9.6-pre3 has been working great for me for about a month, and I've been trying to find the time to do a release. I finally managed it this weekend, after making a final tweak to change the default PHO_REMOTE command from gimp-remote to gimp since gimp-remote is obsolete and is no longer built by default.

The big changes from 0.9.5 are Keywords mode, slideshow mode, the new PHO_REMOTE environment variable, swapping -f and -F, and a bunch of performance work and minor bug fixing.

I built deb packages for Ubuntu (Hardy, but they should work on Intrepid too) and Debian (Etch), as well as the usual source tarball, and they're available at the usual place:

Tags: , ,
[ 18:11 Nov 09, 2008    More programming | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Thu, 06 Nov 2008

Linux Planet: Why Firefox Rocks on Linux

My latest Linux Planet article, Why Firefox Rocks on Linux, discusses Linux-specific Firefox shortcuts involving the middle mouse button, the URLbar and the scrollbar. It's getting good Diggs, too, and comments from people who found the tips helpful, which is great. A lot of people don't know about some of these great Linux time-savers, but these are the sort of things that make me love Linux and stick with it even when it gets frustrating. I hate to think of people missing out just because there's no obvious way to discover some of the shortcuts!

Tags: , , ,
[ 21:44 Nov 06, 2008    More writing | permalink to this entry | comments ]

Mon, 03 Nov 2008

A word count bookmarklet

This posting ended up being published as a Linux Planet Quick Tip. You can read about my nifty word counting bookmarklet there: Quick Firefox Tip: Word Count Bookmarklet.

Tags: , , , ,
[ 23:41 Nov 03, 2008    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | comments ]