charmianland

"(Speculation. The thing about the open house that comments systems constitute is this: you accept my..."

Tue, 29 May 2012 23:12:15 -0400

“(Speculation. The thing about the open house that comments systems constitute is this: you accept my invitation into my house, and then I get stroppy because I want to know why you’re pissing on the floor and refusing to talk about anything other than that one sculpture on my shelf that depicts a whore riding a rocket. But just maybe you’re urinating in fear because you only came into the house to look at the sculpture and now I’m trying to fit you into the oven.)”

- Warren Ellis » Sometimes I Think About Reinstating The Comments System

popejohnpauljones: good guy Freddie

Tue, 29 May 2012 21:08:52 -0400

popejohnpauljones:

good guy Freddie

Birds may be paedomorphic dinosaurs « Why Evolution Is True

Tue, 29 May 2012 04:49:02 -0400

Birds may be paedomorphic dinosaurs « Why Evolution Is True

Minispike: The Hashist | Spike Japan

Tue, 29 May 2012 02:15:21 -0400

Minispike: The Hashist | Spike Japan:

A profile of the “Hashist” mayor of Osaka. The mayors of Japan’s two largest cities are like this?!

turnipfritters: threehundredeightynine: I found this while...

Mon, 28 May 2012 15:59:14 -0400

turnipfritters:

threehundredeightynine:

I found this while Googling “owls doing stuff”.

oh my god

Personality in 100,000 Words: A large-scale analysis of personality and word use among bloggers

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:32:21 -0400

Personality in 100,000 Words: A large-scale analysis of personality and word use among bloggers:

subdee:

For Charmian and Kara.

gameandgraphics: Video Game fan art compilation of the...

Fri, 25 May 2012 23:14:08 -0400

Ukiyo Heroes: Mario Kart, by Jed Henry

Metroid animated comic, by Zac Gorman

Mario by Pablo Ruedachan

Super Mario World by Ashley Davis

gameandgraphics:

Video Game fan art compilation of the week:

-Ukiyo Heroes: Mario Kart, by Jed Henry.
-Metroid animated comic, by Zac Gorman.
-Mario by Pablo Ruedachan (src)
-Super Mario World final battle, by Ashley Davis.

Mod Explanations - Mefi Wiki

Fri, 25 May 2012 22:40:11 -0400

Mod Explanations - Mefi Wiki:

Metafilter mod explanations.

Random notes

Fri, 25 May 2012 04:23:04 -0400

I’m kind of amazed that the post I made on Scarlet Palace and Reimei no Arcana has gotten so many hits, especially since it’s kind of a negative review; the two works are not really similar, also, and I just put them in the same entry because I’m lazy (in summation Reimei no Arcana ends up being decent, but not interesting enough for me to continue (there’s something I have to say about fantasy manga that are not badly written, and fairly good on characterization, but not really interesting as fantasy), and Scarlet Palace, which has dubious art but an interesting premise).

In other news I am rereading Houshin Engi and wishing I had a PS3 so I could play Dynasty Warriors 7, Orochi Warriors 3, and Nier. SOMEDAY. I will console myself by replaying the earlier Orochi games XD.

I am also contemplating getting this keyboard. I think if you don’t touch type, onscreen keyboards are not that annoying, but if you do, it is really irritating to put up with the lack of speed and precision. The greatest weakness is autocorrect deals horribly with any unfamiliar words, and this is really awful for talking about fiction (and non-English speaking cultures).

theartofanimation: Krista Brennan

Thu, 24 May 2012 23:58:05 -0400

theartofanimation:

Krista Brennan

The Facebook Fallacy - Technology Review

Thu, 24 May 2012 03:00:20 -0400

The Facebook Fallacy - Technology Review:

Hmm, wonder if this is really true.

Blue Lines Revisited: G+ Thought

Tue, 22 May 2012 21:49:19 -0400

Blue Lines Revisited: G+ Thought:

mirrorful:

charmian:

tomewing:

midwestballadreview:

tomewing:

Is the reason Google+ never took off (yes yes this can and will be argued by G+ nerds) that the big “Circles” selling point - split yr social media life into discrete private groups - had been organically pre-empted by the thin but real walls between identity across niche platforms?

i.e. Google’s…

Google also simultaneously (right?) killed off the comment/share/follow functions within Google Reader. That really pointed the way toward a wholly different kind of social network rather than a pale tweak of Facebook. Facebook instantiates your IRL relationships in a single online space, and gloms on any content or issue enthusiasm on top of it. A “Super-Reader” could have done this in the opposite direction; branching groups of people based on what they are into, getting to know each other regardless of who or where they are. Instead of chasing after FB they could have gone after Reddit.

Maybe they still would have “lost”; I’m just pissed those functions disappeared.

Yes! The anthropologist Mimi Ito - who knows a lot more about this digital identity stuff than I do - talks about “friendship networks” vs “interest networks”. Facebook is a friendship network - which are usually strongly real-life rooted - and its success means people think “well friendship networks are where it’s at”, but I reckon people don’t NEED more than one online friendship network. Whereas most of the big niche networks and post-FB growth stories - Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, arguably LinkedIn - can be and are used as friendship networks but work best as interest networks: connecting you with people you don’t know already out of a shared interest in stuff. Interest networks are good at different things so there’s no problem with being on several.

One thing about interest networks is that “real” identities are much less important - consistency beats authenticity, whereas in a friendship network you do need some guarantor of identity. So when G+ made such a flap about real names, and demolished the G Reader interest networks it had already built, it was sending very clear signals - on purpose or otherwise - that it wanted to compete on friendship network terms not interest network terms. And that meant Facebook.

(Which is odd since if there’s one thing Google knows about and is (in theory) good at it’s interests!)

Ha, this reminds me of the Metafilter thread recently on Google+, where someone speculated, as Tom is here, that a “friendship network” is a natural monopoly. I felt, when it first started up, that Circles failed to be a compelling differentiator from Facebook. In other words, what they were trying to do was too similar to what FB was doing, and to have really succeeded they ought to have tried for doing something different.

RIP greader-sharing ;_;

Circles would be a great idea if they only matched how people actually compartmentalize their online identities, but they just don’t. It’s the subscription model in reverse: the broadcaster has to decide who’s interested in what, and then they staple it all to your real name just to make sure you won’t say anything interesting. (Which is a long way of saying I think Tom is right.)

It’s worth having different services for different communities of interest, but also for different kinds of message. Even if my Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and (sharing-enabled) Greader bros were all the same people, I like having a separate channel for each size of textbox. Interleaving tweets into any of my other feeds wouldn’t make them more useful.

I’m also a little butthurt on google reader’s behalf: it doesn’t even get a spot in the top bar thingy.

I’m also irked about how they got rid of Google Reader on the top bar! I never used the sharing features, so I don’t mourn those, but I really liked being able to easily access Reader.

Nowadays, I use Tumblr for most of my link sharing needs, btw.

Blue Lines Revisited: G+ Thought

Tue, 22 May 2012 14:52:08 -0400

Blue Lines Revisited: G+ Thought:

tomewing:

midwestballadreview:

tomewing:

Is the reason Google+ never took off (yes yes this can and will be argued by G+ nerds) that the big “Circles” selling point - split yr social media life into discrete private groups - had been organically pre-empted by the thin but real walls between identity across niche platforms?

i.e. Google’s…

Google also simultaneously (right?) killed off the comment/share/follow functions within Google Reader. That really pointed the way toward a wholly different kind of social network rather than a pale tweak of Facebook. Facebook instantiates your IRL relationships in a single online space, and gloms on any content or issue enthusiasm on top of it. A “Super-Reader” could have done this in the opposite direction; branching groups of people based on what they are into, getting to know each other regardless of who or where they are. Instead of chasing after FB they could have gone after Reddit.

Maybe they still would have “lost”; I’m just pissed those functions disappeared.

Yes! The anthropologist Mimi Ito - who knows a lot more about this digital identity stuff than I do - talks about “friendship networks” vs “interest networks”. Facebook is a friendship network - which are usually strongly real-life rooted - and its success means people think “well friendship networks are where it’s at”, but I reckon people don’t NEED more than one online friendship network. Whereas most of the big niche networks and post-FB growth stories - Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, arguably LinkedIn - can be and are used as friendship networks but work best as interest networks: connecting you with people you don’t know already out of a shared interest in stuff. Interest networks are good at different things so there’s no problem with being on several.

One thing about interest networks is that “real” identities are much less important - consistency beats authenticity, whereas in a friendship network you do need some guarantor of identity. So when G+ made such a flap about real names, and demolished the G Reader interest networks it had already built, it was sending very clear signals - on purpose or otherwise - that it wanted to compete on friendship network terms not interest network terms. And that meant Facebook.

(Which is odd since if there’s one thing Google knows about and is (in theory) good at it’s interests!)

Ha, this reminds me of the Metafilter thread recently on Google+, where someone speculated, as Tom is here, that a “friendship network” is a natural monopoly. I felt, when it first started up, that Circles failed to be a compelling differentiator from Facebook. In other words, what they were trying to do was too similar to what FB was doing, and to have really succeeded they ought to have tried for doing something different.

"I didn’t speak a word when I arrived,” says Mohr. “I was a typical American who thought Germany was..."

Mon, 21 May 2012 04:35:33 -0400

““I didn’t speak a word when I arrived,” says Mohr. “I was a typical American who thought Germany was Oktoberfest: I expected to get off the plane in Berlin and find everyone running around in Lederhosen. But I fell in love with the city, and particularly the nightlife, immediately. And I slowly learnt German. “By the time I left, seven years later, I had gotten OK at it, though my vocabulary was obviously a bit skewed toward things that made me the perfect translator for Wetlands. Which is how I got that job, actually. I read the book for the eventual US publisher when they were considering buying the rights. And I said to the editor, ‘You know, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an academic translator who is as familiar with terminology related to anal sex as a former Berlin club DJ is.’””

- New word order - FT.com

Article on translation. As time goes by I tend further to freer translation, it seems.

king-in-yellow: oberstein: If The Owl and the Pussycat went to...

Mon, 21 May 2012 02:01:53 -0400

king-in-yellow:

oberstein:

If The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea and had a baby, I imagine this is what it would look like.

Yeah, I totally agree! (Although there is some monkey in that gene pool too.)

100 posts on notesonleaves

Sun, 20 May 2012 19:48:07 -0400

I’ve reached a hundred posts on notesonleaves.tumblr.com (my extra book-manga-movie-anime blog, where I post “impressions” of what I read/view. It’s a lot more interesting than this tumblr IMHO, though, so you might want to follow it.)

Right now I’m doing a Hi Izuru Tokoro no Tenshi reread, and I hope to in the future (after I finish up a few more things) to do a Ravages of Time reread.

Fan Fiction Friday: Thomas the Tank Engine in "Tension Relief" - Topless Robot

Sun, 20 May 2012 17:03:33 -0400

Fan Fiction Friday: Thomas the Tank Engine in "Tension Relief" - Topless Robot:

WARNING: Contains depictions of oral sex between trains, also, healing…. steam port.

sanitize and canonize: On Razorblades: China Miéville's Perdido Street Station

Thu, 17 May 2012 23:14:29 -0400

sanitize and canonize: On Razorblades: China Miéville's Perdido Street Station:

nextian:

paratactician:

prunescholar:

I cannot choose. Sometime he angers me

With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant,

Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies,

And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff

As puts me from my faith.

- Hotspur, Henry IV part…

Warning for DISORGANIZATION:

….Am I the only person who didn’t feel that blindsided by the ending of PSS? Given the general brutality of the world, the only thing I was sure of was that they were probably somehow going to stop the moth things. But when the revelation about the garuda character’s past occurred…. After that I did not find the ending shocking? Saddening, but not surprising or thematically out-out-of-the-blue. To me Mieville’s books (and maybe this is because I read the Scar first) are more like, literary fiction, I suppose, in that “it could go either way.”

tl;dr: Apologies for bringing up TVTropes, but “CRAPSACK WORLD” is written in letters a hundred feet tall from the beginning, so I am “…..buh”?

Contemplating this more, of the three truths… huh, I am not sure whether these are the truths of PSS, but I suppose I find the first two to be… facts? And thus not cynical? (Although perhaps, banally true, but then that could be said of a lot of truths) The third is more controversial and interesting, and I would argue that it is part of Mieville’s politics. (I am not sure if Mieville’s point is that it is “meaningless.” I think he would say that to promote the idea that love without power will not be crushed is false and also political.)

In response to Mike’s points: for political thrillers, I think they need to do that to maintain the status quo, also. Isn’t genre X called “dark fantasy”? Also, unknowable transdimensional etc. is more Lovecraft territory, so isn’t that also a hat tip?

Apiphile’s post comes pretty close to how I feel about Mieville. I have nothing against realistic and earned happy endings; deus ex machina happy endings annoy me. And on the other hand, I have nothing against earned unhappy endings, and I feel Mieville earned his.

Nextian’s post also. Maybe I’m being unfair, but I have a suspicion as to whether you find Mieville grimdark for the sake of being gratuitously grimdark correlates to how you politically perceive his books?

But then, I have also felt the same way as this person: (Happy ending out of nowhere, WTF?)

Anyway my reaction to the Penny Arcade strip was more: What? Gabe of all people is reading Mieville? (I suppose my reading of Tycho’s dislike is that he feels Mieville goes way too far and that is disgraceful and punch-worthy, possibly because he also does trade in the Latinate.)

tomewing: heyitsnoah: This is super weird. Why are so many...

Thu, 17 May 2012 08:26:57 -0400

tomewing:

heyitsnoah:

This is super weird. Why are so many more babies born in the summer? I guess the winter blues really get to people? Crazy …

(via How Common Is Your Birthday? | The Daily Viz )

USA only, overdramatic heat map scale, etc etc but I still looked for mine and so will you.

What’s going on here?

"The Cadaver Synod (also called the Cadaver Trial or, in Latin, the Synodus Horrenda) is the name..."

Wed, 16 May 2012 03:51:54 -0400

“The Cadaver Synod (also called the Cadaver Trial or, in Latin, the Synodus Horrenda) is the name commonly given to the posthumous ecclesiastical trial of Catholic Pope Formosus, held in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome during January of 897.[1] The trial was conducted by Formosus’s successor, Pope Stephen (VI) VII. Stephen accused Formosus of perjury and of having acceded to the papacy illegally. At the end of the trial, Formosus was pronounced guilty and his papacy retroactively declared null. The Cadaver Synod is remembered as one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of the medieval papacy.”

- Cadaver Synod - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia