metafandom

spacelogic @ 1:51pm: party
I hate housecleaning. *glares balefully at the embarrassing portions of her bedroom*

We're having a party in about ten minutes. We're using the opportunity to wear costumes because we missed trick-or-treating due to 'flu. So Malcolm's a water molecule, Merlin's the Blue Screen of Death (this being a boy who's never used Windows) and Matisse and I are 1950s instructional video characters. Turns out, related to that, that my hair doesn't do pin curls. That's why I'm being the bad example, with wrinkly socks and a stained skirt and a partially-untucked shirt, in contrast to my neat and clean sister. Dad's being Inigo Montoya, and Mum's... Mum. Hopefully pictures will be forthcoming.

gwionfawyr @ 1:40pm: Fic pointing
Because every now and then I get creative at the wrong times. New fics up at darkstar_tales.

Yesterday's Boy (30StM, Spookathon fic) - part 1
Dance (MCR/HP, Of Dragons and Men 'Verse) - Link

Have at, I've got NaNo to try and catch up with. *grins*

Jenn

yonmei @ 5:37pm: Emma Thompson comes back from the dark side
...thanks to a 19-year-old student who talked to her face-to-face about what her support for letting a rapist get away with it looked like. (I wrote a letter to her agent: On striving to think the best of people, 1st November.)

Caitlin Hayward-Tapp, a student at Exeter University: well done her.

(I tried to post a comment at the Independent website re the shameful meiosis of referring to Polanski's rape of a 13-year-old girl as "unlawful sex", but it turns out they've signed on to Livejournal to process their comments, and as I'm suspended... I'm not allowed to comment there.)

gwionfawyr @ 10:27am: *rubbing hands together*
I'm feeling energized, if still coughing a mile a minute. I've gotten over 1800 words typed since I woke up this morning. I'm thinking of taking a break to work on a Of Dragons and Men/Duke of Cambridgeshire short. I know I've been a flake, but I started school and did renovations on the house.

So, by tonight, I'll have the ficlet written, but then I've gotta catch up with my NaNo numbers.

Jenn

yonmei @ 12:24am: About to depart Mumbai for Gdansk
And the figurehead has a good question:

So, internets, if you were sailing from Mumbai to Gdansk what would be your route:
Arabian Sea, Suez Canal, Mediterranean, English Channel and then what? Do you go left around the big island between Sweden and Denmark or do you go right around the big island through Denmark? For preferences, I'd like the route to be on the Copenhagen side because seeing the little mermaid statue would be most cool and in keeping with the theme of the virtual journey.

I agree. I think we should navigate by the coolest route. But what does the navigator say?

What we did in Mumbai

akuma_river @ 4:26pm: Shooting at Fort Hood Army Base
http://community.livejournal.com/ontd_political/4543801.html
http://community.livejournal.com/ontd_political/4544200.html

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/11/05/texas.fort.hood.shootings/index.html

It's horrible.

Fort Hood is home to about 60,000 people. It is about the size of a city. It is the world's largest military base.

It happened in the solider readiness center which is the area where soliders get the last medical check-up before shipping out and coming in.

CNN is saying that ABC out of Waco (which is near Kileen) said the shooters named is major Malique Nadal Hassan.

There is 12 dead. 11 are victims. Of those 11 one was a civilian cop contracted as military police. One of those civilian MP's killed the shooter.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/reports-of-mass-shooting-at-fort-hood/?hp

Update | 7:41 p.m. Given that Thursday’s shooting spree took place at a readiness center, where troops were about to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, the subject will certainly turn to combat stress. A description of the work of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress, where Major Nidal Hasan, the suspected gunman who was killed on Thursday at Fort Hood, says this:

The Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress (CSTS) addresses both the invisible and visible wounds of war through research, education and consultation. The invisible wounds of war include the mental health consequences of deployment. These can range from normal distress to the treatable mental disorders of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Warrior wounds can also involve health risks such as increased use of tobacco, alcohol and/or drugs that can result in violence to self, spouse and/or children.

Update | 7:22 p.m. Information about Dr. Nidal Hasan posted on a Virginia Board of Medicine Web site includes a note that he saw patients at Darnell Army Medical Center Monday through Friday.

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/blotter/entries/2009/11/05/officials_shooting_suspect_dis.html

Officials: Shooting suspect discussed suicide bombings, other threats online
Thursday, November 5, 2009, 07:30 PM

FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS:

Federal law enforcement officials say the suspected Fort Hood, Texas, shooter had come to their attention at least six months ago because of Internet postings that discussed suicide bombings and other threats.

One of the Web postings that authorities reviewed is a blog that equates suicide bombers with a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save the lives of his comrades.

“To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause,” said the Internet posting. “Scholars have paralled (sic) this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers.”

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/blotter/entries/2009/11/05/official_fort_hood_shooting_su.html

Official: Fort Hood shooting suspect not dead
By American-statesman staff | Thursday, November 5, 2009, 08:17 PM

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the suspect in the Fort Hood shootings, has not been killed and is in stable condition at a hospital, Lt. Gen. Bob Cone said at a press conference at Fort Hood.

He is in custody at an undisclosed hospital, Cone said.

Three soldiers taken into custody after the shootings were released, he said. Investigators believe Hasan acted alone.

“Evidence does not suggest this was a terrorist event,” Cone said.

One of the first people to shoot Hasan was a civilian police officer who was shot but survived, said Cone, who added that earlier reports of a civilian officer dying were incorrect.

loqia @ 6:22am: Four Reasons Everyone Should Love Wave

So, as some of you may have guessed by now, in the last couple of days I’ve turned into a total wave fangirl. I know, I know — hipster,ⁱ much — but it’s true. Thing is, though, it seems that a lot of people out there don’t share my squee; there’s a lot of “meh” going around re. wave right now, coupled with a dash of “this sucks”. I suppose I can kinda see why. Wave is in a fairly limited release, so people are feeling a bit lonely. You jump on wave, ready to be all like NEXT GEN COMMUNICATION YEAH! only to find you’ve got no-one to communicate with. So maybe you reach out to with:public, except now instead of feeling NEXT GEN YEAH! you’re starting to feel like you’ve suddenly been thrown back into Usenet after the first AOL invasion.

And it’s like, “Wait. This was supposed to be the Next Big Thing?”

Well, yes sort of. But mostly no. And here are the four main reasons why.

Hold onto your hats, kids, because this? This gets wordy.

( Wave is not Google (Wave) )

( Why Wave Makes My Inner Mail Admin Squee )

( How Wave Could Kill Facebook (but Probably Won’t… Yet) )

( Why Microsoft Wants Wave (but Might Not Admit It) )

The Shiny, Wavey Future

I guess I’ve gone kinda nutso on the predictions here, and I suppose I feel obliged to point out I haven’t really talked about either time-frames or probabilities. If I had to guess, I say we’ll see wave adopted as a social networking tool before it’s adopted as a business tool, but conversely I think it’s more likely in the long run to be adopted by business than it is to replace Facebook and Twitter’s databases. There are also a significant number of hurdles to overcome with wave’s deployment: Real-time communication models are hard to scale; The storage requirements sound like they could be terrifying; What about “offline mode”? People still really like email… All that sort of stuff.

Still, the thing I like about wave is that it’s full of potential and incredibly daring. I mean, re-writing email? People’ve been talking about doing that for years and no-one’s managed to pull it off. Re-writing email and completely changing the paradigm it’s based on? Margaret Thatcher’s balls, man! Wave is either going to change the way the internet works or be the biggest white elephant in IT history.

Personally? I’m hoping for the former. It’s just more exciting that way.

See you in the future.

1. The geeky kind, not the fixed-gear-bike kind. Geekster? ↩

Comment?

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yonmei @ 6:23pm: Opening Lines That Just Mouseclick to 'Report Spam' Button
"With the impending release of the new movie, The Men Who Stare at Goats on November 6, 2009, questions about the paranormal will surely be cropping up in popular culture again."

*click!*

gwionfawyr @ 11:44am: Reality has set in
I wasn't happy with what I was writing and well. Still sick here. So I concede that there is no way on this green earth that I'm going to make 75k this month. I'm going back to the more realistic goal of 50k and just hoping I can catch up.

I restarted my novel from the beginning and yeah, like the way it's going now.

Tomorrow I try to make it through a whole day at school without coughing up a lung. So wish me luck poppets.

Jenn

New word count for today:

3140/50000

And my hands ache.

akuma_river @ 10:05am: ACTA will put you in Jail
Global treaty could throw file-sharers off Internet after ‘three strikes’ (November 05, 2009 - Raw Story - Daniel Tencer)

File-sharers could be jailed under proposed ACTA provisions

Leaked details of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement being negotiated in secret by most of the world's largest economies suggest Internet file-sharers could be blocked from accessing the Internet if they are repeatedly accused of sharing copyrighted material, say media and digital-rights watchdogs.

And the worst-case scenario could see popular Web sites like YouTube and Flickr shut down because of a provision in the treaty that would force them to monitor everything uploaded to the site for copyright violations.

Internet law professor Michael Geist published details of "leaked" portions of the discussions on ACTA on his blog Tuesday, as a new round of ACTA negotiations began in Seoul, South Korea. The US, along with all the countries of the European Union as well as Japan, Canada, Australia and a handful of other countries, are involved in the negotiations.

"The provisions would pave the way for a globalized three-strikes and you're out system," Geist blogged Wednesday, referring to a proposal from copyright holders to have Internet service providers cut off service to anyone accused at least three times of illegally sharing copyrighted material.

"This means that your entire family could be denied [access] to the Internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel," blogged tech writer and digital-rights supporter Cory Doctorow.

Doctorow also noted that another provision being proposed for the treaty would mean "that ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability."

And, as Geist noted in a follow-up article on Wednesday, the proposed treaty could end up seeing file-sharers jailed for sharing copyrighted material, even if they had no financial gain from the transaction.

Geist wrote that the treaty, as currently proposed, would "extend criminal enforcement to both (1) cases of a commercial nature; and (2) cases involving significant willful copyright and trademark infringement even where there is no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain. In other words, non-commercial infringement could lead to criminal penalties."

"The US government appears to be pushing for Three Strikes to be part of the new global IP enforcement regime which ACTA is intended to create -– despite the fact that it has been categorically rejected by the European Parliament and by national policymakers in several ACTA negotiating countries, and has never been proposed by US legislators," writes Gwen Hinze at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

ACTA negotiations were being held entirely in secret until this past May, when the Wikileaks Web site released a 2007 draft proposal.

The Obama administration has resisted attempts to make the negotiations public, though it did make an exemption for a long list of senior executives at major corporations.

In June, the administration announced it would continue the ACTA negotiations started under the previous administration.

akuma_river @ 9:51am: The ACTA Treay and how it will take away your internet and land your ass in jail!!
ACTA is being touted as an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. It's not. It's a vastly reaching copyright enforcement law that will be far more powerful, malicious, destructive than DMCA. This treaty is being designed in SECRET by members or people, whom we do not know their names because of "national security" as agents of our government and 40 other nations.

As a citizen of this nation YOU DO NOT HAVE ANY RIGHT TO EVEN LOOK AT THE WHAT THE TREATY IS PROPOSING! As a worker of any big company you do, but you have to sign a non-disclousre agreement in compesation of being able to read it.

Why? Because the Government, Bush and Obama, have deemed this as a National Security necessary secret.

Other Nations have sued or been given a look at the all powerful secrety treat that is still in the works. It's been in the works since 2007. But us? Oh no, we are given the National Security excuse and told that is all we need to know.

Now we know. Now we are pissed and now we are scared. Because now we know, through a leaked document, what this treaty is about to propose.

Have any of you EVER downloaded music, video, images, wrote fanfiction? Because now through ACTA if you have and if you have been given a take-down notice by the propose owners of the copyright material that you have SUPPOSEDLY violated, then after three times your ISP will be ordered by the GOVERNMENT to take away your homesteads internet service.

That's right, your internet service of your instead house/apartment, etc.

That means even if you yourself have NEVER downloaded ANYTHING at all and only use your computer as a means to surf the internt to check your e-mail but your kid or husband has then ALL OF YOU lose your internet.

This is also most likely going to be in addition of some fine for violation of copyright law and even possibly JAIL TIME!

Don't believe me? Think I'm just over reacting to things?

Then read what the experts are saying:

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

* That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

* Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/03/secret-copyright-tre.html

( cut )


LINKS on what ACTA is:
Lawfont.com: ACTA: here we go again? (Australia)
Lawfont.com: Geist on ACTA (Australia)
Electronic Frontiers Australia (Australia)
InternetNZ alarmed by latest ACTA leaks (New Zealand)
ip-watch.org
WikiLeaks: ACTA search
Wiki Leaks: Talk:Classified US, Japan and EU ACTA trade agreement drafts, 2009
Wiki Leaks: Classified US, Japan and EU ACTA trade agreement drafts, 2009
Petition to Obama - keionline.org
The ACTA Internet Chapter: Putting the Pieces Together
ACTA Negotiations, Day Two: What's On Tap
ACTA Internet Chapter Leak Signals Far-Reaching Copyright Policy
Leaked ACTA Internet Provisions: Three Strikes and a Global DMCA
ISPs Soon Forced to Police Your Internet Behavior?
Secret Anti-Piracy Treaty Turns ISPs into Pirates
EU Breaks Deadlock in Debate Over Right to Internet Access (November 05, 2009 - PC World - Paul Meller, IDG News Service)



That is it. I've had it about these fucking companies influencing laws and governments and getting their fucking way. I've had it.

I'm emailing my congressman. I'm linking to these articles. they have got to know this isn't about piracy anymore this uninforcable and its trying to censor the internet!!

I'm going to write out a long e-mail to my local newspapers.

It is time that we stood up and told these fuckers, no more. Just because I do a little downloading here and there does not mean I am not entitled to my rights as a human being.

this law will make it to where the burden of proof lies on me that I didn't break the law. It is almost impossible to defend against this law. They could say I illegally downloaded music when maybe I just ripped a cd I bought to play music on my computer.

Or about webpages or youtube. They could say that all the film about the Iran Riots and Protests is copywrited and if I uploaded any of it that I'm a pirate.

This, this is fucking insane.

gwionfawyr @ 8:09pm: Day Four - Word Count
So I only got a little over a 1000 done yesterday, but got a good chunk done today in between sleeping. Final word count for Day Four?



Going to spend some time with my S.O. and then sleep.

loqia @ 10:13am: Meanwhile, on the Internet…

• In a Word
  Now to try and use “kalokagathia” in a sentence this week…
  language:english
• Better than Fiction
  Asclepius: Not the same as caduceus. Not. Even. Close.
  lulz fail health:healthcare
• (untitled)
  People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K. Poor Hawking. Forever doomed to be mistaken for American just because his voice synthesiser has the wrong bloody accent.
  fail health:healthcare
• Fuck the homophobic assholes at Tim Hortons. I’m staying with Dunkin Donuts.
  Needless to say, Canadians frown on companies who get into bed with American right-wing religious wack-a-loons.
  sexuality:equalrights
• Guillermina Quiroga and Junior Cervilla
  Dancing the milonga (sort of like tango) to “Billie Jean”. So. Awesome.
  video people:michaeljackson
• Healther Skelter – Obama Death Panel Debate
  Sam Bee fights for private death panels, John Oliver believes in universal death panels, and Aasif Mandvi wants whatever scares the public most.
  usa health:healthcare video
• Gaydar is Dead
  Let me get this “straight”, heterosexual men are no longer barbarians and gay men can’t be counted on to conform to strict stereotypes.
  sexuality
• sketch post
  Did I mention I think I love other people’s sketch posts even more than finished art? Because I kinda sorta think I do…
  art
• why facebook is sooo gonna get you fired
  [E]ven more dangerous than friending your parents on facebook? [F]riending a) your boss and b) the cubicle-mate you kinda can’t stand.
  lulz fail socialnetworking:facebook
• Mermaid or Whale? Vive la France!
  Beginning today, when I look at my butt in the mirror I will think, “Good gosh, look how smart I am.”
  health:bodyimage france funny women
• Worldwide Slump Makes Nigeria’s Online Scammers Work That Much Harder
  “We are working harder. The financial crisis is not making it easy for them over there,” said Banjo, 24, speaking about Americans, whose trust he has won and whose money he has fleeced, via his Dell laptop. “They don’t have money. And the money they don’t have, we want.” Scammin’ ain’t easy?
  internet email:spam
• Dancing Around Possible Meanings of ‘Yahoozee’
  So… apparently in Nigeria they write gangsta rap about 419 email scamming. Or perhaps not, but either way, I guess it beats pimpin’.
  internet email:spam
• Race, Taxes, Birth Certificates, and Eugenics
  It is, in short, a movement made up of the enfranchised and enabled; people who have gained every benefit from the politics of America and yet who feel in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones, the ones who have nothing left to lose, so rapidly is America falling away from them. It is rare to run across any movement so deeply angry — or more to the point, a movement which explicitly celebrates anger as the primary mission of their activism.
  politics racism usa health:healthcare
• What? I Thought This Was a Safe Space.
  I like being racist.
  lulz
• Google Wave Cinema: Pulp Fiction
  This is so EXACTLY how it would’ve gone down. Foa srs.
  video funny google:wave

Comment?

This post has been mirrored from void-star.net. You may comment there using your LiveJournal/Dreamwidth/OpenID URL instead of an email address. Randoms and lurkers are more than welcome.

novembermond @ 9:26pm: ich dachte mir
... vielleicht interessiert ihr euch ja ein bisschen dafür, was bei uns an der uni grade so abgeht. außerdem haben sich uns heute auch ein paar deutsche unis angeschlossen. :D

http://unsereuni.at/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
http://unsereuni.at/
http://www.glocalist.com/news/kategorie/soziales/titel/besetzung-der-unis-muenster-heidelberg-und-potsdam/
http://www.profil.at/articles/0944/560/254638/die-generation-nachkriegszeit-revolte

akuma_river @ 4:15am: The results
Well we all know how Main's Prop 1 went. 87% of it counted and it went to the YES. I call voter fraud and a recount. Nate said it would be NO by 70%. Something is wrong here.

Oh btw, Main passed the medical marijuna distributing bill. So they get their dope but no gay marriages.

Houston is most likely going to have a gay Mayor.

New York City elected two Asians to office, one citywide as comptroller and the other in Manhattan as councilwoman.

Boomberg wasted a lot of money to get his squeaked by win. Which is pissing off the Democrats because the Democratic Party didn't even campaign hard for their guy.

Washington is about to extend domestic partner benefits to same sex parters. In essence they are getting the separate but equal clause of 'gay marriage' not in name. Nate Silver is suggesting that maybe the GBLT should focus on this a compromise to get the benefits to same sex parterns. But we all know that once it gets passed (Nationwide) it will eventually get challenged in the Supreme Court because separate but equal is unconstitutional in all regards.

It seems that Austin passed it so that it is expanding COBRA+ to domestic partners. Since you know in 2006 Texas made the constitutional amendment where Gay Marriage and Civil Unions are not ALLOWED or RECOGNIZED.

And ALL 11 propositions passed in Texas.

yonmei @ 8:56am: Avon still missing. I'm still sad.
Also, I have yet to write a nano-word. Bloody big event eating up my LIFE.

Have fixed up to go out with a lesbian photography club the Sunday after the conference. That should be fun.

Are we at Mumbai yet? What did we do?

spacelogic @ 10:10pm: mannnnn
Numbers so far indicate we've lost Maine. Washington looking more promising but too early to tell. My dad came into my room turning the air blue over Maine -- he doesn't swear much, but he was pissed off. Me, I'm just cynical at this point.

I switched to Arch, which looks like the right level of minimalism for my main machine -- I'll revisit Gentoo when I've got a vacation to set it up in and/or a shiny new system to break (I want a cheapo computer for playing with, but I feel I shouldn't buy one for a while.)

In other news, I'm fed up with casual misogyny in geek circles.

tigresslilly @ 8:37am: My mother woke me Up *insert the tears*
So yea, I'm a awake but a but grouchy. Both my mom and my dad have very early morning exercise and be at work schedules. I'm glad that they're exercising and not letting their lack of weight loss put them off their diets or exercise routine. I don't mind being vaguely awake and aware of those grumblings when they're moving around. I don't really mind when they call out to talk to me and make me fully awake either but I can't fall back asleep and when they leave I'm just tired and grouchy with nothing to do

It's all good, I'll drink tea later and life will pick up.

As a side note now that my facebook picture hunt addiction is over and my try to revive the insanejournal has proven it's not enough (can only post so often, sometimes I have nothing to say, not committed enough for a nanowrite, and can only respond to some friends and coms) I am addicted to facebook apps. I've got cafe world, farmville, fish town, and happy fish. I have others that I tried and just didn't make it to the temp addiction phase. So yeah I'm a little lame.

Moved around all my icons again. Since I only have about 100 free slots whenever I plan a massive update I delete a few I'm not using and add in the newbies. Sometimes i have more space at the end of the swap around. My fannish icons are getting less and less these days but I think that's because I'm not participating in the fandom as much as I should/thought I would. Need to find some Dollhouse and Fringe groups stat.

In other related notes, I've been slowly backdating old journals I never posted because I didn't have internet and journals I wrote by hand.  While going through my Senior high school journal I realized that beyond being pretentious and righteous and a know it all I sometimes had interesting thoughts and connections, but there's a lot of muck to rake through first.  

Also thanks to my backdating, all my Wyoming journals are off the first page of my journal.   There's more in between I should type in but I'm stuck at a particularly angsty journal I don't want to write in or look at again maybe ever. C'est la vie. 

Finished my application for an educator's liscence.  Hopefully the second set of tests will be worked up and graded soon and I'll have everything I need to start applying for jobs.  It's not an ideal time to hunt but we've all got our crosses to bear on that front.  Minimally tutoring of some sort should be approachable.

akuma_river @ 2:43am: Highest in the world!!!
No wonder our system is so damn broken. they our robbing us blind.

U.S. Medical Prices Highest In the World
Posted by: Cathy Arnst on November 02

There is a set of charts flying around the policy blogosphere today that starkly illustrates why the U.S. devotes almost 18% of its gross domestic product to health care spending, while other wealthy nations spend no more than 10% or 11%: Because we pay far, far more per unit of care than any other country.

The 36-page document was put together in September by the International Federation of Health Plans, which represents 100 insurers in 31 countries. It consists of a number of charts that show the difference between what the U.S. pays for any number of medical services, and what other industrialized countries pay.

akuma_river @ 1:22am: Voting
Tomorrow is election day in some states. Some for Governors others for Mayors.

For us in Texas we have 11 Constitutional Amendments going up for vote.

The Burnt Orange Report has a great lowdown on what they are and what major newspapers are endorsing and their own endorsements.

Me, No on Prop 1-3, Yes on Prop 4-8, No on Prop 9-11.

I know a lot of people support Prop 9 (Open Beaches Act) and Prop 11 (Eminent Domain) but I'm against them. First, 9 is taking people's property away from them in cases of land eroison that cause public beaches to become private property. And 11 is just going to screw up the emminent domain laws more than what it is already is and will not FIX/REFORM them. Not to mention that Governor Goodhair (Perry) and Hutchinson and the Texas Tea Party LIKE it!

And seriously there are some amendments here that are ridiculous. Did Prop 5 and Prop 7 really have to exist? Seriously, couldn't we have made LAWS and not constitutional amendments? I know 7 is to add the National Guard to exempt that already has everyone else added...but couldn't we have just tossed the old amendment out and just made a new LAW that did the same thing?

What about Prop 5? A constitutional admendment to dictate how apprasial boards work in concert with each other?!

And Prop 10?! "Proposition 10 would ... allow members of governing boards of Texas emergency service districts to serve terms not to exceed four years." --League of Women Voters Guide


Austin Chronicle: YES. "But trivial, and this belongs in ordinary legislation, not the state constitution."

El Paso Times: YES. "This would provide more continuity and experience on the boards."

Fort Worth Star-Telegram: NO. "This is goofy. There's no good reason why board members of obscure districts in Harris County should have longer terms than members of the Texas House."

Houston Tea Party Patriots: No Endorsement.

Sen. Kirk Watson's "Watson Wire:" YES. It "would lengthen the term of emergency services district board members from two to four years."

*sighs* *shakes head*

Oh for god's sake why can't Texas do something logical for a change!!!

gwionfawyr @ 10:08pm: Day 2 and counting...


My count for today. Still tired, not quite recovered enough yet to stay awake all night. Will do some more writing sessions tomorrow to catch up to where I want to be.

Jenn

loqia @ 10:49am: Meanwhile, on the Internet…

• this country is now officially nuts
  Places I’m Glad I Do Not Live In…
  usa wtf
• Someone is a dick to Rob Liefeld, fapping ensues
  Really, as with all good wanks, there is no right side. A man was a dick to another man who is also a dick, and it got put on the internet. Needless to say, once a critical mass of dicks has been reached, fapping ensues.
  wank wank:irl comics people:robliefeld
• Oh snap.
  Why not to add your work colleagues to your Facebook account…
  fail:irl socialnetworking:facebook lulz
• Down for everyone or just me?
  It’s very remiss that I haven’t posted a link to this site before.
  internet resources useful networking
• I… er…
  Avoiding masturbation and homosexual activities are among preventive measures one could take against Influenza A (H1N1), according to an eminent practitioner of complimentary therapy.
  health:fishslapping wtf wank:irl fail
• Time: Going to the Gym Will Not Make You Less Fat
  I wish I had a gym outfit as awesome as that…
  health
• Pain = Art?
  It wouldn’t be a MotI without some luco_millian art!
  art
• SLsecret, week 48
  SecondLifeSecret! How did I not know this existed? THINK OF THE LULZ, PEOPLE! THINK OF THE LULZ!
  lulz gaming:mmos:secondlife
• Tr.im URL Shortener Shuts Down; Short Links to Die?
  People who get paranoid about link shorteners need to get either, a) better browser, or b) better OSes, IMO.
  internet socialnetworking:twitter
• heathcare
  Let’s be honest here. Most people I know are not well-educated professionals, most people I know do not have healthcare. [...] It’s fucking scary to get migraines, bronchitis, or throw out your back and not be able to do anything about it because you can’t afford to go to the doctor, you don’t have a car to get there, and even if you could, you definitely can’t afford the medications.
  health:healthcare
• Hotter Than Hell
  That’s… and interesting iPhone application. Pretty useful, really.
  blogs:random apple:iphone
• Bev Vincent apparently writes like a girl…
  More-exalted editor made some rather stupid and sexist remarks at the start. Along the lines that it is difficult for a female writer to write convincing male characters (and vice versa), and that Bev really wasn’t very good at it. Bev’s main character was a man. More-exalted editor didn’t believe that any man would think the way Bev’s character did, or call his parents every week. Bev’s writing style was also too elegant.
  writing funny
• The Hero Factory
  The art is good, even if the choices are a bit limited…
  comics art flash

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yonmei @ 1:14pm: Must accomplish something...
"Any day on which you've had dental work and have also accomplished anything else may be classified as a win."

I discovered that the person who picked up my shiny black MP3 player (named Avon, by the way) from the Teviot, where I lost it Saturday at a pre-Nanowrimo getogether, evidently thought "Cool! Free MP3 player!" and not "Oh, someone lost an MP3 player, let me hand it in to lost property".

I don't think that counts as an accomplishment.

I also lost my day ticket, but I don't think that counts as an accomplishment either.

Perhaps I'll pay my phone bill.

I had two fillings. The dentist asked me twice if I was OK. I spent 40 minutes or so remembering to breathe, trying not to shake, and working out prime numbers - I didn't even get as far as 97: I was still trying to work out 91 in my head when he told me we were done.

yonmei @ 8:03am: I have to go to the dentist this morning
*unhappy platypus*

(And I have lost my cool black MP3 player. :-( If someone handed it in at the Teviot from Saturday... *hopes*)




omg XKCD

loqia @ 6:57pm: From a Wave to a Tsunami

Firstly, for the people who requested Wave invites; the process by which they are allocated remains a mystery, though people are reporting average wait times of 2-to-10 days. So hopefully you should get something within the next week.

Okay.

So, it’s my second day of waving and — despite having only one friend to wave to — I… think I’m in love. Wave isn’t quite like anything else I’ve ever used before; it’s more IRC than email, and more LiveJournal comments thread than IRC. The editing and replying functionality is insane, and the whole thing takes a bit of head-wrapping-around. Example: You can edit or delete any of the ‘blips’ (posts) in a wave you’re part of, even if they’re not yours. But the wave also keeps a history of all edits, and you can play these back and pause-and-revert at any point. It’s sort of like Wikipedia on crack.

You can also reply inline at any point in any blip, or reply to an individual wavelet (”thread”),ⁱ or reply to the whole wave. Replying to the whole wave makes it sort of like a mailing list, replying to a wavelet makes it sort of like a comment thread, and replying inline makes it sort of like… uh, I don’t have an analogy for this one. It’s not really like anything.

Do I think wave is going to replace SMTP? I’m… not sure. I think it has the potential to, but I guess it’s going to depend on Google working out some of the kinks (”How can I remove people from a wave?”) and privacy concerns (”What if I don’t want people to see me type my blips in real-time?”). Still, I guess those sort of emergent questions are exactly what the beta is for. It’s also worth noting that this is pretty much exactly not how email was developed; SMTP was a closed shop, of sorts, if only for the reason that not many people were all that interested in it at the time. Wave’s got a couple of hundred thousand users now (orders or magnitude more than would’ve been using proto-email back in the ’60s), which is going to grow exponentially from here on out. And Google is watching how users use Wave — or how they want to use it — and is tweaking the protocol accordingly.

If wave — or, rather, the Wave Federation Protocolⁱⁱ — succeeds, it will be because of this; because it does what people want better than email does from the ground-up, rather than through retrofitted technologies like MIME and SPF.

Criticisms of wave? Honestly, not many. The protocol feels kind of “heavy” right now due to the constant syncingⁱⁱⁱ but I suspect that’s a teething issue. The actual concepts behind the system are pretty amazing, and wave is both small enough to appeal to “non-technical” users — I can see my mum waving, for example — and big enough to appeal to the born-geeks of the Web 2.0 generation.

With a few tweaks, I even think wave could be a Facebook killer. Maybe.

But the thing I think it’s really going to kill? Is LiveJournal. Or at least the fandom part of it.

Why? One search term: with:public.

Remember when the whole of fandom used to be on Yahoo! mailing lists? Well, wave is its own mailing list server. The methods for a) making a wave public, and b) knowing that you can actually have public waves are both a bit obtuse and people are still feeling them out right now, but the potential is there. Oh is it there. Wave is a bit (well, a lot) of a paradigm shift, and it took me a good day or so to realise that I could type with:public into the search box to look for “public waves”; sort of like message boards crossed with mailing lists. Oh, and did I mention that all waves can have tags? And that wave searching is pretty much exactly what you’d expect coming from a company whose main business is, in fact, search?

Right. So what do you think the first thing I typed in was?

with:public tag:fandom.^iv

The fen have a wave, as does Dreamwidth, and the sorts of people you’d expect to see there are, indeed, there. But think about it, fen. Want to squee about the latest SPN episode? with:public tag:spn s5e8. Looking for Smallville fic but can’t stand Clana? with:public tag:fic tag:smallville -tag:clana. Want to stalk your favourite author? with:public with:infinite.alis@googlewave.com. And searches? Yeah, you can save them.

See what I’m getting at here? Your own mix-and-match fandom content channels, that’s what I’m getting at.

And, okay, it’s not perfect… yet. Wave doesn’t yet deal well with trolls, for instance. You can’t have, say, a read-only public wave with moderated write membership. Such a system might theoretically be possible with bots,^v though I wouldn’t be surprised if Google announces a system of granular access control at some point.

On the other hand, its main selling point is exactly what the fen have been clamouring for since Strikethrough. Exactly the thing projects like Dreamwidth and AO3 only half answer. In short, it’s decentralised.

Which, okay, might sound like a sort of weird thing to say, given that it’s Google Wave, but I’m talking here about wave in general; about the WFP. Because Google isn’t trying to write the next LiveJournal or Facebook; the next proprietary, closed site. It’s trying to write the next SMTP; an open, inter-operative protocol. And I quote:

The wave federation protocol enables everyone to become a wave provider and share waves with others. For instance, an organization can operate as a wave provider for its members, an individual can run a wave server as a wave provider for a single user or family members, and an Internet service provider can run a wave service as another Internet service for its users as a supplement to email, IM, ftp, etc.

– Google Wave Federation Protocol Over XMPP, “2.1 Wave Providers” (emphasis added)

When WFP goes “out”^vi you’re talking about a system where my server can wave at your server can wave at Google’s server can wave at Microsoft’s server. Adoption rates may vary, and all that, but still. Decentralised. Peer-to-peer. Who owns the servers? Everyone and no-one, that’s who.

The fen presence on Wave is small right now, but growing^vii and positive. Fen are already camping out their show-specific waves, as well as using the protocol to engage in RP and collaborative writing efforts. Meanwhile, the DW people are thinking of how to embrace wave from their end, and while I haven’t yet managed to scrounge up the OTW, I’d bet they’re not far behind. I think fandom has been emboldened in the last few years with the success of DW and AO3, and wave is a very shiny new community toy to play with.

So yeah. Maybe I’m just being overly optimistic because I’ve never really been a big LiveJournal fan, but… watch this space, fandom. I think you’re gonna love it.

1. This is not, strictly speaking, what a wavelet actually is. However, unless care deeply about the minutiae of the protocol spec, it’s good enough. ↩
2. Also: Way to name your technology like something from a sci-fi drama, Google. Though I guess that’s the point; Google knows exactly who their test audience is — and what image they want to portray to them — as the “Welcome to Wave!” videos from “Doctor Wave” make abundantly clear. ↩
3. Running it over 3G on a iPhone works, but is kind of a scary prospect, bandwidth-wise. I also find it amusing that despite iPhone Safari being an “unsupported browser”, Wave still has a dedicated mobile GUI. ↩
4. Actually, strictly speaking it was “with:public fandom“, which does a text search for “fandom” rather than a tag search. But you get the point, right? ↩
5. Yes, bots. See? IRC. ↩
6. And, for the record, void-star.net has its hand up to beta WFP when it becomes available via Google Apps. ↩
7. Back In The Day, I said that one of Dreamwidth’s strengths was its invite system, if only because it creates a sort of mini “instant community”. Well, guess who’s also using invites for its beta? ↩

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