YakBoy.Net

I finally pulled the trigger and got rid of Windows on the laptop. After fiddling around trying to persuade Lappy to boot from an external disc (it turns out that you hold down ESC to get to the BIOS setup so you can change the boot priority on Toshiba laptops. Who knew?) I booted from an Ubuntu system disc, reformatted the hard drive and installed Ubuntu. I’d been using Ubuntu on Lappy pretty much exclusively so getting everything up and running went pretty smoothly and it was oddly satisfying getting everything installed and tweaked the way I wanted it.

What had been holding me back from doing this before was the fact that I had somewhere on the order of 60 gigabytes of music saved in my iTunes folder and I had intended to move it all to an external drive so I could dump it all back on once I had switched over from Windows but I have a (nearly) identical iTunes library on my desktop computer so I just decided to screw moving everything all at once and just refill the music library on Lappy as the mood takes me.

That did leave me with an issue of not having anything to listen to at work today. I was poking around looking for some free-to-download music (there are a couple of good places to do this, assuming you like remixed video game music or mash-ups) and I hit on The Kleptones‘ website. Their (his really since The Kleptones is really just one guy) double album Uptime/Downtime was released in January of this year, runs for two and a half hours and samples everything from funk to metal to hip-hop to folk. He even threw some Philip Glass in there. I downloaded the album when it was first released but I hadn’t listened to it straight through for a while. It remains a close runner up for being the best mash-up album I have ever heard (the clear winner being Feed the Animals by Girl Talk). There is also a separate project to make videos for all of the tracks on the album. Below is the video for ‘Come Again’ which features samples from The Beatles, Dezo, Lil Wayne, Beastie Boys, Breakwater, Rare Earth, Queen & David Bowie, Daft Punk, Cypress Hill, John Lennon, Boston, Freeez, Criminal Element Orchestra, Art of Noise, S’Express and I’m sure a few others.

The appeal of mash-ups is something I don’t entirely understand, but I could (and have) listened to that track and the whole album over and over again. Good stuff.

Juan Cole is a Professor of History at the University of Michigan specializing in the modern history of the Middle East and South Asia. He is fluent in Arabic and Persian and has written a number of peer-reviewed papers on the modern Middle East. Unquestionably an expert.

It takes him 1400 words to correct everything that is wrong in a single 140 character tweet from Sara Palin. That is why Palin is so dangerous. Stupidity THAT concentrated has GOT to be unstable in some way.

Among the more obvious things wrong with the tweet in question is the word “refudiate”, seemingly some sort of mashup between “repudiate” and “refute”.

I have no doubt that this was a simple mistake. Twitter, by its nature, does not lend itself to thoughtful and considered composition. Instead of just laughing it off as a mistake, though, Sara Palin has doubled down, insisting that “English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!“.

There are neither enough faces nor enough palms to cover even the thought of Sara Palin comparing what was essentially a typo to Shakespeare’s neologisms and poetic devices. Additionally, in spite of the fact that in the context of the original sentence “repudiate” would have seemed like the correct word choice, when she deleted the tweet and resent it she changed it not to repudiate, but to refute. Repudiate (to cast off or disown) and refute (to prove to be false or erroneous, as an opinion or charge or to prove (a person) to be in error) are both useful words but they are by no means interchangeable.

Admittedly, Shakespeare frequently used existing words in new ways (using nouns as verbs – “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle” from Richard II for example) but he was using words he understood in ways that conveyed meaning. Palin is mis-using existing words in ways that demonstrate that she doesn’t really understand what the words she is using mean.

Addendum -Skitt’s Law states that “any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself” so I have absolutely no doubt that there is at least one glaring error in either spelling or grammar somewhere in this post.

Turns out that, as I and many others suspected, the “I Write Like…” meme didn’t actually do any sort of analysis on your writing. It just kind of pulled names out of a hat.

The point to all this, according to the Making Light blog maintained by TOR editors Teresa & Patrick Nielsen Hayden, was to propagate links to a vanity press scam site throughout the internet. Tell people their writing sample is like that of a famous author, have the now star-struck, gullible, hopeful author give you a few thousand dollars to cover the expenses of “publishing” their book, run off one or two copies, tell author the book didn’t sell, keep the money.

I stripped all the links out of my previous post but I’m leaving the results there. I still think it’s amusing that out of all the random names it could have pulled for me it came up Margaret Atwood.

Harvey Pekar died early yesterday morning. He wrote American Splendor from 1976 until 2008 and had started a webcomic, The Pekar Project. His ability to turn the mundane events of his everyday life into compelling, touching, humorous and entertaining stories was without peer.

I was lucky enough to see a stage performance of the American Splendor play at San Diego ComiCon in 1991 with Dan Castellaneta playing Harvey Pekar. Before then I had heard of Harvey Pekar, mostly due to his appearances on David Letterman and I was aware of American Splendor, though I probably hadn’t read an entire issue. The play was amazing and I immediately became a raving fanboy of Pekar’s work. He was in the audience for the play and I got to shake his hand when I bought one of the American Splendor collections they had for sale afterwards.

I was still going to Evergreen at the time with aspirations of becoming a great writer (ah, the naivete of youth) and, if I recall correctly, got back from San Diego pretty much just in time to dive into one of the quarter-long writer’s workshop programs I took while I was there. As part of the program we had to write a paper on an author that had inspired and influenced us and I tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade my professor to let me write it on Harvey Pekar. She had never heard of Pekar or American Splendor and as soon as I told her what it was she dismissed the idea pretty much out of hand. She couldn’t imagine that a comic could be anything inspiring or influential. I think I ended up writing my paper on David Eddings since I was in the midst of reading The Malloreon series. Won’t let me write about an author with a unique talent for conveying character and emotion in a few short words just because he happens to write comics? Fine, you get pulp fantasy instead.

I still find American Splendor to be both inspiring and discouraging. Inspiring because Pekar wrote about nothing more than every day life and somehow turned it in to something extraordinary. Discouraging because I despair of ever being able to write anything near that good.

Plugged in a couple of entries from YakBoy.Net picked more or less at random into a website which claims to use a “statistical analyzer” which “analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them to those of the famous writers”. Apparently…

One of the things I find amusing about this is that Margaret Atwood is one of the poster children for the no true Scotsman science-fiction vs. literature debate. Mundane critics have claimed that her writing is not science-fiction, basically because it has been found to have literary merit. Science-fiction, by contrast, does NOT have literary merit. Therefore The Handmaid’s Tale or Oryx and Crake, for example, CANNOT be science-fiction. Atwood herself has argued that she writes speculative fiction, not science-fiction; “Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen”.

Not that any rational argument could be made that anything I have written, especially not just here on YB.N, comes close to being of the quality of Margaret Atwood, but at least I know science-fiction when I see it.

I’ve already made a post about this over on the ol’ Seattle Geekly but I wanted to give a little more personal perspective on it over here. The short version is that Blizzard is going to start requiring anyone who posts on the official forums for any of their games, Diablo 3, Starcraft 2 or World of Warcraft, to do so using their real first and last names. On the face of it this raises immediate concerns about privacy. Blizzard claims this is necessary because their forums have been overrun by trolls.

The official forums have always been a great place to discuss the latest info on our games, offer ideas and suggestions, and share experiences with other players — however, the forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild. Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before.

Unfortunately this claim doesn’t even really pass the laugh test. It is certainly true that there is currently a very high level of anonymity, at least on the Warcraft forums where people can post under the name of any character on their account. Since people can have up to 50 characters on one account the chances of any inflammatory comments being associated with any particular individual are remote at best. However there are two issues with Blizzard’s implication that they are being forced to take the step of removing anonymity completely because of the trolling problem. First, Blizzard has been very lax about moderating their forums in the past. All but the most flagrant and offensive violations of their terms of service go unpunished and permanent bans are uncommon. Second, if Blizzard wanted to create more personal responsibility on their forums there are methods that have been successful in other communities that do not involve the publication of people’s real names. A rating system like that used on Slashdot or just a single forum identity per account, as is done on the steam forums, would work just as well. there is no real reason to force people to use their real names if the real goal of the policy JUST to limit trolling and there are a number of very good reasons NOT to use people’s real names. Even posters on 4chan, arguably some of the most maladjusted and anti-social denizens of the internet, have realized why this may not be the best idea.

So why is Blizzard insisting that people use their real names? Speculation is rampant that this is the first step in leveraging their partnership with Facebook and turning their games into a new, giant social medium. The have already been making moves in this direction with some of the changes they’ve been making to the Warcraft Armory.

This is where I start feeling like I’m over reacting. There are certainly privacy concerns associated with posting your real name on the internet however, for the time being anyway, Blizzard is not requiring the use of your real name for anything other than forum posting which is optional. There is also, as of now, no mandatory system by which an individual’s real name can be associated with their in-game characters (there is an option that allows you to display your character’s name but it appears to be opt-in). Many people’s real names are already available on the internet in various places. Mine certainly is. Incidences of stalking and harassment already occur and there is no concrete reason to believe that real names on Warcraft forums will increase those incidences. My strongest objections to Blizzard forcing people to post under their real names are mostly of the slippery slope nature. It sets a bad precedent and I have no confidence that Bliz will not, at some point in the future, take further privacy infringing steps.

The change in policy leaves a bad taste in my mouth and this was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back and prompted me to cancel my Warcraft account again, but is this as serious an issue as I think it could be? Am I worried that I will be stalked or harassed because of my activities in the World of Warcraft? No. Am I worried that someone will be? Yes, I think it is almost a certainty. People already have, without their real names being freely available of the official WoW forums.

Privacy is a touchy issue and I think Blizzard is mis-handling this.

A concept stolen from Kieth Knight‘s K Chronicles, this was a moment where I had to raise my arms over my head and yell “YES!” (to be perfectly accurate I think I yelled “victory is mine” but the sentiment was the same).

Before I get into my little victory I need to talk a bit about Rasmussen Reports. Political junkies like myself know the name Rasmussen Reports well. Just as Fox is the lupus of news, Rasmussen is the lupus of political polling. They bill themselves as a sort of rapid response team of polling “if it’s in the news, it’s in our polls” and all that. Of course they, like every other polling firm, intend for people to accept their polling data as an accurate reflection of actual public opinion. Oddly though, their polls almost always show overwhelming support for whatever the Rupublican talking point du jour is. Right wing news outlets like Fox and the Wall Street Journal, as well as the right wing blogosphere absolutely LOVE Rasmussen. If a poll is cited by a right wing talking head, chances are very good it’s a Rasmussen poll.

Daily Kos has done some analysis and put together some handy charts demonstrating the Rasmussen effect.

(click to embiggen)

Nate Silver of 538 has written a couple of pieces analyzing Rasmussen and explaining how they manage to get the results that they do. His conclusion is that Rasmussen has an approximately six point “house effect” in favor of Republican candidates and right wing issues on top of the conservative bias inherent in their polling methods (land-line calls only, no cell phones and usually conducted during business hours on weekdays).

Now, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

We were flopping around the house last night when the phone rang. It wasn’t a number I recognized, which is usually my cue to turn the ringer off and let the answering machine pick up but on a whim I answered. On the line a computer voice informed me that it was a public opinion poll being conducted by Rasmussen Reports. I debated just hanging up on them but then decided it would be more fun to just answer their questions exactly opposite to the way they wanted me to. Country going in the right direction? STRONGLY AGREE! President Obama? STRONGLY APPROVE! Government in general doing a good job? STRONGLY AGREE!

Being Rasmussen, I’m sure my answers will be averaged out of their data but it I still enjoyed doing it. Probably a little more than I should have.

It should be noted that Rasmussen Reports has absolutely no connection to local photographer and blogger Rasmus Rasmussen who’s only bias is towards awesome.

Yet another anti-gay activist has been caught with his pants down. George Rekers, a founding member of the Family Research Council and a professional expert witness against gay adoption, recently returned from a trip to Europe in the company of a young male escort from, no kidding, Rentboy.com. Rekers is, of course, denying that there was anything sexual about their relationship. He told a Miami newspaper that because of recent surgery he was unable to “lift luggage” and had hired the young man to help him, only discovering that he was a prostitute later during the trip. Rekers also told blogger Joe Jervis that he “deliberately spend[s] time with sinners with the loving goal to try to help them” and that he spent the trip trying to turn his companion away from homosexuality.

The escort, oddly enough, tells a somewhat different story. He claims that Rekkers is a homosexual and the trip was pretty much exactly what everyone thinks it was. Insert your own “baggage handling” double entendre here.

I have commented before on the failings of evangelical Christian values in this context. The icing on the cake is that Rekkers is also a board member at the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, one of the more prominent groups advocating the idea that homosexuality can be “cured”. I actually have a fair amount of sympathy for Rekkers (and Larry Craig and Ted Haggard for that matter). He, and they, had clearly been indoctrinated with the idea that homosexuality is evil at a very young age and were unable to overcome that indoctrination in their adult life when they realized that they themselves were homosexual. What is unfortunate is that all three of these men used their power and influence to do everything they could to ensure that there will be at least one more generation of gays that go through exactly the same self loathing and wrenching internal struggles that they had to.

Quick update on the Ubuntu front. I had a couple pictures I wanted to download off our camera onto my computer. I was getting ready to plug it in and thought “oh wait, I don’t have any of the camera software for Linux, I need to reboot into Windows to do this”. Then I figured, what the heck, I’ll plug it in and see what happens and I was delighted to be presented with this dialog box –

I clicked “OK”, a window with all the pictures on the camera popped open, I grabbed the ones I wanted and was done. No extra drivers or software needed.

Ubuntu ROCKS!