void-star.net

Happy Democracy Day everyone!

2010-08-20T23:13:34Z

Don’t forget to vote. (Seriously, don’t. If you do, the AEC will fine you.)

permalink » 2 comments » 14 words posted in: Life, politics, politics:australia, politics:australian:election 2010, videos

How the iPad taught me to stop worrying and love the Kindle.

2010-08-04T00:55:46Z

Hey, so remember a couple of posts back when I got an iPad? How’s that working out I wonder?

As it turns out, pretty fucking great, actually. I admit that when it first came out I was a bit of iPad skeptic. I already had an iPhone, a laptop and a desktop; did I really have room for another device slotted in the middle there? The more I thought about it, the more I realised that… yeah. Yanno, I kinda did. I mean, there were a lot of things I did with my iPhone that I’d probably prefer to do on my laptop, but couldn’t due to portability issues. My 15″ laptop does not fit in my handbag, for instance, and its battery life is approximately half-an-hour.ⁱ But all that feed and fic reading I used the iPhone for? I could totally go a 10″ screen for that.

Not to mention the lure of teaching myself to use the iPad as an art tablet…

Well, it’s been a few weeks, and I can now honestly say I love my iPad. I use it to read fic in bed, to send emails at the shops, to take notes at work, to navigate in the car, to organise dinner…

And then there’s Kindle.

I’ve never really been “into” ebooks, despite the prolific quantities of fic that I read online. With ebooks, it’s the licencing model that bugs me — you don’t “own” an ebook like you do a physical book, rather you have a licence to read it — and the fact that I just really love books and always have. My parents always had walls of books in the their house, and I still judge people on the number of their bookshelves. I don’t care what kindof books people read, so long as there’s evidence of reading. Not to mention I’m a collector, a pack-rat and a completionist at heart; having an entire shelf or two solely devoted to a single author or series gives me a kind of positive glow.ⁱⁱ

Despite all that, I figured I’d give Kindle a go. The app, I mean, for the iPad.ⁱⁱⁱ Its interface isn’t as slick as iBooks, I don’t think, but on the other hand I can actually get content for it. Some content, anyway.^iv So I downloaded a bunch of sample chapters and started looking for something to read.

I learnt one thing really fast, which I think is the single most important factor when it comes to buying ebooks. Some books (i.e. newer ones) come “native” to the format. That is, their text is rendered by the reader. Others (i.e. older ones) are what I can only call “retrofitted”; I’m not sure of the actual physical difference, but it looks as though their text has been scanned and is being displayed on the screen as images. The next result is text that is jaggy and not optimized for screen display. I would not buy this latter type as an ebook; if I wanted to read one, I’d buy the physical copy.

In the end, I settled on buying Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science as My First eBook. For the record, it was enjoyable but didn’t contain anything new (to me), and Mr. Goldacre really needs to get out of the nasty habit of assuming that all his readers are male. (His most egregious transgression being suggesting to me that I might like to purchase a cheap microscope for the purpose of looking at my own sperm. I’ll get right on that, champ.)^v That’s not really the point, though. The point is that I was actually somewhat startled to realise I really liked the iPad as a reading platform, and that I absolutely tea rthrough ebooks.

It’s not just the clarity of the text or the portability of the device, either. It’s being able to highlight passages I want to remember and make notes against the text, not to mention having the same book in sync across multiple devices. (Sometimes sneaking off with the iPad in tow is just too conspicuous. Luckily, my iPhone is much more pocketable… Not that I would ever do anything like that, of course.)

So yeah. Kindle, you’ve won a reluctant fan.

The other thing that’s caught my interest is the WIRED app. I like WIRED‘s paper version — it’s like the Cosmoof Silicone Valley, so sue me — so the possibility of getting their content on my iPad is definitely appealing. And, like their paper mag, their digital app certainly presents beautifully. My one niggle with it is that the issues are so huge; the one I bought and downloaded was an easy 400 MB. I know that’s the price of pretty content and all that — and it’s not toomuch of a hassle to set it to downloading over the WiFi overnight — but still. It feels a bit… awkward. I dunno, maybe it’ll take off, maybe it won’t.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go look for some conducting foam to make myself an iPad “paintbrush”. Gotta put that SketchBook app to use, after all…

Admittedly, this one is my fault. I’m just bad at batteries, as it turns out.
This is the main reason I continue to buy World of Darkness books, despite not having actually played the game since early uni.
And iPhone, and OS X.
One of the things that drives me nutsabout Kindle is the fact that certain books aren’t “available in my region”. So I can buy the physical paper copies and have them shipped out, but not download the ebook version. What the fuck man; that’s so fucking backwards I don’t even know.
This was especially noticeable since the other book I’m reading at the moment, Secrets and Lies – again, covering a “manly” subject in a male-dominated field — specifically does not do this, and is very good at incorporating women into its narrative (though the “example characters” Alice and Eve) and thus its audience. So kudos for that, Mr. Schneier.

permalink » 8 comments » 1,003 words posted in: Comics & Novels, Geeking, apple:ipad, consumerism, sites:amazon.com, sites:amazon.com:kindle

It’s like meta cosplay fanart… or something.

2010-07-24T12:48:02Z

The Hammer and the Con

Hardly done any artage lately, which is very disappointing. But accidentallyⁱ seeing some of the promo shots from the Thor film the other day made me think of this scene from “The Hammer and the Con“.

That outfit really is fucking ridiculous. But weirdly also not as fucking ridiculous as the film version.

Funfax: Unlike the Marvel version, the Cornerverse Loki generally refers to himself as Thor’s uncle, and Odin as his brother. (Well, when he’s not being Baldr and thinking of Odin as his father and Thor as his half-brother. Which he really tries not to do, for reasons which will become apparent in the next sentence.) As the “only two redheads in Ásgard”, however, it’s strongly implied that Loki is actually also the character of Fjörgyn/Jörð — i.e. Thor’s mother — a fact of which everyone bar Loki and Odin (and possibly Sigyn) is thankfully ignorant.

Thor’s Ragnarökk-surviving-sons Magni and Modi pop up occasionally as minor figures in the Cornerverse, usually as semi-antagonistic characters that are made to seem threatening to Loki’s current position in Ásgard, though Loki tends to regard them as toothless tigers (then again, he has a pretty bad track record on this sort of thing, so…). They would probably be a lot more antagonistic if they ever found out the “truth” about their grandmother…

Why yes, I have been avoiding it, why do you ask?

permalink » comment? » 239 words posted in: Art, Corner, art:col-erase, characters:loki, characters:sigmund

Fuck you, Blizzard.

2010-07-07T00:43:25Z

The very first thing my daddy ever taught me about the internet was never to give out my real name.

There were reasons for it, of course; I was 13 and a girl and my parents worried about the Online Predator Bogeyman. More than that, however, we have an unusual last name. Unique, in fact; there are no other people in the entire world that have my name. That means if you know my name, you can find me.ⁱ

So, to this, day, I don’t use my real name online. I don’t use it here (and all my domains have private registration). I didn’t even use it on Facebook. The only time I ever give it out is when I’m making a financial transaction with a company. It’s a system that has, in the past, worked fairly well.

Until now.

See, last WoW-patch, Blizzard launched something called RealID. It’s a great idea in theory; basically a way to keep in contact with your friends across the Blizzverse. I can talk in WoW to my friends playing StarCraft, or my friends cross-faction, or my friends on other servers. When I heard about it, I was really excited.

There’s just one problem; it uses your real name.

Thanks for the "security tip", Blizzard.

Blizzard “warns” you when you try and add a RealID friend to only add people you know and trust in real life. And that’s… okay fine. Except, a) things Don’t Work That Way (I’ve already had out-of-game requests to add online friends I’ve had to ignore because of the reliance on real names), and b) the system exposes your name to strangers anyway.

Seriously? Yes; the RealID friends of your RealID friends can also see your name. So not only do you have to trust your friends, but you also have to trust your friends’ friends.

Apparently Blizzard is staffed by the same twenty-something straight white cismen who didn’t learn squat from the Google Buzz debacle.

There are two things that I just read this morningⁱⁱ that make his whole issue worse.

Add-ons have started exploiting and leaking RealID information to strangers.
Blizzard is now requiring RealID names for forums posts.

Blizzard, seriously. You’ve been pretty good in the past to women and to the GLBT and PWD communities and so on, so I’m going to spell this one out for you:

RealID is seriously fucking broken.

It makes me feel unsafe playing your game, because of the fear that any fuckhead — and believe me, there are a lot of racist, misogynistic, bigoted fucks on Battle.net — with a grudge could potentially find out who I am. Could find out where I live. Don’t believe that could happen? Well tough, because it already has. (Trigger warning for stalking in that link.) So congratulations for just enabling stalking and harassment, that’s a fantastic achievement. I mean, really. I’m totally stoked you think I should pay for the privilege of talking on your forums and logging into your games with the price of my real-world physical safety.

Your implementation of RealID is bullshit, Blizz. ~~Now I have to change all my information on my Battle.net account and risk being banned because you’ve decided to “foster community” by making your game into an unsafe space.~~ Scratch that; it’s impossible to change the name associated with your Battle.net account, and I also can’t change my email address (which uses my real name) because apparently I don’t know what my “secret question” answer is.ⁱⁱⁱ What a clusterfuck of fail.

So, to paraphrase Harriet Jacobs: Fuck you, Blizzard.

Actually, strictly-speaking my parents. As in, their home address. With Google. In five seconds. See why I don’t give out this information?
Blearily, on my iPad in bed. Mmmm… iPad…
It’s worth noting that, if the secret question were “real”, the correct answer would be freely available on pretty much every social networking site ever.

permalink » 7 comments » 652 words posted in: Gaming, blizzard, blizzard:realid, games:mmos:wow, psa, security:privacy

No words necessary.

2010-07-05T05:32:43Z

Step #1

Step #2

Step #3

...

PROFIT!

permalink » 9 comments » 28 words posted in: Geeking, apple:ipad, consumerism, life:middle-class extravagance

OMG DO WANT!

2010-07-01T06:14:19Z

NO CUTS BECAUSE SHIT THIS AWESOME DOESN’T DESERVE IT!

Worgen Druid: Cat

Worgen Druid: Bear

Seriously, though; the new model art for Cataclysm looks fucking spectacular. High-res and modern while still looking “Blizzard-y” and not boring and photoreal. MMO Champion has a page of it that’s totes foasrs worth checking out. People bitch about WoW’s art being “bad” but seriously? This is what it’s looked like in my head the whole time.

permalink » 1 comment » 80 words posted in: Gaming, games:mmos:wow, games:mmos:wow:cataclysm

MetaWatch

2010-06-28T09:41:24Z

MetaWatch

So like, I’m one of those people who reads metafandom. I like to think it’s good for me; both to keep up with fandom and with Hot Issues in Social Justice Today.

But, being the kind of girl that I am, it also leaves me with questions. Not about the meta (though it does that, too) but about the meta about the meta. Questions like:

Who’s posting? Is there really a cadre of “BNFs” who get metafandom’d more than the rest of the unwashed masses of fen?
What are they posting about? Which topics are most popular is easy to find out, but who posts most about which topics?
Where are they posting? How are things going in the LiveJournal vs. Dreamwidth war as far as meta is concerned?

I figured it would be easy to answer my own questions, so I did so. I created MetaWatch.

It’s nothing special; just a really basic RSS scraper that dumps out URLs and categories from metafandom’s Delicious feed. Sadly, it doesn’t include historical data for this-is-too-hard-I-CBF reasons,ⁱ which probably reduces its usefulness for the next six months or so. But whatevs. It has the capacity to answer the three basic questions above.

For instance, I can tell you that (based on the incredibly tiny and admittedly not particularly accurate sample size of last weekend):

Possibly. Even after such a tiny amount of time, there are already users with more than one post that’s been linked. The counter-argument is that they’re follow-up posts rather than instances of discreet meta, which skews it.
At the moment, race and oppression. The interesting thing here is less about what the current trends are so much as where the current trends are. For instance, Dreamwidth is more likely to host meta tagged with social justice issues, while LiveJournal is more likely to host “generic” fandom meta.
Dreamwidth has maintained a tiny-but-consistent lead over the weekend. Thus far, we haven’t had any posts outside of the Big Two.

Like I said, the sample size makes these hardly the most convincing of conclusions as things stand right now. But come back in a few months and I should be able to tell you something more interesting.

Edit: Added a few new tweaks, including a “hottest meta for [month] and who’s discussing it” display, where [month] is whatever is the most recent in the database. I’ve also added a mechanism for excluding tags from the “hottest” lists, if such a thing ever become useful.ⁱⁱ In the interest of transparency, excluded tags will appear in the footer block.

Unlike say, Twitter, Delicious’ RSS API doesn’t have the capability of “going back in time”. Hell, even getting it to supply any more than its default 15 links proved to be impossible, and there’s supposedly a query string argument for that. IDK why that one didn’t work.
I originally dropped “discussions“, until I realised It Did Not Mean What I Think It Meant (i.e. meta on discussions, not discussions of meta).

permalink » comment? » 501 words posted in: Fandom, bloglife:dreamwidth, bloglife:livejournal, communities:metafandom, fandom:meta, lies damn lies and statistics

The handbag meme.

2010-06-25T04:41:17Z

Dee's handbag.

There’s a lot you can tell about a woman from the contents of her handbag. So, in the spirit of sharing, here’s mine as of today.

We’ve got:

Wallet, Nightmare Before Christmas themed.
Keyring and keys, Nightmare Before Christmas themed.
Car keys, two sets (one for mine, one for the hubby’s).
Assorted pens and pencils (mechanical pencil, Sharpie marker, ballpoint pen, borad click-eraser, small click-eraser).
Mechanical pencil leads (graphite and col-erase teal).
Nintendo DS and bag.
Headphones and padded headphone case.
The batPod and iPod skin.
8 megapixel point-and-shoot digital camera.
Mini tape measure.
Bruce Schneier’s Secrets and Lies.
iPhone 3G (not pictured, since I used it to take this shot).

It’s worth noting that the only two things on this list that are “unusual” are the iPod (it’s usually in my gym bag) and the book (I’m not actually usually in the habit of carrying paperbacks around in my purse).

But seriously, man, look at that list. I’m like some kind of fucking geekster Cub Scout.

permalink » 2 comments » 173 words posted in: Life, life:lifehacks, photo:bad iphone photos

Woah.

2010-06-24T03:15:18Z

I for one welcome...

‘Scuse shitty iPhone-photo-of-the-CRT-TV but…

This is our first female Governor General (in yellow) — representing our female queen — signing in our first female Prime Minister.

Holy shit.

permalink » comment? » 36 words posted in: Miscellaneous, photo:bad iphone photos, politics:australia

A bit o’ light reading.

2010-06-17T10:18:28Z

So I was in Borders the other day and I noticed they had a copy of Bruce Schneier’s Secrets & Lies. That sort of thing is right up my alley, so I picked it up for some light reading on the toilet.ⁱ

The examples are a bit dated in places — I have the ’04 revision, and the book was originally written in ’00 — but that just makes some of the predictions even more prescient. I could pretty much quote the whole thing, but I think I’ll stick with a modest-ish excerpt from Chapter 5 (pp.59 – 60):

Almost no one realizes exactly how important privacy is in his or her life. The [US] Supreme Court has insinuated that it is a right guaranteed by the Constitution. Democracy is built upon the notion of privacy; you can’t have a secret ballot without it. [...]

In the United States, individuals don’t own the data about themselves. Customer lists belong to the businesses that collect them. Personal databases belong to the database owner. Only in rare instances do individuals have any rights or protections about the data that are collected about them.

[Talks about the differences between US and EU privacy controls, concluding that in the EU:] Data collectors have the responsibility to protect individual data to a reasonably high degree, and to not share the data with anyone who does not adhere to these rules.

That last clause has caused a contretempsⁱⁱ between the EU and the United States, since the United States does not enforce any controls on personal data and allows companies to buy and sell it at will. [...] Some members of Congress have tried several times to pass pro-privacy legislation (although nothing as encompassing as what the EU does), but have been blocked through industry pressure.ⁱⁱⁱ [...] Unfortunately, much of the industry feels that privacy is bad for business; invading personal privacy is sometimes the only way some companies see to make money.

(Emphasis and spelling errors mine.)

See? Prescient.

Seriously. Short of aeroplanes, that’s where I do almost all my reading nowadays. I blame Mat.
Incidentally, while Schneier’s style is easy to read, he does occasionally pull out academic or obscure language. S&L is the first book I’ve read in ages that actually had a word I had to look up. Not this one, incidentally, but I thought it was something worthy of note.
Not being all down in US privacy law, I couldn’t tell you how current this is; there do seem to be a few Acts that’ve been passed between ’00 and now.

permalink » comment? » 430 words posted in: Comics & Novels, books, people:bruce schneier, security, security:privacy