zvi likes tv

So, internets, I have not posted in a while.

Let's use a linkspam to limber up my fingers.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Huck Finn, High School Curriculums, and Canon by sanguinity Boy, am I glad that I moved from Upstate New York to the DC suburbs way before I got to high school.

'Inception,' Art, Edelstein, And The Impossibility Of Accounting For Taste from monkeyseeatnpr_feed

Can the Internet save the book? An interview with Clay Shirky

1romanceebooks Anniversary Blog Tour, which includes a contest to read a free Sony E-Reader.

I got that link from Jordan Castillo Price, who is writing some m/m paranormal and horror. I haven't actually tried any of the horror, but I've greatly enjoyed her Psycop series, about a schlubby guy who sees ghosts who lands a smoking hot butch boyfriend and doesn't quite know what to do with himself.

Also, in fiction that is new to me, I gobbled up Ilona Andrews' Kate Daniels books in the past two weeks. The romance aspect of the books is not my favorite (I love him because of how much I enjoy kicking him in the head lacks a certain je ne sais quoi), but the world building is really excellent, and I very much like that Kate's ~special~ status is built in from book 1, instead of appearing in a series of highly unlikely and unexplained power ups (yes, AB/LKH, this means you.) I also like that Kate tries to investimagate things, even if her deductive powers are usually being turned towards things that no one's heard of or aren't particularly supposed to exist, so it's very difficult for wearing out leather to be of any use.

Also also, because I was thinking about it and wondering if there was a new book on the horizon (sadly, no) Shanna Swendson's Enchanted, Inc. series. (And, I am so glad that the author has an unusual first name, because I'd gotten it into my head that the series was Magic, Inc., and there are a lot of those out there.) Anyway, these are more fantasy romance than urban fantasy, i.e. our heroine is a secretary whose secret power is immunity to magic, not a practitioner of many and sacred martial arts or ancient monster killing traditions. Recommended to readers of romance who are happy with fantasy elements, but not to people who are readers of fantasy who enjoy romance elements added in.

Last but not least, wen_spencer has been posting bits and pieces from her Tinker/Wolf Who Rules universe. Perhaps she's working on book three? That would be good. I keep meaning to go back and read the rest of the Ukiah series, but the library doesn't have it.

Making Sense of Privacy by danah boyd (danah_boyd_feed). Very interesting thoughts, about which I don't necessarily agree. One thing that this completely fails to address is pseudonimity, and publicity is alluded to rather than discussed.

Two, two, two! Clinton Jones gets Alec Hardison as his own personal felon stories.
Twice is a Coincidence by petra ~5k words
Keyboard Accompaniment by brownbetty, originally commentfic

Also, Betty is guaranteeing a fabulous title to whomever writes the Sophie/Cruz version of this tale. I, myself, have a great desire to see the Diana/Tara version of this story, and I offer glee and cheerleading, as my titling skills are about as good as Shakespeare's. [Hint, all of his tragedies are named The Tragedie of Main Character(s).]

Kinda Busy by yeats A post-Telephone HoneyB/Gaga fic. (Also, I saw several references to it, but today was the first time I found a link to the Out interview with Gaga's prison girlfriend, Heather Cassils.)

97 icons of phat fat, plus a couple Nimoy and a Whitman quote. A bunch of people linked this a week or two ago, so you probably saw it already, but if not, here you go.

Dreamwidth will save us! torra has a very silly dream in which DW saves us at the end of the world, while Gibbs abandons us.

Also, hey, you're watching dw_suggestions, right? You realize that that's the comm which most often lets you vote on and debate the future of Dreamwidth. Some interesting recent suggestions:

• Don't announce upcoming birthdays for memorial journals
• Disemvowelling Button for abusive comments
• Twitter Style User Addressing
• Making communities more visible

When one complains that people on the internet are collating links to multiple documents and suggesting relationships between those documents unforeseen by the original writers, or when one is dismayed that something posted to the World Wide Web can garner a world's worth of readers and commenters, I confess that I am put in mind of someone complaining that telephones put distant noises right in the ear. It is not hyperbole to say that Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web precisely to do those things.* If you wish to prevent large numbers of unknowns from reading or responding to what you have written, if you do not want people to be able to compare and contrast your work with other work to which you have not deliberately contributed, I advise you to choose a medium other than the World Wide Web in which to publish.

In the other direction, when one reads an essay, monograph, or other persuasive writing with hypertext references to other documents, it is generally useful to at least briefly review the documents so linked. The writer of the first document is using the referenced documents to explain things to you: to give you additional background on the subject under discussion, to read counterarguments to her own argument, to incorporate other documents by reference (i.e. the document before you is to be read as if the document so incorporated has been cut and pasted into the document before you.) When you skip this larger context, context that the author has deliberately brought to your attention, you've lost a significant amount of what the author attempted to communicate to you. To my mind, this is a bit like reading a mystery by skipping a chapter whenever you have to put the book down. If, at the end, one doesn't understand the motives, means, or opportunity of the murderer to kill their victim, it is probably because one skipped over just such crucial information.

*(In fact, the ways in which Tim Berners-Lee's vision have not yet been completely implemented are that he would like for computer programs to collate the links between documents, other files, facts, or people [the semantic web is a pipe dream until computers have way fuzzier logic, but that's what he wants], and, at least when he first created the web, he would have liked it if people viewing your documents could amend them in situ, as opposed to merely replying to them. I don't know if the actual practice of wikis has changed his mind on this point.)

Ways to check if a website is down:

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
Ping
Traceroute

(Either ping or traceroute may be disabled for security reasons. Dreamwidth's ping is, Twitter and Livejournal's ping are active. If you think your ping problem may be that ping is incorrectly installed, ping 127.0.0.1. That's the computer you are on, and you should always be able to connect and always have a really fast connection. Unless, of course, you've disabled ping.)

Don't post to your other social media/network site about a website being down. People doing Denial of Service attacks are looking for notoriety; everybody talking about the down service is part of their pwnage.

Also, if you want to give people invite codes, dw_codesharing is the official community. There's also dreamwidth. I have had some success tweeting invite codes with a #dreamwidth hashtag.

Last but not least, if you are concerned about being on a widely known microblogging website which is an attractive target for Denial of Service attacks, consider installing laconi.ca or using one of the open installs, like identi.ca.

Scott Rosenberg comments that Wave looks too busy since its default is a triple column format.

However, he's got a closer screencap of wave than I could see in the video demo, and I would just note that all of the ?widget boxes? have minimize tabs, and the wave itself has a maximize tab. So, the product already has some methods for moderating your input stream. :)