Aff's Diary: News

My New Book is NOT in the Arcadian Storyverse line

Posted in 'Arcadian Storyverse' - by Affirmative on Friday, January 20 2012

I don't like to announce something with a release date until I'm certain it's actually going to happen - and with that, I'm proud to announce my next book will become available in e-book format towards the end of March.

The title is on the forums.

Covering everything that's ever pissed me off from insisting on having an overhead light reflecting off an eyesight friendly LCD into their face through to defragging solid state disks, you'll either laugh or cry when you read up on some of the stupid things I've had to put up with over the years because somebody told them in the 1950's or 1970's that you 'needed to' - you know, things valid for technology that we no longer have or use.

Experience the joy of;

- The eye-twitching pain I've gone through when I see somebody put a CD label-side down so as not to scratch the plastic.
- The agony of listening to somebody explain to me that they bought a registry cleaner only to find it took up more resources than it helped.
- The never ending suffering of giving people good advice only for them to ignore it because a lot of other people contradict it - even if all of those other people are having horrific problems as a result.
- Being told by a self-proclaimed 'network administrator' that you do not in fact, need a modem/router for a home network in order to connect it to the outside world. Somehow, you do it with magic instead.

Comments and registrations of intent to buy are now being taken on the forums.

This book will cost $4.99 AUD, and there is no delivery cost as it is in electronic format (compatible with any word processor capable of handling OpenDocument format).

SOPA and PIPA were just the jumping board line

Posted in 'Other' - by Shadowdancer on Friday, January 20 2012

There's more, and since the Supreme Court has ruled on it, that's screwed.

For those with the will... line

Posted in 'Other' - by Shadowdancer on Friday, January 20 2012

This is the most effective protest against SOPA and PIPA you can do.

In response to... line

Posted in 'Other' - by Shadowdancer on Thursday, January 19 2012

the Megaupload shutdown, Anonymous shuts down Department of Justice and Universal Music sites.

More details at the forum newspost.

It's More Fun In The Philippines! line

Posted in 'Slate' - by Shadowdancer on Thursday, January 19 2012

Streetfood. Fastfood Wars. Pets. Crazy commutes. Jail time. The Department of Tourism in the Philippines has come up with a new tourist ad campaign - or rather, it's using one of the biggest timewasting, chuckle-inducing, features of the Internet: the meme picture.

Using the slogan "It's More Fun in the Philippines" (and yes, we know, we know there was a similar slogan in Switzerland 50 years ago, but they didn't have memes OR the Internet then!) people are encouraged to come up with their own meme picture and post it online, and share it with the official Facebook page. The pictures range from gorgeous photographs of nature and tourist destinations, to our local streetfood and queasine, or 'time-travelling'. Some poke fun (pun?) at things like Twilight or "True Blood" (the first shows a sunset, the second shows a streetfood commonly called Betamax of all things; made from, you guessed it, blood.)

Picture of women on surfboards

More on the forum!

Picture by By Joncy Sumulong, photo from STOKEDinc with STOKEDinc Surfergirls Zoe Jacques, Carla Sebastian, Lorraine Lapus, and Amanda Fernandez.

Wikipedia Blackout line

Posted in 'Other' - by Affirmative on Tuesday, January 17 2012

About time;

- Wikipedia Blackout

Wikipedia will be going down for 24 hours in protest of the SOPA/PIPA acts. Many news sites are owned by News Corp and will not report properly on these actions as they have a vested interest in the bills.

Boycott News Corp.

Ever heard of this? line

Posted in 'Other' - by Affirmative on Sunday, January 15 2012

You may have noticed that many North American web hosts aren't doing so well lately like GoDaddy domains - their customers are leaving to overseas providers. Want to know why?

It's called the "Stop Online Piracy Act", and it's currently in debate by the people who run the United States. I don't pretend to understand their full legal system (because quite frankly, ours provides plenty of entertainment) - but this act would impact the world due to the high number of services being provided by a primarily English-speaking Internet in that country.

Now, first thing's first - Stopping Online Piracy would be a good thing. Piracy costs a lot of money and makes it pretty hard for people to profit and maintain services to provide games and entertainment to us. Companies like JoWood production suffered greatly from piracy - but I bought my copy of Spellforce II and it was a damn good game. Not everyone is as honest as I am, and some would rather pay zero. That hurts companies in a financial and easily seen manner, and results in less innovation where it matters to us - fun games with sexy characters in them.

The 'Stop Online Piracy Act' however, is completely retarded and would have the following immediate result;

1) All payments I'm making to U.S. companies would come to a complete stop.

I'd transfer affsdiary.com and its contents away from VirtualAve (my webhost). They've provided good service, fast responses, and reliable hosting for a very long time - but they'd be bound by the SOPA law and they'd suffer for it due to their being responsible for content on their servers. SOPA would allow a judge in the US to block their hosting at any time without even having to send a warning letter. That would make them unreliable - so I'd have to host in another country.

I wouldn't subscribe to *any* online service from the United States. There'd be the above reliability issue. Whether it's an online game subscription or any other service - it just wouldn't be worth it. International alternatives exist - I'd use those.

The following is taken from Wikipedia, but it's also spread around various other web sites;

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed in 1998, includes a provision, known as the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, that provides a "safe harbor" for websites that host content. Under that provision, copyright owners who feel that a website is hosting content that infringes on their copyright are required to submit a notice to that website to ask for the infringing material to be removed, and the website is then given a certain amount of time to remove such material.

SOPA would override this "safe harbor" provision, by allowing judges to immediately block access to any website found guilty of hosting copyrighted material.

2) I'd have to program my own web browser.

Most of you probably don't know about this - but Firefox and several other browsers based on it can include a plug in called MAFIAAFire. It redirects users to the new location of a domain that was seized by the United States Government. Some domains are seized due to unpopular political opinions - not piracy - this is censorship (that material is hilarious and entertaining reading). Under SOPA, its possible that free and open-source software organisations such as Mozilla may be considered illegal due to their hosting of that plugin.

3) It won't work.

You'd simply cause more dark/shadownets. A shadownet is an unofficial domain network that is not part of the traditional internet. Things such as .onion are domains you can only access with a special host file or piece of software - but they exist. These other networks are numerous and they are where the real piracy and disgusting underbelly of our global network infrastructure actually takes place. The Internet exists because of the immense freedom of speech it offers - freedom from censorship and oppression. All this SOPA law will do is put a stop to that.

4) This is from other sites;

a. "the passage of SOPA could cause Americans to switch to DNS providers located in other countries who offer encrypted links, and may cause U.S. providers, such as OpenDNS itself, to move to other countries" - according to David Ulevitch, head of the US / San Francisco OpenDNS Organisation

b. "Much of what will happen under SOPA will occur out of the public eye and without the possibility of holding anyone accountable. For when copyright law is made and enforced privately, it is hard for the public to know the shape that the law takes and harder still to complain about its operation." - Jason Mazzone, a Law School Professor in the US

5) Screw you.

If you support SOPA, you're not getting my business. Let these companies know in e-mail or just by not buying their products/services;

- List of Organisations that Support SOPA

Note; Wikipedia is being pressured into deleting that page so it may not last much longer. When it goes down, I'll host my own. Try to stop that, bastards! I have a non-US server on standby.

I for one don't want to be held accountable if I say something these idiots don't like on Ventrilo, either. If SOPA comes in, every US based online company loses my business. I'd even leave Battle.Net over this.

United Fleet II line

Posted in 'Arcadian Storyverse' - by Affirmative on Friday, January 13 2012

The sequel to 'United Fleet' (released in 2010) has been completed!

Expect it to hit stores by September this year - but before then subscribers will be able to view the entire story in chapters (with author & editor comments) on the private forum.

Comments are invited - use the subforum.

Someone needs a Japanese-English dictionary line

Posted in 'Other' - by Shadowdancer on Tuesday, January 10 2012

Or a quick use of google translate!

newspost here

Applications of Technology for Moe reasons line

Posted in 'Other' - by Shadowdancer on Sunday, January 8 2012

If I were tasked to come up with an application of tech that is capable of sensing brainwaves to control movement, using that tech to make emotive cat ears is not one of the things that would have been on the top 10 of the ideas I'd have come up with.

Strange as this application of brain-wave sensor tech is, it's not particularly new, and there are other instances of such tech, such as Emotiv and brain-computer interfaces being toted. Applications for gaming perhaps, especially in virtual reality speculative setups, might rely more on such interfaces.

Warnings from Ghost In The Shell and Serial Experiments Lain aside, I'm looking forward to how advances in such interfaces and wetware will go; there are times when I wish I could get the ideas, visuals and music from my mind and port them straight to the computer for sharing... Indeed then the limits to one's art, for example, would be limited only by one's imagination. Then again, I'm playing with the thought of using such technology artistically; the applications outside of this could be even more fruitful.

----------------
crossposted to Walking the Path of Madness @ Livejournal