RPG guru Ron Edwards tries to explain what he means by “Brain Damaged”. I’m still not sure I agree with him, but since I’m one of those pesky Simulationists, what do I know? (See my earlier post on the subject).
Harry’s Place has a post that’s spawned an interesting discussion thread on the power and pitfalls of the Blogosphere. There’s a particularly interesting comment about, well, comments.
One problem with internet social groupings such as blogs, Usenet and message boards is that they tend to deteriorate over time - obnoxious posters drive away all of the sensitive folks. Blogs have a big advantage in that the owner of the blog can moderate and throw out the yahoos, but when they don’t take that responsibility the results are always ugly.
That’s more or less what happened to Blogcritics.org, which became so overrun by the worst kind of trolls I’ve had to give up on it. Although making one of the very worst of the trolls into the Politics editor probably didn’t help. What was the site owner thinking?
I can understand why Norm doesn’t have comments. My own readership is so small that comment trolls aren’t really a problem (lthough I wish I could say the same for spam)
Orcinus tells us of the Combat for Christ course. While their supporters and apologists will no doubt claim that all it does is promote True Christian Manliness in the manner of the Boy’s Brigade, some of the course descriptions seem to betray a more sinister agenda….
Weapons Course: This course challenges the Christian Soldier to engage and eliminate his greatest enemies.
Allegory and metaphor? Perhaps. But the fundies are not known for their comprehension of allegory or metaphor. Do you think such an establishment would be tolerated if they were Moslems rather than “Christians”?
And the founder sounds like such a nice person
An Ooltewah Minister faces domestic assault charges..
Police say he beat up his own daughter.
A family argument over whom the girl was dating led to the charge.
According to Bradley County Sheriff’s reports, Community Baptist church Pastor Bryan Mowery spanked the girl with a belt first — then threw her into a closet, kicked her and hit her in the face with his fist.
Mowery reportedly also got a nine millimeter handgun from his bedroom and fired it outside his Trewitt Road home.
… For now, Mowery is out of jail on his own recognizance.
It’s the existance of things like this that make me wonder if the US Religious far-right is as big a long-term threat as extremist Islamism. What I don’t know from several thousand miles away is whether the extremists represent a tiny and largely marginalised fringe, or whether they’re the leading edge of something much larger and more dangerous.
The Science Creative Quarterly has come up with a game theoretic approach to the toilet seat problem. With mathematic proofs deciding once and for all whether or not men should leave the seat up or down. Perhaps what it really means is that you should never marry a mathematician. (Link from Dave)
I’ve just about recovered from the Manchester Blogmeet, organised by Claire. It started at the Kro Bar in Piccadilly Gardens. Something like 30 people turned up, including Norm.
A smaller and more select group moved on to Efe’s Turkish restraunt in St Peter’s Square, actually more broadly Mediterranean than just Turkish, with a lot of Greek and Italian food on the menu. Finally ended up at Mother Mac’s, a small old-fashioned pub hidden away in a back alley.
As is usual at such events, someone insists on bringing a digital camera to take embarrasing pictures of me. Chern Jie was that person.
A great time was had by all; although I apologise for bringing up the subject of toilets, which set Claire off on a long rant about toilets and bodily functions. Now I’ll actually have to blogroll all the blogs of the people who were there.
As an aside, the Kro Bar gets a black mark for failing to serve Leffe in the proper shaped glass, using instead something more appropriately shaped for orange juice. Presumably the Belgians will declare a fatwa over this.
A long while ago I linked to post by The Gline about how the existence of Lotus Notes was a symbol of the wrong sort corporate culture.
Today, The Guardian has an article on the survival of this horrid piece of software, linking to the Lotus Notes Sucks site.
Why do users hate Notes so much? And why, then, do they use it? The answers illuminate a typical process when companies buy “enterprise” software: the people who choose a product tend not to be the ones who use it.
It goes on to describe how the hostile user-interface seems to come from a parallel universe where neither Windows, Apple Macs or The Internet existed,
It quotes Ben Rose, leader of the Notes User Group, who makes an very lame attempt to defend the awful, crufty email interface.
“Email is quite inefficient. People like to ‘Reply To All’ and send copies of attachments to each other, instead of doing what Notes does, which is to have a single copy on the server that everyone sees.”
In other words, we deliberately made our email functionality crap, so that people wouldn’t use it unless they absolutely had to. Last time I used it, Lotus notes is especially hostile towards Internet mailing lists, because it refused to allow users to do anything *other* than top-post. And you thought Outlook sucked….
I worked for a company that used Lotus Notes as it’s corporate standard. We didn’t make much use of the allegedly wonderful collaberative stuff, only the cruddy email client. After it all went pear-shaped, the CEO ended up doing jail time for fraud. I’m not sure what that says about Lotus Notes.
Spam is the big scourge of the internet. Spammers are increasingly from organised crime rather than the small-time scam artists of a few years back. And they’re allegedly raking in large sums of money from people stupid enough to fall for their scams. Are AOL and Yahoo looking to get a piece of the action with their new Pay-to-spam scheme?
AOL and Yahoo plan to charge fees of up to one cent (US) per message to those that sign up for the service.
Paying the fees means that messages will not go through spam filters, are guaranteed to arrive and will bear a stamp of authenticity.
Both AOL and Yahoo said they would start offering the service within the next few months.
I can’t help feeling this is not going to be a good thing. This will mean most end-users receiving *more* spam, not less. Only this time from big business rather than Florida-based crooks.
It could easily make life a lot harder for small mailing discussion lists (i.e. anything other than Yahoo’s own yahoogroups). I can see them making their spam filters more and more aggressive, and respond with ‘pay up’.
It could well accelerate the decline of mailing lists in favour of the inexplicably fashionable slow clunky web-boards with their all their graphical cruft and stupid avatars.
This is a bad idea, that deserves to be strangled at birth.
Update: A Yahoo PR flack in the comments claims that my fears are groundless. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation seem to echo what I’ve been saying.
Email readers and senders will both lose, because the incentives for Yahoo, AOL, and Goodmail are all wrong. Their service is only valuable if it “saves” you from their spam filters. In turn, they have an incentive to treat more of your email as spam, and thereby “encouraging” people to sign up.
Even email senders who just want to reach Dad@aol.com may eventually be in trouble. Once a pay-to-speak system like this gets going, it will be increasing difficult for people who don’t pay to get their mail through. The system has no way to distinguish between ordinary mail and bulk mail, spam and non-spam, personal and commercial mail. It just gives preference to people who pay.
And prepare to be shaken down if you run a noncommercial mailing list, whether for local bowling leagues or political organizations with a national membership. Not only will the per-message fees quickly add up, but the Goodmail technology will be costly for senders to setup and use. Goodmail’s giving a “special offer” for nonprofits through 2006, but, when that ends, their messages will presumably end up in the trash, too.
Blogging has been light lately. I’ve given I higher priority to the online games I run, the Dreamlyrics games KLR and AEF, and my PBeM on The Phoenyx, Kalyr.
Some of this effort was spent chasing up players who had gone AWOL. Fortunately I managed to track three of them down, and persuaded them to post.
There’s a Blogmeet in Manchester next weekend! Organised by Claire Sudbury, there’s already a day-long agenda.
Part 1 - Tea and Cakes.
3pm onwards in Kro Bar, Piccadilly Gardens (across the grass from the disappearing fountains).I did a cake test. These guys do the best cake by far. Felix (aged three-and-a-half) agrees. They’re also very handy for people arriving on trains.
(Part 1.5)
(we might do a little tour of Manchester in between cakes and proper food, but that’ll be an ad hoc affair)Part 2 - Proper Food.
7.30pm (table booked) at Efe’s Turkish restaurant on St Peter’s Square. It’s in the little row of shops opposite the library (striking circular building).The food is inexpensive, quite varied, and good. I’ve eaten here several times. Not particularly adventurous, but a safe bet when catering for unknown tastes.
Give me a nod if you’re considering this. I’ve booked a table, but I need to check on numbers. I don’t need firm commitments, just an approximate idea.Part 3 - Drinks.
9.30pm onwards at “Mother Mac’s” pub, Back Piccadilly, off Oldham St.Small, peaceful, friendly. Crucially you can get a quiet drink in here on a Saturday night, which is a bit amazing for the city centre. Probably because it’s well hidden down a back street. And it’s a proper pub with proper prices, rather than a too-shiny too-expensive see-and-be-seen noise-fest.
It looks like there will be a better turnout that the meetup.com meets of a couple of years ago. I hope Norm will be there.