Posts Tagged ‘ internet ’

The Internet Has Ruined “I Don’t Own a TV”

rupauls-drag-raceRemember the good old days when you could bow out of any entertainment-related conversation just by saying “I don’t own a TV”?

Yeah, the internet ruined that one.

I’m put in mind of this by an Onion article  – “Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn’t Own a Television” — that one of my Tuesday night X-Rated Trivia teammates shared, in large part because we’re constantly getting hammered on the RuPaul’s Drag Race questions.

If you miss one of those in a gay bar, obviously, the immediate and universal reaction is “Ohmigawd don’t you watch RuPaul?”

And you know what? We tried the “we don’t own a TV” thing. We really did. It’s been my default out on pop culture questions practically since birth, and suddenly it failed me: “Uh, you guys know it’s online, right?”

Well fuck.

Look, we tried to be polite. We go out of our way not to be the “I’d just rather be reading Proust” asshole from the Onion article. But if you’re going to force the point, yeah, we don’t know the RuPaul questions because the show is shit, TV in general is shit, and we really would rather be reading Proust, or for that matter reading The Onion.

Sorry. We tried to give you the “pity the poor culturally benighted Luddites” angle, but no. You had to push, and now you’re stuck with the “quietly resent those effete intellectuals” role.

Well, okay, probably not “effete.” It is a gay bar. They don’t really hold that against you.

But seriously. The internet ruined my best out. Now I have to actually tell you that I think your show is stupid and I won’t bother watching it even when it’s easily accessible.

No hard feelings?

“Hard,” hur hur hur.

2013
04/25
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
2 comments

Modern Things I Just Don’t Fucking Get: TED Talks

ted_logoWell, we can add to the list of things I just don’t get (which currently includes shower gel and those reusable paper towel things, plus a bunch of other stuff I haven’t thought to write about yet I’m sure) — those perennially-forwarded, eighteen-minute TED talks.

I’ve watched a handful. I’ve even enjoyed a couple by speakers I like, talking on subjects I’m interested in, and therein lies the problem, really. There’s no meaningful content or challenge in these things. They’re just a little over fifteen minutes of feel-good talk on comfortable subjects for you.

It’s about the intellectual engagement of a post on your favorite web forum, dressed up in the trappings of a Serious Business Conference (powerpoint, audience of rich white guys in collared shirts, etc.) to lend it artificial authority.

And that’s okay, to a point. There’s nothing really wrong with some pop-learning. I guess the titular “modern thing I just don’t fucking get” isn’t so much the talks themselves as the moral and intellectual weight people seem to give them. TED talks get discussed pretty seriously on your social media of choice, and I’m not sure there’s actually that much meat for discussion in there.

People say a lot of stupid shit in TED talks! The content is almost always biased and agenda-driven, rarely based on any hard data or peer-evaluated science, and occasionally just flat-out wrong. Even at their best they are, by virtue of the time limit, a very shallow summary of the topic at hand.

So watch ‘em, I guess, if that’s your thing. I’ve enjoyed a couple here and there. But they’re light entertainment at most, and I definitely do not get the aura of Big, Serious Ideas that surrounds them — or the $6,000 sticker price to get into the TED conference.

2013
03/05
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
1 comment

Password Requirements: Keeping Your Data Safe by Keeping Your Data Inaccessible

I realize I’m not going to say anything here that xkcd hasn’t already said:

password_strength_xkcd

But is it just me, or are we making it even harder on ourselves as we go on?

It’s been a while since I actually had to deal with regularly-changing passwords for the same account (the bane of every office staff, to hear people with real jobs tell it, but I wouldn’t know about that).

I do, however, have to maintain an ever-expanding collection of website accounts as I write for more and more people. A few of them set their own passwords, but far more prefer to generate long, random strings of gibberish alphanumeric characters that I could never, in a million years, commit to memory. And while I’m often able to reset to my own, personal password, the internal requirements have gotten so stringent that I can’t even use the “at least six characters long with some numbers and shit in there somewhere” passwords I’ve been rotating through my brain for the last decade or so.

The end result is, of course, that the passwords just get written down and stored physically, which is the exact opposite of security. Though I suppose a handwritten note somewhere in my office (re: bedroom) is relatively safe unless we’re being targeted by housebreaking data thieves, which seems a little physical for your average hacker. So maybe that was the point all along?

Now that I think about it, “force all of us to store our passwords physically” is a pretty great way to keep our data off the web. If only it didn’t have the unfortunate side-effect of making me not want to use the web, even when I’m being paid to.

2013
01/29
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
Personal Life
4 comments

The Oatmeal’s Commentary on Internet Writing Renders Everything I Have Ever Said Redundant

oatmeal-icon-robot-headI’m not actually a huge The Oatmeal fan, at least as far as the internet measures such things; I pretty much only remember to go to the site when someone links to it on Facebook at the title catches my attention. In a world where true fans know the number of hairs on their beloved content-creator’s chin, or maybe buttocks (“LOL chin hair counting is for noobs”), that makes me pretty fairweather.

But damn, was today’s* comic about writing for the internet spot-on.

Were there any writing-related points I’ve ever talked about on MA101 that [The Oatmeal creator and artist] Matt Inman didn’t hit on? I think his one comic nailed them all:

It is enough to make me believe that Matt Inman is stealing from me, except that I’m pretty sure everyone who makes a living as a writer goes through most of these thoughts at one point or another.

(That said, I did write a post about pirating Game of Thrones once, and an almost-identical comic showed up on The Oatmeal some time later. So I’ve got my eye on you, Matthew Middlename Inman. On you.)

Say what? Oh. The comic that I was so impressed by that is the entire subject of today’s post. I suppose you all would like to see that? Well too bad; you’re going to have to go look at it on his website. It is cleverly formatted to prevent freeloaders like me from just copy-and-pasting it, which is pretty smart when you think about it.

I know this because I tried.

But really, if you’re any kind of writer, go read it. It will make you smile.

*I don’t know if it was actually posted today or a while ago. Today was when I saw the link. It’s not dated, so who really knows? Matt Inman, hopefully…

2012
11/30
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
Writing Life
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No, You Can’t Copyright Your Facebook Posts. Why Would You Want To?

One of the more interesting cultural quirks the internet has brought out in us: people seem much more concerned about their right to privacy in public spaces than they ever were about the real world.

Maybe it’s that your public online behavior happens, from your point of view, in “private.” You can post to Facebook from a coffee shop, or these days from a gathering of a million people if you have your smart phone with you (and can get a signal in all that crowd), but most of us are doing it from the comfort of home. We’re posting cat pictures and news stories we didn’t check the date of in our pajamas, or maybe in a reinforced bunker as we clutch a shotgun and eat a can of beans. Who knows.

Here’s the reality: the privacy you may expect for anything you post to Facebook is the privacy defined in their Terms and Conditions, which you didn’t read. Things that will not change that include posting a status update like this one:

In response to the new Facebook guidelines I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, illustrations, comics, paintings, professional photos and videos, etc. (as a result of the Berner Convention). For commercial use of the above my written consent is needed at all times!

(Anyone reading this can copy this text and paste it on their Facebook Wall. This will place them under protection of copyright laws. By the present communiqué, I notify Facebook that it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, disseminate, or take any other action against me on the basis of this profile and/or its contents. The aforementioned prohibited actions also apply to employees, students, agents and/or any staff under Facebook’s direction or control. The content of this profile is private and confidential information. The violation of my privacy is punished by law (UCC 1 1-308-308 1-103 and the Rome Statute).

This is meaningless. Someone probably made it up as a joke just to see how far it would get (which, judging by my news feed the last few days, is pretty damn far). It does not change Facebook’s Terms and Conditions, which you agreed to, and it does not “copyright” anything you’ve posted on the website.

(Also, seriously, “the Rome Statute”? I realize most of us are not lawyers, myself included, but we should all still probably know that the “Rome Statute” is the treaty that established the International Criminal Court. Given that re-posting your cat GIFs without permission is neither genocide nor a war crime, though in some cases it could be considered a crime against humanity, the ICC is unlikely to be interested, and its mention maybe should have tipped you off. While we’re at it, it’s the “Berne Convention,” not the “Berner Convention.”)

More to the point, though, why would you care if someone stole your Facebook content? Is anyone writing a novel via Facebook updates or something? It could be a cool art project, I guess, but I’d go ahead and suggest that in a case like that the inevitable “theft” is, in fact, part of the medium, and complaining about it would be like whining that your pastel drawing is prone to smudging.

For most of us, at risk are re-posts of other people’s content, photos with captions on them, and perhaps some personal pictures.

Vastly more effective than posting bold declarations of your copyright would be to simply not post anything you don’t want the public to have access to. Why were you doing that on a public networking site in the first place?

If you have something worth stealing on Facebook, you’re doing Facebook wrong.

2012
11/26
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
4 comments

The Elephant in the Internet: Facebook is Getting Kinda Bad at Facebook

SocialFixer had a reasonable plea today: could Facebook please just go back to displaying everyone’s updates in the order they were posted?

Most of you have probably noticed by now that your Facebook news feed, by default, presents the “Top Stories” — posts and pages that Facebook thinks are most relevant to you. Of course, you can pay Facebook to “promote” your own posts, giving them a higher priority in that algorithm, so what you’re actually getting is a mixture of things that lots of people have commented on and things that people have paid money to put there.

You can switch the “Top Stories” method to “Most Recent” manually, which doesn’t get rid of the promoted posts but does keep them from completely drowning out other things; Facebook, however, will randomly switch you back to “Top Stories” from time to time. No one’s been able to figure out what triggers the reset, as far as I can tell. You just have to sort of keep an eye on it whenever you log in.

Matt Kruse’s post at SocialFixer hits the problem spot-on:

Seriously, Facebook, please listen to your users. Give us the option to see an unfiltered, chronological news feed, and allow us to make it our default – on the web and on mobile. You can put ads in our feed, on our sidebar, and still allow promoted posts to those who stick with the default filtered view. Fine. But don’t take away our content, or you become less and less useful to us.

  • When I tell my Tivo to record episodes of Modern Family, it doesn’t pick out the ones it thinks I will like best and only record them, does it?
  • When I subscribe to a magazine, the publisher doesn’t deliver only the issues that it thinks I will be most interested, does it?
  • The Post Office doesn’t filter my mail, in order to protect me from drowning in all the catalogs, magazines, and junk mail that I’ve requested, does it? No. It delivers everything I’ve asked for.

Why, Facebook, can’t you just be like everyone else and let me see what I’ve said I want to see?! Why must you think you know what I want better than I do? Why?

At stake here is what made Facebook popular in the first place. It aggregated all your friends’ and family’s random-ass thoughts and let you browse them at your leisure. This was something novel, entertaining, and accessible, and it catapulted Mark Zuckerberg into the top thirty richest people alive.

But now, as I’ve pointed out here on the blog before, Facebook is more and more in the hands of people who aren’t thinking creatively about user experience. They’re thinking about ad revenue.

Problem is, Facebook isn’t popular because it’s a great place to advertise a business. It’s a great place to advertise a business because it’s popular.

And the further it gets from that original model of “everything all of your friends have posted, in the order they posted it,” the less popular it’s going to become. As Matt Kruse said, “you become less and less useful to us.” And eventually, something better will come along.

2012
11/16
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
2 comments

Standard Internet Piracy Formatting

Let’s all agree right now: standardization is good for filing systems.

Doesn’t matter what you’re filing or why, it’s nice to have everything using the same labeling system. Dewey decimal system? You bet we do!

(Not original. It was in Questionable Content a while ago. There are lots of good library jokes in Questionable Content.)

Happily, that urge for convenient labels seems to manifest even in the maintainers of bootleg libraries. Remember bootlegging back in the Napster days? An episode of Friends (example picked for convenience; I doubt anyone tech-savvy enough to use early file-sharing services actually watched Friends) might have been labeled “friends ep 14″ or “friends air date sep 7 1997″ or just “my favorite friends episode ever!!11″

That has been a long-standing problem. But happily, it seems to be on its way out, at least for television shows. So on the off-chance that you’re planning on sharing some files illegally (a practice which we wholeheartedly condemn here at MA101, and would never participate in and shame on you), please be sure to use what I refer to as SIP (Standard Internet Piracy) formatting.

TV Shows

A universal format for the season and episode numbers is key here. You want to make it possible for all users to fill in the same blanks when they’re searching. Therefore, a simple format that puts all the variably numbers into a single bloc:

[Full Show Title] ([year aired]) S[two-digit season number]E[two-digit episode number]

Example: The West Wing (1999) S01E14

The above example would mean the fourteenth episode of the first season of The West Wing.

Including the full episode title after the season/episode bloc is a nice gesture to thoroughness but not necessary. There are very few stand-alone episodes so famous that people are likely to be hunting them specifically by name (Star Trek‘s “Trouble with Tribbles” is the only one that springs to my mind, but I’m sure there are a few others — point being that it’s only a few).

The show’s date, however, is vital for TV shows with common words in the title. HBO’sGirls is not the first thing that pops up if you search for “girls” on a typical torrent site, I assure you. Not that the other offerings aren’t interesting, in their own way, but some days you really just want to watch Lena Dunham make coffee.

It’s all right; I don’t judge you for it.

Movies

Movies are trickier. Title followed by date, as in SIP formatting for TV shows, seems to be pretty solidly established by now, but what follows the date varies by host. I’ve seen director’s names, the encoding and original file types, and even occasionally the star actor’s name, typically when the movie was basically a star vehicle. Work to be done there yet. For my part, I prefer including the director, to help with titles that have been used multiple times or re-made:

[movie title] (Year) [director]

Example: Flight of the Phoenix (2004) John Moore

That way there’s more than enough information to let everyone know that this is the shitty remake rather than the original with James Stewart in it. Seriously, why are you even hosting that dog?

Albums

Albums? Very straightforward:

[artist name] – [album name] ([year released]) [version where relevant]

Example: The Who – Who’s Next (1971) 1995 reissue w/bonus tracks

You want artist name before album name so that people sorting search results by artist get it in their first hits.

Standalone Tracks

But what if you’re not hosting the album? Do you still include the album title with the standalone song, so people know where it’s from?

Answer is yes, but further down in the formatting:

[artist] – [song name] (Track [track number] [album title] [year]

Example: The Who – Behind Blue Eyes (Track 8 Who’s Next 1971)

Not all of these have caught on universally yet, of course. And I’m willing to believe that an actual librarian could improve vastly on the formatting, which is at best a loose consensus among functional anarchists.

But for now these seem to be the “best practice” labels for your bootleg files.

And now you know.

But seriously, stealing is wrong. Don’t ever do it. The eagle is watching you.

2012
07/02
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
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Facebook’s “Like” – I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

Remember when you could “poke” people on Facebook?

Yeah, me either; I was a late and reluctant adapter. But you can Google “old Facebook” and remind yourself that things used to look way different if you want to:

I’m not honestly sure when “liking” things came into the formula. Like I said, late adapter.

But it’s there now, and very likely to stay, more because of the plug-in for other pages than for its usefulness on Facebook itself. People like liking. Put the button at the bottom of your webpage and it is going to get clicked. Everyone who clicks it suddenly starts posting all your business’s updates on their Wall Timeline, for free, so you can see the appeal on the marketing side.

All well and good. On our actual Facebook pages it’s a little weirder, though. I mean, how often have you found yourself “liking” something that you don’t actually like, at all? This sort of thing:

Clearly I don’t like that students aren’t getting to vote. That is not what clicking “like” means.

But that unfortunately means that we’ve complicated the meaning of “like” a lot, at least in the context of Facebook. “I like” now means some vague combination of being grateful that something was pointed out to you, finding it interesting, and wanting to let a friend know that you are paying attention to what they’re spending their time sharing with you.

Quite a mouthful for one little word.

And then when you throw the corporate pages into it things get even more ambiguous. Do 16.6 million people actually like Walmart? Enjoy going to the store, approve of its business practices, etc.?

God I hope not. But there they are all the same on Facebook. And in this case “like” mostly just means “will put up with hosting their ads on my Facebook page in exchange for the occasional deal that I find useful.” Not much to do with personal fondness at all.

(And don’t get me wrong, I realize there are some people out there who genuinely find going to Walmart and puttering around enjoyable. But I hope — pray — that they are the minority of those 16.6 million.)

So I do not think that word means what we think it does, anymore. Or it won’t for much longer if we keep on “liking” things on Facebook.

Inconceivable, no?

Psyche! It’s just a graphic. Did you try to click it?

2012
06/13
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
6 comments

There’s a Reason Your Netflix Subscription Sucks

People who trade pretend-money for a living have always liked talking about Netflix.

Mostly that’s because it had been one of the stabler internet ventures of the 21st century. But in late 2011 the company changed its pricing plans, false-started a spin-off venture that quickly got reeled back in, and in general stopped doing what it had been doing well and consistently for the last decade or so, which is to say taking income from its DVD-by-mail operation and turning it into ever-expanding streaming video service.

Lately, as you may have noticed if you’re a subscriber, the streaming options have started to suck.

I say that non-subjectively, less with the “they don’t stream my favorite movies!” and more with the “any movie from the last 20 years or so that you can think up off the top of your head is available on DVD only.” Major blockbusters are permanently relegated to the DVD collection, with the much-vaunted “recommendations” engine pointing you toward sequels and imitators for your streaming content.

Discussion of the recent changes has centered around the cost of licensing movies from the companies that own the rights, presumably because those are the abstract terms that play-money types of people like to think in. Mostly ignored are the practical realities that people who run real businesses think about:

Netflix’s biggest investment is a distribution network for physical products. That’s mailing centers, warehouses, shipping services, cataloging employees, and more, all of which are nothing but negatives on the balance sheet of a streaming video provider. The faster they make their hard-copy business obsolete, the faster those expenses bleed them.

And there aren’t a lot of good ways out of that. Short of getting out of the business in one leap and selling all the infrastructure off to a second-string competitor like Blockbuster, Netflix can’t do much cutting. As long as they offer the DVD-by-mail option, they’ve got to keep the service good enough that people don’t bail on their brand entirely. And that means keeping the distribution network in place, and that means forcing it to pay for itself by keeping as many people as possible on both the streaming and the mail subscriptions.

So if you want to watch Lord of the Rings, mail subscription. Avatar, mail subscription. Titanic, mail. Harry Potter (any of them), Transformers (ditto), Pirates of the Caribbean (again), Toy Story (you get the point) — if it’s a top-grossing blockbuster, forget it. The most popular movies in America are not going to be available to stream.

This won’t get better. There’s no incentive for it to get better. Streaming content on Netflix is going to remain the territory of second-stringers and older “classics” (but not the good ones). And in the meantime Netflix is desperately pushing ads and first-time offers on the baby boomers, counting on a generation that doesn’t think of a three-day mailing period as interminable to keep their senescencing business model alive for a few more years.

Combine that with a freshly-formed FLIXPAC, which we can safely count on to support anti-piracy legislation (Netflix spent money hand over fist last year on lobbyists for things like SOPA and PIPA, but has apparently decided to pay its bribes a little more directly this year), and you’re looking at one of the first really successful Internet ventures fighting desperately to slow the progress of online content.

Sad.

2012
04/17
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
6 comments

Abraham Lincoln, Spokesman for the Get Rich Quick Scam?

This one cries our for explanation, so up on the blog it goes.  You know those sidebar ads that a lot of websites have nowadays, with crazy “exclusive videos” that will teach you the secret to cheap insurance, penny stock fortunes, prehensile genitalia, or just about anything else impossible-sounding?  They’re pretty much everywhere these days, and they all look roughly the same:

Okay, all well and good.  I’m sure there are people out there who do click on these.  Far be it from me, a penniless freelancer, to criticize marketing techniques, even really cheesy ones.

But what the hell is Abe Lincoln doing up there?

Ol’ Abe has a lot of cultural cache, some of it legitimately earned and some not, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him as iconic of wealth before.  If anything, people work to stress the “poor rail-splitter” thing while downplaying the “successful lawyer” thing.  Everybody does hate lawyers, after all.

So I guess this is just because his face is on money?  And we went with the $5 bill because the sort of desperate sod who might actually click through a link like this has clearly never seen a larger denomination in his life, and therefore wouldn’t recognize a Grant or a Benjamin?

I feel like I can look at most ads and say “I see what you did there,” but the Abe Lincoln/overnight wealth connection just escapes me.  Any help?

2012
01/11
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
6 comments

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Geoffrey Cubbage
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