Month: February 2010

There’s a reason we complain about Facebook apps.

D'Arque Bishop3 Comments

The past week or two, I’ve been noticing on Facebook that friends of mine have been joining a group called “I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia”. I don’t generally join such “advocacy” groups, as for the most part the people who the complaints are directed to simply don’t care. In the case of this group, I actually agree with the sentiment of the group, as I for one am tired of seeing all of these posts on my wall from people using apps I will never use. (Really, I’ve seen Facebook games. They’d bore the hell out of me.)

Well, yesterday, a friend of mine posted on her Twitter that she planned on doing double posting of her games to her wall simply to annoy those people who had joined that group. Her point was that instead of complaining, they should just use the built-in functionality in Facebook to hide the apps. Normally I would agree, but there are two problems I have that prevent it from being a long term solution.

The first problem is the sheer number of apps. It seems to me that every time I hit “Hide” on an app, two more pop up in peoples’ wall posts to take their place. It almost seems like every day I’m having to hit “Hide” on one app or another to get rid of these annoying posts. I’d love to be able to just click a box or set a setting to hide them all en masse… and that’s the second problem. To my knowledge (and I’ve asked others to no avail), there is no way to just hide all application wall posts. In short, I’m fighting a losing battle: I can constantly manually hide apps, but new apps keep springing up every day and I have no way to just blanket hide them.

I suppose the easiest thing to do would be to stop using Facebook, but considering how many people I know plan events and get-togethers using it these days, it would make life much more inconvenient in that respect. Unlike before, I actually DO have a social life now. I don’t begrudge people actually using the apps; I (and others) just would like a way to not see them, and Facebook doesn’t offer an easy or convenient option to shut them up. I don’t foresee it changing anytime soon, as I’m willing to bet the money made off the apps overrules any number of complaints. Until/unless something is done, though, those who use the apps should understand that while it might be easier to click “Hide” than complain in the short term, in the long term all we have to look forward is constantly clicking “Hide” or bearing with the annoyance of this filler crap polluting our walls.

It’s not “sampling” if you don’t have permission, damnit.

D'Arque Bishop1 Comment

I just read this story via Slashdot, and it pisses me off to no end.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/europe/12germany.html

BERLIN — It usually takes an author decades to win fawning reviews, march up the best-seller list and become a finalist for a major book prize. Helene Hegemann, just 17, did it with her first book, all in the space of a few weeks, and despite a savaging from critics over plagiarism.

The publication last month of her novel about a 16-year-old exploring Berlin’s drug and club scene after the death of her mother, called “Axolotl Roadkill,” was heralded far and wide in German newspapers and magazines as a tremendous debut, particularly for such a young author. The book shot to No. 5 this week on the magazine Spiegel’s hardcover best-seller list.

For the obviously gifted Ms. Hegemann, who already had a play (written and staged) and a movie (written, directed and released in theaters) to her credit, it was an early ascension to the ranks of artistic stardom. That is, until a blogger last week uncovered material in the novel taken from the less-well-known novel “Strobo,” by an author writing under the nom de plume Airen. In one case, an entire page was lifted with few changes.

As other unattributed sources came to light, outsize praise quickly turned to a torrent of outrage, reminiscent of the uproar in 2006 over a Harvard sophomore, Kaavya Viswanathan, who was caught plagiarizing numerous passages in her much praised debut novel. But Ms. Hegemann’s story took a very different turn.

…

Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

If I can be forgiven the vernacular response, BULLSHIT. The difference between what this girl has done and the “mixers” to which she refers to is the fact that those who produce commercial mixes not only acknowledge who they are sampling from, they get the original copyright holders’ permission first.

The biggest reason for that is the song “Bittersweet Symphony” by the Verve. They sampled a section of the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, and the Stones’ record label (the copyright holder) sued saying that the Verve did not have permission to use that sample. The courts agreed it was an infringement, and now 100% of all proceeds from the song go to the record label instead of the Stones.

If she had admitted to what she had done beforehand, and gave references in her novel, then I could understand what she did. As it stands, right now what she’s doing is making an excuse because she got caught committing the biggest cardinal sin in writing. The story says the book is still a finalist for the Leipzig Book Fair; I (and I would hope others, including author friends of mine) believe she should be instantly disqualified. This should be a black mark on her reputation, and that she’s apparently getting away with it is something I find shameful.

A proposed test for potential voters.

D'Arque Bishop

I’m not usually one for making political posts, but this was too good to pass up…

Recently at the “Tea Party’s” national convention, the opening speaker (a former Republican congressman named Tom Tancredo) suggested that Barack Obama was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.”. Such literacy tests were used in the South to prevent blacks from voting, so one could imagine why that would have leave something of a bad taste in several people’s mouths.

On the other hand, it seems to me that in a way this is kind of hypocritical, as it has seemed to me that many of those who support the Tea Party are themselves ignorant of current civics. For example, the Tea Party seems to be a home for the Birther movement (those who believe Obama isn’t a natural born US citizen despite the overwhelming evidence he is). In response, movie critic Roger Ebert recently posted his proposed civics/history test for potential voters, saying that to vote you should pass this test. I’m going to go ahead and repost his quiz here.

How well will you do?
Read more “A proposed test for potential voters.”