Archive for the ‘Browsing’ Category

So some Facebook users were upset at Facebook's announced privacy policies. (Facebook is, you will recall, the massively popular online social service that allows you to easily stalk your high school girlfriend) So Facebook launched a new privacy policy today, which you know if you logged in and was immediately confronted by a new pop-up demand for clarification of what you wanted seen by whom. Now you can get much more specific on which elements of your Facebook experience can be seen by only your friends, which bits can be seen by friends of your friends, which chunks are visible to your friends and networks, and what gets hung out for the whole frickin' world to see. And yet people are still complaining!

The transition screen recommends you set your privacy settings to "Everyone" and helpfully preselected that for you in every instance, no matter what your previous settings were. You can, of course, select your old settings again and go about your merry, but many users won't bother or won't understand and will unknowingly leave themselves open to identity theft and other nasty things as their personal info gets spread across the land.

Well, yeah.

That was almost certainly Facebook's hope. They want more stuff to be open to all searchers. The more easily findable content there is, the more valuable Facebook is to advertisers. And your Wall comments going public means they can take on Twitter in the highly competitive unprofitable-online-chattering field. They want money, they do, and are in the business of procuring more of it. Granted, it's a bit cheesy to default everyone to the most open and unprivate settings possible — better to leave everyone's settings as they were and then let people open up if they wish — but if FBers don't read the rules they can't really complain when they lose the game.

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If you're not following @drhorrible on Twitter, you're missing some good stuff and sneaky updates like this one. Just sayin'.

This brilliant remix shows what happens when stalkery vampires come after a real girl. Or a real slayer, anyway.

Actually, that pretty well explains it.

Meatcards.com, a new startup offering business cards laser-etched onto strips of beef jerky — because, why not? — is offering sample cards to the first people to send decent live re-enactments of one of three classic Frank Frazetta paintings. But you have to be sincere.

The FIRST TEN NON-HALFASS PICTURES RECEIVED are winners. The definition of "non-halfass" is entirely, solely, and irrevocably up to the judges, and our judgment is final. And when we say "non-halfass", we mean it. You better have a halberd and a bikini and a RIGHTEOUS expression on your face if you're going for "Fire and Ice", and SOMEBODY better be in a bikini.

Since not everyone can hustle this up that quickly — it's a pain trying to rent a dinosaur during rush hour — they're also picking the five best entries submitted before 9 am next Monday, June 22.

Everything about this appeals to me, and I hope they display every entry they get. Go read the rules just to get an idea of the true, horrible scope of this contest. And if you enter, good luck!

Sony's having a contest to promote the new Blu-Ray edition of The Ghostbusters, and it can get you to Comic-Con! Just head here and enter for your chance to win roundtrip airfare, 3 nights at the Embassey Suites, 2 days for 2 people at the San Diego Comic-Con, and more! Or lots of Ghostbuster-related merchandise; shirts, hats, the usual.

You can also head to the main Ghostbusters movie site to put yourself into the team, or upload a video of your Ghostbuster tryout.

The Ghostbusters Blu-ray edition is coming June 16th.

"Save Hiatus" remains on — sigh — hiatus while Adam and I both deal with the parts of our lives that demand money, there's still places to get your whacky space fun on. I highly recommend "The Good Ship Chronicles," by Tauhid Bondia. It's the story of the ongoing reality show based on the Starcorp Delivery/Transport ship, the SS Gossamer. Captained by Hap Manning, the ship is the last stop for less-0than-stellar crewmen who have been transferred from other ships. Manning takes that as a challenge.

The various in and outs of daily starship life, combined with the regular holovision diary entries of the crew and the occasional event as someone else screws with them for ratings, leads to a hilarious webcomic. You got your overbearing and mildly delusional captain, your competent and long-suffering first officer, your openly racist and sexist counselor, your skilled doctor banished for haviung more integrity than sense, your feisty, sexy head of security, your overweight and wheelchair-bound engineer, your too-cool-for-starschool alien rep, your brimming-with too-much-information pilot, your intern who was killed in a tragic rescuing, and more.  The artwork's as good as any webcomic I've seen and the humor rocks. Go check it out.

Just come back when we're ready, OK?

Updated, see the end for Amazon's response

So, last week two historical books — "Transgressions" by Erastes and "False Colors" by Alex Beecroft — quietly dropped off Amazon's bestseller lists.

Not because they stopped selling, mind you, because Amazon apparently instituted a new policy of removing the sales rankings from books with "adult" content. De-ranking a book doesn't remove it from Amazon, but it does keep it from showing up in Amazon's bestseller lists (cutting way down on sales derived from browsing) and there are reports that de-ranked books aren't showing up in regular searches with any consistency.

More newly stripped books followed, lots of them. When asked about this by various puzzled authors, Amazon's rep said this: "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature."

Defensible. Annoying, but defensible. Only… there's still an awful lot of adult material on Amazon with sales rankings. Most of their adult material is still ranked. Nude photography books, explicit romances, everything by Chuck Palahniuk. In fact, judging by what has been deranked, it seems that someone at Amazon is defining "adult" as "gay."

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And now that I have your attention…

On April 10, for some reason, the Amazon sales rankings for two highly-promoted books disappeared. Those books were False Colors by Alex Beecroft and Transgressions by Erastes. They're both historical romances: One is about high seas adventure in the 1700s and the other is a sprawling epic occurring during the English Civil War.

Oh, and they're both homosexual romances. Which, apparently, freaked out someone at Amazon. Or possibly someone Amazon is listening to.

Over the next few days many more authors found themselves stripped of their rankings. Mark Probst, author of The Filly, asked about this and received this response:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Well, huzzah for Amazon and their excellent protection of the children, even for those of us who want no such protection and are actively angered that it exists.  Because we are not being protected from adult content, you see, all the usual sex-soaked bestsellers and romance novels are fully ranked. (So are vibrators.)

Amazon is protecting us from adult gay content. All of the books being unranked (MetaWriter is keeping an updated list here) are  written for and by the GLBT community, even those books with absolutely no explicit sex involved. James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, all stripped.

The Well of Loneliness, written in the 1920s, is considered the first openly lesbian-themed book in the English language. The disgusting, anti-children, filthy sex part? Exactly one line: ""And that night they were not divided." My god, how did the country survive?

Award winners. Books on health and lifestyle. Books on homophobia and lesbian parenting and the military gay ban. Books on Harvey Milk. Young Adult books on coping and understanding. All of them being blocked from Amazon's bestseller lists because there weren't enough pairs of in and out plugs involved.

Well, Amazon, I'm not going to join the rapidly growing wave of outraged people complaining about this apparently homophobic filtering. No, no, no! I applaud your new moral code! I only ask that you be even handed in its application. Clearly all "adult" works should be removed from your bestseller lists.

I demand you remove the Twilight series from your top ten bestseller list.

Hey, that's five of your top ten books cleared out right there, leaving room for more wholesome fare. But how can you filter tender, non-explicit books of male romance but condone brutal necrophiliac sex that leaves the girl bruised, battered and ultimately dead? (That's in Book #4, Breaking Dawn, by the way, currently #2 in total sales ranking.)

Sure, you could just create an opt-in filter, the way Google does for image searches, so children can search uninfected by reality and Amazon's formerly excellent service can continue unimpeded for the grownups. But no, I demand that you remove the sales ranking for any book that includes the slightest hint of interpersonal relationships no matter what the context or writing quality, leaving the bestseller lists for safer things, like cookbooks.

Anyone agreeing with my "Block Twilight" idea should write connect-help@amazon.com or Jeffrey Bezos at 1200 12th Avenue South, Seattle, Washington 98144-2734, 206-266-1000.  Let's get this bestselling necrophiliac smut out of our faces!

Oh, and Harry Potter, too. Rowling has said that Dumbledore was gay, so let's get those highly profitable books tagged properly so Amazon can do the right thing.

Photo: C. A. Bridges

I was at a Jon Bon Jovi concert in New Jersey with my wife a month ago and he was talking about the next Bon Jovi album. The last one, "Lost Highway," had a decided country tinge to it, but the new one was going to be back to basics.

"I'm tellin ya, you gotta trust me on this one," he said. "You wanted a riff rock record,
you got a riff rock record.  They wouldn't let me back into Nashville so I had
to turn up the loud electric guitars on this one." And the crowd of devoted fans went nuts.

One slight problem, of course, was that we didn't know what "riff rock" meant. But we cheered along with the rest and planned to go home and look it up later. I could take a guess. I know what a riff is, and I assume a "riff rock" song would be one with a lot of riffs shoved in it. But the way he said it made it sound like it had an identity. Was it a specific genre, a school, a trend, a group name, a musical theory, what?

No problem! Interweb to the rescue! There were probably hundreds of sites devoted to answering this very question. The Internet knows everything!

Except, apparently, for this. Wikipedia has no "riff rock" entry, not at all. There's a "riff rock" tag at Last.fm, but no explanation. Riffrock.com seems to think I should know already or I wouldn't be there. Google listed plenty of pages and Amazon had several reviews where "riff rock" was being used descriptively, but none of them included a single definition. Ask.com said it didn't know, dot com.

This staggered me. It has been years, literally years, since I casually reached out for information on the Web and came up dry. Had I walked outside, dropped a can, and watched it fall upward, I could not have been more surprised.

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In the battle of the fandoms, Stephen Colbert wields a mighty force. Even in space.

Fans of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" have marched forward on his behalf many times before. All he has to do is casually mention how nice it would be to have something — or, more accurately, everything — named after him to get hundreds of thousands of his eager followers swinging into vote-box-stuffing action. Colbert has already had his name slapped on a minor league hockey team mascot (Steagle Colbeagle, for the Saginaw Spirit), a trapdoor spider (Aptostichus stephencolberti), a Ben & Jerry's flavor ("Americone Dream"), any number of animals in zoos and scientific studies, and even a Virgin America jet ("Air Colbert").

His latest conquest? Node 3 on the International Space Station, thanks to the naming contest for it that NASA just held which included a write-in option, something they now may be regretting. The first two nodes are named "Unity" and "Harmony" and until very recently it was assumed that the third would become "Serenity." Not only does it fit the theme, but "Serenity" is the name of a spaceship in Joss Whedon's beloved-but-canceled TV show Firefly and the subsequent movie Serenity. And the early voting numbers confirmed overwhelmingly that no one is better at organizing online campaigns than Joss Whedon fans.

Except for the Colbert Nation.

"Colbert" won with over 230,000, beating "Serenity" by over 40,000 votes. Another write-in suggestion took third ("Myyearbook," with 147,637) and "Gaia" came in fourth with 114,427. But NASA may not be a democracy. NASA's human space flight chief, Bill Gerstenmaier, appeared evasive about Colbert's ascendency on Colbert's show on March 10. "Well, we're going to have to go think about that," he said.

"That's NASA's problem," Colbert said to him. "You guys think too much."

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