Giant Bomb

Disclaimer: I don't read Giant Bomb. I've got an account, but their aggressively American approach and labyrinthine forums have always combined to produce a community that I find difficult to immerse myself in*.

They recently hired a new writer, and there's been some disappointment expressed on Twitter that it's another white guy. The Giant Bomb community has rallied to the site's defence, and their general argument appears to be, under a lot of bile, that New White Man is a good fit with the site's established editorial style and humour.

I also understand that these places hire people they know, and it's a fact that white guys are higher-profile in the games industry and enthusiast press, as a rule, than any other combination of race and gender. So it makes statistical sense that a bunch of white guys running a videogames website would know and hire another white guy.

But I have difficulty accepting either of these arguments as good enough.

If you care about the quality of opinions and writing, then a different voice than the ones you're already getting can only be a good thing. I already know how white guys feel about Call of Duty. Give me a new perspective.

The statistics are harder to argue with, bit the weakness in that argument is the assumption that Giant Bomb couldn't have possibly found any women or non-white men to hire at all. It would have been harder to find that voice, maybe, but if we really want a more diverse, inclusive industry - and if you don't, I'm afraid we can never be friends - then the established networks like Giant Bomb have to be prepared to put your legwork in.

That they didn't think this effort was worth it - I'm not sure if that's better or worse than the thought never occurring at all - speaks volumes about their (lack of) commitment to improving the industry they're part of as well as the one they cover.

*And I'm a straight white guy, their target audience. I am only imagine how daunting an experience that place must be for women or non-white users.

Returning to Facebook: A thought experiment

This tweet got me thinking.

Haven't actively used Facebook in about 3 months now. Huh. /cc @aniki21
— Robbie (@robbiethng) August 9, 2012

I've kind of been missing Facebook. Not the service itself, but some of the people on it who I didn't keep in touch with any other way. I miss the social bit, not the network (although this post by maciej makes a strong case that social networks are neither).

I'd quite like to keep up with some of those people again, but don't have any real desire to open up my life to Facebook's increasingly terrifying database of People And Everything That They Do. So I've been trying to figure out how I would rejoin Facebook, if the temptation does eventually reach a point where I cave in.

I don't want to just re-activate my old account (I assume it still exists, even though I told Facebook to delete it a year ago) primarily so they can't link up any old data about me. I want them to have as little (useful) information about me as I can provide, so a new account entirely is required.

(I realise this post is going to go a bit Richard Stallman in places, for which I can only apologise.)

Firstly, there's the signup process.

I don't want Facebook to have my real email address (and I'd used it for my previous Facebook account anyway), so I'd have to set up a new one. Not difficult; there are dozens (if not hundreds) of free email providers, and I'm kind of interested in trying out Microsoft's new(ish) Outlook mailbox anyway.

A slightly trickier section is the phone number - Facebook now requires you to provide a mobile phone number when you sign up for an account. I assume this has to be unique, so I can't just re-use the number I had on my original account, or the number I used on my work Facebook account (I need this for testing, and since it uses my work email address I don't want to try and use it for personal stuff). In this instance, picking up a cheap Pay&Go SIM won't be prohibitively expensive - and while I'm not pleased with the idea of having to pay anything to use Facebook, it's probably worth it for keeping my real details away from their servers.

The other major way Facebook can track your information is by watching what other sites you visit - even if you're not logged into Facebook. The easiest solution to this, that I can see, is to only use Facebook in a different browser than everything else, or to use Private Browsing. Chrome has an "Incognito mode" that you can open which uses a different cache from your main browsing session, and which is disposed of when you close the window. This means you've got to re-login to every site if you're Incognito, but it also means anything you do Incognito can't escape to your main browser history. I already do this with my work Facebook account, so adopting this strategy for a personal one wouldn't be a new habit to learn.

Avoiding linking up my Facebook account to other services seems like a no-brainer, and although I'll happily use my Twitter account as an authenticator for blog comments and the like, there's something about the way Facebook collects, stores and uses the data its users provide that makes me much more wary about giving them that data in the first place.

Even with those precautions, I'll have to give this a lot more thought. There are bound to be things I've over looked or haven't thought of, but as an initial to-do list for opening a Facebook account I think this should protect me pretty well if I cave in and re-join Zuckerberg's Monolith.

The Digital Economy Bill

Last night, the House of Commons passed the controversial Digital Economy Bill. For more information on why this bill is a useless piece of garbage, see here and a million other places online.

Immediately after the debate, shortly before midnight, I sent an email to my MP, the SNP's Stewart Hosie, asking how he'd voted. I got a reply from one of his assistants this morning saying they'd look into it and get back to me.

I found the answer myself, before they got back to me, so I sent this to them as well.

Hi Kevin,

I already know, thanks to Hansard (link), that Mr. Hosie voted in favour of the Digital Economy bill, which only really leaves one question outstanding:

Is it the official policy of the SNP to disregard the impact of wide-reaching and unscrutinized legislation on your constituents' civil liberties, in order to appease corporate lobbyists, or is that only the case for this bill? Did Mr. Hosie not read or understand the bill and its implications for free speech and communication, or did he simply not care? He obviously didn't feel strongly enough about the bill's contents to participate in the debate beforehand, despite being in the House of Commons for the finance debate that took place immediately before it.

Dundee prides itself on its thriving digital businesses; games companies like Denki, Realtime Worlds, Tag Games, Ruffian and Proper Games; Abertay and Dundee University's focus on computing and new media courses; the city's participation in the Fibre City Project, and of course the massive publishing and content creator that is DC Thomson. How can Mr. Hosie, who claims to represent many of the people who work for these companies and institutions, justify not standing up to say a single word during the Digital Economy Bill's debate?

Given the controversy surrounding this bill, and the massive impact it could - and very likely will have - on the future of communication in this country, it was essential that the whole House be allowed to scrutinize the whole bill before it was passed. Instead, the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat front benches colluded to have the bill forced through in the wash-up, bypassing the democratic process and cheating their constituents out of their rights. I am horrified that my MP and the rest of the SNP went along with this cheap sham.

Leaving aside the grave implications this bill has for the health of Britain's digital economy, the freedom of speech and the sharing of information, this is a severe precedent set for the future of democracy in the UK.

Yours,

Paul Cosgrove

Internet Social

I'm fascinated by "social networking tools" (which I think is a stupid name for them, but whatever) and blogging stuff in general. Which is really weird, when I think about how highly I regard my own opinion (that being, not at all), and how frankly pointless I think putting it online at all is (which, now that I think about it, might be a major contributor to the demise of my anime blog/news site).

But still, I get drawn into Twitter (and Twitpic), upload occasional YouTube videos and had to stop myself from requesting a 12seconds account; as cool as the idea is, I can't see myself vblogging, really - not when I blog "properly" so infrequently. And that's without having to really identify myself to the wider internet. I was still more excited than I probably should have been when I discovered that I could post (and watch) YouTube videos from my phone, though.

I still enjoy seeing how The Internet (by which I mean, the people and entities connected to and via it) finds new ways to communicate with itself. On their own, individual Twitter posts are just pointless minutae (and in a lot of cases, seem rather narcissistic), but there's something interesting about how they form a single cohesive narrative over days and weeks and months in a way that self-contained blog and journal entries don't. There's a lot to be said for the minute-by-minute reactionary nature of Twitter too; it made watching the second Presidential debate much more interesting, for instance, to see hundreds of other people's reaction in real time as it progressed.

That sort of thing isn't maybe what the creators of Twitter had in mind when they started it, but I find it fascinating to see how The Internet has adapted to the application and how they've adapted the application itself for their own way of communication.

[/ramble]

Obama lawn sign draws internet crowd

This has to be the most potent harbinger of the internet's lack of purpose that I have ever seen.

Live video chat by Ustream

An Oregon woman who wanted to let her neighbors know that she's endorsing Senator Barack Obama for president has had two Obama-Biden 08 yard signs stolen from her front lawn. So she made a third herself, and had her teenage son set up a live feed on Ustream.tv in the hopes of protecting the sign and possibly catching any thieves.

Source

At the time of writing, there are approximately 200 people watching the streaming video. There are 130 in the attached chatroom, a lot of whom are freaking out because a gnome in the garden was smashed. Several of them have changed their nicknames as a mark of respect.

Via Make The Logo Bigger.

Nuclear bombs don't exist!

spEak You're bRanes is a fantastic blog that collects the most ridiculous comments from the BBC website's "Have Your Say" section.

This particular comment comes from a thread about the Large Hadron Collider:

Why was this ‘built’ underground? Simple, it does not exist. It’s a big con.

It’s the same reason India/Pakistan allegedly conducted nuclear explosions underground simply because they never happened in the first place. Why? Because nuclear bombs don’t exist and they never have existed. FACT!

Hollywood and the people behind Hollywood (the rich elite race) came up with the propoganda to fool the ‘Sheople’. They’ll keep taking your money though to fund their lavish lifestyles.

Philip Coalman

It's the "FACT!" that really sells it, for me.

Gold Membership

This is a song an internet friend of mine - cavalcade from The Society of Gamesplaying Gentlemen and Womenfolk, the internet's premiere Victorian-themed videogame discussion forum - put together, fed up spending £35 for a year's Xbox Live just to get verbal abuse from American teenagers. He's hoping to gain internet notoriety from this, so I'm doing my part.

Warning: contains lots of profanity.

The Doyouinverts - Gold Membership (demo)

The cold, cold heart of Web 2.0

This article over at The Register is well worth the read, although I can't put my finger exactly on why.

It's an opinion piece by William Davies, a sociologist, about the application of economic theory onto the internet, specifically how the theories of a guy called Gary Becker relate to Web 2.0.

I realise that it sounds, from that description, very dry and boring, but in actuality it raises an interesting point about the flash-in-the-pan nature of internet trends and how that affects the impact of consumer-created content that's the flagship of modern internet business.

(Also, I know my post titles are getting less original - I'm resorting to stealing the title of the article I'm linking to - but it's better than having a bunch without titles.)

The internet as a subway

Following on from the periodic table of the internet, someone took Sen. Ted Stevens' (R-AL) "the internet is a series of tubes" analogy and decided to map out major websites onto a Tokyo Subway plan.

I'm not entirely sure who's responsible for this, but it's probably safe to say that they've got a lot of free time...

Via Boing Boing

Periodic table of the internet

A full-size version (including links to all the sites on the table) is at Wellington Grey's Miscellanea.

Enough acronyms, already

I spend quite a bit of time every day reading videogame forums, of varying intelligences.

I'm fed up of the number of acronyms that people use - not just regular 'net slang, either. Some of them, like "GoW" can refer to more than one game depending on the context and the console being discussed, in this case the 360's Gears of War or PS2's God of War.

One post I just read, the one that actually inspired this complaint, reads "SMG, MP3, SSBB and MK should all be covered too [at E3]".

I read games forums a lot. I read games news a lot. It took me a couple of minutes to work out what games he was talking about. It doesn't help with the sheer number of titles coming out these days, of course, but is your time that precious, that typing "Smash Bros." would waste too much of it that could be saved by "SSBB"?