Orchids and Shoes - 2

I do find it irritating when people steal my words for commercial gain.  (Shoes). I don’t particularly mind when they do so for non-commercial use which is why I’ve chosen the creative commons licence which permits non-commercial use.  (Stilettos).  But if you want to make money out of words, make it out of your own damn words.  (Sandals). As you remember, the last time this happened I contacted the individual concerned and asked for an invoice address, and they apologised and removed the material.

This time it’s one of those sites which says something like “Aphra’s site is fantastic - here’s her post on internet theivery” and then quotes the first 50 words with a link to the rest of the post. (Wedgies). The thief makes their money off the adds surrounding the post.  (Heelies). They presumably have google set to notify them of any posts in the blogosphere on their specific subject - in this case shoes (hence the podal tourettes - I want to see if the theif captures this in their fishing net) - and they probably automate the process of copying and pasting them too.

I confess to being amused that the thief removed my first two comments on the post in which I politely explained that I objected to the thievery.  I’m even sneakily impressed that the wording of the post has changed to “Aphra Behn is very entertaining” which shows an almost British use of the word.   Me, I’m finding the situation tedious, but there you go.

Anyways, I’ve now contacted the ISP with my complaint and we shall see what - if anything - happens.

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Update:Success! I went round in circles with the ISP for a while; their dispute policy has loads of hoops.  However, I’ve just received a polite email from someone’s gmail account (presumably the blogger not the ISP) saying that the post has been removed and thanking me for my patience. Fine words butter my parsnips, so I’m more than happy with that. I’m curious to know if the ISP contacted the site owner, but it’s likely I never will know.

Hilariously, their bot picked up and plagiarised this post too, though it does show signs of hand crafting, since it starts after the end of the first sentence.  I’ve asked them to remove it, but once again I am sneakily impressed.  I am tempted to set up a blog and publish nonsense with the word “shoes” in the title of every post, but I do have a life, and I am not that petty. Devious, yes.  Petty, no.

Cold turkey for Christmas

I’ve decided that the only way to deal with my Internet addiction is to cut off my supply.

I’m going to post my wireless router to the one I IM with the most.

This may seem drastic, but I think it’s the only way. It isn’t quite as drastic as it sounds: when the shakes and the screaming get too bad I can stand outside the Library waiting for it to open, like the folks who wait at the pharmacy counter of Sainsburys for their bright green doses of methadone.

The problem is that my home-time is outa whack, and I lose hours of my life dickering around on the Intenet. Since I seem to find it impossible to cut down, I need to make it impossible to go online. I’ve a huge bunch of studying to do, and clicking the NaBloPoMo Randomiser ain’t gonna get me educated.

So, I’ve decided to pull the plug on the Internet for a month. I’ll probably keep a diary and blog about it afterwards. You do see how much the Internet frames how I react with the world?

So I’ll see you in the New Year.

Blak Kitteh

I put my blog through the Lolinator last night, and this is how it came out. Lolcatz irrit8z the shitz out uv me, but the appropriateness of this made me laugh.

The shallow end of the meme pool

I’ve been tidying up and fixing all sorts of things recently including my CDs, the contents of the box room, the lights in the kitchen, my plant pots and the categorisation of my blog posts. See how neatly they are listed on the right. That’s one of the things I’ve been doing. There’ve been all sorts of spin-off from this activity; for example I can now take a shower again after three months or so of strip washes and baths, (who’d have thought that when the kitchen lights blew they’d take the shower with them?)

One thing I’ve noticed while wading through my blog posts is that the word “meme” has become little more than a synonym for “personal quiz”.

Dawkin’s original explanation of the meme embraced such things as “tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing fashions, ways of making pots, and the technology of building arches”, according to Wikepedia. But as you know, in the blogosphere a meme is a quiz which you answer, naming one or more other people so that they have a social obligation to do the same. I’ve posted 15 posts which I have categorised as “memes”, and though not all of them fall into this category most of them do.

This has led me to two specific thoughts:

• don’t we lose something if this word is narrowed and dumbed down in this way, and
• would it be possible to create memes in the blogosphere which aren’t quizzes?

In many respects of course the blogosphere comprises nothing but mimetic behaviour. “Posting a blog entry”, “commenting on a blog post” and even “having a blog” could all of them be added to Dawkins’ original list of memes. People lift and copy ideas, topics and subject matter all the time and we learn on-line behaviours (such as providing or using RSS feeds) on the fly.

Explicit memes in blogland have to be posts whose subject matter is generic enough for anyone to post on and which differ from each other by the poster making them personal. I suspect I am trying to square a circle which simply cannot be squared.

Still I would like to think of a subject which anyone can post about, which is not actually about them.

Suggestions, anyone?

After us, the flood

The users of the internet seem to fall into two categories: the literate and the illiterate. I had hoped that the fact that most communication is by the written word would encourage literacy but it doesn’t seem to. Hopefully the increase in visible illiteracy is because the demographic is expanding to include people who can neither spell nor touch type, and not because we are in fact dumbing down.

I’ve been freecycling a lot of stuff recently, and I have to remind myself that just because someone replies to me thusly …

sorry its late but can pick up tomorrow or sunday evening many thanks shirley [phone number] if you ring me i will ring back to arrange pick up and address

… is no reason not to let them have my stuff.

I’ve been playing Travian for a couple of weeks, and browsing the forums. Travian starts off looking like a rural version of Sim City and ends up being an mmorpg war game. I’m not particularly interested in war games and will probably wander back here whimpering when my villages are destroyed by hormone-enraged 13 year olds who cannot spell.

I can’t work out whether the posters here intend to be as rude and arrogant as they seem:

I’m really confused!
I’m new to Travian so I need answers about this server restart business. I’m in server 4 so I don’t know if it affects me but when they restart the servers is everyone going to lose their cities and have to start all over again? Please help me!

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wow, i’m in an answer stupid questions mood tonight….If server 5 restarts, it has nothing to do with server 4. server 4 just restarted like 3 or 4 months ago… if i’m not mistaken, the last game on server 5 probably already ended if its restarting at the end of the month

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Today is stupid question night, but I guess we really shouldnt’ say anything about this guy because he is new… And it’s not in the manual or anything………

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what about server 3?

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wait.. nvm.. i see now.. server 3 won’t be affected ither..

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Wow don’t get mad at me when you didn’t even answer my question… “when they restart the servers is everyone going to lose their cities and have to start all over again?”

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I answered your question You asked:
I’m in server 4 so I don’t know if it affects me but when they restart the servers is everyone going to lose their cities and have to start all over again? Please help me!Ok. The server restart ONLY AFFECTS the restarted server. It doesn’t affect the other servers the tiniest bit! If the server is restarted, you lose everything on that server. But if your village is not on that server, then you don’t lose anything!

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Alright thanks for your time.

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wow, hot to not become mad when after a stupid question (that was answered few days ago and u can find it on the forum) you don’t mind even a little to read SirensMoon’s first post:Quote:
Today is stupid question night, but I guess we really shouldnt’ say anything about this guy because he is new… And it’s not in the manual or anything………Nothing will affect you. |
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that’s an answer

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What A Noob Question

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There are pages and pages of that sort of exchange. I cannot tell if the posters are:

1. badly served by their own illiteracy
2. writing abruptly because they are writing in a foreign language, (Travian was developed in Germany and is “set” in the Gallic / Teutonic boarder at the “time” of the Roman empire), or
3. 13 and hormones and peer-pressure are undermining their ability to socialise or think

It worries me that illiteracy is a fashion and that the posters could in fact type perfectly sensibly if they chose to.

Then it worries me that this is the highest level of their written communication skills, and they are going to be unleashed into an economy where the blue-collar jobs are all done in China.

I don’t which worries me more. Maybe it’s just a noob question.

Facing up to Facebook

It occurred to me today that the exciting stuff with the Internet is now behavioural rather than technical. The e-shopping apps are in, the e-banking apps are in, we use google to satisfy our informational whims, all sorts of transactions are now almost friction-free. Developing apps is not where it’s at.

What’s interesting now is how the Internet is changing how we interact, and the most interesting space of all at the moment is Facebook. The premise of Facebook is that it is your name, with your address, the details of your school, college or work, and your real, live, real-life friends.

This is new in various ways:

• Firstly, we’ve got used to using screen-names, and incidents such as the Oxford students and the Police show that many Facebook users have not yet thought through their lack of pseudonymity.
• Secondly, apps like Facebook in particular mean that we will never loose sight of friends or enemies ever again. They can run, but they can’t hide. And vice versa.

I’m still thinking through the implications of this one. At the moment one can easily and happily drop out of one place and into another by changing jobs, changing hobbies, moving house, leaving a relationship. One can grow up and move on, leaving embarrassments, mistakes, consequences, and really really boring people, behind. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, it’s just a thing. But Facebook, even more than Google, takes that away from us.

And do you know what? It’s so useful and such fun that none of us mind.

For now.

5 reasons why I blog

Severine has tagged me with the meme asking for five reasons why I blog. I realised I didn’t actually know the answer to that one, so I thought about it for a bit, and here they are.

I blog to help me think - Some people think in images, some people work on gut feeling, I think in words. Sometimes I don’t know what I think until I hear myself saying it. If the level of background noise is too loud, I lose the ability to think. So working through thoughts as writing helps me define them and refine them. But any kind of writing would do that, and I certainly didn’t keep a journal or a diary as regularly as I blog, so why do I blog?

I blog to spark conversations - Blogging is not just about writing, it is also about reading, and I like it when people read and post comments. I came here from a cyberplace which was much more conversational and I miss that to be honest. But I do like to talk about ideas with people, and if I write to help me think I post it in cyberspace to start a conversation. But you can have conversations in pubs or chat rooms or any one of any other kind of social space. So what’s different about blogging?

I blog for the attention - The very first words I posted here are: “I want to see what happens when you start over again in a place where you have no history and no credit”. In other words, I want to see just how much attention I can generate. But if it was as simple as that I would blog very differently. The blogs which have garnered the most attention are the medical ones, and if I was nothing but a stats-tart then why would I post things which I know will reduce the stats?

I blog to indulge myself - A photo here. A haiku there. Commentary, poetry, analysis. I could claim it is to try out different forms of self-expression, but if you ask me it’s just a matter of self-indulgence. But if that was all it was, would I put so much effort into making it easy to find specific posts?

I blog to influence others - The ridiculous, incredible, Kafkaesque cock-ups of the recruitment of hospital doctors in the UK have outraged me, and still worry me sick. In less than a month’s time thousands of junior doctors will be out of a job and thousands of hospitals will have unfilled junior doctors positions. The rotas are going to fall apart, because they don’t have the doctors in place to staff them. This terrifies me as a patient, disgusts me as a tax-payer, and enrages me as a voter. But the issues are complex and run completely against any kind of common sense, so people don’t believe those of us who talk about it. I wanted to explain them. But that doesn’t really explain why I blog, because if it was a matter of campaigning, then a campaigning blog would do it better than this one. So what else is in it for me?

I blog as a displacement activity - two, three, hours of an evening spent puttering around the internet rather than painting the house, reading or studying. Shockingly, it used to be more when I hung out in a writing community. I’m aware that I could have got myself at least one post-grad degree in the time I’ve spent hanging out in cyber-space. At any given moment, I’d rather be blogging than doing the ironing, and once I’m sitting at the PC I’m hard to shift. I’ve just bought myself a sofa to replace the awkward and uncomfortable day-bed I’ve got in my living room, so maybe I’ll start watching TV instead.

Ok, that’s six reaons, but another nice thing about blogs is that there’s no word-count.

So how about you. I’m very shy of tagging, but I am genuinely curious why these folks blog:

• Santra
• Dr Z
• Teuchter
• Paddy K
• You - if you don’t really know why you blog and fancy thinking about it for a minute or two.

Podcast Reviews

A lot of literary ladies here review books. Well I am going to review podcasts and I may continue to do so intermittently.

Let me declare here and now that the podcasts I like fall into four categories: History, IT, Management and occasionally Science. I’m a geekette, and proud of it.

Aphra’s favouritest podcast series ever is Hardcore History from Dan Carlin.

Carlin describes these as “conversations around the water-cooler”; he picks up an historical event or theme, peers at it from all sides, pokes it a bit to see what gives and puts it back so we can re-consider it from a distance. There are some very pedestrian history podcasts out there at least one of which must owe serious royalties to Wikipedia, but Carlin shows everyone else how it should be done. Very strongly recommended if you like to have thoughts provoked, connections made and paradigms subverted. Carlin’s not made that many of them, so I have started listening to his riffs off American politics and finding them almost as compelling.

Another must-listen podcast in Aphra’s car is The Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast

A bunch of likable actors from the West Coast of the US shoot a themed breeze each week on some subject relating to their present and past touring shows. A particular favourite was Let it Snow. Gentle and amusing fun. I’m growing rather fond of them, and will of course go and see them next time they are in the Literary Festival in Little-Wittering-on-the-Wold.

I also enjoy the Business Week Cover Story

These are cheerful interviews between one of the editors of Business Week and whoever wrote the cover story that week. They’ve not made me go out and buy the magazine, but they are interesting, informative and sometimes illuminating.

Alt.text from Wired Magazine is good for a quickie

Running to 5 or 8 minutes or so, one of Wired’s columnists casts a flippant and frequently surreal eye over whatever catches his attention that week. Geeky. Silly. Witty. Worth 8 minutes of anyone’s week.

The National Archives Podcasts

Informative and interesting British history from real live academic historians. The lecturers are specialists and really know their stuff, working from primary sources. The slides they refer to, which one cannot of course see, show original documents. No wikipedia here. So understated it’s cool.

Old English in Context

These are undergraduate lectures from Oxford University which provide background information on the Dark Ages for students studying English Literature. They are detailed, funny and fascinating, and - woo hoo - you and I can listen to them and know we don’t have to write an essay or sit an exam. How bloody jammy is that?

There are several podcasters I am trying out to get a feel for:

Dan Klaas does laid-back essays about whatever strikes his fancy. They are classed as comedy, but I find them thought provoking.

The Cranky Middle Manager seem to have quality interviews on business-related subjects without pretending its aimed at the directors of plcs.

Occasionally the HBR Ideacast has interesting interviews with the authors of academic papers or books, but I overdosed on them early on and now I shake nervously when I hear their theme music.

There was one outstanding podcast from The University of Bath Public Lectures by world-class academics and politicians. These are frustrating because the original lectures were illustrated and the podcasts are audio only. Even so “Dead Sexy - the corpse is the new porn star of popular culture” is an exceptional lecture in an exceptional series.

It’s gotta beat Terry Wogan on the way into work, eh?

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I download all my podcasts from i-Tunes. However, it has not escaped my notice that you are going to be looking at this at a PC so the links go to web pages and you can download the podcasts directly and listen to them on your PC. Isn’t that helpful of me?

Happy bloggiversary

It’s been a year now, and the time has come for the traditional taking of stock.

I arrived here on May 10th 2006 with few expectations:

I want to see what happens when you start over again in a place where you have no history and no credit. … This is a step outside [my] comfort zones, to see what happens when - without any background or explanation - a person starts to blog.

I set out my store fairly early. This was to be about anything that grabbed my attention, but my private circumstances would remain private. Yeah, right. I am too fond of blog-streaking to maintain an air of mysterious anonymity, and in fact in my third post I was discussing my reaction to violent erotica. At that time no-one knew I blogged here and the anonymity went to my head. By Post 5 I’d got stuck right in and was discussing how I define my sexuality.

So much for just sticking with ideas.

Reacting

Of course my Big Blogging Event has been the MMC and MTAS debacle. For a while there were no informed, independent explanations of what was going on and the Patients’ Guides brought me what every blogger wants: glory, recognition and in-bound links, but I didn’t have anywhere I could kick back and let loose.

Once I’d unburdened myself, I needed to return to my random ways even though it meant reducing my stats. So now I blog about MMC and MTAS only when it all becomes too much. Not quite true. The whole thing leaves me speechless and I find photoshoping about MMC and MTAS strangely soothing. I am not sure if it was FerretFancier or Dr Rant who produced the Most Wanted image, but I was delighted to find it in pole position in Google Images the other day:

My other Big Blogging Event was a brain-dump about questions which was a compulsive expression of several years’ thinking about questions, and which was met with a resounding silence with the noble exceptions of Kelli and Sol.

Writing

Moving further back in time, I was still finding my feet in the first part of last summer, and many of my entries aren’t worth the pixels they are displayed with. However, here are half a dozen blog entries from May, June and July last year which missed out rather by being written in those early, low traffic days.

• Aborting Girls - India’s Missing Million - A circle my feminism still cannot square
• In the midst of life we are in death - an upsetting episode at work
• The egg - has the merit of being a short piece
• Vertigo - a haiku
• Bloody cat - an attempt to write simply, which is something I find hard
• St Paul’s trompe d’doeil - a photo I still like
• Me, myself, I - simple self-indulgence about me, me, me

In fact, of course, the whole thing is simple self-indulgence about me, me, me. Which make’s Sol’s question about her style all the more interesting.

Reading

The other half of the blogosphere is the blogs one reads. The most delightful post of the year was, without a doubt, the Candy Battle of Helm’s Deep.

The most upsetting blog-reading and posting experience I had was, by a long way, chez icanplainlysee. I’ve been abused online and offline before, I’ve been disagreed with. But this was the first time I’ve been disappeared. On the other hand, this did help me find the intelligent dissenters listed on my blogroll as “Classy Aenenomies”.

Charlotte’s posts about her children enthral me, partly because Charlotte herself shines through so strongly and partly because she does not take anything for granted.

I steer clear of rabidly feminyst blogs, mainly because this sort of thing enrages me. On the other hand, I have the bottom image from this post on my kitchen wall.

The Eerie Apricot’s description of a school concert where the parents are too exited to shut up and pay attention to their kids on stage has disturbed me and depressed me since I read it. Unfortunately she has deleted her blog.

Mr Angry’s posts on the IT industry almost always having me laughing, except when they make me wince.

It is difficult to pick a single post from Compartments because she is one of the most consistent bloggers out there; here is just one example of her clear-eyed intelligence about the world she half-inhabits.

There are a large number of FtM bloggers out there but the only two that I read regularly are also doctors. Nathaniel is in the process of transitioning. Z is more interested in being a doctor and human being.

Forecasting

However, a year on I am even less sure why I blog than I was when I started.

The Wonderful World of Pod

My iPod’s changed my life.

I feel slightly embarrassed about this, because I am such a late adopter and I have been very snooty about them in the past.

But I love it. I love podcasts. They are like Radio 4 on steroids.

What a privilege to be able to spend the morning listening to highly entertaining lectures on the social, historical and religious context of Anglo Saxon literature. Not just any lectures. Lectures from Oxford University. It sure made tidying and cleaning my kitchen easier. (How come I have spent FIVE HOURS on it and it doesn’t look substantially different? How can that be?)

Instead of driving to and from work while listening to and immediately forgetting ephemera like Terry Wogan, or being alternatively depressed and angered by the Today Programme and PM, I listen to and immediately forget ephemera like Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History”, The FT Digital Business and stuff from the Harvard Business Review and I am entertained by the Now Show, the Reduced Shakespeare Company and Russell Brand. My brain does get a bit slooshy at times and then I revert back to Sir Tel or to Radio 3 if I really don’t want any words at all.

Some podcasters are definitely better than others. Skepticality Magazine’s main female podcaster has an “oh, wow, like, cool!” attitude to science which suggests a lack of any critical thinking ability at all, though maybe its some form of subtle American irony that I fail to appreciate with my literal British mind.

You don’t realise how high the audio standards of the BBC actually are until you listen to interview after interview conducted down bad phone lines. The Harvard Business Review is particularly guilty of this while their interviewees all seem addicted to saying “That’s a GR-r-r-r-R-R-R-EAT question!” as if they are advertising Frosties.

But the thing that astonishes and delights me are the university lectures one can listen to: Princeton, Berkley, Stamford and Yale. Oxford, Bath, Glasgow. What an amazing privilege. And I’m barely scratching the surface.

Isn’t the future cool?

PS - I apologise for the cuteness of the photo but I didn’t have a 50p piece to hand and I did have a rather small cat. Surprisingly, he didn’t scratch me.