Amongst the many ridiculous events in the Church’s history, the Cadaver Synod has to rank in the top five. Basically, they dug up a dead pope, cut off his fingers, put him on trial, found him guilty, reburied him, dug him up again and then threw him into the river. Here’s another article about it.
Anyway, that’s all inconsequential. What’s interesting is that the wikipedia page’s discussion is categorized as “Low-importance Middle Ages articles“. Following through to that will reveal a vast depository of obscure and random medieval history. If you ever feel the need to write historical fiction set in the dark ages, this is the place to be.
Eight years ago when I was looking for a domain and dedicated web host for my fledgling weblog, I came across WestHost.com. It offered a lot for a very fair, and student friendly, price. I registered the-inbetween.com through them for the full $70/2 year price tag that domains had back then. The package had unlimited bandwidth (remember those days?), a capacity of 15 MB and full PHP3 support. It was good for the time. In those years that account has been automatically upgraded and I now have 2000 MB worth of space and PHP5 and all sorts of other nice things that I don’t ever use.
Halfway through that run dreamhost started promoting themselves with their weblog friendly hosting packages. Webloggers, and others, started to switch. They raved. The packages were tempting and I was considering the switch myself, but I figured that domain transfer would be annoying and that, well, nothing was wrong with my current hosting provider so I chose to stick it out.
Nowadays I hear nothing but complaints about Dreamhost. Their status page reads like a comedy of errors (Due to a typing error on our primary router while trying to block a denial of service attack, DreamHost is currently offline.) People are canceling their accounts and looking for new options. Meanwhile, my account with Westhost just works. I am glad I never switched.
So when I was looking for some extra hosting for some possible projects, I went with WestHost again. I’m not one to normally plug companies like this but eight years of happy service has to account for something. If you ever need reliable and simple web hosting, give WestHost.com a look and put ‘the-inbetween.com’ as a referral.
Anyway, as I was signing up for that new hosting account I needed a domain. With the help of some friends on IRC, we came up with a list of potential (and available) domains. Since I can’t register them all I offer them as free domain name consultation service to you. They’re all available as of last week.
bossattacks.com and bossattack.com
blockpuzzle.net (unfortunately it’s a .net so it ruled it out for me)
badicality.com
f0il.net and m00d.net (more .net domains, but these are 133t)
resetthis.com (not a fan of the double ‘t’)
loadbutton.com
levelledup.com (very good for subdomain fun, ie. mike.levelledup.com)
isnonplussed.com and isacynic.com and enjoysthings.com (for more subdomain fun.)
In the end, I settled for Runbutton.com. It’s brief and snappy (three syllables); it’s not inherently game-y; it is totally game-y; it’s an obscure reference to weird game-y things (the most useless button ever: the dedicated run button. I’m looking at you Mortal Kombat.); it was available.
What kind of projects are going to go there? I’m not sure right now but the first might be in response to this TIGSource competion and it might look like this:
The ubiquity of YouTube is a wonderful thing. For every one four million view video on the site there’s another forty thousand videos with a hundred views each. This, as Alex Juhasz[1]calls it, “niche-tube” exists below the radar of YouTube’s popularity and is often a treasure trove of weird and specific videos that only appeal to small subset of people. Some of it is prime research material.
Take “Gloomy Sunday” for example. The so called “Hungarian Suicide Song”, which has many urban legends around it, was mostly popularized in English by Billie Holiday. Originally written by Rezso Seress (lyrics), it was promptly rewritten to be less depressing by poet László Jávor (lyrics). It was that version that was later translated into English by Sam L. Lewis (lyrics) and Desmond Carter (lyrics). Carter’s version, performed by Paul Robeson (who has his own interesting history), was the more accurate translation but it proved to be the less successful one. After a bunch of performers, Lewis’ version was eventually recorded by Billie Holiday with a new third stanza that tries to take even more weight off the original meaning of the song by implying that it was a dream. It was this version of the song that persisted, eventually being covered by the likes of Elvis Costello, Bjork, Sarah McLaughlin, Sinéad O’Connor and others. It is this version, three iterations from the original, that is mostly known as “Gloomy Sunday.”
Now this is all well and interesting written out, but a quick YouTube search will reveal all this history in all its aural glory. YouTube is a great cultural library for this media and while copyright issues will always plague it, at this point I doubt they will ever stop it. How can you go back with all this culture a click away? Here’s an audio/video history of the previous paragraph:
With my growing ambition to extend myself to every corner of the internet, I have created a tumble log. I’ve been aware of Tumblr since it launched but never really considered it useful at the time. I already had a weblog. I already used del.icio.us. What did Tumblr do that I already didn’t have done?
Then I had a revelation. Tumblr fills that little tiny niche that exists between a so-called “proper” weblog and a linklog like del.icio.us. It’s great for ephemeral snippets and pieces of the internet. Of course, if I had an invite I’d probably be using ffffound for that too. But yes, n0wak.tumblr.com.
Also, it made for a fine birthday gift, to me from me.
One of my biggest user interface peeves is the use of loading interstitials that don’t leave the user a means of escape. This is prevalent in a lot of Flash and AJAX sites that tend to load a lot of external data. You click on a button or link, everything deactivates while the word “loading”, or some equivalent, is shown on the screen and once the application loads what it needs it reactivates the buttons and does its thing. The problem with this design is that if there’s an error in the data it’s loading or a network hiccup it gets stuck on the loading screen. And if there’s no way to cancel the request, the user is stuck and is forced to reload the whole thing. I hate when this happens on a website.
When this happens in a game — a game that takes a long time to load and start-up — I become incensed. For all the thought that Criterion put into the user interface of Burnout Paradise, it is the lack of a single cancel button on the leaderboard screen that has left the most lasting impression on me.
As you can guess, I was stuck on this screen. There was no way out and I was forced to quit to the dashboard and reset the whole game. Thankfully, I didn’t lose any data, but that doesn’t excuse the mistake. When relying on data coming over the internet always leave a contingency in case it fails because, online, it will eventually fail for someone.
YouTube is a treasure trove of cover artists, remixers, parodies, mash-ups and everything else. On occasion you might hit the jack-pot and find a hidden gem amidst all the usual quality content. Something that transcends bad. Legion of rock stars, as can be found in fibbocs video channel, is one such stand-out. It’s a “cover band” that does such lousy job with the source material that it becomes oddly hilarious. And it’s a mother lode: there’s 178 of these videos.
Legion of Rock Stars (LRS) pioneered Pure Pleasure, in which the band listens to original recordings of classic rock and pop songs on 30db noise-blocking headsets, and then plays along.
Freed from the shackles of practicing, LRS focuses instead on bringing the excitement of a large stadium rock show to the intimate arenas in which it performs.
I’m excited, but mostly for this cover of the The Good, The Bad and The Ugly theme:
Though I have an account I’m not a big fan of Facebook. That “social software” kind of networking has little appeal to me and feels superficial (why send a message through a third party site when you can just send me an email?). What I do like, though, is the Facebook platform and its API. It lets me stay active on Facebook and keep the friends on there informed of my web going-ons without ever needing to actually use Facebook. Through various applications and tools, my profile automatically grabs my latest weblog posts, my del.icio.us links, my Flixster movie reviews (a service I semi-used before Facebook but now often use through Facebook) and my flickr photos. At this point, I log onto Facebook only for Scrabulous.
Scrabulous is a Scrabble ripoff game that you can sign up for and play against other people online. Once Facebook opened its API to developers the makers of Scrabulous seized the opportunity and began to integrate their service with Facebook’s. if you do use Facebook, then all you need to do is add the Scrabulous application to your account and then you can immediately see who amongst your friends has it installed and you can start a game with them right there. You don’t need to sign up on their website and segregate yourself from your social network friends since it seamlessly integrates into the experience. This is great. Facebook is a game platform [1]! That’s something that’ll get more use from me than a social platform.
Meanwhile, all other game networks exist as closed gardens. You have your XBox Live friends and a whole other set for Steam or PSN. Maybe some people are on two or three, though sometimes with different user names. You can only access data and management functions while connected to the network and the best you can hope for outside of it is a gamer card or some stats — none of it standard or uniform.
It would be nice if all these game platform holders could decide on a standard or, at the very least, allow a certain degree of openness. It would be nice if I add a real life friend with an XBox account into Facebook that they would be automatically added to my own XBox Live friends list. It would be very nice. It’s the kind of thing that OpenSocial, or any open system, would be great for. Unfortunately, for everything to work there needs to be a level of participation from all platform holders and that’s not going to happen. The game console makers like their closed gardens. The chances of an open console game network happening are about as remote as an open hardware platform: not gonna happen[2]
The best we can hope for is something new. A new game built on top of all these social networks. The userbase is there. The technology is there. Somebody just needs to make an investment.
Microsoft has been expanding that connectivity a lot — you can log into Messenger and talk to your MSN friends while playing a game on your 360 — so I’ll give them credit for this.
A milestone of sorts as I recently bookmarked my 5000th link in my del.icio.us feed, and that link was to Avatar Machine (in reality, the 5000th link was added over a week ago but that was counting links I marked “private”, this is the 5000th public facing link). That’s almost four links per day for four years.
This, along with Gmail, is the one web application that has really struck a chord with me and I can’t ever see myself not use it. That is, unless they start requiring Yahoo logins. *ahem*
I can pin-point the exact moment when I discovered del.icio.us and started using it: a dyslexic post by me in Metafilter, complaining about the lack of subcategories. This was before I “got” it. Before the tag concept, which was still pretty much new at the time, became so obvious. Also before tag intersections and bundles and all those minor, but very drastic, features were implemented. But the idea of del.icio.us seems like common sense now so here’s hoping to another 5000 more!
And of course, as I write this I get an invite to yet-another-web-app #48. My new profile on pownce (I don’t know if you need to be registered to see it). I don’t get the point of this one — is it a love child of Twitter and SendSpace? — but maybe I’ll be struck with an epiphany after some usage. Or I’ll sign up and forget it. It’s hard to say.
There came a time, many months ago, when I realized that the wealth of information that I had subscribed to had become unwieldly. There was so much to read and watch that it became a fulltime job keeping track of it (which, you know, cut out time to actually read and watch it all.) At any given time, my Bloglines account had in excess of seventeen thousand unread entries. My so-called “shrinkwrap shrine” of games and movies (in other words, those titles purchased but never even opened) was piling up. The emails from the four high-volume mailing lists that I’m subscribed to with my work account are deleted and never read. Podcast subscriptions languish, unplayed. I’m paying a monthly fee to Zip.ca to have a movie sit on my counter, unwatched. I’m paying a monthly fee for Gameaccess. And my stack of unread, but fully purchased, books is demanding a new bookshelf.
Enough is enough. I have to do lists about finishing to do lists. It’s time to start fresh.
I’ve exported my subscribed feeds as an OPML file (for future reference) and purged everything from my Bloglines account. I’m canceling my online rental accounts before the end of this month. And, hopefully, I can start at the backlog of media that I already own. I’m still anticipating Crackdown for the 360, but the next game I write about might very well be Mercenaries or Way of the Samurai. Or, if I want to get real old school, I can dust off my disc of Carnage Heart.
After buying and watching the Massive Attack Eleven Promos DVD, I went looking for some other music videos to pass the time and came across Wild Light – Video works by Tobias Knipf. His two videos for Mount Sims (never heard of them until today) are great.
One of them, for “Ashes”, is really nothing more than an interpretive dance sequence and the other, for “Failling Up”, is nothing but rain hitting a puddle for the length of the track. But there’s something about them. The way they accentuate the music and the mood and the way they are shot makes them more than the sum of their parts. They’re fairly minimal, but they work well. I like.
(And Karmacoma is still, after all these years, my favourite Massive Attack video.)
A little late on this, but Dark Room is the coolest tiny simple freeware app that I’ve seen in a while. Functionally, it’s more bare than Notepad. It doesn’t do anything but take text input and save it, but it’s the idea behind it that deserves merit. A writing tool that removes all distractions and just leaves nothing between the writer and the text.
Of course, such a distraction free environment is illusory. The whole of your music library and all those episodes of that TV show that you downloaded and the entirety of the internet is just an Alt+Tab away. But psychologically, Dark Room remains interesting and, hell, I managed to write more in that one application today than I have all month so something must be working.
you have amused us greatly with your SNL clip videos (which get pulled down due to legal threats) and your “Snakes on a Plane” trailer (which got pulled), and all your other and future videos that will be replaced with a This video has been removed due to terms of use violation message. You cover the full gamut from videos of people geeking out to Guitar Hero on camera to videos of random people dancing to crappy music on camera. All the while you do this using Flash video.
I’m not going to make a judgement call on your decision to use Flash. It is what you chose and it is what I shall tolerate. However, you have made one annoying mistake. You spent all this time coding the site and coding this embedable flv player, yet you forgot one easy to implement thing. One thing that your competitor, Google Video, does do. One thing that *I* could code in five minutes for you guys: volume control.
Please add this feature. Your “all or none” volume button is very presumptuous in its assumption that your video is the only media I have playing on my computer. It’s not. I do not like having to adjust my system volume to view your video at a tolerable level when my system volume is perfectly fine the way it is. Please resolve.
Proving that spam is still as viable as it ever was. If you’re in the game of relying on other people’s content, as Technorati is, you are going to get gamed.
About
This is the weblog of Mike Nowak, a freelance web nerd and digital nomad. I write mostly about games, music, film and tv, the web, and anything else I find of interest. This weblog has existed in some form or another since 1999.
A constant struggle.
