Internet Laws: Poe's Law

By lisala on 6/24/10 7:23pm
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Not the law about poetry formulated by American poet Edgar Allan Poe; that law was about the proper length of a poem ("The unit of poetry must be fixed by the reader's capacity of attention, and . . . the limits of a poem must accord with the limits of a single movement of intellectual apprehension and emotional exaltation"), but the law about parody and religion discussion on the Internet. The initial formulation by Nathan Poe took place in a discussion thread on August 11, 2005 at Christian Forums.Com. You'll note that the first version refers only to Creationism, but that the final, and most cited version refers to fundamentalism in the sense of all versions of religious fundamentalism:

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Internet Meme: Pancake Bunny

By lisala on 6/22/10 4:00pm
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A Japanese photographer named Hironori Akutagawa had a pet rabbit named Oolong. In May of 1999 Akutagawa began to take pictures of Oolong and posted them to his Website. He also trained Oolong to balance a variety of objects on the rabbit's head. The photos really are charming; you can see Oolong playing outside, sleeping, and yes, balancing objects on his head. Oolong had regular excursions outdoors, and even liked to play in the snow.

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FaceBook, Privacy, and Content Grabbing

By lisala on 5/20/10 12:14pm
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FaceBook, Privacy, and Content Grabbing

FaceBook has had a habit of arbitrarily changing their privacy policy, and modifying the software that allows FaceBook members to control what they want to share and with whom they wish to share. As the service has grown to, according to FaceBook, 400 million registered users with a privacy policy that is longer than the Constitution of the United States—and more arcane. One of FaceBook's recent changes was making privacy settings opt-in, that is, users' information is considered public by default. If you don't want anything you post or any information you provide to be made public, you need to set the privacy settings. This is fundamentally bad software design. You can see the increasing co-opting of FaceBook's users content by FaceBook here, in this graphic that shows the increasing absence of privacy, and member control over their data.

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Internet Meme: Pay It Forward

By lisala on 12/30/09 7:26pm
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I like, very much, the concept of "pay it forward."

It's a bit disconcerting to realize that the concept as currently presented, especially in online culture, is most closely associated a slight novel that's so full of saccarine that my teeth hurt just looking at the cover blurb, and a film that's actually even more annoying. Nonetheless, the concept itself is utterly fabulous. Sometimes called "alternative giving," or even "random acts of kindness,""pay it forward" has deep roots in both legal and American culture.

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Internet Meme: Rule 34

By lisala on 12/28/09 8:43pm
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Rule 34 states:

If it exists, there is porn of it.

It was soon followed by Rule 35:

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Medieval Tech Support

By lisala on 12/18/09 3:11pm
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This skit was originally created for the Norwegian Broadcasting company (NRK) in 2001. It was performed on the show Øystein og jeg, starring Øystein Backe (geek) and Rune Gokstad (despondent monastic user), and written by Knut Nærum.

Internet Meme: Skitt's Law

By lisala on 12/10/09 6:08pm
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In 1992 John Bangsund writing in the Victorian Society of Editors' Newsletter observed that Muphry's Law referred to the well-known editorial phenomenon that:

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Internet Meme: Godwin's Law

By lisala on 12/5/09 9:38pm
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Back in the day, in 1990, to be specific, before UseNet was transformed into little more than a digital petri dish for porn spammers, Mike Godwin noticed  a disturbing pattern. In UseNet threads about guns and gun control, those who oppose gun control sooner or later reminded those in favor of gun control that Hitler outlawed personal ownership of firearms. In debates about birth control, those who argued in favor of abortion remaining a legal option were inevitably compared to mass-murderers in the context of Nazi death camps. And of course, in any discussion around censorship on the Internet, some sort of reference to Nazi book burning was predestined.

In response to what he perceived as a method of shutting down open discourse, Godwin devloped Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies (generally referred to in shorthand as Godwin's Law):

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Twitteleh--Twitter for your Jewish Mother

By lisala on 9/30/09 2:53pm
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Twitter, for the one person who cares where you are, what you've eaten, and whether you're wearing a sweater:

Evony: Pseudo-Medieval MMO Game

By lisala on 9/29/09 3:09pm
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I tend to like Civilization style games; I've liked them since before there was a Civilization game, in fact. But there's a Web-browser MMO game that I find more than a little distressing. In its current version, it's called Evony; the Chinese company that owns the game and site originally titled the game Civony; in [cough] respectful homage, I'm sure, of Sid Meier's Civilization. It's a real-time strategy game. The underlying game conceit is medieval civilization; it's a typical online pseudo-medieval feudal warfare game, first created in the venerable Apple II game Santa Paravia by Reverend George Blank. Basically, you settle a city, plant crops, harvest them, and exploit natural resources while you fortify your city and raise tropps—until you can invade your neighbors, or settle new lands.

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