How to run a drama

I've been thinking some more about the issues I raised in my earlier How to run a conspiracy posting.  Here are some ideas that build on that. [2396 words...] NEW: Repaired broken link

Court gender and the Aquarian assumption

I've noticed an assumption that most esoteric systems seem to take for granted.  It's so fundamental that it's hard to state and even harder to challenge, but one way of putting it might be that if things can be divided into a small number of categories, then those categories must be equal, balanced, and symmetrical. Equality, balance, and symmetry are taken as a description:  people assume that things in the world really are equal, balanced, and symmetrical by nature.  They're also taken as an prescription:  causing things to be equal, balanced, and symmetrical is assumed to be a desirable goal or even the primary goal of the entire system.  I'm going to call all of that the Aquarian assumption.  You're not allowed to challenge the Aquarian assumption.  You won't be told that you're not allowed to challenge it, because the assumption is so deeply engrained as to be unstated.  If you work within an esoteric system you may find it difficult to formulate the thought of a challenge to the Aquarian assumption; or even difficult to think of the Aquarian assumption itself existing because the possibility of it not existing is so alien.  Do fish believe in water? [3185 words...]

C-506: ISP licensing is back again

On 14 February 2008, Hon.  Karen Redman (Kitchener Centre, Lib.) introduced Bill C-506, the "Internet Child Pornography Prevention Act".  This seems to be the latest incarnation of the same ISP licensing bill that has been coming around periodically for over ten years.  I may go through and do a detailed comparison with previous versions at a later date, but for now, here's a summary of what's in the current one.  Some of my old notes on other ISP licensing bills are in the relevant category on my Web site.  Some of the links in there are broken because of design changes on Parliament's site; these issues have been spread out over a number of years, an eternity in Internet time. [598 words...]

Search engine optimism and "IFOLLOW"

It's been a couple of years now since the introduction of the nofollow attribute.  As I expected, comment and referrer spam remain scourges.  It's not clear to me that nofollow has really done anybody any good.  However, I've seen a couple of things of interest related to it recently. [2143 words...]

Zankoku na haha no teeze

At some point somewhere in the sequence the lies stop being promises and the realities stop being lies.

Six Apart determined to destroy itself in blaze of idiocy

The new owners of Livejournal have done some very stupid things in the last year or so, but the new "adult content" feature is one of the stupidest.  I'd almost think they are deliberately trying to force the business to fail for the tax loss or something. [1713 words...]

The Influentials

With the new year I'm introducing a new top-level category on my Web site for "economics"; some past postings that fit in there have been moved into the new category, which will probably break links.  Anyway, today's new item is from an article in Science News on the place of highly influential individuals (called "influentials") in viral propagation of ideas.  New research by Watts and Dodds (PDF preprint) suggests that such individuals aren't so important after all; if you want lots of people to adopt something, you're actually better off concentrating on the most easily influenced people in the population, so as to get as many of those as possible.  Sheer numbers are the important factor, not having the adopters be the more influential members of the population. [1665 words...] NEW: a couple of typo fixes

Doing and being

You can do it, or you can be it.  I mean that the things we do seem to have two different kinds of status:  there are things to do, which are at arm's length from our identities, and things to be, which are actually part of how we define and describe ourselves.  Think of someone who says "I'm an actress - but right now I'm waiting tables to support myself." An actress is something to be; waiting tables is something to do.  It's possible to imagine someone saying the opposite:  "I'm a waitress - but right now I'm doing some acting to get my name out in the community." That would have a different meaning, though, and it would be a more suprising meaning.  The same actions can be things to do or things to be, we see a difference between those kinds of things, and some actions are expected to be more likely one kind or the other even though they can fall into either category. [1139 words...]

News on the Eastern Front

It recently hit Anime News Network that the Japanese government was asking the US government to crack down on illegal distribution of anime.  As usual, fans on the ANN Web-BBS thread attempted to make plenty of excuses for why this item should be discounted or ignored, usually attempting to draw distinctions that the law (and the request) doesn't.  For instance, some attempted to draw the usual bogus line between "legal" fansubs of unlicensed material, and fansubs of licensed material; someone else wanted to know whether the request included "raws" or just fansubs; and some said it wasn't anime, just copyrighted material in general (even though the request specifically mentioned anime, and no other form of Japanese IP is routinely infringed on anything like a comparable scale).  Those distinctions matter to fans.  Those distinctions don't matter to the bureaucracy, which only sees copyrights and infringement.  It's similar to the attempts fans of underage-sex fantasies routinely make to draw a line between themselves and the "actual perverts" who are completely different in some way not instantly obvious to outsiders. [635 words...]