I no longer use Livejournal anymore. No particular reason, I just prefer alternatives.

I still read my friends' journals, but not through my friends page. I use Feedly, combined with FreeMyFeed for Friends Only compatibility.

The only posts you will see here are mirrored from my blog on Plankhead. Comments on these posts are disabled, but they have a link to comment on the original post, which is a painless process requiring no registration.

Most of my other updates are posted on my Twitter feeds, @XerxesQados and @omgpurplefox because it's faster and easier than LJ for me.

So, this journal only exists for the purposes of keeping my friends who are sticking with LJ updated.

I know that designing a typeface is no trivial pursuit. I’ve tried it. It was really, really hard. But in spite of that, it’s always seemed unreasonable to me that to use a new font, you often have to purchase it for upwards of 40 dollars. And you don’t even get it in Bold.

But once you have a font on your computer, you can use it for anything, right? Well, it depends. Sometimes that $40 only gives you the right to display the font on your screen and print it out. Can you use it in an image on the web? Sure, unless maybe you can’t. I don’t know. How can they even prove you used their font, though? A lot of them look really similar. What are these things legally protected by, anyway?

Both the exorbitant prices and confusing legal situation make it difficult for anyone but professional graphic designers and/or established companies that employ them to use a particularly wide variety of fonts. The web, however, has given almost everyone who can read a CSS tutorial to be a graphic designer, but for a long time font licensing has stood in the way of using anything but nine free(-ish) fonts that everyone (maybe) has on their computer. Fortunately, this situation is being rectified; soon you’ll be able to pay $78467 to license a font for web use, once they’ve figured out how to deal with “illegal uses”. Whatever the method of preventing these illegal uses may be, some 16-year-old kid in Bangladesh has already cracked it.

But seriously, 40 dollars? For a font? And then maybe I can’t even show anyone what I do with it? Again, I know making fonts is hard work, but are they really that valuable? Especially if it’s the sort of font you use for one small project and then never need again. These prices might have made sense when fonts were the sort of thing that you’d take out of a box and arrange on your printing press, but that’s just not how things work anymore.

Originally posted at Plankhead
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Yesterday I got one of those (non-)shiny new PS3 Slim things. This is a very special occasion for me; it is the first video game console I’ve ever owned.

I’ve played games on consoles before, of course, but only because my friends always had them. Like any child of the 90s who had a life, I grew up on games, but not “video games.” Video games were on consoles (or, as they were called before I discovered proper English, “systems”). I played computer games. And I was a snob about that.

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Originally posted at Plankhead
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Why is it that we must tell everyone on the Internet that things are only our opinion?

Of course “I think” what I’m about to say. Why else would I be saying it? Of course it’s “in my opinion,” because I’m saying it. Anything said by anyone is, when you get down to it, inherently related to what they think, which is consequently their opinion. But now that they’ve been so kind as to emphasize that fact, it hurts their argument.

Here are two different statements a person can make:

A: I think that jumping off the George Washington Bridge can cause severe bodily harm. That could be fatal, in my opinion.

B: Nobody can get hurt from jumping off the George Washington Bridge. It’s actually very healthy and promotes long-life.

Now, assuming you didn’t know anything about the effects of jumping off a bridge, which of these two arguments would be more convincing to you? At first glance, without Wikipediing anything? Most of you will say statement B.

Adding language like, “I think” or “In my opinion” (or IMO or IMHO) to your arguments weakens them. You will sound less sure of yourself, or at the very least like you don’t care as much. This applies to actual speech as well as online discussion.

Some might argue that such disclaimers are common courtesy, but to the audience you’re addressing, they’re common sense. It’s not impolite to omit needless words, and doing so makes the remaining words stronger.

Originally posted at Plankhead
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About a month ago, I installed a wonderful thing on my G1 called CyanogenMOD. Named after its developer, a man who goes by the pseudonym Cyanogen, CyanogenMOD takes the free and open source Android operating system included with the G1 and makes it run faster, look better, and save storage space. After installing it, my G1 barely ever felt sluggish, all of the space-hogging applications could be stored on my spacious 8 GB memory card, and the interface improvements made it so much more of a joy to use. I’m now happily using all of the Google services that make Google their money much more often than I had before, and my phone would be too sluggish for me to make Google money nearly as much if I had to go back. The 30,000+ people who have also downloaded and installed CyanogenMOD probably agree.

So, naturally, Google is showing Cyanogen their thanks for increasing the Google-use of 30,000 people by sending him a Cease and Desist letter. Wait, what?

Well, apparently some of Google’s applications aren’t open source, such as the Android Market (which allows you to give Google money indirectly by buying apps from developers, who then give a portion of their money to Google). Sure, you can easily download and install these apps yourself from the freely available developer repository, but Cyanogen had the audacity to save 30,000 end users the trouble of doing all that just so they could continue using Google’s products and making them money. That constitutes “distribution,” which only licensed developers who sent in $25 and the filled-out form from the back of the comic book work for Open Handset Alliance members can do. Never mind that there aren’t any alternatives to many of these applications, and they’re kind of essential for a lot of Android’s usefulness.

Admittedly, under the current Jurassic-era copyright law, Google has the legal right to do this. Cyanogen does not have the resources to license their software, thus he does not have the license to distribute it. But considering that Android, as a whole, is a free and open source operating system, and that Google has nothing to lose from CyanogenMOD and much to gain, this is a real dick move by the “Don’t Be Evil” company.

Originally posted at Plankhead
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I meant to have this done within a week of the con being over. That didn’t quite happen.

Often with these videos I run into editor’s block. There’s always one point where I just can’t figure out the right clip to match the song, and it stalls me. Then I stop and decide to come back to it later. And despite how much I really want to get it done, “later” sometimes means months later.

But it’s here now, so…

You can also watch it on YouTube if you’re on an Android phone or iPhone, but only because you can’t watch Vimeo on those. Seriously, only click that link out of necessity. If I catch anyone watching this on YouTube because they actually prefer it over Vimeo, I will smack them in the face with the Internet. No joke. I will literally pick up the Internet and hit someone with it.

Originally posted at Plankhead
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Béla Tarr is the director of cult classic Hungarian films such as Sátántangó. Hideo Kojima is the designer of massively popular Japanese video games such as Metal Gear Solid 4. These two men actually have quite a lot in common, save for the medium they work in, their popularity, and their pretentiousness when discussing their craft.

Let me describe Sátántangó to you, briefly. The opening consists of an eight minute shot of the camera doing almost nothing while watching a bunch of cows:

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Originally posted at Plankhead
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Sorry. I’ll try and write happier things.

Originally posted at Plankhead
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Fuck Tweetdeck. Fuck Tweetdeck sideways with a kerosene-coated pineapple.

Fuck Tweetdeck so hard that I’m not even going to do that middle-of-word-capitalization thing that its creators insist on (It’s supposed to be “TweetDeck,” which is fucking stupid so fuck that, you fucking fuckers).

Normally, I’d just switch to another Twitter client that doesn’t suck, like Nambu, except I switched away from Nambu because the one thing that did suck about it ended up driving me nuts: multiple account support. Tweetdeck, however, solves the problem with Nambu by being a piece of fucking shit.

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Originally posted at Plankhead
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So I’m looking through my RSS reader and see this Ars Technica headline: “Goodbye, DRM; hello ’stealable’ Digital Personal Property.” It was like a fucking trainwreck. I could not just pass by the article. I had to read it.

Consumers hate DRM—all that “phoning home,” the outside control over one’s behavior, the fact that you can’t resell encrypted digital media, the worries about activation servers dying. But what if digital rights management could be turned into “consumer rights management” and people could actually own and fully control the digital content they purchase? That’s the dream of Paul Sweazey, who’s heading up a new study group on “digital personal property” at the IEEE.
[...]
Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects.…[DPP files] can be freely copied and distributed to anyone, but here’s the trick: anyone who can view your content can also “steal” it irrevocably.

And why would anyone want something like that? Well…

Digital content lends itself easily to the creation of identical copies, so crafting a system in which digital content can be “stolen” is trickier than it might sound. The idea is to make it a “rivalrous good,” one that, after being taken, deprives someone else of something.

Which is exactly what DRM attempts to do; DPP, at its core, amounts to nothing more than changing two letters. Of course, that’s not just because it tries the same thing. It’s also because it fails spectacularly in the exact same way. Much like every DRM system ever, “the scheme will be cracked, and once it is—even if only a few technically-savvy people can do the necessary work—content will flood P2P [file-sharing] networks,” says Ars.

The fact that people who have actual jobs and educations still consider these kinds of ideas is absolutely baffling. I mean, they’re presumably sapient enough to know how to wipe their own asses, so why does the fact that DRM doesn’t work continue to elude their common sense?

Given that digital content just isn’t like physical content, I ask Sweazey why we might want to force it back into that model…His answer is that such freely-copiable [sic] goods breaks the basic business model of human commerce by making goods nonrivalrous; it no longer has aspects of a private good, and this makes it difficult to sell.

You know, Mr. Sweazy, you’re right; freely-copyable goods do break the basic business model of human commerce. That’s certainly a problem. Now, you go run along and play, because us adults have to go back to accepting reality and coming up with a solution that works outside of Magical Unicorn Fantasyland.

Originally posted at Plankhead
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