So, as some of you may have guessed by now, in the last couple of days I’ve turned into a total wave fangirl. I know, I know — hipster,ⁱ much — but it’s true. Thing is, though, it seems that a lot of people out there don’t share my squee; there’s a lot of “meh” going around re. wave right now, coupled with a dash of “this sucks”. I suppose I can kinda see why. Wave is in a fairly limited release, so people are feeling a bit lonely. You jump on wave, ready to be all like NEXT GEN COMMUNICATION YEAH! only to find you’ve got no-one to communicate with. So maybe you reach out to with:public, except now instead of feeling NEXT GEN YEAH! you’re starting to feel like you’ve suddenly been thrown back into Usenet after the first AOL invasion.

And it’s like, “Wait. This was supposed to be the Next Big Thing?”

Well, yes sort of. But mostly no. And here are the four main reasons why.

Hold onto your hats, kids, because this? This gets wordy.

( Wave is not Google (Wave) )

( Why Wave Makes My Inner Mail Admin Squee )

( How Wave Could Kill Facebook (but Probably Won’t… Yet) )

( Why Microsoft Wants Wave (but Might Not Admit It) )

The Shiny, Wavey Future

I guess I’ve gone kinda nutso on the predictions here, and I suppose I feel obliged to point out I haven’t really talked about either time-frames or probabilities. If I had to guess, I say we’ll see wave adopted as a social networking tool before it’s adopted as a business tool, but conversely I think it’s more likely in the long run to be adopted by business than it is to replace Facebook and Twitter’s databases. There are also a significant number of hurdles to overcome with wave’s deployment: Real-time communication models are hard to scale; The storage requirements sound like they could be terrifying; What about “offline mode”? People still really like email… All that sort of stuff.

Still, the thing I like about wave is that it’s full of potential and incredibly daring. I mean, re-writing email? People’ve been talking about doing that for years and no-one’s managed to pull it off. Re-writing email and completely changing the paradigm it’s based on? Margaret Thatcher’s balls, man! Wave is either going to change the way the internet works or be the biggest white elephant in IT history.

Personally? I’m hoping for the former. It’s just more exciting that way.

See you in the future.

1. The geeky kind, not the fixed-gear-bike kind. Geekster? ↩

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• In a Word
  Now to try and use “kalokagathia” in a sentence this week…
  language:english
• Better than Fiction
  Asclepius: Not the same as caduceus. Not. Even. Close.
  lulz fail health:healthcare
• (untitled)
  People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K. Poor Hawking. Forever doomed to be mistaken for American just because his voice synthesiser has the wrong bloody accent.
  fail health:healthcare
• Fuck the homophobic assholes at Tim Hortons. I’m staying with Dunkin Donuts.
  Needless to say, Canadians frown on companies who get into bed with American right-wing religious wack-a-loons.
  sexuality:equalrights
• Guillermina Quiroga and Junior Cervilla
  Dancing the milonga (sort of like tango) to “Billie Jean”. So. Awesome.
  video people:michaeljackson
• Healther Skelter – Obama Death Panel Debate
  Sam Bee fights for private death panels, John Oliver believes in universal death panels, and Aasif Mandvi wants whatever scares the public most.
  usa health:healthcare video
• Gaydar is Dead
  Let me get this “straight”, heterosexual men are no longer barbarians and gay men can’t be counted on to conform to strict stereotypes.
  sexuality
• sketch post
  Did I mention I think I love other people’s sketch posts even more than finished art? Because I kinda sorta think I do…
  art
• why facebook is sooo gonna get you fired
  [E]ven more dangerous than friending your parents on facebook? [F]riending a) your boss and b) the cubicle-mate you kinda can’t stand.
  lulz fail socialnetworking:facebook
• Mermaid or Whale? Vive la France!
  Beginning today, when I look at my butt in the mirror I will think, “Good gosh, look how smart I am.”
  health:bodyimage france funny women
• Worldwide Slump Makes Nigeria’s Online Scammers Work That Much Harder
  “We are working harder. The financial crisis is not making it easy for them over there,” said Banjo, 24, speaking about Americans, whose trust he has won and whose money he has fleeced, via his Dell laptop. “They don’t have money. And the money they don’t have, we want.” Scammin’ ain’t easy?
  internet email:spam
• Dancing Around Possible Meanings of ‘Yahoozee’
  So… apparently in Nigeria they write gangsta rap about 419 email scamming. Or perhaps not, but either way, I guess it beats pimpin’.
  internet email:spam
• Race, Taxes, Birth Certificates, and Eugenics
  It is, in short, a movement made up of the enfranchised and enabled; people who have gained every benefit from the politics of America and yet who feel in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones, the ones who have nothing left to lose, so rapidly is America falling away from them. It is rare to run across any movement so deeply angry — or more to the point, a movement which explicitly celebrates anger as the primary mission of their activism.
  politics racism usa health:healthcare
• What? I Thought This Was a Safe Space.
  I like being racist.
  lulz
• Google Wave Cinema: Pulp Fiction
  This is so EXACTLY how it would’ve gone down. Foa srs.
  video funny google:wave

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• this country is now officially nuts
  Places I’m Glad I Do Not Live In…
  usa wtf
• Someone is a dick to Rob Liefeld, fapping ensues
  Really, as with all good wanks, there is no right side. A man was a dick to another man who is also a dick, and it got put on the internet. Needless to say, once a critical mass of dicks has been reached, fapping ensues.
  wank wank:irl comics people:robliefeld
• Oh snap.
  Why not to add your work colleagues to your Facebook account…
  fail:irl socialnetworking:facebook lulz
• Down for everyone or just me?
  It’s very remiss that I haven’t posted a link to this site before.
  internet resources useful networking
• I… er…
  Avoiding masturbation and homosexual activities are among preventive measures one could take against Influenza A (H1N1), according to an eminent practitioner of complimentary therapy.
  health:fishslapping wtf wank:irl fail
• Time: Going to the Gym Will Not Make You Less Fat
  I wish I had a gym outfit as awesome as that…
  health
• Pain = Art?
  It wouldn’t be a MotI without some luco_millian art!
  art
• SLsecret, week 48
  SecondLifeSecret! How did I not know this existed? THINK OF THE LULZ, PEOPLE! THINK OF THE LULZ!
  lulz gaming:mmos:secondlife
• Tr.im URL Shortener Shuts Down; Short Links to Die?
  People who get paranoid about link shorteners need to get either, a) better browser, or b) better OSes, IMO.
  internet socialnetworking:twitter
• heathcare
  Let’s be honest here. Most people I know are not well-educated professionals, most people I know do not have healthcare. [...] It’s fucking scary to get migraines, bronchitis, or throw out your back and not be able to do anything about it because you can’t afford to go to the doctor, you don’t have a car to get there, and even if you could, you definitely can’t afford the medications.
  health:healthcare
• Hotter Than Hell
  That’s… and interesting iPhone application. Pretty useful, really.
  blogs:random apple:iphone
• Bev Vincent apparently writes like a girl…
  More-exalted editor made some rather stupid and sexist remarks at the start. Along the lines that it is difficult for a female writer to write convincing male characters (and vice versa), and that Bev really wasn’t very good at it. Bev’s main character was a man. More-exalted editor didn’t believe that any man would think the way Bev’s character did, or call his parents every week. Bev’s writing style was also too elegant.
  writing funny
• The Hero Factory
  The art is good, even if the choices are a bit limited…
  comics art flash

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Firstly, for the people who requested Wave invites; the process by which they are allocated remains a mystery, though people are reporting average wait times of 2-to-10 days. So hopefully you should get something within the next week.

Okay.

So, it’s my second day of waving and — despite having only one friend to wave to — I… think I’m in love. Wave isn’t quite like anything else I’ve ever used before; it’s more IRC than email, and more LiveJournal comments thread than IRC. The editing and replying functionality is insane, and the whole thing takes a bit of head-wrapping-around. Example: You can edit or delete any of the ‘blips’ (posts) in a wave you’re part of, even if they’re not yours. But the wave also keeps a history of all edits, and you can play these back and pause-and-revert at any point. It’s sort of like Wikipedia on crack.

You can also reply inline at any point in any blip, or reply to an individual wavelet (”thread”),ⁱ or reply to the whole wave. Replying to the whole wave makes it sort of like a mailing list, replying to a wavelet makes it sort of like a comment thread, and replying inline makes it sort of like… uh, I don’t have an analogy for this one. It’s not really like anything.

Do I think wave is going to replace SMTP? I’m… not sure. I think it has the potential to, but I guess it’s going to depend on Google working out some of the kinks (”How can I remove people from a wave?”) and privacy concerns (”What if I don’t want people to see me type my blips in real-time?”). Still, I guess those sort of emergent questions are exactly what the beta is for. It’s also worth noting that this is pretty much exactly not how email was developed; SMTP was a closed shop, of sorts, if only for the reason that not many people were all that interested in it at the time. Wave’s got a couple of hundred thousand users now (orders or magnitude more than would’ve been using proto-email back in the ’60s), which is going to grow exponentially from here on out. And Google is watching how users use Wave — or how they want to use it — and is tweaking the protocol accordingly.

If wave — or, rather, the Wave Federation Protocolⁱⁱ — succeeds, it will be because of this; because it does what people want better than email does from the ground-up, rather than through retrofitted technologies like MIME and SPF.

Criticisms of wave? Honestly, not many. The protocol feels kind of “heavy” right now due to the constant syncingⁱⁱⁱ but I suspect that’s a teething issue. The actual concepts behind the system are pretty amazing, and wave is both small enough to appeal to “non-technical” users — I can see my mum waving, for example — and big enough to appeal to the born-geeks of the Web 2.0 generation.

With a few tweaks, I even think wave could be a Facebook killer. Maybe.

But the thing I think it’s really going to kill? Is LiveJournal. Or at least the fandom part of it.

Why? One search term: with:public.

with:public tag:fandom

Remember when the whole of fandom used to be on Yahoo! mailing lists? Well, wave is its own mailing list server. The methods for a) making a wave public, and b) knowing that you can actually have public waves are both a bit obtuse and people are still feeling them out right now, but the potential is there. Oh is it there. Wave is a bit (well, a lot) of a paradigm shift, and it took me a good day or so to realise that I could type with:public into the search box to look for “public waves”; sort of like message boards crossed with mailing lists. Oh, and did I mention that all waves can have tags? And that wave searching is pretty much exactly what you’d expect coming from a company whose main business is, in fact, search?

Right. So what do you think the first thing I typed in was?

with:public tag:fandom.^iv

The fen have a wave, as does Dreamwidth, and the sorts of people you’d expect to see there are, indeed, there. But think about it, fen. Want to squee about the latest SPN episode? with:public tag:spn s5e8. Looking for Smallville fic but can’t stand Clana? with:public tag:fic tag:smallville -tag:clana. Want to stalk your favourite author? with:public with:infinite.alis@googlewave.com. And searches? Yeah, you can save them.

See what I’m getting at here? Your own mix-and-match fandom content channels, that’s what I’m getting at.

And, okay, it’s not perfect… yet. Wave doesn’t yet deal well with trolls, for instance. You can’t have, say, a read-only public wave with moderated write membership. Such a system might theoretically be possible with bots,^v though I wouldn’t be surprised if Google announces a system of granular access control at some point.

On the other hand, its main selling point is exactly what the fen have been clamouring for since Strikethrough. Exactly the thing projects like Dreamwidth and AO3 only half answer. In short, it’s decentralised.

Which, okay, might sound like a sort of weird thing to say, given that it’s Google Wave, but I’m talking here about wave in general; about the WFP. Because Google isn’t trying to write the next LiveJournal or Facebook; the next proprietary, closed site. It’s trying to write the next SMTP; an open, inter-operative protocol. And I quote:

The wave federation protocol enables everyone to become a wave provider and share waves with others. For instance, an organization can operate as a wave provider for its members, an individual can run a wave server as a wave provider for a single user or family members, and an Internet service provider can run a wave service as another Internet service for its users as a supplement to email, IM, ftp, etc.

– Google Wave Federation Protocol Over XMPP, “2.1 Wave Providers” (emphasis added)

When WFP goes “out”^vi you’re talking about a system where my server can wave at your server can wave at Google’s server can wave at Microsoft’s server. Adoption rates may vary, and all that, but still. Decentralised. Peer-to-peer. Who owns the servers? Everyone and no-one, that’s who.

The fen presence on Wave is small right now, but growing^vii and positive. Fen are already camping out their show-specific waves, as well as using the protocol to engage in RP and collaborative writing efforts. Meanwhile, the DW people are thinking of how to embrace wave from their end, and while I haven’t yet managed to scrounge up the OTW, I’d bet they’re not far behind. I think fandom has been emboldened in the last few years with the success of DW and AO3, and wave is a very shiny new community toy to play with.

So yeah. Maybe I’m just being overly optimistic because I’ve never really been a big LiveJournal fan, but… watch this space, fandom. I think you’re gonna love it.

1. This is not, strictly speaking, what a wavelet actually is. However, unless care deeply about the minutiae of the protocol spec, it’s good enough. ↩
2. Also: Way to name your technology like something from a sci-fi drama, Google. Though I guess that’s the point; Google knows exactly who their test audience is — and what image they want to portray to them — as the “Welcome to Wave!” videos from “Doctor Wave” make abundantly clear. ↩
3. Running it over 3G on a iPhone works, but is kind of a scary prospect, bandwidth-wise. I also find it amusing that despite iPhone Safari being an “unsupported browser”, Wave still has a dedicated mobile GUI. ↩
4. Actually, strictly speaking it was “with:public fandom“, which does a text search for “fandom” rather than a tag search. But you get the point, right? ↩
5. Yes, bots. See? IRC. ↩
6. And, for the record, void-star.net has its hand up to beta WFP when it becomes available via Google Apps. ↩
7. Back In The Day, I said that one of Dreamwidth’s strengths was its invite system, if only because it creates a sort of mini “instant community”. Well, guess who’s also using invites for its beta? ↩

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ZOMG!

I must say I’m unreasonably excited about this.

I’ve got 20 15 6 3 invites; comment if you want one!

( Also: Lol… [+1] )

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So the other day a friend of mine told me about this new game called Torchlight. It’s a dungeon-crawling Diablo-clone, apparently made by some of the people who did — wait for it — Diablo. Now, I wasted half my youth playing Diablo, and no imitator has ever quite managed to capture my imagination in the same way. Can Torchlight? I mean, it’s only been out for about five seconds and it’s been getting rave reviews. Cheap as chips (US$19.95), tiny by the standards of today’s games and apparently compact enough to run on a netbook.

Worth a shot, right?

The first thing you need to know about Torchlight is that it has three classes; melee, ranged and magic. These classes are sex-linked, and one of them is “the girl”. Three guess which one it is.

One of These Things...

Oh come on. I mean… seriously? I thought we got over this femme-fatale-leather-bikini bullshit when Word of Warcraft was a raging success with female gamers. Thirteen years and Torchlight can’t manage to get past the same lazy gender roles of Diablo? I mean, Jesus guys, there’s a reason Blizzard made all the classes in DIII dual-gender, yanno?

Okay okay, maybe I’m just being unfair. I mean, maybe the “armour” gets better at higher levels. So I crack out the console and…

Read the rest of this entry »

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Yo readers, listen up!

Parkour!

My good friend and co-conspirator co-author Random has decided to offer book one of his magnum opus, Urban Mythica, up for download.

And I quote:

Chronicling the origins of characters first seen in Urban Nordica: Chainbreaker and Urban Nordica II: Dead on Arrival, Urban Mythica tells the story of “Miriah” Xiong Yi Lian, a young woman who gets drawn into the supernatural goings-on of Underwood Bay. Rocked by the realization that creatures of the night are indeed real and very dangerous, she becomes determined to protect the people who have no idea they are being preyed upon. Before long she gets caught up in an ancient struggle between powerful enemies, as well as the beginning of a deadly rivalry that will define and consume her for years to come…

Currently in its first draft and coming in at roughly 100 pages, Urban Mythica WIP is available in PDF format at this link;

Urban Mythica Book One WIP (Adobe Acrobat or similar required to view)

Urban Mythica is absolutely not for children. It contains scenes of extreme violence, gore, sexuality, and profanity.

Y’all should go read. Trufax.

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Thing is, I’m pretty fucking blind. I mean, as far as someone with otherwise healthy eyes goes. I’m short-sighted but, as I like to point out, “long distance” for me starts about ten centimetres from my nose. Not to mention I’m grossly astigmatic, so the net result is I wear glasses all the time. For everything.

So it was a couple of months ago that I started to realise with dread that I Needed New Glasses. Needing New Glasses is always a Big Deal, primarily because the damn things are so fucking expensive. The last pair I got — in ‘07, just after my car accident — cost me nine hundred fucking dollars. I mean, we’re not poor or anything but come on! Nine hundred dollars for some plastic and wire? What is this? 1886?

Well, I figured that since it’s actually 2009, I’d do what a lot of people are doing nowadays and turn to my good friend Teh Interwebs for my newest pair of specs. First thing, though, was to get a new prescription. Now, our Government Death Panels here in Australia allow every citizen a free eye test every year, so I booked myself into an optometristⁱ in town when I was loitering around one day. Eye tests might be free, but all optometrists here are attached to shops that sell glasses, and it’s often hard to get out the door with a full copy of your script without buying anything.

“It’s on file for when you come back,” said my optometrist.

“I’d like a copy, please,” I replied, knowing full well it’d be illegal for her not to provide it.

Silly me, however, didn’t do my research beforehand and it wasn’t until I got home that I realised I was missing one crucial measurement; PD, the distance between the centre of your pupils. Sneaky-bastard optometrists leave it off scripts so people can’t order glasses online, but luckily I had an old script in the cupboard that had mine written on it (PD doesn’t change once you’re an adult, obviously). So armed, I went to ask Google about getting it filled.

After an agonising afternoon measuring my existing spectacles and pouring over frames, I finally chose a pair from GlassesPoint that were pretty much identical to my existing ones. The total cost including shipping and fuck-you’re-blind taxⁱⁱ ended up being around $215, which is expensive for online glasses but, well. It’s not $900.

Anyway, I get home today and what do I see?

Internet Glasses!

And I really do mean “see”, too. I’d kinda figured that I’d need to take them to a glasses shop to get them adjusted before wearing them, but no; they actually fit really comfortably (even if I keep trying to push them up my nose out of habit). They’re super-light and dear gods trees have leaves again, and everything will be prefect once the raging migraine goes away.

Overall rating for this experience? A++, Would Buy Again for sure. They came fastⁱⁱⁱ and exactly as advertised. In fact, emboldened by this success I’m making plans to do something I’ve never done before; buy a pair of sunglasses.

Dear gods my life is thrilling!

1. A word Firefox’s spell-checker apparently doesn’t recognise. Trufax. ↩
2. High index lenses and a surcharge for my astigmatism. ↩
3. Even when I buy glasses in the shop they take a couple of weeks to arrive, again because of that pesky astigmatism prescription. ↩

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• The skin artist
  Ariana Page is a very…unique artist, due to the fact that she suffers from a condition known as dermatographia (the immune system exhibits hypersensitivity, via skin, that releases excessive amounts of histamine, causing capillaries to dilate and welts to appear (lasting about thirty minutes) when the skin’s surface is lightly scratched). She draws various patterns on her body and then takes pictures of herself, thus works of art are born.
  art
• Physics WIN (gif)
  I just… how do you even go about learning something like this? Dude!
  video funny movies
• “Puff”
  INCREDIBLY NSFW. Also not-safe-for-taste. And yet so hilarious!
  nsfw lulz system:filetype:jpg system:media:image
• Lamborghini
  I would so drive this car. Srsly.
  art
• Oh, for fuck’s sake.
  I know people who’ve run some of Australia’s “government death panels”. Trufax.
  health:healthcare
• But really how do you feel about having someone who is black as President?
  Some might say that is racist! I mean, not me, because clearly you are a well thought out sane person, but there might be a crazy Liberal! What do you say to those crazy wacky Liberals who might think it’s wrong to use that otherwise perfectly logical and polite terminology?
  racism fail
• Exclusive Body-Image Survey: 16,000 Women Tell Their Body Confidence Secrets
  Okay, it’s a bit light in the statistic department for something purporting to have its basis in a survey, but the “secrets” I think are worth it nonetheless…
  women health:bodyimage
• Respect is sexy.
  Trojan sells itself. Also: Go check out the rest of About-Face while you’re there.
  marketing feminism
• Amazing Horse
  A song about how womens [sic] rights have improved as the use of horses for transport has declined. Not kid friendly.
  wtf flash video nsfw
• HOLY SHIT GUYS, I DON’T HAVE A SOUL!!!!!!!(?????)…
  Oh, Yahoo! Answers. Never stop bringin’ home the trolls.
  wtf fail religion:christianity:ewchristians

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• ‘Web addict’ death investigated
  Super-bonus unfunny: In July, China’s Ministry of Health formally banned the use of electroshock therapy as a treatment option.
  china internet fail wank:irl health:mental
• ‘Tarot’ Comics: Where Softcore Porn and Haunted Vaginas Collide
  This is Jim’s better half, Holly GoLightly, whose very existence makes us believe in True Love, and we are not even kidding. Think about it: Jim Balent is a guy who is really into witchcraft and comics about naked girls, and in this crazy world of ours, he managed to find a girl who was also really into witchcraft and comics about naked girls, who married him — no joke — in a Star Wars theme wedding where she wore Princess Leia’s metal bikini. And yes: He was dressed as Darth Vader, which means he got married while dressed as his bride’s father. We couldn’t make up a love story that great if we tried.
  comics lulz
• The Grand Cheshire Ball 2009
  Cheshires are an old cliché of the glamfurs, but nonetheless I still love them. And, more importantly, I love other artists’ takes on them.
  art
• 5 Things You Didn’t Know About District 9
  Bonus embedded “Alive in Joburg” video which, honestly, is not only a zillion times better than D9, but is also thankfully lacking some of the film’s skeeviest racism.
  movies genre:scifi video
• episode iii, the backstroke of the west redux
  Mr. speaker, we are for the big.
  lulz movies:starwars
• stripper acquitted of rape
  So… what do people think would’ve happened had the genders been reversed?
  wank:irl
• f i tell the adoption agency the soon to be parents are bad will i get in trouble?
  This site makes me despair for humanity… And yet, you’ve gotta laugh, don’t you?
  fail wank:irl lulz
• Puss and Boots The Ballet Danced by The Paris Opera Ballet
  I can’t decide whether a chorus line of people in period costume wearing giant plastic cat heads is hilarious, terrifying or cultured. Also: Ballet fanservice!
  art:dance video fanservice
• Use the Firefox password manager
  It isn’t perfect, but using the password manager built into Firefox is better than using duplicate passwords or storing them in a plain text file.
  software:firefox security
• Risk Management Fail
  This is so my job, hey.
  lulz lulz:fail

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