All posts by Harry Underwood

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About Harry Underwood

Website designer, blogger. Columbus, GA. #LGBT #p2 #wordpress

A profile of Daric Rawr

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Daric Rawr is a 16-year-old would-be writer who entered into a brief spell of notoriety when he and an alleged woman named "Cheryl Williams" posted on the death of a young man named Terrel Williams, a native of Beverly Hills, California who was allegedly being bullied by five high school classmates, who threw Williams into a brick wall at his high school in Lakewood, Washington and, as a result, hanged himself in his bedroom closet.

This event occurred during a season of suicides by young LGBT people all over the United States, accompanied by various campaigns such as Dan Savage’s "It Gets Better" and the Facebook + GLAAD-sponsored "Spirit Day."

However, in a twist of events, the alleged son of "Cheryl" and boyfriend of Daric came under scrutiny not long after the story hit sites such as PerezHilton.com, LGBTQ Nation, and Queerty, as reader and blogger efforts to locate the name "Terrel Williams" through Clover Park High School’s administration turned up empty-handed, and no coroner’s office in either Pierce County, Washington or Los Angeles County, California reported the name, either. Furthermore, only one profile on Facebook barely matched the name, but it didn’t have a photo or any profile information.

There was a Twitter page named "@MemoryofTerrel" and Rawr had a Twitter page which listed himself as "Ex Radio Host, Deactivated Disc Jockey, Mile High Radio Head, LGBT/YoungAdult/Romance Author. Available In Stores Now", but both pages have disappeared long before this post was written and well after both pages had been moved to a number of different usernames.

The icing on the cake was the fact that the photo of "Terrel" was actually that of "Donny Lumpkins" of YO! Youth Outlook Multimedia, neither of whom have any relation in any way to the events which took place; this photo (later pixilated by Queerty staff) was initially posted onto Change.org’s story and the MemoryOfTerrel Twitter page, the latter of which was purportedly owned by Cheryl Williams, Terrel’s mother. This same photo was retweeted repeatedly by Cheryl before she removed it and took partial responsibility for the misappropriation of the photo of Lumpkins. 

Meanwhile, Daric’s Twitter page, before it was deleted, used the same graphic background as that of the Terrel memorial page, that of an African-American baby boy.

Finally, Daric emailed Queerty to purport that the death was not a hoax, that the Williams family was staying in a vacation home in Lakewood not two weeks before the suicide, and that he was preparing to talk to the media as soon as Cheryl gave him permission. Meanwhile, Cheryl posted to Twitlonger that no photo would be released, and that the suicide did not take place in Washington State at all, purposefully keeping the knowledge of the location of the suicide between herself and one other person.

Then both Twitter pages were abruptly deleted, and no mention of an interview with local press members regarding the death exist outside of the Internet.

But before this bizarre sequence occurred, Rawr seems to be an enigma. 

Glancing through the mentionings of his person on various blogs and pages, he seems to be an aspiring singer and writer based in Washington State who has not, to date, published much of anything other than two MP3s on Amazon which are listed as part of a digital album by him titled "I Am" but are, in reality, songs recorded by two respective singer-songwriters who have pages on MySpace: Charly Boy of Laval, Quebec (who sings "Tonight" or "2nite") and Gustav Magnusson of Malmo/Stockholm/Skane, Sweden (who sings "Dance Along With Me"). 

He also has no books published, and stories about his alleged fame seem to be highly exaggerated by a few posters on practically no-name blogs (most of which, until the Terrel Williams incident, are non-LGBT related); posts discussing his comparison to Matthew Lush, his criticism of Miley Cyrus, his supposed inspirational influence to LGBT teens, or other things predominate in the mentionings of his name on such blogs, even though he has not published anything of notoriety to speak of.

Perhaps this one commenter, Gerard McGarry, got the hint when he wrote the following to UnrealityShout.com in September: 

I’ll tell you why I think he’s a phantom, going on each of your links:

His amazing novel is "Temporarily out of stock on Amazon". Overwhelming public demand, I’d say, especially since the product description contains so many grammatical errors I lament for anyone who actually bought the book. Here, just in case someone deletes it: "Lady Sennox brings the science world into a whole new meaning. Follow her as she discovers her new-found love for science, but also is forced to go head to head with one of the hottest science buff’s in the world."
The ‘quality’ Associated Content article is written by a Mark Longsteen, someone who has only contributed two articles to that site – both of them about…Daric Rawr. So, clearly not an impartial or widely recognised journalist.
Hilariously, that third link is an article that one of his ‘fans’ posted on this site. Back around the time when you yourself signed up to this site and started posting articles about him.
I’m mentioning all of this publicly because as an admin on this site, I really feel that you’re trying to leverage this site for publicity for someone I’m not even sure exists. I even did a search on YouTube this evening and can find no videos featuring this multi-talented enigma. Surely such an amazing singer should at least have a few virals on YouTube?

All we have to go on are some pictures of a kid who clearly spends too much time staring into the lens of a cameraphone. And a load of articles written on sites where it would be easy to spread fawning puff pieces.

And whether he exists or not, (and his internet presence or lack thereof suggests he doesn’t) I strongly doubt the claims that he’s a prodigious talent based on the evidence I’ve seen around the web

……

Ah, Daric Rawr: Singer, Actor, Male Model, Author, Celebrity Chef, The Most Talented Guy In The Universe. And yet at the same time a complete phantom. Really Stephanie, I’ve asked you to substantiate your claims about Daric Rawr in the past, and yet let’s be honest – it’s all a big sham and no-one really cares.

It feels like an experiment in trying to tell people that he’s a celebrity in the hope that it’ll somehow become a reality. And as yet, other than the spam you guys are leaving across the net, there’s no evidence that the guy actually exists. Prove it!

And then "Terrel Williams" happens.

So is this the last undue inflation of self-importance that the Internet will archive of Daric Desic Rawr (if that’s his real name) of Washington State? Is Mr. Rawr that far gone, that pathological that he would sell other people’s MP3s in his own album, compel bloggers in some way to write about him as if he’s already a well-known celebrity and lie about a fake (ex-)boyfriend in order to achieve celebrity for himself during a historic and unfortunate period of LGBT rights history?

What is wrong with this guy? What is wrong with Daric Rawr? Why is he hoaxing so many people in the LGBT community? And when will he be compelled by someone in the LGBT community to stop his behavior, at least while he’s still young and impressionable?

EDIT 11/19/10: More is coming in on this character. According to one source (Leesa Nixon aka FagHagMom of Starmount High School prom fame), Daric’s real(?) name is Derrick Goff, and he’s actually 20 years old.

Oh, and he’s rekindled his interest in Twitter recently (under the name JustDaric), even though his tweets are now protected.

And from the looks of things, he hasn’t changed his behavior, nor has his amazing astroturfing abilities dissipated.

Again, what is wrong with him?

On HTML5 video players and annotations

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As of present, Kaltura has one of the few working examples of an HTML5 video player with subtitle annotations (and its being tested on Wikimedia Commons).

Of course, if subtitles and subtitle hyperlinks can be implemented in the Kaltura player, then what about full-blown YouTube-like annotations (including notes, speech bubbles, spotlights and video pauses) which are already available in YouTube’s Flash player?

What would it take for Kaltura or another company to use a combination of CCS3 or canvas with a dynamic, easy image map-plotting mechanism? And the case of uploader-arranged playback manipulations (such as pauses or replays), what can be used?

Other possibilities can ensue, such as the transposition of internal or external media into timeline rather than needing to manually edit other external content into the video itself.

I’m pretty certain that such could and should happen with future iterations of HTML5 players like Kaltura’s.

Facebook: the “UGLY”

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This is part of a three-part article for The Macon Statement titled “Facebook: Good, Bad or Ugly?“.

Harry Underwood
October 11, 2010

Facebook: the “UGLY”

Over the Internet, particularly on such prominent uses of this network as the World Wide Web, browser security has long been an issue for those who use Microsoft Windows-based computers, as the platform has, for much of its history, been the primary target of malware infections and unscrupulous “black-hat” cracking (in other words, using a computer network to gain unauthorized entry into other computers for malicious, bad-faith purposes).

For Windows users who spend a large chunk of their waking hours on social network services such as Facebook, the threats of having a user account compromised or one’s own computer being compromised are very real and can manifest themselves when one is not aware or safeguarding of their own security or privacy.

For instance, the wide diversity of accessible media and apps hosted on the user or group pages of the website can hide malware

The implications of having one’s own Facebook user account compromised by another person can wreak havoc on one’s own sense of personal security and can, in extreme circumstances, force the user to create a new user account. However, tools for recovery of control over one’s own Facebook account exist on the site.

“Honestly, it has only ever happened once and it happened when I couldn’t gain access to my own account,” said Cameron Walker, a student at Macon State. “All I had to do was change my password and everything since then has been fine.”

On Arutz Sheva and pre-Christian religion in the blogosphere

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 In Firefox, underneath the "Religion" folder, I have the Arutz Sheva/Israel National News live bookmark.

Why do I read it, even though I don’t like that they used to link prominently to JONAH, a Jewish version of NARTH, and that the writing and lexical style of non-editorial news items on the site is closer to your average conservative "blog(osphere)" (with ample amounts of xenophobia)?

Because, first of all, I want to get the raw opinion of religious Israelis on how they perceive both the outside world and their own country, which is often not the same as such opinion which comes from even conservative American Jews, and definitely not the same as conservative pro-Israel Christian Americans. Of course they view their government through exceptionally-critical lenses (even the current Netanyahu coalition cabinet), but they also extol the land in which they live and the orthodox religion which they practice as the best for their people and the land (or at least they don’t extol their religion as being the one true faith of the entire world), probably with far more celebratory output than what they may give their government. It seems that, in the ongoing, slowgoing "reconquest" in the West Bank (that is, to say, that they’re trying to reconquer a cultural homeland through settlement and open religious observance), the writers and editors are seeking for a non- or pre-expulsion Judaism which is anti-cosmopolitan, increasingly rustic and proximatively ignorant of the world outside; such attempts to seek and live a pre-Christian life and community are interesting spectacles to watch.

Second of all, through reading Arutz Sheva alongside newsposts aggregated by HinduCurrents and pagan blogs such as The Wild Hunt and Pagan + Politics, I want to get a glimpse of how the practitioners of non-proselytizing, non-racial, sometimes land-centric religions (Eclectic Neopaganism, Hinduism, Judaism, Humanism, etc.) view their religions and relate to their respective governments and neighboring worships. 

Sky Angel and the fragmentation of television providers

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I read the Wikipedia article on Sky Angel, an IPTV television provider which only offers channels and networks which pass a Christian-family threshold. 

Basically, this is the first time that I’ve heard of a television provider, rather than just individual channels, catering to specific niche demographics of viewers. Perhaps IPTV, as a medium, potentially allows for that ability to forego packages of all types of content without taking serious dents into the financial bottom line of the provider (at least compared to cable, satellite, terrestrial or fiber). 

But I wonder if Sky Angel could be the first prominent example of entire television providers fragmenting themselves by the type of content which their carried channels (VOD, live streaming, or playout) offer.

Continue reading Sky Angel and the fragmentation of television providers →

Nationalist negation of the diaspora and theodicy: where they intersect

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When the audio transcript of John Hagee’s theodical justification of the Holocaust (and, by extension, Christian anti-Semitism) as a means of accomplishing Christian eschatological ends through mass Jewish aliyah surfaced online in 2008, various political sectors observing the then-ongoing presidential election leveled intense scrutiny against Hagee and the Republican presidential aspirant who had courted Hagee’s support in the election; not least among those reacting sectors were the demographically-dwindling Jewish members of the Holocaust survivor community, who took particular exception to Hagee’s open and explicit co-opting of both an ideologically-driven tragedy that wreaked so much havoc upon them and the repatriative ideology of Israeli Jewish nationalism – both of which emphatically exclaim that the adherents to the Jewish religion, including the dead victims and living survivors of the Holocaust, do not belong anywhere else in the world but Israel – as a positive step toward the eventual end and destruction of the world (according to the Christian worldview).

Within Judaism, theodical explanations for the Holocaust have been offered – and just as fiercely rejected and demeaned among Jewish survivors of the Holocaust – by Haredi (Orthodox) rabbis and rabbinical authorities, including former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel Ovadia Yosef (repeatedly) and the late Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch sect, Menachem Schneerson. 

But an interesting aspect of John Hagee’s intersection of Jewish aliyah with the Holocaust (as a forceful push), Israel (as a destination to be pushed toward), anti-Semitism (as an ideological justification), Negation of the diaspora (as a process) and Christian eschatological timing (as the end and answer to all of the above) is that he only added a further layer to the belief that the Jews are only a collective object to be pushed around at the whim of their neighbors, most of whom want to push them entirely away from themselves and reject the view that these people are citizens of their own countries (or, in the case of Iran and the USSR, keep them within their own states in order to eventually drive the Jewish religion or sense of ancestral/cultural homeland out of their adherent citizens and turn them into compliant, assimilated citizens). Another, more crazed dimension to this meme is the long list of ethnic enclaves to which various powers sought to pull or push the Jews as a people, the majority of which placed the Jews in the most-isolated (or least-populable) outposts of various continents.

This meme of constricting an entire people into one place in the world was also visited at one point by both U.S. philanthropists and (repeatedly) Afro-American ethnonationalists upon the Afro-American minority of the U.S. in the view that Afro-Americans cannot ever belong in this society, and that the colorism, racism, ethnic segregation and slavery foisted upon them was the end result of existing in a majority-European-populated country, and that the only country in which they could feel safe and defend themselves and their interests would be in a country that was ruled and majority-populated by their "kind", reasonably removed from the land of their should-be-former oppressors, and build alliances with foreign powers which work to their own best interests. Of course, Liberia didn’t attract the majority of the African-American population, and neither did Sierra Leone attract the majority of former British Empire slaves and maroons, but both countries became templates for the sometimes-mutual ideological movement for repatriation, which presented the two agents – the repatriater and the receiver – view the same people within endemic views which complimented each other: the repatriating country saw the ethnicity as trash, and the receiving country saw the ethnicity as treasure. 

This trash-treasure view is embraced in some countries in Europe by far-right nationalists, who often participated in discussions which demonized the Jews as "parasitic" "trash" which could only gain respect if they were as far away from their own white, European Christian selves as possible (hence the oft-used expression by far-rightists in Europe "go back to Israel", which is probably less used than "to the ovens" or "Hitler should’ve finished the job"). The BNP in the UK (and, perhaps, the NASOFI group in Germany) is one of the more notable "converts" to this ideology, particularly as it pragmatically-partners with the pro-Israel right (seeing that Israel plays a useful role in decimating the presence of Jews in Europe and earns its macho stripes in "kicking barbarian ass") against Muslim fundamentalists in an about face from their previous stance against the presence of Jews in the UK. 

To the theodical and eschatological views typical of Hagee, however, perhaps the Jews are seen less within the "trash-to-treasure" spectrum and more along a "wandering, rebellious ram to docile, sacrificial lamb" spectrum. For Hagee, it matters less that the Jews get out of his country and stop being "parasitic" "pests" and more that they stop being so gosh-darn rebellious and proceed to fully populate Israel and the West Bank in order to set the stage for Christian eschatology already (even if it means that there are few rebellious Jews left in North America in his view, or the less, the merrier!).

What do Israelis get out of repatriation (whether it is justified by anti-Semitic or "philo-"Semitic reasons)? They regain their homeland in full, get back the Temple Mount, smooth out the wrinkles caused by the initial Roman kickout of their ancestors nearly 2000 years prior (or get those other tribes’s lost descendants back as genetic citizens, if possible), let the Arab-Israeli dispute settle down somewhat, hope that the European Union can nip the pervasive anti-Judaism meme that caused incidents like the Holocaust in the root, hope that both Christianity and Islam both deservedly grind themselves and each other into dusty minority stubs over their very structures of propagation and expansion, and so on. (Sorry, no Holocaust Part 2: Christian Apocalypse – ed.).

But perhaps there will be an end to the usage of the Jewish people as an object to be carried around. Maybe the Jewish nationalism in Israel will be less propelled (or resisted) in its persistence and will morph into something else (like most nationalisms do after the threat of eminent danger has passed), even as the religion continues among its practitioners and leaders without as much molestation, or becomes subject to another cataclysmic schism within the group. 

EDIT 1/1/2011: Let me also emphasize that one component of this belief – that the Jews are a monolithic people who are destined to be placed in some part of the world at the end of time – also intersects with the study of any nation-state’s own intersection with its own diaspora. Diasporas can be used as couriers and beneficiaries of the homeland state’s own relationship with another state, or they can be rejected by their homeland state’s government due to an antagonistic foreign policy against political exiles. 

 
Thus, if diasporas are seen as "useable" or "disposable" by the home country’s ruling government when they are not resident inside the home country, then such a perception should be judged by observers of human rights as a barometer in terms of that home country’s civil and human rights record, holing just as much validity in terms of observation as the treatment of that same country’s current residents and citizens, immigrants, expatriates, etc. 

Wiley Drake’s “imprecatory prayers” as autoterrorism

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Still thinking about Wiley Drake long after his notorious pronouncement of imprecatory prayer upon Obama’s life.  

I’m wondering, though, about how befuddled the immediate reaction against Drake’s announcement became, as the reaction varied between "This is Abrahamic religion in the raw" to "well, he’s not encouraging others to pray the same prayer, but it still could inflame violent opinion or reaction against Obama".

Now let’s think about it: Drake was officially entitled by the 1st amendment to pray this prayer for himself as long as he didn’t communicate this as a desire for other people to act upon (which could be described as "incitement to murder", or if there is a monetary incentive, "solicitation of murder"). However, that the reaction against the idea of an imprecatory prayer – where you pray to your preferred imaginary friend or imaginary surrogate parent to wreak havoc upon another individual’s life or livelihood so that you don’t have to – tends to exhibit the continuing fear within the public of incitement of the supernatural to harm a mortal individual.

But if, from an atheist standpoint, such incitements of imaginary beings are only being directed to a memory or concept within one’s mind, and that the violent thought is only involving the burning of an effigy within one’s mind rather than a public effigy burning, then maybe this burning or killing of one’s enemy within one’s mind counts as "autoterrorism", or terrorism against one’s own self.

It can be considered an act against the self because it dedicates the mind’s resources to killing one’s own concept of a living being through incitement of the imagination to that effect. Since this does not involve any mock killing of an effigy in public or the solicitation/incitement to the public to kill a living person, then the act of terrorism only takes place within the mind against an externally-influenced product of the mind. This playout of terroristic acts by the mind against its own production can only be described as terrorism against the self if the skeptical outside observer ignores or denies the existence of supernatural beings.

So prayer, when directed toward the solicitation of murder by a supernatural being, is meant as a reinforcement toward the mind’s own action of terrorism against its own concepts of an individual or group. Imprecatory prayer (including curses) can be best described as autoterrorism.