First off, my condolences to the people of Haiti in the aftermath of this past Tuesday’s tragedy. And a pile of shit on Pat Robertson’s head, or the head of anyone who decides to bring any sort of theodicy into this tragedy; it’s uncalled for, and it is usually wrong in its assumptions about a tragedy.
All posts by Harry Underwood
Idea: Creative Commons multi-genre convention
It’s not free publicity, but I think that organizing a multi-genre convention for only Creative Commons-licensed and other freely-licensed works (literature, music, performance art, etc.) would be a good means by which users of Creative Commons and free media licenses from all genres and niches can meet face-to-face, promote their works, and collaborate. It could be massive, and it could lead to the furtherance of a fandom or devoted following for such works.
Of course, there’s the iCommons iSummit, but I’m not sure if it’s going for the sort of elevation that is most associated with fan conventions.
Speech and thought bubbles in the 3D Web
I was thinking about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication, and how synchronous communication has been successfully ported to fleshed-out, CGI-heavy "virtual worlds" like Second Life and IMVU (hence the oft-used descriptor "glorified chatroom" in regards to such virtual worlds).
Apparently, because of the enduring popularity and expanding capability of the World Wide Web, it isn’t likely that we’ll see a big move to a "3D Web" anytime soon, at least not in the way that we’ve seen such massive movements from text-driven mediums such as MU*s and (IRC, Yahoo, MSN, AIM) chat rooms to the modern-day virtual worlds. However, if synchronous text and voice chat have become mainstays of most active or ongoing MMOGs such as SL and WoW, then why is it that asynchronous communication – that which relies upon "boards" to contain persistent messages – has not been successfully reimagined in a 3D, CGI-heavy context? And what would a 3D Web look like?
I would think that the first measure to accomplish in the fleshout (or avatarization?) of asynchronous communication would be to flesh out the "pages" which are used to contain submitted information. Pages are text-centric documents, are presented as flat, 2D objects onto which information is appended, are encoded with a wide variety of strategically-placed visual cues (or "GUI elements") which allow for the web browser to perform just as wide of a variety of actions, and are accessed through devices which are best designed to interact with flat, 2D objects, i.e., keyboards and computer mice.
So a few ideas spring to mind:
- Replace hyperlinked documents with hyperlinked speech bubbles/clouds
- Augment text with 3D-native visual communication systems which drive any one person’s thoughts directly to the user without losing anything in translation or clarification.
- Flesh the bubbles out into a 3D visualization
- Design a variety of stationary or dynamic GUI elements which provide for smooth navigation between 3D speech bubbles.
- Promote 3D-centric navigatory input devices
I think that Ted Nelson, the man behind the Xanadu project (also called "the longest running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry" by Wired magazine in 1996), might be right in his contention that Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s implementation of the WWW was a well-intentioned, much-too-document-centric oversimplification of his own ideas on hypertext. So perhaps a re-visualization of how we interact with asynchronous communication tools could lead to a translation of what we’ve placed into the 2D Web into a 3D structure that is much more fleshed-out and tangible.
I will think more about this idea for a 3D Web in the future.
Creative Commons-licensed performance scripts
If you’re looking for Creative Commons-licensed performance scripts (that is, for stage plays, films, television series, etc.), feel free to peruse through Zhura.com.
Also, I found this play that was not uploaded to Zhura, but is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA.
- "This is school: Or, Changing the Script", by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (performance video, directed by Jenny Whitman)
The “LGBT convenience store”
The news that Argentina – and Latin America – has just held its first gay marriage ceremony, in addition to the news that Mexico’s Federal District (containing Mexico City) became the first jurisdiction to legalize the recognition of same-sex marriage – comes to me as welcome, but with a shaky, unsettling feeling that such recognitions of marriage equality are granted from the top-down, and can be abrogated within a matter of months if another government institution in Mexico or Argentina decides to strike it down rather than let it be.
Sentience + ARToolKit = AR done right
sentience is a software library that allows for robotic stereo vision using stereo webcams (like Minoru 3D, which is of British origin despite its Japanese name), and is written in C#. Meanwhile, ARToolKit is one of the most widely-employed augmented reality software frameworks (and is also, like sentience, FOSS).
Opinion: Two tiers of intellectual property conception
A while back, I wrote a few posts in regards to the Pirate Party, BitTorrent, the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, and the divide in understanding between the hacker culture and the P2P file-sharing culture. Continue reading Opinion: Two tiers of intellectual property conception
Project: de-Antisemitizing the Jefferson Bible
I’ve been working for the past few minutes on removing verses from Jefferson’s Bible that can be construed as implicating the Jewish people or Jewish religious leadership in either alleged opposition or alleged conspiracy against the main figure of the Gospels and his followers.
Continue reading Project: de-Antisemitizing the Jefferson Bible
Raising LGBT consciousness and friendliness through community centers
This may be an unfounded opinion, but I think a major reason for why Prop 8 was affirmed by a slim majority of the California population is because you don’t have that equal of a distribution of local/municipal LGBT community centers within the state. Continue reading Raising LGBT consciousness and friendliness through community centers
Freemasonry, religion and Furry fandom, race and culture
Reading Lewis Lofkin’s writings on American Deism, I thought over the night about how English (or "Regular") Freemasonry maintains a ban on religious or spiritual discussion – save for (upon initiation) whether an initiate believes in any Supreme Being – inside a lodge. I think that this ban on religious elaboration places a mask on possible religious expressions, intrigues and possible bigotry.
Maybe it is a good idea, and perhaps this is comparable to how the furry fandom has placed such a heavy and long-standing emphasis on disguising one’s own ethnocultural or ethnoracial identity under a fursona (be it manifested on a furry media archive via an avatar or in the average real-life furry meetup/convention via a fursuit). By hiding such distinctions under the furry equivalents of tribal initiation masks and nomens mysticums, the more divisive flareups around race and ethnicity are, theoretically, avoided or subsided.
