Unjapanologist

So Amazon is now selling the Kindle in Japan, meaning they also have a Kindle store. I might be tempted to think this would enable Kindle-owning me to buy e-books from the Japanese Kindle store, seeing as I live in Japan and already have an account on amazon.co.jp to buy print books.

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Here's a lovely video about why open access for academic articles is so important. It touches upon many key problems with academic publishing, and it's animated by the guy who makes the awesome PhD Comics.

Open access explained! (8min)

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Flanders held local elections yesterday. I've been more concerned with European than national or local politics in the past few years, but I voted by proxy (it's compulsory) and I'm going to live there again next year, so I'm trying to catch up.

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"I don't mind that these fics with the serial numbers filed off get published commercially. I just wish they'd publish the good fic."

I've seen a lot of people react like that to Fifty Shades of Grey, and it seems to be bubbling up again with the news that a book based on a One Direction fic* called Me, Myself, and One Direction is also getting published. The problem for many people seems to be that these fics aren't very skilfully written. A lot of fans would clearly have preferred for the first fic that caught the public eye** to be something, well, more impressive in a literary sense? Something less embarrassingly representative of what most fic is like?

Personally speaking, I also feel it would have been nice if the first publicly acknowledged fic had been a literary masterpiece. But I like to think of it like this. If it had been *insert my favorite stunningly well-written story here*, then fic would have been noticed by literary critics and a niche audience, and they would have loved and respected us. But instead we got a crowd-pleaser, so now fic has been lovingly read by millions of women (and men) who may never have heard of it otherwise. They may even decide to look for more fic and join fandom.

That really sucks! I wish we'd gotten the respect of literary critics instead of the love of millions of potential new fans.

Er.

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There's a way to install comments functionality on a tumblr! I was working on the upcoming reboot of the good old Symposium blog today, and since the built-in commenting system of WordPress seemed a bit clunky, I decided to try out Disqus. Disqus is a free commenting service widely used on blogs that lets people comment with their Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Disqus accounts. I've used it elsewhere, but until I visited its website today, I had no idea that Disqus can also be installed on individual tumblrs.

(ETA: Some background from troisroyaumes: There was a time when Disqus was in wider use on Tumblr, but it seems to have faded into obscurity after Tumblr added more options for users to interact.)

I've been trying it out with our group tumblr that shall not be named, and it seems to work pretty well. I'm ridiculously excited about finally being able to comment in public on the beautiful things my esteemed colleagues post. Tumblr is fun and all, but we usually end up turning to mail for leisurely gushing and discussion, and it always feels like such a shame to separate feedback from a work.

Installing the commenting system on a tumblr is easy: log in or make an account at disqus.com, then follow the instructions on how to register a tumblr and add the commenting system to the tumblr's preferences. Here's a how-to with pictures. Here's the basic commenting FAQ from Disqus' website, and some more questions.

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Distracting myself from a bigger post about the State of the Research. Here's an quick 101 about virtual economies in games, prompted by the fact that players in Diablo III get a store where they can sell virtual items. As the video explains, this is significant in part because it's a legitimization of a widespread fannish practice: exchanging virtual goods in games for money in ways that were hitherto not recognized or even forbidden by companies. Much more importantly, though, the new store amounts to an "official" signal that the virtual goods made or earned by gamers can and apparently should be able to make people real money, if they want it.

Idea Channel: Is Diablo III Turning Virtual Economies Into Real Ones? (8min, but only the first 6min are about games)



ETA: Via Boing Boing.

I'm increasingly convinced that all schools from the primary to higher level should establish new classes on the history and functioning of the internet. Every adult in the world should be forced to attend at least a semester of such a class. Policymakers who are involved in regulating the internet should be forced to attend and come back for remedial classes at regular intervals, because they need a well-developed bullshit radar to deal with the horrendous policy proposals that are lobbed at their heads all the freakin' time.

( Read more... )We've seen a lot of bad recommendations for internet policy in the recent past, a lot of it related to misguided copyright enforcement initiatives, but this is really special. No anonymity? Constant oversight? Only real pictures as avatars? No using languages that the internet police doesn't speak? How on earth does this sort of baffling nonsense make it into the recommendations of an official body made up of grownups with brains?

The noxious influence of business interests is strong in this one; EDRI calls the whole initiative "little more than a protection racket (use filtering or be held liable for terrorist offences) for the online security industry". What's kind of shocking here is not that business interests are trying to influence policymaking, though. That's been happening ever since businesses and policymaking came into existence. The real issue is that these sorts of recommendations have some chance of getting somewhere. They may or may not make it into law, but they will almost certainly end up influencing the policymakers who will lay eyes on them. Far too many of these people have no earthly idea how the internet works and what is necessary to keep the internet gears from turning. They don't have the necessary background knowledge and practical experience to recognize these "recommendations" for the harmful crap they are the moment the papers land on their desks. I shudder to think that serious lawmaking people will be looking this over, nodding along and assuming these ideas are very reasonable and terrorist-stopping.

Nobody can be expected to have a thorough grounding in every topic in existence, but the internet is no longer a "special" issue that you can ignore until some proposals come around, at which point you call in a "nerd" to explain things and tell you what to do. Knowing about the workings and needs of a functioning internet is as essential for a 21st-century public official as knowing about traffic rules. Every time you make a new rule, you should consider the effect it will have on the internet, and you should know how to do so. Back to school for everyone.

Boing Boing, one of my favorite blogs, is going to start publishing new chapters of Elfquest, the comic that was the shining and beloved fandom of my youth. World, you do love me and I love you back so much.

What I love the most about this announcement, besides the fact that it's real and it's happening, is that it shows that Elfquest's creators Richard and Wendy Pini are eminently sensible people who genuinely cherish and prioritize their fans. The comic stopped appearing regularly a decade ago, and the last time any new material came out was in 2006. Releasing the new series online is sure to get Elfquest a lot more attention and a lot more new fans than if they'd tried starting over in paper publishing. And this isn't the first time that the Pinis show that their main objective is to make sure that Elfquest is always accessible to old and new fans: in 2008-2009, they released the whole 6000+ pages of the series on their website entirely for free. 

Devour it before the new series starts! Begin with the Original Quest. In its later years, the series branched out into a lot of spin-offs by guest artists, and some of those were not exactly earth-shattering. But the bits drawn by Wendy (MY HERO), especially the first couple of series, are consistently excellent and beautiful and very, very moving. After the first few issues, the art goes from pretty to stunningly gorgeous, and the story is captivating. Elfquest was one of the first US comics to seriously deal with character deaths, non-heteronormative sexuality, and other 'adult' themes, and still feels wonderfully fresh and new today.

(More Elfquest. I can't believe it. All right, I'll probably spend the whole run of the new series tearing my hair out in frustration because my favorite characters, Pike and his Go-Back harem, are in Ember's tribe and it sounds like the new series is going to be all about Cutter's tribe. But I'll live. I'm so looking forward to moaning about all the things I used to moan about!) 

I moved all the links to research-related stuff and my other accounts on various online services that used to be on this journal to a professional homepage, because I need a place that showcases all research-related things I do online. Most of my online activity is on Twitter and Evernote, and it's kind of hard to show that in Dreamwidth because there's no RSS feed widget-like things to put in sidebars. I'll keep posting about research here as per usual.

All info is now on the new homepage, but it still looks fantastically boring. I made it in Drupal because that's what I'm used to, but I've been tinkering with WordPress lately and found it much easier and more pleasant for making really pretty things. Perhaps I'll switch to WordPress when I next have copious amounts of free time and am less inclined to fill it with fic writing and Teen Wolf watching.

Busy with AdaCamp right now, where we've had a couple of great sessions on fandom/fanworks and open culture/open source software. More on that later.

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