Best advice on scandals ever from TNH

In the Making Light thread on the SFWA's debacle where Andrew Burt used a bot searching for 'Asimov' to issue DMCA takedown notices willy-nilly, sideswiping Cory, Teresa Nielsen-Hayden gave the clearest, most compact advice on handling net PR disasters ever:

1. Get out there and say something, fast.
2. Acknowledge that there have been screwups. Avoid passive constructions.
3. Explain what you're doing to help fix the problem. Be telling the truth when you do it.
4. Give up all hope of sneaking anything past your listeners. You've screwed up, the internet is watching, and behind each and every one of those pairs of eyes is a person who knows how to Google.
5. Corporate-speak will do you more harm than good. Instead, speak frankly about what's going on. React like a human being. Talk like one, too.

Also, James D. MacDonald said:

While one should not attribute to malice anything that is adequately explained by stupidity, any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

Update: Teresa made it a post, so now it has it's own intelligent comments.

Lunar eclipse tonight

As I was up anyway, working on some code, I stayed up to watch the lunar eclipse and took some photos.

Update: A lovely composite photo taken by Matt Onheiber.

Actually, in-video linked ads date back to the 80s

Mike Arrington has been stirring it about YouTube's new in-frame ads but this idea is something that dates back years, way back to the late 80s. In 1989 my colleagues Max Whitby, Nikki Barton and Chris Prior made a documentary with Douglas Adams called "Hyperland" looking at hypertext and the interlinked video future. Here's a snip where they explain 'micons':

What they went through back then to make all those overlaid animated video loops doesn't bear thinking about. I remember it involving Macromind Director and early 8-bit video capture cards and writing out to framestores one frame at a time...

Bacn and mushrooms

The term bacn for

email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.

is a handy word for a new phenomenon, but it looks like it should be an acronym. Boring Automated Computer Notifications, perhaps?

Also, we need another word for the kind of bacn that doens't tell you the notificiation, but is just a way to get you to click on a link and generate a pageview for someone like Evite or Facebook. I suggest we call these 'mushrooms', as they keep you in the dark and feed you dirt. Also, because that gives me an excuse to link to Andrew's Bacon movie again.

De Vermis, by Mike Ford

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days —
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

from Making Light

Stardust - best movie of the year

Before I go into details, let me say that you should go and see Stardust tomorrow. Take friends and loved ones; you'll thank me for it later.

We watched Edward Scissorhands in San Jose's St James Park on Friday night, which has a magic realism of it's own, what with the light rail passing either side of the park, the planes and nightclub searchlights in the sky, and the audience mixing the homeless who sleep in the park with a throng of our friends picnicking. I called Edward Scissorhands a geek parable before, but its screenwriter Caroline Thompson describes it as a fable - a story you know isn't true but care about anyway. It takes a fantastic character and brings him into the mundane world to try to cope.

Stardust is in some ways the opposite of this - Tristan escapes from his conforming world to a fantastic one, a world of danger that tests him. That he can't resist returning to show himself off is a pivotal moment in the plot; the world of Stronghold has a very sharply drawn medieval conflict over succession, that echoes and parodies many we have seen. Tristan's lovestruck quest is pithily skewered by Yvaine, the star who is its object. It is a picaresque story, but Vaughn brings some of the English subcultural texture from Snatch and Layer Cake to it too, with archetypically English small time crooks and fences represented.

What is different from those works, and which owes more to Gaiman than Vaughn, is the underlying morality of the story. I have been strongly impressed by this current within British fantasy work recently - the revived Doctor Who is exemplary this way, as is the Dangerous Book for Boys, and even Christopher Hitchens can see it in Harry Potter.

In each case there is an acknowledgment that there is evil in the world, but a consistent message that it is best fought through love, through integrity and through striving to transcend our recognised flaws. Though secular in tone and style they echo for me the sublimated Anglicanism of Lewis and Tolkein; doing the right thing for the sake of this world, not the next.

I happen to have Mr McLuhan right here

The other day I was joking about some abstruse aspect of XML and I said "I happen to have Tim Bray right here", in reference, of course, to Woody Allen's devastating cinema queue put-down in Annie Hall. Now I was only half joking - Tim Bray was on IRC with me working through the Atom Publishing Protocol interop at the time - but the deeper point is that through the web we do have access to people and their works in a way that was pure comedic fantasy in 1977. I can find copious examples of Tim Bray's or Marshall McLuhan's work, searching them for the citation I need, I can talk to Tim, or see how the authors of books I like feel about their movie adaptations.

It seemed as if the joke was on me, as the chap I was talking to had never seen Annie Hall. But I happen to have Mr Allen right here:

Heck, I even have the strange Dada website pitching direct debits I remember from the UK in 1996 here.

Andrew's Film Bee Aware - public screening

Andrew and Christopher have been making videos since they were 5, but this summer Andrew got the chance to go to Camp Cinequest, a summer camp for young filmmakers at San Jose University, organised by the Cinequest Film Festival. He told the local paper all about it (PDF version). Now there's a public showing under the Cinema St James festival - come along!

Bee Aware and Edward Scissorhands at Cinema St James

Friday, August 10, 2007 7:30 PM - 11:00 PM

St. James Park

First Street and St. James Street
San Jose, California

37.3404, -121.892

Unwind by taking off your shoes, kicking back in your favorite lawn chair with a cool glass of beer, and watching a great flick under the stars. Cinequest provides Maverick short films, tonight featuring "Bee Aware" and "The Seed" before the main fature, "Edward Scissorhands". Bring the rest of the family for a night out in the park! Seating available starting at 7:30 p.m. , pre-show begins at 8:00 p.m. and the films begin at dusk. All screenings are FREE.

Microformats in Blogger - hAtom support

Those of you who read my blog directly, rather than via a feed-reader, will notice that it is looking styled again, for the first time since CSS Naked Day in April.

I made an initial conversion to hAtom by hand in the meantime, but a few weeks back Michał Cierniak and I checked in a change to the underlying Blogger templates to make hAtom the default, which the Blogger team graciously accepted. This should enable much simpler client-side parsing of the blog pages. One thing we had to do to enable this was to add a new datatype to output a date in the W3C's ISO-8601 profile, as expected by hAtom. If you look in the templates now, you'll see markup like this:

<abbr class='published' expr:title='data:post.timestampISO8601'> <data:post.timestamp/></abbr>

If you want to make your own hAtom friendly templates, you can use the data:post.timestampISO8601 appropriately in the date-time design pattern; the data:post.timestamp will reflect your personal formatting preferences as before.

Caliban's Mirror, YouTube edition

The UK Professional Association of Teachers has called for YouTube to be banned because it has been used to show people being bullied. Meanwhile, Oxford police are pursuing a man who pinched a news reporters' bum on air:

I trust the PAT will call for Channel 4 to be banned too.

Perhaps the net can fulfill Bentham's dream of the panopticon, where prisoners are always watched. In the Philippines they are showing the way. With Bentham, Busby Berkeley and Michael Jackson as guiding spirits, 1500 prisoners perform "Radio Gaga", "Thriller", the Algorithm march, and, yes, "YMCA" for the camera. If they're taking requests, I nominate Pink Floyd's "In the Flesh".

YouTube, like the rest of the web is a mirror to life. If you don't like what you see, look for something else, like this elegy for Concorde:

Or remember Antonioni

Or Syd Barrett

Or make a video to tell your own story.