Ramblings

Well, I had a deep and insightful post here, but the stupid thing timed me out, so now it's gone.

Yet another reason LiveJournal is superior to this blogging service: autorecovery, my one true love. Seriously though, I feel like a total jerk typing it over again. I know it never saw the light of day, but I have this issue with repeating myself. Also, I felt very emotionally charged about my reaction to the one reading, and now that's dead. Alas. Well anyway, I'll try to recreate some of it, even though the magic's gone...

This article reminded me why I find human beings so frustrating. Really though, people on Facebook need to deal with the fact that putting picutres of yourself being a moron/doing something illegal online is a BAD IDEA. Not only is there absolutely no reason it needs to be done, there are also plenty of stories about the bad things that have happened when people have done it! And then they're SURPRISED when doing something stupid has consequences. Let me tell you people, that's LIFE. Honestly...

The issue in this article was actually legitimate though. Obviously students want their freedom of speech, but you can't publicly attack someone online. It's really just bad form. I know that "James Knowles is a Twat" is a pretty benign attack, and the words used could have been much harsher, but it could have been said more tastefully too. This really is a direct personal assault.

Hopefully that code of conduct the school is working on for social networking will be fair and clear some things up.

So I finally have a Facebook.

... I feel incredibly unclean. I have jumping on the bandwagon issues, and it did not help that just about every single one of my friends posted "haha, you finally caved" on my wall within one day. I guess there is absolutely no reason for them to assume it was a class assignment. In fact, it would be incredibly strange if they did. Doesn't make the reaction any less obnoxious.

See, I have this problem with things that are "popular." They just rub me the wrong way, you know? Like it's going to rob me of my precious individualism or some other such nonsense. That's why I've always liked LiveJournal. As I have seen, it always seems to be characterized in a much more nerdy, quirky way than MySpace or Facebook.

Ugh, thank God we didn't get to making a MySpace in class on Tuesday. I don't think any number of showers could have made me feel any less unclean if I'd actually made one. Hopefully there will be no reason to anymore.

I know that was melodramatic. It's just frustrating, you know? I just really prefer smaller little cult sensations to whatever's popular at the time. It doesn't bother me as much if I join early, and then it becomes a big deal, but Facebook doesn't really seem like anything special to me.

I'm probably just being stubborn though. I should give it a try and I might actually really like it or whatever.... But I really don't feel like figuring it out right now. Maybe some other time when I don't have so much homework....

I feel like I should have had links in here somewhere. Maybe I'll come back and edit this later tonight with some justification for what MySpace makes me cringe.

So yesterday instead of a normal English class, we learned how to make ePortfolios using this nifty site called Weebly, which is probably the best free website making tool I have ever used.

It's all drag and drop, fairly customizable, no html skills required (though there is the option of simply force-feeding it the code if you want). Apparently it was made by a couple of former IST students, which really shows, because it's incredibly user-friendly. And when I say that, I mean user-friendly in such a way that it seems like they sat down and said "what will the people using this want to be able to do, and how can we make easy, self-explanitory functions that allow them to do that."

You can make regular webpages, or add a blog, or two. The navigation is created automatically. The blogging function is a bit less annoying than this one too, though you still can't comment on comments, which still drives me crazy.

To be perfectly honest though, a lot of what I really liked about Weeble was that it looked good. That's important. Like this blogging site? Sure it's functional, and it's got mostly everything you might want to use if you can bother to find it, but it isn't... pretty. The fonts are small, the layout is kind of cluttered, the colors are okay, but they're not vibrant and attractive.

It was a pretty cool site. I strongly advise checking it out.

The two articles I chose were about online gaming, specifically MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games). This is a topic that has only somewhat touched my life. I love RPGs; they’re my favorite type of videogame. I love solving puzzles and becoming involved in a storyline, and ever since Pokémon, I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for devoting hours upon hours to tedious leveling up.

However, MMORPGs are a beast I have yet to conquer. World of Warcraft was fun and everything, but not worth paying for a monthly subscription, and the social aspect of it doesn’t appeal to me either. Playing a multiplayer game with people who are right next to me is fun, but trying to play with someone on the other side of the internet quickly frustrates me. Somehow, I always manage to find the jerks who walk away from the game when they start losing, and even when I can manage to find someone reliable, then there’s waiting for them to come online, and trying to coordinate being on together, and then after that, you can’t walk away without disappointing the other person, even though realistically you’re both exhausted because it’s 3am and you’ve been playing for 6 hours straight.

This doesn’t appeal to me, but millions of others have made it a way of life.

The first article, Game Censorship, had three key sections: Virtual Economies—Money & Property, Virtual Gambling, and Deviant behavior. The first section addressed the issue of property in online games. Most online games have their own money system by which items earned in the game can be bought or sold, but some players will sell their rare or powerful items (usually on eBay) for real world currency. This matter has sparked a controversy, as well as laws about the ownership of virtual property. The article questions how and if laws should be applied to owning virtual items or even virtual land (such as in the game Second Life). Obviously, these matters are rather clear-cut in the real world, but courts have been hesitant to set new precedents in the case of online incidents, and there are no laws as of yet that clarify the situation.

The second section notes that actions may soon be taken against gambling in MMORPGs, even though it is done in the currency of the virtual world, not actual, real life money.

Finally, the third section dealt with deviant behavior specifically in MMORPGs and how laws should transcend real life into the virtual world. I. e.: does raping a virtual character “count,” should someone acting as a virtual character have freedom of speech as that character, and can the concept of libel be applied to someone’s avatar (game persona)? The conclusions the article came to were that there aren’t any real answers to these questions yet, but the approaching legal battles that will determine those answers are probably unavoidable. MMORPGs are too big a part of too many peoples’ lives to leave all of this in legal ambiguity.

I thought this article was really interesting. It posed a lot of really thought-provoking questions, though it didn’t really offer many solutions. I especially thought the topic of ownership in a virtual world would be fascinating to explore. Obviously, the things you, as a character, “own” in an MMORPG aren’t real, but they do represent an amount of effort, and certainly a time commitment. Losing an item, especially a rare or valuable one would be very upsetting, but it still wasn’t an actual piece of property, it was just some code in a game. I can imagine being very upset, maybe for a little while, but it certainly doesn’t seem life-shattering to me. On the other hand, I’m not a devoted gamer with countless hours invested in a character in an online world.

As tempting as it may seem to start making laws about property on the internet, and as cool as it would be to have an office in government devoted specifically to managing online gaming laws, I don’t really think it’s the government’s place. These games were created by companies who should have complete control over what goes on in their servers. If anyone should be handling these issues, it’s those companies, not the government. This eliminates the problem of different laws applying to gamers from different countries: if the companies make the rules, they apply to all of its players, no matter where they’re from.

The second article was more concerned about addiction to online gaming. It compared MMORPGs to gambling or even alcohol addiction. The argument presented in this article outlined a serious problem. Although many of the millions of MMORPG players have perfectly normal and healthy gaming habits, there are some who do have a serious problem.

[In] an online survey of more than 40,000 MMO players, the average player is 26 years old; most hold full-time jobs. Seventy percent have played for 10 hours straight at some point, and about 45 percent would describe themselves as "addicted."

This kind of gaming behavior led to the creation of Online Gamers Anonymous, which uses a process similar to Alcoholics Anonymous to help players overcome an addiction to online gaming.

Okay, given, there are some troubled people out there who use MMORPGs to escape their problems. This idea was represented in the article (compared to watching television or reading a book, neither of which we would label “addictions,” even if done frequently or obsessively). Still, the concept of online gaming as being harmful and addictive was pushed much more heavily, and some of the content even suggested that this obsessive playing was a direct result of something intentional made by the creators of the game. This made me angry. Given, the layout of the article was aggravating to begin with (crammed into a tiny, constrained column, most of which was taken up by obnoxious adds), but don’t gamers have any personal responsibility?

Yes, there may be pressure to continue playing even if you’re tired or hungry, but if you’re too stupid to get up and feed yourself because you’re in the middle of a game, how is that the game’s fault? Do we really want these people in the gene pool? If leaving the game is such a big issue, grab something to snack on before you sit down. Is that so hard? And these help groups—not to knock them, because it’s a great idea. I’m sure there are a lot of people who need help dealing with gaming addiction, but I don’t think the game itself is the problem. Obviously, if you’d rather be playing Everquest than eating or sleeping, and you spend more time in a virtual world as some made up character than you do in real life, you’ve got personal issues that need resolving. If not videogames, these people would find some other way to escape reality, and that is real problem, not that the game is too much fun or whatever other nonsense anyone wants to use to explain a gaming addiction.

Even though these two articles dealt with very different social impacts of MMORPGs, they both made the same overall point. Online gaming is a huge part of our culture today, and its growing. We can’t just ignore it. Whether that means that countries need to start making laws to control in-game conduct, or that we need to start forming support groups to remind people that there’s a real world beyond their computer screens, this is a factor that touches our lives.

I actually finished up a picture! With a background!

I love this character. He's my favorite. And I know the background looks like crap, but I had fun with it ^^

So if you guys want to waste some time instead of doing homework, I will recommend the OTP Generator.

OTP stands for One True Pairing, and this thing includes EVERYONE. Like, Poland is in there. I love this thing because you can tell how much of a nerd you are by how many of the characters and/or historical figures you recognize. And I can really tell I'm a dork by how many I think are funny. It's entertaining though.

Okay, so I don't think I communicated my point in class today, which is why I'm going to to attempt to elaborate on it here.

People sort themselves, and other people into categories. We like to associate with people who we share things in common with. That's one of the beauties of social networking--it's a tool that makes that easier. Instead of having to find people, break through the awkward barrier of small talk, and invest the time to get to know them, they're conveniently categorized and searchable for you.

However, when a group of people with similar characteristics gets together, people notice that they all of similar characteristics, and they start to associate those traits with that group. This is logical, isn't it? Well it's also stereotyping, but of course it sounds bad when you say it like that.

So, given all of that, of course different social groups will pervail over others. If one social networking site appealed to everyone, there'd be no competition in the market, and no incentive to create anything new in the field. True, a network is only as strong as the number of people it reaches, but why should it reach to people we don't really want or need to reach? People should be allowed to pick where they want their internet presence to be. Some people's online identities are important to them, and given the amount of stereotyping that goes on with social networking sites, which site you choose to have a presence on is significant.

But it's still a personal choice. Nothing is stopping people from getting a MySpace or a Facebook no matter what social group/class/strata they belong to. There is no physical barrier there.

There's a mental one. I'm a prime example of that. I resisted Facebook and MySpace because neither of them particularly appeals to me, but being on Facebook isn't the end of the world. I didn't burst into flames when I created an account. It was completely painless, and if I can do it, MySpace users can too.

Not that they would want to, or that anyone should make them.

I guess that was my other problem really. Like, even if MySpace and Facebook are segregated by class... what would we even do about it? Tell MySpace users they have to get Facebooks? Force the CIA to recruit out of MySpace? As far as I can tell, things are how people want them to be, and even though it's interesting to point out, I really don't see the issue here.

Well, for this assignment, I decided to choose sites that I have personal experience on, which made LiveJournal and deviantART easy choices, but I think for my third site, I’m going to throw in Neopets.

LiveJournal is a great place to meet people. Apart from keeping users in contact with their current network, LJ has a wide variety of ways to make new contacts. Joining communities is a good way to meet new people with similar interests. On the main page, LJ has a Spotlight for different communities, which changes regularly, creating many opportunities for people to join groups they may not have thought of otherwise.

LJ also facilitates finding communities in other ways. Users are able to input any interest and locate other people and communities with that same interest. In addition, users are able to add “interests” to their profile page, and clicking on these creates a list of all the users and communities who list the same interest. There is also the Advanced Search.

The advanced search feature allows you to search for LiveJournal users by age, friends, interests, location and more. This feature is available to Plus and Paid account holders

DeviantART is another beast entirely. Although dA offers a journal option, the central focus of this site is on the art, which facilitates networking and communication. On the front page, there are four categories of pictures: Newest, Popular, Prints, and Daily Deviations. The newest simply lists whatever the most recently updated pictures are, and the Popular category features the deviations (pictures) that have the most views (hits) for that day. DeviantART allows users to sell prints of their work, and the Prints category on the front page can be viewed by the most recent or the best sellers, and the Daily Deviations are works that are featured for the day for being particularly good. There is a search feature that shows pictures that have been tagged with the given input by the deviant (artist/poet/what have you). These can also be viewed by most popular or newest, and there are links at the bottom of the page that allow users to view a random deviation or a random deviant’s gallery.

Viewing pictures and commenting on said pictures is one of the main ways of building a network on dA. Pictures can be commented on and added to “Favorites.” A deviant’s favorites are displayed on their user page, less prominently than their own gallery, but it is a good way for users to help send traffic to pictures that they admire. Deviants can “watch” each other, and the deviantWATCH is similar to an RSS reader that updates with links to pictures as watched deviants upload them. Deviants can “note” each other, which is a form of private conversation, or they can leave a Devious Comment, which is similar to a Wall posting on Facebook.

Other places on dA where deviants can communicate with each other are in the Today section, which has community updates and popular journal entries, News, which has articles written by deviants that can be read, commented on, and favorited like any other deviation, Chat, which provides instantaneous conversation with other deviants, and the Forums, which allow discussion among deviants on various topics.

Now Neopets is another completely different networking environment. Communication is based around the game—users can buy and trade items with each other, battle each other in the arena, or compete against each other in contests. However, there are avenues for networking. There are the Boards (forums), where users can talk about their pets, the game, or just talk in general to each other. The site also features Guilds, which vary in size, activity, and focus. Some are game oriented, but others are devoted to bringing together people of similar interest. These guilds often run contests, have events, give their members free items, and generally enrich the experience of its members. Connections can be made between different users by makings “Neofriends,” which gives users special options, such as giving items to each other. Also, “Neomail” allows users to communicate with each other directly. The site notifies users when they receive Neomail and/or gifts from Neofriends.

(NOTE: links are conspicuously abscent in this section since most of the communication features require that you have an account to access them, and I don't think any of you really want to make a Neopets account just to check it out.)

These three sites are all very different, but each site offers features appropriate to the service they’re providing. LiveJournal is a very general site that encompasses a wide variety of interests, so most of its features allow users to search for others like themselves to form networks with. DeviantART on the other hand is primarily a site for sharing artwork. This site’s form of networking is based almost entirely out of responding to others’ artwork, forming relationships between artists who like each others’ works. DevART encourages the feeling of a community, and for a deviant’s art to be recognized in such a large community, it is almost necessary for them to form social contacts with other deviants in order to get their art seen and to increase the number of places on the site that link back to their gallery. Neopets also takes a radically different approach to social networking. Because Neopets is primarily a game, the social networking that occurs forms around the game. This site also tends toward a younger audience, so the networking is more basic and less personal, possibly for security reasons.

Yeah, I've been kind of MIA lately... but now that I really should be writing my narrative for English, this seems like a much better alternative!

Highlights of the last week: On Saturday, I went to my first tailgate, though I did not attend the game. Tailgating was cool. I got to hang out with my dad.

Next day was Ren Faire! The Three Broomsticks took a trip to the PA Renaissance Faire, and I managed not to spend ungodly amounts of money, which is a first for me, because I'm weak-willed like that.

And then on Monday I woke up, looked at the clock and though "damn! I missed Calc!" So I rolled over, thinking I'd get some more sleep, right? But then slowly I realized "wait... Calc is at 9, not 8... Crap." So, on the bright side, I did not miss Calc, but I didn't get to sleep in T_T.

But it got better after that. I was so disoriented while I was leaving that I magically forgot to bring my wallet, which has my ID card and my room key. This is the... third time I've been locked out of my room. But I think I can safely say that I am a getting back into my room ninja after Monday. I managed to get into Simmons to get a locked out key, and I got right into my dorm without my ID card and with no waiting around for people to come by.

So, even though I felt like a moron, I at least have complete faith and confidence in my ability to get back into my room without key or ID. Yarr.

It did get me to wondering if there was a better way to do the swipe in thing. Like some method that can't be lost, stolen or left behind. But typing in your number wouldn't work, since people could steal and use it, and I don't really think anyone wants a barcode tattooed onto the back of their hand. Fingerprint or retenal scanning would be teh awesome, but that's completely impractical. Or we could pull a Hogwarts and have sekrit passwords XD. That method isn't exactly moron-friendly either though, though I don't know if it's more or less vulnerable than the ID card system. I mean, srsly, you don't need an ID card to get into a dorm. I guess the RAs are on the lookout for intruders, but I've been outside without my ID card like, three times now, and almost without any waiting involved, I have always been able to get back in.

I guess the moral of the story is I need to remember my freaking keys and ID card, and if I get locked out, it's my own damn fault -__-.

Visit Penn State Security and Risk Analysis Students

Yeah, so this is the SRA Social network that I spent my life's blood designing the theme for -__-. Ning is cool and everything, but using it makes my soul cry. In my professional opinion, the different features and the felxiblity of the colors and background pictures only creates the illusion of customizablity. Sure, you can change the colors around and everything, but in the end, the sample layouts are all the same design with different colors plugged in, you can only arrange the features so many different ways, and the only things that really distinguish these networks from one another visually would be if the creators incorperated uncommon widgets. Even then, widgets were difficult because the column sizes were completely ridged. You couldn't even deviate from the three column design.

Overall, it ranks better than this blogging site, but under LiveJournal and WAY under Weeble. It's good for what it is, but there's way better stuff out there. Sites definitely can be made highly customizable without an extensive knowledge of HTML, though from what I saw on Ning, not even HTML could really help.

Well, all the Ning stuff today was cool, but I'll talk about that later, because OMGSIMS3WTF.

I know it's far off on the horizion, but work is already being done on Sims 3, which makes my soul cry. Anyone who's ever played an EA game, especially Sims knows that EA Games is the devil and their games are created with the sole purpose of stealing peoples souls. The games Sim City, Sims, Sims 2 and all the like are a marvelous feat of videogaming in that, there is no end. There's no final objective to be reached. There's no levelling up, no monsters to beat, no bosses to defeat. Literally, it can just go on and on forever. And I don't even want to think what Spore is going to be like.

But I'm not so sure about Sims 3. According to this article the sims are now going to be much more customizable (liking TV or not liking TV?), which is cool I guess, and more socially aware, which could have some funny results. I guess it's the fact that they're going to be more aware of thier own ambitions is what bothers me. Like, part of the point of the sims is that they need someone poking them around into doing things because they literally can't take care of themselves. They'll be dying of starvation, whine to you about it, and then go watch TV. Some of the fun of it comes from the fact that they're like nauty children: they'd rather play with toys than do homework, or write in their diary instead of studying to get more skill points. If they do that kind of thing on their own, what's the point? There's even less of a game if it plays itself like that.

I guess what I'm saying is that just because the AI can do these things on its own, doesn't mean it should.

So, last night I went to the Drag Show, and boy was that an experience. There's nothing like cross-dressing to make you really appreciate how gender boundaries totally don't exist anymore. Of course, most of us don't see men in dresses and too much makeup prancing around on a regular basis, but we've all seen people who really and honestly could be either. You know you have. In fact, I spent half of my junior year of high school wondering what gender some kid was before I saw him walk into a boy's bathroom.

The simple fact of the matter is: it's just plain hard to tell anymore. Long hair, flat chest, pants, earrings, even makeup... they just don't mean anything anymore. They might all hint one way or another when added up, but nothing's definite anymore.

The internet makes this even more difficult. You've got to take the person's word for it, which I must imagine makes online dating rather exciting. I remember in a Pew Report on online dating that I came across way back when, it talked about how relatively few people are availing themselves of the service. Still, everyone has heard the big names: Yahoo! Personals, eHarmony, Match.com, Chemistry.com, and out of those four, only eHarmony restricts its services from homosexual people.

It's all just very interesting. But anyway, the drag show was fun ^^

So today in English we were told to think of someone who we argue with all the time, and think what about arguing with that person really makes us angry.

This was an unfortunate task for me, since I'm generally a wrathful, enraged person, and thinking about something that has made me angry in the past just makes me angry about it all over again. I really need to learn to let things go, but that is not the point of this post.

The point is that miscommunication is so very, utterly obnoxious, and the internet exacerbates this problem exponentially. The lack of emotion conveyed by type is a problem. Emoticons have fixed it to a small extent, but there isn't really anything to be done for sarcasm. Like I need to be able to type [sarcasm][/sarcasm], or hit Ctrl+Asshole on my keyboard, and that would solve about half of my online communication problems. There just has to be SOME universally recognized, visually conveyed method of experessing sarcasm over the internet.

So since we have to describe Digital Ethnography, first things first: go to Wikipedia for a definition of the big word

Ethnography (ἔθνος ethnos = people and γράφειν graphein = writing) is the genre of writing that presents varying degrees of qualitative and quantitative descriptions of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. Ethnography presents the results of a holistic research method founded on the idea that a system's properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other. The genre has both formal and historical connections to travel writing and colonial office reports. Several academic traditions, in particular the constructivist and relativist paradigms, employ ethnographic research as a crucial research method. Many cultural anthropologists consider ethnography the essence of the discipline.

So obviously, on this site, the human social phenomena that is being studied is YouTube. By having the students make a presence on YouTube, they immerse themselves in the culture of the site in order to get a better idea of its community and implications.

The sites I chose were Dailymotion, Veoh, and Newgrounds, all sites I frequent and was interested in learning more about.

Business Model

The three I picked are actually radically different in this area. Dailymotion is by far the most professional in this regard. It has a specific page in its information section devoted to its corporate information, and this page details the type of company, publications director, telephone number, and even share capital and trade companies register, whatever that is. A lot of this information seems useless to the average user, but it certainly looks impressive—like they really know what they’re doing and can be trusted. It reassures users that it isn’t just running out of someone’s garage. Newgrounds, on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, did run out of its creator’s basement for more than ten years. Since then, it has moved into an office and owns some servers hosted in a facility in Philadelphia. The people running and maintaining Newgrounds are primarily the creator’s friends, and there are less than a dozen of them listed on the staff page. Also, I feel it is important to note that the Newgrounds staff page is formatted like a fighting videogame’s character selection menu. Not unlike Dailymotion’s straight-forward, just the facts corporate information page, this sends a message to users, and that message is: Newgrounds is fun and awesome, just like a videogame. Since Newgrounds features a lot of flash-based games, this actually makes a lot of sense. They might not be taken as seriously, but they are targeting their audience very efficiently. Veoh on the other hand is a privately held company with investors such as Spark Capital, Michael Eisner's Tornante Company, Time Warner Inc. and Shelter Capital Partners. Their mission statement is to

Give viewers a limitless marketplace of compelling or informative television programming for wherever and whenever they choose to watch.

Similarly to Dailymotion, Veoh has a clean, pristine page that displays this information, though they’re much wordier about it than Dailymotion. The page gives a professional feel that “leading technology and media investors” would be more inclined to invest money in.

Advertisements

None of the three sites requires a fee for joining, and all three feature advertising. On all three sites, the advertising is generally negligible, as it rarely fills a significant portion of the screen. Veoh keeps it off to the side in a separate, narrow column. Dailymotion features an ad prominently in the top right corner of its contents box, and smaller text ads above it, but only on the main page and during video browsing. Both Veoh and Dailymotion label their ads as advertising. Newgrounds has an ad at the top and bottom of every page, and an extra ad in a separate column on the pages that feature the most popular games and cartoons.

Both Veoh and Newgrounds both partner with DoubleClick for advertising, and both offer an opt-out option. This feature does not remove the advertisements, but it does remove the accompanying cookies. Dailymotion does not transmit personal data to third companies, but does collect and process it in order to create website statistics. Veoh does not disclose personal information except as necessary for certain services. Newgrounds gives information about users’ activities on the site to third companies, but no personal information.

Intellectual Property Rights

Both Newgrounds and Dailymotion explicitly state that the ownership of all content uploaded to their sites belongs to the user who uploaded it; however both sites retain the rights to reproduce and display user-generated works throughout the site. Veoh does mention that users have ownership of their uploaded works, though it’s hidden in a lot of technical jargon. All three sites restrict the reuse of uploaded user content without the consent of the user who uploaded it. They also all make express points of pointing out that user content is the sole responsibility of the user, and any consequences of those submissions are the responsibility of the user as well. Also, each site specifically states that uploading content risks that it may be stolen, and denies responsibility if this happens.

These intellectual property right policies seem to indicate that video sharing sites all have the same interests to protect when it comes to these issues. They all cover the majority of the same points, which all are all focused on protecting the site from copyright infringement issues.

This article was actually really interesting. We, as a generation are feeling the effects of this issue over tagging and keywords. Flexibility allows for ease of expression, but uniformity allows for ease of searching. It's a very delicate balance. Personally, I like how del.icio.us handles the matter. It's nice to know how other people are tagging the same content, and to be given prompts and suggestions for tags, but it also lets you use your own tags for personal reference.

Actually, reading this article reminded me of this video:

From the Digital Enthnography website. Personally, I found the video a much more interesting representation of a lot of the same information. Hooray for multimedia! I guess that's kind of what this unit is supposed to be teaching us.

Well, I finally slept through calculus, which is annoying, but whatever. I'll just really have to read the book to make sure I don't fall behind. Hopefully he'll still be doing examples tomorrow, and I have a friend I can get the notes off of.

Also, on a more amusing note, I'm so glad that these are my targetted advertisements:

So the internet knows I like Batman. I don't know whether to laugh or headdesk again.

Hey, for those of you who don't know, November is National Novel Writing Month.

I know this is kind of late notice, but anyone who's always wanted to write a novel: this is a great experience! It's a lot of fun, even if it does kind of drain the life out of you (50,000 words in one month means 1,667 words a day, and that may not sound like much, but when you get behind, it adds up fast).

Anyway, that's why I'll be dead for the entire month. Anyone who cares to join me, it's not too late to check it out. One of my friends started a week into November one year and finished a week early, so it can be done!

All I can say is thank God for the internet, or else craziness like this would not be possible. That counts as a link to technology, right? Oh! Automated word counting. That helps too ^^.