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POPSPreserving Fandom The Organization for Transformative Works has created some really quality solutions for dealing with the October closing of Geocities. Even if you don't own any content on Geocities, you can help document it.
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POPSViacom Abuses DMCA to Silence Criticism Someone criticizing your shitty racially cleansed movie? Well the DMCA can help you! Send that hosting site a DMCA take-down notice over something clearly fair use, I'm sure no one will notice! Sure, it's unethical and probably illegal, but hey, give it a shot! -- Assholes.
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POPSGeocities Archival Project Utterly atrocious page colors, but I am glad to see that more than one group of people are doing their best to save our net-history.
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POPSPhiladelphia Police Beat and Arrest Bamboozle Roadshow Bands Clipped urls are links to videos of the incident. There are further details in the comments on the page. The video on myspace shows what happened inside, the youtube video shows what happened outside. The Valencia link is an eye-witness account. Utterly disturbing - explicit violence and cussing.
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POPSRapidshare Unsafe For Uploaders I was wondering how long it would take for the mafIAAs to start in on the fileshare/hosting sites. Honestly, I am surprised it took this long. Torrents are (technologically) harder to track. Sites like rapidshare are pretty unambiguous.
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POPSFannish Preservation The Organization for Transformative Works is offering shelter (hosting space) in their Open Doors project for fanworks that are losing their homes with the closing of GeoCities.
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POPSYahoo! set to bulldoze GeoCities later this year Geocities was my first net home when I got on-line full-time back in January '97. I had a page in Athens, though I can't recall which sub-division I was in or my exact address. My first site was eye-bleedingly awful. But I learned, quick, and got better. Signing up for GeoCities is where I got the handle I still use to this day. There is still some good things found on GeoCities and it's sad to see the entire site close.
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POPSUtah Phillips - Pacifism and Privilege "You know, an alcoholic, they can be dry for twenty years; they're never gonna sit in that circle and put their hand up and say, 'Well, I'm not alcoholic anymore' - no, they're still gonna put their hand up and say, 'Hi, my name's Utah, I'm an alcoholic.' It's the same with violence. You gotta be able to put your hand in the air and acknowledge your capacity for violence, and then deal with the behavior, and have the people whose lives you messed with define that behavior for you, you see. And it's not gonna go away - you're gonna be dealing with it every moment in every situation for the rest of your life."
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POPSWhy I Actually Prefer It When People Aren't Civil The are all sorts of problems with this, which is frequently referred to as the tone argument. But I haven't yet seen anyone say, fuck man, I LIKE it when you're beautifully, articulately, pointedly angry, and if my attention and my comfort is least and last in your order of importance. I'm not sitting here thinking, well, you've obviously got something important to say, so I'll try and see past the anger and hear the message. It surely can't be said enough times that this is not about my safety or my comfort, but actually, dammit, I feel safer and more comfortable if you're angry.
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POPSOn Having A "Polite" Tone Politeness (under which requests for the "right" "tone" seems to fall: it's not specifically a soft tone or a pleading tone or whatever that's requested, but something more abstract, especially in written discourse) is a product of cultural conventions that grow out of historical and political dynamics. It's a product of society: it reflects the order established in that society. Discourse that upsets the dynamics of society fails to conform to that order.
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POPSWas Einstein Wrong?: A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity Our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say, a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a man with a stick that can then push the rock—or some such sequence. We term this intuition "locality." Quantum mechanics has upended many an intuition, but none deeper than this one. And this particular upending carries with it a threat, as yet unresolved, to special relativity—a foundation stone of our 21st-century physics. --- SO COOL!
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POPSIf it walks like us... Clipping from four different sites: News about the oldest footprints found of an animal that walked like we do now.
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POPSMegacorps Agree To Stop Being Dicks At least for the moment. As someone who would've been screwed by this money grab, I'm glad they've come to an agreement. However, I think this shows why regulation needs to be brought back and brought back hard.
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POPSThe Methane Time Bomb As pessimistic/cynical as I am, I really didn't want us to get to this point. Perhaps it won't reach the critical point, but I'm not holding my breath.
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POPSTo Queer, or Not To Queer? One of the few genuinely interesting things about the Knight Rider movie/pilot earlier this year was FBI agent Carrie Ruvai's apparent queerness. Unsurprisingly, it's caused waves and will probably never be seen again. But some of the people behind the scenes aren't as homophobic as the suits.
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POPSHP Lexicon Ruling Will Not Kill Fandom The Lexicon book did too much verbatim copying and paraphrasing, so it’s not excused under fair use and it’s an infringement of JKR/WB’s rights as copyright holders. Tranformative works are cool; this transformative work isn't so cool.
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POPSAs The Disc Turns I would make me quite sad if it turned out to be a fraud, but ultimately it is better to know the truth. I'm looking at you Greece.
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POPSPotential Paradigm Shift? I am always wary of ideas that glorify computers as the best (and perhaps only true) way to understand the functions of the world and life. However, this one is slightly different from the ones I've seen before, so...maybe?
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POPSListening To Teens, Not Just Demonizing Them I listen to My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy and others that are called 'emo'. I know, from an adult perspective, that calling them suicide-promoting cults is a filthy lie. But it's really good to see a teenager eloquently saying it as well.
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POPSFatal Hit And Run By My Home I heard this happen. I heard a huge thudding crunch and then silence. I knew that there had been yet another accident at this intersection. I'm saddened, but not remotely surprised that it was fatal. Always, always the accident is caused by someone attempting to go West on Buckingham. Without fail.
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POPSCutting Your Food's 'Gas' Price I've heard of the whole eating locally thing, which I still like the idea of, but I like that this goes a step further. Of course, I'm starting from a pretty decent spot...being only lacto-vegetarian. Damn my cheese addiction.
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POPSSound in Smoke It doesn't sound like much at all, but for something recorded in soot it's pretty damn impressive
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POPSNet Socialization Good I feel like saying "duh", but also I'm glad to see someone say something positive about online social interaction. Even if they did use Myspace as their source.
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POPSAnother Fannish Meta-tale Seriously, being part of slash fandom (and media fandom in general) is one of the best things that's happened to me. I've met the best people and it's things like this essay that reaffirm that.
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