Derik in Minnesota

04:53 pm - Like bees gathering honey.

Sometimes the human race is pretty damn amazing.

This is the near-Earth view– mostly weather and scientific satellites. The communications satellites orbit much further out.
Sped up ~ 2000x.

It’s pretty. And they almost never collide, using ballistic orbits.

We can do almost anything… it’s making us want to that’s the trick.

10:45 pm - The Bastards of Free Culture

I’m a Transformers fan. For the last few years I’ve been active on the Transformers Wiki. And the TFWiki is currently debating whether or not to migrate our site-wide licensing from GFDL to CC-BY-SA3. Essentially a platform change in our site’s underlying “legalese” from Linux to Mac.

Sounds boring, right?

The complete meltdown of Western Civilization, after the cut.

08:09 pm - Whos who at the Laurentian Abyss

Transformers; Revenge of the Fallen has dropped.

I saw it on Thursday. It really doesn’t hold together as well as the first one. Sub-plots and character scenes got cut left-and-right int he second half, and the result is that it’s almost solid robots, and Epps and Lennox feel a little useless. It’s a bit frustrating because review after review talks about being baffled by the plot, and I know it’s supposed to make more sense than that… it’s jsut that about half the movie’s exposition ended up on the cutting room floor. Bummers.
On the plus side, stuff explodes like every 30 seconds!

Not helping with the confusion in the film is the bazillion robots in the film. The official total is 42, but I’ve heard some people who were counting say that total was much higher.
Since they’re often in motion (stomping around like bags of jello with metal parts suspended in them) and almost none of them are named, telling who’s who can be a bit… challenging.

Fortunately, I have resourceful friends. So I present screencaps!

08:15 pm - 10 of the Most Ridiculous Transformers, Ever

The Street Level blog recently posted a list of the “Top 10 Most Ridiculous Transformers, Ever.” Their choices were boring– all from the original cartoon and not very ridiculous at all.

As a Transformers nerd, I know exactly how ridiculous Transformers can get.

01Name: Piano Transformer guy (no formal name)
From:Generation 1 Marvel UK comics “Target 2006”
Year: 1986
The meek “Piano Transformer guy” transforms into a Player Piano in Maccadam’s_Old Oil House, a time-and-dimension-spanning bar on Cybertron. Maccadam’s is recognized as neutral ground by Autobots and Decepticons, and both sides rub shoulders and knock a few back. Here the Piano Transformer guy runs afoul of a foul-tempered Decepticon with no taste in music.

02Name: Esmeryl
From:Japanese Transformers Victory manga “Heroic! The Victory War”
Year: 1990
Esmeryl is the wife of the thoroughly badass and yawn-inducingly boring latter-day Decepticon leader Deathsaurus. At the end of the Victory series, just as the Autobots had defeated the Decepticons and were about to destroy them, Esmeryl appeared and begged for the Autobots to spare them– revealing that Decepticons only stole energy to feed their families, cue the appearance of hundreds of adorable Decepticon children crowding around the ones about to be executed. (Needless to say, the Autobots caved.)
Esmeryl, like her husband, appears to transform into a dragon-like Kaiju. Esmeryl is apparently sterile, having no children of her own. Instead, she and her husband adopted a human boy and turned him into a cyborg. Awww…

03Name: Misfire
From:Generation 1
Year: 1988
Misfire is a Decepticon with no aim. He couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn from the inside of a barn. Repeatedly flunked out of Decepticon Military College, only granted an honorary graduation after the college itself was destroyed by Autobots.
Misfire is a Targetmaster, partnered with a smaller robot that transforms into his weapon and aims for him, freeing him up to concentrate on other battlefield tasks. Unfortunately, his partner goes by the codename “Aimless“…
Whichever Decepticon human resources assigned them as partners should really be fired.

04Name: Pepsi Convoy
From:Generation 1, Japanese toy-exclusive
Year: 2005
There was a “Pepsi Optimus Prime” in the United States as well, but here it’s just Optimus Prime disguised as a Pepsi delivery truck. In Japan he’s a completely separate character.
Product of the same NASA experiments that created the Japanese superhero Pepsiman, Pepsi Convoy is a tiny robot who live in Optimus Prime’s freezer and battles the forces of an evil Decepticon-owned pizza chain with the power of his CO2 gun.

05Name: Sky-Byte
From: Robots in Disguise
Year: 2001
Sky-Bite is Megatron’s right-hand-’bot, a fearsome figure as he cuts through the air in his atlmode of… a singing shark?
Apparently Sky-Bite used to be quite fearsome, but he took one to the head in his first appearance, and ever since then he’s been a bit… off. A vain, preening insecure prima-donna who write Haiku’s to his own accomplishments… but is devastated when Optimus Prime criticizes the derivative imagery and non-cohesive structure.
Sky-Bite is pretty much pure liquid awesome, even in a series like Robots in Disguise (which was a comedy.)
How can you not like a guy who sings his own theme song?

06Name: Legion
From: Kiss Players
Year: 2006
At the opposite end of the comical-to-creepy scale from Sky-Byte is the Legion, an army of penis-tongue’d Megatron-lookalike Decepticons created when Galvatron crash-landed in Japan and his immune system went nuts. The Legion exist to rape (or possibly eat) little girls and use them fashion horrible new bodies for themselves.
Opposing the Legion are the government-sponsored Kiss Players, a group of abused girls who give Transformers special powers by kissing them. Nudity, fetish-vomiting, panty shots and a human-on-transformer rimjob follow in short order.
Bravo Japan, way to avoid Western stereotypes about your country!

07Name: Drift
From: IDW’s modern Generation 1 comics
Year: 2008
When IDW relaunched their Transformers comics All Hail Megatron, they decided to really shake things up by introducing a new character; Drift.
There’s nothing wrong with that, Transformers adds new characters on a regular basis. But Drift is that special “designed-by-committie awesome” quality; he’s an albino-japanese-streetracer-taciturn-former-Decepticon-honorbound-samurai-ninja.
How awesome is Drift? Look at that picture? He has three swords. Three at once!
Drift’s actually been pretty inoffensive in the actual stories he’s appeared in, but any character IDW Comics refers to as “our Wolverine” during interviews has a real uphill climb towards acceptance.

08Name: Break
From: Beast Wars Neo
Year: 1999
Break is a insubordinate foul-mouthed snot-nosed pubescent ‘git who turns into a penguin.
When his injured commander Big Convoy made a rare confession that he was proud of his crew, Break replied by insulting the size of his penis.
He also sounds exactly like Naruto, since he has the same voice actor, doing the same “type” of voice for both characters.
Basically: “Penguin Antagonist Naruto” sums up Break pretty nicely.

09Name: Shortround
From: Transformers Cybertron
Year: 2006
Shortround is a Decepticon nerd. Now, Decepticons have a certain tolerance for nerds when they’re using their nerd brains to figure out how to steal cable or design esoteric doomsday weapons… but Shortround collects toys. Specifically rare, convention-exclusive, limited-edition toys, which he’ll often wander off his mission parameters in search of.
Between his giant clumsy pincer hands, his unrequited crush on his sexy nipple-flashing teammate Thunderblast, and his tendency to vomit napalm when nervous, Shortround makes a surprisingly touching metaphor for adolescence.

Ah… my teenage years. I remember the first time I vomited napalm…

10Name: Signal Lancer
From: Transformers Cybertron
Year: 2005
Signal Lancer isn’t much of a figher– he’s a civilian. So when the entire population of Cybertron evacuated to Earth and took disguises, he chose a nice safe altmode; a stoplight. Signal Lancer was a stop-and-go running gag throughout the Transformers Cybertron series, but he proved himself surprisingly useful in a pinch and when the series ended he became a cartographer, mapping Earth and the galaxy.


So there you have it. 10 ridiculous and odd Transformers. This barely scratches the surface. There’s more than one Transformer that turns into a toaster after all, and no one can forget The King, no matter how hard they try…
I’d like to thank TFWiki.net for suggesting some of the more obscure ‘bots on this list.

02:44 pm - Orion Bursts His Belt

I’m always on the lookout for news stories that sound like the first act of disaster movies or cautionary tales. Most of them turn out to be nothing (”super-cures from Alligator blood!”) but they’re fun to keep an eye on.

One of our largest stellar neighbors, Betelgeuse is mysteriously shrinking, to a significant degree (it’s lost 1/6 of its size.) No one knows why, but they’re not very concerned about it either.

Now, I happen to be aware that a supernova sterilizes the entire ’stellar neightborhood’ for many lightyears around, so I experience some normal concern when I hear that part of Orion’s belt might collapse or explode.

Here’s the numbers– Leo F. Rog posted a generalized summary (based on old sci.astro consensus) of what would happen if a nearbye star went up on “Bad Astronomy,” a blog which debunks Hollywood depictions of space.
The upshot is that Betelgeuse is ~500 light years from Earth, which puts us out of range of everything but the gamma radiation burst– which would be many thousands of times that amount of Gamma radiation that Earth sees during a solar flare. No one’s quite sure what that would mean, but gamma radiation is something our atmosphere blocks pretty well.

This sounds unlikely to wipe out all life on earth even in a worst-case scenario. I’m pleased!

11:08 am - Three things I have learned about AS3 and Flash recently

I’ve been developing a Flash application for a CD-rom recently for my last internship before graduation. Permissions, priorities, and even some of the design aesthetic are… totally Bizarro-world compared to web applications. It’s like looking at the tool from a completely different angle.
Here’s some random thoughts/discoveries from the last few days:

1. AS3’s TextField CSS rules don’t really support contextual inheritance, and it fails badly.; .credits p {} not only doesn’t work– it will cause The rest of the Stylesheet it’s not included in to not work. Naughty naughty!
2. Importing video with alpha is surprisingly painless. (v9+)
3. Resize-with-player is both extremely simple, but not as robust as you might expect. (It’s totally globalized… but you wish it wasn’t.)

Nothing groundbreaking, just there.

02:38 am - Citation Needed - Linguistic Akido You Need To Know

Language is a funny thing. Humans used to believe that words had power– that monsters cannot cross a threshold without being invited in, or could not deny requests phrased in a certain way.

I have this fantasy

1. Allows Wikipedia to say “Well it’s not our fault we got it wrong.”
2. Filters out some of the cranks by requiring they find a corroborating source.
3. Gives the reader a starting point for seeking more information.

Over time citations, should increase the reliability or articles via slow pressure. (Even if that timeframe is geologic.)
In practical terms, Wikipedia sometimes runs into Strange Loop problems, like the story about the musician who added a few sentences about his father to his Wikipedia bio (Note: No one should ever edit their own Wikipedia bio.) and was confounded to see a “[citation needed]” appear after his additions because it was information that had never appeared in a book or interview. It was true, he knows it’s true… but how do you cite something like that on a website with a No Original Research policy forbidding Wikipedia from being its own source?
The problem fixed itself a few months later when a newspaper article which included information on his father as background. It could now be cited. The uneasy thing about this resolution was… the newspaper article almost certainly drew that information from the Wikipedia article. The repetition of an uncited source has, in effect, “laundered” the information, it is now citable– no more verifiable than it ever was; it’s ‘factiness’ has simply reinforced itself. A false statement that the artist “loved black licorice” might become “citable fact” in exactly the same manner.

A lot of people seem to feel that this is a problem with Wikipedia. I argue that it’s actually a problem with everyone else but Wikipedia. If the newspaper had provided a source, or even a bibliography, it would be readily apparent if it was referencing the unverified Wikipedia article.
When politicians throw out a crazy number like “70% of all households that…” wouldn’t you love to be able to instantly check and see where that figure was coming from? To find out what kind of standard was used to arrive at that terribly impressive number?

Sad but true: Wikipedia has a higher standard of proof than network news.

Stephen Colbert is one of the masters of “magic language” in America today… right now it looks like that’s going to get a node on the International Space Station named after him. And last Tuesday it got him knighted by Queen Noor of Jordan.

Naturally, Wikipedia demands citation. Not of the knighting itself– that got enough press attention– but for the modification this imposed of vainglorious title Colbert’s character uses to refer to himself by. Perfectly natural, there was much argument on wikipedia about how to properly register his honorary doctorate. (The common assumption, “Dr. Stephen Colbert” being incorrect.)

So, for the record…

The April 7 credits; 'Sir Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, D.F.A.'

Linguistic forms fulfilled, this fact is now citable. A blog isn’t the best quality source, but for a simple matter of fact it should be more than sufficient, especially when accompanied by pictorial evidence.

The other “magic” linguistic trick used in this blog entry involves copyright. To use that screengrab, I have credited it thusly;
Image (c) 2009 Comedy Partners. Excerpted here as fair use for reasons of citation and commentary.</div>

Credit, unambiguous statement of non-ownership, a point in the direction of the owners, and a simple statement of why I get to use an image that belongs to someone else.
It’s not really that dissimilar to the logic behind providing citation on Wikipedia, is it?

Everyone should know how to properly credit copyrighted material for use. It is a necessary skill in an age when the Public Domain has been so badly eroded and everything around us is owned by someone else. This protects you, and it protects them.

Some people are confused when I say this, since I sometimes write about piracy in my blog… but while I think that Copyright law in the US has been expanded beyond all good sense, I am not in favor of piracy per-se. I just find piracy interesting from a force-gradient perspective.

Fox is trying to give away most of their shows for free on their website already after all, it’s just that the distribution channel they’ve chosen for this is so bad that most people would rather break the law to watch those shows online rather than do so legally through Fox’s site.
Fox feels this is a problem with the rest of the internet, rather than their site.

I feel like I should care about that distinction more, but right now I’m more interested whether Jordan now recognizes Stephen Colbert as a Head of State. Queen Noor did call him the “Leader of the Colbert Nation” when she invested him after all…

02:47 pm - Man vs. Internet

I haven’t watched television since about… 2002? I gave up on normal TV shows first, news was the last to go. This gave me a lot of free time since in 2002 television hadn’t yet migrated online. That’s reduced as I started guiltily following TV shows again (starting with House,) but still nowhere near the 4+ hours a day the average American spends watching TV.
I’ve also come to know the pain of having a favorite series canceled (I think I’m the only one who watched Blade), and my current favored pleasure is Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles.

Terminator has at least half a million people downloading it every week. (I say “at least” because direct-download is growing, and that doesn’t show up on those numbers.) It’s also been canceled, which strikes me as a really odd move with a movie months away. This makes me think that either;

1. The movie really, really stinks.
2. It’s a ‘fake’ (or at least tentative) cancellation to see what happens.

What I see, trying to grab the latest Terminator episode, is that almost every link to it was dead within 2 hours. That the ones which weren’t were dead were bogus (containing deliberately corrupt archives or only the first 15 minutes of the program) and foreign video-sharing sites were having spastic twitchy meltdowns I associate with denial-of-service attacks (or possibly just massive overload) and were unviewable. And meanwhile, on SurfTheChannel (a watch-TV-online indexer site) all the links are dead or nonfunctional except “buy on iTunes” or “Watch on Fox.com.” (Note: This was last night at peak usage. 24 hours later Youku appears to be sorta working again.)
I have no ideological problem with watching the episode on Fox.com where they feed me fewer commercials, but ones targeted to my demographic information. (I doubt Fox.com’s ability to stream half a million copies of the episode as they do their damnedest to cripple the distribution network sending pirated copies around the world, but that’s a separate issue.)
And then I get there– and I remember why I don’t use Fox.com. They want to install software on my computer before they’ll let me view the episode. No.
I repeat, with emphasis, NO. All these sites Fox appears to be going out of its way to strangle in order to force me to use theirs are able to deliver fine quality video without first demanding that I install 3rd party software on my machine. So may I offer a giant flaming “No and Fuck You Too” to Fox.com’s kind offer.
I go to sleep. And I wake up to this:

Well… we knew it was coming.
Ballparking some math… half a million copies of T:TSCC at 300mb+ each is about 130 terabytes, and divided over the 24 hours of peak downloading… that’s about 13GBit/s, or about 17% of the missing internet traffic solely attributable to Fox’s actions. (I’m being semi-facetious here.)
Regardless, with Fox flexing its muscles and Sweeden setting sweeping new legal precedents, now is definitely a time to keep one’s head down. If Fox is trout-slapping pirate distribution channels, BitTorrent (where everyone can see your IP address) is probably not a good idea. Say… trout-slapping, that gives me an idea!
So I find myself on Efnet, a part of the internet that predates the World Wide Web (it’s first major internal schism occurred four years before web browsers were even invented) that’s remained essentially untouched while the internet evolved around it. Efnet in specific was founded by the modern cult that worships the Greek goddess of chaos, which i appreciate.
FServ’s are a type of direct client-to-client file server that leave no records, log no IP’s, don’t occur in a web browser, cannot be listened in on, and are essentially 100% untraceable because they occur between two individuals– no vast pool of seeds like on bitTorrent, no central download server like on Rapidshare. They are less convenient than modern file-sharing methods… but much much more secure. (And in most cases more searchable.) They have no backbone or infrastructure to be torn down or attacked, they can move with 5 minute’s notice– and any legal attempt to monitor their gross traffic would involve exposing thousands of private conversations completely unrelated to the file sharing that isn’t even (properly speaking) occurring on the network– the transaction is entirely between the two individuals. As private as a streetcorner drug deal. Note to self: Find better analogy for this.

Ooh, bonus! I’m getting a faster transfer rate than I did on Rapidshare! Thanks for pushing me to another distribution network Fox!

01:46 pm - Obama’s college writing under scrutiny

Marsailles, France (VP) April 2,2009 — President Obama suffered another setback today as excerpts of an erotic fan-fiction written while in college surfaced on the internet. (Full Story)

http://tc.indymedia.org/2009/apr/obamas-college-writing-under-scrutiny

10:36 am - Five Servos of Seperation - Kevin Bacon Goes to China

Continuing what appears to be a vague Transformers theme to my recent posts… for the second time in a week, the new episode of Transformers: Animated has “dropped early,” or as TFW2005’s news post so tactfully put it:
Once again, Cartoon Network and Turner Broadcasting have succeeded in leaking another upcoming episode of Transformers Animated.
Passive aggressiveness aside, as a lifelong Transformers geek, this is a bit distressing. The current TV series– widely regarded as the best thing Transformers has done in over a decade– has been relegated to Timeslot Hell by the network airing it. And why not? TF’s viewership is less “sticky” than other Cartoon Network series (tending to tune in just for this show) and while CN wants to target a demographic that skews older, the show is widely downloaded by that demographic since they have no desire to get up in the wee hours of the morning to catch new episodes.
Cue a positively-reinforcing cycle of downloading depressing ratings with results in a bad timeslot, which encourages more users to download.

Are you being served?

Cartoon Network allows users to view the episodes online via their website– a few weeks after their premiere, so as not to depress ratings. In theory this encourages viewers to watch the episodes when they’re broadcast instead of online.
In practice it really just make the online video service completely irrelevant, it is tasked itself to “reruns,” not premieres. Youtube doesn’t have an arbitrary imposed blackout period on new episodes, so people watch it there instead, an hour after they’re broadcast.

At least, that’s the normal state of affairs. Recently however you’ve been able to watch the episodes on Youtube before they’re broadcast. Cartoon Network uploads the episodes several days or weeks before their premiere, and simply doesn’t “hook them up.” By changing a few episode numbers by hand– viola!
No, actually, it’s even worse than that. Because you can’t watch the episodes through Cartoon Network’s player (which includes matrix to track viewership,) you can only download the files directly with no advertisements, and no way for CN to know someone is watching.

This is distressing from a security standpoint (the files should not be downloadable at all, let alone for yet-to-premiere episodes,) but more dishearteningly from a systems standpoint– because the CN video player backbone already has in place has a very simple mechanism built into it that would prevent this sort of thing… they simply choose not to use it. (I decompiled their player code last night to check, it’s there!)

Channels of Distribution

What does piracy mean in practical terms? When the episode dropped early I uploaded copies of the .flv files onto my own server for a friend in Canada, since the Cartoon Network site is geo-locked for United States visitors only. From there is gets murkier– a hidden copy of the link was posted on an internet message-board, when very few people seem to have noticed it. But analyzing my server logs, I can see a series of people accessing those files with no referring URL, which means they got the link instant-messaged to them from someone– like a game of “telephone.”
Two hours after I uploaded the files for one guy in Canada, a link to my server was posted on a Chinese message board, and there are suddenly have several Chinese Transformers fans downloading it from me. …Oops.
10 hours (and a signifigant chunk of my monthly bandwidth allotment) later, that’s trickled down to nothing. The episode finally made its way to Megaupload, and from there to Torrent sites (the reverse of the usual pattern!) where much vaster numbers of people will download them. I have no idea if the versions being uploaded came from my server, or via someone else independently exploiting the same security flaw. It’s about 50/50 odds either way– one badly secured file was “transformed” into 30,000+ downloads in the span of about 10 hours. The episode won’t air for another 24.

That’s slower than usual. Usually it only takes 3 hours.

Is There Life on Mars?

The music industry spent a decade fighting the idea of digital music before embracing it– with restrictive Digital Rights Management. They’re now slowly coming to terms with the fact they have to give that up too– because by the time they came around, the consumers had already embraced devices that made that way of doing things a restrictive nuisance.
Television fought the same battles– and is now finally grudgingly releasing their content on sites like Hulu, generally under the same “watch the episodes after a blackout period” system, kneecapping their content in the name of protectionaism for their broadcast advertizers.
And as-can-be-expected, because viewers want to see them NOW, a network has spring up for encoding and distributing the episodes hours after their air– “Fuck your blackout period.”
These pirated episodes, unlike the ones on Hulu.com, have no advertisements whatsoever. If Hulu offered the episodes the same time that they aired… there would be no pirate network. (Or at least it would be very small.)

So the question really becomes… how can the networks sell ad-space on a pirated television show when the people doing the piracy cut out ads?

I argue “yes,” but that’s a subject for another time.