2013 – Key Takeaway

Posted on May 11, 2013 by bluedepth

Give your newer sisters and brothers-in-WordPress one piece of advice based on your experiences blogging.

If you’re a new blogger, what’s one question you’d like to ask other bloggers?

The best advice I can give is to be honest but have control over what you say. Honesty is the best policy, as the old adage is fond of saying and it keeps blogging simple as you don’t need to remember any lies you’ve written in order to keep your blog internally consistent. However, honesty has it’s limits, and that has more to do with sharing and privacy. Depending on why you blog, sometimes you may find yourself wanting to write about something private. I think that assigning posts passwords is a great feature to WordPress and makes sharing securable.

Some things are worth talking about, writing about. Some things you share aren’t really meant for your coworkers of your employer and then the best policy here is to slap a password on the posts and keep them private from wandering eyes.

There are a lot of great reasons too, to blog independently from WordPress.com. Having control over your content, not having to worry about quotas or paying for extra services all make self-hosting with WordPress.org really worth it in the long run, especially with the right hosting provider. I’ve found a lot of the plugins that enrich the self-hosted option of WordPress.org makes the product really shine. Here are some things to look into if you think blogging may be for you:

1. Fixing your .htaccess file on your blog. This can be configured to restrict your blog from foreign browsers. I’ve decided to ban entire countries from reading my blog mostly because I don’t agree with their politics, and in the case of China, I’ve gotten quite tired of comment spam. By limiting incoming traffic from browsers using this file, you can preclude them from ever being a problem. Just because the Internet is global doesn’t mean that you should feel forced to respect that globality.

2. Blacklist & IP Filter – These two plugins help identify unwanted IP addresses that are unwanted on your blog and the plugin IP Filter helps you block those with more configurability than you can get with .htaccess.

3. Akismet and Jetpack really help protect and extend your blog. Every blog I host has these two plugins and once you get them configured properly they add so many wonderful features to your blog that it’s difficult to imagine using the blogs without them.

4. PhotoDropper – This plugin makes searching for and inserting pictures in your blog posts a cakewalk. It takes care of searching for the terms you want, only shows you Creative Commons licensed imagery so you don’t accidentally run afoul of image copyright holders and automatically includes credit lines to your posts to help respect the people who are sharing the imagery you are using on your blog. It’s about as turnkey as I’ve been able to find when it comes to finding and crediting blog pictures that I use to enrich my blog posts.

Beyond plugins it’s also worth it to mention AgileTortiose’s iOS app Drafts. This app makes writing anything, journal entires, emails, and blog posts a snap. You can update on any connected device until you are ready and the destination selector feature makes pushing your updates out to various service a snap. I journal with DayOne and I post to WordPress using Poster. Drafts has options for these other apps and a dizzying array of more just for the tapping.

Blazing Bright

Posted on May 11, 2013 by bluedepth

Does the collision of beauty, attention, drugs and promiscuity always lead to suicide?

This was a question that came to me after reading a few reports in the news about adult entertainers who were committing suicide. I’m not sure if it is that their suicides are remarkable or rather that sensationalist reporting is to blame for concentrating the reports in the popular media. It seems to be a common thread in the adult entertainment industry. That people who appear to have everything have personal wreckage that they are carrying around and eventually they just can’t cope with what is unfolding in their lives and they shoot or hang themselves.

If its a natural extension of their lifestyles, an extension of the Hollywood dysfunction, where fame, power, money, attractiveness, and drugs collide in ruined lives then this post is just a subset of that, but to me it seems that this sort of thing appears to happen to adult entertainers with remarkable regularity.

I suppose the adage of the candle that burns twice as brightly lasts half as long. In it may be a lesson against the Adonis complex. Working so very hard to look like the people you see in the movies or on TV (or in more prurient forms of entertainment) is actually one more thing that is, in the end, bad for you. The best way to be is to be who you are. Don’t try to be like anyone else, just be the best you that you can be. If that best you carries around weight, or some other not-in-the-ideal characteristic it is likely best to celebrate that feature of yourself. If the Hollywood “clone machine” is any lesson, when you get what you think it is that you want, you find that it’s actually nothing and eventually that makes you sad. Does it lead to suicide? Probably not, but it probably isn’t good for you either.

This gets me thinking that fame should be listed as a negative life event, kind of like a self-defeating Trojan Horse. It looks good on the outside, but it’s jammed with disaster on the inside. Perhaps the feelings of “not being enough” is a healthy warning against the false gold of the object of your pursuit.

Iron Man 3

Posted on May 4, 2013 by bluedepth

Last night Scott and I went to see Iron Man 3. The movie was a nice summer movie that came out too early. It should have been released in June or July. Generally the best part of the movie was the time spent in the dialogue between Tony Stark and the kid was the best section of that movie.

The movie was okay, it wasn’t as good as the first two movies and it squandered the Mandarin character. Sir Ben Kingsley was pretty much wasted in the role of the Mandarin, and casting the Mandarin as a shill ruins the central tale behind Iron Man. Tony’s primary battles are alcoholism, his relationship with his father, Pepper Potts, and on a grand scale the battle between Technology and Magic. The Mandarin is supposed to be in command of supernatural powers provided to him by the Rings of Makulan. Tony is the expression of humanity wielding Technology and the central story is this battle between the supernatural and the technological. This movie also trots out Extremis. The comic books and the Iron Man Anime forged a canon that Extremis was a tool for Tony to use to bridge the gap between the organic and inorganic so that Tony could be on-par with his technology as much as the Mandarin is on-par with his magic.

The movie pretty much squashed Extremis as a sideline curiosity, elevated AIM to primary villain status and squandered the Mandarin. In the comics AIM was always the bumbling army of grunting henchmen, they weren’t clever or particularly villainous, they were principally retarded thieves. But the movie pretty much just shat all over all of it.

Marvel’s excuse that they trot out to calm the criticisms down is that the movies exist in a parallel universe called the ‘cinematic universe’ so these issues don’t matter. That feint gives them an out to write whatever they want, essentially giving a pass to all this character mangling.

I would not see this movie again, once is enough, and due to a rather prolonged free fall scene I would definitely not see this movie in IMAX. The content is okay, but not worth 3D or DBOX prices. I would give it 7/10 stars. It is qualitatively worse than the previous movies.

One Slipped Key

Posted on May 3, 2013 by bluedepth

While working I wrote a little bit of SQL, trash really because it was just a one-shot query, real short too, and I wanted to show off the SQL code for making the iModules degree info pretty. Instead of clicking open, I clicked the save button. I found the file I thought I was opening and double-clicked. The computer asked me “Are you sure you want me to save using this file, overwriting the old file?” and I absent-mindedly clicked Yes.

The little useless fragment of SQL code replaced my huge SQL script. Boom. All gone. So sorry.

So then I was thinking about how I could recover the file, that it was on my laptop at home and so if I could turn off the Wifi at home and start my laptop I could copy the file before the Dropbox sync app replaced what I needed with my mistake.

But then I thought there should be something in Dropbox that helps address my stupidity. Turns out there is. Right click on your oops file, click on “View Previous Versions” and it opens a website and shows you all the previous times you saved your file on the service. Oh look, there’s all my hard work, right there. Click. Whew!

So, how much do I love Dropbox? Even more.

photo by: JD Hancock

C2E2: Creating Comics with Comixology

Posted on April 27, 2013 by bluedepth

While sitting in listening to the Comixology staff hawk their Submit technology, which is quite nice to see especially for independent comic book creators there was a point raised at the end of the panel by one of the attendees. That some people are hesitant to engage with digital comic books because they perceive their purchases not as licensing but rather as chattel. When I buy an issue of Comic X for $1.99 in paper, I have that comic and I can put it somewhere safe and always go back and enjoy it. What then for the digital comics? What if Comixology collapses? This touches more than just comics and the real discussion is actually cloud escrow. Cloud services could collapse at any time taking their content with them, right down the drain. Evernote, Dropbox, Comixology, and even Google itself could founder and collapse leaving behind a smoking corpse and no way for customers to retain the data they consider as theirs.

The industry has perhaps accidentally selected this as a possibility by only conducting business in a cloud infrastructure way, it’s a thin veil on digital rights management — a way for content creators to secure their goods for sale (DRM) without driving away their customers, that veil works quite well. Except for when things utterly fail. What happens when fail comes to call?

When this fear pops up in other, more serious business discussions there is usually a section devoted to source code escrow services from escrow surety companies. So is there room for cloud escrow services in today’s world? Would that be enough to help keep people feel safer so that they would presumably give digital comic books a chance?

I can’t deny that this could be a great niche for a middleman company to step up and offer a kind of data presence insurance. The cloud products you buy are safe, permanently so, not by the companies that fail, but by the escrow service that vouchsafes the data in question.

What’s to keep the escrow service safe? This may be a irreducible hall-of-mirrors. There may be no way for people to feel absolutely safe until content is delivered in an open non-DRM format. I seriously doubt that DRM will go anywhere soon, so this may all have to be sidelined as an argument for some other time.

What started out as a blog post about escrow services has apparently turned into a railing against DRM. There may be no way out of the argument over DRM. It all comes down to “Who do you trust?” And “Can you?”.

C2E2: Where is DC?

Posted on April 27, 2013 by bluedepth

A disturbing thought occurred to me this morning. In regards to DC and their lack of show-floor presence at C2E2. When you come to a convention like this, it’s your best opportunity to connect with your fans, otherwise known as your customers. The usual way to do this is to have some prefab construction that your fans can spot and congregate around. Marvel, Dark Horse Studios and the three big tee-shirt companies Graphitti, Stylin Online, and SuperheroStuff. No DC presence at all on the trade show floor. When asked about this, DC stated that they wanted to engage in the panels and let their artists engage in Artists Alley.

I can understand the logic, but It seems rather remarkable and upsetting. Marvel brought their A game with a big beautiful HDTV with Avengers on a play-loop. DC? They didn’t even come to the game, let alone bring anything for us. They are still giving things away, as is the custom, but only in the panels. It’s fine really, but indicates a disturbing new take on how DC considers conventions and fan/customer relations.

What occurred to me that pushed my worry buttons even harder was the way DC is treating their writers and artists. I call it DC’s Musical Chairs for their creative staff. This upsets the fans because you like how a story is being told and how it’s being illustrated and after a few issues things change. This points to DC turning their creative staff into a commodity pool. You have X random writer and X random artist and they seem to be selected by dartboard or roulette wheel. Ignoring the convention goers by abandoning the trade show floor shows a mark of carelessness that only gets reinforced by the musical chairs. Who cares who writes Superman? Who cares if he’s made of teeny triangles, stick figures, or photo-realistic styles? DC doesn’t. This turns their conventions and their creatives into commodities, just another rude list of ingredients which lowers the art down to mechanistic pablum to seed fandoms and sell movie tickets.

I say rude because this squandering of talent and respect is eroding the brand identity. Marvel is making off with all the jewels. Our attention is on Marvel, on The Avengers, not on DC, Green Lantern (movie flop) or, and here’s the real obnoxiousness, where is Superman?!? You’ve taken a archetypal hero (he is now, everyone recognizes superman) and squandered him. The Man of Steel movie comes out in a few weeks! What are your fans thinking? We’re thinking about Marvel, The Avengers, and Iron Man 3.

Superman didn’t show up.

This was an error DC. You are sliding down the drain and eventually your fans will wander away. I only hope this sort of concern, and the reasons for it are just a blunder, never to be repeated.

C2E2: Thrillbent and Comixology Panel

Posted on April 26, 2013 by bluedepth

Today I learned about a new comic book site hosted by Mark Waid. The site is called thrillbent.com and I’m quite interested in taking a deeper look. I asked Scott about Mr. Waid and if I’d like his work and he said “Duh, yes. You’ll love him.”

After the digital comics first panel and a recent look at the @comixology app I feel it is only fair and appropriate to blog about how they have improved because they definitely have.

C2E2: DC Panel

Posted on April 26, 2013 by bluedepth

The Q&A is less about DC rah-rah and more about DC not having a show-floor presence, a don’t-wanna-be-dead Damian Wayne, and fans expressing irritation on DC’s musical chair design for writers and artists in their titles. Mostly it’s back-pedaling and affable excuse mumbling. It’s not pretty.

At least they’ll be coming out with a story about trillionaire teenagers, because flogging that trope has a oodles of miles left in it. L.O.L. 😉

C2E2: Digital Comic Panel

Posted on April 26, 2013 by bluedepth

Attending a panel from a company called iVerse about Digital Comics. Lots of talk about price points, acknowledging the 800 pound silverback in the room, Apple, and talking about digital libraries. Social networking is still the red-headed stepchild, phrases like “… Twitter, whatever.” which I find *hilarious*.

What I find really interesting is when these digital comics will become so mainstream that they feel comfortable moving forward with a Netflix model where you pay a monthly fee and can access as much as you like.

Now we’ve entered the dimly lit world of licensing versus ownership, flooding, fire, or company collapse. How can you secure your digital goods if you lose access one way or another? Thinking about this topic with some of the things I’ve experienced in my professional life you would just need a source-escrow agreement so when the company fails, the content you purchased is made available to you in an open format. This doesn’t exist now, but it could.

Bluedepth's Journal

Thoughts & Opinions

Iron Man 3

One Slipped Key

C2E2: Creating Comics with Comixology

C2E2: Where is DC?

C2E2: DC Panel

C2E2: Digital Comic Panel