Haibane.info

Category: meta

  • sharing

    I see that Shamus is offline for going above bandwidth 🙁 (UPDATE: he’s back!) The likely culprit is his brilliant “DM of the RIngs” parody which reinterprets The Lord of the Rings as a D&D gaming session. It’s a concern that all of us hobbyist bloggers, especially in the otakusphere, should share – we tend to put creative things online, be they motivational posters or site maps or videos of our kids or audio samples from our favorite science fiction. The assumption we make in putting them online is that only a small circle of readers will partake of our binary goodies, which is the essential opposite of the political blogsphere in which the only output is text and everyone wants to get the Big Link.

    One way to reduce our vulnerability is to use thirdparty services. YouTube for video and Flickr for photos (or comics) are obvious solutions. But what about audio? Is there a Flickr/YouTube for pure sound? It would be pretty interesting. An obvious but utterly illegal use for such a service would be to put your music collection online so no one could access it. If you were able to password protect your audio links however then you could upload copyrighted content for your personal exclusive use. However, I doubt such a solution would satisfy the RIAA given that they took on mp3.com a few years ago for a similar scheme. Still, maybe the RIAA sees the benefits of YouTube’s collaboration with the MPAA and might be open to fresh thinking. Or maybe not.

    But would an audio sharing site have any appeal without copyrighted content? Most would argue no, but I can see a lot of people using it for their own stuff. There’s an active MIDI community for example that would probably love a YouTube-like interface to simplify their filesharing. Brief excerpts from popular radio and TV are also probably justified under fair use, as well. And of course voice recorders are almost ubiquitous now on digital cameras and cell phones and mp3 players, so baby’s first words and ad-hoc skits and even random interviews might onstitute a large fraction of the content. I know that in college my friends and I experimented with WAV files and microphones for all sorts of things… Today’s computing environment affords exponentially more capability.

    So, does such a service already exist? should it exist? what should it be called?

    Update: an interesting blog post about audio sharing. And there’s already a service called Odeo which has some of the functionality that I am looking for, and seems tailored to podcasts in particular (which is an obvious application of such a audio-sharing site). Odeo seemed to have been founded by Evhead of Blogger fame, and there’s already a WordPress plugin. Seems promising. I’ll have to play with this thing further…

    Update 2:

    powered by ODEO

  • diversification

    I’ve added two new categories to the blog. The previous post inaugurates one, and I’ll inaugurate the other today after lunch. I’ve got a third in mind, too, but that will have to wait for a bit…

  • kawaii poster contest

    voting has begun in Riuva’s motivational poster competition. (warning: many entries NSFW!) I got one sympathy vote from Shamus. I guess my entry was too Haibane-insidery.

    ah well. if you’re gonna vote for something, vote for Sugar! In fact, I think I’ll start a kawaii poster contest of my own. Anyone want to take a (SFW) shot? First prize will be me printing it out for the enjoyment of my four year old (who is about halfway done with Hooked on Phonics). Here’s an entry to get us started that sets a low bar indeed: Waffo

    The rules are: kawaii, safe for work, and readable by a four year old 🙂 (and I guess it doesn’t need to be exclusively devoted to Sugar.. I guess. We can even accept that penguin chick too.)

  • Bridge Bunnies

    Finally! someone has started a anime blog titled Bridge Bunnies. It’s run by Ubu Roi (of Houblog fame) who has wisely decided to put his anime content on a separateblog from his politics to avoid burnout (precisely why I started Haibane.info, in fact). And the name just rocks – I claim partial credit!

    Still, I am disappointed that Kim, Sammie & Vanessa didn’t make the banner image.

  • Welcome, stranger!

    So, you got here via Oceangram, eh? I assume you read the following message in a bottle:

    We are all castaways on the ocean of culture. But some castaways have more in common than others. If you spend your time on the deserted sandy beach dreaming of Anime, Science Fiction, and other geek miscellanea, then drop by Haibane.info. There’s a welcome message for you here:

    Welcome, stranger!

    Do drop by! The welcome mat will never fade… And leave a comment, using guest account login gilligan, password [REDACTED].

    I think that leaving URLs in oceangrams is the best possible use. After all, Google itself represents a vaster sea of random enlightenment than any ocean – simulated or otherwise. I wager that the actual bandwidth of real bottles in the real ocean is pretty much negligible compared to this very blog alone.

    I think I’ll throw a bottle with the message above into Oceangrams on a regular basis. I’m eager to see who ends up on this shore as a result.

    hat tip to Steven, Shamus, and Da Duck.

  • memomes

    Matoko tries to convince me that memomes are a valid concept for discussing super-rationality; I am not convinced.

  • Super-rational

    Steven made the following comment at Chizumatic recently: “The fact that you and I disagree about something doesn’t mean you know more about it than I do. Sometimes people who have exactly the same body of knowledge will disagree anyway.” He correctly notes that I am a disciple of this axiom. In fact, I even launched a blog dedicated to that idea. The blog, Super-rational, makes reference to a very interesting experiment run by Douglas Hoftstadter, a variation of a single-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma. That blog is really structured as an extended discussion, between contributors as carefully filtered as the participants in DH’s priginal experiment. I consider the blog itself to be a meta-discussion on the statement above – and the statement above to be self-referential in a sense because the point it makes is itself an unprovable statement, to which different observers will come to different conclusions!

    Ultimately, why do people disagree? Because we never are able to truly have the same body of working facts? Or because of a deeper flaw with the very process of reason itself?

  • a happy 4th

    Just got back yesterday from a nice, long vacation in San Diego. 300 emails, a pile of work at work, and a bunch of neglected blogs.. ah, priorities, priorities!

    Hope y’all had a great holiday.

  • with great power…

    …comes great responsibility. That’s always been the maxim of the two superheroes who are arguably the most important, iconic characters in the history of American comic books: Superman and Spider-man. Since Spidey is younger, Uncle Ben had to explicitly spell the principle out for him, whereas Supes just sprt of imbibed it from the example and upbringing of his adoptive parents. But that is the tie that binds these icons and why they resonate so strongly with the American psyche.

    So I find myself extremely pleased indeed at my Superhero Personality Test results… (more…)

  • Akismet

    Bit the bullet and enabled the Akismet plugin. In the last week the number of comment spams I have received has gone up drastically.

    Why can’t WordPress just give me the option to restrict commenting ability to registered users?