Daily Blend: 04/24/13

Deepak Chopra

I promise I’m not dead! I think. Just reading a lot. And trying to work on my songs.

Also, the searchbar to the right now includes an image search. Just so you know.

A proposal: How about parents put on probation after killing one sick child with prayer lose custody of their remaining kids before they kill another one?

CNN is just actively trying to punish its viewers at this point.

What’s more hilarious than über-crackpot Deepak Chopra ^[pictured] whining about TED “censoring” pseudoscientific talks? (No, really, what?)

And finally, I’ve updated ‘A Morning by the Sea’ over at Creativitas.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

My art blog: Introducing Creativitas!

If I’ve been quieter than usual this week, the reason is I’ve been spending every day planning, designing and coding (and coding, and coding, and …) a brand-new website that I’m now – finally – ready to unveil. You might remember the false start I had ’round last Christmastime when I tried to set up a separate art blog to try and keep my creative works from being tainted by all my inflammatory political rhetoric (heh). Well, I’ve now gone ahead and finished the job.

Now presenting:

Creativitas

(It took me an inordinately long time to come up with such an obvious name.)

All my music, stories and art has already been ported over there and backdated to their original publication dates, here. I’ll now be replacing their instances here with redirects (rather than deleting them outright, which would screw up links and post counts and other details). From now on, the only time I’ll be mentioning my creative works here is to post the occasional notice whenever I’ve updated something over on Creativitas.

So … that’s about it, then. Off you go, and don’t be afraid to sate my hunger for yummy, nourishing feedback. (Pretty please?)

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UPDATE: 04/20/13 1:42 AM ET —

Finished. All posts here have been redirected and their comments closed.

Reorganizing my music; songs offline for a while [updated]

As often happens, I’ve had a sudden change of heart and decided to revamp the folder structure for my music. Which means I have to go and manually rearrange every folder in my FileDen account. Which means changing the MP3 files’ URLs. Which means they’ll all be broken links that I then need to replace (again, manually) across this blog.

I think I hate myself now.

Oh, well. Will update when done. Expect songs to alternate between on- and offline until then.

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UPDATE: 04/14/13 11:00 PM ET —

Okay, I guess that didn’t take as absurdly long as it usually does. All finished, songs fixed, bedtime.

Musical revisionism incoming

An unexpected opportunity regarding my musical works that I may or may not be at liberty to discuss at some point in the near future may have presented itself recently. As such, I am now entering my usual routine of rushing to revise and revamp my songs in preparation, updating them with improved sounds and other various tweaks. As a result, this means you may perhaps expect a higher number of bumped musical posts on this here blog for the foreseeable future.

That is all.

Man, do I rock this cryptic talk stuff or what.

New Disqus is live (sigh)

Welp, it’s official: All those long and tedious hours of work, planning and troubleshooting I’ve put into customizing the appearance and function of this blog’s comments have been promptly rendered moot with the imposition introduction of the New and Improved Disqus 2012™.

Highlights (compared to the previous version) include:

• Inability to customize general appearance (sizes, spacing, colors, etc.);
• Inability to modify code to allow for automatic hyphenation (something I was quite happy with);
• Inability to change position of comment input box;
• Inability to change avatar size or placement (avatars now create a wide margin of wasted space);
• Inability to remove superfluous bells & whistles (fave-like “star” system, “Community” and “My Disqus” tabs, “share” buttons, etc.);
• Inability to disable comment “likes”/“dislikes” (which I’m sure spammers and trolls would never abuse);
• Inability to set a default site-wide comment thread sorting method (by date, popularity, etc.);
• Inability to set custom text colors via CSS classes (which really came in handy for moderation;)
• Inability to hide attached media (though attachment should be disabled for newer threads);
• No more one-click comment editing (now requires browsing through several menus);
• No more “absolute” timestamps (eg. “12/30/2012 12:00 AM”), though you can see it by hovering your mouse over the uselessly vague “3 months ago”;
• Automatic hiding of longer comments by default that can’t be disabled;
• Forced comment nesting (with depth limited to only three reply levels); and
• Presumably several more issues that will surface over time.

Meanwhile, basic functionality like backlinks is still inexplicably missing despite being a quasi-standard almost everywhere else.

In short, Disqus has taken what was a mostly functional and customizable system and rejiggered it until virtually every helpful feature has been either lost or buried under layers of useless, unwanted and irremovable crap, whilst stripping admins of the ability to repair virtually any of the damage. And they call it an “upgrade”.

Look, I’m not opposed to all these new gadgets and trinkets being included in the new platform. If others enjoy them, so be it. But would it really be too difficult to at least give admins the option of enabling or disabling said gadgets and trinkets on their own blogs? Many of the features that are now immutable used to be optional in the previous platform, so it’s not like they don’t know how to do it. Really, what’s more basic and commonsensical than giving users the choice of which features they want included in their product?

I realize I may sound a bit peevish and nitpicky over this, but I think I’m entitled to be. I quite liked the way I’d gotten the old system to work (despite its flaws). Then Disqus decided they wanted to appeal to the crowd’s dissonant whims and simply steamrollered all over it without any choice to opt out.

While it’s possible they’ll eventually improve the current system, I’m not holding my breath. I’m rather going to be looking into alternatives and seeing whether they might give me the control I want over my own blog’s comments system.

</rant>

Daily Blend: 03/13/2013

TJ Kincaid

Heads Up: Later today/tomorrow is when Disqus is slated to force its “upgraded” platform upon users (like me) who still cling to the old, customizable version. Might take a little while for changes to take effect. Stay tuned.

I’m also trying out a new title style for this Daily Blend (rather than the usual long-form date). We’ll see if it sticks. That is all.

Oh, look, it’s another bone-chilling climate study for pseudoscientists and ideologues to deny and lie about!

New Zealand votes to guarantee passage of same-sex marriage. Yay!
(via Joe. My. God.)

Some more gay (in both senses) news: Floundering “ex-gay” group National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) loses tax exempt status, forced to slice their Rentboy budget.
(via Joe. My. God.)

This just in: TJ Kincaid ^[pictured] is still an embarrassment to the atheist community and humanity in general. (Also: Go, Anita Sarkeesian!)
(via @SallyStrange; RT: @jennifurret)

Virginia steps a little further into the 21^st Century by overturning law against “consensual sodomy”. (Wingnut outrage in 3 … 2 …)
(via Joe. My. God.)

And finally, here’s an interactive infographic of global Internet porn habits. (East Europe is amazingly perverted.)
(via Joe. My. God.)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Blend: Thursday, February 28, 2013

Bill Donohue

NOTE: Effective tomorrow, Disqus will automatically “update” the old system (still in use on this blog as of this writing) to the new platform, which trades in marginally improved functionality while stripping any trace of customization. I expect to spend some time tinkering with the new system to try and squeeze out any possible improvement, though I won’t hold my breath. (Configurations and commenting histories should remain untouched.) That is all. (UPDATE: 03/06/13 3:35 PM ET – Date has been set back to the 13^th. So … yay?)

You know, it’s not often that we see priests making accusations of clerical child abuse against their superiors. Refreshing?
(via Joe. My. God.)

Indiana Republicans correct themselves: One government-sanctioned rape by medically pointless transvaginal ultrasound (instead of two) is just right for women seeking an abortion after all.

Another prosecutor thinks the best way to protect teens from the eeevils of “sexting” is by ruining their lives with the criminal justice system.

US Senate finally reauthorizes full Violence Against Women Act despite House Republicans’ best attempts to derail it and strip LGBT, native American and undocumented immigrant protections.

(Old gem) Quacks of a feather: Australian chiropractors accused of being key supporters of the anti-vaccination Australian Vaccination Network.
(via @DrRachie; RT: @BadAstronomer)

And finally, I don’t understand what Bill Donohue’s ^[pictured] anti-abortion argument is, here. I don’t think he does, either.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Blend: Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Vox Day

Quick notes: I made a few minor changes to the commenting rules and revamped the Dungeon. That is all.

Another ACLU win: Federal judge rules key part of NYPD’s “stop and frisk” unconstitutional, orders them to stop immediately.
(via @ACLU_NorCal; RT: @radleybalko)

Ohio’s Jackson Middle School administrators are willing to waste a whole lot of money losing in court rather than comply with the law.

Vox Day ^[pictured]: Sloppy thinker, lazy photoshopper, and all-around terrible person. (Originally planned to devote a full post, but then I realized I just don’t care anymore.)

Public Policy Polling: “While the Democrats in Congress aren't popular (-12 at 38/50) their approval rating is a net 48 points better than their Republican counterparts (-60 at 15/75).”
(via @BuzzFeedAndrews)

And finally, just in case you thought the Freethought Blogs/A+ haters couldn’t get any more pathetic.
(via @DaylightAtheism; RT: @pzmyers)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Blend: Tuesday, January 01, 2013 – Bienvenue à 2013!

Happy new orbital revolution! [source]

Quick note: I now make it my policy to automatically delete empty or otherwise illegibly glitched comments (as now noted in the Commenting Rules). Just so you know. Carry on, then.

Old but important: Anti-abortion activists actually tried to get a doctor fired for refusing to force a mentally ill 10-year-old incestuous rape victim to endure her pregnancy. I couldn’t find any word on whether Dr. Neuhaus won her appeal in the end.
(via Uzza)

And finally, I am satisfied to learn that Fox News’s Sean Hannity lost over half his audience after it was revealed last November how impressively full of shit he is.
(via @BuzzFeedAndrew)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

This year in bloggery: Top 10 posts of 2012

Another year has passed us by, and with it, by far the most traffic this here blog thingy has ever seen (though that’s mostly thanks to one particular incident). Without further ado, here are the ten most popular entries of 2012, as ranked by number of individual visitors:

(NOTE: Stats retrieved 12/31/12 2:13 AM ET by combining browser & mobile traffic data from Google Analytics.)

#10: Australian billionaire plans to build Titanic II
Posted: April 30, 2012 | Unique (Total) Pageviews: 455 (590)
Aussie entrepreneur Clive Palmer declares his intention to oversee the design and construction of a modern incarnation of the erstwhile Ship of Dreams. I can only wonder how amazed or appalled the strict perfectionist in me will be once it’s completed – if it ever is, of course.

#9: House Republicans hinder abortion access for raped soldiers
Posted: June 13, 2012 | Unique (Total) Pageviews: 497 (515)
You didn’t think House Republicans would drop their obstructionist vendetta just because a few thousand female soldiers are raped every year and require access to critical reproductive healthcare, right?

#8: Welfare recipients “are slaves to the government and should be reminded of that fact”
Posted: February 28, 2012 | Unique (Total) Pageviews: 535 (583)
Brion McClanahan at The Daily Caller is peeved at all those freeloading poor people being able to use their food stamps in grocery stores like they’re all that, because “[t]here should be humiliation and pain in government assistance”. (Thanks to Daily Kos commenter dmhlt 66 for the bump!)

#7: This wet koala wants to eat your soul
Posted: July 17, 2012 | Unique (Total) Pageviews: 550 (705)
Who knew atmospheric precipitation didn’t agree with Phascolarctos cinereus?

#6: More fun with the anti-Atheism+ brigade
Posted: October 20, 2012 | Unique (Total) Pageviews: 667 (720)
Where I learned one sure-fire way to attract lots of bigoted stupidity is to state the obvious about how opposing the movement for women’s equality is inherently misogynistic, regardless of the typical misconceptions applied. (Thanks to r/atheismplus-ites for the boost!)

Daily Blend: Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Quick updates: I finally found how to replace the old “Older/Newer Posts” links with actual post titles, something I’ve been trying to do here for quite a while. I’ve also replaced the clunky old search bar with a Google custom search bar, so older posts should now be much easier to find. Oh, and Disqus reactions are finally working again. That is all.

The Atheist Census ^[pictured] is finally back from its DDoS-induced coma, so get yourself counted if you haven’t already.

Speaking of godless representation, a new comprehensive Pew Research Center study reveals that 16.3% of the world is religiously unaffiliated (though not necessarily atheistic, of course).

Not that you need it (I would seriously hope), but the Bad Astronomer has a write-up explaining in detail how and why the world will not end this Friday.

And finally, it looks like the new SimCity will be the first in the series I won’t be spending my money on. It’s a damn shame; I love Maxis, but to hell with EA’s prohibitive DRM fixation.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Blend: Monday, November 05, 2012

Karen Castor Dentel

New blog policy! For the sake of convenience, I henceforth reserve the right to fix any broken links in reader comments (leaving an admin’s note whenever I do so, of course). That is all.

It still bewilders me how some cultures perceive teenaged girls showing the slightest interest in boys as a greater “dishonor” than burning them to death with acid.
(via Friendly Atheist)

Stunningly hideous Republican attack ad compares Florida elementary schoolteacher and Democratic House candidate ^[pictured] to Jerry Sandusky for supporting teachers’ unions.

Shorter buzz-killing scientists: Not only is light-speed space travel impossible, it would also irradiate us to death in minutes. (Stupid hydrogen.)
(via The Daily Grail)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

A quick note about Disqus vs. Blogger comments

When I installed Disqus on this blog, the original requirement was that I keep the default Blogger-platform comments open for the Disqus system to override them. Unfortunately, while this worked just fine most of the time, every now and again I find a slice of spam (or the occasional unlucky commenter) has somehow slipped under Disqus and left a message on the old Blogger system, forcing me to manually repost it into Disqus using my account (thus defeating the purpose of installing the new platform with its comment filtering options in the first place).

Since installing Disqus, though, it appears that the requirement to keep Blogger-platform comments open has vanished, and after a bit of testing, I’ve found that Disqus still works perfectly under posts with Blogger comments disabled. As a result, I have permanently disabled and hidden all Blogger-platform comments on this blog, both to deter any more spam and to encourage readers to use the intended commenting system.

That is all. Now go forth and Disqus!

Housecleaning: Swapping old image hosts for a while [updated ×2]

I mentioned earlier this year that image hosting service ImageShack, which I originally used for this blog’s graphic content before later switching to the superior (if downtime-prone) Imgur, had suddenly imposed limits on the number of images that could be uploaded to free accounts such as mine. As a result, starting on November 01, the 500-max limit will be enforced with the rest of my uploaded content being deleted from their servers, causing a large number of pictures on older posts to go dark.

And so, I’m now launching into a conversion campaign, locating and re-uploading each ImageShack-hosted image to Imgur, which I expect will take me anywhere from a week to the rest of my natural life (and possibly beyond). And that’s if I can get bloody Imgur to work. (There seems to be a curse on me that makes that site undergo “planned maintenance” or otherwise screw up every damn time I need to use it. Notice how I haven’t been able to upload the corner image yet.) (Edit: IT LIVES!) (Re-edit: No, it doesn’t. See below.)

I wonder how many bloggers put as much effort into pointless technicalities as I do.

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UPDATE: 10/09/12 7:27 PM ET —

Naturally, it turns out Imgur’s been down all day, according to its Twitter feed, which means my plans are grudgingly postponed for the time being.

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UPDATE #2: 10/09/12 9:02 PM ET —

Now it lives! Unfortunately, having just realized how many hundreds of images I’d have to manually and individually replace, I’m effectively scrapping the project altogether. Let the older posts go image-less; their content will be unaffected.

Daily Blend: Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Pres. Barack Obama

Quick notes: Firstly, in correspondence with both popular (or so) demand and my increasing weariness, I shall henceforth relegate most doggycide incidents to Daily Blend mentions and reserve individual posts to only the more brazen gob-smacking cases. Secondly, I’m retiring my “Fail Quote” tag as it’s become largely redundant.

Obama administration fights to keep the right to indefinite detention (that Obama ^[pictured] said he’d never use because it’s totally wrong).

Boy Scouts takes a leaf from the Catholic Church’s book, tries to cover up hundreds of cases of child molestation.
(via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)

Doggycide in Bennington County, Vermont: Deputy resigns during an investigation into the shooting death of his neighbor’s escaped pitbull. Details are mostly anecdotal for now.
(via Dogs Shot by Police | Facebook)

Doggycide in Elyria, Ohio: Police kill an “extremely aggressive” “pitbull” by shooting it eight times with a rifle. So many questions that this one-sided police release fails to address.
(via Dogs Shot by Police | Facebook)

It seems New York State has some of the worst sex ed classes ever. (At least they’re illustrated!)
(via @pzmyers)

Conservative wingnuts whine about how the media doesn’t treat the Romney “47%” video with the same suspicion they reserve for serial hoaxer James O’Keefe’s bogus “stings”.

And finally, here are some awesome, touching and generally badass photos of military dogs.
(via @ebertchicago)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Tags: Barack Obama • Obama administration • National Defense Authorization Act • indefinite detention • Department of Justice • Boy Scouts of America • child molestation • Bennington County Sheriff's Department • Chad Schmidt • Donald Loveland • Melissa Kilbride • pitbulls • Elyria Police Department • June Ross • New York State • New York Civil Liberties Union • James O'Keefe • David Corn • Mitt Romney • John Fund • dogs • military dogs • army dogs

Preliator 2012 Survey: Results and analysis

Earlier today, I closed the polls on the month-long Preliator 2012 Survey, the third iteration of my yearly reader census. Here are the results, including replies to personal comments and suggestions. I received a total of 19 responses, not enough to form an ideal decent sample pool, but still more than I’ve gotten in previous years, so I’m definitely not complaining. :)

As before, I’d like to reiterate that all the responses I received were completely anonymous, with the only information I could see being the respondents’ individual timestamps and the answers they chose. So you can sleep soundly tonight, free from any worry of waking up to find subscriptions to Brony Magazine in your inbox. (Unless you’d like that.)

(Note: Some of the “Other” answer choices are marked as such because they were left blank.)

1) Readers’ age

The Preliator 2012 Survey is now closed

It’s been an awesome month, but alas, today marks the end of the Preliator 2012 Survey. I’ve closed the poll, removed the link at the top of the page, and will be going over the results tomorrow. A cool 19 of you (a new record!) have chosen to share a little about yourselves, for which I thank y’all grandly. Nothing beats confirming that people actually do read this little online journal of mine, and that some may even do it willingly. (IKR?)

Tags: Preliator 2012 Survey

I swear this is my last post about my music player [updated]

It’s been a hell of a couple of weeks since my long-beloved embedded audio player (the Google Reader podcast player) suddenly up and died on me. But after a couple of tentative and deeply imperfect solutions, I’ve finally, exasperatedly, arrived at what I dearly hope is the last solution I’ll be making in a long while.

Long story short, I was able to find a copy of the source code for the original Google Reader player, and after re-uploading it to FileDen, I now have a fully functional audio player that works perfectly across all modern major browsers (I’ve tried it in Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer – because people apparently still use that one). You can see it in glorious action right here!

By the by, if I sound anything less than totally excited right now, that’s probably because I now need to go and manually revamp all 50 of my music posts. Again. Again.

Seriously, the things I do for you people. Bah! Will update here when done.

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UPDATE: 08/20/12 6:37 PM ET —

Okay, that went rather faster than expected, given that I didn’t need to upload and convert and reupload and reorganize and link several dozen files this time around. All song posts are finalized. And I’m officially done with this player stuff for a while.

Tags: Google Reader • audio players

Changing my audio player again [updated]

I’m still on vacation (though it’s over in a few days – nooooo …), but I’ve managed to kidnap my computer back from my Facebook-addicted friend just long enough to notice how crappy the recently revamped music player I updated my music posts with really is. It turns out it doesn’t work at all on Chrome (at least from what I’ve heard and tried), and only a few specific plugins even allowed it to work with Firefox at all. In addition, it automatically buffers the entire audio file on each page load, which practically overwhelms my already limited monthly bandwidth allowance from FileDen.

So, after a bit more searching and tinkering around, I’ve arrived at the HTML5 <audio> element, which is the most promising so far. It boasts cross-browser compatibility (so no more being left out for you poor Chromians) thanks to the ability to swap between audio sources (MP3 or OGG), a relatively decent interface (though the Firefox version oddly lacks any volume level controls), and (particularly important on my end) the ability to prevent it from auto-loading the audio before clicking ‘play’. Here’s a little comparison (though note that the Firefox player I’ve seen doesn’t have the empty ‘X’ space above the control bar):

[source]

So, yet again, I am to spend the following few hours slowly and tediously converting all my MP3 files to OGG, then slowly and tediously uploading all my songs to FileDen (and re-uploading the ones that inexplicably fail to load the first or second or third time(s) around), then slowly and tediously revising every one of my 50-or-so music posts, then (slightly less) slowly and tediously testing them out to make sure they actually work this time around. Expect some major stability issues with the song posts until this is all sorted out.

Aren’t my vacations just the best?

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UPDATE: 08/18/12 1:43 AM ET —

Okay, so that took even longer than I expected. But I did manage to safely upload all my tunes and update my song posts accordingly with the shiny new HTML5 <audio> with surprisingly few complications (at least for now). The only problem – because of course there’s a hitch somewhere – is that the player interface doesn’t appear to agree with my Firefox (v14.0.1) and has a nasty tendency to simply disappear the second I click “play”. At least, that’s what it does on the random songs I try it on.

So, yeah, instead of screwing over Chromians, looks like I’ve now kicked Firefoxers, instead. W00t.

Tags: HTML5 • HTML5 audio • music players

On vacation for a few days (fortuitous airline screw-up edition)

So, here’s how the last ten hours or so went down:

Yesterday afternoon. Friend tries to use PayPal to pay for Delta airline tickets to fly over for a visit.

Delta gives him some generic “transfer could not be processed” error. No tickets.

Friend checks his PayPal balance. Payment went through. Still no tickets on Delta’s end.

Cue frantic and increasingly irate phone-calls to typically useless customer service representatives. Arrive at a stalemate.

Skip forward to 3:30 AM (1.5 hours ago at this writing). Friend receives email from Delta: Payment finally, very belatedly, went through. He has tickets.

Departure set for 6:40 AM. Today.

Looks at the time.

Cue maniacal laughter.

So, yeah. From today ’til Sunday the 19^th, consider me temporarily AWOL. (Or whatever the version with official leave is.) Some blogging may still take place, but don’t count on it. I’ll mostly be active on Twitter (to some extent) and saving up more important links for when I return.

Arrivederci!

(The Preliator 2012 Survey is still live, however. I’ve already received more responses than last year’s sad little 12, so wouldn’t it be so totally awesome if you fine folks saw fit to welcome me back in a week’s time with another response or two to finally push it over 2010’s record?)