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It has been popping up on various blogs: the IntenseDebate comment system. If offers a wider variety of functionality than the standard Wordpress comment system. If you register with IntenseDebate all your comments on ID-systems will be collected in one profile, which is pretty useful I’d say!
Tags: intensedebate, plugin, wordpressThe Russian government is in the process of drafting a law to make emo and goth music illegal, says the Moscow Times.
“State Duma deputies, Public Chamber members and social conservatives have hammered out legislation aimed at heading off the spread of emo culture, which they describe as a ‘dangerous teen trend.’
Among other measures, the proposed legislation apparently calls for heavy regulation of emo web sites and for banning young people dressed like emos from entering schools and government buildings.
According to the bill, The “negative ideology” of emo culture may push young people toward depression and social withdrawal, and the movement carries a significant risk of suicide, especially for young girls.”
This news has been popping up on various music websites. It has both been welcomed gladly by antagonist subcultures and outraged the emo subculture itself. I do not consider myself to be any part of the subculture and I do not hold any personal grudges against emos, nor do I hold them in any high regard. The emo subculture doesn’t seem to be as big where I live, and I do not know any emo personally. I’m not going to make any judgements about them - but I am going to about this law.
This is a shitty law based on petty bullshit. Now that we have that out of the way, let me explain why I think so.
We’ve seen this shit before. Do you remember the eighties, and the attacks on heavy metal? Allegations of the presence of satanic messages and subliminal messages kept the ignorant fearful and the informed annoyed. These poor, made-up accusations have been torn apart by those who care to apply logic and reason. So where are all these young, female suicides? Where are the figures for social withdrawal displayed by people who listen to emo music, and why do you reckon such a thing is a danger to society anyway? What is wrong with a fascination for the dark side of life? How many people grow up to be emo for the rest of their life?
And there is no such thing as dangerous music! If anyone is ever so stupid to kill themselves over music: Good riddance! Anyone who lets themselves be negatively influenced by music and who consequently turns into a depressive, gloomy, self-pitying pile of human garbage should kill themselves. If music makes you sad and you don’t stop listening to it, you’re a fucking idiot. I don’t need your endless whining, and nor does the world. Snap out of your pretentious bubble or save us from yourself. Remember kids, it’s down the block, not across the road!
Tags: ban, dangerous, depression, emo, freedom, Music, politics, russia, subculture, suicide
About two weeks after I wrote the review for The Iliad I have finished reading the Odyssey. After about ten pages it became clear to me that the Odyssey is much more fun to read than the Iliad. Whereas the Iliad can get very tiresome in it’s reiterations and lists and unneeded detail, The Odyssey is a fast-paced book full of magical adventure.
The Iliad versus The Odyssey
The Iliad doesn’t delve too deep into Greek mythology and only mentions gods who guide warriors and help heroes. It is a pretty down-to-earth story about a seemingly endless war. The Iliad starts off nine years into that war, and ends maybe a month later - and still the reader is left to guess at the fate of the Trojans and Greeks. It is a dramatic piece full of sorrow, wrath and soldiers dying by weapons of bronze.
In contrast, the Odyssey is a piece ending in happiness and a return. Cyclopes, Sirens, nymphs and sea monsters decorate the Odyssey, making it all the more interesting to read. The protagonist is the wise tricker Odysseus, who is trying to get home after having sacked Troy after a ten year war. Unfortunately, he has angered Poseidon because he did not make offers to this god of the sea, and so Poseidon is making sure Odysseus and his crew have to endure hell on earth. After another ten years lost at sea, imprisoned or otherwise fucked Odysseus returns to his home and slays the men who have been living off Odysseus’ wealth, trying to seduce his wife into marrying on of them. An epic tale ending in slaughter: What more can you wish for in this happily ending timeless tale?
In conclusion: If you have to choose between the Iliad and the Odyssey: read the Odyssey.
The journeys of Odysseus [Sort of synopsis]
Odysseus starts his epic journey falling into the hands of the Cyclope Polyphemus. This cyclope has a taste for Odysseus crewmen, and eats a bunch of them before Odysseus and his remaining men drive a huge stake through his one eye. They escape and after almost reaching home Odysseus men fuck up majorly and open a bag that the master of winds had given our protagonist. The bag contained the winds that could have guided them, but now they’re just being swept away from home again. They visit the wind master Aeolus again and set sail again. The first island they encounter and land is unfortunately inhabited by cannibals, and crewmen are eaten, ships are destroyed. Odysseus flees with his remaining men and finds another island. This one is inhabited by Circe, a goddess that turns people into pigs - she’s a funny one. Our clever twat Odysseus tricks Circe and she is made to turn Odysseus’ men pigs back into men. They chill out for a year before Circe tells them they have to go east first right into the fucking underworld. Shit! Odysseus talks with some dead people including his mom and receives a glimpse of the future from a dead prophet. Our protagonist returns with his men to Circe’s island and she tells them how to get back to Ithaca. Unfortunately, that means passed the Sirens who sing to sailors and seduce them to come closer and hit the rocks and die in Davey Jones’ locker - yes, these Sirens bitches are sadistic - and past a many-headed monster and a whirlpool. They survive (or rather: most of them) but on the first island they encounter Odysseus men do something Circe forebade them: Kill and eat of the cattle on that island - for they are Helios’s cattle. For some reason, this god likes looking down at cattle. Everybody gets killed in a following shipwreck because of it except Odysseus, who didn’t eat of the cattle. He floats and gets to an island inhabited by a nymph who has the hots on for Odysseus and keeps him there for some seven-odd years. After that, Athena pleads for Odysseus release at the feet of her father Zeus, and he grants her will. Odysseus is instructed to make a raft and drift over the ocean until he finally finds an island inhabited by normal people, who help in to get home. At home, dressed up like an old beggar he makes a bloody mess out of his wife’s 108 candidates using his bow, but also with the help of his son and two of his slaves.
That was epic.
Tags: greek mythology, odysseus, odyssey, reviewI’ve been wanting to make a post like this for a long time, and now I’ve found the time to do so. In this post I’ll talk about the extensions I use for Firefox, and other customisations I have made or preferences I have set. I consider myself a “power” user, meaning that I have tried to optimize my Firefox for enhancing browsing speed and certain functionality that allow me to do more with my browser than your average user. Furthermore I still try to keep my plugins to a minimum because my computer is a daft old machine that needs replacement. In conclusion: If you are looking to harness more power in Firefox whilst not having hundreds of plugins that hog your computer’s resources, this article is one I’d recommend you read.
This picture shows a clean install of Firefox, with the bars numbered (for later reference).
Theme
I use the NASA Night Launch theme because it is the best dark theme I have been able to find. It looks very nice with my black Windows XP theme, which is one of the main reasons I choose for a dark theme in the first place. The only negative thing about this theme is that it is very large (1.7 MB!) compared to other themes, but I can’t say if this actually affects my performance. It does mean that it includes 100% theming and some sub-themes as well!
Bars and buttons
I try to keep my bars to a minimum - in that way I maximalize the actual website space. Your standard Firefox comes with a lot of bars. On top: The menu bar (1), the location bar (2), a bookmarks bar (3) ,the tabs bar (4) and on the bottom: the status bar (5). Some people even want to add yet another bar such as the google bar (6). This is way too crowded for me.
First of all you can simply get rid of the bookmarks bar. I’ll provide better ways to quickly access your bookmarks later. To get rid of the menu bar, I have installed the Tiny Menu plugin, which places the bar with a pop-up menu. By right-clicking any of the top bars and choosing the bottom-most option you can shuffle around your bars and buttons. You can place the tiny menu button at the front of your location bar. Furthermore, you should opt for small buttons instead of large ones - and get rid of buttons you don’t need. Also, you can remove the little search bar at the far right. I’ll clue you in on how to use search functions more effectively later. After some time I decided to also hide my status bar. I can still access it by hovering over it’s bottom border. To do this, you must add the following code to your userChrome.css file:
@-moz-document url(chrome://browser/content/browser.xul) {
#status-bar { border-top: 1px solid ButtonShadow !important; }
#status-bar {
height : 1px !important;
min-height : 0 !important;
overflow : hidden !important;
}
#status-bar:hover,
#status-bar:focus,
#status-bar:active { height: 24px !important; }
} /* 20070927 */
The following screenshot is what I am left with:
Now it’s starting to look like something that I can feel comfortable with. There is one other visual add-on that I wish to share with you, and that is the LocationBar2 plugin. It will make the URLs in the location bar much clearer. I think it is the best that I just show you another screenshot instead of me trying to explain. You can customize the way URLs look, and this is my version of it:
Plugins
Now that we’ve set Firefox up for maximum browser space and how to display URLs nicely, we can move on to adding some necessary plugins. I’ll include the plugins I mentioned earlier, too, just to be complete - I’ve marked these with asterisks (*).
Power browsing: Bookmarks
The key to power browsing (to me) is making use of bookmarks. Firefox offers very useful functionality. FF3.0+ uses a tagging system for bookmarks, but I would like to show some insights in how useful the previous “keywording” is. For every bookmark you can add a keyword (install OpenBook). If you enter that keyword into your location bar, you’ll visit the bookmark. I’ve set one-letter keywords for websites I use daily, such as my social networking messaging centre pages.
Firefox also offers the usage of keywords for searches. Right click any serch box and “Add keyword for this search”. I’ve set up a lot of search keywords, ranging from Wikipedia and Google to Amazon and Last.fm artist pages. The keywords aren’t hard to remember if you use suggestive ones. Use “g” for Google, “w” for wikipedia, “a” for Amazon, “l” for last.fm, et cetera.
If I want to look something up, I hit <ALT-D> (the most important hotkey) type the keyword and enter my search term. No need to touch my mouse! Of course, power browsing is also includes the heavy usage of tabs and knowing how to operate them using keys only, but I’m sure you’re quite aware of this already. And with that, I want to conclude this small article.
Tags: add-on, firefox, optimisation, plugin, set-up, settings
Last.FM Journals
