Author Archives: Craig

Your comment spam of the day

I won’t approve the comment, since if you wanted some trendy headphones with the brand of a highly influential hip-hop artist, you would find them in your own way, but this is some of the best comment spam poetry I have seen in a long time:

Substantially, the material is because of fact the freshest on that laudable topic. Certainly with all your conclusions and may eagerly rely on your forthcoming updates. Declaring many thanks are unable to just be all you would like, for the amazing clarity inside your creating. Permit me absolutely directly get your feed regardless of the kind of updates. Genuine work and far achievement while in the enterprise endeavors!

More Apple License Info

This is now old news, but this post has been in draft for several months.
From the 5.0 license agreement:

When you use Siri, the things you say will be recorded and sent to Apple to process your requests. Your device will also send Apple other information, such as your first name and nickname; the names, nicknames, and relationship with you (e.g., “my dad”) of your address book contacts; and song names in your collection (collectively, your “User Data”)

Granted, they add

All of this data is used to help Siri understand you better and recognize what you say. It is not linked to other data that Apple may have from your use of other Apple services.

I don’t remember this from last time, though it would not have caught my eye last time, either:

9. Digital Certificates. The iOS Software contains functionality that allows it to accept digital certificates either issued from Apple or from third parties. YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR DECIDING WHETHER OR NOT TO RELY ON A CERTIFICATE WHETHER ISSUED BY APPLE OR A THIRD PARTY. YOUR USE OF DIGITAL CERTIFICATES IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, APPLE MAKES NO WARRANTIES OR REPRESENTATIONS, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS TO MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY, SECURITY, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT OF THIRD PARTY RIGHTS WITH RESPECT TO DIGITAL CERTIFICATES.

It’s the little things

A couple weeks ago, one of my Twitter accounts was followed by a spammer. This is not unusual; a huge percentage of Twitter accounts are spammers. The thing that caught my eye—though perhaps not quite as the spam machinery intended—was in the bio: “dip me over and fuck me doggystyle. Whatever you want I will try it (NO ANAL).”
Let’s say I am so naïve that I believe an actual person has set up this Twitter account, and has invited 267 other people to do her doggystyle; do I find her more enticing because her “Whatever you want” is qualified? Especially given that the qualification excludes a pretty mundane practice—am I to infer that she’s up for (in lieu of listing several other possibilities that would likely get the blog undesirable search engine attention, I’ll just say) bloodplay? I just don’t know.

Dead Mann Walking Review

Dead Mann Walking: A Hessius Mann Novel, Petrucha. Yes. Petrucha has created a unique (to my knowledge) first-person narrator in Hessius Mann. I am looking forward to the next installment to see if he can maintain the level of interest, given Tana French’s rationale in giving each of her Dublin Murder Squad books a different protagonist: it’s hard to justify life-changing events happening to the same person over and over. Some aspects of DMW resonate with another recent work I also enjoyed; I think it rather validates Petrucha’s vision that a different group of talented writers went in a similar direction given a related premise. The only passage that pulled me out of the narrative was the improper (and strained) use of “to coin a phrase.”

I’m willing to believe there are 99, and it’s definitely photography; I’ll give them that

It has, again, been a while since we’ve had any good FP examples here, so I was initially thrilled to see this link to 99 self-declared “Excellent Examples of Forced Perspective Photography.” When I followed the link, though, I was disappointed to find that while several of the photographs are excellent, very few of them use FP very well, if at all.

Writing Movies for Fun and Profit Review

Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!, Garant & Lennon. Non-Fiction. This is a ruthlessly practical guide to selling screenplays to Hollywood studios. It also provides appalling and entertaining insight into what is required of a writer in order to make a living doing that. If you are at all interested in the business of writing Hollywood studio movies, I encourage you to read this book. Even if you’re not, it’s probably worth a look.