Sharktopus. Really. I’m Not Kidding. And A Special Treat.
Just when I got comfortable thinking that Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus set the low water mark for entertainment, SyFy comes along and produces Sharktopus. (Thanks, Miss C. Thanks SO much 
.) I knew it was coming, but some small part of me held out hope that it would never see the light of day. No such luck.
Apparently Eric Roberts hasn't had much to do lately. My best info is that Sharktopus will grace our screens in September. I know I'll be watching.
Now, as if this wasn't enough, SyFy has also seen fit to give us Mega Python vs. Gatoroid. Here's a preview:
Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, based on the preview, seems like not much more than an opportunity to get 80's singers Debbie Gibson and Tiffany onto the screen at the same time. (Gibson, if you recall, was the female lead in Mega Shark.) If they can find a way to get a cameo by Kylie Minogue, they'd have a trifecta.
I'll probably watch this, too - I'm particularly impressed by its sharply written dialogue.
It's apparently going to grace us with its presence in 2011.
So many bad movies. So little time...
-Jay
The Badger’s Guide to Internet Fauna, Volume 2
Today we'll look at some more of the exciting denizens of the internet. Classification of internet fauna can be tricky, because different species often share characteristics that, at first glance, seem remarkably similar. The key to successful classification rests in being able to determine which of these characteristics are derived characteristics and which are examples of convergent evolution. Another way of considering the matter is that while assclowns may behave similarly, there are a lot of different ways to get to that point.
If you have spent any time at all on internet discussion boards or on blogs with topics that are in any way controversial,you've probably seen discussion participants who tend to get argumentative, in the manner of the characters in Volume 1 of the Guide to Internet Fauna. Typically, these gits will eventually get banned, but that's often not the end of them.
Enter...
The Sock Puppet - Representative Generic Specimen
The Sock Puppet - This pernicious pest uses a variety of techniques to create new identities from which he can continue his asshattery.
These techniques can vary depending on whether you run a blog or a forum, and whether or not you require registrations. There are several categories:
The Premeditated Sock
The Premeditated Sock - This subspecies of Sock will register for your site, and then (possibly over a period of weeks or months) create several different identities. The more advanced Premeditated Socks will use multiple IPs and e-mails to conceal their common owner. These sleeper Socks may remain dormant for years, or they may be active throughout their lifetime, chiming in on discussions from time to time. It can be extremely challenging to positively identify such users as Socks. Often it takes comparisons of writing styles or trends within discussions to ferret them out. An infestation of such Socks can be a nightmare for the administrator of a large blog or forum, since they able to hide effectively amongst the normal users. One helpful clue is that if you ban someone who has been a heavy participant in discussions, and a user who has rarely or never posted turns up loudly defending the banned individual, you might be dealing with a sock.
The Impulsive Sock. Note the slovenly appearance
The Impulsive Sock - This variety of Sock is usually easier to detect. Typically, a participant gets banned, and within a day or so a new user appears that interacts much like the banned identity. Often, an administrator can figure out what's going on just by comparing IPs or the registrant's e-mail address. While stamping out Impulsive Socks isn't typically as challenging as dealing with the Premeditated sort, it can be no less frustrating. Often what the Impulsive Sock lacks in sophistication he more than makes up for in tenacity.
The Multiple Personality Sock
The Multiple Personality Sock - Occasionally you'll notice several commenters that always seem to interact with each other, sometimes in rapid-fire succession. They may all agree, or there may be one hold-out that the others gang up on, but you can pretty much count on the fact that if one comments, they all will. This may be a case of the Multiple Personality Sock. A recent example of this (which actually inspired me to write this) is illustrated here. If you observe what you think might be a Multiple Personality Sock, you can have a little fun by trying to provoke the various faces of the Sock into arguing with each other.
The Agent Provocateur Sock
The Agent Provocateur Sock - The last sort of Sock to mention here is the Agent Provocateur. These are rare, but dangerous, and tend to emerge during times of strife. Despite their innocent appearance, their sole purpose is to foment discord. Typically, they'll initiate their troublemaking with a private message or an email, maybe something like "I just wanted to tell you that you're doing a really good job of moderating the Godzilla Back Scales forum. The other mods are real hard-asses, especially Fire_Breathing_Mama." Your alerts should start triggering at this point, because:
It's very, very likely that you're dealing with an Agent Provocateur Sock. It may be someone who, in fact, doesn't like Fire_Breathing_Mama and is trying to dig dirt on her, or it might be Fire_Breathing_Mama herself trying to figure out who her friends on staff are. Or it could just be someone trying to stir up trouble. Don't take the bait. It's much better not to let yourself get dragged into the middle of internet drama.
And with that, we complete our brief survey of Sock Puppets. For our next installment, we'll be looking at the vast and varied world of Trolls.
-Jay
The Badger’s Guide To Internet Fauna, Volume 1
The internet is a wide and varied environment, with a tremendously diverse group of denizens. In many cases, there's a layer of anonymity to the internet, so it's not always apparent who you're really interacting to. In some ways, you may come to think of people you interact with on the internet in terms of their behaviors.
Many of those behaviors are innocent in the sense that the person exhibiting the behavior probably doesn't realize exactly what he or she is doing. A fine example of this is when someone new to the internet1 sends YOU AN E-MAIL TYPED IN ALL CAPS AND POSSIBLY CLASHING MULTICOLOR FONTS. .
Other things that fall into the same category are naïve but well-intentioned warnings about internet threats:
WARNING!!! If you receive a message from someone named Stabby McEvil O'Bastard with an attachment named "800 Ways to Barbecue Kittens", DON'T OPEN IT!!!!1111!!!! It's a virus that will infect your computer, melt your hard drive, and then crawl out of your monitor and steal your soul when you're asleep and the world will end in 2012!!!! Immediately forward this message to everyone you've ever met to make sure they're safe from this!!
Ummm. Yeah. Snopes.com should be a default bookmark in every browser. Before you get your boxers in a twist over some alleged threat to freedom, the internet, and kittens, take a minute and check into it. This sort of behavior seems very common on social networking sites like Facebook, which leads me to my next category:
Conflation of personal and professional interests in awkward settings. If you run a business with a web presence, more power to you. When you start weaving that business into your personal web presence, it can get weird and annoying really quickly. An acquaintance of mine just got her real estate license. She lives in a small town in another state. Many of her Facebook friends do not live in her state. A huge number of her postings these days are descriptions of homes she's listing. In her town. Which are of extremely limited interest to anyone not in her town. Which is most people.2 Just set up a separate page for your business, and use your personal page to keep in touch with folks. It'll probably work better for you anyway, and you won't alienate the people who friended you because they're actually interested in hearing things about, say, your family or something.
Most of the interactions on social networking sites like Facebook are voluntary, so it's pretty easy to ignore things that don't interest me, but sometimes it seems that for every one status update or posted link that is interesting, there are several dozen "I'm bored now" status messages to wade through. The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low.
Enter forums. Forums give their members the opportunity to engage in strident argumentation with people they've never met over topics that most people don't care about, such as the number of spines on Godzilla's back in the original film.3 Forums also take the following equation to its limit: Internet + Anonymity = Assclown. Some of the ways this equation may be expressed are:
- The Asserter. Makes claims without making any effort to back them up. When challenged, will often react defensively by releasing a cloud of new claims, much like a squid releasing ink into the water to escape a threat. The Asserter occasionally proves useful by providing fodder for discussion.
- The flip-side of the Asserter is the Demander of References. The Demander of References will challenge any point in a discussion which he feels are not adequately supported, even relatively non-controversial points like the color of the sky or the chemical composition of water. It is not uncommon for the same individual to assume the role of both the Asserter and the Demander of References, often in the same discussion.
- The Reflector. The Reflector is less common than the Assertor or the Demander of References. The usual behavior of the Reflector is to use a valid source to make an invalid claim (he might, for example, claim that a 95% confidence interval in some reported data is the same as a 95% chance of any single value in the range being correct). When someone points out his error, he'll appear to accept the explanation, but then turn it around and attempt to claim that the new interpretation still supports his point.
- The Goalpost Shifter. Superficially similar to the Reflector, the Goalpost Shifter will make an invalid claim, and will appear to accept (all or part of) the explanation, but will then retreat far enough from his original position to require a different specific explanation. Goalpost Shifters can be quite skilled and crafty.
- The Lunatic. Most forums have a certain number of regular members that are the equivalent of the creepy guy on the bus sitting in the back mumbling to himself. They randomly show up in discussions and make bizarre, off-topic comments that only make sense within the confines of their delusional architectures. They're harmless for the most part, but on occasion figure out how to start new threads, at which point the become the equivalent of the creepy guy on the bus who forgets his pants every morning.
- The Walk-off. The Walk-off will engage in an argument for a while, often quite civilly, but will at some point abruptly leave the discussion. He will then go to either his blog or to another forum that agrees with his ideology and declare that he won the argument that he walked away from. Crucially, he won't link back to his "victory", and may well not even mention the other venue by name. It's common for these obnoxious gits to build up quite an impressive resume of "victories" that evaporate like mist in the sunlight if you take the time to dig in and verify them.
- The Smoldering Ember. These guys can be fun. They give every appearance of being articulate, intelligent individuals who are normally very polite (though perhaps a big condescending). However, beneath the surface lurks a raging beast that can be unleashed if you happen to press the right combination of buttons. Maybe you express your opinion that his preferred expert is a barely literate charlatan, or maybe you point out that he's selectively applying his logic to everything but his own position, but in the end he explodes in a tirade of profanity-laced invective so scorching that people from other forums join yours just to watch the fireworks. The Smoldering Ember often vanishes for a while after that - either from a formal suspension or in an arrogant huff - and when he returns will once again be wearing his mask of sanity. When the Smoldering Ember goes off, he frequently reveals new, heretofore unknown, buttons that will subsequently be pushed.
I consider blogs to be like extremely personal and somewhat less compartmentalized versions of forums, and so we should expect to see quite a bit of overlap between the rogues in both venues. A key difference is that forums are often very partisan, so discussions on one forum don't often spill over to other forums (unless the discussion is about the forums themselves), but discussions can start on one blog and drift from blog to blog depending on who gets spun up enough to pick up the topic. This dynamic leads to a couple of interesting variants.
- The Grenadier is a specialized descendant of the Walk-off. At some point in a discussion (which may be ranging over multiple blogs), the Grenadier will retreat to his own blog, where he will continue the discussion with himself. He'll accomplish this feat by abandoning the other active discussions without warning, and will pick up where he left off at his own place. The problem is that he won't tell anyone else that he's done it, and he won't provide any links back into the original discussion. He'll then start tossing verbal grenades at the other bloggers who, unaware that they're being pelted, won't have anything to say. The Grenadier will then spin this silence as evidence of his superior logic and argumentation skills when in fact it's just evidence that everyone else thought he went away.
- The Recruiter. Occasionally someone in a blog discussion will go out and recruit his friends for help, particularly if the discussion isn't going his way. These friends will engage in the discussion by repeating the same points that the Recruiter has been making, but slightly out of phase - Recruiter makes Point A. Blogger responds to Point A. Recruiter makes Point B. Friend 1 makes Point A (again). Blogger responds to Point B and to Point A (again). Recruiter makes Point C. Friend 1 makes Point B, and Friend 2 shows up and makes Point A (again), and so forth, with the result being that the blogger must choose between addressing the same points over and over or ignoring the repetitions. Eventually, the blogger will give up because he's arguing with a bunch of tree stumps and write a movie review, and the Recruiter and his friends will slink off to their blogs and declare victory.
- The Batshit Crazy Canadian Computer Salesman Who Comment-Spams With Incoherent Screeds And Threatens To Kill You. There's only one of these that I know of.
There are, of course, other sorts out there, but many of those lack the entertainment potential as the ones listed here, and are often more difficult to spot. They're kinda like Pokemon in that respect.
- Jay
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1They still exist. They frequently go by names such as "Grandma", "Grandpa", and at least in one case, "Dad". As far as I'm aware, my father has never touched a computer, let alone surfed the internet. I've seen him answer the phone, but never dial it. He probably belongs to a support group for technophobic older gentlemen.
2I know a number of realtors. Most are very nice people and I have no real problem with them trying to do their job. I realize that the people who succeed in that business tend to be the more agressive ones, but really, some of them need to dial it back a little.
3The sheer number of web forums out there is astonishing. There are forums for movies, TV shows, music, science, religion, mythology.
Gadget Acquisition
I recently acquired a Kindle.
A Kindle DX, specifically, which is the version with the larger screen.
I had originally considered such things to be gimmicky and largely pointless, because my overwhelming preference is to read real books, ideally in a comfortable chair in a quiet room with minimal distractions. Consequently, the idea of reading glorified .PDF files on a special computer that does pretty much nothing else seemed about as far away from my standard reading mode as you can get.
That said, I also travel a lot, and I tend to take several books at a time with me - usually hardcover, often large, and almost always awkward. Books are heavy, especially stuffed in a carry-on that's already loaded up with a laptop, notebooks, and whatever other pseudo-essential things I've crammed in there. If I put books in the checked baggage, they're displacing something, but it's been a series of tradeoffs that I've been willing to live with.
Also, left to my own nefarious devices, I'm a book-marker and a note-taker. The book marking issue I've managed to get under control with the liberal use of bookdarts - small, very thin page markers that I keep in tins scattered around the house (and in the car, and in the backpack...). The note-taking is a more challenging issue. Often, I'll make notes and references in the margins of the actual books. That may seem heresy to some, but for volumes that I own and intend to refer to from time to time, it's the method that makes the most sense to me. Sometimes I'll make notes on separate sheets of paper and tuck them into the book when I'm done, or will make notes in a Word file, but I find those methods to be inconvenient.
Anyway, back to the Kindle.
My objective was a reading device that was easy on the eyes, had a fairly large established library, that enabled note-taking, and supported multiple alternative platforms. I played around with some alternatives - Sony's Reader and the Barnes & Noble Nook, for example, as well as the iPad (which I can't bring myself to consider seriously just based on the name), but in the end the Kindle's multi-platform support and note-taking motif won me over.
Kindle has client-side apps for BlackBerry smartphones, iPod Touch/iPhones, PCs, and Macs. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to learn that somebody has gotten a hacked version running on an Xbox. That flexibility and the synching of Kindle libraries across all the platforms means that I can have access to reading material in just about any situation.
The chicklet keyboard on the Kindle device lets me enter notes on-the-fly that stay with the book. I haven't explored how those notes transition between platforms yet, so I must withhold comment on that aspect of the device.
The readability of material on the device is extraordinary. Reading large amounts of text on a computer screen is unpleasant for me - I suspect because I'm always the same distance from the screen, whereas with a physical book there is some variation, so my eyes aren't focusing at the same distance for long periods of time. The Kindle allows for such variation, and provides a very paper-like look. I haven't found eyestrain to be an issue, despite several lengthy reading sessions.
Amazon has done a good job of supporting the Kindle with a large and varied library of books, and there is a huge catalog of older, public-domain titles available for downloading. Most of the titles I looked for were available.1
All-in-all, I'm quite happy with the device. The only thing that really jumps out at me that I wish Amazon would do is tweak their content model so that books that I've already purchased from them in physical editions would be made available to me for, say, $5.00 extra. There are a number of books that I'd like to have available electronically, but I'm not inclined to pay an additional $15 or $20 for them, but that's a minor ding against an otherwise well-thought-out device.
-Jay
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1And a lot of titles that I wasn't looking for. I was looking for Richard Preston's Ebola book, The Hot Zone. Most of the Kindle hits for the words "Hot Zone" are porn titles. I probably shouldn't be surprised.
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