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Ed Webb

BBC News - Blizzard cuts off Iranian access to World of Warcraft - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...technology-19399375

games gaming mmorpg WoW Iran sanctions

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • "This week, Blizzard tightened up its procedures to ensure compliance with these laws, and players connecting from the affected nations are restricted from access to Blizzard games and services," read the statement. Unfortunately, said Blizzard, the same sanctions meant it could not give refunds to players in Iran or help them move their account elsewhere. "We apologise for any inconvenience this causes and will happily lift these restrictions as soon as US law allows," it added. Although the block on Wow has been imposed by Blizzard, other reports suggest a wider government ban might have been imposed. Players of Wow and other games, including Guild Wars, said when they had tried to log in they had been redirected to a page saying the connection had been blocked because the games promoted "superstition and mythology". Blizzard said it had no information about Iranian government action against online games.
Jared Bernhardt

Do We Really Need a Nightline/Twitter Show? - News and Analysis by PC Magazine - 0 views

www.pcmag.com/...0,2817,2346933,00.asp

Twitter Nightline Micro-blogging

shared by Jared Bernhardt on 12 May 09 - Cached
  • Jared Bernhardt on 12 May 09
     
    Twitter and Nightline? Wow.
Jared Bernhardt

Second Life | Currency Exchange: Buy or Sell Linden Dollars (L$), the currency of Secon... - 0 views

secondlife.com/...currency.php

Second Life Money

shared by Jared Bernhardt on 09 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Jared Bernhardt on 09 Apr 09
     
    Yes--I remember reading something about being able to convert Linden Dollars into US dollars..not that this is that shocking with gold in WoW being sold on eBay.
Ed Webb

The End of Solitude - ChronicleReview.com - 0 views

chronicle.com/...21b00601.htm

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09 - Cached
  • if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Discuss!
  • Reading, as Robinson puts it, "is an act of great inwardness and subjectivity." "The soul encountered itself in response to a text, first Genesis or Matthew and then Paradise Lost or Leaves of Grass." With Protestantism and printing, the quest for the divine voice became available to, even incumbent upon, everyone.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Mark Edmundson makes a similar argument in "Why Read?" - http://the-ed-rush.blogspot.com/2009/01/book-review-why-read-by-mark-edmundson.html - he believes reading has the potential to be life-changing.
  • The world was now understood as an assault on the self, and with good reason.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • The Romantic ideal of solitude developed in part as a reaction to the emergence of the modern city. In modernism, the city is not only more menacing than ever, it has become inescapable, a labyrinth: Eliot's London, Joyce's Dublin. The mob, the human mass, presses in. Hell is other people
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      "Hell is other people" - L'enfer c'est les autres - is one of the more famous utterances of Jean-Paul Sartre.
  • authenticity
  • heroic self-discovery, a voyage through interior realms made vast and terrifying by Nietzschean and Freudian insights
  • the universal threat of loneliness
  • But through the 70s and 80s, our isolation grew. Suburbs, sprawling ever farther, became exurbs. Families grew smaller or splintered apart, mothers left the home to work. The electronic hearth became the television in every room. Even in childhood, certainly in adolescence, we were each trapped inside our own cocoon. Soaring crime rates, and even more sharply escalating rates of moral panic, pulled children off the streets. The idea that you could go outside and run around the neighborhood with your friends, once unquestionable, has now become unthinkable. The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the grandparent of a kid who sat alone in front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot. We were lost in space.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      This begins to veer into conservative reaction - compare to Rothman on television. Is all so gloomy, really? Would we all be happier if things were more like the 1950s? I really don't think so. Only the rich white men would be happier.
  • A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point.
  • Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection
  • My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And of course, they have no time at all for solitude
  • The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern
  • Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negative experience of that state. Television, by obviating the need to learn how to make use of one's lack of occupation, precludes one from ever discovering how to enjoy it. In fact, it renders that condition fearsome, its prospect intolerable. You are terrified of being bored — so you turn on the television.
  • consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.
  • has been said
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Passive mood raises questions: said by whom? in what context?
  • the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Wow - now, that is nicely written, whether one agrees with it or not.
  • Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading
  • Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Are both kinds of reading not possible?
  • there is no mental space that is not social (contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory). One of the most striking things about the way young people relate to one another today is that they no longer seem to believe in the existence of Thoreau's "darkness."
  • The MySpace page, with its shrieking typography and clamorous imagery, has replaced the journal and the letter as a way of creating and communicating one's sense of self
  • The suggestion is not only that such communication is to be made to the world at large rather than to oneself or one's intimates, or graphically rather than verbally, or performatively rather than narratively or analytically, but also that it can be made completely
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Do we really buy that suggestion? Does anybody? I know what Facebook et al are selling, but am not convinced too many are buying it.
  • We are not merely social beings. We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood.
  • One must protect oneself from the momentum of intellectual and moral consensus — especially, Emerson added, during youth.
  • Today, of course, universities do everything they can to keep their students from being alone, lest they perpetrate self-destructive acts, and also, perhaps, unfashionable thoughts. But no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral, can arise without solitude. "The saint and poet seek privacy," Emerson said, "to ends the most public and universal."
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Harsh, dude. But possibly fair. Does this mean universities are broken? Beyond redemption? Or is the argument too sweeping here? Not everybody has the talent or inclination to be a seer. Those that do, will find their solitude, surely?
  • Solitude isn't easy, and isn't for everyone.
  • But it takes a willingness to be unpopular.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 09 Feb 09
       
      Almost anything worthwhile takes that willingness.
  • Not for nothing does "gregarious" mean "part of the herd."
Ed Webb

Marines ban Twitter, Facebook, other sites - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

twitter censorship military socialnetworking

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Aug 09 - Cached
  • "These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries," reads a Marine Corps order
  • The Marines' ban will last a year.
  • Price Floyd, the Pentagon's newly-appointed social media czar
  • Ed Webb on 04 Aug 09
     
    I wonder if this will also apply to forum-based communities. I know many in the armed forces, including USMC, play online games such as Cybernations or WoW - a great deal of the interest is in the social side as much as the gameplay.
Ed Webb

Beirut's draq queen scene is starting to flourish, inspired by Ru Paul - The Washington... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-a17e-162b712e8fc2_story.html

Beirut Lebanon drag LGBT LGBTQ

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Jan 19 - Cached
  • Beirut’s drag-queen scene
  • The Middle East is known for its conservatism, but with its febrile nightlife and more liberal mores, Beirut has long been hailed as a relative haven for the region’s LGBTQ community, though not without challenges.
  • Performers usually turn up in their street clothes, transform into a whole new character, then shed their costumes again before slipping back outside. Anissa, though, will be making an entrance tonight. A car to the venue has been organized, and she wants to enjoy the reactions of her fellow passengers. 
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Many here who became drag performers grew up watching Bassem Feghali, a comedian who gained popularity in the early 2000s by impersonating female singers. In 2015, Evita Kedavra, a Palestinian Armenian drag queen, took the stage, and one by one, the circle grew. 
  • With dozens having taken the plunge since last year’s Grand Ball, the artists credit one celebrity above all: RuPaul and his wildly successful talent show “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” “That made a huge difference,” said Narcissa, another drag queen, of the Emmy-winning U.S. television series. “Suddenly everyone was watching it, and you just thought, ‘Wow, I could do that, too.’ Those artists taught us a lot.”
  • a scene that blends an homage to American drag culture with something distinctively, and irreverently, Lebanese. Anissa Krana and Narcissa exude Hollywood glamour, all tumbling curls and dresses with jewels. Performers like Kawkab Zuhal set kohl liner on dramatic lashes for acts lip-syncing to Arabic music or telling sharp jokes about Lebanon’s crumbling political system. 
  • The Grand Ball earlier this month was to be at one of the biggest, with some 30 contestants competing in front of an exuberant, tightly packed crowd
  • In October, to almost everyone’s surprise, “RuPaul’s Drag Race” star Sasha Velour strode through one of Beirut’s most famous civil war landmarks, a brutalist-style cinema still riddled with bullets known as the Egg
  • “My drag is what I couldn’t be when I was young,” said one performer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety. He said he had started trying on his mother’s heels and makeup in secret, years before coming out as gay. When his parents found out, they barred him from their house and his friends turned on him. He lives with other drag queens now. “They’re like my family,” he said. “We help each other with food, with makeup, money — everything.”
  • Although the Lebanese state is more tolerant of homosexuality than other Arab governments, the penal code can still be invoked to make arrests
  • “We don’t have stable laws here,” said Narcissa. “One minute, the state is looking one way; the next, it’s staring right at us.”
  • Only a small number of venues are recognized as “safe spaces” for the drag and broader LGBTQ community, and owners must have strong ties to local authorities to ensure the police won’t turn up and harass attendees
Ed Webb

Translation project offers Israelis look into Palestinian literature - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...-translation-poems-novels.html

Israel Palestine israelpalestine literature language Arabic Hebrew stories translation culture politics

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Oct 19 - Cached
  • Only 0.4% of Israeli Jews under the age of 70 can read the stories in the original Arabic language, he says. He also points to the fact that according to Israel’s National Library, less than 1% of all literature translated into Hebrew was written in Arabic, and 90% of the translators were Jews
  • The stories of “Amputated Tongue," which all deal in various ways with language deprivation, is written by 57 Palestinian writers from Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and abroad. The impressive compilation of contemporary Palestinian prose was translated into Hebrew according to a unique model by 36 translators, where one Arab and one Jewish translator collaborated. One-third of them were Palestinians. The short stories by some of the best Palestinian writers provide Israeli readers with more than a glimpse of entire lives lived in this land, and of this land.
  • The project lasted three years. Its goal was to give a voice to Palestinian Arabic society in the hostile climate created by Israel’s right-wing regime that views Arabic as an enemy language — as made abundantly clear in the 2018 Nationality Law, which downgraded the status of Arabic as an official language. The anthology targeted those few Israelis who want to know more about Palestinians but have had little exposure to them until now.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The first story in the compilation is by Gaza resident Sama Hassan, titled “No." It tells the story of a woman whose husband repeatedly rapes her, sometimes until she is bleeding, but she cannot utter the word “No." “… Over and over he cut into her flesh, which grew increasingly tough until she emitted a groan of pain. … You are nothing but the family’s property, was the first grating thought. Hands and womb, hands and womb." I told Burbara that the story had shocked me. I put the book aside and could not continue reading for a few days. “We put ‘No’ first on purpose,” she explained. “We wanted readers to feel and tell themselves, ‘Wow, what is she telling us? How will we learn more about the women in Gaza who are not heard.’”
  • Given the nationalistic climate in Israel, with a prime minister who incites hatred of Arabs, I asked Burbara how many Jewish Israelis she thought would read the book. “That is the million-dollar question,” she answered. “But I believe that if you start to drip water on a stone, it digs into its surface and leaves a mark. 'Amputated Tongue' is the first rain that will drip onto the Israeli stone and dig into it deeper and deeper.”
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