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I do some writing for fun and enjoyment. I've written a few thousand pages of anime fanfiction, original fiction, essays, rants, etc.

I prefer TextPad on Windows and have used BBEdit on Macs. I used to use Super NoteTab on PC, but I moved to TextPad for a few of its features.

I will not use a word processor for my writing. Period. I will not choose a font. I will not use 'styles' until I'm finished and want to convert my work to stylized text for a web page. I do not want tables. I do not want headers and footers. I do not want 'assistants'. I loathe, I loathe, I loathe autoreplace features! If I wanted a fucking long dash rather than two hyphens, I wouldn't have typed in the two hyphens, would I?

I really loathe vi's 'modal' text entry and prefer the ability to drag text around with a mouse. I like soft-wrapping, but it's not essential. I like spell-checking, but hate the underlining features of Word that check spelling and grammar. Yeah, I know that sentance isn't formed correctly. I took high-school English. Quit bothering me, dammit!

I wrote a short piece comparing Bush to Hitler a little while back:

http://www.furinkan.net/display.php?pageid=119

Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi

[does spit-take with coffee into monitor; writes this one-handed while wiping the screen]

So now the pirates are wrapping themselves in the sari of Ahimsa?! Glad I read it here; If someone had told me this, I would not have believed it.

Thanks, son, for my laugh of the day.

Oh, wait, I just visited your homepage.

Anime Fan-Fic, eh? Great God in Heaven, where do I begin...? I'd probably have an easier time finding some common ground with a cross-dressing Islamic fundamentalist... OK, try these two concepts:

[1] Imagine that all the manga, from which so much of the anime that floats your boat is based on, were to suddenly be given away for free. I'd say you'd be looking for a new hobby pretty quickly. Might I suggest butterfly-catching?

[2] Or, let's imagine that, instead of spending your time writing derivative work based upon that of another creator, you had enough talent to author an original story (I know it's a stretch, but work with me on this one, 'kay?). Let's even pretend that you had to support your family on the revenue you derived from the distribution of your masterpiece. Dat ol' information don't want to be so free anymore, now, does it, Bunky?

One last suggestion: Print out what you wrote here today, and save it in a cigar box, to be opened 20 years from now. This way, after you have become one of those "old people on the Internet" whom you abhor, and are about to chew some naive punk's head off in whatever constitutes a cyber-community in 2023, you'll show some restraint, being reminded of your own angry and idealistically naive youth.

It (usually) works for me.

Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi

[does spit-take with coffee into monitor; writes this one-handed while wiping the screen]

So now the pirates are wrapping themselves in the sari of Ahimsa?! Glad I read it here; If someone had told me this, I would not have believed it.

Thanks, son, for my laugh of the day.

Oh, wait, I just visited your homepage.

Anime Fan-Fic, eh? Great God in Heaven, where do I begin...? I'd probably have an easier time finding some common ground with a cross-dressing Islamic fundamentalist... OK, try these two concepts:

[1] Imagine that all the manga, from which so much of the anime that floats your boat is based on, were to suddenly be given away for free. I'd say you'd be looking for a new hobby pretty quickly. Might I suggest butterfly-catching?

[2] Or, let's imagine that, instead of spending your time writing derivative work based upon that of another creator, you had enough talent to author an original story (I know it's a stretch, but work with me on this one, 'kay?). Let's even pretend that you had to support your family on the revenue you derived from the distribution of your masterpiece. Dat ol' information don't want to be so free anymore, now, does it, Bunky?

One last suggestion: Print out what you wrote here today, and save it in a cigar box, to be opened 20 years from now. This way, after you have become one of those "old people on the Internet" whom you abhor, and are about to chew some naive punk's head off in whatever constitutes a cyber-community in 2023, you'll show some restraint, being reminded of your own angry and idealistically naive youth.

It (usually) works for me.

you dont get blogs, yet you seem to be maintaining one. i dont get that.

Funny you should mention that. I wrote a short rant about it in June:

http://www.furinkan.net/display.php?pageid=83

These semantic arguments are not silly and boring. They are crucial to how the debate is framed. If you are charged with said actions, it will fall under violations of copyright law, not theft of property. The morals of each is are starkly contrasted; one is the literal taking of another's physical posessions (ideas are no posessions; ). The other is violating set of chains American society placed upon itself to promote "useful arts and sciences" and is embodied in laws defined by solely by corporations, with no regard to public interest; read Jessica Litman's "Digital Copyright" for how exclusionary and pro-settled-corporations copyright law is set up.

There is nothing inherently morally wrong with reproducing information; it doesn't go against the principles of freedom that are described in the Declaration of Independence or Constitution. This is talked about in at http://www.furinkan.net/display.php?pageid=75

I get irritated if I don't have eyecandy to look at while I work. I've made several anime- and movie-themed wallpapers of various kinds. While not a program that generates art, I do make the photoshop files containing both 'borrowed' and original art available for others to modify.

I like to see this behavior, particularly in games like 'Freesim', where you can download and edit the tiles.

Where are those popups everybody seems so angry about? Haven't advertisers stopped using them around the time Mozilla was released?

Recently, I decided to redo my personal site with a PHP backend for easier updates. In the process I decided to eliminate all javascript from my site. I had an image gallery that opened images in a popup, and most of the text files were targeted at new browser windows. Turning on Moz's first version (not the newer, slightly more intelligent version) of 'Don't open new windows', it elminated about half the content on my site.

Javascript is a wonderful thing, but it's just like anything else. If abused, it's ruined for everyone.

Now, I'm happier. My users are happier. Those of us using Moz are infinitely happier than those using IE.

better image quality? you just finished saying png is lossless, and jpg is lossy. how can it be better image quality? its WORSE image quality. but at a much better file size.

Get yourself a reasonably noisy, graidient toned image. Any given photograph will do. Resize it in the editor of your choice, Photoshop, PSP, the GIMP, or any of a dozen others. Then, set yourself a reasonable filesize, like about 90k for a full-screen image.

Save it as a jpg, reducing the quality enough so that it fits within your target filesize. Now save it as a png, reducing the color depth enough to get as close to 90k as you possibly can.

You probably *won't* be able to compress a full screen image with PNG to 90k without only using 2 colors, but get as close as you can. Now examine the two images, each of which should have *some* distortion, regardless of the fact that PNG is lossless at 24 and 32 bit color depth. This is because PNG is *NOT* lossless at lower bit-depths and has to dither color information just like GIF.

Despite the fact that the two files will be approximately the same file size, the jpeg will look much better and clearer even if it is much smaller than the jpeg.

If you don't beleive me, please see the following two files I've created for demonstration purposes:

http://www.furinkan.net/amethyst.png

http://www.furinkan.net/amethyst.jpg

Since Adobe's PNG library is not as efficient at compression as some out there, I've given the PNG image 20 extra K or so on the jpeg. As you can see, the jpeg is flawless unless you start looking at it in depth on a pixel-by-pixel basis while the PNG image is visibly flawed.

better image quality? you just finished saying png is lossless, and jpg is lossy. how can it be better image quality? its WORSE image quality. but at a much better file size.

Get yourself a reasonably noisy, graidient toned image. Any given photograph will do. Resize it in the editor of your choice, Photoshop, PSP, the GIMP, or any of a dozen others. Then, set yourself a reasonable filesize, like about 90k for a full-screen image.

Save it as a jpg, reducing the quality enough so that it fits within your target filesize. Now save it as a png, reducing the color depth enough to get as close to 90k as you possibly can.

You probably *won't* be able to compress a full screen image with PNG to 90k without only using 2 colors, but get as close as you can. Now examine the two images, each of which should have *some* distortion, regardless of the fact that PNG is lossless at 24 and 32 bit color depth. This is because PNG is *NOT* lossless at lower bit-depths and has to dither color information just like GIF.

Despite the fact that the two files will be approximately the same file size, the jpeg will look much better and clearer even if it is much smaller than the jpeg.

If you don't beleive me, please see the following two files I've created for demonstration purposes:

http://www.furinkan.net/amethyst.png

http://www.furinkan.net/amethyst.jpg

Since Adobe's PNG library is not as efficient at compression as some out there, I've given the PNG image 20 extra K or so on the jpeg. As you can see, the jpeg is flawless unless you start looking at it in depth on a pixel-by-pixel basis while the PNG image is visibly flawed.

I agree with Taco, too. The interface of blender, when compared to other modeller's interfaces, sucks donkey balls.

It may be very quick for someone who takes the time to learn it and become one with the app, but as someone who's sat down with several modellers over time, yes, including candy-coated Bryce, it's almost unfathomable. The icons are meaningless, the tools are painful to use, and the vast array of options given to the user make absolutely no sense. It wouldn't be so bad, but understanding of all these is required to do anything at all in the modeller.

I've spent quite a bit of time with different modellers, but when I tried to do something so simple as to create a rendered sphere in Blender, it took me almost two hours to figure out that the reason my image was coming out blank was that Blender does not provide default lighting... like every other modeller out there does.

Blender can and has been used to create some fantastic graphics. I'm so glad that it's been open sourced so that development can continue. As a graphic artist, however, I strongly encourage the design team to *completely* revamp the interface. It may what programmers want, but it's definietely *NOT* what artists want.

When I recently redesigned my site, I spent time creating a fairly robust table/css layout scheme. I implemented it and checked it in a variety of browsers... Including Lynx and Opera, just for you zealots/bigots.

Since I developed with Moz as my 'reference' browser, I didn't see the need to check in any other version of Netscape. Checked it multiple times in IE. After I was satisfied that it would work, I posted it. Low and behold I found that I had a few dozen emails the next morning from angry Netscape 4.x users wanting to know why the hell I took my site down.

It seems if you nest style delcarations inside a table element in Netscape 4 series browsers, it hides the affected text, rather than displaying what it doesn't understand anyway, ala the HTML spec.

The hell of this was that I *knew* that Netscape 4.0 behaved this way from an earlier site I designed, but hadn't even thought about it since Mozilla 0.7 came out.

As someone who makes lots of free sellable and href="http://www.furinkan.net/fanfic/">unsellab le content, I think The Wayback Machine is an invaluable resource. I can look back a see how big a dork I was and still am. I've also found stuff of mine that I've lost over time, amazed that anyone ever bothered to hold on to it.

Yes, the server space and bandwidth are mine. These are finite items, requiring either physical parts or service to maintain. Those are property. The information... the text, images, and everything else are available to anyone else who comes there.

Would you like to download any of the images I've created? I put a copyright notice on them so that people will not try to use them for for-profit works without first contacting me, but you're welcome to download the image, use it in almost any way you see fit and spread it to all your friends? Feel free!

In the first place, it was created to protect individuals against corporations. Now it's used by corporations to take advantage of individuals. There are just too many advantages to having no restriction on the flow of information. As the poster put it 'leveraging other business' should be the only way people who make information, be it text, code, music, etc... make money. It's the way I and everyone I work with makes money.

It's also the way I spend a great deal of my free time.

Patents, copyrights, and 'intellectual property' has got to go. If not, then when we, as a society, manage to convert fully to a non-scarcity based economy, those who have the ownership rights to information will be kings and everyone else will be paupers.

I wrote an essay for my website about this subject some time back. You can find it here:

http://www.furinkan.net/display.php?pageid=75

The one exception that I would make to getting rid of all IP laws is the use of Trademarks. These are less in the way of making a piece of information which *should* be able to be copied freely uncopiable, but is a lot more about an individual or a business uniquely identifying themselves.

Other than that, IP law has got to go. End of story.

In the first place, it was created to protect individuals against corporations. Now it's used by corporations to take advantage of individuals. There are just too many advantages to having no restriction on the flow of information. As the poster put it 'leveraging other business' should be the only way people who make information, be it text, code, music, etc... make money. It's the way I and everyone I work with makes money.

It's also the way I spend a great deal of my free time.

Patents, copyrights, and 'intellectual property' has got to go. If not, then when we, as a society, manage to convert fully to a non-scarcity based economy, those who have the ownership rights to information will be kings and everyone else will be paupers.

I wrote an essay for my website about this subject some time back. You can find it here:

http://www.furinkan.net/display.php?pageid=75

The one exception that I would make to getting rid of all IP laws is the use of Trademarks. These are less in the way of making a piece of information which *should* be able to be copied freely uncopiable, but is a lot more about an individual or a business uniquely identifying themselves.

Other than that, IP law has got to go. End of story.

I have to say that this is a way of trying to shut out non-commercial sites from the web. For example, my site is a privately run anime fansite with nothing for sale and no adds. Despite this, it gets flagged for not having a compliant privacy policy.

Now, I suppose that I could make a privacy policy for my site, but why should I have to bother when I'm obviously not in any kind of business, let alone selling personal information?

The web should be for *everyone*, not just businesses with large advertising budgets. Shutting out sites who don't have privacy policies posted is FUD tactics against little guys, plain and simple.

I am an artist and an amature writer. I own a domain and pay for hosting service. I host my artwork, which I have made available for free download, on my website. I also host both my fiction and my non-fiction on the same website. I pay a certain amount every year for domain and hosting.

I also pay a certain amount per year for cable modem service. If I wasn't afraid of the privacy implications of running a file-trading service such as Morpheus, Kazaa, etc... I could host those files on my own cable modem connection rather than pay through the ass for domain and hosting.

Downloading the code now... at a whopping .8 k/s.

'sokay. I'll just let the download run all night and maybe I'll have a whole tarball in the morning. If not, I'll try again and grab it off one of the mirrors that will inevitably spring up.

What I'd really like to see come out of this, however, are 'userland' Win32 and MacOS implimentations ala 'Triangle Boy'.

I'm simply not much of a coder, or I would spend time on this, since I think it's such an important project.

Make this usuable for both experienced and inexperienced admins, and you have done a great deal for privacy and freedom.

I don't really agree with you.

For those who visit my website, you would know that I am a big fan of the Ranma 1/2 anime and manga. Recently, I had the opportunity to obtain a complete, free, fan-translated run of the manga in GIF format. Each page was its own image, and had to be read with a web browser or image viewer like IrfanView (free) or ACDSee (not free).

Despite the fact that I already have it in a digital format, I continue to pay for the 'legitimate' release of Ranma 1/2 as it comes out, month by month, at $3.95 an issue.

When I want to re-read a story or figure out a particular reference for a fanstory, however, rather than reaching for the stack of manga... I pop in the CDR containing the digital versions. Not only is it easier for me to read than the text version, it's quicker, you don't have to hunt for issues, etc...

I've also recently obtained the 'Complete MAD Magazine,' which is a 7 CD set containing every issue of MAD magazine between the first issue in the 50's to around 1998 if I'm correct. True, some of them are dogs, especially the newer once. My old stack of MAD's hasn't been touched since, however.

If you have indexing of any kind, you can search on that. If not, you can search on filenames. While I think that the current e-book formats, all of which are burdened with copy-protection, are inherently flawed, they have a great deal on print books.

I especially like the PDB (Palm) format, which can be used with or without copy protection, and allows you to read books on your organizer. With the aid of a few utilities, said PDB files can be easily converted to HTML, Star, Word, or ASCII Text.

I don't think copy protected e-books will go over very well, but I *do* think that the e-book is only going to get more and more popular.

Mod Parent Up.

I was going to say something about this, but was beaten to the punch. As I understandd it, olympic athletes are verbotten by the IOC from keeping any kind of public journal of their experiences at the Olympics.

I wrote a rant mentioning this after the 2000 olympics in Sydney... http://www.furinkan.net/rant/olympics.html

Register is handling its slasdotting with grace... but not perfectly. Here's a mirror of the zipfile. It contains an EXE and several C src files.

http://www.furinkan.net/mirror/657.zip

I just happened to have it installed instead of GPG, but I will probably make the switch now that it's being discontinued.

1. Private Data... There's a lot of stuff that I do and say through email that is perfectly kosher, but is none of my company's or coworker's business, like emailing my wife whilst at work. I know for a fact that there are nosy people in my networking department, but 2048 bit D-H encryption makes this Somebody Else's Problem (tm) even thought I am forced to use Exchange at work.

2. Insecure Mail Servers... By the same token, I am forced to keep sensitive data on an Exchange server. It doesn't take a genius to see that any given company's Directory/Mail/Personal Info server is going to be one of a malicious cracker's first targets, if he or she is interested in doing anything other than 0vvnZ'ing the website. When the time comes... and it will... I will be able to say... 'No, my sensitive data was NOT compromised, because it was securely Encrypted.

3. Personal Liability. I'm a freely spoken individual. Some people don't appreciate it. If I say something in an email that could possibly be used against me later by the owner of a mail server, it goes in encrypted. By the same token, any personal files on my work PC belong to me, and not my company. Without my passphrase, they can't do shit with them.

4. Geek factor. It is oh, so cool to be able to 'sign' an email, and advertise your public key. Mine is:

http://www.furinkan.net/key.txt

WARNING!

You may not download, save, reproduce, or otherwise illegally use images on this website. By clicking the link below, you attest to the fact that you will abide by this license and report all instances of its violation to the copyright holder at once.

Click to enter FreePics.Com!

I've written a fairly detailed essay on 'Scarcity'-based business models in relationship to information and the internet:

http://www.furinkan.net/goodies/systemsofscarcity. html

that being said, not all people believe in free speech. those who don't probably shouldn't join...

George Bush is on record as saying 'There should be limits to freedom'.

The case in Michigan is the purest example of this, and the reason why it's important to fight for the rights of individual speech, even if those rights are held by someone who is a raving nutbar.

The Michigan COPA pretty firmly tried to put the kibosh on the internet sex thing. A national version, such as what John Ashcroft, that judgemental prick, is harping about would face the same fight. "Put internet sex-peddlers in prison, for the sake of the children".

Okay, so they outlaw internet porn or make it so difficult to get to that it might as well have been outlawed. What's next? Outlawing internet literature? How about all that nasty 'slash' fanfiction out there. That's pornographic, right? How about the vast amount of R and X rated Anime fanfiction? (Guilty!: http://www.furinkan.net/fanfic) We can use the first law as a precident to set the second to outlaw explicit text on the internet. Then, how about any kind of webpage that could even vaguely be construed as 'obscene'? That's a pretty broad category, which just about anyone could put any thought, image, or speech they didn't like into. It's also one we're allowing our congress to try to outlaw over and over again.

Personally, I'd rather deal with racism, sexism, and/or religious intolerance than lose my freedom of speech to speak out against them.

I maintain a series of my admittedly liberal and somewhat populist views on my website on a 'Rant Page'.

http://www.furinkan.net/rant/

Subject matter ranges from griping about bad Anime dubs or things that piss me off in the news. I regularly slam organized religion, conservatism, and moralism.

What really amazed me when I started this site was the large number of emails it generated, both in favor and against the ideas I put forth. Some are flames, but a good number are intelligent, crafted rebuttals of my arguments. It has improved my world view, and made me more prone to carefully consider my arguments before I post them.

While I do think that hate groups and kiddie porn groups exist that feed off of their own homogenity, I think this trend is not the norm and still a sign of stupidity or introverted and psychotic behavrior. From my experiences, I beleive that the majority of intelligent people out there do seek out differing views on the subjects they're interested in.

It will keep corporations away from 'serious' websites.

Instead of people who are whoring their sites to the first corporation who comes along with a nice big check, individuals will start to think a little bit before they hand over their content to a big site network like IGN or *gasp* V.A. Linux.

Despite the fact that not all of these networks are evil, I would rather see people keep their sites to themselves and free of corporate content and control. If there are fewer Excite's and Go Networks out there, it can only benefit the rest of us.

http://www.furinkan.net - Never had ads, never will.

Has been pretty bad. The ISP I used to work for was pressured constantly by community religous leaders and 'society' folk to impliment filtering of porn sites so that their kids couldn't get to them. The ISP rigourously refused despite the fact that one of those society folk was one of the big shareholders. Finally, when N2H2 came out, we signed a contract for them to provide proxy filtering service. For a week or so before we added 'Filtering Service' for an extra fee for customers who wanted it, we tested it internally by browsing with it until it wouldn't display a site we wanted to go to and then using another browser to figure out if the site was banned correctly. It was pretty miserable. It banned all of my art pages (http://www.furinkan.net/art/)(which have some non-photographic nude images), yet did nothing to filter out some of the worst hard-core porn. R-rated Fanfiction? It would trash it every time, but Nerve Magazine went completely unfiltered at the time. I dunno if this is still the case since I haven't used Bess since the testing period. At the time, it seemed to unfairly ban *most* anime pages. After the testing period, the ISP announced the filtering service for availability. We had many, many customers calling in, interested in the service, but when we explained that it couldn't tell the difference between them and their children and/or spouses, they promptly lost interest. By the time I left, less than a year later, we had a user-base of around 40000 dial-in accounts. Less than 20 of them used Bess.

The first rule of web design is plagarism. I would be *flattered* if you ripped off my designs! ^_^ Feel free:

http://www.coredata.net
http://www.furinkan.net
http://www.harringtoncc.org/ (This one's a little out of date. They may have changed it a little, but the original design is mine.)
http://www.kennethwyatt.com - The art is Mr. Wyatt's, the site design is mine.

The 'regulon' you're looking for here, the limiting factor, is humanity's limits to absorb this information. If there is not a demand for it, the information won't be replicated, and therefore won't exist in any substantial sense.

When I go home at night, I have to perform a careful balancing act, like most technically minded people with real lives I would guess, to do a little surfing, read a little news. Watch a little anime that I've downloaded from Alt.binaries.multimedia.anime. Then I do something that does *not* involve the rest of the world or the internet. I spend time with my wife. I play a game. I read a real, print book. I write or draw. I spend time working on my 3d artwork.

I discard over 99% of the information available to me, and refuse to let it take away the kind of life I want to live. The information that I'm not interested in simply dies with me. It doesn't get passed on to anyone I know or reproduced on my website for general consumption. It has 6 billion other ways to procreate, but will not do so through me.