ABOUT CLICKED

The modern news consumer ignores Weblogs and online citizen journalism at his own peril. But not everyone has the time to keep track of what's going on the Web. With this blog we hope to track the highlights of what's being discussed online so when news breaks from the Web, we're ready.

Will Femia is a Weblog enthusiast who, through good fortune and dumb luck, was introduced to the form as his position as chat producer for MSNBC.com careered into obsolescence. On any given day, Will can be found having already spent an unhealthy amount of time squinting at a computer screen.

Send a message to Will at spotter@msnbc.com



Harry Potter and the Fanfic Library

Posted: Saturday, July 14, 2007 4:41 PM by Will Femia
Filed Under:

As you know, the links in Clicked are drawn largely from meme trackers and link aggregators.  Today I learned of a new-to-me tracker called Wattpad, which I gather is devoted to content that's meant to be read on a mobile phone. Among the week's most popular links are a number of authentically lengthy Harry Potter fan-written fiction books, some of which credit HarryPotterFanFiction.com as the source. We've got a new Potter book coming in a week so you might not be in the market for extra material at the moment, but once it sets in that you'll never have another new Harry Potter book, this may be worth keeping in mind. ADDING: This is not the same as the fake Chinese books though the idea of ancient Chinese magic in the Harry Potter setting does have an appeal. (These also aren't the erotic/porn fan fiction we've mentioned before - "het" and "slash" and that stuff.)

Though this article makes it clear that giving this lady the world's fastest internet connection is mainly a stunt, can you imagine what that kind of speed would be like in our day-to-day lives?

Reprieve granted for online radio. What do you know, take Congress out of the picture and reasonable things start to happen. (This sentence was not really correct enough to keep. See the comments.)

Christian protestors heckle a Hindu priest in the U.S. Senate, of all places.

Speaking of religious activism, "It basically said anybody who doesn't believe in our religious belief is wrong and should be taken care of." The religious group wasn't named. UPDATE: More here.

While at that Breitbart site I saw this video of the ecstasy kid demonstrating that she can do the eye roll on command. In keeping the story on the wrong side of ridiculous the mother pointed out that the eyerolling was inspired by a horror movie they'd just allowed the girl to watch. D'oh!

11 Craziest Ways To Browse Flickr Photos - Like this blogger I also ended up wasting a stupid amount of time on Flickr Combat (some NSFW).  It's funny how important it feels to render a thoughtful judgment.

"The patient had second-degree burns on his chest and left leg. In addition, two linear burns extended along his anterior chest and neck to the sides of his face, terminating in substantial burns in the external auditory meatus bilaterally... Both of his tympanic membranes were ruptured, and he had a severe conductive hearing deficit. He also had a mandibular fracture."
Before you click, see if you can guess what caused that burn pattern on this lightning strike victim.

Breaking news: The Internet has crashed.

Girl knits a Ferrari - The coolest part is that she welded the frame herself. When the world ends, I want this girl in my refugee camp.

Banana security is face recognition security for your computer. I wonder how long you'd have to use it before you got too old for it to recognize you. Sounds like this might work as an aid to face blindness as well.

"64squares is a completely free, fully featured and easy to use online chess site with a clean simple interface."

Coin operated jiggle machines may be the most ridiculous exercise idea since those jiggling belt machines.

McDonalds set to give new meaning to the phrase "eat here, get gas." "Over in the UK, McDonald's announced today that it will start using its own waste cooking oil to make biodiesel, which will be then used in its entire truck fleet of 155 vehicles."

Another day, another advance in solar technology.  I don't mean to be flip but it does seem like we see this kind of headline often. Has anyone noticed this stuff hitting the market?  Are we still too far back in the research phase?

Meanwhile, speaking of sensing light, I happened upon this slightly old story about advances in digital camera sensitivity. An improvement of 2-4 times in low light conditions would just about warrant the purchase of a new camera I reckon.

Have you ever seen that Real Sex segment on HBO of the guy who makes the ultra-realistic dolls?  I think Howard Stern got one. Anyway, apparently those have surpassed the novelty phase, completely transcended the sex toy phase and for some men has reached the level of "acceptable dating pool." The clip at this link doesn't have any nudity or sex acts but obviously does touch on some adult themes.  From there it links to a blog with the full documentary (about 45 minutes long) but I haven't watched that.

The more things change, the more they stay the same - a photo series from the future. Cool photoblog.  I think it's all advertisements. NOTE: There's one boobie shot on the front page.

This'll be an interesting bit of collective journalism.  This blogger is wondering why there's been a spike in the budget outlays for the Executive Office of the President.

The latest twist in 9/11 conspiracy theories is the recollection that bin Laden initially denied involvement in the attacks. It's amazing to read all the little explanations in this article; who bin Laden is, what the Taliban is.

High speed photos of glasses breaking

Following on the horror of seeing an aging Metallica, The Princess Bride is 20 years old.  ABC has then/now photos.

"Ours is the largest artificial weather program in the world in terms of equipment, size and budget." "The United States, which pioneered cloud-seeding techniques in the 1940s and 1950s, has long cooled in its enthusiasm for the science behind artificial rain." I wonder what that's about.

Remember that kid who bagged groceries at the local supermarket and would always put the bread on the bottom and the gallon of milk at the top?  Looks like he got a job in shipping.

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Comments

Re the Bin Laden denial of 9/11, it does have to make you wonder.  What is the point of terrorism if you do not let those you attacked know who did it and what the purpose was?  In this case of course there was a video released after this story of Bin Laden supposedly admitting the 9/11 attacks; and of course there are a lot of people who have analyzed this video (and the suspicious circumstances in how it was found) a bit and claimed it was faked.  'We report, you decide.'  http://www.bestandworst.com/v/97082.htm

Ben, Chicago (Sent Saturday, July 14, 2007 5:59 PM)

Will,
I think (for now) I'm glad that every home doesn't have 40 Gigabit speed. Because internet bandwidth is tight, people continue to be inventive in how to compress a lot of information into a small amount of data. I'm afraid if we all had enormous download bandwidth we wouldn't be as interested in small file size, and technology would be less innovative as a result.

Alex, Lawrence, KS (Sent Saturday, July 14, 2007 8:41 PM)

Hey Will,  the "photo series from the future" is actually a campaign from Diesel Jeans (love the last one by the way).  Check out their latest one entitled "Global Warming" here: http://www.diesel.com/#/globalwarming/

Nadeem Cokar, Calgary (Sent Sunday, July 15, 2007 12:36 AM)

Re: Internet Radio reprieve

The link at Wired said it was due to Congress' intervention.  ISn't that Congress getting into the picture?

Patrick, Chicago, IL (Sent Sunday, July 15, 2007 1:45 PM)

Will, I'm wondering why you referred to the woman who knit the Ferrari as a girl - twice.  She's a 22-year-old grad student!  "Young woman" or "graduate student" would have been more appropriate.  I guarantee you wouldn't have called a male of the same age a "boy."  With your stated interest in the treatment of women (online or otherwise), I thought it was worth a mention.  Men don't even realize how much they do that, but it's extremely off-putting.  I expected the person on the other side of the link to be 13 or 14.

Lisa (Sent Sunday, July 15, 2007 2:39 PM)

"Has anyone noticed this stuff hitting the market?  Are we still too far back in the research phase?". The problem is that however great most of these are, they do not end up with manufacturing yield or resistance to the elements in real long term use. So, we get news of cool new solar cell techniques that work really well in a lab, but fail miserably when it comes to the essential 3 factors: cheap enough to manufacture in volume, can survive long term use (at least to pay for themselves), have a power density that make them practical in any real use.

Paul, Alamo, CA (Sent Sunday, July 15, 2007 2:48 PM)

To put the photovoltaic device into context - it is a lab scale device with excellent short term preformance and worthy of publication in Science. These sort of devices tend to have poor stability in light (they mention 50% or so loss after a couple hundred hours illumination). This is the achilles heel of almost all organic devices.

Stephen Moratti, Dunedin (Sent Sunday, July 15, 2007 9:01 PM)

Lisa, the fact of the matter is that as I wrote up my notes I looked quickly at the page to remind myself what it was.  I saw "student" in the headline and she looked young in the picture so I wrote girl.

But since I find the sensitivity to "girl" to be an annoying bit of sidetrackery from legitimate issues for women I'll give you an argument. Feminists should stick being concerned with equal pay, not equal semantic ridiculousness. Contrary to the insistence of the kind of people who look for things to be hurt and offended by so they can maintain an identity as trodden-upon victim, girl is not an insult. Girl is not belittling. Girl is not simply "female boy." Just because men have contorted youth into an insult as a means to goad each other into further entrenchment in cultural machismo doesn't mean women have to as well. In spite of solid efforts to encourage the use of "gal" as a counterpart to "guy," the fact of the matter is that in common American English, girl can also mean a young woman. In fact, I reckon women have so thoroughly taken ownership of "girl" that it can mean any kind of woman and not only not be demeaning in the slightest but actually be a term of affection.

And since I'm also put off by your insinuations, what I'm wondering is why you feel such a pressing need to paint me as a sexist. I "guarantee" if I was a woman you'd let me say girl.

Will Femia (Sent Sunday, July 15, 2007 10:59 PM)

Patrick, it's hard for me to disagree with you since the Wired piece goes out of its way to credit the people who pressured Congress to step in, but the way I read it was that the Copyright Royalty Board, which is part of the Library of Congress, which is part of Congress, was only in the way and once SoundExchange and the webcasters got together directly things started moving. I'm a little confused by the way Congress seems to be doubly represented here. The implication is that scrutiny by Congress frightened SoundExchange into being more open to negotiation. Since the CRB is the group that set the unreasonable rates in the first place, it seems weird to me to cast Congress as the hero. So by Congress I meant the CRB, not Congress, but ultimately it's a stupid sentence, even if I can twist my way to a justification for it.

Will Femia (Sent Sunday, July 15, 2007 11:36 PM)

(re: The use of the word "Girl")
Way to stand up for yourself, Will! Too often men (boys?) get pushed around by women over the tiniest of errors in semantics; or simply for differences in word preference. For instance, I have a friend who is my age (mid-twenties), who is quite pretty and who stands barely 5' tall. I "mistakenly" referred to her as a 'girl' once (gasp!) and she nearly ripped my head off (Which is both impressive and embarrassing when you consider that I stand 6'3" tall). Despite her vehemence about not being called a girl she had no real reason why she didn't like the word. She said she just thought it was demeaning and then asked me how I would feel being called "boy" at my age. I thought about it, and the truth is that it would only bother me if the person calling me 'boy' was doing so simply to make me angry; I would never be offended by a girl (Women? Gal? Person who happens to be affiliated with the sex that I would consider to be the fairer of the two?) calling me "boy”.

Frankly, I have never understood why some people (and some groups) get so hung up on semantics. It’s like the whole ‘Black’ versus ‘African American’ debate. I have a friend who watches BET (that’s ‘Black Entertainment Television’) who despises being called ‘Black’ and demands to be called an African American (to which I usually reply “Don’t you mean African Canadian?”). I just don’t understand it. If’s he’s not offended by a channel that explicitly calls him ‘Black’, then why is he offended when I call him Black? (I’m White, by the way. Or Caucasian or whatever. Use whatever word you want, I'm not easily offended)  It’s just like you said Will, if you were a girl (oops, I don’t know how many time I wrote ‘girl’ in this comment when I meant to write ‘woman’) Lisa would never have said ‘boo’ about you using the word ‘girl’ to refer to a 22 year old ‘woman’; and if I was ‘African American’ I could probably call my friend ‘Black’ till I was blue in the face and he wouldn’t say ‘boo’ (pardon the really bad pun, I couldn’t help it).

Lastly, I would just like to say that I prefer the word ‘girl’ (I think it is more of an affectionate term than “woman” and I’ve always found the term ‘gal’ to be a little weird.) and that I tend to use it to refer to any ‘woman’ who is younger than my mother.

Michael, Halifax, Canada (Sent Monday, July 16, 2007 10:01 AM)

Actually, Will, I wasn't trying to paint you as an sexist at all; I wouldn't read Clicked if you were.  I was actually trying to make you a _better feminist_ through constructive criticism.  I applaud that you see women's issues and bring them to light.  You're trying, which is why I bothered to say anything at all (I'm not fond of running full speed at a brick wall).  You seem to have pegged me as a man-hater or something even though I wasn't being aggressive or angry.  I criticized your choice of words, but I did not attack you.  Why such an emotional reaction?

Feminism isn't a collection of singular issues from which one can pick and choose, and it doesn't hate men.  Real feminism is the idea that women and men deserve to be treated equally (e.g., it's valid for either Mommy or Daddy to choose to stay home with the kids).  That's the perspective from which my criticism comes, not some rabid foaming-at-the-mouth death-to-men extremism.  Men and women are partners in this.

What men call women plays directly into, to use your example, issues like equal pay.  Using the same term to refer to both adult and child females implies differences between men and women in things like intellect (which ties more directly in with what your "worth" is perceived to be).  It's an undercurrent, but it's still a negative effect, and most men don't seem to realize that.  I know you weren't purposefully belittling that student, but calling her a girl lowered expectations of who would be on the other end of your link.

And yes, I actually do make the same point to women.  We're all hypocrites about something, but this isn't one of mine.

Lisa (Sent Monday, July 16, 2007 11:45 AM)

I have yet to understand "FanFic".  I see it all over the place.  Maybe I'm out of touch but it seems really weird to me.

Melanie Brooks (Sent Monday, July 16, 2007 12:09 PM)

kudos on defending your use of the word "girl" above, Will, when most would fold.

There is all too much pressure for everyone to do what doesn't offend others these days, whether it be at the office, in entertainment, or whatever.  It's becoming too commonplace to hear people whine about it, while the good of the world seems to ebb away in the background.

Brian, Tampa, Fl (Sent Monday, July 16, 2007 1:14 PM)

Gee, more Christians doing their best to give the rest of us a bad name.  How annoying.  Heckling and threats just don't seem like the optimal methods for sharing God's love and mercy with others.  Nice.

Mike, Boise Idaho (Sent Monday, July 16, 2007 1:14 PM)

Touche, Will!!

Judy, Georgia (Sent Monday, July 16, 2007 2:01 PM)

Will, I totally agree with your response to Lisa!  The guys riding in the Tour de France are routinely referred to as "boys" and they are grown men in one of the most grueling sporting events today.  At 46 I'm ok with being called girl.

Kim, San Diego, CA (Sent Monday, July 16, 2007 2:04 PM)

"girl"

Ha!  I was told the other day that referring to a 30+ year old man as a "boy" was demeaning.  

I'm just going to call everyone 'it' now.  It seems the safest thing to do.  ;)

Chelle, Oregon (Sent Monday, July 16, 2007 4:23 PM)

At 37, I have no problem being called a girl.  My friends, co-workers and relatives and I regularly call each other girls. At the law firm I worked at, we routinely asked if the "boys" were back from their court dates, in reference to 4 attorneys ranging in age from 35 to 55.  It was never done as an insult and they never took it that way. There are far too many more real and important feminist issues to worry about than this.  I also think it's incredibly dumb when some go so far as to spell "woman" as "womin" so as to remove the "-man".  Sheesh!  Get a life!
Sign me, "one of the girls"

evie, reno, nv (Sent Monday, July 16, 2007 5:49 PM)

Lisa, sorry for the flame, I read your comment in a very different tone.

Elissa, just to be clear, I'm not saying that girl means woman or that they should be interchangeable.  But in casual American speaking, we use the word girl in a way that is not offensive to women. I have an aunt (she's not my grandmother, but she is a grandmother) who took a trip with her friends to Aruba.  The way it was described in the family was that she was taking a trip with the girls.

I write this blog with casual language and colloquialisms and my use of girl fits within that milieu. I'm not arguing that since everyone uses the word it's OK.  I'm saying the word is defined by the way speakers of the language use it.  Efforts to retro-define the word with age limits and sexist connotations not only creates a problem where there isn't one but unhelpfully further alienates the sexes from each other.

Naturally, now that we've had this little chat, when I'm consciously aware of using the word girl I'll unavoidably double check myself, but -and I think this is the reason I'm so sensitive about this charge- if I miss one and say "girl" about a woman who is not young but merely youthful, I don't appreciate the implication that I'm a pig for doing so.  It's the very low regard I have for sexists that makes me bitterly resent pedantic traps set to cast me with that lot.

Lisa, your point about the undercurrent of meaning in how men refer to women is interesting to me because while I agree with the overall point, I disagree with how you're applying it. It can be argued that there's greater potential for offense in the undercurrents of "woman" than for "girl" because girl is non-sexual. Maybe one of these days MSNBC.com will introduce a gender issues section and we can pursue this further on the corresponding blog.

Will Femia (Sent Monday, July 16, 2007 5:59 PM)

The thing I dislike about current silica based solar products is that when you go looking for residential pricing - its not available unless you want to sit down with them and start negotiotions- which is NOT what a person putting out casual feelers is willing to do.

Robert Kubica, Andover CT (Sent Monday, July 16, 2007 8:03 PM)

"…but my point is that girl shouldn't be used to describe all women. Even if you feel it's okay, maybe you should let women decide if it is or not."
I'm sorry, maybe I'm kicking a dead cat here, but this really reminds me of a Dilbert comic. Ratbert decides that he no longer likes the term "rat" and decides that everyone must refer to him as by the proper term "ratus" since all groups have the right to choose their own name. To this, Dogbert replies "From now on you cannot refer to me as a 'dog', my new class name is 'Better than a stupid Ratus'".
Now, that not meant to be sexist (I'm not trying to imply that men are better than women or something) I'm only trying to illustrate how stupid an argument this is. Oh, and by the way, subdividing people into groups and saying that only certain groups can do certain things is the definition of discrimination. So saying that only women can decide something (and that men better stay the heck out of it), well, isn't that sexist?

Michael, Halifax, Canada (Sent Tuesday, July 17, 2007 8:25 AM)

Will, you go girl.  First you stand up for yourself, then cave in (granted not all the way, but enough).  You are well within your rights to use words as you understand them to mean instead of letting others define them for you (BTW, my admittedly "old" 1990 Websters definition 1b defines "girl" as a "young unmarried woman").  As long as you're "sensitive" (I know it's wrong for me to read that as "afraid") to being called "sexist" over something this trivial is sad.  Should you be this sensitive to being labelled with right-wing epithets?

KW (Sent Tuesday, July 17, 2007 8:45 AM)

Wow!  Love the blog with a passion, but today the comments section is more interesting than the blog itself!  I smell a stunt/hoax...Did you plan this, Will?  You could post a link to your own comments section! Verrryy postmodern.

chris browning Stillwater, mn (Sent Tuesday, July 17, 2007 9:45 AM)

Not going to comment on the girl/woman semantics other than I think you were right.

I did, however, have to say thanks for providing that Princess Bride link.  Those "then and now" things always interest me and it was quite a laugh showing it to some of my co-workers who had to do a double take looking at Cary Elwes' photo.  Metallica was far more frightening though. :-O

Leslie, NM (Sent Tuesday, July 17, 2007 10:15 AM)

Hey Chelle,
You know, we could all start using gender-neutral pronouns as well, to avoid offending those who can't even stand the assignment of a distinguishable sex:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun

That way, when ze or hir gets offended by the insensitivity of those who would refer to a person based on zir or hir sex, you can tell ze to stuff zirself.

Sarah, Minneapolis, MN (Sent Tuesday, July 17, 2007 10:59 AM)

Will, I'm kinda surprised by your defensiveness at being called out on the word "girl."  I'm glad you backtracked, and I realize your blog is casual, but I still think it's professional enough to use the word "woman" in this particular context.  (Meanwhile, Evie seems to miss the point that her context is totally different.)

I'm not Lisa, though for the record, I would not call you a pig or sexist for calling someone a "girl". Imo, she wasn't either, just pointing out that on a popular, professional news blog, she thought it was inappropriate.  The only thing I would have changed about her original statement was the "guarantee" that you wouldn't use the word "boy" (too presumptious.)

(Also, if you count teenagers as girls, not sure how you say that "girls" are non-sexuual, but that's another argument altogether.  :P)

A "girl" (Sent Tuesday, July 17, 2007 12:03 PM)

Most likely the reason contractors will not respond to casual questions about photovoltaics is that demand has outstripped supply for several years and the situation is not going to improve in the short term, so there's not much point in talking to tire-kickers.

Most of today's photovoltaic production goes to Europe, where all kinds of alternative power are heavily subsidized -- you read of farmers being paid to checkerboard their fields with solar arrays.  Meanwhile, companies in the supply chain manage production to maximize profits and there are high barriers to entry, so competition is limited.

My case may answer some of your questions.  A year and a half ago, We signed up with a contractor, had him install the brackets, wiring, and inverter, then waited several months until he could score some panels. Two deals fell through before he got some.

We're grid-tied, with a time-of-use plan, which means that electricity --used or placed onto the grid -- during the middle of the day is valued at about 28 cents per kWh, while electricity at other times is valued at around 7 cents per kWh. (You can't get that deal in Calilfornia any more.  It was something the state legislature forced on the utilities for a limited number of customers to incentivize the market.)

You can use the electricity you place on the grid when the sun is shining to offset the electricity you use at other times, but if you produce a surplus, the utility doesn't have to pay you for it. (The legislature giveth; the legislature taketh away.)

The array on our roof puts out about 2.4 kW peak on a nice day.  Not counting the new shingles, which we needed anyway, the installation cost around $24k. A rebate from the utility brought that down to around $17k. There are taxes and fees and niggles on the bill that come to a few bucks a month, and those are not offset by the juice you put on the line.

The account is reconciled once a year, which in our case is coming up the end of this month.  Thanks to proper sizing of the system, our net costs for electricity this year will be zero.

At the rate the family used electricity in the past, one could say the solar installation will be paid off in about 14 years, but that's not counting what $17k invested in T-bills would have earned.  Figuring-in the time value of money, break-even is a long, long way down the road.  The alternative view is my wife's.  She's counting on significant increases in electricity costs over the years.

Batteries?  Short answer is that grid-tie and batteries are presently incompatible for reasons of linesman safety. But this post is already too long.

Don Tuite, California (Sent Tuesday, July 17, 2007 12:15 PM)

"because girl is non-sexual."

Girls Gone Wild, anyone?  "Girl" is, in Western culture, inherently sexual.  That's one of our problems.

Sorry, Will, I love your blog, but I'm with Lisa on this one.  Language use shapes how we think, and the use of diminutives has meaning beyond the obvious.  It's not a matter of over-sensitivity, it's a matter of courtesy.  I'm an adult with a job and a mortgage: if someone referred to me in public as a girl, I'd be annoyed. "Girl" implies someone who is not an adult, who has no control over her circumstances.

It's also wrong to draw the analogy to "boy", as that term hasn't been used to belittle or disenfranchise a population of historically oppressed... Oh, wait, I guess it has.  *raises an eyebrow*

Thank you for apologizing to Lisa: that was gracious.

Constance, Oakland CA (Sent Tuesday, July 17, 2007 2:29 PM)

Okay I'm curious as to what Lisa would expect a 30 year old on the dating scene to refer to his/her relationship partner as. I would find it awkward to refer to the person i'm dating as my "woman-friend" and by no means are we at the point to be classified as "significant others". I have no issue being called a "boyfriend" and know hse has none with my calling her my "girlfriend" though by all rights she can be and is also called a woman. When her mother is speaking with her peers about their children, she says she has "2 boys and 1 girl" though all are adults and the brothers are married with children themselves. Depending on one's geographic region I would think the term "boy" would more likely be construed as offensive for racist reasons rather than age based. If no disrespect was meant (and I'm sure there was none on your part Will) people need to leave well enough alone.

Joe Levittown, PA (Sent Wednesday, July 18, 2007 12:35 PM)

boy... girl... what we need is a new, PC gender-neutral pronoun.  In keeping with the obviousness of the subject, I propose "s(he)-it".  Feel free to say it out loud, with emphasis!

Dale, Portland, OR (Sent Wednesday, July 18, 2007 1:58 PM)

Dale, your ideas intrigue and amuse me. How can I subscribe to your newsletter?

scalpod (Sent Friday, July 20, 2007 4:38 PM)



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