Singapore has attempted to bring websites under the same decency standards are other media.

The Singapore government just announced an intention to begin regulating websites that report on the country, requiring a S$50,000 ‘performance bond’ and compliance with any takedown notices from the government within 24 hours. The reason for this is apparently to regulate content which solicits for prostitution, undermines racial and religious harmony, or ‘goes against good taste’"

It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post.  For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service.  Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

Again mostly Scarlett, but also a scan from a photo I took when I was in High School. Dan’s all the way on the left, in the water.

[caption id=“attachment_6568” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Costume Quest - DLC[/caption]

Costume Quest (7 hours) - I completed the main Costume Quest and then continued on to the DLC. The game continued to be charming and I enjoyed playing it as well as the simple story arc of the brother and sister realizing they didn’t hate each other that much. Gameplay-wise the game is not too forgiving when you make a mistake. There aren’t any items to use for healing so any mistakes in the Mario RPG-like mechanics (hitting a button on a certain timing to empower your attack or reduce an attack against you) could lead to losing an encounter quite quickly. I think it took me about 5-8 tries on the final boss of the main game to get just the right combination of add-ons (which increase HP or allow you to retaliate when hit) and costumes to make it through to the end. It also doesn’t help that the enemies appear to level up with you. That is to say, if there’s enemy X at the beginning of the game and you come up against him later, he has more HP and hits harder. That’s a bit different than the mechanic used in most of the Squaresoft RPG games I played in my youth. That said, there aren’t really any consequences to losing a fight. As far as I can tell, you don’t even lose candy when you lose a fight. You just end up right where you were before and you have another chance to start the encounter again or move away to change the costume equipped.

[caption id=“attachment_6659” align=“aligncenter” width=“231”] MLK in a Hoodie (you can buy prints here)[/caption]

I’m breaking my usual schedule because of the Trayvon Martin case. This story over at Gawker has an important point to make about how race played a part. Personally, I think that, like OJ, Zimmerman is free of jail, but may still end up guilty in a wrongful death lawsuit. After all, he did admit to killing Trayvon and he was told by the 911 operator to leave Trayvon alone. He might have not had enough of a burden of proof to go to jail, but he IS guilty of killing a kid. I am against the Nancy Grace crowd and the way she treats cases like this one of Casey Anthony. Look, we have a court system and we have to abide by its rules or we have chaos. Ken White of the law blog Popehat makes a VERY salient point about this that everyone who’s pissed about the Trayvon case needs to read. This case angers me personally because I have been the target of racism. It was only once, but it stung. I have a younger, adopted brother who is half black and lives in Florida. My parents are well off and my brother could definitely find himself in a neighborhood where people don’t think he belongs. I think I would only act more irrationally towards someone killing my wife or daughter than I would for someone killing my brother. It sucks that so many decades after the 60s we still have stuff like this going on. What bugs me more than anything each time I hear about this case is that Trayvon didn’t do anything to instigate violence - he was just walking through a neighborhood. Whatever he may or may not have done once Zimmerman followed him, he didn’t start anything and he still died. Again, we have a system and the system has chosen not to find him guilty in a criminal sense. Hopefully the system can find him guilty in a civil sense.

When I decided I was going to blog 5 days a week, I picked five categories I wanted to blog about: Fatherhood/Family, Technology, Culture, Photography, and Politics. And because I only have a certain amount of time to write throughout my day - usually during my lunch break at work with a little bit at home - I started keeping a list of topics I wanted to talk about. The list has grown unwieldly and it’s getting to where I can’t remember the point I wanted to make on some of those posts. Sure, some of that is fixed by better note-taking, but a lot of it is that the way I like to write involves being in the moment. When it’s a month (or more) later, I might not really be in the same headspace to talk about that topic. So I’m going to work on paring back the list. I’m going to keep the same days for each topic so that there might start to be a few gaps in the schedule, but it should roughly even out.

Do I even need to repeat it here? Eh, why not: “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics”. Between the way the mind works and the way we’ve been socialized, statistics carry more weight than the same information without statistics. However, there are many ways to take the same data and bend the results to draw out your conclusion. In the case of a story I came across at the end of May, it was through omission. The story mentioned a study by the Drug Czar’s office that revealed

It’s once again time for my biweekly Photojojo post.  For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service.  Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

The video called Keyboard Scarlett comes from the fact that I found out I was able to make her laugh hysterically if I moved her hands back and forth on the table like Keyboard Cat. Interestingly, now that she has full agency over her limbs, she hates when I do anything like this.

For the second quarter in a row The Beatles have NOT made the list! But that’s easily explained: I have been listening to a lot of new music and a lot of playlists that don’t include The Beatles. But as you’ll see, they kinda snuck in sideways. This quarter I spent a lot of time listening to Jonathan Coulton and I Fight Dragons because of their Kickstarters, which I backed. I Fight Dragons released two albums as Kickstarter bonuses - a live recording of their most recent concert and a remix album of sorts in which the band members sung different arrangements of the songs. There was also the new Fall Out Boy album, Save Rock and Roll. I really enjoyed the album but it was overtaken in my mind by the previously mentioned IFD and JoCo music and I quickly forgot they had a new album out. Again, that’s a shame since I did enjoy it and while I was in Florida last week I quickly tired of “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark”. Incidentally, I was reminded of why I stopped listening to live radio - it’s far too repetitive. I think the true problem is that it’s too formulaic in its repetition. I didn’t mind hearing “The Princess Who Saved Herself” every day for a week because the songs surrounding it were always different. On a separate note, I got some music for Father’s Day and I’ll mention that below.

Over at All things D, Venture Capitalist David Cowan talks about predictions he was asked to make about the future. His predictions involve more immersive wearable computing than Google Glass and a loss of the taboo of cyber attacks. He envisions our vision essentially merging with Hollywood’s depiction of robotic or cyborg vision - think of the Terminator. If you’re looking for a specific tree, it could highlight it for you and draw your attention to it. Cowan also thinks it’ll allow us to review past moments it has recorded or allow us to see someone else’s point of view. Interestingly, I think this is a technology that has the opportunity to either bring humanity closer (helping us remember names, auto-translating foreign languages) or be the final nail in the coffin for human interaction. Call me curmudgeonly if you want, but I start to lose my patience when people keep being interrupted by their phones when I’m trying to socialize with them. By definition, there should be very little more urgently needing your attention than me if I’m actually there and the other person is not. A few check are fine. And if someone is relying on your texts to meet up with you or get directions, just let me know and it’ll go a long way towards ameliorating the situation. But once people don’t even have to look away to be involved in something else, it could lead to a roomful of people who are all alone - or interacting with those outside the room more than those inside the room.

When you’re part of a dominant class you don’t realize how differently you see the world. Sure, I’m ethnically Hispanic and have suffered humiliation and financial consequences over one overt racist incident. But by and large the world is my oyster. I’m a man and racially I’m white. In fact I’ve had coworkers come to me and disparage Hispanics (all-to-often a codeword for Mexicans - especially Illegal Mexicans - in the USA) and then say, “they’re not like us white guys.” So for the most part I never saw anything awry with pop culture. In fact, one of the few times I realized consciously that I wasn’t actually represented on TV was when I did see myself represented on TV in the form of reruns of the TV show ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.?. The show was exactly about me - it was about kids (although I think they were high school age or older) who were born in the USA to Cuban immigrants and whose grandparents only spoke Spanish. It was odd and fascinating and I couldn’t get enough of it. But other than that one year or so when I saw those reruns, I was able to identify with virtually any TV show. I could see myself as Chandler, Ross, or Joey in Friends. (Or as a character on Full House or Home Improvement) Now, I loved showed with African Americans like Hangin’ with Mr Cooper, Family Matters, The Cosby Show, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air so it’s not as though I needed to see myself in TV. But until I started poking around on the Internet as an adult I never realized that for people like African Americans, those four shows were almost the only opportunity they had to see themselves on TV (especially in a positive sense). And forget it if you’re Asian! (including Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis) I came to realize that I had been as naive about the entertainment landscape as those white couples from the 1920s who use to take trips to Harlem on the weekend to experience the Jazz and other aspects of African American culture. At the end of the trip they could retreat to their comfortable lives while the African Americans were stuck there.