~snip~

“I saw this in my own research for Ending the Gauntlet: Removing Barriers to Women’s Success in the Law. Many of the women partners I interviewed described a lack of support and sponsorship from key men in their firms. Several talked to male colleagues who admitted that the success of married women as equity partners invalidated the choices they and their wives had made about how to divide the responsibilities of work and family.”
Are Women Held Back by Colleagues’ Wives?, by Lauren Stiller Rikleen, Harvard Business Review, May 16, 2012

Freaking charming. Go read the whole thing. Take some Dramamine first.

I think marriage equality will help some of this mess. Or we just have to wait for an entire generation to die off so a better world can be build upon their pulverized bones. Both of these are fine with me. But, hooray! for this comment:

“The same holds true for single mothers. The perception that a woman can raise and support a family on her own can rankle both men and women colleagues, even if they don’t recognize why.”

There should be more recognition of successful single/divorced/widowed/dumped/whatever mothers. Not just the famous Hollywood ones, but all of them. Anyone who is even trying to raise a kid or kids by themselves is a successful single mother. I know single dads have it rough, too, but they get more credit for trying. Nuclear families know how hard it is to raise kids with two parents; they should bow down to anyone who can do it with one parent. And that doesn’t mean do it the way right-winger cavemen and women think it should be done, but to do it at all is a major accomplishment. Let’s have a round of applause for all the single mothers.

Vote for this. It makes sense.

(Oh, and it’s on the November ballot, but don’t mess around if you’re not registered to vote. Do. It. Now. Please and thank you.)

But this new way of gathering petition signatures is brilliant. Please do what I did and go to Justify Their Rates (justifyrates.org), get this petition (pdf), sign it and send it in.

Stop the thieving California heath insurance companies now! Enough already!

Thanks, Calitics for the heads up.

“That’s where the robot squirrels come in. To find out, Sanjay Joshi, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the University of California, Davis, built a squirrel with a heatable tail and a flagging mechanism, each controlled separately. That means biologists will be able to tell which signal the (rattle)snake is reacting to.”
Robosquirrel vs rattlesnake in head-to-head battle, by Jesse Emspak, New Scientist, April 4, 2012

Good to know knowledge is marching on while the rest of the state sinks into oblivion.

“The state Fair Political Practices Commission overruled its chief of enforcement, who had argued that Norby lied when he claimed to have checked into a motel as part of a study of homeless issues.

“‘He listed the date of separation from his wife as the exact same date he checked into the motel,’ Gary Winuk, the commission’s chief of enforcement, told the commission, adding: ‘The respondent committed a very serious violation of the [Political Reform] Act.’”

“However, after hearing some testimony in public, the commission went behind closed doors and a majority voted to uphold the conclusion of an administrative law judge who determined that the motel stay was properly paid for with campaign cash because it served a governmental purpose to help Norby study the homeless issue.”
Assemblyman Chris Norby cleared of alleged campaign fund misuse, by PolitiCal, LA Times, April 5, 2012

No, folks, that is the punchline, sorry. VERY sorry.

“The U.S. government recently shut down file-sharing giant Megaupload. The shut down of the site caused millions of its users and fans lonely days and broken hearts with their streaming media hunger’s unexpected cut-off supply.

“Now according to a report, Carpathia Hosting, which hosts Megaupload’s frozen data, is seeking the U.S. government’s help to pay for its piling unpaid bills. Carpathia Hosting hosts the data of up to 66 million users.

“Furthermore, according to the same report, Carpathia Hosting filed an emergency motion with the U.S. Court to either pay them for retaining the data, take the data from them, or delete them altogether after allowing users to reclaim their precious files.

“In the motion, the Virginia-based company says it is paying $9,000 a day to host the data, which works out to more than $500,000 since January of this year when authorities shut down Megaupload and arrested its founder, Kim Dotcom.

“The said hosting service could not perform any action on its own due to the risks of lawsuits with different parties with an interest in the data like the Motion Picture Association Of America (MPAA), for example.”
Megaupload’s Web Host In Money Trouble, Asks U.S. For Help, by Dan Reyes, Technorati.com, March 26, 2012

I am not making this up. Outrageous! If our tax dollars aren’t footing this bill, they will be soon. We’ve already paid for the DOJ to waste its time on this mess. We can be sure the MPAA isn’t going to kick in anything on this deal, even though this is all their fault. Grrrrrrrr.

Via: Open-Site.org

Geh redux.

Plus ça change, but in a good way.

California votes to end the death penalty this year and that’s the best news I’ve had in a while. Maybe a step in the right and revolutionary direction, too (please, God).

Yeah, I read a few scanlations, but I also buy the printed English version if it’s licensed and published, and if I just can’t stand it, I’ll even buy the Japanese version. No, I can’t read Japanese, but the pictures tell most of the story. And the scanlations often have a note urging readers to support the mangaka (creator) by buying whatever version of the work is commercially on sale. That’s no hardship for me because I love the feel of a book in my hands. But if there are only scanlations, then I will read the scanlations and hope I can eventually read it in book form.

In the course of reading these scanlations in undisclosed locations, I became aware of a most wonderful thing: communities of manga loving females devoting their time, talents, and energy to producing this work, and producing it well enough, for other likeminded, non-Japanese reading females. I became very impressed by the camaraderie and professionalism of these groups offering new members a chance improve their Japanese, editing, or visual editing skills. I’m not a joiner, but this is one club I’d love to be in if I had the time, talents or energy for it. The scan groups, as they call themselves, have often been the catalyst for getting certain Japanese works licensed and published in the U.S. In every case that I’ve seen that happen, the scan groups do the following things:

1. A gracious note reporting the happy event.

2. A link to the publisher site and encouragement to buy the book when it’s published.

3. A notice that the scanlation files would no longer be available.

Of the communities I follow, I have never seen it be otherwise. (I am aware that there some unscrupulous places on the web that host scans they did not create, refuse to remove scans they did not create, and raise $900/month in donations to ruin the party for everyone, but they are not the subject of this essay, so they shall remain unnamed.) The civil society of the internet succeeds with success in the scanlation communities of my experience and I salute them. In many cases, this means a scanlation community will destroy years of work to support the publisher and the mangaka’s publication in English.

So you can imagine how distressed I was when I learned that one, possibly two, of my favorite scan groups were being attacked with DMCA (digital millennium copyright act [aka the Disney copyright grab act]) notices to their filehosting site and possibly their webhosts and were being reported to Google for TOS violations. Filehosts, webhosts, Google and their ilk do not generally have the time or resources to investigate allegations; they just shut the sites down when the get a complaint.

I was distressed squared when I learned that the culprits were the company run by a man I respect very much, the CEO of Digital Manga Publishing (DMP), Hikaru Sasahara. A few years ago, began a company called Digital Manga Guild (DMG); a collaboration between DMP and Japanese translators (many of them former scanlators) to produce ebooks of manga. The interesting part of this arrangement was that the people doing the work would not get paid unless the ebooks sold enough copies. (See Digital Manga Guild: Smells like Exploitation! for better financial analysis than I can do here.)

On March 3, 2012, this innocent thread started on the DMG forum: Dealing with scanlations of your titles, (here’s a pdf if the posts vanish GM) and ultimately snowballed into these from Shroud (Kimiko Kotani):

“Actually, as a member of the Guild, I have sent file sharing sites, blog hosts, etc as DMG has asked us to help combat the piracy by sending C and D’s, that means they HAVE given us permission to request on their behalf.

“The result was not only did filesharing sites take down where fans had uploaded files they had DL elsewhere, but Google removed search results to aggregators and such so that search results show only the legal listings. And yes, it is best to ask scanlators and bloggers and the like to take down the links and files themselves politely and informally first. But don’t be afraid to go further if you get ignored by anyone you contact. DMG asked us to send C and d req, and the polite thing Ben suggested is fine for an informal req but is in no way legally inforceable using that language, but since they have given permission AND requested we actually send a C and Ds for our titles, you can do so to the blog host, filesharing site, server host, etc. If a formal DMCA gets ignored or challenged by these, then ultimately DMP who has to decide how to take it further since the issued DMCA was on their behalf, and you’ll have to let them know so they can decide what to do. And that’s the crux of it. YOU are not the rights holder but you ARE the production partner DMP have given permission to send down take down requests/notices on their behalf for the titles you work on.”

And then, after Shroud (Kimiko Kotani) sent a DMCA to the filehost Mediafire (MF) on or about March 10:

“I filed for Takaga…not just the file I’d listed that had been in your acct, but files of it uploaded by others. I have NO idea why they they lumped your other removals with my request, but as they did, I am enquiring with them about it. if they did so after seeing the other copyrighted material present in your folder, they need to give the proper reason and not attach it to my complaint.”

“I never pretended that (she represented herself as the copyright holders of everything in the scan group’s Mediafire archive). The key legal statement is ‘that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.’ DMP gave us the right to request the take downs.

“As for how long it took you to learn of the license..that does not alter the fact that you still relased it knowingly AFTER license and release. As for referencing the fact it affects sales and sales provide the livlihood of those in the publishing business, it does have relevance. This fact has been repeated again and again and again in articles to do with scanlations of licensed titles ad nauseum. It’s not just MY paycheck..it’s EVERYONE’s, incl. the mangaka. The one whose work is being promoted. Asking someone to respect that is not unprofessional…it is fairly standard. Look at the front of nearly EVERY ebook produced by many small press these days, and you’ll see the same plea “Please don’t share..this is the livelihood of…”. As for how I treat people, I have been polite. People with fingers caught in metaphorical cookie jars may not always like it when they get caught, or find their files are gone, but then, as you point out…the content is illegal and they do not work for, with, or represent the copyright owners in anyway.

“… I complained to MF about DMG stuff. mediafire however has seemingly looked at the DP acct and suspended the entire thing for illegal content that had nothing to do with my takedown request. That issue is between DP and Mediafire. I’m (done) talking about it.”

Kimiko Kotani (Shroud) on the DMG forums, might think she’s within what she perceives as her legal rights, but this certainly smells like cyberbullying to me. And she’s done a great deal of damage to my opinion of DMP. I know business is business, but allowing “partners,” not employees, not lawyers, not owners of DMP to run amok like this, is sad and horrifying at the same time, and I don’t think it’s done much good for the goodwill towards DMG. I know I’ll never buy a or promote DMG titles and probably won’t buy from DMP again either if this is how DMP is going to allow DMG to behave in the communities from whence it mostly sprang.

So, here’s my latest monovision crush: Date Masamune from Sengoku Basara anime.

The anime is based on a fighting game “set” during the Waring States Period, populated with “real” historical figures, and all twenty-four episodes are thoroughly delightful.

I’m not a Japanese historian, but I’m pretty sure Tadakatsu Honda was not a giant flying cyborg, Oda Nobunaga was not the devil king of the sixth kingdom or whatever it is, and if there had been a female ninja named Kasuga, she would have worn more clothes. Oooh la la! Sorry, fanboys, that impossible catsuit impossibly never falls off in all 24 episodes.

See for yourself:

Never mind the Engrish. Oh, and the slash writes itself.

Oh, I forgot Motochika Chosokabe! How did that happen? Wow.


Sengoku Basara anime

Sengoku Basara game

Motivational Motochika

My heroes!

I heard this yesterday, but I refused to believe it.

Rest in Peace, Davy.

Marcy Kaptur has repeatedly stood up for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

So, of course, she has to go.

Beeeeeeeeeeecaaaaaaaaaaaaaaause “… the Republicans in the state-house have redrawn Kaptur’s 9th district to make it run in a thin line from Toledo to Cleveland – some 150 miles – along the edge of Lake Erie, encroaching on Dennis Kucinich’s old district and forcing the two into an elimination match in the Democratic primary.”

Sigh.

Anyway, please send Ms. Kaptur some money. Win or lose, she’s gonna need it. Thanks.

Actually, I’ll sweeten the deal: anyone who can email me proof they sent Marcy Kaptur at least $10 before March 6 can be emailed an ePub or Kindle version of any one Wapshott Press title that has an ePub or Kindle version. Here’s the list of those titles:

The Wizard’s Son; Maiden in Light; Dr. Hackenbush Gets a Job, Dr. Hackenbush Gains Perspective; Storylandia 3, 4, and 5; Electricland; and The Lady Actress.

Any other titles (that are not adult content), same deal, but I can only send a pdf or ePub. Am I nice or what?

Win, Marcy! WIN!

Great podcast by Dr. Mihir Desai at Harvard Business Review (I don’t agree with him about capital gains tax, but it’s still a good podcast):

The Incentive Bubble, by Mihir Desai, Harvard Business Review, March 2012

Massively paraphrasing Dr. Desai: “People are outraged by the level of CEO compensation, but it’s the form and contracts that determine that compensation that are the real issues.”

“Reporter: No, actually, because when Reagan came in later on, things actually changed.

“Brown: No, Reagan came before me. Reagan came after my father and then I came after Reagan.

“Reporter: And then you actually lost your term thereafter, no?

“Brown: No, I’m the only Democratic governor in history to serve three terms. In fact only two governors have ever served a third term.”

~snip~

“Brown: Last year… Are you a Moonie by any chance?

“Reporter: Sir…

“Brown: Because your incisiveness is kind of suspect. Anyway. California, the economy is doing better, it’s coming back. The private economy added $90 billion, and that feeds into the public sector as well. There are deficits because there’s been excesses in the last decade, brought on principally by the mortgage bubble and breakdown. And we’re now cleaning up after that mess. It does take a while to do that. I’d say we’re on a very positive course. Not as rapid as I would like, but the trajectory is all in the right direction.

“Reporter: Thank you, sir.”
Jerry Brown takes on Washington Times reporter, by Anthony York, LA Times, February 26, 2012

Just when I thought I could not love Governor Moonbeam more, he does this and I do.

I think Mr. York has the title wrong. It’s not “Jerry Brown takes on Washington Times reporter,” it’s “Foolish Washington Times reporter tries to take on Jerry Brown and gets her ass handed to her.”

And, y’know, Gil Duran, get some of your boss’s zen cool or get a new fucking job. I’m just about sick of your hot headed rudeness and arrogance.

Geh…

Updated: March 20, 2012

Via: Open-Site.org

“Mr. Moglen: I don’t understand what that means.

“The data is a privacy issue because we have an enormous ecological disaster created by badly-designed social media now being used by people to control and exploit human beings in all sorts of ways.

“That’s the consequence of social media structures which encourage people to share using centralized databases, and everything they share is held by someone who is no friend of theirs who also runs the servers and collects the logs which contain all the information about who accesses what, the consequences of which is that we are creating systems of comprehensive surveillance in which a billion people are involved and those people’s lives are being lived under a kind of scrutiny which no secret police service is the 20th century could ever have aspired to achieve. And all of that data is being collected and sold by people whose goal it is to make a profit selling the ability to control human beings by knowing more about themselves than they know. Okay? That’s true of all this information all the time everywhere. The thing you’re working on is simply one of 100,000 implications of that disaster.

“Me: Right.

“Mr. Moglen: Okay, so have you closed your Facebook account and stopped using Twitter?

“Me: Have… I?”
In Which Eben Moglen Like, Legit Yells at Me for Having Facebook, by Adrianne Jeffries, December 13, 2011

Brilliant! Don’t tangle with Dr. Moglen, just delete your FB and stop using Twitter. OR BE DAMNED.

And remember, you heard it at the Hackenblog first!

“I’ve been struck particularly by two things missing from the DS9 universe–one unpredictable in the 1993-99 span of the series, and one predictable but unattractive from the creators’ standpoint.

“Nobody uses social media, and nobody wastes time.”
#shitsiskosays, by Cat Valentine, February 7, 2012

Oh my God… So if we continue on our present trajectory, I’ll be dead by the 24th Century.

“‘It was strictly a tuba raid,’ said Rolph Janssen, an assistant principal.”
‘Tuba Raids’ Plague Schools in California, by By Ian Lovett, New York Times, February 9, 2012

Tuba raids. Wow.