Uhhh - not again

I'm a member of a site called Urbis.

Urbis is a writer's forum, but not in the sense of normal internet forums (though it does have one of those) but more along the lines of a writer's group like you might get as part of a teaching course. The jist is that you post up pieces of your work, and then other writers offer critique.

Now, there are quite a few of these types of site on the intarwebs, but what sets Urbis apart is their use of a credit system. This works like money - for every review you write you get credits, which you then have to spend to unlock the reviews people do of your own work.

It's quite simple, but very clever (as are all the best ideas) because what it means is that everybody is forced to contribute in order to get what they want - critique of their own work. Normally on writer's sites, everybody posts their stuff, but nobody bothers reading or reviewing it. And if they do review it, then they simply give you slap on the back and tell you you're great - even if you're not.

At Urbis, because you have to pay for reviews and the system is finely balanced so that, very roughly speaking, one review you write unlocks one review of your own work, if someone gives you a rubbish review, you can ask for a refund and then spend the points getting at reviews that actually help you improve your work. Also, things are done anonymously, so you can't really be prejudiced when writing reviews.

However, and this isn't really a complaint about the system, I do seem to find myself making exactly the same points over and over again.

There's a book called "Techniques of the Selling Writer" by Dwight Swain, and what this book does is to lay out all the fundamentals of modern fiction writing. One of the points made in the book is actually that there's no such thing as a set of hard-and-fast rules, but as far as these things go, that's what he gives you - a set of basic rules, the mastery of which will set you in good stead.

Some of the absolute basic ones are:

• Show, don't tell;
• Nothing happens at the same time - only sequentially; and of course
• Review your work several times before you show it to anyone (for both spelling/grammar and sense).

And I seem to have to keep making those same points about things I read on Urbis over and over again.

But the worst part is that I was the same when I started - someone on Urbis told me about the book. So in many ways I feel honour bound to pass this information on and tell them about the book, but it doesn't half get depressing when within the first 5 sentences of a 5,000 word piece someone has done all three of the above :(.

42

I've tried not to include politics in the blog as, well, it's not all that interesting, but I've been kinda intrigued by the issues over the extension of the detention without charge powers to 42 days.

In theory this power is only for use with terror suspects and will allow police to detain them for up to 42 days without charging them. This is important as, since the signing of Magna Carta way back in the early 1200's, every person arrested or detained by Police in England has had the right to be released unless charged within 24 hours.

It's called Habeas Corpus and it's essentially seen as a fundamental human right. They cannot hold you without formally accusing you of an actual crime. It's important because it's what separates us from despotism and dictatorship - this is your real and actual freedom that people who talk about freedom actually mean when it comes down to it.

This power to hold was extended for those suspect of terrorism up to 28 days a while back now, and has recently been approved for extension up to 42 days by the House of Commons.

Really, this, for me, is a very scary thing, because it's the thin end of the wedge. Where does it go next? What other suspects of crimes might start to have longer periods of detention? How long does it become? 84 days? 168 days? 365 days? As long as the police need in order to manufacture evidence?

But the really scary thing is that, apparently, surveys indicate three quarters of the UK population agree with the move. To me, that's staggering, and it seems it's because it's about terrorism.

For some reason, people have become so brainwashed about terrorism that they somehow feel it is okay to abuse people's human rights because of it. And here's the key point in this - these people are suspects. They have not necessarily committed a crime.

There seems to be an attitude that if you're arrested for terrorism then you must be guilty. But what about those that aren't guilty? This is the fundamental point about freedom and why it is so important - everyone has the right to due process. Even the bad guys.

Of course, to some extent, I believe it to be a little academic, as I don't see why the house of lords won't just throw the law out the window, but bizarrely, this means that the unelected part of our democratic process is better able to safeguard our rights than our actual elected representatives :/.

bring on the rain

Following on from yesterday's bloggage, it's been so sunny, I washed my car yesterday evening. Such are the advantages of the lighter evenings in summer.

But then, guess what? It's rained overnight. How come that always happens? If I wash my car, it's almost guaranteed to rain on it :/.

I also took the opportunity as the family I lodge with are off on holiday right now. I always prefer to wash my car when they're not around. Partly, that's cos I'm so fat and unfit I get a real sweat on and it's a little embarrassing if they can see me, but mainly it's cos I don't want to talk to them about it.

I noticed the first few times that every time I went to to wash my car one of them would pop out for a chat about said car washing activity. Now, as I say, bit embarrassing with me panting and sweating, but also it would always start with that joke.

You may know the joke I mean - it's the "you can wash mine while you're at it" joke. For some reason this joke always really annoys me. No, you can wash your car, and I'll wash mine. How about that?

It's a silly thing and I've no idea why it gets my ire up so much, but there it is.

New monthly Japanese mags are on the way apparently :) and I think I've broken the back of my previously mentioned obsessiveness. Now I just need to drag my overdraft back into the black.

fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun

It's been really sunny and warm here the last three or four days.

Now normally I would be struggling with this. Being one big-arsed fat fuck, hot weather is generally not the most comfortable thing for me. My eyes are also very sensitive to bright light, so I end up squinting and still being nearly blind. Also, I need a lot of sleep every night and I find it difficult to get to sleep if it's warm and sticky. Hot is almost always accompanied by sticky in this country.

However, at the moment I'm actually kinda enjoying the hot weather.

The reason is that the last 2 years have been really bad weather wise. Now I kinda like rainy days, but this last couple of years it's rained almost continuously, with entire weeks of torrential downpours.

I also prefer it cooler, but this last couple of years it's been bone-chillingly cold. Even in spring and autumn I've had to have my heating on full blast, which is unusual for me. On top of which fuel costs have spiralled, of course, so it's been costing a small fortune.

So given all that, I'm almost glad it's sunny and warm - even if it's just because it represents something of a change :/.

scanning

Scanning stuff is a bit of an odd activity.

Well, it's not odd as such, but when you do it a lot, and you do it for a particular area like anime as I do, you end up with some slightly peculiar attitudes.

I mean, the fundamental truth is that the things you scan are not your own, as such. You scan artwork that was made by someone else and probably took them quite a lot of time, effort and a whole heap of talent.

But it's you that buys the book and, in the case of anime, has to pay quite a lot, since it all comes out of Japan. And at some level as the end consumer you're going to be the one paying the shipping costs, even if you buy it from a company local to your country.

So you're investing quite a bit of money.

Then, in my case, and I know I'm more at the extreme end, you take this book apart (you pull out the staples or use an iron to melt the glue and then slowly pull the pages apart). This is actually quite a time consuming process.

But what's even more time consuming is that you have to actually scan it. I have an A3 scanner so there's not much I have to do in more than one pass, but still, you need to scan at quite a high resolution - at least 400dpi - and that means it takes a good minute or so per page. Multiply that by, on average, around 100 pages, and you can see scanning a book can take around another 1.5 hours.

Having scanned them, you generally have to process them before you can save them. Often times this means rotating them slightly so that they're properly vertical, cropping off unwanted parts outside of the page, and maybe adjusting the levels slightly to compensate for colour problems. More time and effort.

If you're a real nutter you'll even go through the process of cleaning and tidying up the scan - if it's a 2 -page spread sticking it together, for example. If you do that it can take hours.

Then you save as a high quality file. Now if you're doing this as a dedicated activity, you're going to amass a lot of scans pretty damn quickly. That means a lot of big files, so you need some way to store them. For me that meant buying an entire external hard drive to put them on. But not only that, you need to back them up as well. That means burning them all to CD/DVD.

In other words, you have to pay money again to store the scans, as well as the time and effort spent archiving them in this way.

So my point, in summary, is that scanning artbooks (and magazines) in any serious capacity is not a quick and easy thing to do. It takes time, money and effort. And as such, what tends to happen is that you kinda become attached to the scans.

As I say, they're not "yours" as such, but you start to feel that at some level they are yours. It's your effort that's gone into making them.

And this is sort of where the problems start.

Because having done the actual scanning, most scanners then want to display their work on websites. This can take several forms - they may upload it to a public site (minitokyo, AnimePaper, for example) or they may have their own site (APA, ferricorp, for example). If you upload to public sites then normally it means you'll have to do some additional processing on the scan. The actual scan you made will probably too big for the public site and may also need additional tidying up. More time and effort. If you have your own site then you may not do quite so much tidying up, but you have to pay for the site. It costs money to have internet hosting.

But anyway, the fundamental issue here is that the scans become available for other people to download.

Other people who have absolutely no appreciation of the time, effort and expense that went into making those scans.

Other people who will re-upload your scans onto other websites, claiming to have made them themselves (or at least, not saying who did make them).

Other people who will give no thanks or acknowledgement whatsoever for what you've done to get the image available for them to re-upload.

These things are extremely annoying if you are the person who did make the scan. You see, it's not that you mind them having your scans, it's not that you mind them re-uploading them, it's that they do not acknowledge your efforts.

It becomes worse at sites like AP where they operate a system of exchange - for uploads you are enabled to make downloads. This means these unscrupulous people can "profit" off of your efforts and also affect the running of the site by effectively leaching their bandwidth.

It's why I've never really uploaded stuff to 4chan's /hr. In many ways sites like 4chan could be an answer to some of the issues above - you don't really need to tidy it up to the same degree (other people can if they want), the files can be really big and you're not paying for the hosting and bandwidth.

But /hr is also absolutely dripping with all those fuckwits that will re-upload your scans onto other websites and not acknowledge the source. Indeed, most of the uploads onto 4chan are such images - stuff taken without then being credited.

It's ungrateful is the problem - as I say, you have no problem with them having the scans, or even uploading them to some extent (though doing so en-mass is a piss take) but not saying who actually did the scan is just plain ungrateful.

There are a couple of ways around this (well, outside of not uploading your scans, but that sorta defeats the point). Firstly you can add a sig to your scans, saying who may it.

The problem with this is to some extent it disfigures the image, and that's not why you're a scanner. But also, you come in for a lot of flak. Which is so ironic it almost hurts - people who did not make the scans, and have no appreciation for what it takes to make them complaining that you've put a sig on and these same people are the ones who then steal your scan if it's sigless.

The other way is to try to police the internet. By which I mean you go to sites like mt on a regular basis and trawl through the scans to find the one that are yours. To say this is tedious is understating the issue on a biblical scale, but also, many public sites don't actually care where the stuff was stolen from.

Sometimes I do think "fuck it - I'll just upload my shit on 4chan. Let them steal it - it'll save me all the hassle." But every time its the lack of gratitude that stops me clicking the submit button.

... got a bit carried away there :).

stuck in my brain

Don't you just hate when you get a song stuck in your head?

It just keeps looping around and round and you find yourself singing the words under your breath. Sometimes it's okay if it's a song you kinda like, but even then it can get a bit tedious after a while.

The worst is when it's so lodged in there you can't sleep cos you mind won't relax enough to stop it from looping the song endlessly over and over.

Maybe it's worse for me. I'm fairly sure I'm a bit OCD (Obessive Cumpulsive Disorder). I don't say that in an emo pity me sort of way, I just used to be really quite obsessive about things and occasionally still find myself utterly fixated.

I guess the best way to explain my particular thing was that it was to do with patterns.

Draw a small square with the tip of your finger on the palm of your hand. Right, now where did you start? It was probably at one of the corners, right? And you kept your finger constantly on the palm, rather than lifting it off to draw each side, right? What direction did you go in? Clockwise of anti-clockwise?

Well that's all perfectly normal. My problem was that, having drawn the square once starting at one corner, I would then have to redraw it starting at the other four corners. Sometimes I'd also have to redraw it four times starting at the different corners going in the opposite direction too.

If I didn't do this I would feel... odd. If I did do it, it would be, I dunno, pleasurable, I guess. Like finishing a good book or something - a pleasure in a sense of achievement.

Also, it wouldn't generally involve actually drawing the shape, just mentally picturing the action of drawing it. And the shapes were more complicated than squares, but not so complicated as to prevent their easy repetition.

It's not something I still do (nowadays I obsess over things like Civ3 for short periods - you may have noticed in previous blog entries) and it was probably not OCD, I was just reminded of it with this bloody song going round and round in my head like the patterns I used to draw.