One of the issues lately that really makes my blood boil is Photographers’ Rights. The idea that taking a photograph makes someone a terrorist is just stupid. And giving someone (usually a rent-a-cop) the arbitrary power to question and/or detain someone for it doesn’t make any kind of sense.

I used to think that I just needed to leave the country because of the idiocy, though this story from the BBC makes me think maybe I need to leave the planet:

The family was stopped by a plain clothes officer from the Channel Tunnel Policing Unit on 20 February.

Ms Maynard, a legal advocate, said the officer, who failed to identify who she was, asked for the family’s passports then asked “who’s the boy?”

“My son is mixed race and the officer then told us, ‘I believe you are child trafficking’.”

Terror police detain disabled boy

For a nice (and maybe much-needed) laugh, enjoy the live enactment of xkcd’s I Love the Discovery Channel strip. And a fun video detailing why I don’t like getting involved in website design here at the office, The Process. What if there were no stop signs… and a major corporation was charged with inventing one?

Any geek worth their salt should know why getting this catalog/junk mail today made me laugh at first, and then feel a bit sad. It also made me wonder what the hell mailing list my address got stuck on.

Also this is an excellent 3 minute video on How To Tell People They Sound Racist. I love the ‘what they did’ vs. ‘what they are’ concept, and his wallet analogy is brilliant.

I have never truly been a fan of anything Joss Whedon put out, mostly because I just never got started on things, and by the time everyone was having their fanboygasms about the shows, they were well into their arcs or … off the air and not yet released on DVD. So I never got into Buffy, Angel or Firefly and I still ain’t seen Serenity. What I’ve heard about his new show doesn’t particularly interest me, nor was I impressed by his writing stints on various comic titles. Though I do admit to being impressed by him letting the Buffy/Angel comic books be official canon and continuity for the now off-the-air series.

Just about every site has been linking to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day (from that fantastic and surreal Cheetos commercial). It’s not really sing-along, unless you’ve watched it a million times to know the words, there ain’t no bouncing ball, but it’s very funny. Norman watched it through before me and he suggested that a line from this scene would be his new quote:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

It’s in three acts, all online until midnight Sunday July 20, also available on iTunes right now. After it goes offline, it will be coming out as a DVD and there will be details about the DVD at Comic Con. One of these years I’m going to have to make it out there for that… and Pride, of course.

When I used to play the RPG Vampire the Masquerade in both tabletop and LARP forms, there was a vampiric ability called Presence. It allowed the user to influence the emotions and actions of others. In terms of social networking, it might have been nicknamed the drama power. To this day, I still believe it actually exists on LiveJournal. Probably reaching back to the date when “friend” overcame “befriend” as the popular verb form and it’s opposite “unfriend” gained even more use in day to day language.

Web 2.0/Social Networking provides us a different type of Presence though, the ability to appear omnipresent in a way. But it can also send very confusing signals about one’s activities, location, online attention span, etc. I signed up for ping.fm which is a service that can send a status message, microblog (140 characters) or an actual blog post to many different services. Effectively it updates your status/messages on all services at once. I still can’t tell whether this is a good thing or just annoying, since if people are following you on those many services, they’re pretty much getting spammed when you send a multi-update, especially those using SMS notifications.

Other services strive to act as the lighthouse in the Marvel title Excalibur which exists simultaneously across the multiverse. They will update your actual profile information across multiple services so that you remain the same on facebook, myspace, hi5, etc. While I think that would be a great way to keep your online social (friendly) and networking (work-related) profiles in line, I usually keep most of mine pared down to the basics anyway.

The most popular of them all, I think, are the multi-account instant messenger clients like Adium (my fave at home) and meebo (my fave at work). I think these are great. One application, all your chat buddies, click a button and your away/present status is set for all services.

Unfortunately… read on to see how these apps also foster abuse…

I’m totally loving this site, The Periodic Table of Videos from the University of Nottingham. A short video about each element is available by clicking on the table or by checking out their YouTube profile. Lauren Cooper clearly needs no assistance, and the producers of Look Around You just might have gotten their elements a bit mixed up.

I’ve seen the trailer for Watchmen and even having never read the book, it looks great. I plan to get through the series at some point this weekend.

Paramount will be giving out some promo posters for Star Trek at Comic Con, Entertainment Weekly has a sneak peek at them. The four combine into the larger image, but fans are only getting one-per. I don’t think the die-hards will have trouble getting a complete set. I’d like to be more excited about this movie but… *meh. It’s probably because I’ve read too many spoilers online about what is, isn’t and might be happening.