(no subject)
Hi! You're looking very pretty today.
Some non-poppish stuff I've been enjoying lately.
TeahouseAn online comic set in a brothel in some sort of lush fantasy/anime world. Reasons this is good: lots of queerness, including gay and bi characters, kinky characters, and an androgynous character. Also, a storyline featuring one of my bulletproof kinks: the hard-edged guy who swears he's not gay right until he gets seduced.
(Although I could do without the guy throwing so many gay slurs around, meh.)
I started reading this because torch wrote sprinkles & cream for Yuletide, a delightful bedroom farce with bonus cupcakes. I definitely recommend catching up on the comic first -- it should only take about fifteen minutes.
We're Going Down (Revenge vid)Great song choice, incredible editing, and it really captures the feel of the show so far.
Also, if you're not watching Revenge, consider this a recommendation! It's a fabulous, soapily good time with strong female characters.
Stand Alone Among the Wreck by Giddy (Sherlock)A story that really works for me and not only because it aligns with how I see the relationship between Sherlock and John: deep love, affection, frustration. (But not slash.) It's also beautifully, evocatively written. If you were broken by Reichenbach, this could be some glue.
Girls by Deep Sea Arcade.Ever since proteinscollide recommended this recently, I can't stop listening to it. Great '60s surf pop feel.
When Did You Choose To Be Straight?When I was looking through my YouTube favourites before I shut my account down (more on that in a minute), I came across this video. There's a lot of debate about whether the "choice" argument is the right one for gay activists to take, but leaving that discussion aside, I think this is fascinating as a piece of rhetoric. Never before have I seen one carefully-stated question cause so many people to have an A-ha! moment.
Google's been on a run lately. In the last few weeks, they've:
- Broken search results by prioritising Google+.
- Been caught stealing data from Mocality, then lying to lure its customers away.
- Been caught vandalising another competing business, OpenStreetMap.
- Been busted by the US Government for knowingly selling ads for illegal drugs.
But wait! There's more. Google is now making an explicit grab for your privacy by associating everything you do on their dozens of sites with your real-life identity.
What this means for you is that data from the things you search for, the emails you send, the places you look up on Google Maps, the videos you watch in YouTube, the discussions you have on Google+ will all be collected in one place. It seems like it will particularly affect Android users, whose real-time location (if they are Latitude users), Google Wallet data and much more will be up for grabs. And if you have signed up for Google+, odds are the company even knows your real name.
(From Google's Broken Promise: The End of "Don't Be Evil" at Gizmodo.)
I've had my doubts about Google for years, so I only use them for three things: search, YouTube, and Google Reader. I've followed the steps in the article to delete my aggregated search data, am trying out Bing and DuckDuckGo for search, and closed my YouTube account, but I haven't yet had the time to look around and find a good substitute for Google Reader and Flipboard, which relies on it. Once I do, I'm going to delete my Google account entirely.
Paranoid? Perhaps. It's not that I think Google will do evil things with my information, necessarily. It's that they think they have the right to collect and collate it, and I absolutely object to that.