Month: March 2019

Will this be the #spring in history that sees curtains for YouTube?

While the protests and the petition signatures were clear, the directive to restrict copyrighted material, known as Article 13 in the EU, received a “yes.”

Video on YouTube will likely no longer include “remixed” content once individual nations of the EU establish how they’re going to legislate protection for mainstream media, its images, film clips, and music.  For years now, the Internet has taken liberties in the name of freedom, to borrow from established media and then return to it transformative work, for the purpose of review, satire, parody and other kinds of humour.  This will likely end.

On YouTube, content filters for video uploads could become stodgy, and uninventive.  Removing freedoms to speak with ideas recycled from mainstream media inhibits Internet creators’ ability to articulate.  These come in the form of memes, even when it is an upset to the original, and identities in solidarity with views closely held to championed archetypes.  In the face of traditional media protected by Article 17 in the EU, emerging voices can and will fall by the wayside.

School bus pausing at Louth United Church, St. Catharines

If the nations of the EU no longer can upload or view content that contains copyrighted elements, for YouTube, a platform that facilitates hundreds of millions of hours of new and original video every day, doors are closing for what is a livelihood for hardworking creators.

In addition, the possibility that social accounts would be charged fees to link to web pages is a terrible limitation for small bloggers, with pages that have no hope of affording such a privilege.  This was the spring, of 2019, when Articles 11 and 13 became Article 17.  There is every possibility that the restrictions on uploading copyrighted content in the EU will drift into the same freedoms available regardless of where the Internet is accessed and overtake them.

A content filter is complex; it could be, despite how valuable original content is for Google and for Facebook and Twitter, that content filters will only function effectively if they are applied universally, and not just in the EU.  This could be a matter of months or years from now, but the challenges facing the EU, by creators on YouTube, and users enjoying social, and the right of Google to chart the world as it’s understood online, should be informing you.  You should at least consider the possibility that you need to be informed.

Photographer:
Kelly Sikkema

Article 17 will heavily favour the promotion of mainstream media.  Independent voices will lose the opportunity to include portions of copyrighted media, and this could mean a “talking head” style of video on YouTube rather than video containing the freedoms we enjoy now.  All art and video would be required to be free of copyrighted material, which I think is a practical impossibility.

There are creators who thrive on the “remix” of media images or industry music or PC games.  Formerly, they were smart enough to make a living doing that, and exceptionally.  Their opportunities are going to disappear.

The outcome of Article 17 in the EU is only just beginning to take shape, but there will be changes for Facebook and Twitter and YouTube that Article 13 is necessitating, the requirement to filter content video users upload.  Users on the Internet, with the support of the infrastructure of YouTube and Google, will have to strategize differently once Article 17 goes into effect.  It is a sea change.

You are welcome to “like” this post, follow the blog, and/or leave a comment.  Whatever your age, if you are interested in tech, you stand alongside the brightest minds challenging the narrative of the mainstream media.

How a #spring ruling on Content Curations made me a better person

My younger sister wrote me this spring that she had read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”  She said the book improved her interpersonal interactions at work.

One morning I started my content curation tools on the internet, and to my surprise, the designers I tool I use most often had revamped the app.

I work in a mostly volunteer capacity at a cemetery.  http://www.maplelawncemetery.org

What the app does is to find webpages for the purpose of putting content on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Looking at it after its overhaul, I saw I needed to think of keywords for content that were both honest about what I am interested in doing, and valuable to people looking at me on Facebook, and on Twitter.  The reality of whether the more fringe areas of my research were or weren’t going to fly in the face of other people squarely confronted me.

I don’t want to inadvertently confuse people.

Some of my ideas just weren’t going to work, I saw. Our Facebook page is small, but those people aren’t going to be swayed, I now believe, by where I had been putting my nose if I am being transparent.

https://www.facebook.com/LouthUnited

There is an idea in business that employees don’t work for the boss, that in fact, the boss works for the employees.  I work for the people who like the page.  I don’t have the freedom to indulge every avenue I want to, if I don’t want to turn off the people I speak to, and it is probably true that new people I might possibly interest will have similar sensibilities to those who are already involved.

Boss-Employee Relationship Etiquette https://www.thespruce.com/boss-employee-relationship-etiquette-4117468

I hadn’t been aware the more fringe elements of my keyword research was a potential problem, and, without my input, a solution presented itself.

I had envisioned that I would find a strategy to make this work when the time came.  With fresh eyes, I began to see how to better use my content tools going forward.  In the process, I became, in a small way, a more honest person, at least more honest about what I am doing on social.

As the Buddhist maxim asserts: “Never lie, cheat, or steal.”  I got a little more spiritual, yesterday, you might say. It was unexpected all the same.

Maple Lawn Cemetery

On Twitter, I’m https://twitter.com/findingenvirons  

DrumUp is an app on the world wide web at https://drumup.io  

The DrumUp starter plan is inexpensive, and it offers a lot of use for someone with a business model on Facebook, Twitter, and/or LinkedIn.

Every #spring a St. Patrick’s Day

2018-032-15

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.  I’m a Canadian every other day of the year.

When I was a boy, my godmother bought me a coffee table book celebrating Ireland.  It followed that in grade school, I thought to turn a work assignment about other countries into homework on the subject of Ireland.   I flipped through the book to do the research (that I could do at that age) for the teacher.

2018-032-15
St. Patrick

The photos in the book illustrating Irish women helped shape my attitudes to the fairer gender, as well.  I briefly visited the UK in the fall of 1999, but I didn’t go to Ireland.

There is a friend I know whose parents are Irish.  This friend is not fond of the English, despite what I know from grade school about the role the English played shaping Canada.

At the same time, this person has a different understanding of how the Irish fared in history than I have got.  That said, when my mother asked me the other day whether I am prouder of Dublin or Belfast, I found myself answering Belfast.  Until then I didn’t know I felt that way.

I was born in 1977, two days before St. Patrick’s Day.  My mom and dad named me Patrick, after my father’s late brother Patrick.  This uncle died when he was a young man, in a motorcycle accident (he was riding).  My name remembers this Uncle Patrick of mine, and of my brother and sister.

My mom and my father’s mother had a bond.  When my mother was young, the two women would speak to each other privately having a coffee or Coca-Cola together or the like.

Another time In grade school I was instructed to ask questions about the family line. I brought to my paternal grandmother the question of the origin of our name.

I never knew my paternal grandfather.  He’d died before I was born.  I suppose I assumed we are an Irish family.

My grandmother let me know that the surname she took when she married is Welsh, of all matters.  At that age, I was not aware that Wales is a principality of Britain, or otherwise knew anything about it.

Many years later my brother took a strong interest in the Irish.  He went backpacking there with one or two of his friends.

He later researched our family line, and he learned of many of our living relatives in Ireland.  I am sure it is an Irish family, whether the surname is Welsh.

I work for my father as a cemetery groundskeeper.  When we were at the cemetery yesterday, handling a funeral, for which we were responsible, to my surprise, as we wrapped up our clean-up, we saw a hailstorm!

Louth United Church and Maple Lawn Cemetery

The spring solstice ahead:  it doesn’t feel like it.  Last week my father reminded me of the old expression, “In like a lamb, out like a lion.”  That’s what my father was predicting for the month of March here.

About Ireland, I know it is hard when times are tough, and I am empathetic of others experiencing suffering.  If you are Irish or love the Irish, God bless you.  It’s your chance this day, as it is every year, to be Irish.

I hope you’re having a great day.  Naturally, you are welcome to “like” this post, to follow my blog and/or to comment.  Thank you for having an interest.

The cemetery where I work with my father is on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/LouthUnited  My duties for the work I do are nominally tied to the posts I publish in this blog.

Mermaid’s March 2019 WordPress Tea Party

The Little Mermaid is a site which entertains bloggers who bring together their thoughts on a theme suggested by the moderator.  These tea parties, the setting for discussion, began several months ago. The Little Mermaid is on a new site now, found at https://www.thelittlemermaid.site/tag/tea-party  For the tea party, March’s theme is fashion.

Personally, I am fashion-challenged, by which I mean I haven’t let fashion out of my bag.  I don’t have a memorable sense of fashion.

Aiming to define fashion reminds me, for example, of an Internet dating profile, where a user is invited to assess his sense of fashion in a field drawn from a list of narrow but conventional approaches.

Photographer:
Nordwood Themes

I wish I’d made the decision to dress better when I was younger.  If you don’t invest in yourself, how can you expect anyone else to?  In a media-hungry capitalist structure, it is important to be “cool” by wearing a wardrobe that both help you feel good about being seen in the street and identifies your lifestyle to people who speak with you.

I believe it’s important, and I would have liked to be more fashionable.

A rule for wear is that clothes must mostly fit.  This sounds obvious, but it isn’t necessarily easy to determine that clothes which cultivate a brand for you are far superior to dressing at random.

I am less interested in making an outfit look good than I am, I feel, non-discerning about social mores.  That’s how I haven’t let it out of my bag.

I do experience mild anxiety about looking shabby when I ought to be feeling fine, but something in my psychology prevents me from being able to coordinate a wardrobe.  That’s kind of funny, eh?

I hope you are not disappointed.  You are welcome to click “like,” to follow my blog, and/or to leave a comment.

The Little Mermaid’s tea parties provide inspiration and heighten my interest in others for who her tea parties are likewise attractive.

#spring dst and its usual sleep deprivation

The Monday after the change to DST

The Saturday 3/9 edition of the National Post, one of the papers that my parents get, carried a big story by a Sharon Kirkey on A3.  The paper included the rather off-putting headline “Heart attacks and other risks of daylight savings” https://t.co/hU0Wp67UVx

I don’t worry about sleep-deprivation, but my father said last night after I read the Sharon Kirkey story that I could point out what she wrote about DST safely.  Kirkey’s conclusion to her story in the National Post is the wonderful words LOST SLEEP ALSO MAKES US SLACKERS

Before the ninth of March, my mother was already pointing out to me that Daylight Savings Time was here Sunday at 2 a.m.  I got a normal night’s sleep the Saturday, the ninth, and in the morning I changed my alarm clock, my answering machine and my microwave oven to DST.

The computer adjusted automatically.  I was fine.

My mother and father

I was pleased my mother thought to remind me of such business, as this pragmatic reality might have gone right by me and caused inadvertent confusion.  I see the effects of sleep deprivation everywhere, but many perspectives we take are a matter of our consensus about what’s true.  In any case, there is presently no option except to join in Daylight Savings.

I subscribe to the email newsletter Publishous, which just moved into the top four hundred publications of writers on Medium.

In the month of March, Publishous readers are writing about #spring.  The intention is that writers reading Publishous should pass on their work to the Publishous editors for consideration, but I am doing no such thing.

I am only glancing at Publishous to see if there is anything I find splendid and want to read.  I do draw inspiration from it independent of the need to participate in writing for their eyes, although any are welcome to read me as I am putting the ideas together in this blog.  I just don’t want to bat out of my league.

Sharon Kirkey’s story is grim, but I am pleased that my parents thought to provide me with advice, when I explained to them what I had in mind to blog.  My dad is also my boss–we operate a tiny cemetery http://www.maplelawncemetery.org

You’re welcome to click like, to follow my blog, and to leave a comment.

Good luck recovering from any impact you yourself felt from the change to DST.

Welcoming #spring at the cemetery

Maple Lawn Cemetery

I enjoy the odd book bringing up self-management.  I look at ideas of that kind on Publishous.  I was pleased to see Publishous’ newsletter today, published yesterday, highlighting the spring season now that March is here.

Publishous readers are evaluating what they are doing in the month of March.  For my cemetery job, we will tend to the grounds soon, by collecting fallen tree limbs and wrapping up the majority of our activities inside the church, which is where we make our efforts in winter.

I’m not aiming to write for Medium, but I like the specific design of the Publishous newsletter.  I am turning forty-two this month, and I am thinking about Lent and Catholic worship.  Years ago, in the 2000s, I read the first book by the American writer and pop psychologist, the Women are from Mars, Men are from Venus author John Gray.

It is, in Gray’s estimation, a sequence of the seven years of one’s life, between the ages of forty-two and forty-nine, that one sees in his life the influence of community upon him.

I don’t think there are many guarantees in life, but we have, as the next seven years begin, the outlook of keeping organized a little cemetery.

Louth United Church

The work I do, the most distinctive work I do, is to help a small cemetery and to do odd jobs around the church that is on the property.  I am also an SMM–I do a blog which I connect now and then to the work I carry out on the cemetery grounds.  This is the site you’re on.

I am also curious about the group of bloggers which who explore “tea parties” that assemble participants into thinking about what the hostess of the tea parties has suggested for the month of March.  You can find the tea party hostess’ site at https://www.thelittlemermaid.site/

You’re welcome to like, comment, and/or follow, if you are interested in what’s going on.

We’re on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/LouthUnited and posts include photos and links to articles which could be of interest.  It is a small page, but the people are good.  The tone of the feedback I receive from people following the page helps me decide what will be well-received and what won’t (what to avoid).  All of this I practice as a skill set.

I updated the profile picture for the cemetery on Facebook August 1 and I enjoy curating content for the page. We will continue with as much aplomb as we can muster going into the future from here. All the best to you, and have a safe and spooky fall.

Prayer can be an effective remedy for what ails you.

Why Do People Think Pathfinder Version Two is a Good Idea?

Ten years ago the gaming company Paizo introduced the first season of the tabletop RPG Pathfinder to the public.  In the nine years since each year there’s been an additional season until now we are Season 10.  Each season brought with it new ideas for players of the role-playing game.

In 2016 the Humble Bundle website again made Pathfinder available in exchange for its usual “pay-what-you-like” model.  Humble Bundle accepts funds for charity in exchange for what are usually digital materials for gaming.  It was season six when I saw the opportunity on Humble Bundle to make a charitable donation in exchange for a lovely gaming bundle of digital materials for Pathfinder.

My twitter handle is @findingenvirons and my blog is found at https://findingenvirons1.blog …so that’s why I wanted to learn some of the rules of Pathfinder.  Pathfinder is a fantasy environment to explore and combat.  Characters representing players of the game are customized to keep many choices open when players put together a class, ancestry, and background.

Looking from Louth United Church in St. Catharines for a glimpse of Maple Lawn Cemetery

Looking into what’s happening with Pathfinder, I went to Pathfinder publisher Paizo’s blog.  I saw that Wednesday, February 13, 2019 Paizo announced that they are preparing version two of Pathfinder to improve upon the existing game.  Playtest is over, so what’s the plan? https://paizo.com/community/blog

At this time Humble Bundle has brought back its offer of accepting funds for charity in exchange for more digital materials of the game, now in Season 10.

For $8 (about CA$10.58) Pathfinder game supplements Shattered Star 1 and 2 of 6 are included, along with several digital gamebooks for Pathfinder. For $15 (about CA$19.84) Shattered Star 3 and 4 of 6 become available along with many others.  For $18 (about CA$23.80), all of Shattered Star unlocks, along with many, many others.

If you’re interested in pursuing this, you will have to act soon.  https://www.humblebundle.com/books/pathfinder-10th-anniversary-books

Version Two will be streamlined, but consistent, with the original design of Pathfinder.  Tactical play will remain similar.  Likewise, magical items will be similar to how they were in the first version.


Photographer:
Skitter Photo

On August 2nd Paizo started playtesting to ensure that Pathfinder version two will be as fun and as effective to play as the original version.  Paizo made the reveal at Gen Con 2018.

Although I’ve never, strictly speaking, been part of playing Pathfinder, being familiar with how of the game works is of interest to me.  It reminds me of playing Dungeons & Dragons, which is where the game Pathfinder began (creators of Pathfinder at first intended it to be a refinement of D&D’s “3.5”).  I may pursue Season 10 for my own reasons, to get additional insight into Pathfinder, so that I better relate to players of the tabletop RPG.

It is exciting to think that this new edition is becoming available after ten years of popularity already.

To get a more accurate picture of what’s happening with Pathfinder, I turned to Quora for information.  Although perhaps odd, I put my question to Quora this way:  How would you recommend I proceed in anticipating the Pathfinder RPG version two?

Monday I received four answers.

Todd Gardiner, from Hieroglyph Photography, said this:

“If you anticipate an upcoming product, I would recommend you buy it.

“Not really sure what other advice you are seeking here. ‘How do I anticipate something?’ isn’t really a question most people ask.”

Given his constructive criticism, I see the value of his advice.

Ryan Marshall, the author of Gishes & Goblins, answered this way:

“Try not to worry about it, until it’s actually published. The beta test of the rules was a wide departure from the first edition, but it was also poorly received, so there’s no way to anticipate the scope of the changes they might implement.”

This was a problematic answer because Marshall is saying that the beta test possibly won’t stand the test of a comparison to the first version of Pathfinder.  This is a very different point of view than the other three answers I received.

Steffen Häuser, playing Pen&Paper Games for 30 years, had this to say:

“Just play them. Me and my friends who before played 5e got ourselves some copies of the printed beta rules (available on amazon) and just started playing. Imho 2nd edition pf is hugely better than both dnd 5e and Pathfinder 1st editiob” (sp).

In contrast to Marshall’s answer, Steffen here is offering the point of view that the new version is superior to the first.  A complete opposite of Marshall’s opinion!

Nelson Cunnington, a player since the 70s, said this:

“You need a plan to anticipate something? I can only suggest the usual eager looking-forward, interspersed with impatience that it isn’t coming quicker and depression that it hasn’t happened yet.”

I think Cunnington is looking at the situation with humor.

I did get one more answer a few days later.  This is what one “Richard Bachman” had to say:

“I would avoid major purchases of Pathfinder 1 books until you see how things shake out in your area. If I enjoyed Pathfinder 1 (which I do), I would personally feel no need to change editions unless all my friends insisted on doing so and I could no longer find Pathfinder 1 games.”

Another fine response.

I hope the publisher Paizo continues to be successful, and also earns many charitable donations.  Humble Bundle facilitates charitable giving in exchange for the enormous value of digital materials for play.

If you enjoyed this post, you’re welcome to “like,” follow me and/or comment.  If you play Pathfinder, I am particularly interested!

Paizo Announces Pathfinder Second Edition for Summer 2018

Posted by Rob Wieland on March 7, 2018

https://geekandsundry.com/paizo-announces-pathfinder-second-edition-for-summer-2018/