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Topics - ryos

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31
Rants and Stuff / Stupid Legitimate Spam
« on: March 23, 2009, 09:44:37 PM »
I'm feeling the need to rant about something. Here we go...

So, I'm really careful with my email address. I give my real email only to people I actually know. For everyone else, there's aliases. I have several tiers of aliases (and even entire email accounts) that I give to organizations of various repute, the idea being that if one of these aliases starts getting spam I can simply change it and move on without having to bother letting people know that my email has changed.

These practices have paid off - I receive, at most, around one illegitimate spam message per month. Legitimate spam is, however, a completely different story.

A necessary evil of doing business on the Internet is that you have to give out your email address. The reason this is evil is because these entities, nearly without exception, abuse this relationship in an attempt to get more money from you. They want you to feel confident that they won't do this, so they put a checkbox (consistently and unfailingly checked by default) that says something to the effect of, "YES! Do please send me all your crappy spamletters!" I consistently and unfailingly uncheck all of these checkboxes. Do you think that stops them?

No. Apparently those checkboxes are simply there for psychological manipulation, as nobody seems to have any intention of honoring that preference. I'd be surprised if they even bother to save it. Almost without fail, regardless of my stated preference, these businesses will start sending me unwanted newsletters and promotional offers.

Fortunately, they all (with one exception) honor an explicit unsubscribe request. However, they require you to get at least one crapmail before they'll allow you to get off the list, and even though it's a simple thing to click an unsubscribe link and hit delete, the cumulative annoyance of having to do it every time I enter a business relationship with a new entity is really starting to wear on me.

What's the one exception I mentioned above? Pizza Hut! If you order pizza from pizzahut.com, don't give them your real email address (or even, as I did, your "most trusted" alias) because you can NEVER get off their list. After about 30 unsubscribe link clicks and two emails to their contact address (one polite, the other demanding), I finally decided to make a filter to shunt all their crap into my Junk folder and never buy pizza from them again.

Is that overreacting? Maybe, but it's all I have. Unfortunately, I can't do it very often or I'd never shop online at all, because like I said, they all abuse the relationship.

There, I ranted. Now, back to clicking those "unsubscribe" links...

32
Reading Excuses / 16 March 2009 - Sea of Sand - part 1
« on: March 16, 2009, 09:03:13 AM »
I know I promised you 1700 words. Well, somewhere between now and then it turned into 2700. I hope nobody minds. :)

Here are a few brief details about the story:

- This will be a short story - I'm shooting for somewhere south of 10,000 words.
- The (working) title is "Sea of Sand".
- Though I've written several little things here and there over the years, this is my first attempt at a "real" (as in, "I plan on trying to sell it" real) work of fiction. I have no illusions that my first attempt will turn out publishable, but don't let that stay the hand of critiquing.
- I suck at naming things. It's one of my failings as a human being (fear for my unborn children). You've been warned...

That's it. Thanks for reading!

33
Music / Great bands you've never heard of
« on: March 14, 2009, 02:44:44 AM »
OK. I listen to a bunch of stuff that nobody I come in contact with ever knows about before they met me. And a lot of it is great.

How much great stuff am I missing, because I've never heard of it?

So, let's try this. What obscure bands/albums do you love? Crap you're sure nobody listens to but you?

I'll go first: J Minus. Download the free songs off their (sadly, entirely flash-based) web site. Be happy. :)

34
Howard Tayler / What's speed got to do with it?
« on: March 08, 2009, 05:10:19 AM »
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20090308.html

Is the Touch-And-Go trying to escape a gravitational field or something? There shouldn't be any forces associated with going fast. Accelerating, maybe, but when you're already at speed...

35
Brandon Sanderson / Thoughts and questions about Elantris (spoilers too)
« on: February 27, 2009, 06:40:52 AM »
Hi guys,

Sorry if you've already talked Elantris to death and I just missed it. I made a good-faith effort to find old discussions about my questions that came up pretty dry, but if you're all tired of this stuff feel free to beat me off with the noob stick.

That said, I just finished Elantris, and now I want to talk about it. :)

First, GREAT BOOK! I loved it all the way through. I did have one issue while reading it, though, and it came when Sarene tells Raoden and Galladon that the Aons represent the land. As soon as I read that, it was immediately obvious to me why the Aons weren't working, and it seems odd to me that it took the characters a few more chapters to figure it out. That's a minor quibble, but it leads me to other questions:

  • Why did Raoden need a Teo to tell him that? Wouldn't an Arelene, living as he does in the shadow of Elantris, already know it?
  • I also wonder why nobody told the people that Elantris and the surrounding cities formed a giant Aon Rao, and that this fact causes the Shaod. It seems like something you'd teach your schoolchildren in history class.
  • Assuming it was considered a sort of Elantrian proprietary secret, why then didn't the Elantrians make the connection between the chasm and the Reod? I mean, they're presumably the ones who thought this stuff up. Fixing the Shaod turned out to be incredibly easy. We know that at least one Elantrian survived the upheaval after the Reod, and I assume he wasn't alone. How did it never occur to any of them to draw a line in the dirt?
  • The Shaod's connection to Elantris presents a sort of chicken-egg conundrum. I assume that since fixing the Elantrian Rao fixed the Shaod, then there was no Shaod (and no Elantrians) before its creation. But, only Elantrians can draw Aons. So...?

    (I'll admit there are a few hints about this in the book. The Derethi priests appear able to access the Dor through sacrificial means, and the Jindo through ChayShan focus and motion. We also see that an incompletely-transformed Elantrian (Dilaf's wife) was created by an improperly-drawn Aon, implying that a full-blown Elantrian could be made with a properly-drawn Aon.

    Or, the characters' belief that only Elantrians could craft Aons and have them take effect might simply be wrong.)
  • Finally, a more random note: I assumed throughout the book that Wyrn was somehow behind the earthquake that caused the Reod, and the book gives no evidence either way. Am I off base here?

That's about it. I don't mean to sound overcritical here, because as I said, I loved the book. I'd love it even more if these questions had good answers. :)

Thanks for reading my rather TLDR first post.

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