Nutty Bites 12 Part I: December

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Nuchtchas

Yes it’s pretty late in the month and I’m just getting to December, but I got a lot of content here for you. I hope you enjoy it.

Show Notes:

What’s awesome in the month of December?

Tek is home
Christmas
New Years
Epiphany
So much, whew…

What I’m Listening to?

Alien Nation: The Newcomers Podcast
Not much new, let me talk about games instead
STO
DDO
Sims Freeplay
Life
Scrabble & Words with Friends
Monopoly
Arkham Horror

I heard it on twitter

Black Bread Recipe

What I’m reading

Comics!
Sherlock Holmes Stories

TBC

Contact/Feedback

(347) NUTTY42 or (347) 688-8942
http://nimlas.org/blog

Created by NIMLAS SUDIOS
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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How was that?

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Nuchtchas

Any night sweats? Terrors? Suddenly not knowing simple facts because you couldn’t look them up on Wikipedia? The Anti SOPA/PIPA blackout was interesting for me at least. I saw a few sites that said they would go black but didn’t, I attribute most of that to mistakes made in coding and one site I know believes the report that SOPA is dead.

There were a lot of confused people thinking we were talking about soap but spelling ti wrong.
Some supporters of SOPA/PIPA called us names and claimed the blackout was a gimmick
A lot of sites only blacked out their US websites
A lot of memes were created today
several websites had great blackout messages (I think my favorite is the Oatmeal)
Two co-sponsors of the bill have withdrawn their support and other backers in congress have stepped back (I refrain from giving a number because this may increase, I hope)
I really enjoyed this article from the BBC, it even has screen caps of all the sites that went dark (I didn’t realize I could make all my flickr images black for the day, that would have been cool)

Would SOPA/PIPA have passed if we didn’t do this today? Maybe, maybe not. Now we will never know since it is clear we have made a change. It took a day of people wanting to leave GoDaddy for them to change their mind and half a day of the internet to black out to shake the co-founders, I will call this a win. Still, let’s not think we won completely, the bills are still out there and they have supporters and lot of money behind it.

Are you ready to protest SOPA and PIPA?

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Nuchtchas

For the past few days I have been getting questions about my Twitter/Facebook/Google Plus avatar, why did I put a [CENSORED] bar over it? It’s not a joke involving innuendo or anything like that, it’s a sign to protest two bills that they are trying to pass in the USA, dubbed SOPA and PIPA. You also may have already noticed I censored this site a while ago to get people to write their congressmen and senators. I’m an American, I live in Canada but I am still an American and a voter, more so my host is in the USA so this would effect my site in addition to my enjoyment of the internet. The bills are written in such a way that would give the government (and private citizens and companies) the opportunity to harass innocent people and punish someone they think needs punishing when they can’t stop them with other legal means. You’ve seen it before, the local guy who is noisy against his local government gets tickets for jaywalking when no one else gets tickets in that city[true story].

I wrote my congressman, Joe Courtney and my senators, my congressman actually sent me a letter back. It’s a form letter telling me I don’t understand law and he is just trying to protect americans. I highlighted the portions of the bill that I have problems with and explained why and told him if he voted for this bill then I would not be voting for him. That was weeks ago, I don’t expect a reply. I have not gotten a reply from either Blumenthal or Lieberman and I’m not holding my breath. It saddens me that as a voter I’m basically told I don’t count, am too stupid to understand law and am just simply ignored. This isn’t how the world works, people have a voice and we will make our voice heard.

How? By blacking out the internet tomorrow. Goodbye wikipedia, good by all those fun blogs you like to read. The net is going dark… I’ll be fine, I have a lot of comics to read till it’s over. What will you be doing?

What is SOPA and PIPA? Why should I be against it?

http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa

How can you help?

http://americancensorship.org

Didn’t I read that Obama is going to promise to veto this?

Yeah because he promised to veto NDAA too, (even worse of a bill), oh wait, he signed that into law, didn’t he?

How do I blackout my website?

(I want to thank Tabitha Grace Smith and Mathew Wayne Selznick for helping me find tools to make blackout/strike easy for me, and everyone else trying to get the word out)

He had a dream….

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Nuchtchas

You know you’ve been living in Canada when you wake up and only realize that it’s Martin Luther King Jr’s Birthday because everyone is commenting about it on social media about it. That is truly sad, and I feel a little shame about it.

Growing up in NY we all knew King’s legacy, he was a hero everyone could look up to. Protesting, he did it right. He showed the world that you can make a change and be clear about your principles and ideals without confusing the message. He got progress because people worked together and were a team, they all wanted the same thing and they went after it in a way that made them mighty. Civil disobedience, non violent protest, these were things that helped bring the civil rights movement to progress. If you think spitting in a cop’s face is non violent protest, you’re wrong. Look to Dr. King as your template whenever you hold up a protest sign or stand in a picket line.

In a large part of the USA Dr. King’s birthday is not a day off from school or work, I remember being surprised when my nieces moved to VA and had school on this day, it baffled me and that was my eye opener that not everyone sees this man as great, even today :(

Are things perfectly equal and civil today? No, but we keep working, we keep trying and we continue to follow his message, we will get there.

Now I invited you to listen to the entirety of his “I have a dream” speech in it’s entirety, not just the section we are all familiar with.

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Dude, like a real Tricorder would be so cooooool!

Posted on January 15, 2012 by Nuchtchas

I know this has been discussed to death, but I wanted to assure everyone that we here at NIMLAS Studios would love it if one of our mixed nuts or nutcases won the latest XPrize.

The Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize

Introducing the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE.

Imagine a portable, wireless device in the palm of your hand that monitors and diagnoses your health conditions. That’s the technology envisioned by this competition, and it will allow unprecedented access to personal health metrics. The end result: Radical innovation in healthcare that will give individuals far greater choices in when, where, and how they receive care. Learn more about the competition

I used to have a toy one, I bought it for way more than I should have and I loved it till the batteries corroded and ruined it on me. That toy had stickers in place of the instruments, but if it actually worked, well that would just be awesome. Forge needing national healthcare, we could all have one of these in our homes and never have to worry about the little aches and pains, the tricorder would tell us if it was a tumor or not :) The only downside is kids couldn’t fake being too sick to go to school, sorry kids, better think of better ways to play hooky.