Category: Meta

Federation, When

Posted by Ryan A - October 1, 09

via アニ・ノート

Steven says:

And as for certain people who just mail their comments to me instead of posting them, I really wish you’d register, log in, and post for yourself.

Okay, really now. Here’s a brilliant idea. Every blog should require registration to comment. That way we can have accounts on every single service just to achieve a fluid channel for communication1.

Here’s an even better idea, let’s reform e-mail so that in order to send to myemail.com you have to have an myemail.com account. No no no, it’s totally great this way! That way, you can have like 150 accounts to sign into and check and talk on, but you know all the cool kids are doing it so you know it’s good….

ESTABLISHING THAT MOAR POPULAR = BETTER.

Meanwhile, []2 I’ll continue my quest for Federation.

More…

Yes, That Is So

Posted by Ryan A - September 18, 09

From the Mellow_Bunny:

Zaitcev does it all the time. Yet others don’t seem to fathom how it works. Well whatever, I like the idea and it’s certainly more of a motivator to blog myself then leaving a comment is. I could spend years leaving comments on people’s blogs and never feel satisfied. My comments could get lost in the mire. I hate the mire. It leaves you with no control over your own words either.

Yes, indeed. I’ve probably mentioned somewhere in a post or comment long ago, that zaitcev’s format, is actually the standard on most blogs (not counting the disabled comments feature).

Blogger reads something, Blogger blogs it…. TRACKBACK.

Methodical New Music

Posted by Ryan A - August 21, 09

Lately, there’s been a ton of new music1 to listen to around my abode, but it’s not such a simple matter; listening to unheard albums.

Perhaps the downfall to new album introduction is the passivity of listening. How familiar do we get after just one listen? Even with an active listen, I’d say it’s a very small imprint, and so I’ve devised some tips to deal with audible overload.

Album Selection

Grab 3-5 albums of the bunch, at random works, and plan to listen to the group throughout a single day. This is a good way to eat though mega lists. Also, it is recommended to NOT go by artists alone, just grab albums from different artists, without regard for who made it2.

Play-by-Album, Play-by-Track

Use a desktop-based music application and listen to an album from the beginning, with a catch. Put the player on single-track mode (play only one song at a time) so that you have to keep going back to the player and manually click the next song…. naturally, I’m assuming multi-tasking and a passive listen.

This helps with the pacing, so that an album doesn’t woosh fly right by. It isn’t always necessary to listen through an entire album (we know what we enjoy, right?), but listen enough to be able to categorize the album.

Tag and Rename

Meta-data is nice for organization, but I have my quips with auto-tagging (specifically genre). Anyhow, it’s a good idea to manually assign genre and/or style tags to tracks. Genre is great for overall categorization (ie. Classical, Jazz, Rock, Pop, Electronic…), but style allows definition of finer attributes, such as j-rock, experimental, fusion, indie, lo-fi or larger genre if the work touches, but doesn’t quite focus on it. For example, a rock album that tends to have jazz influences could be listed as, genre:Rock style:Fusion, Jazz-influence… etc.

Using style could be an entire post itself, but the main concept is organizing while or just after listening. Listening to the music and asking, “what genre/style is this,” makes it slightly more active.

Then rename. I’m sure we all have music organization preferences, but following with the genre-style tag idea, why not use them in the name? Generally, my naming format:

<artist>/(<date>) <album>/<tracknumber>. <track>

But let’s see that with categorizing tags:

<artist>/(<date>) <album> [<genre>,<style>]/<tracknumber>. <track>

The advantage of having genre as part of the album’s folder name is simple, it’s quite difficult to remember every artist/album and their sound. More than likely, the sound will be remembered, but then finding which artist it was will take playing songs from random album folders. With genre-style properly and personally assigned, filtering possible albums becomes a simpler process.

And that about sums the method. Sure it’s heartbreaking to listen to tracks that aren’t the current addiction, but working though many albums efficiently yields a good feeling and help avoid music overload3.

More…

Rating an Experience

Posted by Ryan A - August 11, 09

Oh god. Not again. Right?

In a recent post on The Animachronism, there was a nice little comparision between Good Reads and MAL rating categories. As a stimulus, I thought I could elaborate a bit on a 10-level suggestive system, and wound up bouncing thoughts around with ghostlightning (GL). For reference, we were on the concept of rating experience as compared to rating an item in general; probably a whole separate discussion could be spawned from that idea.

My initial proposed system was overly-positive, having double the levels for positive ratings (6), one neutral, and three negative. GL expanded/modified and came up with a 5 positive and 5 negative; well-balanced.

Overly-Positive System

  1. Pathetic - A rating of pity
  2. Fallible - Well below accepted.
  3. Unacceptable - Inadequate, insufficient.
  4. Ordinary - Of no special quality.
  5. Acceptable - Standard.
  6. Commendable - Worth the experience, in time/energy.
  7. Exceptional - Above the norm.
  8. Excellent - Superb representation of the medium
  9. Essential - Essential experience within the medium
  10. Transcendent - Transcending a given medium

5-to-5 System (credits to GL)

  1. Waste - Wasted my time and hate myself for it.
  2. Discouraging - Begin to question why I like this medium.
  3. Undesired - Will watch again only if I admit I like the wrong kind of pain.
  4. Displeasure - Suffered throughout.
  5. Negative - Felt like I should have enjoyed myself but could not overcome my problems.
  6. Positive - Enjoyed myself despite having problems.
  7. Solid - Enjoyed a lot and have little problem saying so.
  8. Validating - Reminds me why I like this medium in general.
  9. Excellent - A superlative experience that can eclipse my preferences in the medium.
  10. Orgasmic - I came, and will orgasm every single time I watch.

Make of these what you will. Right, so after a bit, I attempted to hybridize, which caused me some mind exhaustion. This morning (on the EST) I sat down with a few relatives who have listened on ratings for some time now, and gave them some example rating lists (including MAL and ANN) for thought. After some coffee, snacks, and smirks:

  1. Wasted - Complete waste of time and mistake on my part.
  2. Despairing - A turnoff towards the medium.
  3. Poor - I suffered and will watch again only if I admit liking the wrong kind of pain.
  4. Unfavorable - Unable to overlook my issues during the experience.
  5. Ordinary - Just. Neutral. Not positive, not negative.
  6. Acceptable - Enjoyed, but with some issues.
  7. Good - Enjoyable and do not mind saying so.
  8. Great - A reminder why I enjoy this medium.
  9. Excellent - Able to eclipse my preferences within the medium.
  10. Superlative - Exceptional in and beyond the medium.

At first glance, there are still more positive levels than negative, but I feel there is a special kind of lensing inherent. If we take levels 5 and 10 out of the list, we are left with 4 positives and 4 negatives; balance. So why discard these levels in considering balance?

Ordinary, is neutral, so there is no effect on balance. On the other hand, Superlative is the most positive, the highly-debated 10. My personal stance on 10s I don’t have a stance, nor a 10, ‘kay I’ll make something up is that there is no reason not to have 10s, but at the same time, the occurrence of them should somewhat represent an exponential decay from 6 to 10 1. it’s a 10 don’t cheapen it >_<! Considering this should-be rarity is outside of the Gaussian distribution, it can be discarded.

Also assisting in the rarity of 10, is the terminology. For those who may be reading and do have 10s, do all of them fit the Superlative description? Exceptional beyond the medium? I feel, in most cases, about 60% of 10s would become 9s 2. It’s not a bad thing, only a redefinition; being stuck to the notion of omg but it’s a 10 is silly.

Well what about a 1 rating, can’t that be thrown out? No, because the Zero rating has already be discarded :P.

Light, fun, nothing serious.

Notes

There are merely thoughts and pondering. I, myself, still prefer rating with arbitrary numbers, by subjective quality high-to-low (doesn’t matter what a 10 is, but it was an experience greater than a 9… drops the requirement of having any specific number of tiers).
1 - It’s a 10, why cheapen it >_<
2 - General guess.

Artists and Non

Posted by Ryan A - August 5, 09

Apparently there was an explosion on fanart usage, so I’m adding fuel to the fire. For the record, I passed up wildarmshero’s post, and pretty much every other related post. There was simple generation of interest, which led to reading some related posts.

OFP (link)

After reading the statement, I have to identify a bit with omomomomo. It’s silly because it tends to give off the impression, GTFOG. In a perfect function of this OFP, everyone would contact the original artist and request permission to post the art along with names, links, etc. Fantastic, but what a pain in the ass, likely involving waiting.

If artists don’t want their art shared [by foreigners or whoever], then use the OFP badge or state their exact conditions, preferably with the notice in at least one Western language.

Reading List

Best point made: go to Pixiv
On an unrelated note, I didn’t even know I had a pixiv account… wtf

2nd best point made: accredit what you can (artist name, link, homepage, etc)

Re-enforce Pixiv

Image blogs are a popular item, and there are numerous Japanese posters who re-blog other artists works [here's one I like recently, for the blend]. Having subscribed to a few of these, I think one of the OFP’s bullets is regularly breached; contacting the artists for permission, but whatever.

The most reassuring point that comes from seeing posts on these blogs, is that most anime/manga-esque works come from pixiv, and one can go right to the pixiv page. I believe it is a good situation for both parties.

In the spirit of accreditation, here’s two arts I recently liked: one brushing teeth and one Ms. Langley. (Images not featured :P)

Tech Thought

This issue that was raeged about is not simply going to be solved, due to unawareness. Now, if we had something like MusicBrainz acoustic fingerprinting, for images (or partial images), open registration/submission for identifiers and artists, we wouldn’t have a problem of knowning who really created what we see. Probably could use Eigen pairs, though I have no experience with that for color images ^_^

How soon is Fall?

Posted by Ryan A - July 31, 09

The other night Seinime comes onto the melative microblog mentioning he’s going to be linking to melative for all the coming Autumn series. Naturally I was like “Shit!” because I hadn’t entered any of that info.1

Well, after a couple hours of searching for resources and whatnot, most of the info was present. Seimine’s early Fall forecast is out.

I once wrote an article on the essence of a Season Preview, with some focus on melative. Today I took a few hours and javascripted a dynamic info-fetcher based on the melative API; mind you, it was in raw javascript, had I been using jQuery it’d likely have been quicker.

It can be found on this page. While the javascript source is here.

Before that, Hold up

Isn’t is like this early to be doing Autumn seasonal stuffs. Here in FL, we’re still on the lookout for afternoon thunderstorms, swimming through the humidity, and wondering why god has forsaken this penisula just when this season will end. Shit, I’m still in summer; and I’ve only sampled two series -_- So anyway…

I’ll get my Autumn seasonal forecast… eventually. /smirk

About the Script

First, it’s very rough.

If anyone cares to copy-pasta and modify it, go for it. It’s probably very easy to mod into a hard-page format (where the info is dynamically loaded into the page, but the page appears solid; no hover-popups).

Second, it uses dynamic <script> injection with a callback from the melative api to MelaMeta.callback, in which the JSON response is passed. The call to the api (/api/media.meta.json) is simply given a parameter such as anime=Kobato, but also a callback parameter and and a cache parameter. Callback is self-explanatory. Cache enables the JSON to be cached by the browser (the default atm is for 30 minutes… the data is not likely to change that often).

Finally, it is activated by an <a> tag with the rel attribute set to “melative” and href linked to a valid melative page (doesn’t really matter what is used). We can link music, events, manga, etc.

More…

The Conceptual Library

Posted by Ryan A - July 30, 09

In pondering the existence of various media forms (mainly of entertainment), there comes a thought of The Conceptual Library.

Contrary to WorldCat, a conceptual library is one of intangibles, though such existence is truly real. An item within such a cataloged system may not be indexed by a physical or non-intrinsic label. These items exists only in the aether, such places as the Internet.

While it may seem whimsical to identify this place, we are in a most positive sense, dealing with a conceptual library on a daily basis. Formless existence which provide an experience. In the most basic relation, these works are the physically non-instantiated contents of what manifests from factories and publishing presses.

Are we dancing yet?

The most apparent form of instantiating an item of concept would have to be the ISBN. It is with the ISBN we can catalog physical ownership or experience of works, but in our current go, what is the usefulness when most of what we may experience has no ISBN? Furthermore, in what way do we catalog an experience, when a single entity has multiple ISBNs?

Clearly, almost every system for cataloging experience does not rely such things as ISBN or re-issues. The existence of a film in Blu-Ray or VHS is inconsequential to the experience; quality of experience, perhaps.

While both libraries have uses, I generally feel the one less physically manifested is the more useful, though in many cases this would be false, why is that? Simply, not everything exists on the Internet, and for many items, an international cataloging number is the best way to locate them (through libraries).

Yet, for experience. I cannot say cataloging by physical items would be very useful. For example, a given anime series is not “as a whole” in reality. It is broken into multiple DVD sections, in which the physical index exists for each DVD. If one wished to express about a series as a whole, ISBN would be fairly useless, for it distinguishes between parts of a greater entity, which should be indistinguishable.

And so we have our conceptual libraries. Though, however unfortunate it may be, the physical libraries win in one major area, standardized semantic representation. A given library understands the contents of another library, usually through ISBN. As for the libraries we use for this type of entertainment, I don’t see that sort of understanding between them.

ANN doesn’t understand what exists on AniDB, nor especially BakaUpdates. The same can be said for nearly any site dealing with a specific entertainment form.

Bubbles exist.