j.modjeska

A short exploration of the history, controversy,  and possible future of China’s dualistic written language. And the perspective of a student trying to balance an appreciation for culture with a desire to learn the language sometime in his lifetime. 

Introduction

Many centuries of history form the foundation of logographic written Chinese. But it is only in the last sixty years that we have seen the bifurcation of that character system, and the debate that inevitably followed, when the Communist government in the late 1950s introduced what would be known as the set of simplified characters, officially eliminating the use of the previous character set (now known as traditional characters) in mainland (People’s Republic of) China. Since many were opposed to this significant change, and because other Chinese-speaking entities continued using traditional characters, the debate over simplified versus traditional characters began immediately and continues today. Now, as modern technology and globalization wield ever more influence over an ancient culture, novel arguments lend further intrigue to an already fascinating political and linguistic question.

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Summary: Leave P2P, iTunes, and wasted plastic behind. When you can’t get your mp3s from an independent distributor like CDBaby, Amazon offers high-quality mp3s without DRM. It’s time to start buying music again.

Out here, in the world, far from the offices of RIAA executives and their overzealous lawyers, plodding along ignorant of the many layers that exist between ourselves and the artists, are the people who listen to music. We don’t want much. Access to music we like. At a fair price. And seriously, no DRM.

First, let’s be clear. Despite my utter frustration with the state of the digital music market in recent years, I have never been an advocate of stealing music. As you can see from my previous post, I take intellectual property seriously and I don’t play nice when people steal from me. So this is in no way a defense of music piracy. I get why people turned to stealing music though. For many of them, it was the same reason I mostly gave up procuring new music altogether for several years. But for those of us who never objected to paying a fair price for a fair product, I think the market is finally catching up with us …

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Update 3: April 4, 12.22pm: This article is now the #1 Google result for a search for ‘Virtisys’. Thanks everybody!

Update 2: March 24, 6.42pm: I think we won this battle. The Vertisys site was moments ago replaced with a redirect to the “Rick Roll” video on YouTube, then shortly thereafter disappeared altogether. Thanks to everyone who emailed, commented, and notified SoftLayer of the copyright infringement. I’m really encouraged by the response I got and happy that we were able to help protect bloggers from having their content stolen.

Update 1: March 24, 4.31pm: My article has been removed. Several other bloggers whose content was used on virtisys.com have contacted me expressing their intent to complain to SoftLayer.

Completely by accident today I discovered that a website I’d never heard of – www.virtisys.com (note the spelling; I am not talking about Vertisys, an entirely separate company) – was syndicating my blog content. Quite obviously I don’t mind if people do that, as evidenced by the links to various syndication services beneath each of my posts. It’s part of how blogging works and how people discover each other on the Internet. But this is different. Unlike digg, del.icio.us, and every other syndication service out there, Virtisys aren’t crediting me. They aren’t linking back to my original post. They aren’t even acknowledging that the post is a syndication. There is a different name for what they’re doing and it is stealing.

They might be doing it to you too. It appears their entire content base is made up of articles by blog authors from all over the world. All of them are technology focused, all of them (as far as I can tell) are WordPress users, and none of them are given credit for their work.

Virtisys provides no contact information on their website, or in their domain registration records, so I have sent a notice of copyright infringement to SoftLayer, their hosting services company, asking them to remove the offending content. To the extent that I have time today, I am also notifying other bloggers whose content is being stolen. That isn’t always easy because Google searches don’t always locate the original source, but I’ve already had a great response from one person (Remko at EvilCoder) who intends to file a similar complaint with SoftLayer.

Just in case you’re reading this on Virtisys or anywhere else right now, you can find my original post at j.modjeska.us. And by the way, no-talent ass-clowns over at Virtisys, I’ve discovered a number of really interesting people and blogs through your site. You’d have a really nice service there if you’d just credit the authors and provide links back to the original works instead of blatantly ripping us off.

Update 06.15.07: Article published on Kuro5hin.

See Dog Run: Behavioral observations on the introduction of autonomous motility to a digitally-entrenched corporate whore. An essay.

Cross-Borders Jam #2
OK, here we go: Freeway Park, Seattle, circa summer 2006. Jump up on a dirty gray pillar, sandpaper concrete scuffing still-tender hands. (I’ve only done this a few times now.) Crouch down into a fists-at-feet gorilla-style perch and watch for stragglers crossing toward the fountain. Emerging from the city jungle, the ones who know me call me by name: Hey Raindog! It’s July’s final Sunday but still plenty of summer left — always something to cherish in a town so drenched we don’t even bother with carrying umbrellas anymore. Behind me, amid the concrete maze all draped in lush green tentacles, is the usual cross-section of local color: Convention Center sales suits tote briefcases in purposeful stride, sun reflecting off of shiny black shoes, while Mad Dog-soaked knapsackers shrouded in 7-month-beards look on from the benches, sitting this one out. Freeway Park: a community of circumstance dead-center in a city founded on making the best of poor planning. A place to work, live and play, held inexplicably together inside a bigass floating geometry lesson with a highway spilling out underneath. This is where the fun begins.

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Click here to skip to the pictures.

A cold, crisp, sunny afternoon in Seattle last week offered a reprieve from the bitter “Day After Tomorrow” winter-of-impending-doom we’ve been enjoying, and happily coincided with one of my handful of days at home this month. So I dusted off the old digital camera and took the Seattle Art Museum up on their offer to preview the spanking new Olympic Sculpture Park before it goes public. I was reminded once again that despite our many faults (of both the human and geological variety) this city is nevertheless damn cool!

The park has totally transformed the former no-man’s-land between Western Ave and the Elliott Bay waterfront into a gorgeous, wide open public park space. It even has a train running under the brilliant psychedelic pedestrian overpass. For me, the park evokes feelings of stark European minimalism mixed with old-fashioned larger-than-life American badassness. Except the good kinds of those things. I think. What am I, an art critic? Go look at the pictures and see for yourself.