This is how Twilight works (COMIC)

How Twilight Works

A few weeks ago I had the miserable experience of reading Twilight.A friend bought it for me and I took it with me to read on a long flight from Seattle to Houston. I knew it was going to be crappy, but I thought it would be a guilty pleasure kind of crappy - where you know it's bad but you still get enjoyment out of it. I actually managed to power through around 400 pages until I gave up and started reading Sky Mall. I've been seeing Twilight everywhere lately, especially with Vampire Teens II New Moon's release, so I thought I'd break down why chicks go apeshit for it.




First off, the author creates a main character which is an empty shell. Her appearance isn't described in detail; that way, any female can slip into it and easily fantasize about being this person. I read 400 pages of that book and barely had any idea of what the main character looked like; as far as I was concerned she was a giant Lego brick. Appearance aside, her personality is portrayed as insecure, fumbling, and awkward - a combination anyone who ever went through puberty can relate to. By creating this "empty shell," the character becomes less of a person and more of something a female reader can put on and wear. Because I forgot her name (I think it was Barbara or Brando or something like that), I'm going to refer to her as "Pants" from here on out.


So after a few chapters of listening to Pants whine about high school, sucking at volleyball, and being the center of attention, the second major character is introduced. Imagine everything women want in a man, then exaggerate it by ten thousand - and you've got Edward Cullen. The level of detail that the author goes into while describing Edward's appearance is remarkable. At one point while reading I started counting the number of times the author used the expression "Edward's perfect face," and it was far into the double digits. The author excruciatingly details his muscular pecs, clothing, hair, eye color - even his goddamn breath (I'm not joking).



Edward intensely listens to everything Pants has to say, even if she's bitching about she had diarrhea on Christmas or her preferred method for cutting a sandwich in half. As far as the reader is concerned, Edward cares about nothing in the world more than Pants. What the author has done is created a perfect male figure - a pale Greek statue which the reader can worship and in turn be worshipped by.



So what about men that like Twilight?
If you're male and you like Twilight, you're gay. I don't mean that in the derogatory sense, I mean it in the "you want to put your testicles against another man's testicles while gripping handfuls of chesthair" kind of way.

And the movie?
The movie is just the same uninspired crap shat out onto a film reel. If you like the taste of horse manure on your bologna sandwiches, you're probably gonna like it on your birthday cake as well. The same principle applies with Twilight.

Beyond that, it's just a romance novel with the occasional vampire teen drama bullshit peppered here and there. It doesn't really break any new ground in the realm of vampire fiction, other than portraying vampires as a family of uncomfortable retards who prance around the woods eating deer and bunny rabbits. There's lots of nervous lip-biting, tender kisses between Pants and Edward, and lengthy descriptions of every feature of Edward's body. Pants is a static character who never really progresses beyond being an insecure vampire fangirl who obsesses over Edward. Whether her character grows beyond that is unknown to me, I'd stopped reading by then and shifted my attention to an electric butt-massaging chair in Sky Mall.

Eleven Great Edited for Television Movie Lines



I can’t say I actually watch many movies on television. Not because I don’t enjoy films, because I do. But you often get a bastardized version of the film on broadcast television filled with commercials and edited content, both in sight and sound. Sometimes it makes you wonder if its even the same film. I don’t consider myself a movie snob, but I’d rather just have the real thing. Though there’s a strange hypocrisy when networks keep in all the violence, but deem it necessary to edit out even the mildest curses.

Still, occasionally you come across some re-dubbing of a profane line or lines that leads to unintentional hilarity. And those moments stick with you. The Powers that Be were not content to substitute freak for every f-bomb, they instead went above and beyond in a whole different direction. Wouldn’t you want to be that guy who comes up with the most absolutely idiotic re-dubbing for inappropriate movie language? Here are eleven (sue me, I couldn’t decide which one to cut) classic examples with a few goodies at the end:

Mininova Deletes All Infringing Torrents and Goes ‘Legal’

Mininova, the largest torrent site on the Internet, has removed all torrents except those that were uploaded through its content distribution service. Mininova’s founders took the drastic decision after they lost a civil dispute against Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, and were ordered to remove all infringing torrents from the site.

Mininova’s decision to delete all infringing torrents from its index marks the end of an era that started five years ago.

In December 2004, the demise of the mighty Suprnova left a meteor crater in the fledgling BitTorrent landscape. This gaping hole was soon filled by the dozens of new sites that emerged to fulfil the public’s increasing demands for torrents. Mininova became the most successful of all.

Mininova was founded in early 2005 by five Dutch students, just a month after Suprnova closed its doors. The site started out as a hobby project created by tech-savvy teenagers, but in the years that followed the site’s founders managed to turn it into a successful business that generated millions of dollars in revenue.

With increased popularity also came numerous complaints from copyright holders, who saw their intellectual property being shared by users of the site. For years Mininova has complied with these takedown requests, but earlier this year the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN decided to take the torrent site to court nonetheless, demanding that the operators proactively filter torrents pointing to copyrighted material.

The case went to court in June and a few weeks later the verdict was announced. The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringements, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.

To avoid having to pay these penalties, the Mininova team saw no other option than to disable access to all torrents except those that were uploaded to their content distribution platform. This means that only approved uploaders can share torrents through the site for now.

During the last few months, Mininova has extensively tested several filtering techniques, but none of these proved 100% effective. “It’s very unfortunate that we’re forced to take this action, but we saw no other option,” Mininova co-founder Niek told TorrentFreak.

Mininova still hasn’t decided yet whether they will appeal the verdict, Niek further told TorrentFreak. They have appealed the verdict pro-forma, which gives the company more time to decide whether they will indeed continue with the appeal. As it looks now, a successful appeal is the only option for Mininova to bring all torrents back.

In the meantime the Mininova team will focus on other projects besides Mininova, as well as growing the number of users for their content distribution platform.

The implications of Mininova’s decision will have a huge impact on the BitTorrent community. The millions of Mininova users and uploaders have to look for a new home, but perhaps even more importantly, Mininova had the largest collection of user-submitted torrents that were used by dozens of smaller torrent indexers.
More information on the consequences and background of Mininova’s decision will be addressed in a follow up article.

"Bandwidth hogs" join unicorns in realm of mythical creatures

One analyst has had it with Internet data caps. Bandwidth hogs are a myth, he says, and caps simply penalize heavy users who cause no problems for others. Now, he's throwing down the gauntlet and challenging ISPs to turn over some data for analysis.




There's a spectre haunting Internet service providers—the spectre of the "bandwidth hog." But does the mythical beast really exist? One telecom analyst is dubious, and he's calling out the ISPs.

Benoit Felten is a Yankee Group analyst who covers fiber to the home issues from Paris, but his "bandwidth hog" challenge is a product of his personal blog, fiberevolution. Felten is a knowledgeable voice on fiber issues, and his blog reliably makes for an interesting read, but it rarely takes the adversarial tone it struck today.
Hunting the mythical bandwidth hog




Felten's basic critique concerns bandwidth caps—not because they exist, but because he sees them as disingenuous. Carriers can use them as a way to control bandwidth and wean people away from what the marketing department implicitly promises: all-you-can-surf Internet access for one monthly fee. The caps are sold as cutting off "bandwidth hogs" who use "more than their fair share," but Felten's take is that ISPs really have no idea if these people are causing any sort of actual congestion at all.
ISPs "claim that bandwidth hogs steal all the bandwidth and cause network congestion, and therefore their behavior harms all the other regular and peaceful law-abiding users," he writes. "And to add insult to injury, they pay the same price as the others! No, policing and rationing must be applied by the benevolent telco to protect the innocent. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, the way that telcos identify the Bandwidth Hogs is not by monitoring if they cause unfair traffic congestion for other users. No, they just measure the total data downloaded per user, list the top 5 percent and call them hogs."

That is, ISPs are going after "heavy users" simply for being "heavy users," not necessarily because their usage causes problems for anyone. Imagine that some of these crazed downloaders are BitTorrent fiends (not a real brain-stretcher, that idea) and that they have their client set to do most of its downloading in the wee hours. At the end of the month, they may end up in the top tier of ISP subscribers even without causing problems for anyone. So why cap based on total monthly data transfer, rather than capping or throttling based on actual congestion problems?

Felten doesn't get into the answer to this question in great detail, though he does say it's "actually an admission that telcos are uncomfortable with the 'all you can eat' broadband schemes that they themselves introduced on the market to get people to subscribe." One might also suspect that some companies (*cough* Time Warner Cable *cough*) may see low caps as a way to extract more cash from subscribers. (For ISPs like Comcast, with decent 250GB caps that aren't exceeded by more than a tiny fraction of the company's subscriber base, this doesn't currently seem to be a motivator for the caps.)

In any event, Felten wants to see data showing that caps actually relieve congestion, not just punish heavy users. So he throws down a gauntlet to ISPs.

"Here's a challenge for them: in the next few days, I will specify on this blog a standard dataset that would enable me to do an in-depth data analysis into network usage by individual users. Any telco willing to actually understand what's happening there and to answer the question on the existence of hogs once and for all can extract that data and send it over to me, I will analyse it for free, on my spare time. All I ask is that they let me publish the results of said research (even though their names need not be mentioned if they don't wish it to be). Of course, if I find myself to be wrong and if indeed I manage to identify users that systematically degrade the experience for other users, I will say so publicly. If, as I suspect, there are no such users, I will also say so publicly. The data will back either of these assertions."

If Felten is right, then the "bandwidth hog" is an imaginary creature for the digital age, a sort of postindustrial unicorn. Unlike the unicorn, however, bandwidth hog makes terrific eating; its bacon is the single tastiest kind of bacon imaginable, shot through with the flavors of 4chan, the essence of Twitter, and a small pinch of TechCrunch (warning: it's pretty pungent). If Felten does slay the mythical beast, Internet hipsters everywhere can rejoice… then slap crispy strips of bandwidth hog bacon into their vodka and ice cream.

Five Years of Digg…and counting
Five years ago today, Digg.com went live. What started as a simple idea has certainly come a long way. From a vision of a new way to surface news, and a team of three, to 40+ million monthly visitors and 80+ passionate employees…well, suffice it to say that I’m very proud of what we’ve become.

There have been a lot of memorable moments over the years. From the Paris Hilton phone hacking incident to cracking the HD-DVD key, you guys have defined Digg and are the reason for our growth. To date, we’ve had over 14 Million stories submitted and Dugg by you.



So for today, our 5th birthday, we have a couple of things to celebrate and share.

First off, we’re excited that Dec 4, 2009 is officially “Digg.com Day” in our home base of San Francisco. We are proud and humbled by this honor.

Also, as way to commemorate all of the great submissions over the past five years – and more to come – we’ve today launched Digg 365, a visualization of all of the blockbuster stories surfaced with your millions of Diggs. We worked with our friends at The Barbarian Group to provide an interactive, fun way to showcase the top ten stories on any given day, month or year. You can also see the top ten in each category by year. The ability to view past stories this far back hadn’t existed until now, and we wanted to show it in a pretty cool way.

Digg365

Hard to believe five years have gone by, but I’m even more excited for the next chapter. We’ve got some amazing things in store, and with your help will continue to change the way people discover and share the content they care about.

Digg on,

Kevin