American Civil War Part II: Upload Wars

The architect of our doom.

The law-dogs in Washington (which is near Seattle) proposed two bills on capitol hill that would allow websites to be blocked if they post stuff that other people claim is not their stuff.  These bills (SOPA and PIPA, which stand for other words) alienated the Internet community thing and people were mad.

Pictured: SOPA, an asshole douchE.  FIRST!

People were so mad that they went back into the past and formed companies called Google and Wikipedia.  They made these Internet companies become really popular by giving away free information and services so that when the time came for the bills to be protested, January 18th, 2012, they could shut down or post stuff to highlight the things.

Pictured: Google, Wikipedia, other websites and the Internet behind them.

Then came the day after the time for the bills to be protested, January 19th, 2012ish.  The website megaupload.com was shut down for the main reason that these bills were proposed.  Then came the small collective Anonymous, who was really really mad, so they started hacking and hacking until they could hack no more.

Pictured: Anonymous hacker people

The fighting escalated after that.  After the government raided the offices of all the big banks and sank their ships and bailed them out, the whole country started what was known as a "flame war" but what is now known as "American Civil War Part II: Upload Wars." The fighting continued until the mighty American States of United Way was destroyed December 21, 2012.  Then we all got spaceships.

Evan Banned, III

History report for Ms. Habisham's 12th Grade English Class

January 24, The Future

Sources:

Wikipedia, Jr.

Cracked.com

Facebook Has More Photos Than Anybody

The photography blog 1000memories did some number crunching and found that Facebook has nearly 140 Billion photos in total at a rate of 200 million photos uploaded per day.  That is nearly 10,000 times the size of the Library of Congress photography collection.  Holy crap, check out the article here because the numbers are truly staggering.

What does that mean though?  Our archives, our history, is becoming digital more and more each day.  Our photos have moved from physical albums to online ones, our records are either scanned or typed directly, our books are on non-existent bookshelves.  And you know what?  It has made us more present.  We are more as a people.

Chances are, most of you did not build the house or were not the first person in your apartment.  Have you ever looked up your residence in an old city directory?  Seen the name of the person who lived there?  Just a guy, right?  A name on a piece of yellow paper in a dusty book.

Think about how our grandkids (or kids if you start getting busy now) will look that up.

You are your grandkid.  You have the address of your home.  You put that address into the ether and find a list of names of people who lived there.  You pick a name.  That name is on several social networking sites, but one in particular seems to be from around here.  Sure enough, he lived in your house and there are pictures of a Halloween party tagged there.  As you go through the pictures, vowing to clean up that corner a little better, you see a couple dressed as Jack and Jill making out.  Her face is visible and tagged.  Its your grandma. But Jack is most def not your grandpa.  Ewwww.

Welcome to the future.

Call of Dewey: Modern Librarians Create Video Game

Librarians at Fairfield University in Connecticut have created a video game to help with freshman orientation at their school library.  The video game was inspired by Scene It (hopefully not the Twilight edition) as a point and click question and answer type game to familiarize students with basic library functions. [Library Journal]

Shudder...

This is a cool step in teaching the young'ins about libraries, but how about we go further.  Video games were doing 3D animation nearly twenty years ago with titles like Doom and Duke Nukem.  Why can't there be a tool like that in libraries?  With lower graphic standards on extremely popular Internet games (Minecraft, how I love thee), someone out there could create a virtual library that users could run around in, click on switches and items and be led to real time catalog searches and eBooks.  Think that's a weird idea?  Ask anyone who played the first Dragon Age or Mass Effect games how much crap there was to read in those games.  A 3D virtual library could revolutionize catalogs as you could look at a library shelf in real time, see what's there, pick out an ebook version, or just find something interesting by browsing.

If any programmer out there wants to start programming this library "game" I have presented, be my guest.  If you make money on it though, I want a kick back and a mention in the credits.  And you better follow me on Twitter.