Yeah, I’m alive.
I’m also updating to the latest version of the Atahualpa theme for WordPress, and possibly changing stuff around. This will inevitably lead to things breaking, so to my single faithful reader (probably that hit I keep getting from Kyrgyzstan), please bear with me.
That’s right, there’s still someone alive over here, mostly. A combination of life events, game releases (largely Dragon Age) and sheer, unadulterated laziness have meant that this space remained a ghost town for some time. But no longer! Having discovered and installed Windows Live Writer (which seems to be working well, and a slightly lengthier review of which may be forthcoming), I have vowed to start updating more frequently. Or, you know, at all.
Maybe.
It’s hard to take a more than a few steps (hyperlinks, if you will) in cyberspace within the last week or so without bumping into scandalized “news” posts about the recent deletion of two George Orwell books from people’s Kindles.
The short version of the story goes something like this: A company that did not have the rights to sell the books (two of them), put them on Amazon’s digital store through a self-service function. After being notified of the violation by the copyright-holder, Amazon removes the item from their online catalogue and–this is the part that has everyone all in a tizzy–also remotely nuked all of the copies of the book already purchased and on people’s Kindles, refunding the purchase.
Now don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t the greatest decision, and Amazon has publically acknowledged that. And it doesn’t help that one of the books in question is 1984, the irony of which every article makes a point of mentioning, or that the books were removed from Kindle’s without notice of any sort.
But let’s not start ranting about censorship and the end of freedom as we know it. Amazon has stated that they will be making changes so that such an incident doesn’t recurr, and it was clearly a case of copyright violation–physical book would have been pulled from store shelves if something similar had happened in that case. Now, others may use the example of someone coming into your home and removing the book, but that, too, seems like alarmist exaggeration; it is clearly not the same thing. You can’t simply materialize books from a large library into your bookshelves, after all.
EDIT: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has posted a public apology for the incident on their website here.
At first it felt like cheating, using a CMS (WordPress). After all, I could be writing this all in HTML and CSS. Or I could finally crack open that Flash book that’s been gathering dust on my shelf for a few months, now. But in the end that’s what kept me from updating the old site. I’d come up with an idea, go to actually put it up, and wind up once again cursing the ancestors of whoever designed IE as I tried to make it look as good in that browser as it did in any four others.
So, my hope in using WordPress is that I’ll be moved to update quite a bit more frequently, as doing so (hopefully) won’t involve any coding at all. Thus far, at least, setup has been relatively painless, and posting stuff is about as easy as it could be.
I’m using BytesForAll‘s excellent Atahualpa theme, for those who might be interested. It offers a huge amount of customizeability–at the expense of increased setup time, of course, but that’s to be expected. Thus far I’m quite pleased with it.
Yes, it’s just another WordPress blog. It’s eventually meant to become a place where I can dump digital 3D art, computer game reviews, and random rants and musings. Obviously it’s under construction, so kindly bear with me.
