Madgirl.org

So Project Runway just kicked off again, which always brings out my inner fashion designer. Unfortunately, my inner fashion designer has no talent to speak of, so I resort to virtual means. (Sort of like when my inner ass-kicking elf comes out, I can’t really do much for it but play World of Warcraft.)

I have played a lot of exceedingly lame fashion design games in the past couple of years, but have come across ONE that not only completely hooked me but is probably the best game by an independent publisher I’ve played in ages. JoJo’s Fashion Show.

Screenshot while I was playing JoJo's Fashion Show

Remember paper dolls? There’s something inherently satisfying about playing dress-up. Still, whereas I understand that it’s really popular among the tween crowd, something like Stardoll gets old after a few minutes if you’re not twelve. What JoJo’s has managed to do is take the paper doll concept and turn it into a goal-oriented puzzle game. The point is to mix-and-match clothes to fit certain styles. If a model is supposed to be dressed “Mod,” then you’ll get points for putting her in platform boots and geometric jewelry. If she’s supposed to be “Biker,” then send her down the runway in a cut-off skull tshirt and black leather pants. If she’s “Conservative,” give her the turtle-neck and leave the booty shorts for the “Provocative” model.

My only complaint is that I wish there was a mode without a timer so that you could take the time to put together the outfits that you think are the most aesthetically pleasing and see which score the best. (There IS a “dress-up” mode where you can basically just paper-doll to your heart’s desire, but no scoring.)

I call this hot mess "Boho Biker."

The reason I bring this up now (besides the Project Runway debut) is that a sequel to the game was JUST released. I’ve already played through the entire thing (hey, I’m on vacation)! I’d say they did a pretty good job of adding new features and keeping what made the game great, but my complaint is that it’s too short. There are less levels than the last game. But if they keep releasing a new one every year, I will forgive this.

And the best thing about this game (like most other small, download games like it) is that you can try it for free and decide if you want to purchase a full copy. You can get it straight from the creator at the link above or from a bunch of different games vendors online, like Big Fish Games or Reflexive Games. The full version usually runs $20, but some of those sites have specials. (Big Fish, for example, offers a “club” membership that gives you two games for $20). I have also seen boxed versions of the first JoJo’s on sale at places like Best Buy.

And for the record, my early favorite on Project Runway was the winner of the first challenge, so I’m feeling very optimistic for this season…

City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare

So I finally have had the opportunity to read the first two books in Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments trilogy, City of Bones and City of Ashes. My assessment? Two thumbs WAY up. I shouldn’t be surprised, really, given how much I love Holly Black and Justine Larbalestier, and not only are the three of them friends, but they seem to have very similar approaches to urban fantasy. In fact, if I had to compare the MI books to anything, it would probably be Holly’s Tithe and sequels. Not necessarily in ideas or content, but just some spark that makes the fantasy very gritty and real. It makes me feel like I need to live in New York for a while to be a good writer. (I should also add the caveat that Holly was one of my Clarion instructors and probably one of the coolest people I’ve ever had the opportunity to hang out with.)

I’m always pleased to see new systems of magic and new takes on magical creatures (one of my favorite things about urban fantasy is seeing how different authors handle vampires in particular because there’s so many different myths associated with them), and Clare’s shadowhunters are quite different than anything else I’ve seen. She’s got great characters, ones that you care about, the kind that you find yourself rooting for and reading between your fingers by the end of the books, hoping that she doesn’t kill any off. The kind that, given the time to build up a fandom, will probably start shipping wars (which I always thought would be a kind of fun thing to see as an author).

A lot of people probably realize that Clare was (still is, really) an incredibly well known Harry Potter fanfiction writer. She came up more than once in interviews when I was studying fandom in graduate school, and then again when I was researching my note this past year. I would consider this a feather in her cap rather than a negative thing–at the very least, I imagine it helped her sell books! But I’m really pleased to see that the books are doing well on their own, and that her name is moving on past the fanfiction stuff.

I did actually bring her up in my discussion of social norms in my note (which is out now, actually - “Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Fandom: How Existing Social Norms Can Help Shape the Next Generation of User-Generated Content”), because her case was a great example of the self-policing of copyright matters. She was accused (by fellow fandomers) of plagiarism in her fanfiction, and whether or not it was even a valid accusation, it followed her into her legitimate writing career. Because googling her writing name (Cassandra Clare) still had hits to pages about the “Cassie Claire plagiarism debacle.” However! That was… nine months ago that was I writing it, and a new google search just now showed that the page still shows up on the first page of hits, but it’s now at the bottom and it’s the only mention of “Claire” at all on that first page. So I think that’s a really good indication of how well her writing career is going.

And I can definitely see shades of a Harry Potter fan in her writing, too - which, to me, is also a good thing! I always like stories that have the shadow of a previous generation because it provides such rich backstory with very little work, especially if there are parallels with the current generation. So like the Marauders in Harry Potter, Mortal Instruments gives us the “Circle” and there’s even the Giles/Remus/teacher-with-a-darkside character in Luke, which is probably my favorite character archetype.

So all in all, I highly recommend Cassandra Clare’s work, and personally, I think that these books (along with Holly’s and Justine’s and a number of others) are far better than the Twilight series, which seems to be getting all the press lately. And as someone who’s always said that fanfiction can be a springboard for legitimate writers rather than quicksand, well, here’s one good example for me.

(Oh, and also, Clare wrote a story in my friend Steve Berman’s recent anthology Magic in the Mirrorstone. Which I haven’t read, but I’m sure it’s ace if Steve liked it.)

iMacs - they came in different flavors!

Whatever your feelings about Apple, you do have to admit that the company not only managed to reinvent itself in the late nineties, but also that they had a major impact on one part of the computer hardware industry as a whole: they started making technology pretty. This might have been a calculated move to target women as a demographic, but in any case it definitely came at the right time. At the point where computers become a necessity rather than a luxury, that’s when style begins to matter. Even Elle Woods had an orange iBook in Legally Blonde! And must we even discuss the absolute coup of the iPod? MP3 players did exist before that (in fact, I had one - I cannot remember what brand it was to save my life, but it never worked very well and was pretty ugly to boot), but Apple’s marketing focused on trend and style as much as functionality, and that’s what helped boost the iPod to the industry standard.

And so it is with cellphones. Now a necessity rather than a luxury, style matters. By the time all of the major brands began producing phones in pink and purple, sleek designs, it was pretty inevitable that Apple would come up with something just as trendy. Enter the iPhone. Now, I wouldn’t say that the iPhone is marketed to women specifically, but with the new 3G and the app store, there are definitely some features that appeal just as much to the girl in me as the geek in me.

In my opinion, a touch screen is just about the best thing that could have happened to a cellphone. Heck, I spent two year studying usability in grad school and there are few things worse than trying to figure out how to do things on your average cellphone, especially if you pile on more functionality. If something is going to be a phone, an email reader, an internet browser, a date book, an address book, an instant messenger… then one set of controls is not going to be able to work for all of these things. But with a touchscreen, the controls can change with the function. You need to dial a number? Here’s a touchtone phone. You need to write an email? Here’s a QWERTY keyboard. I never bothered texting at all with my old phone because it was such a pain to try to spell using a touchtone phone. Even if you’re not interested in an iPhone in particular, consider one of the other new touchscreen phones out there. Seriously. So worth it.

And finally with the 3G update, there is a (FREE!) instant messenger (AIM) application for the iPhone. It’s about time. I’m not sure why it’s AIM instead of iChat (probably a marketing deal with AOL), but it works pretty well, so no complaints from me. Also with the new version… GPS! As someone who’s had a GPS device in my car for the past two years, I can tell you that it’s pretty much priceless. Especially moving to a new city. And there’s this new application called Loopt that when I first saw it, my immediate thought was - a GODSEND for soccer moms. Talk about awesome carpools - you can look on your phone and see where your friends are on the map. Of course, from what I’ve seen of reviews it’s pretty buggy so far, and of course there’s the issue of other people having the program… but I don’t know, I’m fairly optimistic that these are just early in the process kinks to work out.

iPhone - it's all about the touchscreen

Though really, the best thing about the iPhone is also the worst. Which is: it’s basically a computer. This means that with the new app store, there is an almost endless level of customization of functionality - what do you need your phone to do? Calculate your weight watchers points? Teach you Spanish? Play music? Keep track of wines you’ve tasted? Calculate your gas mileage? Keep track of your friends on Twitter? Have Facebook at your fingertips? Play poker? Get you around the Seattle bus system? Pretty much anything you can think of that you COULD do on a phone, you can now. Much of it is free, though some of the applications cost five or ten dollars.

But of course, there’s the bad news. Being a computer means that it sometimes crashes like a computer… which is not really something that you want your phone to do. However, I will say this: if you DO have problems with your phone, then having one of the Apple Store “geniuses” fix it is a much better experience than dealing with a broken cell phone. And nine times out of ten, if there’s something wrong with your phone then you can fix it by restoring it to factory settings, and your computer keeps a backup of your data so you wouldn’t lose your phone numbers, etc. Still, if you’re one of those people who breaks every computer you touch… you might want to give that some weight.

… oh, and did I mention it’s pretty? The iPhone, I mean. Mine has a purple leather case, but I kind of think it would look cool dressed up like a monster.

All in all, the thing that I like best about Macs in general applies to the iPhone as well: if you’re a computer geek and you know your way around, you can do lots of really cool stuff, BUT if you don’t know a motherboard from a mother ship, then it’s still incredibly easy to use.

Barelypolitical.com, home of the infamous Obama Girl, posted this video on YouTube, in which the brains behind several prominent websites (Craigslist, MySpace, Wired, YouTube, Idealist.org, etc.) attending the Personal Democracy Forum spoke about the effect of the Internet on politics:

One of my favorite comments was how Hillary Clinton’s website was like “the PC version of the PC versus Mac debate.” A lot of this is fluff (and self promotion), but it does bring up the point that (I really hate this term) the “blogosphere” has had an amazing affect on politics. And though we were starting to see it in the 2004 election, this presidential race is really the first one that (I think) could be won or lost in the blogs. After all, the Bush/Kerry race was pre-YouTube. And now? Yes We Can won an Emmy. A political ad.

You might call me a cheerleader for user-generated content, and here’s another reason why. The world would simply not be as interesting a place without this video, featured not only on The Huffington Post, but in this week’s Entertainment Weekly:

In my latest post for JETLaw Blog, I wrote about some recent cases involving community standards for obscenity. I’ve never been a big fan of the Miller test being applied to the Internet because of relevance/jurisdictional issues. But the core issue to me is: which community, the Internet one or the geographic one? I first started thinking about this during the first Livejournal censorship fiasco. Because whereas I kept having to gently remind people that it’s not a first amendment problem if a private company tells you what kind of material you can or cannot post in the community that they own, once Livejournal started citing obscenity laws (and Miller in particular) as the reason for the sudden policy change… that’s when I saw a potential problem. After all, the community of people who use Livejournal will be exactly the same whether the servers are located in San Fransisco or Salt Lake City.

So all that said, I found the case of the lawyer using Google trends as “proof” of community standards to be pretty interesting. According to him, the fact that more people run searches about orgies than apple pie means that the residents of Pensacola, Florida may not know as much about their neighbors’ “standards” as they think. So as a little experiment I decided to find out some more about the standards of my current community. Here is a representation of how often Tennessee residents run searches about “porn” compared to “football”:

Hmmm. Well, I’m not sure what this tells us about obscenity standards, but it does show that my friends and neighbors are less interested in pornography during football season. Good to know.

The tragic death of 13-year-old Megan Meier, highly publicized in the beginning of this year, has made its way into the courtroom. This should not be surprising, since generally when a child dies, we want someone to blame, and in this case there is someone - Lori Drew (or rather, Lori, her husband, their daughter, and a friend). Megan committed suicide after being rejected by “Josh,” a false persona created on MySpace by the Drews. Their intentions? It’s unclear, but the result was the confusion and heartbreak of an already fragile young girl.

Originally there were no criminal charges filed against the Drews since investigators found that their actions, while cruel, did not break any laws. However, a little over a month ago, Lori Drew was indicted under a criminal computer fraud statute. The theory of the case is that when Drew registered the account for “Josh” on MySpace, she agreed to provide truthful and accurate information and refrain from promoting anything intentionally misleading. Because she violated this agreement, the federal government was able to charge her with conspiracy to access MySpace without authorization.

Clever, huh? In a way, this seems right - a loophole in the law to allow some consequences for intentional cruelty, some justice for a dead girl. After all, the public outcry about this case was huge - according to the New Yorker article, the local police received phone calls from as far away as India begging them to do something. It is a highly sympathetic case.

But the thing about the law is that a single case sets a precedent. Whether a reward or a pitfall of a common law system, you decide - but in this case, it seems clear that a highly sympathetic set of facts could make very, very bad law. The danger is this: that every terms-of-service violation is a federal crime. Considering that the majority of people don’t even read a TOS contract before clicking through it, they might as well lock us all up right now (between that and the RIAA music downloading cases, they may run out of space soon, though).

Remember how the feds finally got Al Capone for tax evasion of all things? Well, as the WSJ law blog pointed out, now all the government has to do is prove someone violated some random website’s TOS in order to have an excuse for criminal charges. I think that everyone feels for poor Megan, but I wish they could have made some sort of harassment charges stick to Drew instead.

In the meantime, just in case? You may want to make sure you’re not lying about your favorite book on your Facebook page just to make yourself look smarter.

I tend to go through cycles with my fiction writing, particularly in terms of submissions. There will be a month or two where I will submit-submit-submit, market-market-market, maybe even write-write-write depending on how busy I am with school, and then I’ll go twice that long without so much as a single query.

So, do to my burst of submission energy in February/March, I’m now getting back a slew of rejections… but also several (small) sales. Cue the fireworks! After nearly considering is officially trunked, I finally sold “Evil Sleeps in Pink Pajamas” to Kaleidotrope, one of many genre-bending small press ‘zines, but the first to actually like this story! I also sold “RSVP” to Sam’s Dot Publishing’s Drabbler 11, which… apparently is already available! I hope I’m getting a contributor’s copy in the mail because the cost of the magazine is more than my payment (this happens more often than you might think). I suppose since it’s a “drabble” (100 words), it’s a flash story, but really I consider the piece more of a poem. And last but certainly not least, I sold “Tea Time at the 13th Hole” to Neverlands and Otherwheres, a print anthology from Susurrus Press. I originally wrote this piece as a children’s story meant for Cricket, but eventually reworked it a surreal-ish flash story.

And in the “published” category, we have a reprint of “Answer Me This,” in the Strange New Worlds of Lunacy print anthology. Not only is this the first time that I’ve been published in an anthology (and there’s something so lovely about a real book with my name in it), but my story was illustrated! Poor, dumpy Anthony, sitting on his couch looking positively dejected while the Sphinx smirks up at him from her spot curled up at his feet. (That story can of course still be read here in its original publication at The Town Drunk, but unfortunately sans the charming illustration.)

With the sweet comes the bitter, of course, and I’ve gotten a slew of rejections lately as well. Of course, they’re all very prestigious rejections - Chizine, IGMS, Weird Tales, etc. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, eh?

I think I feel a new wave of submission fever coming on.

A recent issue of Entertainment Weekly with the theme “new classics” featured a March Madness-style bracket tournament pitting against each other the great pop culture moments of the last 25 years. After just barely slipping past Harry Potter in an early round, the iPod swooped in to win it all (defeating Michael Jackson in the finals).

I saw a shirt once that said: “I had an iPod before you knew what one was.” Though I would hesitate to wear such a pretentious statement emblazoned on my chest, the sentiment is probably true enough - I first got an iPod in early 2002, the first generation with the mechanical scrolling wheel that only held 5gb. I was pretty sure at the time that it was the greatest invention ever to deal with the monotony of schlepping my way across campus numerous times a day as a college sophomore. At this point not only were iPods new and rare, but they marked you as a Mac Person. I had one of the bulb-bottomed iMacs.

I still have that iMac, actually. I haven’t really used it in three years (the lack of a DVD burner was eventually very troublesome, but my inability to install World of Warcraft was finally the last nail in the coffin), but I keep it in the entertainment center in my living room attached to a mean set of speakers. It exists solely to run iTunes, my personal boombox. Of course, the only tragedy is that it’s completely incompatible with current wifi, so every once in a while I have to burn a CD filled with MP3s to update its library. In a way, I suppose that iMac has become a glorified, importable iPod.

I do not still have that original iPod. I’m not sure what happened to it, though. It may be shoved in the back of a drawer somewhere. But now that you can get Nanos that hold twice as much music as that bulky thing, I can’t imagine who would want it. Right now I have a pre-video 20gb classic and a 2gb nano, which I trade out in my car. (Oh, the terrible dilemma: the nano holds such a small fraction of my music library and yet the classic doesn’t support cover art, which is wicked cool showing up on the radio screen.) I no longer even have a CD player in my car. What I do have is the ability to download the latest episode of Escape Pod onto my iPhone, then play it immediately while driving.

(Speaking of the iPhone, the ONE thing missing that has been driving me up the wall is an instant messenger client, and lo and behold, it looks like AIM is going to be there before iChat. I won’t complain, as long as it’s not as clunky as the Mac platform version of AIM. I’m assuming that this will be launched as part of the App Store, which should be coming… in June? It’s about time, I say. Heck, I even had AIM on my dinky little Nokia flip phone.)

Now that I have managed to bore you with my little trip down Mac memory lane, my point is this: the top spot in EW’s contest was well deserved. The iPod may have been single-handedly responsible for the digital music revolution, but it was certainly the catalyst. Like a huge log tossed into the fire sparked by Napster. We spent an entire class in my Entertainment Law course talking about the legal and business implications of digital music and how different the entire business model of the music industry has become since 2001.

Harry Potter, the boy who lived, might have been the end of Voldemort, but the iPod is still working on the demise of the compact disc… which, hey, whereas not as evil, certainly had more impact in the Muggle world.

In anticipation of wanting to be heavily involved with JETL (Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law), I took all of the IP-related classes that I could this past year.  I think that this was a good call on my part, because as I vet new articles coming in (I’m the new Senior Articles Editor - so a checkmark on the heavily involved bit), it is extremely helpful to have familiarity with the subject matter.

Of course, that means that I haven’t had a great deal of breadth yet, which is one of the reasons that I’m working in the Domestic Violence Clinic this summer rather than in an IP-related job.  I wanted to do something different, and I wanted to actually see the inside of a courtroom.  I start tomorrow, but from what I can tell, check, and check.

These are the courses that I took this past year:

Law of Cyberspace
Professional Responsibility
Administrative Law
Entertainment Industry Transactions (short course)
Trademark Law (short course)
Corporations
Copyright
Law and Business of the Entertainment Industry
First Amendment Law

I remember leaving grad school and thinking that while I had learned a LOT, I didn’t really have any marketable skills. Law school was a great remedy for that particular problem. Pie in the sky, but doesn’t the above list make me look super qualified to be working as counsel for some large Internet media company? I wonder…

One of my favorite things about the law is that, although it can be (a huge amount of the time) very dry, there are definitely great stories hidden in there, and sometimes just plain silliness. I think that the world deserves to know about these gems, and as such, I’m going to occasionally blog about fun legal cases.

To begin with, we have United States ex rel. Mayo v. Satan & His Staff (for those of you with access to Lexis, etc., the cite is 54 F.R.D. 282). What could this lawsuit possibly be about, you might ask? Well… it’s basically just like it sounds:

He alleges that Satan has on numerous occasions caused plaintiff misery and unwarranted threats, against the will of plaintiff, that Satan has placed deliberate obstacles in his path and has caused plaintiff’s downfall. Plaintiff alleges that by reason of these acts Satan has deprived him of his constitutional rights.

However, poor Mr. Mayo did not prevail, as the court decided that even if there was a cause of action (alleged infringement of civil rights), they did not have jurisdiction over the defendant. And moreover, the potential parties with cause for complaint would be so numerous that it should really only be filed as a class action suit. No go. However, there was this interesting tidbit:

…there is an unofficial account of a trial in New Hampshire where this defendant filed an action of mortgage foreclosure as plaintiff. The defendant in that action was represented by the preeminent advocate of that day, and raised the defense that the plaintiff was a foreign prince with no standing to sue in an American Court.

Oh, and also? Mr. Mayo neglected to file with his complaint the required form for the U.S. Marshal with directions for service of process. I wonder what those directions would look like. “Go to Hell?”

If I were a Civil Procedure professor, I would assign that case in a heartbeat.

This sort of thing intrigues me, because I can’t help but think that “US v. Satan” would be a spectacular title for a short story. My wheels are turning already. I adore legal matters that somehow fit into the world of speculative fiction… i think that this one is right up there with Stambovsky v. Ackley (”As a matter of law, the house is haunted.”).