Raise Your Flag (Rewind 2019 edition)

Almost one year in my good article quest on two enwiki biographies, some updates:

• Yes, I misinterpreted the intent of Björk's song, i.e., various aspirant countries not limited to Foroyar—always nice to get GMT as the favourite timezone—because raise your flag also works for other topics not limited to LGBTQ flags.
• My dogma department always insisted on no male gods, and no male witches as corollary, with a female Roman luna vs. a male German moon as fun fact. Of course la lune is your friend, where le soleil is potentially aggressive, and die Sonne is your friend, where der Mond could be too cold for comfort. Wicca vs. Old English female wicce was news for me. Bye bye, Cerrunos, Karnaya, Herne, and Osiris, drawing the line at blasphemy. The main rule is a living person SHALL NOT be considered as goddess with tons of reasons, try queen if you are desperate.
• For the pride flags I really don't care above one enwiki citation needed fix followed by a tumblr post, but it could be a nice project for 2020, get the labrys symbol into my Freeciv radius ruleset as proper flag for the Natives instead of stealing the Aleut flag, or recycling the NATO flag only because it starts with nat.
• Otherwise All Quiet on the Western Front, the phans lost their bridge-head and the breach is heavily guarded, as always too late, but hey. The nerds wait for an endorsement from their queen. Nothing against AOC, Ball, or Iversen, but they are not my favourite coffee junkie.

Björk – Declare Independence (Paris 2008)	Rewind 2019
Bestial Mouths – Witchdance	Rewind 2018

Background, Richie Havens' Freedom at the top of Rewind 2019 celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival in 1969.

BTW, two YouTube oddities, actually I picked Fatboy Slim samples Greta Thunberg’s speech to the UN during UK concert by The Guardian as playlist thumbnail, but that's not the first entry. Sharing YouTube playlists does not work as it should at the moment (on blogger + tumblr), only the first video of the playlist is shown, I added links for the playlists here and hope for a fix also for other posts with embedded playlists.

One of those magical effects, Yoko Ono had a blog Butter NotMargarine read by Mismade Girl, I once owned Ono's Walking on Thin Ice vinyl single, found the eponymous YouTube channel, and stumbled over this Live in Woodstock gem. Just to be clear, I got the three LP record set about ten years later, but that was my favourite song. Today it would be Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit, Live from Woodstock 1969 featured as off by one (year) in the In principio (pt. 1: 1970-1999) playlist. 40 years ago this kind of magic seriously spookedimpressed me, now I enjoy it.🧙

Greta . (German . Trutzteutsch)

Barely avoiding a first German aus gegebenem Anlass post here.😞

Hier Kommt Alex	Klapperstrauss
Clockwork Orange	Brave New World
Random Acts of Senseless Violence	Lord of the Flies

#NetzOhneGewalt

I miss you × I know it when I see it

A short episode in the YouTube vs. users series:

1. Too much transparency, it is none of my business who claimed the copyright for a now deleted video, unless I uploaded it.
2. Not enough transparency, I need a notification if a video in one of my playlists is deleted.

Background, a triple strike on Björk in In principio (pt. 1: 1970-1999): Human Behaviour v=KDbPYoaAiyc is now v=36Srr08PN_Y, I miss you v=IKSoBJ8WirE is now v=ybDX_5hQ6So (non-adult version), and Hunter v=CyM5wow-hUk is now v=DnW77jmr-Xg.  There are lots of I miss you versions on YouTube, but I cannot tell if one of them is the wannabe-adult version for a playlist about YouTube's Community Guidelines. Or in other words, I removed I miss you from the Guidelines playlist, because there is still another "uncensored" (age-restricted) Pagan Poetry video by Björk in it, and I replaced it in the 1970-1999 playlist.

While at it, the deleted Declare Independence v=4z7NN4n8CTY in In principio (pt. 2: 2000-2019) is a major loss, I'm not going to find and fix all posts here, where I embedded this master piece. IMNSHO this is a bug, YouTube could simply redirect its URL to the still existing identical v=4P5xSntVWQE. Don't let them do that to you … Raise your flag:

Just for the records, the (apparently) deleted account issue (2) has nothing to do with the leaked copyright strike issue (1), only the platform (YouTube) and the effect (deleted video) are similar.

Hey you, you're losing, you're losing your…

To some degree tumblr worked for me as an ersatz-Google+ or actually ersatz-Buzz: I could like some Instagram-posts automagically copied to tumblr. YouTube's "share on tumblr" feature also worked, same idea as "share on blogger". The opposite direction—share something found on tumblr elsewhere—might be tricky if you don't accept any "tumblr as a platform" spam. Or it is like SoundCloud, their default <embed>-code for sharing is horrible, with some radical manual modifications it is good enough, TBD.

Still having fun with my YouTube playlists:

"Vitamin C" on Toxic Waste	"Your Mind" on Rewind 2018
"DAF Mussolini" on Klapperstrauss	"KMFDM Mussolini" on I know it when I see it

Raise Your Flag (pt. 4)

Parts 1, 2, and 3 corresponded to my Blogger profile with six favourite music videos, books, and films. Maybe I'll expand that later, today I add my top six C. J. Cherryh books suited for folks not planning to get into dubious trilogies or even the huge Foreigner saga.

I anyway don't like the male Foreigner protanogist and his unrealistic background. An elaborated State Department bureaucracy for in essence one ambassador representing one of two nations on a planet with boring marital problems makes no sense. Everything else in this saga is fine, but if I hate the hero it doesn't help.

This post is also inspired by Björk, her nice 340 MB audio download of a 2007 concert makes sadly no sense for my eight years old laptop, or for my ears, a few years older than hers ;-) The six book cover images are non-free, enwiki uses them as "fair use" on the relevant articles, and I hope that this is also okay in links to these enwiki pages:

Check out the English descriptions on Wikipedia for details, some quick notes: Actually I wanted to add Regenesis as second best after Cyteen, but they belong together, Cyteen is the first book featuring Ari Emory. I have the Baen version of The Paladin with a different cover, Wikipedia shows both. This is neither SF, nor Fantasy, it's about a heroine in a fictitious country—remotely like Japan, Korea, or China—trying to get her revenge after losing her family in a civil war, but first she has to become a sword master educated by The Paladin, another survivor and dissident, who is not immediately impressed by this rural girl.

Devil to the Belt is an omnibus of two books, the most proletarian work of Cherryh with a background history of "the rab", a youth movement, suppressed in a revolt against the companies, a part of Cherryh's Company Wars universe. Wikipedia labels it as "Alliance-Union" universe without reference; I'm not sure if that's the canonical name or "alternative facts". Merchanter's Luck and Tripoint also belong to this universe, but unlike Downbelow Station and Finity's End they are not essential to get the picture. Serpent's Reach is only remotely related to this universe, has a heroine, and fascinating bee-like aliens.

Ignore the prequel of Forge of Heavens, the Gene Wars universe was a short-lived disaster, but this book is one of Cherry's best, on the same level as The Bonfire of the Vanities. No Freeciv flag in this blog entry, check out Björk's SoundCloud, and don't let them do that to you:

YouTube Got Talent (pt. 2)

Next musician in need of some serious WikiLove, she's not even one of those women in red at the moment, and a registered #GirlsGotGroove hashtag does not help on YouTube, if nobody uses it. Unregistered used hashtags also don't work on YouTube, both cases yield a small error message for #foobar immediately followed by any ordinary search results for foobar without #.

After some religious debates with myself I finally kicked Sina's drum covers as not good enough from the In principio (pt. 1) + (pt. 2) playlists, and then upgraded some original tracks incl. Deep Purple's Child In Time in the Religiously Incorrect + Toxic Waste playlists to Sina's 201x versions. Maybe some purists scream, but as you could have read in this blog there was a hard timeout in February from my PoV, so (quote) fuck it (unquote), and I've posted the source of this quote in March.

Back to April, all fine, Google+ died as planned, but without its exorcist as eye-witness, and maybe one protective spell three months ago with Deep Purple's April worked. Standard question, what could possibly go wrong? Answer: (1) Spells sometimes work. (2) If they work they sometimes backfire. Putting that together, for a time-limited protective spell, back could be in time and hit the target instead of the caster. Which might be exactly what happened, if an also convoluted explanation involving an obscure toxic forum since about November doesn't suffice. Meanwhile it's May, let's forget the Deep Purple April 2019, it's history like Google+.

I collected lots of Karma-points for the possible spell-disaster on another Emma, a bad case of woman in red fixed in record time by some enthusiasts, thanks: On Wikipedia wikilinks are shown in blue if the article exists, or in red if it does not yet exist. Meanwhile somebody uploaded the 19 images extracted from one video on WikiMedia Commons, and sadly the somebody was me: I broke a three years old WikiMedia log-in strike for this business, and on the same day I found that enwiki offers an image upload request page for these cases, tested, works.

If you missed major parts of the drama, you might wonder what happened to the Topic, VEVO, and Vloggery channels, it's explained on enwiki Emma Blackery. Of course unrelated to the five years old drama, YouTube always finds the worst points in time for changes related to this musician. Admittedly losing YouTube Heros, Rewind 2018, and Google+ to one singing Slytherin and her allies must have been hard for Alphabet, and hopefully she doesn't plan to kill Blogger just because she could. Back to music, she released the studio version of Cute Without You in April is the cruellest month:

The Google+ black list

Now that's against my rules as of (roughly) 1983 to 2018, or isn't it? Sometimes enwiki manages to surprise me, and I'm not talking about the major obstacles when not logged-in users try to add a perfectly valid film title on a biography. Admittedly Fuck  is exactly what vandals would try to write, and there's an edit filter trying to forbid it. I'm not telling you how to bypass the filter, if you don't know this you might be up to no good, and I hate vandals armed with a mobile phone and social media rumours.

JFTR, the complete title is Fuck Slaves, and I needed it to explain two different awards in one year, where the second award was related to an arguably notable film, i.e., one wikilink was required for my second good article  quest, and one statement about two awards needed both titles.

Google+ also tried to surprise me with its second "sexually explicit"  strike in a "privately shared"  (unlisted) collection. The content was a perfectly harmless review of The Juliette Society, only the domain of the publisher has an X before its BIZ. Exactly the same X before a CRIT as in the first strike for a perfectly harmless 2006 interview originally posted here (on blogspot), now again posted here (by me as embedded scribd-PDF, there's certainly no X in scribd.)

Chilling effects, I dare not post it here at the moment, Blogger could also hate the X, I only know that this is not about the content. Lame excuse, after buying the first part of the trilogy I should anyway read it before linking more reviews.

After testing the title link, this playlist is as the name says toxic. I stick to the now usual layout and added two videos here.

G+ photo backup

Still T-31 days until G+ shuts down, but actually I want to be ready with the Mismade Girl import here before March, 14.  Checking enwiki, yes, mdy for US dates.  I'm not sure what happens with shared Google Photos below lh3.googleusercontent.com when G+ shuts down, maybe this post will be a mess after the <newspeak> sunset </newspeak>:

Note to self: Figure out how to stop animated GIF auto-play on Chrome later; for now I just enjoy it as funny.

Duck or Grouse

My G+ backup strategy would kill my one high risk bet for 2020, so here is a copy. YouTuber Anni The Duck will have more than 1M subscribers before 2021. German, but for one song at the start it doesn't matter:

YouTube Got Talent

Raise Your Flag (pt. 3)

Apart from favourite music and books a blogger profile also offers favourite films, and this is my attempt to pick 3×2 films (as of today) and a third flag:

Obvious problem, this would be kicked out of my YouTube channel or go straight into the Religiously Incorrect playlist, but this is a blog, the channel rules are not (yet) applicable here. For some kind of minimal standard I picked seen at least twice, and of course fans of Hitchcock, Kubrick, or Monty Python would pick other master pieces (and I'd love to see them again, but what I listed here impressed me most.) Silent Running made me cry, that's rare for a movie or music (Kate Bush - Cloudbusting surprised me recently, after what, over 30 years, really?) For books it's not that rare, e.g., Han Qing-jao as heroine in Xenocide.

Hot candidates for position 7 include L'Age d'Or / Un Chien Andalou, Triumph of the Will (beating Metropolis), and at some point Space Patrol – The Fantastic Adventures of the Spaceship Orion would just hop to the top based on General Lydia van Dyke and Lt. Tamara Jagellovsk.

The Nato flag is unused in Freeciv and in theory suited for the Natives, but in practice no ruleset loads the unused flags, and changing that manually isn't easy, unless you accept that new versions will overwrite very simple straight forward modifications.

Raise Your Flag (pt. 2)

Various cats, hamsters, 99 Luftballons, pugs, 140 billion unicorns and other magical creatures including a dragon seriously confused me, therefore I started a strategical retreat into the FoGs of Greyscale with at most one pet. Standard CCC question, what could possibly go wrong?

Nothing, until today, I found a 2017 film not yet listed in enwiki, a 2010 interview about another film with the same director and lead actor, some not so nice books about the Fields of Grey (fortunately in a NN state), and ten Google sites linking to free PDFs for the worst book, where free stood for only register with your e-mail address for a free trial followed by you're almost there, verify your address with your credit card, no costs at all.

Sure, I also loved that they couldn't predict if the PDF is actually available on their site or not. With the cheapest Amazon offer at about $ 850,– and lots of allegedly 1…3 hours old reviews, finally I got this rare e-book for free, and it is wonderful etc. One hour later I had doubled my number of Google abuse reports in this millennium (was 10, now 20.)

Checking a remaining biography I got some irrelevant search hits about the grey area, and one Twitter hit by her.😢 Without Twitter account all hashtags I really cared about were #SaveYourInternet (not necessarily agreeing with Alphabet), #the_accidental_poet (for the _poet), and #GirlsGotGroove (for Sina.) Even folks who never used Twitter get the idea of proper #metoo subsets, and that's why I'm now tackling the promised Raise Your Flag part 2 with a guaranteed number of zero pets:

Nicola Griffith	C. J. Cherryh	Lois McMaster Bujold
Neal Stephenson	Anne McCaffrey	Elizabeth Moon

The next entry will be tricky, it's definitely Liaden, but which heroine? The mathematician is brilliant while she lived, but her after-life and later resurrection are too bizarre for my tastes. Theo is clearly the best, a coming-of-age begin followed by a career as solo-fighter and renegade. OTOH if I need help against the dragon mentioned above it must be Priscilla, and the religious zealots (in my head) will try everything to have her. Some fanboys not busy with the Slytherin or the racing driver would of course pick Miri based on 5'2" up to 5'6" (and the wrong kind of red hairs, idiot boys), but that can't beat Priscilla or Theo. So, who is it, Priscilla? Thought so.

Moon is not the best of these authors, but Once a Hero is the best military SF I know (that includes Honor Harrington and what's listed above.) McMaster Bujold is brilliant, and I don't know only the Vorkosigan-Saga. However, Miles vs. Ari, it's not fair, by definition Ari is the better heroine. For Barrayar it's Cordelia vs. Ari, possibly maybe Cordelia should win, but I love coming-of-age stories as in Cyteen. Crystal singer is actually a trilogy and an exception, not the boring (for me) heroine gets at least six children, and at least one of those gets also six children plot, but a heroine who cannot get children at all. And "only" three books in a trilogy, not ten or whatever for the unicorn girl, and besides I've had it with unicorns after Hogwarts.

Griffith is a legend, and the part claiming that she's writing about sex are alternative facts: The thriller:tech:romance:sex ratio could be 9:7:3:1 on the border to not enough sex (admittedly more than all others listed above), and if you think that it's the wrong kind of sex check out The Diamond Age, neo-Victorian might be your thing. It also has a heroine and a coming-of-age plot.

While trying to fix all broken SVGs for Freeciv (that ultimately failed for various reasons, it can take years to not fix a single comma if it's outside of the radar of all still active maintainers) I never got to the point, where I could add Pirate Jenny as female leader to the Pirates, or just for fun Julia Reda. On YouTube folks disagree who was the best Pirate Jenny, with two or (counting Lotte Lenya) three hot candidates. I've found a fourth, Anne Kerry Ford is the most militant, demoting the others to drama queens.

99 Luftballons

SOTU: Not as bad as in January, having fun with obscure record labels helps.  And I'm curious, will the next Like push the number here over 99, or is it frozen by sharing / posting?

Raise Your Flag (pt. 1)

After figuring out playlists and 800×450 the next obvious step is "good" old table layout with six cells for 384×216 iframes  representing the favourite music top 6 (as of today) in my Blogger profile at the bottom of all pages:

That was easy, replace any allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" by allow="" referrerpolicy="origin" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin", get rid of any moz… or webkit… cruft, possibly maybe add a title="…", and while at it put an ordinary link between <iframe …> and </iframe>. Thanks to MDN for their iframe-spell book. The next exercise in a planned Raise Your Flag (pt. 2) for favourite books will be harder, it could require hot linking of stolen cover art, maybe from enwiki, claiming "fair use" for "educational purposes".

About the title link for Raise Your Flag (pt. 1) inspired by Björk's Declare Independence, it's about an old roll your own scenario project for Freeciv 2.3, later replaced by roll your own nation (stealing the nice Aleut flag), arriving at roll your own ruleset for Freeciv 2.4…2.6. As shipped Freeciv has no nation group sisters, just flip core (about 60 nations with translations) to all (about 600 nations), then pick the classic group to find the amazones, or the imaginary group to find the hackers.

Industrial music

It's not that I don't get industrial at all, in fact I loved Steh auf Berlin (1981), and it's still brilliant. Ignore the copyvio for a moment, download (incl. share a.k.a. embed) isn't illegal, only upload is verboten (cf. #SaveYourInternet), and unavailable on YouTube is as clear as it gets for music:

Berlin am Nullpunkt from Wolfgang Lange on Vimeo.

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Skipping Grünes Winkelkanu as possibly mavbe only me, time travel, 27y fast forward, the next master-piece was a recent blitz-promotion from unknown to top ten ever:

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OTOH I'm still lost with some of the Fifty Shades of Clickbait:

Meanwhile I almost like it, but two other remixes still beat me. Of course this won't stop me to juggle NPOV, OR, IAR, and other balls (excl. one too dangerous CRYSTALBALL) until the result is exactly as eclectic as it should be.

purl.net/xyzzy

Reviving this dead blog was possibly maybe a bad idea, but I'm still terrified to get a Twitter account to replace G+ in April, maybe Blogger is goodbad enough. At least it still works, and apart from Gmail I'm not aware of any other still working Google product. #GirlsGotGroove could be an argument for Twitter, "registering" hashtags is about as much fun as playing with WikiData.

The old websites are now all gone, R.I.P.: 2004, 2010, 2012. For the required legalese I trusted that "click on banner + click on imprint" covered your privacy also for this blog, i.e., there is no such thing as privacy on Google products, and if you allow third party cookies SoundCloud.com (example) will track you on any page with an SC iframe (=technical term for an embedded object, ignoring images + applets.)

SC politely asked to put that info into any affected privacy policy, so consider it done here for this blog until I get a static blogger page for some remotely legal legalese. I still don't do analytics or monetisation or cookies, not here, not on YouTube, nowhere, period. BTW, get an AdBlock, and disallow JavaScript on all sites complaining about it, c.f. chrome://settings/content/javascript.

DynDNS killed xyzzy.webhop.info some years ago, IIRC it was a redirect to my Google Apps account. Meanwhile Google also killed the target, good riddance.

DynDNS also killed xn--80akhbyknj4f.boldlygoingnowhere.org and xn--xyzzy.boldlygoingnowhere.org belonging to my i18n-fun pages here. That's sad, but the fun factor was possibly maybe limited to some folks I (virtually) met in IETF WGs. All is well if it ends well, SPF is a proper RFC now, the technically dubious (or ethically too ambitious) Sender-ID is dead, and I even produced a silly RFC to balance the IAB appeal.

Channel banner

New banner (attribution: Georges Seguin, licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0):

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Old banner (attribution: Christof Pins, licence: CC-BY-SA 4.0):

The banners are also available in a shared photo album with the hilarious Google search result (left side) in a readable size. The utter dubious licence is for the right side, I'd still say that this is PD-ineligible (no sweat), but IANAL.

Commons

At some point in time Blogger added a Google+ tracking script to this blog, and I've not yet figured out how to get rid of this spyware. If you have a browser extension blocking wannabe-social tracking sites such as ShareMeNot this won't affect you. While at it and FWIW I have replaced the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license for this blog by 4.0, removed the dead Google Reader links, and fixed some other minor blog template rot issues.
Recently Google Sites somehow managed to clobber embedded Google Docs videos with non-existing YouTube content. Just embedding the video again can fix this. Just for fun I try this also here—for the complete story see its page on my Google site:

Upgraded 2019 (almost 5y later) to <iframe allow="" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin" referrerpolicy="origin" …>. I'm not updating older iframes in this blog if there are any.
Fun observation, blogger gave up on <p>…</p> and now firmly demands <div>…<br /><br /></div> for a simple paragraph: HTML 3.2 rulez, and I know it by heart (in its XHTML 1.0 transitional incarnation), now singing nah pop, no style. I strictly roots..

Some hours later, the docs.google video doesn't play, neither here nor on sites.google, revert doesn't help, view the video on WAYBACK or Google Photos (sic-K).

Google ±

Google+ wants me to join Google+, because I'm on Google+.

SideWiki shutdown

Google SideWiki — good riddance. Just for fun I save my last (of five) entries below, they were all futile attempts to get in contact with a human being interested in fixing Google bugs. Next stop, let's kill Knol.

'Meta-searching' Google
The alleged "meta search" is an ordinary "cached" link offered in an ordinary Google search result, where the found Google groups article does not contain the searched +"bigfat" fat16 -forum, and I hoped that at least the cached result might be related to my query.
Instead I get a runabout ending in this "sidewiki" known to be yet another Dave Null at his support work. If you do not want cached Google groups search hits to be clicked just do not offer the links.
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