SNSD April 2016 Jakarta Phantasia Tour Streaming

There appears to be a temporary stream of the Jakarta
concert for SNSD Phantasia at this link:
http://mixlr.com/fanboysnsd/

It is believed that the reception inside the concert venue is bad, so it cuts out frequently, but appears to be real.

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Master List of “Pirate Kings” Game App Strategies: Not Losing Coins, Etc.

I’ve only been playing the app-game “Pirate Kings” for about a month now, and I’ve already noticed several patterns that make these seemingly completely-random game not exactly random, and have developed a few strategies that could help solve your pain of losing everything when you’re saving for something big:

If you’re interested in trying this game (which I would characterize mainly as a kids game but loosely a mix between a slot machine and resource management, with very kid-silly kinds of graphics, but seemingly fairly advanced CG motion), check it out their official site here.

1. Your spins automatically regenerate 5 per hour, on the hour. My best advice is to only play once every several hours or so, and no fewer that 10 hours between the most recent play (if you’ve exhausted all spins) in order to maximize your free spins per day.

2. The best way to not lose all of your coins from steals, is to only use up your spins until you can buy the next thing. If you spend all of your spins and rack up 2 million coins but can’t use them, not only have you just put a 2 million coin prize for someone else to grab, but you’ve wasted all of those spins you used to get there. If you still have 20 spins left (a) you’re probably not going to get enough coins to buy that huge prize, and (b) saving those spins will make it a lot shorter wait until it gets closer to the 50 maximum so you can try to get enough for the huge prize.

3. Everyone steals and you will always lose all of the coins you have unspent. This is a fact that you will simply have to believe, and once you play with this belief, anything you have left when you return again will just be lucky for you. It’s not bad luck that you were stolen from — being stolen from is part of the game. The luck is having *anything* when you come back.

4. Always steal, even if they are from your best friend or granny or whoever. That’s how the game is played. Your granny can steal it back if they know how to play. Being nice by trying to pick an island from the steal screen you know isn’t granny or whatever, only steals from someone else’s granny. If you’re not comfortable with stealing, then you’re not comfortable with winning.

5. Make sure all of your smaller “island map” prizes are bought also. If you look at the “island map” of islands you have previously filled up, you can hire computer pirates to dig on and produce small amounts of coins automatically that you can randomly collect later at your convenience. It costs each time to buy a miner pirate for those islands, and those costs are usually a bit smaller cost. Buying the miner-pirate for your previous full islands will help keep your total unspent money low so fewer people will try to steal it.

If you have any more suggestions for this list, please send them to ablestmage@gmail.com, and I’ll add them to the list =)

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All English Grammar Questions Answered At Once: Is it this way, or that way?

The type of English grammar question I see most frequently is of the sort, “Which way is proper: this way, or another way?” as if to settle a dispute or idle curiosity.

The answer in general, is that you must first specify a style of English to measure up against. There is no “standard English” that governs usage. If you think this is what dictionaries are for, you might seriously reconsider that whole idea after reading on.

Asking, “Is the term really supposed to be preventative, or is it really preventive?” without specifying a style, is like asking, “Am I allowed to hold the ball with my hands?” without specifying which sport. Being able to hold the ball with your hands depends if you’re the goalie in soccer or lacrosse, but is acceptable if you’re playing NFL football. It’s generally required in bowling, but disallowed in cricket.

Saying, “I mean, according to the rules of English in general,” in response to the style question, is like responding, “I don’t mean any sport.” Well, then there is either no answer, or perhaps too many answers to decide on just one, because no style governs the others. The rules for bowling do not govern jai alai; the rules for hopscotch do not govern lacrosse. The rules for APA style do not govern the Chicago Press; the rules for Yahoo! online style do not govern writing a letter to your grandmother. Unless you specify a style to measure the question against, you’ll get a thousand answers and no answer.

In the way that there are specific rules for the broad spectrum of each kind of sport that exists, and that each sport’s rules govern no sport but itself: English itself has no all-governing style that must be followed, but does have within it several styles which self-govern.

When I was at university for my major in English, I also took print journalism classes for my minor. In my news-writing classes, we were bound by the Associated Press Stylebook which prescribed rules such as hyphenation of “eight-year-old” and spelling out the number if it were below 10, phrasing large currency amounts such as “$10 million” instead of putting all the zeroes, and referring to a source in the story by their surname after having mentioned it fully once already.

But, there are other styles that other journalism programs abide by, such as Chicago Press Style or even the The Yahoo! Style Guide for online writing. Which style you are bound by is either up to you, or a governing influence such as an employer who can call your employment into question for failure to abide by the rules of that style.

This journalistic style differed from my English literature classes that required essays. A friend of mine taking the same type of classes received a call for a re-write of his literature essay with the words, “This might make a good story for the NYT, but this is English literature,” in red pen. Most of our literature classes abode by Strunk & White’s Manual of Style.

You may recall having to make term paper citations in MLA, APA, Turabian, or other such styles that have specific orders for parenthetical source references appended to statements within the paper. Even further, the professor could institute formatting styles such as double-spaced, certain margins, font sizes, and more. Of all of those styles, none of them are correct except within the confines of the situation — none of them governing English itself.

You may have said, “Well my Dear Mrs. Meriwether I had for home room in 8th grade Literature, said they’re is a contraction, and their is possessive, and showed us how the dictionary says so!”

The dictionary does not list the limitations of how words are permitted to be used. The dictionary does not prohibit a usage that isn’t listed within it. Perhaps more generally, the dictionary does not prescribe anything, but rather describes. Stay with me.

The researchers for dictionaries, called lexicographers, observe how words are used in every-day writing like Facebook, magazines, newspapers, Twitter, novels, TV scripts, letters, and more. These lexicographers jot down the different ways that the writers of the words intended to use them. That intention is pivotal — what the writer intends the word to mean is what is observed.

For instance, if one lexicographer observes that a particular writer uses abode when appearing to mean domicile, while another writer appears to use it as past-tense for abide, the lexicographer documents both usages. All of these go into one huge database called a corpus, which has all of the other lexicographical documentation from others observing in the same fashion.




When a dictionary entry is crafted, the corpus is consulted to identify the most numerous uses of a specific word in a certain way. For instance, use of abode may show in their records to spike higher when used to describe a domicile than as past-tense for abide. What constitutes “frequently enough” usage is arbitrary to the publisher’s whim, and not standardized. What you see in a dictionary entry is merely describing the ways which the word was observed to have been used most frequently — neither a limitation nor an approval of whether one is allowed or disallowed to use it. Other facts of the entry may reflect a predictable level of usefulness to the reader, but shies away from commandments of official status.

Merriam-Webster posits (emphasis theirs), “By relying on citational evidence, we hope to keep our publications grounded in the details of current usage so they can calmly and dispassionately offer information about modern English. That way, our references can speak with authority without being authoritarian.”

Michael Quinion, publisher of World Wide Words who also provides citations for the Oxford English Dictionary and wrote a third of the entries for the second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of New Words, remarks, “Many believe that when (and only when) a word appears in a reputable dictionary it receives formal validation and can take its place in the English lexicon,” adding that, “As one of a number of researchers who collect evidence of new usage for the OED, it intrigued me to think that I might be a member, even a junior member, of a shadowy cabal that sets the standards for all well-educated English speakers. No — the process really is as anarchic as it seems.”

Why is it, do you think, that dictionary entries contain meanings in the order listed? Why that particular order? They’re listed in the order of most frequently observed.

There was a fracas several years ago when journalism pieces began to emerge announcing that dictionaries were “changing” the entries to include meanings about marriage that included ways other than merely a man and a woman, and outrage resulted from people who believed dictionary editors were bending to the will of political pressure to make the changes — but that was simply untrue.

The simple fact was that the observed usage of marriage began to appear in commonly observed text to intend to mean ways different than simply one man and one woman — so since the statistics of the corpus changed because of how the common people used marriage, so too did the content of the entry. It was believed to be a political move by those who failed to understand dictionaries, as if they dictionaries were proposing that marriage is or isn’t actually one way or another. Rather, the dictionaries merely reflect how the masses intend words.

Think of a newspaper that reports on a murder. Is the newspaper saying that since a particular murder happened at one point in time, in a certain way, that all future murders must take place in the same pattern? No, the newspaper is merely describing an event that took place prior, not prescribing how murders must take place.

Likewise, is the sports page mandating that all future sporting events between two teams must be scored 77-113? No, that is the score of a prior event, not future events. Likewise, a dictionary is a newspaper about how words have been observed to be used, not how they are limited from being used.

Also, the idea that only the most frequent usages are what must be used (perhaps for purposes of requiring as few as possible questions of intent) is a philosophy, not a rule. If it were a rule, then we would not have even heard of the poet ee cummings, as nearly every bit of his poetry exhibits the astandard.

The insistence that language be standardized to offer the least ambiguity is merely a preference of communication applied in numerous valid situations, like the medical field when mere seconds of inefficient language breakdown may cost a patient their life. In journalism, setting a codified style can be employed successfully to act as evidence in a courtroom scenario such as for a libel case whether the ambiguity of something can be cited against the stylebook, to identify objectively what a certain phrasing did actually mean, in the face of what was falsely interpreted by the reader.

Further, consider the classification of an English degree — it is an Arts degree. If you are taking a class for how to paint in the pointillism style, and your professor says you must use a certain brand of paint, are you failing to paint in pointillism by using an off-brand? No, you’re merely transgressing the limitations the professor insists for the purposes of achieving a passing grade within the context of the class.

If you use broad brush strokes and call it pointillism, are you still painting in pointillism? You still could be, because art is not even susceptible to regulation except by entirely subjective standards, rather than objective measures. The broad brush strokes could be to make a single large dot spanning a single canvas, whereas the completed work is a series of so-dotted canvases.

Further, considering the fact that the dictionary itself is based on how words are intended to be used, it could be reasoned that the dictionary is merely a listing of the ways words are most often intended — and that a dictionary itself is not more reliable than asking the source what was meant, but just that larger numbers of other people meant to use the word differently than the usage in question, and the larger numbers don’t make it more correct unless your personal philosophy insists on matching the trends of the masses.

Think of a hashtag search of Twitter or Tumblr. If you enter a search for #SNSD, what you will receive is a listing of the observed usage of #SNSD, not the limitations on how someone is allowed to use #SNSD. The dictionary is, in essence, a hashtag search, if almost all words were hashtags — and it observes the trends in the ways people have used them, without suggesting that those ways are the only ways allowed to use them.

If it were up to me, the “correct” philosophy of communication would be the speaker to be the sole authority on the meaning of their usage. My reason for this is that, under a system that proposes that the listener’s interpretation of the speaker’s words having more merit, allows for cases of abuse to be credible, such as situations in which consent is required.

If the listener has more credibility on acting upon interpretation, then yes may simply be interpreted as no, and the abuser may act by interpretation of consent. However, if the speaker’s usage is investigated and given higher credibility than the listener’s guessings-of, then there will be little room for miscommunication. The speaker, who would suffer the greatest amount over the misunderstood intent, should have the highest degree of authority of what their own usage intended to express.

The fact that dictionaries are crafted at their very essence upon this aspect is very significant — and I think you may find that those who (falsely) believe that dictionaries actually mandate correct or incorrect usages also believe that it is the listener who has the authority over proper interpretation of the speaker’s intent, rather than the speaker over their own.

Someone told me that an old teaching adage supposes that, “If the student hasn’t learned, then the teacher hasn’t taught.” I would propose a modification instead to be, “If a teacher refuses questioning, then the teacher hasn’t taught; if the student hasn’t questioned, then the student hasn’t studied.”

If you are still in disbelief of this idea, that dictionaries do not regulate English, and you still maintain that dictionaries do set limitations on the ways words must be used, then be so kind as to look up, in your dictionary of choice, to discover whether “word” contains any definition that includes limitations. I think you will find moreso to the effect, of a letter/sound or series of letters/sounds that correspond to an intention..

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The Real Irony of Reporting on False Pro-Rape Meeting Cancellation?

Making the rounds today is the story that Daryush Valizadeh, leader of a group of manly-men called Return of Kings, has cancelled a gathering of rape-legalization advocates after not being able to find sufficient secure meeting areas. Ironic, right? Actually, no.

The article that many are reporting as the promotion of rape legalization was just a satirical absurdity, and Valizadeh himself has stated repeatedly that it is just a thought experiment and not meant to be taken seriously. But, naturally, the kind of person who doesn’t fact-check took it as real and continuously makes clickbait headlines like This Colossal Douche Thinks Rape Should Be Legalized instead, seemingly preferring the kick they get from being angry or making others angry.

Normally, if there is a satire site, you can find somewhere on the site that states that the article(s) is/are satire, and nobody reports on those as if they were true. However, the people who are continuously fooled into thinking The Onion is real are laughed out of the park because they don’t bother to check. I’m at a loss to explain how so many people simply refuse to make the same acknowledgement of the same kind of disclaimer on the site they claim is pro-rape:

Q: “Why do you want to legalize rape?”

I don’t. Legalizing rape is a notion so insanely absurd I never imagined that people would take it 100% seriously, including politicians. I don’t believe any form of physical violence against men or women should be legalized. I’ve said that “How To Stop Rape” was a satirical thought experiment so many times that it’s clear to me current misinterpretation of it by the media is deliberate.

The Real Irony

The real irony, is that the false reporters are essentially raping this guy’s message for what it is. They are ignoring his declarations of “no, it isn’t” and believing he means the reverse, and taking out abuse on him for something he never claimed to be true. The people who report that he advocates for legalizing rape, when he doesn’t, are basically saying, “we won’t take no for an answer,” and then paradoxically just doing as they please regardless of what he says.

Next perhaps they may also cry out that such-and-such is a namecaller, despite namecaller being a name the accused is called.

An additional irony could be that the false reporters could be actually in danger elevating the satirical article he wrote to classic literature status.

Famed literary writer Jonathan Swift, known to English teachers across the globe, wrote in his treasured hyperbole, “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public” (usually shorted to A Modest Proposal), that children of the poor should be consumed as food in order to support wealthier people, so that those children are no longer a burden on the public good —

“A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”

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Linksquib: Apps Like Make It Rain, Magazine-Made Blocks, and Making Trouble

I don’t listen to StoryCorps on NPR very much because most of them seem to be sad — but I did run across one in particular I found quite funny, called Up To No Good. The show itself is generally just brief interviews with random people who have an interesting story to tell. This episode’s topic was about adults recalling stories where they got into mischief, and whether it still affects them today.

Lately I have been hooked on a game app called Make It Rain: The Love of Money (iOS/Android) because it follows in the footsteps of other such “accumulator” (what I call them) games similar to the web browser hit, Cookie Clicker. If you hadn’t heard of Cookie Clicker I must forewarn you, you may blow an entire weekend on it if you’re not careful. There’s not nearly as much story to MIR as CC, but it’s at least a slightly different version than simply tapping the screen — you swipe up as if you’re counting off paper currency from an infinite stack. You start out counting off $1 bills, and once you’ve counted enough you can spend that amount on various upgrades that either increase the amount per swipe, or automatically swipe for you. There are several other kinds of powerups, and can even be accumulated while you’re not even using the app.

I’ve been playing these kinds of games for a while now, and so far have also enjoyed (all iOS, mind you) the questionably-titled Cookie Clickers (unrelated to the web version above), EpicClickers (formerly Hero Clicker), and arguably the best and most advanced app of this kind: AdVenture Capitalist! which I’ve been playing for nearly a year now..

I’ve devised a way to recycle magazines so that they can be turned very simply into a kind of building blocks for structures, although they require hot glue or other adhesive to stack well enough. The basic idea is to (a) tear out a page of a magazine you’re finished with, (b) fold it in half side-to-side so it maintains its original length, (c) fold again the same way, (d) fold again the same way, (e) take a pair of needle-nose pliers and (f) twist one end around upon itself to roll it up, and (g) tape the end to make a neat little cylinder. As I make more and more of these, I’ll make additional posts about structures I’ve made with them — and each blocks only requires a single magazine page. Just imagine how many things could be made, Minecraft-style, with only a single magazine..

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Linksquib: Marginalia, Markov Chains, and the ‘Rein’ of Taeyeon in the Kpop Kingdom

Found a web comic generator called Calvin and Markov that creates remixes of Calvin & Hobbes comics based on something called Markov chains, a concept based on work of Russian mathematician Andrey Markov.

Have had several encounters lately with a recency illusion in real life.. in my particular case, out of the blue I decided to look up why page margins are a thing, because wouldn’t all that space just be wasted? Why not just print to the edge? I guessed maybe that older books might suffer a lot of wear and tear from being transported or stored in less-ideal locations, but actually, it was for purposes of creating marginalia, or notes that a book-maker would use to scribble in notes about the book. Think of them like the DVD commentary track for a movie, except in the margins of a book. The very next day, I was listening to a new episode (s08e01) of Museum of Curiosity, with Holly Walsh as a panelist, who mentioned a fondness for marginalia, and then not but perhaps 2 days later I was watching an episode of QI (M12 “Medieval & Macabre’) that mentioned it.

I am super excited about the upcoming release of Taeyeon’s new music video, Rain, on Feb 3 (Teasers 1, 2).

I’ve been an SNSD fan for a while now, and Hoot was the first MV I got to see on the release day. SNSD holds a special place in my heart because their debut song Into The New World because about that time I’d learned of a nerve disorder I have and was entering my own ‘new world’ at the time. Taeyeon is SNSD’s “kid leader” and has become my ultimate bias over the years, and I am quite excited to help admin the gigantic Facebook group TaeYeon 태연 International Fan Club currently boasting 26,000 members <3

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State of the Dead Sea Blogs Address: Jan 2016

You may notice the site become gradually populated with articles dated for much later than you’re familiar with seeing — or, perhaps you may be unfamiliar with this one and notice that several sites from the ablestmage press appear to be lifted from there and pasted here. I am, however, the person that runs the ablestmage press myself, and I’ve decided to start migrating several of my most popular posts from there to here.

In the early 2000s, possibly around 2001-2004 thereabouts, I had a linkpost blog called the “Dead Sea Blogs” that I posted weird/silly/interesting links to, and I’ve grown to miss those days so I decided to revive it. My previous project at the ablestmage press *(t-a-p) above has started to get bizarrely popular, but I have no way to monetize it since it is hosted by wordpress and they don’t allow ads/etc. If I do manage to add ads one day, they will be preferably quite minimalist if I can help it. T-a-p is starting to bring in hits on a magnitude of 5000-9000 per week, and I thought maybe if I duplicated a few of the best hit-grabbers here I could eventually migrate.

I’m not convinced that it is the ‘brand’ of ablestmage that has become reliable, but moreso the pagerank or search results, since a vast majority of hits all come from search results and people linking articles directly, rather than repeat readership. I realize that I began t-a-p in 2007 and have nearly 10 years of content that contributes to that aspect, so I figure I had better get started now, so that perhaps in 2026 I might be able to draw a slim dollar or two from writing, perhaps even as a living =)

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Did the Largest Rally Against Islam In The History of the World Take Place In France Recently? No. Here’s Why.

Making the rounds is a meme that proposes that you won’t hear from the American mainstream media that the largest rally against Islam took place in France recently — because it didn’t.

“The largest rally against Islam in the history of the world took place in France recently. But you’d never know it by watching mainstream media!” are the words emblazoned accross a photo of a large group of people.

There was, in fact, a massive rally in France against terrorism. It was attended by 3.7 million, and covered by CNN (video included), that took place on January 11, 2015. It was covered by all the major American networks (Fox, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, NYT, etc.)

So.. why didn’t you see it recently? Look at the year again. 2015. Is that this year? No, it isn’t.

It didn’t take place recently. It wasn’t covered by mainstream media recently because it didn’t even happen recently.

Do you expect a news agency to cover stories, again, and from over a year ago?

The dominating theme of the gathering was “Je Suis Charlie,” being French for “I am Charlie” as the people identified themselves with the victims of the attack on Charlie Hebdo. The emphasis was upon solidarity and unity, against terror in general, not specifically from a single source. Were there people in attendance who were against Islam? I think that sounds entirely plausible, but it wasn’t a dominating theme according to observable accounts.

To everyone that believed this before looking it up, and who was sent here by someone who linked to this article: The fact that you’re willing to believe a Facebook picture or meme without researching it first is indicative of how horrible of a source for information YOU are. You encountered information, and then instantly believed it, because you have a FALSE understanding of the world.

If your criticism is that this story didn’t appear on the “mainstream media” then you have quite possibly the worst research methods ever. Furthermore, YOU ARE ON THE INTERNET. There are THOUSANDS of news sources to check and cross-check, at your leisure — but you, you sit there and complain that perhaps 5 of them didn’t cover something recently, and those news sources that have to squeeze the entirety of world history into a single hour of coverage somehow doesn’t match the mind-boggling standards that make up the impossibly small bubble you live in — that, not only did they actually cover, but it happened well over a year ago AND you complained about it then, too.

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Did YouTube Lower the SNSD/Girls’ Generation “Gee” Music Video from 150m views to 800k? NO. Here’s Why.

Today there has been uproar from Sones, (fans of Girls’ Generation, or SNSD for short), especially on twitter using the hashtag #JusticeforGEE, from the idea that YouTube has somehow reduced the number of views that SNSD’s music video “Gee” down to about 800,000 views, when previously it was up to about 150,000,000.

This is not true.

But here’s the real story we do know so far:

There are two official posts of SNSD’s Gee video, which were posted by SM (SNSD’s publisher) on different official YouTube channels. The video with the 150 million hits was taken down by YouTube based on an unspecified copyright claim, and the one with 800 thousand views is still up. The view count on the 800k video stayed the same.

Link to the 150m-view Gee MV: here *
Link to the 800k-view Gee MV: here
* this address is what the Wikipedia entry for Gee links to as the official video.

SM Entertainment has at least 2 YouTube channels: sment and SMTOWN, both of which have official SNSD videos on them. Both of them have/had Gee music videos, but only one of them was taken down.

The removal is not permanent, it is only a copyright claim. I personally have had copyright claims against my own videos being taken offline temporarily while the content issue was discussed, and when it was resolved as not being my fault, the video was restored with the same number of views still intact. Let’s just wait to see what happens.

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Is That Ship Loaded With Syrian Refugees? NO. Here’s Why.

Making the rounds lately is a photograph of hundreds of people loaded onto a single ship, practically spilling out over the edges.. along with the claim that it is a photograph of the Syrian refugees of ~2015 — except it’s from 1991. For some reason in the popularized version has the letters L and O out of the ship’s name VLORA are removed or blurred, but in other photos from that particular even show the ship’s letters very clearly.

Biggest perpetuator I could find: “Political Veracity” (as if).. with 17,762 Likes and 54,833 shares as of this article’s writing:

This article, which also seems to use it as a broader illustrative purpose rather than for historical merit (and even seems to label them as refugees from Libya), seems to describe a general migration pattern all flooding into Europe over the years.. but also has a lot more images of the same VLORA ship and from different angles.

I couldn’t locate the original photographer’s name for credit, but if known I’d like to know also, perhaps also if they could give an account of what they saw that day.

According to the below YouTube video, in 1990 the social unrest and economic collapse after the fall of a communist regime lead to a mass migration from Albania to Italy, all aboard one ship called the VLORA. In 1991, this ship loaded down with passengers arrived at the Bari pier and Italian administrators were unprepared for the arrival, resulting in many deaths.

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