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Random Q & A Thread - PART 2

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09:13 / 31.03.04

The old Q & A thread has become large and unwieldy - here's a lovely, fresh, manageable version for new questions. Please continue to use the old thread for posting replies to questions/issues that were raised there. Rules as before:

Use this thread to ask any old question you fancy an answer to, but can't be bothered to research in the proper manner like any normal, self-motivated, self-respecting person with a bit of get-up-and-go would. Questions that aren't worth starting an individual thread for. Anything from "what the hell is psychogeography?" to "how do I fix my leaky toilet?" Alternatively, use this thread to show off your mighty knowledge by answering a question or 2 or 3.

Note: People asking rhetorical questions for tiny comic effect (eg "What's it all about, then?" or "Why?") will be punished to the full extent of the law and beyond.

I shall kick off with a question about copyright and how it applies to images used in collage, digital art etc: How careful do you have to be about using other peoples' images in your own artwork? Graham Rawle, for instance, makes exstensive use of other peoples' photos(cut and pasted from magazines) in his 'Lost Consonants' and 'Vowel Movements' thingies which have been running for some time in the Guardian. Does he have to get the equivalent of sample clearance for each bit, or does he just rely on no one bothering to make a fuss about it? Or is he getting them from a copyright free source? See also: those Rather Good vids with the kittens and the credit card ads with the penguins.

13:36 / 31.03.04

I *think* if it's sufficiently recontextualized, it becomes yours. The deal with a lot of samples, especially early on in the game, was that they were immediately recognizable -- people could tell that a certain song was being referenced, and referenced by using a part of itself. That's the difference between Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" and anything by Weird Al Yankovic, I think... both use licks from other songs, but one didn't reframe it enough to make something new (at least according to the courts). Parody and pastiche are protected by fair use laws in the states, and artworks that use the same mechanisms would be equally protected.

This is just my impression, so others with more knowledge of the law can correct me if wrong.

ONLY NICE THINGS

21:05 / 02.04.04

I'm having idiot problems with adobe. I can't rememeber how to get the hand symbol off and just have the arrow for the cursor, how do you do this?

This from Zen Memetic in the former thread.

18:47 / 03.04.04

Grammar question.

These trousers are not as loose round the waist as they used to be. Okay. But in the past tense:

These trousers were not as loose round the waist as they had used to be?

Or is it still just 'used to be'?

ONLY NICE THINGS

21:35 / 03.04.04

"Had previously been"?

"Used to be" is, I think, by definition perfect in usage - because it has stopped being that which it ued to be...

AAAAAGH! Brain melty!

21:39 / 03.04.04

In American films, when people get married, they always have to get blood tests first. What are they testing them for? Rhesus factor? Congenital syphilis?

22:23 / 03.04.04

Xoc: It varies state by state. Most states in the US don't actually require blood tests. Below is a link to a list of states, whether they require a blood test, and a link to a list of what tests they require if they do: Ici, from about.com.

Most seem to be for syphillis and/or rubella.

22:35 / 03.04.04

How about 'the trousers were not as loose round the waist as they had been.

22:49 / 03.04.04

Re: digital copyright...not sure myself, though I've wondered a lot. I do a great deal of photoshopping, and I'm very careful to alter to the point where only I can pick out any borrowed elements. I remember reading a posted thread somewhere a few months ago that dealt with fantasy art and its origins, where posted images clearly showed that pics from Bioware's Neverwinter Nights were just slightly altered images of Angelina Jolie and Gucci ads. Not sure where it was though...

23:21 / 04.04.04

Well, this probably makes no sense, but ...
what do you call a series of hyperboles of decreasing intensity (or exageration)?

I'm feeling too stupid to really figure out whether this process is of any use or not, or whether it's classifiable at all, but I accidentally wrote a line in which this seemed to happen, and got wondering.

(Please, try not to kill me with shame. I'm young and dumb.)

12:15 / 06.04.04

Warning, the following question is incredibly vague:

I was just went out for lunch on High Street Kensington and across the way (near the Israeli embassy), there was a demonstration for Yoga in Romania - the inference being that Romania didn't like Yoga, and that it should. What's all this about does anyone know?

03:15 / 07.04.04

What do/did mods wear? I'm going to a mod night and I have no idea what that means.

07:34 / 07.04.04

DPC - have you never seen Quadrophenia? Get youself a nice green trenchcoat, ben sherman shirt (is this still cool?) and a sharp suit. Here's a mod clothing site... Cosmic Breed

12:40 / 07.04.04

Does anyone know what the technical name for a question mark is? It has another name, but my fiance can't remember where he found it, and it's poking at my brain.

12:49 / 07.04.04

Maz> Interrogation point?

Ex

13:25 / 07.04.04

What do/did mods wear? I'm going to a mod night and I have no idea what that means.

I've just been made a mod in the books fora, and I'm wearing - let's see - a nice maroon brocade jacket and a gold tie.
(Oh, someone had to...)
I think with the moddery, it'll be the details that make the outfit. Smarten hair (if any). Wear buttons done up properly with tie. Otherwise, the same suits and boots could imply any number of different subcultures.

14:12 / 07.04.04

i am stupid, this is known.
it has recently been manifesting as an inability to find a way to archive all my hotmail emails onto a handy disk... short of going through them one by one, cutting and pasting.

i also have far too much paper as it is.

Q: how does one archive their email correspondence when one uses a web based account(eg hotmail)?

cheers.

14:45 / 07.04.04

Randy- Thanks, but that's not the one I'm after. It's a a single kinda-cool sounding word.

17:28 / 07.04.04

Toksik -- by far the easiest way is to use Outlook/Outlook Express to access your Hotmail, then get them all in one big Send & Receive. I don't know whether or not Hotmail would charge for this access so it might not be exactly what you're looking for, but it's by far the easiest. Have a look on the Hotmail and Microsoft sites -- maybe you'll get a free trial. From Outlook you can save messages as plain text files to make it even easier for your biographers to copy and paste :-)

There are I think other ways with obscure browsers and web tools but I don't think they'd be any quicker or easier really because the messages are likely spread over several pages. And Hotmail only really gets on well with Microsoft software.

If you're only using Hotmail as an example and actually have another kind of account, then what you want is POP access. They'll more than likely charge about $20 a year for this, but they usually take the dumb ads off the bottom of your e-mails as well. With non-Hotmail accounts you don't have to use Outlook, you can use Eudora, Netscape or whatever you prefer.

lord nuneaton savage

18:40 / 07.04.04

Dread Pirate Crunchy...
As you can imagine dressing "moddy" can be complicated.
For the love of God DO NOT WEAR A PARKA!!! you will be generally sniffed at.
Jackets should be three buttoned and cut slim, trousers should be pleatless. Desert boots are recommended, only if they have two holes.

If you're not going to spend money getting suited and booted then I would advise going for a more casual look; Adidas lo-cuts are always "acceptable" (Gazelles, Stan Smiths etc) try these with a pair of bootcut Levis or cords. To finish, a Fred Perry or similar smart polo shirt looks pretty sharp.

Avoid "baggyness". Keep your lines sharp and clean. It's generally only the older mods who get sniffy (y'know, old Jam fans, but they moan about everything as a rule) the younger chaps and chapettes are usually as hell bent on getting slaughtered as you are.
Don't worry about a dress code, these places can do with as many punters as possible.
Relax, dance to top music, have a fantastic time. Do let me know how it went.

14:55 / 08.04.04

Mazarine - An "interrobang" is a combination such as !? to denote more emphasis into the question. I don't think anyone uses it in proper academia though.

22:20 / 09.04.04

I keep getting these pop-ups which aren't windows with an x-box in the top-right corner you can click to get rid of, but have a wierd sleek looking design. And they all say 'save' on them. But they're all advertising different things. But they all say 'save', with a little blue circle next to it. I'm getting pissed off with it, it's making me want to waste money rather than saving it.

I got MSN Toolbar just a few days ago, and apparently it's blocked 13 pop-ups already. Why is it not blocking these 'save' pop-ups? I've checked for dodgy software on my system and I can't see anything. Where are they coming from? Does anyone know how I can stop the bastards from appearing?

10:45 / 10.04.04

It was a program called Save that installed along with a program called Weathercast, which I don't remember installing either. So, I've got rid of that. Should do the trick.

17:08 / 10.04.04

Are there any rules about ending sentences (or paragraphs) with bracketed clauses? It's something I do relatively frequently, and I've just only realised now how nasty it looks.

20:49 / 10.04.04

Vincennes: not sure. However, if you're feeling a need to add something else to the end of the paragraph, after the main point has been concluded, you could be better off using a footnote. In general, you should keep footnotes for references but very occasionally, they're the only place to put parenthetical information, and it might help you out of that problem.

Either that, or just reconsider sentence structure - make a few sentences a bit shorter so you can get the parenthetical bit before the climax of the clause. You want to finish the paragraph on the Big Important Fact (tm) that leads onto your next paragraph, not a little anecdote about the rarity of teabags in eighteenth-century Tibet. (As it were).

18:07 / 11.04.04

Okay, another question from me: I'm trying to recall the name/singer of a kind-of folky song about a gay couple who adopt two (I think it was two) children, establish a family, and whose children are later taken away by the state for no reason other than the men were homosexuals. I haven't been able to find anything on google.

Okay, so here's what I do know:

1. The singer/songwriter was male, I'm pretty sure it was an individual, not a band.

2. One particular lyric referred to one of the children, a boy, having some sort of fit, and then waiting to be hit, but getting hugged instead.

3. The song is really, really sad.

Not much to go on, I realize. Anyway, thanks if anyone knows what I'm talking about.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

20:42 / 12.04.04

Okay, so myself and Mr. Adjective-Noun have flung Windoze 98 unceremoniously off our mutual laptop in favour of Linux. Yaay!

Except now the laptop doesn't want to connect to the internet and we can't mount our pen-drive. And we don't know why. Which is irksome.

Can nice people a) advise us how to solve these drastic and uncomfortable problems, and b) recommend a good Linux message board? Ta.

21:56 / 12.04.04

Mordaant -- I've been tinkering with a dual-boot set up Linux recently and I had a problem connecting to the 'net. If you're using LOADLIN then make sure your computer is initially booting in DOS safe mode.

I'm afraid that's about all I've found out though. If anyone knows how to get an ESS 1869 soundcard working on Slackware ...

21:59 / 12.04.04

http://www.google.com/linux is quite useful.

09:16 / 14.04.04

Ordering Things Off the Interweb: Cafepress

I ordered a t-shirt from Cafepress last night, bunged in the card details, hit go, and everything seemed hunky dory. But this morning I got the following email from Cafepress:

> Hi from CafePress.com!

> Your recent order could not be completed because the
> credit card was rejected by the bank for the following
> reason:

> "Do not honor. The transaction was declined by the
> issuer without definition or reason."

Any idea what the feck I should do about that? Any idea why it might have been declined? Could it simply be because I'm hugely overdrawn?

Possibly pertinant facts:
- I'm in the UK and the bill was in dollars
- I specified a different delivery address to the bill address
- my card is a debit card with a Visa thingy, not an actual credit card (but I have successfully used it for ordering off the web before)

09:30 / 14.04.04

A lot of card issuers are getting more and more worried about "cardholder not present" fraud, like internet purchases. Specifying a delivery address different from the billing address is one of the things that raises red flags in these cases. That would seem to be the most likely explanation.

10:10 / 14.04.04

Yeah, your first and third facts shouldn't have made any difference at all, Sav. I've had similar things happen when trying to buy from some US-based Internet shops before, despite the delivery and billing addresses being the same. Then I'll find the same thing somewhere else and buy it without a hitch. Never understood why.

10:31 / 14.04.04

Thanks, chaps, I'll give it another go with the same addresses (a bummer cos it's a pressie for someone at that address). Unfortunately I can't buy it from another vendor cos it's a custom job.

03:01 / 15.04.04

my granny has a DVD player that has the function to play photos and audio CDs. i assum its a bit like mine, and therefore plays jpegs and gifs. if i make sure that my PC is taking screenshots in one of those formats, do you think i could share some of the internet with her? (she has already read a whole bunch of barbelith, and quite likes the headshop)

would a CDr with a whole bunch of files work in her DVD player?

has anyone done this kind of thing before?

03:03 / 15.04.04

does anyone know what paint works best on trainers? the pair i am thinking of are skate style shoes in a patent leather finish. my main concern is the cracking of the paint once wearing them breaks in the leather.

the design is one i have previously stencilled, so that would be a good way to do it.

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