by ·Comments Off on Defamation and Why I am now Too Scared to Post Anything

From now on, I will try to avoid just posting my lecture notes on anything I find interesting, as that would most likely be dull for everyone else and would be the very definition of quantity over quality.  Also, it would happen frequently, because I am going over a lot of (in my mind) very interesting things.

However, here is an interesting little nugget of the law concerning saying things about other people:

1) Defamation, more specifically libel, is where you say or write something that is published in some manner that damages somebody’s reputation (the actual definition is a little longer and more extensive than that, but this is the gist).

2) If this happens, a person can sue you for damages that will be decided by a jury who probably doesn’t like you and won’t be on your side (or in most cases, actively hates you).

3) Every fresh publication of this can be considered a new instance and can also be actionable.

Here’s where things get a little more scary if you are updating a blog.  In the case of internet publication, it is considered a new publication every time the piece is downloaded.

In short, if you get away with something potentially defamatory, you probably won’t get away with it for long.  Not only that, but even if you pull your piece, Google will still have it.   Google will have cached it.  Google will have downloaded it.  Google will know all about your defamation.  That’s enough.

I have been through some of my previous posts and I’m fairly certain I’m ok.  In a worst case scenario, I could use defences of “Fair Comment”, in particular with relation to being maybe a little bit rude about theatre pieces, or if I’m feeling particularly confident, “Justification”, where I would claim that what I said was true, which should never really be too hard to manage.

All the same, if you notice a drop in the number of posts, just be aware that the above is swilling around in the back of my mind.

Additional Notes:

I suppose the very worst thing you could do if you’re worried about defamation is to put a brief outline on how the law around it works up on your site.  I suppose the only thing really worse than that is to put up the contact details of a good tort lawyer.

Another reason you might notice a drop in posts is that sleep is fast becoming a luxury event up there with eating and drinking when put next to the desperate scramble to keep all the shorthand I’ve learnt in my head.

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"David" in shorthand. It almost feels like I paid a PR firm lots of money to rebrand me or something. UPDATE: Aaaand I'm wrong. The dashes should probably be on the OTHER side. I think I might just take the "it's a personal language" defence...

I am now on my way to becoming a profeshnul riter and I have just finished my first day on my NCTJ (which is a series of letters I never seem to be able to get in the right order the first time) course.  I have already learnt some valuable lessons which are as follows:

1)  Despite being a swot and trying to learn a bit of Shorthand before the course, I know nothing and what I do know I now know I know wrong.

2)  In shorthand, my name looks a bit like the logo for some variation on Starfleet.

3)  When you interview someone, you need to ask for a contact number.  I already knew that you also had to ask for their age, but asking someone over the age of about 40 for their age is an exercise in diplomacy that I wasn’t quite ready for today.

4)  Work experience in a call centre is good because it trains you for people telling you to “go away” in much less polite terms than that.

5)  I have a lot of work ahead of me.

In reference to lesson number 5, I am actually remarkably excited about this.  I’ve often said that I like having lots of work, but this isn’t entirely accurate:  I like having lots of work that I’m going to enjoy.

This work in particular is looking highly enjoyable and to be perfectly honest, this might well have been the first day in about four years that I haven’t found myself constantly checking the clock on the run up to 1pm and 5pm, traditionally being feeding time and home time respectively.

by ·Comments Off on 9 Second Lego Castle

Well, I like stop motion and I like lego…

I remember when I was young Lego used to make amazing adverts with everything building up in stop motion and flying around all over the place.  Maybe if I’m feeling ambitious I might try something similar, but for the time being I’m just proud I got this to work.  I want to try and make a little bit of traditional style animation using the same software so this has turned into a wonderful little test.

by ·Comments Off on Collecting Compulsion

I’m not interested in frogs.

Frog. Not interested.

That is, I’m not interested in frogs until you give me a green one and a brown one and tell me there are more to collect.

This compulsion to collect things is something that a lot of ordinary geeks have and something that affects almost all of us at some point in our lives.  If you have two of something and there’s a third that’s in the same set, it’s almost impossible not to want it because you feel like the items “belong” together, and that getting two and not the other is somehow like splitting up a family.

In terms of gaming, the desire to get 100% completion of a game can sometimes overwhelm an individual, but this is a slightly different issue:  This is more to complete a collection.  To get a full set.   The confusing question that you will ask yourself shortly after completing a collection is obvious, but only obvious once that condition is triggered:  What happens next?

The answer is most of the time simple and a little distressing:  Nothing.

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by ·Comments Off on Increased Tortoise

If anyone has been trying to read this thing tonight, I apologise for the rapid updates that I’ve made over the course of the evening.

This is somewhat of a redundant post, but I’ve changed the layout a little bit.  I managed to get rid of those annoying widget things in the top right that I’m fairly confident nobody used and I know I didn’t like at all, I’ve updated the colours and of course forged a lovely shiny new logo, shown above and to the left here in small pin-badge-able form.  I have decided to retire the faithful “Speedy” from my previous logo as he did after all belong to Blizzard, and they might want him back sooner or later.

I am aware that the colours are quite different to what they were before.  On one of my monitors it looks ok and on the other monitor it makes my eyes twitch a little, so if any of my lovely readers have any comments on this change, I have enabled comments for this post and you are allowed to have your say (whereupon it may well be ignored because the way I’ve updated this is through a series of technological voodoo rituals that I am already starting to forget.  All I know is that my fingers are hurting from excessive crossing).

I must admit that I have definitely come a long way since I started this blog (and even further from my Blogspot days and further still from my not-completely-functional webcomic site) and fiddling around with css files and snippets of php was starting to make a little sense.