It’s hard to condemn people, these days, for copyright infringement — even blatant copyright infringement.

Why?

Because those people who hold those copyrights do things like try to extort money from libraries for reading to children.

Yep, that’s right. Trying to force libraries to cough up money for reading to children.

It baffles the mind. There are actual people who work for this SABAM – the Belgian rightsholder group in question – writing letters and making phone calls to try to extort this money. There are managers who decided on this course of action. A whole organisation of people who somehow rationalize this behaviour.

You know your legal framework is broken when there exist entire organisations full of people who presumably look at themselves in the mirror each morning, and then go to work and do despicable things. I preferred it when it was only lawyers embarassing themselves with silly cease & desist letters to law schools.

Ah, the halcyon days of youth.

Photo is of Hallstatt, Austria, by Akos Major, found on The Behance Network.
Webcomic is Up Up Down Down, by Khon, Sheflin and Ewington.

It’s that time of year, again — time to take a look back at 2011, and see what you liked most about the Big Bad Blog.

How can we tell? We use a complex scoring system which tracks links back to the Big Bad Blog, comments made, and pageviews. Maybe not that complicated. However we came up with the list — and truth be told, even we are not entirely sure — this is it:

5: Google Plus: A first look

We received an early invitation to the new Social Network on the block, and dutifully gave our first impressions of it — and they were positive impressions, indeed.

While an update of those impressions are overdue — first impressions, while important, are not necessarily final opinions — this blogger still feels that Google Plus has the potential to be the best of the available networks, but it still has some way to go before it arrives there.

4: Character creation and alignment

The roleplaying area of the blog has taken a big backseat this year. While the generally haphazard update schedule has reduced the amount of content published, of all types, the roleplaying section has had to address a second deficiency: I stopped running my D&D game.

Most of the content I produced was the result of running a game myself — a weekly article was easy when I was introducing myself to the fourth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game. Running a game once a month was enough to provide ongoing monthly articles — ideas or actions would arise in planning or playing that were comment-worthy.

But a baby makes for little playing time, nevermind planning time, and the game only managed one session after Maggie’s birth in 2010 to prove itself to be too much work. It went on hiatus, and my impression now is that it is a permanent one.

Since then, I have been thinking about my next game, which will be of the more old skool D&D bent. Although actual game development has been minimal this year — maybe it will get off its feet in 2012 — I read something that triggered ideas about alignment, in terms of the next game, and voila. A popular D&D blog post.

If scheduling permits progress towards running this new game next year — by no means a necessity — we should see plenty of roleplaying goodness on the Big Bad Blog next year.

Otherwise? The 2012 edition might not have a roleplaying entry.

3: Bringing down the meme: Demotivationals

It seems that every year, I get excited about a meme. And then soon in the new year, I get tired of the meme and write about it.

In 2009/10 it was the FAIL meme. In 2010/11, it was the demotivational.

Next year? No idea. I sadly feel as though I’m not amused by any current memes — it could be the end of a Big Bad Blog tradition.

This particular blog entry makes me quite proud: the comments tend to be people stopping in to tell me that I’m unfunny or stupid. This, as you may be aware, is an indicator of blog excellence.

2: Because you’re all horny for Felicia Day

It has long been noted that Felicia Day nude, Felicia Day naked, and their ilk are popular search terms, when it comes to finding the Big Bad Blog, sending over 100 people our way on an average day.

The traffic from these search terms seemed to be spiking over the summer, when I saw this photo on Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr thingy. (I always call then “Tumblr thingies”. Calling it “so-and-so’s Tumblr” seems wrong. Calling it a “Tumblr blog”, also wrong. What to do?)

The forces of Google meant that I had to write something including that photo.

And the popularity of the search term guaranteed its place here.

1: Twitter to Facebook not working

Back in February, I noticed that my tweets had stopped automatically updating my Facebook page.

This was a concern — I disliked, and continue to dislike, interacting with Facebook directly. But I like all the people on Facebook (also known as “all the people”) to be able to follow me, if they so wish.

So … importation.

It had, for whatever reason, stopped working. So I did what one does in these situations, and starting to try to figure out how to fix it.

Once fixed, I figured that I would post the solution, as it was neither easy to find nor immediately evident. Mine was apparently well-indexed on Google, as it prompted plenty of re-tweets, Facebook likes and (for this blog) a healthy number of comments.

A bit boring, maybe, compared to previous year’s number ones, but it’s nice to be helpful sometimes.

Have you built a time machine?

Have you been sitting putting off using it, for fear of the grandfather paradox?

Fear no more! Grandfather paradox-free time travel is now available!

(Math from Tenso Graphics.)

There are plenty of people in the world who cannot read Chinese (or Japanese). Yet a significant portion of these people insist on getting tattooed with Chinese (or Japanese) characters. Here are their stories.

London is amazingly unfriendly to the disabled. It has many old buildings which are (unsurprisingly) inaccessible. Most of the tube stations require that patrons traverse stairs, nevermind the conundrum of minding the gap while in a wheelchair. Apparently the brains behind the 2012 Olympics are extending this inaccessibility to the internet, as well.