It both impresses me and amuses me…
March 10, 2023, 4:21 PM
You all have probably heard about the artificial intelligence tools that can write articles and such that have been taking the Internet by storm lately. One such service is ChatGPT, which is a chatbot by a company called OpenAI, which can answer your questions about various subjects. I asked the service about myself and about Schumin Web, because (A) my name is unique, and (B) Schumin Web is also unique, and (C) I’ve been around on the Internet long enough that I figure that it should know who I am. Additionally, giving it inquiries about myself and my website, I was able to do a good check of accuracy because I know me really well, and I know my own website really well.
So on March 1, I ran the inquiry five times for each, and collected five different responses for each. In evaluating what it spewed out for each one, I found that the accuracy was a bit questionable, and varied quite a bit. It got some things right, and it got some things very wrong to the point of being comical. In its discussion about Schumin Web, it was actually quite insightful, making points that even I hadn’t thought much about, doing way more than I would have otherwise expected from an AI chatbot. I was also a bit flattered, because in running other people who I feel should be far more notable than me, it didn’t know who they were, even with some additional prodding, while it knew who I was right out of the gate without any additional clarification or questioning, and it knew what Schumin Web was without even blinking.
In judging the accuracy of each output, I scored them by factual claims. A claim that was accurate got a point. A claim that was inaccurate got no points. A claim that was a mixture of accurate and inaccurate information got half a point. Divide by total number of claims to get an accuracy percentage, which would be the final score. I don’t know if experts in this sort of thing would score it this way, but it’s the best that I could come up with, and for purposes of this discussion, we’ll go with it. 
Continue reading…
Categories: Myself, Netculture, Schumin Web meta
Educating people about copyright…
February 27, 2023, 1:24 PM
Sometimes it’s interesting what happens when you discuss copyright infringement amongst your friends. I recently made a post on Facebook about a company that routinely uses my photos in their work, that I have not had any success in pursuing. It led to very positive discussion, and I think that I helped a few folks learn something new about intellectual property that they may not have known before.
Unlike most occasions when I will go online and grouse about unauthorized usages of my photography, this one turned up some new discussion besides the standard responses like, “You should sue them,” and the like. For the record, while taking someone to court over copyright infringement is definitely a possible remedy, it is by no means the only remedy, nor is it something that one takes lightly. This is not a case of, “When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.” A lawsuit is really only a viable option in a small subset of usage cases, and while there have been lawsuits filed on my behalf regarding unauthorized usages, they are exceedingly rare. Also, note “filed on my behalf” in that last sentence. I do not file lawsuits myself. People that I have designated as my agents who know more about these things than I do are the ones who file the suits. I know my own limits. Also, people forget that the instances of copyright infringement that I grouse about online are just the ones that really irk me, and also are ones that got away. Most of my copyright infringement cases are resolved amicably, and you never hear about those.
A few points came up in this discussion that are worth mentioning here. First was a suggestion that I watermark my images. This is a perennial suggestion, and, truth be told, it’s something that I’ve tested and implemented in the past, and later had to undo. Back in the early 2000s, I started some early forays into photo licensing, under a brand called “StratoSearch”. When I was getting ready to implement that, I started putting watermarks on my photos on Schumin Web in order to prevent clean copies of the larger photos from going out willy-nilly, i.e. reserve the clean versions for paying clients. With that, I put Schumin Web’s logo in the corner of the full-size images, i.e. the ones that you click through to see. That was a bit of extra work on my part, but I did it, using a template to apply the logo. I eventually dropped the licensing effort there after a rebranding and redesign in 2003 failed to drum up any business. I now understand that my work back then was not to the level of quality that I thought it was, and that my marketing efforts were terrible. But nonetheless, the watermarks remained. If you want to see what the watermark looked like in practice, go look on College Life, where the watermark has been retained, and where there are no plans to remove it for historical reasons.
Categories: Copyright infringement, Social media
You made your bed, and now you have to lie in it…
December 9, 2022, 12:56 PM
Lately, a lot of the DMCA takedown notices that I’ve filed have been for “nostalgia” pages on Facebook. In other words, those pages where people find photos around the Internet of stuff from a given period and then repost them with no permission, no attribution, or anything else. I don’t typically frequent these types of pages myself, but others who are familiar with my work will usually let me know when they spot one of my photos being used in an unauthorized manner. When I’m notified, I will go in and locate it, and then I’ll get all of my ducks in a row before I complete the DMCA form and submit it. And then, unsurprisingly, the people who get nailed get a little salty about it, while never considering for a moment that they may have had a lapse in judgment somewhere.
Two recent instances of this stand out in my mind. The first was for a nostalgia group that focused on the 2000s. In that case, I found a number of photos from my Journal entry about the 2005 remodel of the Walmart in Lexington, Virginia. For that, I had to submit multiple takedown notices in order to cover the various photos that were included, but I got it done. Two days later, I received confirmation from Facebook that the photos were removed. A few hours later, I heard back from the infringer, a woman named Darla Griffin, who was clearly unhappy about the situation that they now found themselves in. Like many infringers, they wrote me to complain, while attempting to verbally lick their own wounds after they got caught.
Categories: Copyright infringement, Social media
A question about what is okay to critique…
September 19, 2022, 12:04 PM
This is something that happened back in November of last year, and it’s something that I still question because it leaves something unsettled that I had previously considered to not be a question at all. My understanding was, when it comes to a person’s appearance, the only things that are okay to to critique are hair and clothing, because those are choices that the person made, and that they can readily change. That comes with a lot of caveats, though. You don’t critique things about hair if it’s something that they can’t change, like baldness, though anything that they can still change is fair game. Likewise, with clothing, you wouldn’t criticize the fashion choices of someone who clearly can’t afford anything else.
So, with that said, here’s why I ask. Last year, I was off on Black Friday, and Elyse had planned an adventure for us on that day. She planned a shopping adventure that day, and she wanted to go out and check out the “doorbuster” events. Me, having spent four Christmases working in retail, I wanted nothing to do with any of it and would have preferred to just sleep in and work on the website or Flickr, but I wouldn’t have gotten a moment of peace if I stayed home – so out I went. We chose to go to Annapolis so that I would have something to do, with the idea of my going out to Sandy Point State Park to fly the drone over the water while Elyse shopped. Unfortunately, however, when I got to the park, I judged the wind to be far too strong to fly, so the drone never even came out of its carrier. After sitting in the car for a while feeling annoyed about the circumstances, having driven out to the bay for nothing, I headed back to the mall, feeling somewhat defeated, and met back up with Elyse and joined her on her shopping adventure, because nothing was going up into the sky other than my frustration.
Categories: Annapolis, Shopping, Social media
A little awareness goes a long way…
April 11, 2022, 9:53 AM
Sometimes, it surprises me about how much some people lack awareness about their situation when they get caught in a copyright infringement case. In this case, I sent a takedown notice for a photo of the old Giant Food store on O Street NW in Washington, DC, i.e. this photo:
Categories: Copyright infringement, Middle school, YouTube
“Just singing a song…”
March 15, 2022, 12:00 PM
This past Thursday evening, Elyse and I found ourselves at JMU, touring the recently renovated Zane Showker Hall. I’m going to go into more detail on that adventure later, so stay tuned for that, but while we were in the lecture hall formerly known as G5 (now numbered 0212), I found a microphone up front, and it turned on and worked. When you give me a microphone, you never know what I’m going to do with it. In this instance, I had a little bit of fun with it, and belted out a tune, which Elyse recorded:
Categories: Harrisonburg, JMU, Today's Special
When moderators become the thought police…
February 7, 2022, 10:00 AM
What is the point where elected officials have killed their credibility?
November 18, 2021, 11:41 AM
Starting Saturday, November 20, Montgomery County, Maryland implements mask mandate number three. This is based on rules that the Montgomery County council, sitting as the Board of Health, determined in August and October, where seven consecutive days of “substantial” COVID-19 transmission by CDC guidelines (50-100 cases per 100,000 people), based on raw case counts, automatically triggers an indoor mask mandate, and seven consecutive days of “moderate” COVID-19 transmission by CDC guidelines (fewer than 50 cases per 100,000 people), again based on raw case counts, automatically rescinds an indoor mask mandate. This continues until 85% of the county’s population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The result of this auto-on, auto-off policy has been a yo-yo effect, where it’s masks one week and no masks the next.
For some history on this, the Montgomery County government first implemented a mask mandate in April 2020, not long before the governor issued a statewide mask mandate. That mandate was rescinded in May 2021 when everyone else did after the CDC said that fully vaccinated people didn’t need to wear masks anymore. When the county had reached a 50% vaccination rate, they abandoned their own COVID rules and began following the state’s guidance instead, which included no more masks and a full reopening of everything. Then in August, after the CDC revised its guidance again, and the county council watched as case numbers went up, Montgomery County started implementing its own rules again separate from the state, and brought back the mask mandate. The idea was that the mask mandate would last until there were seven consecutive days of “moderate” transmission, after which time it would automatically be rescinded. This happened in late October, and the mask mandate was rescinded effective Thursday, October 28.
Right after this is where they started to shoot their credibility, and it demonstrates what is wrong with looking at raw case numbers as a metric for determining public policy. On October 30, two days after the mandate was rescinded, they were already talking about reinstating the mask mandate, as they soon returned to “substantial” transmission territory, and announced a return to masks less than a week after they were rescinded, to be effective on Wednesday, November 3 (i.e. six days from rescission to reimplementation).
Categories: COVID-19, DC area local news, Montgomery County, Reddit, State and local politics
Regretting the shot not taken…
October 14, 2021, 10:04 PM
Some of you may remember that a month or so ago, there was a large protest on Reddit about COVID misinformation, targeting a subreddit called /r/NoNewNormal. The idea of the protest was that a number of subreddits “went private”, i.e. stopped accepting submissions, and vowed to stay that way until Reddit management did something about this subreddit, after Reddit management had previously stated that they were not going to intervene. Ultimately, /r/NoNewNormal was banned, and as such, the subreddit and all of its contents were removed from the Internet, as if they had never existed. I have mixed feelings about the whole affair, and I feel like I have a unique perspective on it, because I used to moderate the subreddit, and probably did the most in building it, and then once it caught on, it slowly morphed into something that it should never have been.
First of all, my own stance on the whole pandemic is no secret. I wrote a very long Journal entry about it back in May. In short, I said that vaccination is the only way out of this, and that we should have never fooled around with much of the fabric of society like we did. We should never have had mandated masks, lockdowns, closures, plastic shields, social distancing, or any other weird new rules and restrictions. And then when the vaccine became available, get it without delay. That has been my stance more or less from the outset. The entirety of “your part” in this is getting vaccinated. Aside from that, nothing else matters, so leave me alone. I took an exceptionally dim view of people who tried to justify all of these changes as a “new normal” like they expected this to remain a thing for the foreseeable future, as well as playing the “wE’rE iN a PaNdEmIc!1!1!” card as an excuse to be exceptionally rude and/or judgmental with other people who disagree with them.
At the same time, it initially felt like those of us who opposed all of these new rules, ostensibly to curb the spread of COVID-19, were fairly alone in our opinions. The sense that I got was that most people were all in agreement on these measures, and that I was the odd man out. Then I discovered the /r/LockdownSkepticism and /r/EndtheLockdowns subreddits. These were people who thought more like me on these matters, i.e. that the lockdowns and related measures were security theater. I later found /r/NoNewNormal, which was started a little bit after the other two, and I tended to participate in that subreddit most, as it had the post quality of /r/LockdownSkepticism, but unlike /r/LockdownSkepticism, it did not have a “gatekeeper” for posts. I tend not to post in communities that have gatekeepers, because I don’t want to waste my time posting somewhere when there’s a chance that no one will ever see my post based on the whims of some anonymous approver. If I go to the trouble of posting something, I want a guarantee that it gets seen. In any case, /r/NoNewNormal fit that bill, with decent, open discussion and no gatekeeper. It was described in its sidebar as, “The phrase ‘new normal’ is pretty creepy. Let’s talk about concerns with it, and what can be done to resist it.” It was sort of a way to criticize the measures being taken, and also a place to get emotional support for what we were all going through from a sympathetic group of people. In other words, it was built with good intentions.
Something about sitcom endings…
September 29, 2021, 9:44 PM
Recently, I was thinking about the way various sitcoms that I watched ended their runs, and it made me realize that I actually prefer a certain kind of sitcom ending over others. I admit: I didn’t ever think that a preference for certain kinds of sitcom endings would even be a thing, let alone that I would have a preference for types of sitcom endings, but here we are.
First, though, to clarify: I am referring to shows that had a proper final ending, i.e. shows where everyone knew when they were taping the final episode that it was to be the final episode. To clarify what I mean, Perfect Strangers and Full House, for example, had proper final episodes. Everyone knew that the final episode was to be the final episode when it was being made, and it was aired knowing that it was the last episode. By comparison, Family Matters and Step By Step, while both long-running series by sitcom standards, did not have proper series finales. Both shows were cancelled after their ninth and seventh seasons, respectively, and a proper finale was never filmed for either one. In this entry, I am talking about the former case, where the end point is known, and not the latter case, where the final episode was not intended as such from the outset.
And interestingly enough, my preference is for series endings where the characters are set up to just go on and on, where things don’t drastically change in the finale, where we’re left feeling like the characters that we had come to love would be just fine going forward, even though we wouldn’t be watching them anymore. In other words, I prefer the ones where the people involved don’t pull out all of the stops to make a huge grand finale. They may still provide some sense of closure – a capstone of sorts – but it leaves the premise of the show intact.
Categories: Television
Woomy has his own website…
July 2, 2021, 3:59 PM
So Elyse and I recently went hunting online, discovered that woomy.info was available, and snagged it. This is the result:
Categories: Netculture, Schumin Web meta, Woomy
I believe that we have finally reached the other side of this thing…
May 25, 2021, 9:37 PM
On Friday, May 14, 2021, a number of state governments rescinded emergency orders requiring the wearing of face masks in public for people who have had all of their shots for COVID-19, i.e. “fully vaccinated”, on the heels of earlier announcements providing dates for when nearly all COVID restrictions would be removed. And with that, I think that it is safe to say that we’re finally on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that life will return to normal. Ever since the middle of March 2020, when the response to a novel coronavirus started becoming out of proportion to the actual threat, and fear began driving the narrative, I’ve been looking forward to this time, when the world finally started returning to normal.
Truth be told, I took a dim view of the official response to this thing from the beginning. From the outset, my stance has been that almost all of these various “precautions” were unnecessary, and that the best advice for the public was (A) wash your hands at frequent intervals, and (B) be careful about how much you touch your face. This is the same advice that we give about nearly every communicable disease, and it’s served us quite well. I didn’t see any reason why this one should have been any different. Lockdowns, social distancing, masks, limits on gathering sizes, closed restaurants, closed drinking fountains, plexiglass shields, one-way aisles, contactless everything, the constant cleaning and “sanitizing”, temperature checks, and all of the rest of it is all just security theater, i.e. “the practice of taking security measures that are intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to achieve it.” In other words, these measures were there primarily to placate a certain vocal subset of people who were afraid, and their fear was then projected onto the rest of us. In the end, though, as long as there was no vaccine for it, there was nothing that most of us could reasonably do to prevent its transmission. It was a problem that was beyond most of our capabilities to solve. With that in mind, I wasn’t worried about it, and trusted that the scientists whose job it was to solve it would come through. For the rest of us, there was only one single action that was “doing our part”. That action was getting vaccinated against COVID-19 when it became available. Nothing else made a bit of difference. But until that time came when a vaccine was available, we just had to wait.
Unfortunately, though, we all know how much people hate to be told that they have to wait for something to be solved, and can’t do anything about it in the meantime – especially when they’re scared. And for a mass hysteria event, we apparently just can’t have that. Unfortunately, telling people to wait doesn’t look good for politicians, whose constituents will demand that something be done about it after the media has whipped them up into a frenzy – especially during an election year when many of them were trying to keep their jobs. You know that people would practically crucify any elected official who got up and said, “I’m sorry, but there is really nothing in my power that I can do to solve this at this time. Until a vaccine becomes available, we just have to wait.” So, instead, they pander to the masses, going out and doing things that make it look like they’re doing something, i.e. security theater. When they make it look like they’re doing something, the masses eat it right up. They stepped in and shut down businesses (and destroyed many people’s livelihoods in the process – see my Gordmans entry), enforced social distancing rules on everyone, and required masks. Everyone was impacted in some way, and it sure looked like something was being done while we waited. Especially with the use of mask mandates, they put the pandemic in your face – and on your face – all the bloody time. As far as the politicians were concerned, mission accomplished.
Categories: COVID-19, National politics, News, Social media, State and local politics
I find it very hard to feel any sympathy for Kevin in the second film…
December 8, 2020, 10:07 PM
Since I’ve been a Disney+ subscriber, I’ve been able to watch the classic Home Alone movies, i.e. Home Alone and Home Alone 2, all over again. And I figure that this seems as good of a time as ever to explore my thoughts about the movies based on this rewatch as a 39-year-old who is now closer in age to the parents than to Kevin. In other words, I’m waaaaaaaaay more mature than I was when I first watched them when they were new.
For those not familiar with the Home Alone movies, in the first movie, the McCallister family, a well-off family in the Chicago area, is planning to go on a Christmas trip to Paris to visit relatives. The night before they are to leave on this trip, two things happen. First, at dinner, youngest son Kevin gets involved in a fight with his older brother Buzz, who is being unkind to him over pizza. That leads to his being banished to the attic bedroom (“the third floor” as it’s called in the movie), for the night. Second, while the family is asleep, high winds cause a tree branch to fall on some nearby power lines, creating a power outage, which takes out the alarm clocks, among other things, causing everyone to oversleep. When the parents wake up, there is a mad dash to make it to the airport in time. In the course of taking a headcount prior to leaving, a neighbor child, who stopped by to see what was going on and chat, was accidentally counted. So, with a good headcount, they were off to the airport. Unbeknownst to them at the time, they had forgotten Kevin. Kevin, meanwhile, wakes up to discover that the family has left for the airport, and he is all by himself. He eventually learns that two burglars are working the neighborhood, and that they are looking to target his house, among others. So he comes up with a plan to defend his house against said burglars, and leads the burglars through a series of traps that should have killed them many times over (but didn’t because this is the movies). Kevin also befriends a neighbor along the way, who ultimately finishes off the burglars with two well-placed blows with a snow shovel, which leads to the burglars’ arrest. While this is going on, Kevin’s mother, after realizing that they had forgotten their youngest, is trying her best to get back home to Kevin, and flies to a number of different cities to that end, and ultimately hitches a ride in a van with a polka group to get home, arriving on Christmas morning. The rest of the family arrives home shortly thereafter, and there is a happy reunion, with no one except Kevin’s knowing what had happened the night before.
Categories: Movies
Going down a nostalgia rathole…
October 11, 2020, 10:29 PM
Sometimes you sit down at the computer, and the next thing you know, you’re going down a major rathole on some obscure topic. For me, this was recently the case when I happened upon some videos about the old Care Bears movies by Nostalgia Critic. They did four such videos: one on the original Care Bears movie, the second movie, the Wonderland movie, and the Nutcracker special. Gotta love the Internet.
I watched all of these movies as a child, and enjoyed them quite a bit back then, considering them to have decent replay value. I watched some of these again more recently, and I kind of regretted it. The problem was that what my child self found to be quality entertainment, my adult self disagreed with that assessment. As an adult, I saw these movies for what they really were: feature-length commercials for toys, with relatively low quality standards. The stories didn’t necessarily make a lot of sense, the animation had mistakes in it, and it gave me an overall sense that the people in charge of this film knew that the public would eat it up regardless of how crappy it was. Therefore, quality was something of an afterthought. As such, I kind of wished that I had left these movies as memories instead of rewatching them, only because the new viewing has changed my stance on the films, and I didn’t like my new take on them after rewatching. I was hoping to have an enjoyable experience with an old favorite, only to be disappointed in what I was presented with. I resented the change in my views, and it made me nostalgic for the old memories of the films before I added to them, so to speak. Innocence destroyed. Some children’s movies are still great films on their own merits, even as an adult (Follow That Bird immediately comes to mind), but these, unfortunately, are not.
In any case, watching Nostalgia Critic try to reconcile the events that occurred in the first movie and the second movie got me thinking a bit. For those not familiar, both movies contain origin stories, and the two origin stories conflict with each other in a very fundamental way.
I bought myself a toy…
September 19, 2020, 2:12 PM
Soooooooooo… I recently got myself a toy. I went on Etsy and bought myself a full-size retro arcade machine. Check it out:
Categories: House, Video games