I also wrote a paper on remix culture and mashups for a copyright class I took last year. If you are interested, you can read it here.

I read Emily Horner’s A Love Story: Starring My Dead Best Friend wanting a light summer read starring a queer lady, and that is exactly what I got. In fact, I camped out at Coffeehouse Five (it was too cold to hang out outside) and read the whole book in one day. I didn’t want to like it because my good friend Caitlin has been talking about writing a queer YA book about a girl who goes on a bike tour for quite a while, and I was secretly hoping that it wouldn’t be very good so Cait could write a better version. It turns out that I really enjoyed the book, and I still think Caitlin could write a great novel. So win-win.

The story is split into two different timelines, the then and now. The “then” story arc primarily consists of Cass dealing with her best friend Julia’s death. The two had previously planned a cross-country road trip from Illinois to California, but after Julia is suddenly killed in a car accident, Cass decides to go by herself to spread her dead BFF’s ashes in the Pacific Ocean. By bike.  In the present time, Julia (a self-described drama nerd) had been working on a script for a bloody ninja musical before she died, and her friends (all of whom are also drama nerds) decide to put on the play in her honor. Cass is the only non-theater person helping with the play and she has some serious struggles with belonging – even though she has a tight-knit friend circle, they are friends she met through Julia. When Julia dies, Cass wonders if Julia was the only tie she had to the people she has spent the past few years hanging out with.

Working on the play, she is forced to work with Heather, her arch-nemesis from middle school, the girl who called her out for being queer in front of the entire school and generally made her day-to-day a living hell. But she quickly discovers that Heather is not so one-dimensional as previously thought. Oh come on. I’m beating around the bush trying to not give anything away, but we all know Heather is gay. That is why she was such a homophobic bitch to Cass, obvs. Don’t worry – knowing that gem won’t ruin the rest of story for you.

I love a queer young adult novel. I kinda think it is a formula you can’t go wrong with, and I wish there were such awesome, positive and heartwarming books out there when I was in middle or high school. One of reasons I liked this book so much, though, was Cass’s use of a bike as her main mode of transportation. In the media, I feel like there is generally so much focus on driving and having a car, especially as a metaphor for escape and entrance to adulthood, while bikes are typically portrayed as babyish in movies. So to see Cass using a bike a way to escape her life and process her grief and become an adult was awesome. It made me want to go on bike tour and just be quiet with myself for awhile.

I am totally addicted to the Pretty Little Liars series, and realized that I just couldn’t wait for the library to process it — I wanted to read it TODAY. So I decided to shell out the $10 to buy the e-book. I really like reading books on my eReader, but generally I buy books because I like to have collections. But since I figured I probably wouldn’t be buying the rest of the series, it would be silly for me to just have one book — the final book in the series, at that. The e-book was a tad more expensive than the hardcover (which I think is astounding, since you don’t even get to put anything on your bookcase), but I decided to just go for it. I think copyright is generally used for fucked up reasons, but it is still important to support artists. As I entered my debit card info into Barnes & Noble’s site I thought, “This one is for you, Sara Shepard!”.

I chose B&N because they were $0.50 cheaper than Sony’s e-book site. Big freakin’ mistake.

Apparently, B&N not only uses DRM, but the format is incompatible with all devices EXCEPT their own Nook and the iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch. I have an iPod Touch, but the whole reason for having an e-reader is that sweet e-ink that is supposed to be like reading a real book and not a computer screen. So why won’t it work with my fancy-pants expensive e-reader? I like the Sony Reader because it is supposed to be compatible with basically every format, but I guess not if the vendor locks it and makes it incompatible. Boo.

I can’t get a refund, so I’m stuck with an electronic format I can’t use, and legally I’m not supposed to tamper with it to make it usable. I found a program that turned it into a PDF, but it left a watermark on each page so its not really usable. I could purchase the program to make the watermark go away, but it costs $30. For that, I could have bought three more books and would now own half of the series.

So what are my options? Do I illegally download the book? Yes, its illegal, but I already paid for the rights to view it. So is that really morally wrong? Or do I just wait for my library copy, cut my losses and say it was a huge FAIL? I really am trying to obey copyright law, but it is really hard to NOT be a pirate these days…

http://www.gayleague.com/wordpress/2010/04/27/maggie-hopey/

So my friend Cait and I made the first episode of what is sure to be a smash hit on the podcast scene, No Bones About It. Cait’s been wanting to make a podcast called No Bones About It for some time (mostly because it is the best name ever), and we’ve narrowed our focus to queer nerd stuff. In this episode, we tackle our favorite lesbians in comic books and realize that horse-lust is the WORST sexual identification. Ever.

Listen to it here at the No Bones About It site, or subscribe to our podcast at by clicking here.

So at OCOM, I’ve been working on the new library website and trying to think of ways to bolster our online services and connect with those students who don’t ever step foot in the library. We decided to try out video streaming, and we tested a lot of different formats, including hosting the videos ourselves and looking at different streaming sites. There are a slew of video streaming sites out there that will host your videos (and I think I tried out all of them) but we ultimately chose Vimeo for a few reasons:

1. You don’t have to use your own server space to host the vids, which is awesome because that means your library site won’t be bogged down by using a lot of bandwidth for streaming. Instead, you can just redirect traffic to your Vimeo account.
2. It allows the use of HD videos so the quality is going to be really nice and clear. If your video is higher quality and doesn’t take a lot of time to buffer, students might just seek out the DVD if streaming isn’t cutting it.
3. And it is free (which is always nice), but if you do fork over the dough for a Pro account, you can actually control who is able to view the videos, which gives you a ton of control over the videos you are uploading.

Vimeo allows you to display your items a few different ways. The prettiest way is by creating a channel. You can select which videos show up in the channel, and the way in which they are presented. I prefer a YouTube-kind of format, but you can also create a gallery or blog-type setup as well. I’ve created a single channel that encompasses pretty much all our videos, but we also have different channels for specific categories.

Channels are slick and can also be used to promote your institution, but if you want to have greater control over who has access to your videos, albums are the way to go. The cool thing about creating albums is that if you have a Pro account, you can organize your videos into collections and categories that can be password protected. What this means is that if you don’t want to make some videos available for public viewing, (such as if the video author only wanted students to have access to the video), you can lock them so they are only accessible by those with the correct password. We are currently using this for work-study video tutorials – the world really doesn’t need to know about the inner workings of our checkout system.

Vimeo makes it really easy to create custom widgets for your videos so you can display them on your website. You can make a widget that displays screencaps for the videos in a specific channel or album, or even just show your latest videos. I experimented a lot with the Vimeo widgets, but I just couldn’t get it to look the way I wanted to. I didn’t want them to link to specific videos, but to the entire channel. So rather than using the Vimeo-endorsed widgets, I used HTML to custom-make thumbnails that would link directly to specific channels so people can view videos by category, but also a general channel that would house all of our videos. This helped to bring some organization to the video collection and redirects traffic to our Vimeo account so our website doesn’t get bogged down with streaming.

Some institutions will block streaming sites like YouTube, so its important to know those limitations beforehand. TeacherTube was not my first choice, but if YouTube is blocked, then you might need to broaden your search.

1. Get a Vodpod account. It is free, and if you are working with a free WP account, this is one service you want to get down with.
2. Publish your presentation on SlideRocket. In the option menu, copy the embed code.
3. Click on the “Add Video” button in Vodpod. Paste the embed code and give your slideshow a title.
4. After you are done adding the slideshow, click on your new video. Underneath it will be a “Share” dropdown — clicking on that will give you a WordPress option. You can fill out all the info if you just want the video to be uploaded to your blog as a new post, but if you want to put it in a special place (say on a page rather than a post), you can click on the link that says, “WordPress.com shortcode”. This will give you a URL that you can just paste right into your blog where you want it to appear.

I used this a lot for my ePortfolio. You can see it in action here.