Selective Apathy on Urban Dictionary and how about an Online Mauritian Creole Dictionary

Very busy with writing my MSC thesis which the boss wants a first draft of by Monday but I thought I’d treat myself and blog.

Those of you who have read the section about Selective Apathy will know loosely what I am getting at; although sometimes I think I need to express myself a bit better regarding that. Anyways last week I decided why not add an entry concerning Selective Apathy to Urban Dictionary? For those not familiar with urban dictionary, it is an web-based dictionary tool where users upload their slang words and phrases although there are legitimate entries as well. It is a hugely popular site which also sells merchandise such as “your definition on a mug”, it used to be T-shirts but I think they pulled that after numerous entries in the dictionary of T-shirt being “Something UrbanDictionary.com is selling now to increase popularity amonst teenagers who see their friends wearing the said shirts.”

Anyway I love Urban Dictionary, its funny, creative and allows anybody to express themselves in their own way. So I submitted a definition of Selective Apathy which was then approved by the moderators and published on the site this week. While I take Selective Apathy as a concept a bit too seriously sometime Urban Dictionary usually stays true to its roots and words or phrases usually have to be cool or slang which is sometimes degrading to be approved and added, so I had to dirty my definition a bit and here it is, Selective Apathy:

Selectively choosing things to be Apathetic towards.
In other terms this can be interpreted as choosing selectively things to care about.
Through Selective Apathy, you do not feel Apathy towards everything but only at certain things so that you can say fuck it to some things and don't care about them but still care about others.
To employ empathy or care only when needed.
This can be to dismiss negative things and care or be empathetic about positive ones or dismiss negative things and care about personal things or similar combinations.

"Dude, you've lost your job, have no education and you smell."
"Selective Apathy man, who cares about that shit. I'm gutted that my team lost the league though. That's something to care about."
or
"Dude you just lost your leg".
"Don't care about that, it enabled me to eventually find a cure for that flesh eating disease and help others - Selective Apathy."

So what do you think?

I also had an idea some years back about a Mauritian version. This stemmed from the fact that I was twelve when I moved to Scotland and missed all the cool new words you learn as a teenager in Mauritius and whenever I go back I’m like what does that mean. I ran this idea by my cousin who said it wouldn’t work and I really did not know how to go about creating a dictionary site anyway. Recently with the interest of standardising Mauritian Creole, I thought how about an online Mauritian Creole dictionary, where you can submit your word, how you would spell it but if it means the same as another word spelt similarly, they would get grouped together and then you can have votes on a standard spelling?

Foto-Mosaik-Edda – Freeware Mosaic Picture Creator

Foto-Mosaik-Edda is a free mosaic picture creator/generator from sixdots.de: “you can create mosaic-pictures, which are composed of many small pictures (tiles), from your own photos”  which was recently featured on Lifehacker. The site is of German origin and no I didn’t want to try it just because I am living in Germany at the moment, it looked very interesting and since it is free I obviously clicked on through to download and try it out. The comments on Lifehacker also point you to other such programs. Unfortunately it was a Windows executable and I didn’t feel like trying it out with Wine in Linux Mint (my default OS). But no matter, there’s always my Virtualbox virtual machine, running XP.

On to the download and install. The software is free but the others will not say no to a donation via Paypal of which you are reminded of the first 7 or 6 times you start the program. The first thing to do is create a database of pictures the program would use to create the final picture. I added all the pictures from my digital camera which is around 1500 picture. Note that the more pictures you use the better the final mosaic as the software will have a lot of pictures to choose from. This took a log time fro me as I was running this in a virtual machine and adding the pictures from a shared virtual folder and I chose the highest settings for my pictures. So “The single pictures will be analyzed and copied into one or more databases. You can use your holiday photos, pictures of the last family celebration or even take over whole picture-CDs into the database.” The main menu is shown below:

After you have added your pictures to the database “A simple to use wizard will guide you through the program and will turn the creation of your own photo-mosaic into a piece of cake. Amaze others with this extraordinary effect. Just try it!”

So I did, you can then click on Create mosaic-picture button and follow the Wizard, to choose your picture:

 

I chose the picture I usually use as my profile picture, which is of me at Ile aux Cerfs in Mauritius, in 2008, wearing my Choong Fam t-shirt.

You then choose the database you would like to use and are then taken to the mosaic options screen:

This is the important screen, my first attempt was using the default settings which outputted the following picture:

As you can see it is not as detailed as the first picture in this post. My advice here is to experiment, but only if you have an adequately powerful computer as it may take some time to render the image.

The options page allows you to set the number of tiles (the more tiles the better the final mosaic will be).

The format of the tiles, I found quadratic worked best here.

The resolution in PPI and the Paper size, as per your personal preference, mine was A4 in case I would like to print it at home in the future.

 

 

The final screen before rendering is another options screen. The first option asking the number of times a tile can be used. If you do not have many pictures in your database, like me, you should set this number quite high, I had it set to 50 for the top picture. I left the other options alone, but you can Force the program to use all the pictures in your database and change how much of the original picture may be blended into the final image, I believe a higher blend percentage will result in a finer picture but less detail in the tiles.

You can now click the Start button and the image will be created through several steps such as loading the database, analyzing the picture, choosing the tiles and rendering. The rendering process takes the longest but it all depends on your choice of settings and the processing and graphic power of your computer.

Overall it is a niece piece of software but I don’t think I will be donating to the author(s) as I have done with other software in the past as I don’t see myself using this regularly or even again. I just wanted to give it a try. But if you like it, have fun and I would like to see some of the pictures you create.

Music – Tank – She’s Gone

Yes I know, another music post. This one comes simply to test Imeem’s embeddable player which I had only used once before on selectiveapathy.com. It is a bit slow to load but it seems to be one of the few players which I can’t find the embedded audio source to download. I had been worrying about that lately as the it is easy to find the source audio file using the player I am using just now…which may be regarded as illegal.

The song is called She’s Gone. There are several versions of this song from different artists but Tank’s is the first version I heard back in 2007 and I think is the best.

Tank is a great singer with a very captivating voice. Sadly I have not heard anything new from him for a long time, although he does make some appearance, the latest being on Ginuwine’s A Man’s Thoughts.

So have a listen on imeem’s player, please bear with it if its slow to load and tell me if you manage to find the source and download the song. Sorry the player has ‘adverts’ attached to it, damn I meant to keep selectiveapathy.com free of those. Ah well, we’ll see how it bears up.

Edit- Damn, right after I posted this I was able to download the song from here. It looks like the download thing only doesn't work when its on the actual imeem site. At least the imeem player gives links to the legal download sites.

This still worries me but I have researched this and it seems at the moment it is impossible to restrict folk from downloading streaming media. Well I guess I shall keep on posting music I like untill I get complaints, then I will have to settle to linking to other sites rather than embedding.

Shes Gone - Tank
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