Made me smile.

In one line: Not as good as advertised.

After lots of raving recommendations to read “1Q84″, by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, I finally forced myself out of my reading-comfort zone and finished the book.

Set in a world of parallel universes, religious cults, and imaginary creatures, this book could definitely be classified as fantasy, which is my favorite reading genre.

Yet, while the book is so beautifully written that it is hard to put down, I was not impressed.

Maybe because I spend the bulk of my reading-time getting lost in the greatest fantasy and sci-fi around, I was not mentally nor emotionally satisfied with the under-developed plot in “1Q84″. It reads like a book meant to appeal to the generic bestseller list, as opposed to those of us who really treasure good fantasy fiction.

Murakami is definitely an exceptional writer. I’m sure that many things were lost in translation, but I was still completely taken by the beauty of sentences and paragraphs. The words fit together magically, and that is never an easy feat. Yet, beautiful sentences aside, the book’s build was too stretchy. There were many times, especially towards the beginning and the end, when the only thought on my mind was “Enough repeating!” It just felt like he stretched things on purpose to make the book of epic length.

Over all, I’d give it a 3/5, and mostly for pretty sentence structure. In terms of plot, there is nothing new nor particularly interesting. In terms of character development, most characters were not that interesting, and in fact, copy-pastes of each other.

I’d recommend it if you want to dip your toes into fantasy. But, if you already have read real works of fantasy and sci-fi, stick to the pros.

Other book reviews on AndFarAway:

The Millennium Trilogy
The Mists of Avalon
All My Friends are Superheroes 
The Lord of the Rings
His Dark Materials
Persepolis
Harry Potter
Blood and Gold
1984
Twilight
Maus
Fatal Identities
Cry to Heaven, Anne Rice
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Alchemist
Eleven Minutes

UPDATE 2: Since PIPA is still on the table, the blackout will go out as planned.

UPDATE 1: SOPA has been shelved, so AndFarAway will not go dark, I guess. PIPA is still on the table.

If there is anything in the world that I feel very strongly for, it is that information should be free.

I feel it very strongly, more strongly than anything else, because I would have been a different person if I didn’t have access to information online growing up.

I mean, I grew up in the compounds of Saudi Arabia, where the world is nothing beyond best-selling pulp fiction and shitty American drama. Information was not available to due to censorship, lack of choice, or inaffordability. Fortunately, I had the Internet. I read, and read, and read. I downloaded books and PDFs. I got to learn the world through websites, through links, through files downloaded on mIRC.

The freedom of information on the Internet is why I am who I am today. It is how I learned to design. It is how I learned to write. It is how I learned to code. It is my livelihood.

The same bullshit corporations that make bullshit pulp fiction and bullshit American drama want to kill the Internet. SOPA is a pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world. These culture imperialists are greedy. They are evil. They are assholes. And the least we can do is to make a stance.

I know. It’s an American issue, and you are thinking that we are not directly affected. But of course we are. The Internet that we know and love cannot co-exist with SOPA. Websites could never link to another website unless they are sure that there were no links to anything to infringe on copyrights. Making one link would require checking millions of pages, just to be sure that we weren’t in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits.

If web owners failed to take this precaution, the domains will be confiscated and added to a US-wide blacklist. If your server (like mine) happens to be in the US, your website will be affected even more.

To quote BoingBoing, “Big Content haven’t just declared war on Boing Boing and Reddit and the rest of the “fun” Internet: they’ve declared war on every person who uses the net to publicize police brutality, every oppressed person in the Arab Spring who used the net to organize protests and publicize the blood spilled by their oppressors, every abused kid who used the net to reveal her father as a brutalizer of children, every gay kid who used the net to discover that life is worth living despite the torment she’s experiencing, every grassroots political campaigner who uses the net to make her community a better place — as well as the scientists who collaborate online, the rescue workers who coordinate online, the makers who trade tips online, the people with rare diseases who support each other online, and the independent creators who use the Internet to earn their livings.”

Information should be free. Here’s to creative freedom, digital freedom, and a world where ideas and knowledge are not owned or controlled, but are instead tools to change destiny.

SOPA Strike is compiling a list of sites that are also going dark for Jan 18. If you want an Internet where human rights, free speech and the rule of law are not subordinated to the entertainment industry’s profits, I hope you’ll join too. 

If you have a WordPress blog, you can download this plugin.

Review by Amr Hijazi

The Nokia N9 is a solid, nice-looking phone. It’s simple. It’s slick. The hard corners are gorgeous. It dares you to try to throw it on the ground and then jump on it. It also has a decent weight and a fantastic grip.

In fact, there’s a lot to say about the Nokia N9.

A Button-free World
At first, it is hard to comprehend that there is no home screen button to press. Look, no buttons, ma! The whole experience is based on touch. Thankfully, it is a well-designed experience, and you soon get used to living without buttons.

In fact, it feels pleasantly strange not having buttons. It also feels weird having the light sensor at the bottom instead of at the top. You unlock the phone by double-tapping the screen, and then swiping in any direction. If you would rather not, you can still use the lock/unlock buttons on the side if you’d rather go the old-school route.

From the lock-screen view, you can access a shortcut menu by swiping up and holding your finger still. This menu contains shortcuts to what the developers obviously now assume are the main functions of a phone – the phone itself, messages, camera and browser.

Touchscreen Responsiveness
The most pleasant discovery about the N9 is that its smoothness and responsiveness is nothing like any previous Nokia touchscreen device. The touch capabilities are fantastic, although the iPhone is king of touchscreen slickness. It is also only responsive to the front tip of your finger; it is actually really frustrating to deal with if your fingers are dry, or if you accidentally swipe the phone with the sides or upper tip of your finger.

Software
The phone is unique in having only three view pages that contain everything you have on your phone; the applications page, opened applications page, and events page (containing the live feed of your Twitter account, Facebook account, mail application, and other notifications). It is quite annoying that you cannot really control the content of the event page to add anything else that you prefer. It’s the uncomfortable middle between Android’s complete openness and Apple’s complete control.

Hardware
It’s wonderful how well-designed the N9’s handset it. It’s strong, gorgeous, and different. The Clear Black AMOLED display is truly a sight to behold, with stunning viewing angles, and a curved Gorilla Glass front.
Yet, the N9 gets a really hot, slow and sticky when too many applications are active.

The energy conservation features of the screen are annoying. For example, the screen automatically switches off after a period of time, even if you’re playing a game that requires you to not touch the screen all the time.
For the charger, it is no surprise that N9 comes with one cable that can be used either to connect the phone to a computer via USB or to a power outlet via a power adapter. Since phone battery is essential, it would have been nicer if the phone also came with a dedicated power cable.

The Internet and the N9
If you are not connected to the Internet, the phone makes a point to annoy you to death by constantly prompting you to access a wi-fi connection (it’s like the N9 just won’t accept the decision that you do not wish to connect to the internet. It itches to connect.)

Browsing the internet on the N9 is easy and relatively fast considering it is only a phone. Zooming in and out of webpages and panning around the screen is really smooth, especially when compared to other Nokia devices. The phone’s native web browser is not the friendliest nor well-designed. For example, any new opened window that is opened for a new internet page is actually considered a separate application. This is extremely impractical since it means you have to do around 3 or 4 steps to switch between windows.

Camera
The 8MP camera is brilliant. Nokia have referred to it as the “fastest image-capturing phone”, and it’s hard not to agree.

All in all, the Nokia N9 is a good phone. However, the 500USD price range a bit too high. Furthermore, the N9 is said to be the last Nokia device to host the operating system MeeGo, and that makes it a phone with a limited future.

So, memes make it to protests in Jordan. In Arabic. And it’s carried by a female protester.

Wow.

I’m so awesomed out right now I’m speechless. Creativity meets geekdom meets Jordanianism.

Via Majd

Today, I googled something and found no results.

Today, I didn’t find a forum thread somewhere that made me feel better.

Today, I felt alone on the World Wide Web. A little girl suffering from a rare malady.

Internet, I can’t believe there is no crazy group on Facebook with seven members who share my rage. There are no memes on the topic. There is no Lycos page bitching about how annoying modern web technology can be.

Internet, could it really be that I’m the only person in the world with a raging hate for online videos?

But I do.

I HATE ONLINE VIDEOS. I HATE YOUTUBE. I HATE DAILYMOTION. I HATE VIMEO. I HATE STREAMING. I HATE LITTLE BOXES WITH MOVING FRAMES EMBEDDED IN A WHITE BACKGROUND. I HATE VOICES COMING OUT OF MY HEADPHONES.

I HATE NOT HAVING CONTROL OVER WHEN AND HOW I SWITCH THROUGH MY TABS. I HATE LAGGING. I HATE THAT VIDEOS SO RUDELY DEMAND PRECIOUS MINUTES OF UNF**KING DIVIDED ATTENTION. I HATE HOW PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS SHARING YOUTUBE LINKS WITH ME; I’M SURE THEY’RE COOL LINKS, SO IT MAKES ME FEEL GUILTY.

I HATE HOW VIDEOS EAT UP BANDWIDTH. I HATE HOW THEY SLOW DOWN MY BROWSER. I HATE NOT GETTING THE INFORMATION I’M LOOKING FOR BY SKIMMING. I HATE HOW VIDEOS ARE SO UBIQUITOUS. I HATE THAT THEY START ON THEIR OWN.

I HATE HOW YOU CAN’T JUST GLANCE AT THE PAGE AND INSTANTLY DECIDE THAT THIS SUCKS ASS, THEN CLOSE IT. I HATE THAT THEY DON’T ALLOW YOU TO CONTROL YOUR INTAKE EXPERIENCE. I HATE THAT VIDEOS AREN’T A STILL IMAGE.

There.

Therapy.

I hate online videos. I HATE THEM. Just the transcript, please.

P.S. I’m aware that there’s a YouTube video in the post below. Rest assured, I haven’t seen it.