While it's quite nice to have this blog read enough to have a quote taken out of context, I'm not sure the context I'd created was altogether the best. The end of last week was bad for my ill-informed brand of punditry. I was sure it was my other blogging misstep that would generate the criticism. Either it's easier to tell when I mean homophobia even though I say homosexuality, or Mark gets more passionate when someone misrepresents Lessig's values on IP, than when someone misrepresents his values on sexuality.
To frame my case, it's of substance to explain that the quoted passage in question was intended to offer contrast between the opinions of the complacent pirate and the activist Lessig. This, in hindsight, is not how it reads, even to me. Call it a descriptive pratfall, you, Mark, have saved me from misrepresenting myself. I wholeheartedly agree with Lawrence Lessig's stance on freeing culture, and I feel that the record companies (and other such culture hoarders) have this position of power because we have given it to them.
As consumers, we continue to fund this trend of centralized culture ownership, and as artists, we commonly fall into step with practices that find our creations in the hands of a studio, label or other such publisher of creativity. Does Paramount have goons on the city streets that mug you at knifepoint and leave DVDs in your wallet where cash once was? Is BMG stealing albums from its artists and then offering them a pittance of compensation so they don't seek legal recourse?
Though it may feel as though this is happening, the right to abstain is still something often thrown away by the consumer or creator that will not discriminate between "easy road" practices that violate their morals and "high road" practices that find their values intact. Though it may be more difficult to take the high road (and it usually is) the easy road should be subject to your discontent. The record companies are doing what they can, to do what companies want to do, grow, and avoid what companies don't want to do, fail, and indeed we may feel that companies are often without morals to judge the means to grow and not fail.
So the next time you're angry at the record companies for charging you fifteen dollars for an album, or the next time you hear an artist gripe that their work has been usurped by their label and they're being treated unfairly, blame not the company, but the fact that the record company even has this power over us. It's our fault that we're being taken advantage of. As the oppressed, no one will give their power to you, you have to take it for yourself by whatever means necessary, and in this case, perhaps the best means is to retain and exercise the right to abstention. Don't give up your rights just because doing so makes it easier for you to listen to or make music. If you don't like the FBI anti-piracy warning on the back of that CD, then don't buy it. If you don't want to pay a record company for a service that you could provide for youself while still owning what is indeed your own creation, then don't. Just don't.
Post-polemic, I'd say that you should do right by your values. If you have no problem with the practices with which a company conducts itself, then by all means continue to patronize them. However I think that it's sad and counterproductive for someone to call upon laziness to defend their consumerist choices. Please, vote with your dollars and influence companies in a way that you thought only they could do to you.
Yes, you heard me right, if you truly don't have a problem with the RIAA's treatment of artists or their steps in piracy prevention including error-prone copy protection and bulk lawsuit threats, then I feel like you should continue to patronize their constituent labels; and I feel like it's important for me to value your right to vote with your dollars as well as my own similar right. With some research, I feel informed to vote the other way. I disagree with some policies of the RIAA, and so I don't fund them. After all, you wouldn't knowingly contribute to or vote for a political candidate that you don't endorse or agree with.
I think this may come down to complacency of both the legal and illegal consumers. Most online pirates are happy enough to be getting a 15$ CD for free, and would proudly tell you that they'll never buy another CD again. Where as most music purchasers who are Death Cab fans will buy Death Cab for Cutie's new album because they don't care enough about their values to abstain from supporting Atlantic Records and the RIAA. This whole situation makes me sad... no, seriously, just thinking about it is depressing.
I think (if I'm not misinterpreting Mark here) that he and I actually line up on this issue. I think his decision as a well informed consumer to purchase music from labels and artists who he feels comfortable supporting and only downloading with the law and his values is one of the most important decisions you can make as a consumer. Would that the world were as responsible with their actions in the marketplace, perhaps we might not have found ourselves in this problem. Perhaps we'd still have the power that Mark and others like him value, and it wouldn't be that "the wrong people end up owning copyrights that last nearly forever and it isn’t very easy to build on past art."
I'd not have gone on so long if I didn't feel I needed to defend my position in spite of my inaccurate statements. Maybe one day I'll learn that it's exactly when I don't proofread that I make the most serious errors. I understand the difference between homosexuality and homophobia and I can tell when a sentence I write has the exact opposite meaning than what I intended, I just can't always prove this at all times.
Dan: I blew it.
Casey: Yes.
Dan: I mixed-up... I inverted the definitions of secular and non-secular.
Casey: Looks like that might be the case.
Dan: Hillary Clinton thinks I'm an idiot.
Casey: Either that or a religious bigot.
Dan: I went to an Ivy League school, Casey.
Casey: It's a proud day for Dartmouth, Dan.
Dan: I made an idiot out of myself in front of Hillary Clinton.
Casey: Yeah, but at least you had to spend a thousand bucks to do it.
I'm going to try at a bit of blogging momentum here and drop a piece of my GMail "me" label on you.
"What does that mean?"
Well I find crap that's neither interesting nor relevant to, really, much of anything, and I feel an urge to save it so I can force feed it to Mark in the form of instant message links in seemingly innocuous sentences. This delights me to no end, and if Mark were the tireless victim I wish he were, I could go on for hours directing him around the oddities of the web, like a virtual carnival sideshow tour guide.
"And GMail or Google provides some sort of sponsorship funding for this enduro race of dumb shit?"
If only I could get someone to cut me a check for this distraction. No, GMail fits into the equation thusly: When I'm at work and I spot a nugget of internet strangeness, the curio is sent to myself through GMail. I've got a stockpile of URLs in my inbox labeled "me", as they are from me, and they're all clamoring to be used before they expire, as all things on the internet do, and usually quite quickly. So, in sparing Mark the effort of having to go through this alone, here's a slice of moist absurd cake with a sugary non sequitur frosting.
Hitachi is revolutionizing magnetic storage technology, and they're not going to let you get out of understanding the superparamagnetic effect. Cue the goofy Schoolhouse Rock, Flash-style. I have to hand it to Hitachi for creating an educational use for Flash and still making Actuator Man seem just a little creepy.
Soon there will be another movie named Crash. Feh helps us sort them out. The guy who wrote the screenplay for Naked Lunch, followed by the guy who wrote the screenplay for Million Dollar Baby. To be fair, I'm sure they're both very talented people, but I get excited when I hear anyone mention Cronenberg's Crash, and no, I don't mean that kind of excited. Sure, I have the DVD, and no, you can't borrow it. If I wanted semen fingerprints on my DVD cases, I'd put them there myself.
Wonkette is the DC based blog in Gawker's family, and I read it because sometimes there's something funny on there. The Nazi Pope isn't so much funny, but the double-edged sword application for the quote "Oh, he was young, it was compulsory, he was 'reluctant.'" knocked the wind out of me in only the most humorous way.
I've also stumbled across an interesting read into one top Canadian legal scholar's views (and well substantiated views at that) on P2P and it's effects on the Canadian music industry. I know I've long believed that if I haven't deprived you of a sale, I haven't pirated your product. If I never intended to pay thousands of dollars for your software, or even twenty dollars for your movie or fifteen dollars for your album, how, then, have I deprived you of any income?
If you like being on the shadier side of online piracy and having someone tell you it's not so bad, check out the New York Public Library's discussion with Lawrence Lessig of Stanford and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. (Edit: Lessig and Tweedy offer a conflicting viewpoint for you, who "like being on the shadier side of online piracy and having someone tell you it's not so bad". This discussion may change your views from the complacent pirate to the conscious consumer.) Mark and I prepared ourselves to attend, but alas, the show was sold out before we knew it (About five minutes! Who knew the library was so damn cool?).
And finally, Ms. Subways says, "Trains aren't for pooping." I honestly love any attempt to hijack advertisement, and can be convinced that most public guerrilla art is good art. Now all we need is for someone to print these out on their office's plotter and paste them up in subway stations. Any volunteers?
I read alot of political news during the day, and so I feel like I know about politics. This is, of course, a lie, as I dont have a tolerable comprehension of politics in this country, nevermind others. To feel better though, I remember that not very many people know anything at all (and I mean, flat out, nothing) about the governments of other countries, except to say, "America is the freest country in the world. Try to pull your unAmerican liberal protesting in China and see what happens."
On that note, China seems perfectly happy with unJapanese protests, and while Japan and China are masking an important struggle for the future seat of power in Asia with Chinese students stoning the Japanese Embassy, someone, somewhere is asking themselves why they don't just roll out the tanks they've had garaged since Tiananmen Square to crush this dissidence.
Back home, the freedom we once enjoyed, but still too keenly lauded for the democracy hating liberal democrat kids, is steadily evaporating. I'm not so myopic to relegate this to a recent affair, as the very thing that makes America great has been dying since the day it was born.
Here's the part where I'm not going to cite the things I've read that have incited me to say such hurtful things about our country. I'm going to leave that up to you. Pick up a newspaper, watch or listen to the news or even turn to the unreliable internet and its lying weblog journalists.
Now I don't mean watch Access Hollywood tonight and then tell me that you're uninterested in what's going on outside your door. That's not news, and I feel that if you're smart enough to read this blog post, you're smart enough to know the difference between NPR on your radio and the Star on the supermarket rag rack. I mean for you to get your news from several sources, and discern which ones you feel are the closest to representing the truth (believe me, all of them are biased) and then use the information you've gleaned from several sources, both right and left, local and foreign, and try to tell me that what you've found out is something that paints the state of the world in a positive light.
More than likely, you'll have found out that the news media is a sham, no matter what views you hold, and that everyone everywhere seems to be circling the drain and trying to pull the next guy down with him. It's nice to hear this from someone else, whom you may think is full of shit himself, but it's seriously, much better to spend the time and figure it out for yourself.
Yeah, I know... I'm going to hell. Probably for a multitude of different reasons besides pope jokes, Christopher Reeves jokes, creative license on my taxes, jay walking, carding, defacing the live journals of 16 year old emo punks (...and sadly no one noticed the difference). I don't care who's against me, Pope Fabulous XVIII would have ruled.
If you don't know who Father Guido Sarducci is, you apparently missed the 'Golden Age' of Saturday Night Live. I mean, hell; the jokes are older than I am but they still work. Remember when Chevy Chase had hair and was still funny... yeah exactly.
Father Sarducci recently popped up doing a guest appearance on The Handsome Boy Modeling School CD "So... How’s your girl?". The CD was apparently created in an effort by Prince Paul and Dan the Automator to show what if they got together to make an album, they could get the ladies moist. The CD as an experiment offers up a full spectrum of urban beats an hip-hoppery with talents ranging from Del 'tha Funkee Homosapien' (Yeah, spell check LOVED that), Kid Koala, Alec Empire and DJ Shadow just to name a few. A second album was released not too long ago with more delectable beats to chomp on, but I dropped a track from first on the podcast for your sampling.
Oh Yeah, I’m working on a podcast. Currently in the very-much early testing phases. Music is up, but no commentary. I was going to write my own, but a million of these are readily available on the internet, so why not try one on for size first.
Apparently Brandon needs to vent all this pent up musical cargo on us and I’m going to provide an able and hopefully fully PHP automated channel for it. You can polk at it at PodCast.StupidMammal.Net. I know domain names are case insensitive, but if you love me you’ll type it that way. The first one is up at PodCast.StupidMammal.Net/2005-04-19/ with RSS available at rss.php. For mor information on the deal, hit iPodder.
I'm not too sure if it was a productive weekend, but I did get alot done. I was planning on writing this crazy anti-leech / download quota script in PHP this weekend but that didn't happen. I like PHP, it's a fun language. That and VB are the only programming languages that I can ass-code (drunk usually) and it will pretty much work on the first run with minimal tweaking to be done later for cleanliness.
Instead I spent the weekend outside with the dog and just generally roaming around Manhattan and eating. It was too nice out not to spend it outside. Harry’s friend Varden was looking for a new cell phone, so we ventured down to Chinatown and that’s when I decided it made perfect sense to pick up a PSP. I had waited long enough for one... and on the up side, it could be played outside.
I must stress how sharp and bright the picture is on this bad boy. The whole concept of having a racing game on a handheld seems a bad idea, but it actually works. WipEout Pure is everything I expected it to be++. I also signed up for a GameFly account as to take full advantage of my new toy. That seemed like a good idea. I could copy the latest and greatest PS2 games why trying DS & PSP games before I buy. Right now it just seems like bragging rights, but this is just catch up, there was a point to writing an entry... I just don’t remember it yet.
I read a t-shirt review over at Preshrunk.info that had me laughing for a good 15 minutes, that I felt I should share.
Just he fragment "Dick move, Voorhees." had me on the fucking floor. For some reason when I read that line back I hear Mark’s voice saying it. Sounds like his type of catch phrase, along with "You’re a quitter and I’m a winner."
But anyways... Let me expand your mind and waste my bandwidth:
SeaLab 2021 - This TV is our new GOD
SeaLab 2021 - I declare Martian Law
SeaLab 2021 - Memento Stormy
South Park – I nearly pissed myself when Wing takes a hit to the face
Triumph, the Instult Comic Dog – in honor of Episode III
DJ Shadow - Six Days video
DJ Shadow - You Can’t Go Home Again video
DJ Shadow vs Keane - We Might As Well Be Strangers
The Postal Service - Against All Odds (Phil Colins Cover)
The Postal Service - Complicated (Avril Lavigne Cover)
In other news, Adobe will be buying Macromedia. Wow, their really bent of pushing their SVG standard format.
I loved this post. Get a cold, Hack your source code. I’ve never been to a Scientific Theory Slam before, but I feel like I’ve missed out and I really really need to go to one now.
The Xeni-Caption to the above photo is "Chopsticks safety: you are NOT the walrus! Goo goo g'jooob!"
Finally, If they ever make a movie about my life; I want it to be animated. With a talking Dog and Cat ala Ameie or Stewie. Maybe done in anime style... make it a mech-anime...
It feels like I haven’t been appropriately flexing brain lately. I just feel off edge. I don’t mean this to be self deprecating humor or anything. I forget things seconds after I mean to remember them and I’m debating whether or not it’s a sign or a curse.
If I’m already too far gone and it’s too late for me, I could go down as the first 23 year old diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Tell my family that for the most part I love them. Let Sam, Loki, Koko and Plato (yes… Plato) know I will probably miss their memory the most. I’ll miss all of the video game endings I’ve accomplished. I’ll miss being able to sing along with Radiohead, Weezer and Portishead (I do a mean Beth Gibbons). I’ll miss the memory of all of my ‘firsts’, good and bad.
If it’s not too late, maybe it’s just a sign I need to slow down. Multitasking is a privilege, not a right. I attempt to do so much and accomplish so little, with all of the leftovers scattered around behind me. It could just be that my system of priorities is seriously flawed. I don’t let go of the truly unimportant things to make room for the more imperative things in my life. I’m a memory pack rat.
Tastes, scents, stories, movies, songs, situations and experiences. There are so many things that a use to define myself and I don’t really know where the line between us is defined. Am I just the sum of all of my parts or is there more there? Without making it sound like some serious soul searching bullshit (which it’s not… I’m probably going to go on like this entry never existed), I wonder how I have changed over time as opposed to just how my taste in things has changed.
I haven’t changed… but I’ve grown.
People come and go. Lovers won and lost.
If you’re lucky, some friends stick around for the ride.
It can be lonely without your support network.
Brandon & Harry are a big part of my support network. So is Phil, but with different respects. I’m there for Harry as far as hearing him out on not having a boyfriend. I wish he would find someone or better yet someone find him. He deserves someone to treat him good. Same goes for Brandon. Granted he can seem like a big asexual panda bear sometimes, I’m sure there is someone special in his heart and I hope he gets her. He deserves her too.
The ROTFLMAO == RALPHMACCIO conversion was pretty funny.
RTMF: Not just the law, but a good idea.
IANAL: Um... Ok dude, whatever floats your boat.
Some internet jargon is just plain crap. The stuff done as a joke it welcome, but some messages just get lost in 1337-sp34k translation. The discussion board on Slashdot is a very scary place and I can only pray that no more verbal abortions make their way from the internets to meatspace. IANAL sounds like some pr0n movie with Will Smith and an electronically operated sexual device from the future with some crazy robo-back door action. Cue Brandon with the cyberdildonics update...
BTW, Cory dropped a link to a hilarious remix of the Star Wars: Episode III trailer up on BoingBoing. Definately worth a watch at least for a few chuckles. But seriously, next person to SAY, IN PUBLIC (!) "LOL" is getting kicked on the nuts (or C.P., where appropreate).
I'm keeping with my current arsenal of:
'...', roX0rz, boX0rz, soX0rz, wtf, 'teh suck', pwned, 'in soviet russia', ^_^ and o_0?
"LoLz, What a n00blor!" / "This new silencer roX0rz my soX0rz."
Just don't. It's a waste of an episode. It's another one of those "Suske is a self important pussy" episodes and it doesn't go anywhere. If you don't follow the manga (which is apparently not that far ahead of the anime), here’s a spoiler: NOTHING HAPPENS! Not even a stalemate. Suske just goes off on his own and Naruto is left holding his pud with this stupid look on his face.
Here’s another spoiler for all you Star Wars fans waiting in line for Episode III:
YOU WILL DIE ALONE.
After the joygasm that was episodes 127-128 (A double episode, SUPER LUCKY!!!), ep 129 is anticlimactic and feels like a big letdown. Save yourself the trouble and don't watch Naruto for the next 3 to 4 weeks, let this storyline run it's course because nothing of importance or relative coolness will be happening in the foreseeable future.
In short, Naruto Episode 129 is teh suck.
A Black Rock Lee with an apparent bed-wetting problem.
rock right the fuck out.
No one pays attention to service advisories in the subways. They're common enough to see and almost never apply to you unless you're looking for a local train from the financial district to the Brooklyn Navy Yard via the Bronx Zoo at 3:45am on a wednesday.
It's nice, however, to see an anomaly in your daily life in the form of curious signage, and the sign at right was posted at the Astor Place, Times Square and Grand Central stations at rush hour. Let it be known that I do feel for the individual in question, and I hope the situation resolves itself with Brittney, Noland and yourself.
With reference to (This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan (Incidentally, every time I hear this song title I think of Aaron Chan. Aaron Chan has bagel nipples.), there is substantial support for this Dntel number sounding akin to The Postal Service. This is because Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie, All-Time Quarterback) and Jimmy Tamborello (Dntel, Figurine, Stritly Ballroom, Arca) did their first collaboration on this track when Tamborello invited Gibbard, who was in LA visiting Jimmy's roommate, to lay down a vocal track for his upcoming album, recorded under the name Dntel, called Life Is Full of Possilities.
Ben did the vocals in an hour one afternoon, and the indie gitch-pop song was born. Because this project was remarkably easy, Jimmy and Ben began to play with the idea of doing an EP of pieces like (This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan. When SubPop heard the track, they were interested in the collaboration, thus ushering the nascency of The Postal Service (So named because the effort took place with the help of the aforementioned courier service to bounce tapes between Tamborello in LA and Gibbard in Seattle). This long-distance cooperation yields some very interesting song stylings found on their LP, Give Up, and their few EP's, featuring some catchy singles, quality B-sides and interesting remixes.
Recently, though, I found that The Postal Service was featured on the soundtrack to the film Wicker Park with their creative cover of Phil Collins' Against All Odds. It's somewhat necessary to note that I have neither seen the movie, nor heard the soundtrack yet, but I have heard The Postal Service's contribution to this compilation... many, many times. It manages to invoke the original while making the composition their own in many ways, which is how I feel a cover should be enacted. To simply mimic the original is useless and often times, to contort it beyond recognition is not only wasteful of the material but also shows weakness on the part of the artist.
Yes, I have thought about this at some length, and should you disagree with me, sadly, you won't have much luck changing my mind. When you listen to 7-10 new albums every week in addition to all the other music you listen to, you quickly gain the base for forming opinions that could be inflammatory if they didn't serve to disinterest most, if not all, within earshot. I've found that the only way these musical opinions can be suppressed is for me to have another broadcasting opportunity, like my two year stint producing and DJing a weekly radio show on WRPI... I'll be in my room working on this.
I want a PSP... I just do.
I have no real use for it besides WipeOut (Yes, it's necessary that I type it like that).
I just want one.
I feel like I must drop an entry in so, here it is.
Have these lying around in the archive, so I might as well share them.
Robot Chicken Clip [Download] What really went down on Charlie Brown. Hey, that rhymes.
More Doves-
Man this is an awesome album, I have been dropping pieces of it on people left and right. Here are another two tracks and a reappearance of the doves track I posted.
Doves - Pounding [Download]
Doves - Last Broadcast [Download]
Doves - There Goes The Fear [Download | UNKLESounds Mix | Video]
In the same vein as The Postal Service is Dntel's '(This is) The Dream of Evan and Chan'
It's good shit.
[Download | Superpitcher Kompakt Remix]
I just got another UrbanMedium Shirt, DJ-D2. It's R2D2 with a krylon and beat-box, what's not to love. It's a good compliment to the Che-Trooper shirt I got before. Which brings me to RJD2. RJD2 rules. So does Evil Nine's 'Crooked' flash video, but back to RJD2.
RJD2 - Ghostwriter [Download]
Oh yeah, OS X's inline spelling correction is the ill nana. It works with anything you put text into, just turn it on under the Edit menu and it'll underline any questionable gibberish. Sounds like the kind of thing that might make it's way into Linux one day and Microsoft should rip that one off to some time around 2010. That should clean up a bit of my writing... Now about those grammatical issues and using the right friggin' words.
-> Until next time.
Just like most video games based on a movie, Friday the 13th for the NES was a big, steaming pile of crap.
