“…the advances in technology impacts everyone, and we all must adapt…This market consists of individuals embracing innovations faster than the fans of classical and jazz music.â€
“What is important for the music industry to understand is that this really doesn’t hurt the artists.
Not sure what the jazz and classical thing is supposed to mean, but he was probably high.
The RIAA and friends say file-sharing is hurtful stealing that kills the blood cells of huge artists and gives them HIV. Why would you believe companies that steal from the very artists they pretend to protect? Everyone knows almost all music contracts are completely one-sided deals that artists hardly benefit from in comparison to the contractor. Fun fact:
50 Cent has engaged in numerous feuds with other rappers including Ja Rule, The Game, and Fat Joe.
THE DUDE IS SERIOUS BUSINESS. He deserves serious respect, even if he was blazed out of his brainhole during the interview; he utters truth. File sharing hurts profits, not artists.
This sketch from The State was the first time I had been made aware of the idea of pushing a nonsense argument beyond its own limit:
This method has come under frequent use the past couple of years under what has become the insane modern umbrella of serious comedy.
With some comedy we are just past the point of jokes, where a joke can even be past itself, and this is that case. The real emphasis lies in drawing attention to the argument despite its pointlessness. This is a serious matter. This is acting; there’s an art form in excessively pigheaded lying.
Seem familiar? If you work in a bureaucratic environment, this crap tends to happen in real life! Politics? Watch a modern debate and tell me those guys are pushing lies to the point of comedy. They use this beyond circular reasoning crap as a debate tactic. It’s post-ironic.
Today we’ll talking about how to import your bookmarks from browsers and convert your browsing methods to focus on the idea of remembering important things about the links instead of remembering where you put them. When you are considering hundreds of bookmarks, as many people have, this method is necessary for scaling and to prevent incredibly unnecessary limits.
The idea here is that using del.icio.us to do the work for you, it is possible to think about bookmarks, the internet, and navigation in a new way. The old way could be considered a rigid, organizational construct that is a leftover from a few decades of simple, common sense-based professional computing. This new way of approaching it is basically a by-product of the wholesale industry adoption of tagging, which is a construct of a lazy new generation really making computers do the work for them. The sad part is that this time laziness triumphs. Firefox makes it even easier.
If you don’t have a delicious account, go there and sign up, and then in the settings you will want to import or upload your current bookmarks. Don’t feel pressured; it took me about three years to do this.
From here, the flexibility of the system gets pretty insane. You can tag things however you want (for example, I didn’t tag anything old but tag everything new). This contrasts bookmarks in that there was only one place you could put one bookmark without duplicates. Now, you can have one bookmark with an endless amount of ways to organize and find it via infinite tags.
There’s more. You can subscribe to tags and get alerts from fairly specific triggers. You can add people to your network. You can add me and see what I mark. I watch people that I know have an eye for trends and the like. The great downfall of the networking on delicious is that right now (changing in 2.0) there is no simple way of inviting people or adding people; the only way is to visit their profile and hit add.
(Side note: you can bundle tags. This essentially means that you can tag tags. That drives me a little beyond the edge as it’s time to get less organized, not more!)
The Oregon Attorney General, working with the University, has filed a motion in court to quash the legal move by the Recording Industry Association of America, which the University says is trying to force the educational institution to perform a legal investigation for the benefit of a private corporation. The agrieved parties ought to perform their own investigation, the University argues.
A number of the names requested are of students living in University of Oregon dorms, making it impossible to determine which of the students living there downloaded the music, representatives of the school said. The U of O is infamous for its inhumanely cramped dorm rooms, though, making it improbable that one resident could have committed such an act without the other being intimately aware.
What is sad to me about this is that the RIAA continues its tactics of calling out shit for piracy at random when confronted. This isn’t quite as dumb as government officials crying terrorism out of every window, and is certainly no straight McCarthyism, but it’s not far off, either. It’s very obvious that this organization is very frightened, out of ideas, and completely on the defensive.
Finally someone throws it back in their face. High fives to Oregon.
I imagine most people favorite the crap out of youtube. I don’t. I am oddly picky with what I mark as a favorite, so it took me a good year and a half to get to a hundred.
My 100th favorited video is a seasonally appropriate thing I have seen about 97,000 times because it’s on at work. It’s a damned JCPenney commercial, but holy hell is it well done.
I started working on the editing of these response videos I made in reference to the YouTube/CNN Republican debates (as previously discussed here) at 6 PM. It is now 3:45 AM. I have uploaded the entirety of the 160-something megs two and a half times now, and I think I’ve finally gotten the goddamn thing to stick (all after a good three-plus hours cutting out myself making fart jokes).
This is essentially a compilation of my thoughts and reactions to the various things asked and said during these debates. Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here.
I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in film/video and digital media technology. What the hell people? There is no way I should be having this much trouble making this thing; i.e. everyone that regularly makes high-quality videos with the overshoot-and-edit-and-upload model deserves a significantly high five. I don’t really see myself being able to cope with Premiere for that long.
Nintendo America didn’t release Super Mario Bros. 2 in the United States because they didn’t think people would buy a game that looked just like the original, and they thought it was too hard (which it is, unless compared to the second half of the first game). Eventually it came along as the Lost Levels in Mario All-Stars, but was it ever really much more than just a damned sequel? Instead, this acid trip got made into a Mario game:
If you look at other Nintendo Entertainment System series, you see that sequels became a commonplace way to get more games out, and in many cases just make some cash for garbage. But those sequels generally had a few things in common.
They sold.
They looked very, very similar to their predecessors: Mega Man, Double Dragon, Castlevania, Final Fantasy, Metroid, Dragon Warrior, Adventure Island, etc.
They were almost never an entirely different Japanese game in disguise with very few changes.
They always warranted unneeded items on lists, or even unneeded lists.
Mario’s a weirdo all because they decided to make his first sequel another goddamn game in disguise.
One of the few major exceptions to this rule, which also follows the “logic” behind the Mario Bro decision, is Zelda. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, looked very little like its predecessor, but maintained Zelda continuity traditions that continue today. Zelda II was, however, insanely difficult.
Zelda stories are like a comic book over the years. The stories come from different places and do different things. Link is a bunch of different dudes. Mario’s just one guy. It seems now that he hasn’t changed at all since Super Mario Bros. 3. Instead, the game engines that drew him did. He’s a brutally minimal example of technological evolution, as are the worlds he lands in. Mario is video games.
You should watch the republican newbtube debates as soon as you can to get informed on how ludicrously out of touch with reality most of these guys are, because tomorrow I will hopefully have edited and uploaded my video response to it.
These aren’t debates. They’re sideshows posing as clown colleges. These guys make Dukakis look good; Americans almost can’t lose. Fuck Romney though:
Enchanted is so stupid that it had to have been written by the small children slaving away in a behind-the-scenes writer’s sweatshop inside the it’s a small world ride.
Millions of people saw it today. Trillions of brains cells melted.
Please leave your change in the cup.
The problem with the Nintendo Wii is that there are so few decent games that the prices will stay stubbornly high indefinitely, even for used copies.
Once upon a time, rap was a hard-knocks-triumphant honor to have as a career; rap was a portrait of black, urban life overcome in America. Now, rap is winning the lottery and not even tipping your hat at the ghetto. DJ Shadow expressed it precisely with this song that explained the problem with hip hop in ‘96, “It’s the money.” (ALSO: Whatever happened to DJ Shadow? What a loss? I seriously am not sure)
I gave a bit of a rambling speech wondering how the generation currently coming of age will handle having grown up during a dudfucking rut in American culture. I was pretty tired but I think i got the idea out of my mouth (and subsequently the head for the night).
TIP: There’s a hole in my Mario Pants? TRAGEDY; AM I RIGHT? Yes.
We’ve gotten to the point where even people with shitty taste are tired of how crappy mass media has gotten this last decade. I also forgot to mention how I am seeing 2009 as being the beginning of a new era for a culture-starved and corporate-ruined country. Guess why.
News flash: Britney Spears is no Madonna.
(p.s. thank fucking god for wordpress’s autosave, but i lost all my tags)
(P.P.S. I don’t really like the band Priestess. Better make a Priestess tag just for safe keeping)
