2010: Week 44 Blots

BLOT: (07 Nov 2010 - 03:11:16 PM)

Cooks Source vs File Sharing. Is it just me, or...

E-Reads posted, last Tuesday, "Defiant Pirates Rub Knuckles in the Eyes of Authors and Publishers"", latest in a line of articles on their blog about ebook pirates (being an ebook centric company, it seems like the sort of thing that would concern them). In general I recommend their blog, it has an intersting number of book and publishing topics brought up, as well as discussion of their releases. Today, though, we'll focus on this linked entry.

I left a comment on the post, as of right now the last one and I was late to the party, in which I briefly compare pirate/sharing sites and the often cited "THEY ARE DEFENDING USER RIGHTS!" stance with the explosive outcry against Cooks Source, which copied a blogger's recipe and then, upon her complaining, told her (1) the Internet is Public Domain and (2) she should think them for the free editting job. I think the dumbass reply had a lot to do with the anger, but still, what's with the disparity? Why do we treat one group like Robin Hood and the other like the worst sort of thief and the justified target of ire? Comments in the linked-to Washington Post article on it say things about shutting down the magazine and not letting up the assault.

I know money is part of it. File-sharing is treated as a noble way to get around those pesky fat-cat content owners with their ideas that they should get paid*. Cook Source, though, robbed a poor woman of an article and then used that article as partial justification for advertisers to give them money (apologizes for the polemic generalizations, but just to set the stakes). I also know that part of the game is responding to the concept of open information. In one case, books that would require some activity to access are being made "freer", while in the latter, the already free article is enclosed off into a tiny little paper thing. And well, the dumbass reply mentioned above? It probably had a lot to do with it, but how much different is this than your average pirate reply on why they feel perfectly justified in taking anything they want because "information longs to be free" or because "so what, I want to?" I have nothing but sympathy and understanding for the notion of wanting to be able to buy a book and not be afraid of your copy disappearing in a couple of years because a DRM server became too "costly" to maintain. But if a fraction of people who file-share books actually were buying all of those books, the book industry would never had problems to begin with.

Even BoingBoing.net took a stance defending the copyright holder in this one. Ha!

And yes, by the way, the Washington Post article does have some comments that bring up the "It cannot be theft since nothing was realy stolen, just copied" style argument, so some people are judging this in the same way as they judge other Intellectual Property incidences. I would just say a fair number are treating this as two types of things. How about it, two types of things or the same thing?

UPDATE: There were a couple of updates, which I linked to and discussed, very briefly, here.

* By most things I have seen, Cooks Source is actually kind of small, independently produced magazine that has a fair, but not massive, circulation. I could be wrong about this.

LABEL(s): Copyright

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 44
BY MONTH: November 2010

BLOT: (07 Nov 2010 - 12:05:11 PM)

McSweeney's "Letter to the Homeless Person Who Saw Me Lose It"

McSweeney's website has a series of "Open Letters to People or Entities Unlikely to Respond". On November 5, 2010, there was posted "AN OPEN LETTER TO THE HOMELESS MAN WHO WITNESSED ME TOTALLY LOSE IT LAST WEEK". The gist? Dude has a really crappy "professional meet-up" that turns out to be mostly people shatting out buzzwords about social media and using brand as though it had a capital B and they knew what they were talking about. Basically, what happens when the sort of people who use synergize on Twitter get together in real life. On the way back, the mostly broke and unemployed man is approached by a homeless guy looking for money, and our suited gentleman flips out. Throws money in the street.

Leaving aside the "How annoying is it to be begged off of...especially in a place like Huntsville where half our beggars drive around in cars until they get to their spot?", I just thought it summed up human interactions in an interesting way, and wanted to point it out.

Plus, it is a good life lesson. Not everyone who wears a suit deserves to wear a suit, and not everyone who lives on the street got there do to easily summable reasons. There is a student I know, who is working hard to get his degree, and he is homeless. He lives in his car most of the time and has a few friends who help him out. He is at the library every night working on homework. But, once you reach that stage, once he gets done, what will happen next? Even with a degree, without a mailing address or nice clothes, is he going to have that much of a chance? I don't know, but I hope so.

LABEL(s): Society

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 44
BY MONTH: November 2010

BLOT: (07 Nov 2010 - 01:56:43 AM)

One class down, the Gadsden Trip, the TV Dilemma, and the Ultraman Tiga semi-oops

It is almost 1:30am right now, and I pretty much have to be in bed by 2:00am, so this post will be written a bit more hurried than I like to write them in. This weekend (last night and today) was spent wrapping up my final class meeting for LS542, which is a Library Science class dealing with helping teachers (grade school through high school) design lesson plans and activities. I was the only non-School Medial Specialist in the room, and the only one without extensive training for handling school-aged children, so I often approached assignments with a degree of cynicism wrapped around common sense. The others tended to take them more as a delight to explore and dive within. Collages and Bulletin Boards (and hand puppets, cannot forget the hand puppets) are about as far outside of my comfort zone as I am sure discussing the deeply ironic nature of contemporary horror would be, if not outside, not altogether congruent with their own. I appreciate hand puppets—even I do not quite get the joy of Punch...—I just tend to think in user-interface and efficiency of search algorithms.

Usually, with these weekend classes, people show up a bit early. This Friday, I got there about a quarter of an hour before class started, and the room was empty. Not even the professor had showed up. I had an immediate spike of paranoia. Did I pick the wrong weekend? Was I somehow later than everyone else and the class had moved to another room? It was shocking how fast self-doubt slammed into me. I had only three hours of sleep, and not deep sleep at that. I had had an immense couple of days building up to it. I was tired, and feeling kind of vulnerable. The five minutes I waited for someone else to show up, the professor in this case, was this horribly negative moment. Stupid brain. Then, one of her first questions she asked me if I was ready to switch over to be a School Media Specialist and seemed kind of surprised when I said "No, no, I like my reference work."

I do like my reference work. Talking to Sarah about it, afterward, I told her that it was kind of like being given a series of puzzles and being asked to help find a solution. Not to solve them, usually, but to work out algorithms of solution. And then to teach those algorithms and confirm their validity. Reference librarianship is a weird thing because there are more facts than any one person can handle, but you learn to organize and set up mental paths so that you remember general arcs of motion, along with pertinent sub-arcs.

Enough with library science blather, let's move on to something more important: the TV. A few weeks ago, maybe a month+, Comcast switched just about all of their channels over to a digital tuning system. Those without some sort of DTV style tuner, and apparently one specific to Comcast, gets only about 15 channels now, including a TV Guide channel that mocks you for the programming you don't have. Since I mostly watch TV shows on DVD or through something iTunes or Amazon's Unbox, not having a ready TV full of content is not that big a deal. Except we are still paying for "cable" (limited basic) and so it comes down to the choice: do we cancel our cable subscription and get a converter and antenna, or do we upgrade our service for about $20-$40 a month and get the other channels back? I like a handful of those now missing channels—AMC, SyFy, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network/Adult Swim—but can do without the majority of them. At the same time, no real reason for us to keep paying even $15 for the Limited Basic if all we are getting are broadcast stations. We looked into the converter/antenna set, and it would run us about $100. The upgrade would quickly exceed this over a few months, but then again, the broadcast option only nets us a dozen channels while the upgrade gets back those mentioned above. I'll flip a coin, maybe.

I have 20-minutes before my self-imposed finishing of this entry, so I'll end with a quick discussion of an aggravating oops. A year ago, I was getting a handful of the various Ultraman and Kamen Rider shows on DVD. I am a fan of the tokusatsu genre, though as much as a curiosity as an outright fanaticism, and those two are my favorite meta-series (each has numerous unrelated-but-by-theme sub shows). Ultraman, somewhat uniquely for the entire tokusatsu genre, has had a few series released on American DVD without significant altering (most, like the Super Sentai shows that became Power Rangers upon transformation, are reshot and edited with American actors and some new CG to the fight scenes). Ultraman Tiga came out in a four volume set a couple of years back, and then proceeded to fade out of existence. I had access to the first three DVDs, but the fourth was just *poof*, except for one copy on Amazon.com that sold for a bit. Not a super-huge bit, nothing like three digits, but enough of a bit that it was about twice as expensive as the other three combined. I put off ordering it, even though I had the other three, because I did not want to spend so much for it. After a week or two, I broke down and got it. Ebay and such searches had failed to turn up any other copies that weren't usually more expensive.

Tonight, while doing an unrelated search, I found copies on Amazon.com, and multiple copies by several sellers, easily 1/6th what I paid for it. Sure, by what I can tell, it took several months before these showed up, but I still feel like I could have just waited an blah blah blah. To sum up, I am not that upset, and have been on the flipside of that before (one book I recently bought new but on sale has went up in value by over $100 from what I paid for it, and my Wizardy CDRom is occasionally worth more than $200 even though I got it clearance). It is just, you know, poopies. It never feels good to buy something and then find a cheaper version, a significantly cheaper version, show up before you even had time to enjoy it. It is like the time I took the last Plumb album in a store, and my friend wanted a copy but I was latched on. He then ended up going into another nearby store, and getting it for half the price I did because it was on sale. Again, poopies.

Seven minutes go, I am finishing up. Of course, it is about to 1am again as Daylight Savings Time ends, but I'm sticking to a promise since trying to stay up any later will probably result in me being facedown on my ccompter...my forehead continuously pressing the center keys until the loud beeping occurs and let's me know that I am being a bit too repetitious.

GOOD NIGHT, EVERYONE!!!

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 44
BY MONTH: November 2010

BLOT: (05 Nov 2010 - 06:34:50 AM)

Two life lessons learned. Or, on pre-sleep showers and brainaches...

Life lesson #1: If you feel icky before going to bed, like you really think you need a shower, take it. If not, you will wake up a half-dozen times throughtout the night going "ewwww". Spend the 15-minutes showering and the 15-minutes drying. It will be more efficient.

Life lesson #2: If you spend six to eight hours writing over 8000 words for a class, you will develop brainache. It will apparently hit about 4am in the morning, and it will hurt. It will take twice as long as a regular headache to subside, and it sucks. Remember, love your brain.

Alright, time to go to work so that I can go to school so that I can take classes all weekend so I can come back and work all day on Sunday. BUT...once this weekend is done, I think I will have said more or less goodbye to the mega-weeks of grad school. The next couple of assignments (which are the last for the semester) are going to be staggered and I only have two, theoretically less intense, classes next semester, which should be much better.

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 44
BY MONTH: November 2010

BLOT: (04 Nov 2010 - 01:10:14 AM)

Weekly Readings: November 3rd, 2010

I have decided to introduce a new feature, that might or might not stick, in which I discuss my various readings from the past week (roughly Wednesday to Wednesday, though some Thursday love may slip into it). The primary function of this act is to encourage me to keep up my reading regimen, by keeping it in short quanta as opposed to "how many books have I read this year?". And, well, by adding in a slight embarrassment factor, i.e. "Sorry guys, still reading Dick and Jane Buy a Pencil, maybe I'll be done next week." The secondary advantage is that it gives me an informal way to review books in short form.

This week's readings:

Robert Smartwood (editor)'s Hint Fiction: Already reviewed by me, this is a short collection of very short psuedo-narratives (they "hint", hence the name, at longer pieces). A terribly fast read, the book borders somewhere between brilliant and a gimmick (see also, for instance, The Zombie Survival Guide). It's too light a tome to recommend outright for purchase, but such short short stories as "Looking for the body, we found hundreds of burned-out lightbulbs in a clearing. Found four bodies, but not the body we were looking for." will act like koans to inspire some deep and great thoughts.

Ramsey Campbell's Secret Story: There is definitely a review coming for this. Imagine you're a serial killer, kind of a pathetic person, but with extreme delusions of grandeur. You write stories about your victims, and what they did to deserve it (mostly not realizing how AWESOME you are). Then, one day, your mom sends one of your stories in to a magazine contest, and you win. Initial fright turns into a burning desire to finally be recognized as genius, though most people simply don't care. Campbell writes the story in a slow, plodding voice (as his normal for him) that can frustrate—and the overall flavor of the novel can leave you wanting a shower—but he taps so well into the horrific edge of the lost psyche that is hard not to recommend this book to those who can make it through it.

Kenneth Hite's Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales: A fan-centered counter-voice to some of the stuffier critique about Lovecraft. A fun quick read that touches, generally briefly, on the key tales of Lovecraft's writings. Hite, for the most part, does not break any large or particularly new ground, but he does have some interesting things to say and makes plenty of references to other critiques and studies. It is like a gateway drug to the wider world of Lovecraftian dialogue.

Ok, and for the books I'm currently working on, we have P.G. Wodehouse's Code of the Woosters, Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash, and Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors (the S.T. Joshi edited edition from Chaosium).

LABEL(s): Readings

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 44
BY MONTH: November 2010

BLOT: (03 Nov 2010 - 04:58:40 PM)

Photo: Gray Day at Fontainbleu Terrace Apparments 2

This one better gets the vibe. Also, if you click and look at the full version, I kind of dig the way the fall colors manage to come through the gray. Keep fighting, hues!

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 44
BY MONTH: November 2010

BLOT: (03 Nov 2010 - 04:52:33 PM)

Photo: Gray Day at Fontainbleu Terrace Apparments 1

This photo doesn't really do it justice. It is just an amazingly gray day here. Misting rain, chilly but not quite cold temps, a slight fog. Whip out the hot chocolate children, today is the day for it.

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 44
BY MONTH: November 2010

BLOT: (01 Nov 2010 - 10:31:51 AM)

Pic-Spam Part 4 of 4: Non-Halloween, but Sarah's new "self-kinked" Hairstyle (and "I'll kill you all" cat bonus)

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 44
BY MONTH: November 2010

BLOT: (01 Nov 2010 - 10:29:16 AM)

Pic-Spam Part 3 of 4: Sarah in Costume, also our Orange/Red Color Scheme Set-up for Halloween

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 44
BY MONTH: November 2010

BLOT: (01 Nov 2010 - 10:26:04 AM)

Pic-Spam Part 2 of 4: Alternate (i.e. slightly brighter) View of Our Jack-o-Lanterns

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 44
BY MONTH: November 2010

BLOT: (01 Nov 2010 - 10:20:10 AM)

Pic-Spam Part 1 of 4: Really Pretty Halloween Sunset over Our Apartments

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 44
BY MONTH: November 2010