What the hell?! My brain dedicates valuable dream time to anti-DRM agitprop, also the sadness upon waking...

BLOT: (26 Feb 2013 - 11:42:37 AM)

What the hell?! My brain dedicates valuable dream time to anti-DRM agitprop, also the sadness upon waking...

Sometime this morning, I woke up and saw Sarah getting ready for work. I don't know what time that would be, but it felt relatively late for her to be here. Then, I rolled over and went back to bed. The dream came after.

In the dream, I was trying to watch a Christopher Nolan-esque Batman movie. Not Dark Knight Rises, though I think my brain took it as such originally and then added things to it. A lot of things. My brain, you see, is a joker at heart, mocking the eventual heat death of the universe by asking entropy if that is all it's got. In this case, the extremely long nameless Batman movie had elements of other super-hero franchises and some long subplot about a couple being hunted by government ops turned terrorists but it turned out they weren't a married couple so much as a man being tortured by an otherworldly being who only appeared to be his loving wife in some angles of perception but it kept looping back on itself and dragging him with it.

The dream was raised to high comedy, as much as anti-DRM agitprop can be, when I didn't have a disk player so I was having to watch a temporary streaming copy unlocked by my purchase, but the hours-long slog of a film was too long to actually finish in the time period set by the DRM lock-out, and I was only about 20% of the way—and a handful of hours—through the movie when the digital copy ceased being functional. I went next door—like many of my dreams, this took place nearly entirely inside of one mega-structure building—and bribed my neighbors into letting me use their computer to rip a copy of the movie by letting them keep a copy. Since I had burned up my one DRM-allowed chance to watch it, we could not play it via their player and ended up using something like an advanced VLC to get a rip.

Or so I assume, since about this time, another, female, neighbor showed up and started flirting with me, but then got agitated whenever I would flirt back, so I chased after her and and we ended up waltzing like a bit from a 40s movie, and she called me Dean, and I don't know if that Dean-the-name or Dean-the-job-title, and I woke up.

At any rate, kind of sad to see my brain go all Reddit-esque argument on DRM—even if the odd commentary on movies in general was strangely, if not surprisingly, informative about what I really think—proclaiming that if the manufacturers only made things cheap and easy to share and instantly available and let's aim for free and see where it goes from there then we-the-consumer would buy things left and right and so since the publishers haven't done this, they are actually forcing us poor, middle-class-waged victim-consumers to go out and torrent and share and risk legal repurcussions and we are the fans and every artist owes the fans everything and so forth.

Anyhow, when I woke up, I was temporarily excited to see this email:

Because Maruchan Mushroom Ramen is my kryptonite, one of my favoritest things, and it seems to be strangely "out of print"...except when I went to the link, I found out this:

Which means I can pay over six bucks in shipping per box, with an 80% approval rating merchant (1/5 of shipments had an error), and these might be old boxes found sitting around as opposed to new boxes. Sigh. I think I'll pass, for now, but I might break down if they are still there in a couple of weeks.

Sad face.

Thank goodness I've read an old Cracked article about real-life urban legends to cheer myself up since then.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: February 2013