If anyone doubted the fact that the RIAA is merely a floudnering industry trying to keep itself afloat by whatever dastardly means are available to it, think on this. The RIAA has acquired legal authority to receive royalties for any music streamed online, no matter who controls the copyright.
Perhaps I shouldn't bother bringing stuff like this up, especially since my opinion won't change anything, but this is absurd. I just wanted to express that.
Sarah was working on writing accounts of 9 different species of birds for her ornithology class, so I decided to sketch each of the birds as she got to them. I used references from Google, of course. It was very fun.
The very young: 3ish-year old landlady
The very old: The Zimmers
I was talking to Aaron last night, and I wanted to use the term "ur-poem", in a rather limited sense. But I wasn't quite sure if that would be precisely what I wanted to say, so I did a quick google search to see if it was common. For "ur-poem", I recieved rather disgusting results.
In the first two pages, there was only a single hit that was what I had intended (at the beginning of the second page). The next proper hit was five pages in. The others were all variants on the soul-reaving "i luv ur poem!"
This disgusts me.
The proper usage of the phrase "ur-poem" is not some stupid slack-jawed internet-shorthand. The prefix "ur-" means "original", and "prototypical" [wikipedia]. (Interestingly, the root is German. As in ursprache, protolanguage. I thought it would have something to do with the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur.)
Just so you know.
I paint in Photoshop.
I compose poetry in my favorite code editor.
Mmmmm.
I just realized that I have been keeping up my book list for a year. Here are some statistics:
time period: April 13, 2006 to April 12, 2007
books read: 102
books per month: 8.5
best month: August 2006 – 22 books
worst month: September 2006 and February 2007 – 3 books
best author: Roger Zelazny – 16 books (they're small)
genre – see how sparse non sci-fi/fantasy is?
poetry: 4
mystery: 1
essay/non-fiction: 7
thought: 2
other: 3
literature: 4
humor: 1
by month
2006
2007
other notes:
I have not read a book twice this year, which seems unusual.
I counted books by "Various Authors" as having one author, but cowritten books count for each author
The favorite book thing is probably not as useful as "notable" book, because I hardly need to mention (for example) that Fahrenheit 451 was my favorite when I read it.
Genre is very iffy. I didn't do it nearly as carefully as I should have.
Sarah can attest that I do something similar to this.
Except instead of factoring, I convert them into their lowest possible base. So, a time like 10:01 would be in base 2 (decimal: 9), a time like 1:22 would be in base 3 (decimal: 17), etc. It gets harder and harder to do, so base 7 is quite difficult (although base 9 is extremely easy by comparison).
I once told Josh a story about how I woke up at 8 (10:00), but didn't get up until 12 (11:00). I said that I needed to leave for my class around 4 (1:00), so that I could start taking my test at 6 (1:10), but that I definitely wouldn't be finished by 7 (1:11). He was confused, to say the least.
Joyous news today: iTunes will carry label EMI's entire catalog in higher-quality, DRM-free form
some important bits: they will be priced at 1.29 instead of 0.99; old, DRMed tracks can be upgraded by paying the difference; albums will be upgraded with no price difference; Beatles music will still not be among the offerings
This is an important step forward for the music industry. Granted, to anyone who knows anything about music it has been an obvious necessity for a long time now, but that doesn't equate to actual practice. It was impossible to tell how long it would take for this to come about, and I am grateful it started as soon as it has.
I predict that the music industry is going to see a quick leap in sales as many of the holdouts who didn't want to restrict themselves with locked-up music start buying digital music. That will be strong incentive for other large labels to begin offering their music similarly freed.
Steve Jobs has now offered proof that he was serious when he wrote in his February open letter that whenever a label was ready to commit to distributing DRM-free music, Apple was ready as well. Major kudos to you, sir.
The trend has gained its foothold. Now it's only a matter of time.
Next on the agenda: decriminalizing the file-sharing of copyrighted tracks
Sarah sent me this, and it is utterly amazing.
O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just waiting to get at the drinks and food–
And the priest! He looking at me if I masturbated
asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife?
And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!
I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back
She's all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!
And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on–then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes
Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
The winking bellboy knowing
Everybody knowing! I'd be almost inclined not to do anything!
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
running rampant into those almost climatic suites
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls
I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy a saint of divorce–
"Once upon a time," Finnan had told her, "the gods got fed up with this not existing malarkey that they'd had to put up with for the last forever, because if you don't exist, well, there's no pressing need to get out of bed of a morning; it's not like ye've got any work to go to, eh, and obviously that kind of unemployment lends itself to low self-esteem, if not downright depression. So they all came together one day and decided amongst themselves that they wanted to have a go at this existing thing. They'd been watching humans at it for a good few millennia, from the insides of their heads, living in the human imagination as they did, and the humans seemed to be having all sorts of strange experiences—living, dying, fucking, grieving, hunting, drinking—hell, even suffering is at least an experience, and to a god that only gets the secondhand scraps of dreams and delusions, well, it's better than nothing. Of course, most people have such poor imaginations that the gods had no idea what they were in for. They thought it would be all epic battles and noble struggles, valiant causes, good against evil. Ye have to pity them, sure because they weren't at all prepared for life as it is, poor sods. What the fuck is this, they says to themselves, when they finally find a way to push themselves out from the back of our heads and into the noggin as a whole, when they pick themselves up off the floor and dust off their stolen bodies and look around at the world. What the fuck is this? Where's the grand quests and eternal mysteries? Where's the foreshadowings and symmetries, the plots, the themes? Where's the meaning? O, in time some of them would come to live it, sure, this mad world of ours; but some of them, well, they just keep trying to make it fit their notion of what a world should be like. They're insane, of course, and sooner or later one of them will come along and try and rope you into some mad empire-building scheme of theirs. And, of course, if you're not with them you're against them, as far as they're concerned. Take my advice and steer well clear of them."
—Hal Duncan