out of the blue

Music artists don't need protection from piracy, they need protection from the RECORD INDUSTRY.

On the whole, pirates are people trying to improve their quality of life without harming the artists who are their beneficiaries. They still buy music, they still go to shows, they still support in many ways the artists they deem worthy of their money. The RIAA, on the other hand, is out to SCREW artists. They are out to transform the cultural scene of the world into a barren wasteland of commercialism.

Screw them.

I am not going to buy any more music. I am going to pirate every CD I want, and if I want to reimburse the band, I will find a way to do so that does not support this unconscionable violation of the artists. I will still spend just as much money on music, but I refuse to benefit in any way the RIAA. If I am convinced that some label has a decent relationship with its artists, I will support it, but never at the price of participating in this wanton destruction.

Note that this post is not private. Anyone can read it. Anyone can see that I am planning to break the laws and "steal" music.

Good.

We have gotten to the point as a culture where we accept that anything can be made into property. This is patently false. We need to remember this.

If you stand with me, post something on your blogs. Tell people why you support free sharing of information, of culture, and the proper compensation of artists. Let's have a revolution this generation, so that our children won't have to deal with this absurdity. Call out for solidarity, make sure that your friends know where you stand. Make sure the WORLD knows where you stand.

This is important.

So, I've been reading pretty much non-stop all night. With the exception of getting some food, and talking to people, of course. I'm reading books for my philosophy of technology essay, and I felt like reading as much as possible. So I read two entire books, around 500 pages, in a bit less than 12 hours. It was very exciting. I am rather exhausted right now, but I'm trying to decide whether to go on to another book, or sleep. Hmmm….

This came up in a conversation today, from the lips of Aaron Brown. I don't hardly remember the circumstances, but it was hilarious. So I went downstairs and brought it into existence.

Stolen from sister Jenny.

[1] Do you ever see garbage bags on the side of the highway and wonder if there are body parts inside?

Well, now I will…

[2] If you ever got the chance to practice cannibalism, would you?

No. I find it morally abhorrent.

[3] If forced to overdose on a drug, which one would you choose?

Hmmm… As long as it wasn't a bad trip, acid sounds pretty interesting. And if I didn't have to deal with the bad long-term effects (overdose, you see), it might be pretty fun. I've always wondered what reality would be like if it were different.

[WOULD YOU RATHER BE…]

[4] Shot or stabbed?

Shot.

[5] Asphyxiated or exsanguinated?

Asphyxiated.

[6] Drowned or buried alive?

Drowned.

[7] Killed by blunt-force trauma to the head or crushed to death?

Head trauma.

[8] Poisoned or overdosed?

Poisoned!

[9] Killed by a flesh-melting virus or by rats or ants slowly pecking at you?

Virus.

[10] Out of all the above choices, which one do you like best?

I like the idea of poison. Cyanide apples, anyone?

[11] …Which is the worst way to die in your opinion?

Of the choices? Probably the ants or rats.

[12] Killed (by a person) intentionally, or by accident?

By Sarah, intentionally.

[13] Killed by a serial killer (for pleasure) or a hitman (for profit)?

For pleasure (by Sarah).

[14] Killed in a car crash or a plane crash?

Plane crash! I love the sensation of falling.

[15] Killed in your home or away from home?

In my home (which means that my home would have to be a plane).

[16] Killed in your sleep or while watching TV?

Sleep. TV is evil, for the most part.

[17] Killed by someone who knew you, a stalker, or a complete stranger?

Not a stalker. Sarah could kill me, but I think it might be cool to be killed by a complete stranger, provided the reason was interesting enough.

[RANDOM…]

[18] What do you want done with your body when you die?

Ritual grokking.

[19] You're forced to have your funeral at a place OTHER than a church – where would you choose?

A place of striking natural beauty. Not so much peaseful as amazing. There are any number of such places, but a lot of them are in the Canadian Rockies.

[20] What song/s would you want played at your funeral?

Queen – Another One Bites the Dust
I'll Fly Away (from the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, sung by people who mean a lot to me)

I'm sure there are others. I love music, and it helps me deal with crazy situations.

[21] What outfit would you like to be buried in?

Blue shorts and a t-shirt? But without shoes.

[22] Who do you want to give your eulogy?

Whoever knew me best, and could best speak for and to me.

[23] Any other specifics about your funeral you'd like to share?

The part of me that's not grokked can be cremated and scattered to the winds.

[24] Would you rather be forgotten about when you die, or remembered but hated?

Forgotten.

[25] Would you rather die alone, or die loved but leave a heartbroken mate behind?

I think that death is actually a beautiful thing. I would love to experience someone's whole life and then live in solitude for a while before dying myself. But if it's a matter of living a LIFE unloved, I would much rather leave a heartbroken wife behind. I would like to think that she would share my views on life.

It snowed all day yesterday. The world was covered in a blanket of white. Across the street from our house is a park, through which the late-afternoon sun slanted. The trees cast blue shadows, and the shifting tongues of light flickered between them as the day wore on. It was incredibly beautiful today, when it didn't make you think solely of desolation.

One of the stupidest and most absurd interface decisions in Windows XP is the automatic restart that occurs for some Windows updates. It will pop up a dialogue box that says "automatically restarting your computer in 10 seconds", and if you don't stop it in time it'll close all your programs and reboot. It brings horrible images to mind of what might happen if there was an unsaved document up at the time, or a large file transfer going on overnight.

As it is, I've never lost anything important from a reboot, but I have been rather confused when coming back to my computer and finding Ubuntu running instead of Linux. I only figured out today that it must have been due to the automatic restarts, so I looked up a way to turn it off. If you care about the health of your computer, you might want to change this setting as well.

( instructions )

I'd like to point you all to a post on Making Light titled "Naming the War". It's amusing.

Here is a quote that I thought fascinating from a book by Cory Doctorow, a brilliant modern author and a staunch proponent of digital rights:

The most striking thing about cunning artifice is its sudden absence. While the actors are on stage, they can command our complete attention, still the nattering voices in our minds, suspend our disbelief to the rafters. But no matter how magical the action onstage is, it can't touch the shocking and wildly-dissonant moment when the curtain rings down and the lights come up, returning the theatre from a house of wonders to a mundane place of people and things. In that interstitial moment, the hot second when the world slides from fantasy to reality, our brains do a kind of flip-flop that is more interesting than anything on the stage or off it.

– A Place So Foreign and 8 More by Cory Doctorow ( amazon )

If you want to read more, most of the stories in the collection are online somewhere. The best one I've read so far is the title story. Six of the stories (including "A Place So Foreign") are located on his website (along with the introduction by Bruce Sterling), and "0wnz0red" can be found here. I can't recommend him highly enough, if you're at all intrigued by the modern world.

Humans share 95 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees, but they share 99.9 percent with pirates!

–Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Today has been a good day. It's kinda interesting the variety of my reading material today: I finished off the last 125 pages of Foundation by Isaac Asimov, read about 70 pages of The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, and read about 40 pages out of the poetry collection Intensive Care, by Miroslav Holub. So I've read classic epic science fiction, recent non-fiction argumentation for the non-existance of God, and Czech imagist poetry written by an immunologist and translated into English.

Speaking of books, ever since April, I've been keeping track of the books that I read. Here are the monthly statistics:

• April – 5
• May – 5
• June – 3
• July – 22
• August – 5
• September – 3
• October – 6

This comes to an average of 7 books a month, although if you exclude July as an outlier, it comes to 4.5. I was very surprised to note that I read 22 books in July, but you have to remember that a lot of them were only about 200 pages in length (The Amber Chronicles, by Roger Zelazny. By contrast, two of the June books were about 600 pages each (the ones by Dan Simmons). Some interesting trends. I may at some point add a page that calculates such statistics, but that'll probably come in the next iteration of the database structure and interface design.

Finally, I'd like to share a poem. It's by Miroslav Holub, from the collection that I'm engaged in reading. It's funny, but also interesting. Here it is: