Some Words

Old link from Boing Boing in which the entertainment industry calls people who use encryption are pedophiles. Man… I work at an ISP, and by that standard everyone I work with has short eyes. But that’s actually really canny. There’s a history of pedophilia being used to tar things. Think about that. If you hear about pedophiles in the media, the reporter always goes out of their way to underline that they find the activity loathsome. It’s so stigmatized that just reporting on it makes you have to deny that you are one. Painting encryption as the domain of sex offenders may be the entertainment industry’s only way of stopping this otherwise totally sane and sensible thing to do with your data.

Oh and speaking of data, this other Boing Boing post underlines how they want you to give up the right to own it.

The Valve had this little bit about why people like me are posting pointless chunks of our personal lives online.

Matthew Yglesias laments that he likes a band that Pitchfork doesn’t. I feel for you Matt. Maybe not on that band, but for a review site Pitchfork often feels like they’re too worried with being trend setters, or getting caught out liking something dorky. That might harm their indie cred, but it would tell me that they actually cared about the music, or having fun with the stuff. Still, there are times when the reviewer seems to know that music can be about fun more than art or that you don’t have to take yourself seriously all the time. Sometimes they even let on that personal taste or situation might effect you’re like or dislike of an album, not its inherent value as some sort of object of art.

And finally, me wanty, but $30 is a bit high for a t-shirt to me.

P.S. Jewish Priates!

I want to sail the seas in search of booty like my ancestors.

Back in the day I had an incredibly crappy web page, where from time to time I would post thoughts and things I had written. It was like this blog, but without php making things easy, nasty graphics that I had done myself in photo shop, and even less frequently updated. I can tell you’re all wondering why I’m not an internet phenomenon already.

Anyhow one of the things I wrote about back then, was how I wished there was a service, either a little program (the sort of thing that would now go in the OS X dashboard) or an email service, that would aggregate all the bands I wanted to track so I would know when they were coming through town. A lot of bands had sign up lists, but it was not consistent, and usually they would just send out a big tour schedule. I’m lazy and I wanted it to feel personal.

Well, yesterday the good folks of Fabulist let me know that such a thing now exists. Tourfilter, and here I link the Twin Cities portion, but it’s there for a bunch of other cities. Lets you track who’s coming to town. They send you email notices and if you want to, you can post it to your blog. And oh, what’s this I see? It can integrate with iCal and thus end up in your dashboard. Now I have even less excuse for why I don’t go to all those shows I miss.

Aislinn gets it right on the subjecto of Snakes on a Plane. Half the people I know, if asked how much illicitly acquired data they go through in a day would have to give the answer in gigs. I think Tycho once used the phrase “bathing in a sea of illegal data,” but I’m too lazy to look it up. Indeed, I would say that illegal data downloads were the porn of our day, (cheap, easy, often of dubious quality) if not for the fact that 80% of it is probably actually porn. Indeed, the net seems to only support two enterprises right now, porn and T-Shirt companies.