Humor
Humor is a product of ransacking the obvious in search of something less tedious.
Motor
Well, the best-laid plans are the first to go bottoms-up. I find it most prudent to approach life from a vantage of abject befuddlement.
Eighth note appetite
My toaster oven is clicking in precise time with this Queen song. Headlong into toasted cheese!
Spamaray
I wish everything came in amaray DVD cases. Except for those things that come in digipaks.
I’d want sandwiches to come in amaray cases. So I could neatly stack them in the fridge.
Criticism by numbers
Three things to consider, when regarding an expressive work:
1) How well it says what it’s trying to say
2) Whether what it’s trying to say is worth hearing
3) Whether there’s worth to what it actually does say
When you’ve found all your answers, the order in which to weight them is: 3, 1, 2.
Snips of conversation
A nail clipper is a pretty interesting little bit of machinery — the construction, and the principles behind it. It’s very simple, yet it’s also oddly complex. And on a level it seems like some ancient baroque thing. Like some awkward eighteenth century invention, that just happens to work as intended. And on top of that there are some curious concessions to convenience — the complex way the top swivels back around so you can close it flat, and the nail file.
The idea behind it is… a bit odd. Nail scissors aren’t good enough. What we really need is a finger guillotine! No gradual snips here. Just snap ’em off, one quick motion! And the way it achieves this is by a rather simple yet oddly complex lever and spring system, that transfers a huge amount of force to a tiny area. (To make up for the lack of the falling distance, you see.)
It’s such a strange invention.
Unpacked Excerpt
The point in having things is that they possess some practical value, that to some degree empowers you.
This is no less true of art than of a wrench. A wrench is a physical tool; a novel or a painting or a videogame is an intellectual or emotional tool. Every perspective we absorb further helps us shape our own ideas, much as a hammer and saw help us shape a room full of lumber.
The Recall Horror
Nostalgia is poison. Zombie thoughts, out to getcha! They’ll eat you alive!
The present is all we’ve got! If you can’t keep it vital, let it go!
Of course, in our postmodern world there are plenty of ways to fold most of the history of the universe into a pithy, intertextual, and up-to-the-minute Youtube video.
What we really need is a post-fetishism movement.
For further discussion, see this. And how’s that for reappropriation, daddy-o!
Fromage
There are four levels of cheese reception.
1) Being unaware of cheese
2) Being disgusted by cheese
3) Being able to ignore the cheese
4) Being able to embrace the cheese
Swash awash
“Piracy”, in the intellectual property sense, tends to have a regulating effect. If people enjoy a work enough, they tend to want to own their own copy — preferably a copy presented in the best possible quality. That’s why people buy DVDs after seeing a movie or watching a TV show, and that’s why “free samples” exist. You’d have a much harder sell by avoiding the initial courtship and just asking people to buy an entertainment product, sight unseen. To an extent, the idea is kind of ludicrous.
The downside from a marketing perspective is that if people don’t enjoy a work, and they know that ahead of time, they tend not to buy it. As a result you get these interesting effects where, say, Brittney Spears loses sales to “piracy” because people don’t consider her music worth paying for, and smaller, more interesting bands are often “made” by “piracy” because people who might like the band’s music are able to hear it, hang onto it, and judge it over an extended period.
From what I can see, the only way this could be a bad thing is if you’ve invested a ton of money in something culturally vapid, and you expect your dividends nonetheless. I’m sure the natural balance of the universe would feel powerfully unfair in that instance, and you’d be tempted to lobby the government to draft all kinds of arbitrary regulations to ensure you get the result you wanted. If you’re offering something of real merit, however, there doesn’t seem much danger of losing profit. Indeed, the more people who know, the better.
To boil it down, people generally:
1) want to own things that they enjoy
2) are willing to pay for things they consider of value
3) tend to value “legitimacy”, to a point.
If you place before a person a dirty CD-R burn of an album and a full, legit copy, both for free, I think it’s fair to say that most people will choose the legit one. If instead you charge a reasonable price for the legit copy, a fair number may still buy it if they already know that they adore the music on the disc, they know they won’t find the CD for a better price, and they can afford it at the moment. If you charge an unreasonable price, or don’t allow people to test the album out first to see if they like it, the free, dirty copy will look all the more appealing by comparison.
All that things like Youtube and P2P networking and tape-trading do is bring a level of honesty and clarity to the exchange. So long as you offer something of merit, at a reasonable price, and your customers know that they like it, you’ve got nothing to fear. If anything, this kind of distribution serves as free advertising; all it should do is increase your potential customer base, to a certain threshold. (After all, every work has only a certain natural breadth of appeal.)
So yeah, whatever. Go ahead and watch what you will, how you will. Make up your own mind what you value, and to what extent. Then go ahead and purchase the things you like, provided you’ve the money after you buy what you need. There’s nothing dishonest or unethical about any of this. Anyone who tries to tell you differently has an agenda to protect.
Further Eefining the Definition
Art is a means of communication through implicit, rather than explicit, symbolism and meant to appeal to the subconscious and intuition, rather than to the conscious and reason.
This communication can be conducted through any medium. The fun part about it: intent needn’t even be a factor; merely communication. So if the recipient of a manmade work reads in it something that was not consciously intended by its creator, that reading (presuming it’s genuine) is as legitimate an interpretation as any based upon a deliberate message. Perhaps more so.
As regards non-manmade works — a sunset, a rainbow, an orangutan; whatever natural beauty you might appreciate — that’s somewhat different in the sense that, provided you aren’t subscribing to a supernatural interpretation of artist (say, God), it truly is a one-sided conversation.
I suppose the act of receiving an artistic message would best be described as inspiration. One may be inspired by anything, of course; art is simply a manufactured way of appealing to that impulse.
Note for the balconies
I’m just going to say this here for posterity, so I can link back to it in a few years.
Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are going to bomb, people. Not as badly as UMD, though that should give you an idea what we’re dealing with. One or both will hobble on for a while as a high-end videophile format; there’s a hole to fill, now that laserdisc’s gone away. As a mass format, though, DVD’s not budging. Not so long as most people don’t even know if they’re watching a TV show in the right aspect ratio, and not so long as there’s nothing wrong with DVD.
People change their ways when they’ve damn good reason to, and not a moment before. Plain old DVD is going to stick around until it’s too unwieldy to maintain any longer — if for no other reason than that there’s too much personal and architectural investment in the format to arbitrarily pick up and switch to something that’s exactly the same except that guy you know who will scream at you for not hooking up your stereo correctly insists it’s somehow better.
For there to be a successor to a format as established and perfect, for its part, as DVD it will have to offer something so significantly different and so obviously better in just about every aspect of convenience, simplicity, and quality, that there is no comparison between the two. You create something that’s meant to be compared, and you’ve lost before you’ve begun — however nice your product in its own right. Nobody cares! At least, nobody outside the geek ghetto — and that’s the whole issue, in a nutshell.
In conclusion, Sony is fucked.
opinions
He has the right to voice an opinion. Your response was unnecessarily rude. Please refrain from such “snarkasm” in future, ok?
Thing is, simply voicing an opinion isn’t terribly constructive either. It’s not an issue of whether this person has the right to or not; it’s an issue of whether doing so adds to the discussion.
Okay, so it’s “naff”. Fair enough. Point is, simply declaring it so doesn’t say anything particularly meaningful. Now if this assertion were paired with an explanation for why it’s naff (whether insightful or bizarre), then hey — there’s a point for discussion. Someone here might have a chance of learning something, or having an interesting thought, however trivial.
On its own, though, raw opinion is pretty rude itself. It takes up space, demands attention to itself, and gives nothing in return. It is a vacuum of communication, crying “I” at the heart of the world. Beyond that, it’s uncomfortably prevalent around here. Thus the snippy response; it gets tiresome. Perhaps unwarranted in this circumstance, of course; I’m just slowly getting irritated.
True Balance
I am never so constructive as when I am meant to be working on something else.
The modern heart
The driving force behind all “civilized” behavior is loneliness.