Monthly Archives: May 2010

Apple and Adobe fighting is a lot like when Mommy and Daddy were fighting cause Daddy Slept with the Waitress and Lied about it after

Uncategorized, , , ,

Okay, maybe not the same. At least I don’t see Apple or Adobe having to sleep on the couch or sneak into your room to ask “Is Mommy Still Mad?”.

It’s been really bizarre lately to listen to the fight between Apple and Adobe about whether or not Flash has broken up the family. Mommy and Daddy, stop fighting, Flash will be good and stop getting into trouble at school if you just stop fighting!

Okay, again, that doesn’t seem to work, but let’s put some history into perspective here because both Apple and Adobe seem to have forgotten how the relationship used to work. You see, I used to work as a computer technician years ago for a university, and I remember when Adobe was the big boy in the computer software bin. Adobe Photoshop was the big kid on the block, and I distinctly remember an Adobe sales rep talking to us about Adobe when me, a PC technician, asked, “why are you still making software for Apple?” Back then, I really didn’t see a future for Apple, and honestly, neither did 99 percent of the rest of the planet. But the rep told me that Adobe continued to make its software for both platforms because Apple still did make good computers, and as long as they continued to make quality software for Apple, they were still going to be around to make those good computers. She told me that it was important for Adobe to continue to support both platforms because both platforms were important for different aspects of the creative community.

Flash-forward a decade, and I was shocked to hear Steve Jobs actually trash talking Adobe, which made me wonder if he even remembered how hard certain companies were working to keep Apple as a viable manufacturer of computer equipment. Back then, I don’t think Adobe would have suffered all that much if it dropped Apple as its main platform for its software, but they never did, and they continued to work with Apple to keep making software that helped Apple become the main type of machine for creating design applications. Somehow, something happened that has really put a real wedge into the middle of what used to be a really cohesive agreement.

All I can think is that Apple has completely forgotten how important Adobe is to its software line, especially with its personal computers. If they’re planning to focus on only iPads, iPods and iPhones, then it makes complete sense, but if they’re still planning to make quality computers, why are they doing everything possible to derail their own future? If other manufacturers of multi-platform software see Apple’s encounters with Adobe as a forerunner of their own future encounters with Apple and Macintosh, then Apple is doing everything possible to destroy its own future as a computer manufacturer.

Look, sometimes Mommy and Daddy get back together for the good of the kid, so perhaps Apple needs to start thinking ahead rather than picking fights with former partners. Of course, sometimes Mommy leaves Daddy so Daddy can hook up with Angelina Jolie after she breaks up with her crazy ex-husband, even though everyone said Daddy was nuts for dumping a hottie like Jennifer Aniston, so if that’s the case, we understand. But someone please think about the children….

Do Superpowers Recognize When They’re Losing Their Significance?

Politics, Television, ,

I’ve often wondered what it must have been like to be a citizen of France at the end of the first World War when it can be argued that the French Empire was finally no longer the superpower they once were. Almost overnight, the German war machine built itself up and rolled right over the forces of France, forever destroying their ability to posture like…well, like the French. At the same time, I also wonder how a British Empire citizen must have felt when he or she realized that the imperial power of the once great British Empire was no longer significant. Some might argue this happened right about the time the American colonists kicked them out of the colonies, but it’s quite possible that this demise was coming sooner than that, and that it may have taken a bit longer than 1789 to finally occur.

But what gets me wondering is how those citizens must have not believed that it was possible their empires were no longer the behemoths they once were. Having said that, I start to wonder if the United States might not be in the same boat today, having once been the emergent superpower in the world, but now somewhat irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Oh sure, like most superpowers, we’re still up there at the top of the list, but at the same time I don’t think we evoke the respect and fear that we might have had maybe 50 years ago. Look at how nations like Iran react to the United States today. In the 1960s, a country like Venezuela would never have dared say half the things Chavez says on a daily basis. His country would have been invaded, and he’d be sharing a prison cell with Noriega. Remember that guy?

But not today. Today, the US is seen as one of the most powerful countries in the world, but it’s not seen as the hegemony that it tends to think it is. At one point, in response to 911, we invaded Afghanistan and then for any number of irrational reasons, we invaded Iraq. But then we got bogged down in those stupid wars and we really don’t have a way out. I don’t even think we have a rational reason for why we’re still there, other than “we’ll leave when everything calms down”, which is a pretty scary thought because these are areas that have never really been calmed down, at peace or even stable. Well, Iraq was, but we wiped out the guy who stabilized it, and well, who knows?

During the Cold War, it was probably okay to be one of the main hegemonies in the world, but we were directly at odds with the Soviet Union, and today, I’m not even sure what it is our point is any more. We keep building up a huge military to fight against some mysterious enemy that doesn’t exist, although Russia keeps seeming to want to become the enemy it used to be, even though there really doesn’t seem to be a rational reason to let them do so. There’s nothing about Russia that is really a problem for the United States other than the idea that they’re the “other” hegemony, but in reality aren’t really powerful enough to be just that these days.

That’s the problem right there. We seem to exist to counter a great enemy somewhere, but there is no great enemy anywhere any more other than ideological ones, like the concept of terror. But how do you counter a concept? You really can’t. You can talk about it, scream at it, and claim you will stop it, but it’s an idea, not an actual enemy. It’s like declaring a war against smoke but not recognizing fire as an enemy but something to be coddled in hopes that it will make smoke go away. That’s why I hate these concept wars, like the war on poverty.

But what no one wants to face is the possibility that the United States really has no meaning any more. Think on that for a moment. If someone was to ask you what the United States stands for or means, the usual answers of “freedom” are pretty limiting because “freedom” exists in many places, some of which have more of it than the United States. The idea of the “melting pot” also comes to mind, but in reality it’s more a fantasy and a promise that we don’t actually live up to any more. If you go to any major city, you’ll find more people interested in ethnic and racial separation (within those ethnic and racial identities) than you’ll find that are interested in “melting”. In the old days, the melting pot metaphor was useful because when people melted into society, they still tended to look a lot alike and didn’t seem to want to fall back into their identity separations. But not today. Nowadays, we spend a great deal of energy with politically correct dogma that requires us to work on separating ourselves from each other by color and creed, all in the name of this bizarre fantasy that somehow this will make us all want to live together in harmony. Something really wrong happened in this country, and people are too scared of being branded racists, bigots or haters to want to do anything about it, when in reality the people who want cohesiveness and racial harmony are the ones who most often have least chance of achieving it. It’s pretty hard to advocate for racial harmony when there are people who owe their entire political careers to making sure those separations never go away. Sorry, but that’s a sad sate of our current affairs.

But back to the thesis of this post, and that’s that what we don’t seem to realize might be exactly what is happening all around us: The entire foundation of what makes America “America” has been falling apart for many decades now, and no one is doing anything about trying to bring things to a better place. Instead, every time someone talks about “fixing” America, it ends up being someone who wants to do things that make America that much worse, doing stuff like creating barriers to immigration, forcing English on the population, or just making it so that more and more people hate each other all in the name of some ideal that no one really intends to emulate.

Sadly, most people won’t realize there’s a problem because the fantasy of America is much stronger than any reality can ever be. It’s because of this that we can rack up a massive deficit that is reaching proportions we may never be able to repay. And instead of deal with it, we just stick our heads in the ground and figure that it will all fix itself, or we’ll all live long enough to die before we ever have to deal with the consequences. Well, I have a feeling that many people in the numerous republics of the Soviet Union were probably thinking that nothing bad could ever happen even as the warning signs started appearing in the 1980s, not realizing that in a decade the whole foundation would collapse on itself.

As a huge fan of Stargate SG1, a sign of my eternal geekdom, I have to say that I’ve always been a fan of the one dialogue they kept bringing up, where they’d talk about their main plan, and then realize that if it doesn’t work out well, they’ll have to fall back on Plan B. And in the show, one of the running gags was that they never really had a Plan B, but they’d always just keep running until things worked themselves out. Well, that’s the United States today. Plan A is to hope for a miracle that no one is actually working towards. Which means Plan B is already in place, and we’re running forward, hoping that the evil aliens don’t end up killing us and destroying everything we believe in. Fortunately, in the TV universe, they usually came out ahead. Let’s hope that fantasy is somewhat based on a sense of reality. Otherwise, we might be in a whole heap of trouble, and there’s only so many “To be Continued” episode endings we can use before the network finally realizes it has to cancel the show.

The Inevitable Process of Editing Old Stories

Writing, ,

One of my failings as a writer is I tend to avoid rewriting old stuff. Instead of going back and fixing a lot of my earlier work, I just chalk it up to a learning experience and then write something new. As a result, I have about 150 short stories, 12 novels, and a whole bunch of other writings, including plays, poetry, screenplays and whatnot. But I’ve been writing for about 25 years now, so over this time, I’ve managed to build up quite a catalogue of stuff that just seems to gather dust, or takes up space on hard drives that don’t get used any more.

So, recently, I decided that it was time to start going back, finding this old stuff and rewriting it. A lot of it is actually pretty damn good. Some of it is atrocious. I guess that happens because few people sit down and write War & Peace their first time out. Until that big break, many of us have the bad habit of writing stuff like Raid of the Evil Mole People, or worse….

So, I’ve started with the first of many of my short stories, looking over the list of stuff that hasn’t seen the light of day for years and rewriting them. My first three (figured I’d do this is batches of three and then send them out once completed) are some interesting selections:

“Precipice,” one of my later short stories involving a psychological study of a writer who realizes that his last story may in fact be his LAST story.

“Simple Girl,” a short story of a young woman who sees life in simplicities, but through her daily adventure projects the revelation that perhaps she is the only one who truly understands the complexity of life. This one actually won a contest a few years ago, and I never bothered to do anything with it after winning.

“Postcards From Hell,” one of the last stories in my old Runner series, which was one of my more successful collections of short stories that were heavily published in my early days of my writing career. Most of these stories were dark horror, and at the time I was actually on the way to creating a market for myself in this genre. This was the final story in this grouping, but it was shelved before I ever had the chance to start submitting it. Then I went on a very long hiatus before writing again.

So, I’ll be working on these over the next week. Let’s see if anything comes from it.

Is Ownership an Illusion?

Politics,

Every now and then, a new article on Second Life will pop up, and people will start arguing about whether or not intellectual “property” is, in fact, property. What the argument means is that there are people who own virtual land in games, and they argue that they “own” that land in the real world. Linden Lab, the company that owns Second Life, recently changed its user agreement to indicate that they own their property and that the players only get to use it as Linden Lab allows it. Well, in case you don’t know this, people have spent thousands of dollars buying property in that land and developing it. For them, they’re somewhat pissed. But it’s a show down that is now going to the court systems of the real world in the United States (California, actually, as Linden Lab is located in San Francisco, California). The court system, however, has been very apprehensive about taking cases of this nature, because in case you don’t realize it, a decision on this issue would be one of great magnitude and importance, and no one wants to be the precedent for this sort of litigation.

But you’re probably wondering, who cares? You don’t play Second Life, and chances are you probably don’t play anything else, like World of Warcraft to really care any way. Well, neither do I, but I do find the issue to be one great importance because it is touching on an issue that is very dear to me, and that’s the idea of ownership in general.

You see, I’ve been convinced for a long time now that ownership is really an illusion, something we convince ourselves of being tangible, only because we’ve convinced enough of our neighbors to buy into the fantasy. It’s partly why I’ve never looked at property as an investment. I’ve never bought into the whole idea that it’s actually mine. It’s kind of hard to think that way when the property you’ve bought is subject to taxation by the government that automatically indicates that the property actually belongs to the government and I’m just living on it. I mean, if it was MY property, then no one should be able to benefit from my ownership. It should be mine, straight out.

But it’s not. The government claims that it is authorized to charge me money if I happen to own a bit of property in ITS jurisdiction. If I don’t pay them, they can forcibly take that property from me and give it to someone else. Also, if the government decides it wants to build a tea garden where I happen to have built a gazebo, they can just take it and offer me whatever THEY decide they want to offer me for it. There’s a whole amendment to our Constitution that pretty much says they’re not supposed to do that, but when it comes to government following its own laws, well there’s an exception to everything. When it benefits them, it’s an exception. When it benefits me, it’s a breach of law.

This is a problem that goes way back to before our country was even founded. Kings used to think that they owned all of the territory and that the peasants were just there to work the king’s land. We’re not that far off from where we used to be, even though we took the Lockeian direction and claimed that land we own is now something that belongs to the people and individuals. But it doesn’t. Nothing is really ours as long as someone with more power wants it. If someone with economic power wants your land, he or she attempts to buy it. If that doesn’t work, he or she then attempts to take that land through legal maneuvers, like suing you for some “crime” that you have done to that individual, like growing your weeds too far over a fence or something equally ludicrous. If that doesn’t work, then quite often a business will turn to government to declare your land a public land grab and then take it that way. It happened in San Francisco when I was living there. The government took land that was owned by individuals because they wanted to develop it for “the poor”. When they completed their land grab, businesses lobbied government for it and then took ownership of the same property for private development. The people who complained were pretty much told to shut up, first by loud mouth private interests and then by baton-carrying police officers. Well, the same thing happens all over the country, and whenever you hear of government planning to “clean up” an area, expect a land grab to happen soon after as the richest elements of that society then profit off of the misery of those who were told to move off their previously owned land to make way for “progress”.

What is interesting about this whole thing is that with the collapse of the housing industry, the illusion is a lot more present than it has ever been before. There is currently a huge land grab taking place all across this country, as the rich are now buying up the land that had to be cast aside by those who could no longer afford to make their payments that were too much for them to pay in the first place. It was all a house of cards waiting to fall, and someone removed the queen of spades from the bottom of the deck, and rather than have the whole thing collapse, the whole house is teetering now, just waiting to cave in on itself. Yeah, so much for an overused metaphor….

In the very near future, we should see a lot of interesting tales as the reality of what has taken place starts to make its way into the public realm. A lot of this was able to continue as long as no one ever questioned how it could keep maintaining itself, but the era of manifest destiny has been over for a very long time. There are no more trails to travel with lots of land as far as the eye can see. We reached the ocean, and ever since then there’s been the realization that expansion is over; consolidation is never as much fun or as opportunistic for all involved. Now that we’ve turned back inward on what we passed on the journey to reach the water, we’re left with the realization that there’s nowhere else for us to go, and all that is left is what we have already seen. Mix that in with the reality that ownership of land is just an illusion, and there’s a very interesting powder keg preparing itself for something. What that something is might be much more interesting as it begins to reveal itself in our future.

Reflections on Life in General

Politics, Religion, , ,

I spent a few hours this weekend paying bills. You know, the usual, where you sit down with your check book and write out checks for all of the bills that have been building up over the last few weeks. The kind that build up not because you can’t afford to pay them, but just because you don’t want to take the time to pay them. I find myself doing that a lot, and have even paid some bills really late because I just didn’t feel like filling out the paper work that is required to fill out in order to pay a simple gas bill. I really hate  paying bills, and no matter how many times I pay it, that feeling just doesn’t change.

For me, it feels like my life has very little meaning when it comes down to it, because when I’m sitting there with a handful of utility and credit card bills, one starts to feel that there’s really little purpose in life other than paying bills to people who don’t provide anything for me other than little nuances that one needs to endure in order to live somewhat comfortably. I pay a gas bill because I don’t want to freeze, and sometimes I like to cook food without having to rub two sticks together and hope that millions of years of evolution don’t put me back a couple of thousands years to where I’m still required to provide my own fire. I pay an electricity bill so that I can watch TV, turn on the lights, run the microwave (avoiding that rubbing sticks together thing), fire up my computer to write this blog, and other things that come from Ben Franklin’s kite discovery a couple of centuries ago. I pay my rent bill so I don’t get kicked out on my behind and actually have a stuff to put my, to put what George Carlin eloquently referred to as, “stuff”. I pay my car payment so I can avoid having to take the bus to work, and then I get to pay my insurance bill so that I’m legally allowed to drive my car on the road. Add in credit card bills and other little nuanced payments here and there, and honestly, I’m paying a lot of money to maintain a very low level of existence.

But what’s the meaning of it all? I mean, why continue to pay all of this money to entities that don’t care one iota about me in any way just so one can continue to survive? Throughout history, reflective souls have constantly asked the inward-looking questions of “why am I here?” and each generation seems to have one or two philosophers that think they have it all figured out, yet why is it that we still keep having to ask this question? I mean, we can read all sorts of philosophers and think we have it all figured out, but I get the impression that no one has ever really figured it out, because we still have to keep asking the questions. But we don’t seem to come up with any real answers.

I remember a colleague and I once joked in political science that we were challenging the paradigm Americanist belief that all representatives do what they do in order to be re-elected. We posited that perhaps the rationale behind congressional representatives was a little simpler, that maybe they did what they did in office, and to achieve office, because they were interested in dating. In other words: Attracting a potential mate. Sure, those of us in the discipline laughed at us, and we chalked it up as a joke, but if you think about it, there’s probably something there. If you look at it from a basic biological necessity, most people tend to do the things they do in order to perpetuate the species. Men fluff their feathers in hopes of attracting a mate, so why couldn’t it be seen that in the end congressional representatives do everything they do in hopes of perpetuating their species as a biological necessity? Sure, getting elected, or re-elected, may appear to be the end goal, but what if it’s really just a step in a biological direction? I honestly think that scientists aren’t all that interested in examining such issues with sincerity because then it would present all sorts of dilemmas that they don’t want to deal with, especially if the base values of a politician are narrowed down to simple reproductive functions.

Which brings me back to my original question of “why are we here?”. I mean, is that all there is? Are we here specifically just for reproducing, and thus, all of our mannerisms and manifestations mean nothing but achieving survival through offspring? I’d really hate to think that life is as simple as that, and the bigger picture is really nothing more than just the continuation of the species.  Wouldn’t that be truly sad to discover that after all of this evolution we’re no different, or better, than a snail slug? What a joke that would be if our achievement of sentience means absolutely nothing but an ability to acknowledge that we really don’t have a purpose in the first place.

All of this discussion makes it really difficult to conclude without at least mentioning the concept of religion because when it comes to this type of conversation, there’s always this tendency to try to find answers through a “higher” meaning. Having been brought up in the methodist sense of spirituality, I often find it interesting that there are people who can so easily surrender to the idea that it’s all just a part of a religious purpose, that there’s no need to think any deeper than that. In a Penrose sort of way, it’s hard not to be able to acknowledge the possibility of something deeper than basic humanity, but at the same time it’s so difficult to accept that we have managed to figure it all out because someone in an earlier age, with less ability to understand the bigger picture, had it all figured out and wrote it down in a book for the rest of us to follow, especially when the book is so damn confusing, is interpreted so many different ways (often leading to war, subjugation and hatred), and no two copies of “the book” are believed to be any more valid than any other. And then the followers of those books do such horrific deeds and offer up such hatred towards other people, all in the name of doing the right thing.

Anyway, I’m starting to ramble now, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Thumbs up for new Court Yard Hounds CD

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Most people are probably wondering who the hell is Court Yard Hounds, which is part of the interesting approach to this band. First off, the band is essentially two women: Emily Robinson and Martie Maguire, who you might know as the two back-up singers for the Dixie Chicks. Natalie Maines has been taking time off, so the two of them decided to release their own music while waiting for Maines to jump back on the music wagon again.

It’s a really interesting CD, too. The first release of “The Coast” has been climbing the charts lately, and it’s a pretty cool song. The other hit they have going for them on the album is “See You in the Spring”, which is a duet between Robinson and Jakob Dylan. But so far the really power ballad on the CD, in my opinion, is Ain’t No Son, which is this song that starts off very nice and sweet in typical country style and then kind of just erupts. The fascinating thing about these musicians is that, like their last album, Taking the Long Way, their music is really hard to pin to one genre; sometimes it has no tie at all to anything you’re used to. Ain’t No Son is one of those kinds of songs. It starts out with a sweet, little fiddle/banjo jingle and then just builds into something hard to describe.

The only thing missing is Maines’s distinct voice. Robinson, who does the main vocals on all of the songs but Gracefully (which is sung by Maguire) sounds a lot like Sheryl Crow without that distinctive Crow guitar. But the variation is definitely worth the journey until the Dixie Chicks reunite again.

The Problem for the Future Might Not Just Be the Government

Politics, , , , ,

As an advocate of free speech and very (extremely) limited government, I’m often talking about the problem of government control and its intrusive nature. For those like me, we’re often seeing the future as a variation of “1984” and fear the process of new-speak and Big Brother. But one thing that has emerged over the latter part of the 20th century and into the early part of the 21st century is the revelation that the problem may not be coming from big government, but from big business. This is somewhat ironic, or tragic, because most people who tend to advocate for less government are usually big fans of privatization and the freedom of business interests. But what has happened is that big business is slowly usurping big government as the entity we most need to fear.

Look at Microsoft, Google and Facebook for examples of what I’m talking about. Microsoft won the operating system wars by dogmatic policies and, as some lawsuits would have you believe, through some pretty crappy business practices involving monopolies and claims of stolen innovations. Whether or not there’s any truth in that latter claim, I don’t really care about, but what arguments can be made is that by having huge monopolies of this nature, we’ve really made it practically impossible to innovate in new directions because dogmatic companies just don’t let you do that.

But to make matters worse, these types of companies are now going out of their way to innovate their own successes on the backs of most of their customers. Facebook, lately, has shown itself to be a behemoth that no longer cares what people think as it buys and sells our own personal information, and it laughs at us if we think what they’re doing is wrong in any way. I love their procedure for dealing with you when you decide to quit them. Instead of actually allowing you to delete your account, they “allow” you to “deactivate” your account so that they can still use your information and treat you as one of their products rather than one of their customers. To ACTUALLY delete your account, you have to go through a four or five click process to finally reach a page that then informs you that it will take 2 weeks to delete your account, as if the owners of Facebook realize that you’re being rash and hotheaded, so they’ll give you some time to think about it before they’ll allow you to make the “mistake” of leaving. Even when you deactivate your account, they make you feel so guilty about it, reminding you that if you should dare to deactivate your account, you will no longer be able to communicate with your friends, your wife, your loved ones or your family EVER again.

The biggest problem with some of these companies is that they buy and trade our own private information as if it is their own. And read the legalese they make you click and agree to before you ever access their pages. THEY OWN YOU and your information, and you’re only living in THEIR worlds. That’s really how they feel about it.

Lately, there has been a new movement to pretty much dump Facebook because of their unilateral strategies in ownership of information. The backlash has been a claim of “if you don’t continue with Facebook, then you can never communicate with anyone ever again”. It’s straight out arrogance and stupidity, but people fall for it.

What we used to fear was government becoming too powerful, which is why we made rules of what government could and could not do. But private enterprises don’t have this same type of hold on it, unless you count the government itself. Right now, Congress is looking into a number of these different large companies to stop their approaches to ownership over data and information, but these companies are doing an amazing thing as a response: They’re appealing to citizens and acting as if government is using its power to stop them from donig what is their right to do, which essentially means they are upset that government is stopping them from doing to us exactly what we wanted to make sure government could never could do to us. The irony is that because they’re not government, they think it’s okay that they get to do things that we would never allow government to do.

As big businesses are becoming more aligned with the wants and needs of government, and often use government to back up their plans (police agencies have always responded to the needs of large businesses before they respond to the common folk), this collusion may one day reach a point where we are going to find ourselves being detained by government at the behest of these organizations. Recently, when Gizmondo printed a story about the new iPhone, the government raided their offices and took all of their computer equipment. No one knows who pulled the government’s strings on that as Apple claims it was the individual who lost the iPhone, while many others claim it had to have been Apple because the government agencies involved then went silent when questioned further.

It might not be something people realize is a problem just yet, but when it becomes a problem that everyone notices, it will then be too late. But when has that ever caused anyone to be proactive about one’s own rights and responsibilities?

The Demise of the Dedicated Movie Critic

Movies

There’s an interesting article at CNN’s site, titled, “Is social media killing film criticism?” And it’s an interesting question. I mean, one might wonder if social media is killing film criticism when everyone has an opinion, and people constantly have something to say. I’m no different than anyone else here as I’ve reviewed a couple of movies here recently as well.

But I think there’s more to the situation than just social media as being a knife wedged into the back of film criticism. To begin with, I think film criticism as a whole has suffered a lot lately with the demise of the two media darlings of film criticism themselves: Siskel and Ebert. When Gene Siskel died, that left Roger Ebert as the only one left, and for the longest time there was an attempt to recapture what Siskel and Ebert had on evening television every week. Those two arguing back and forth over whether or not a cartoon mouse was socially relevant in a film, or whether or not Jeff Spicoli really managed to overcome the evils of Mr. Hand to the point of achieving social relevance  (Fast Times at Ridgemont High). Almost every week after Siskel died there was a new replacement to argue with Ebert, and it just never worked. Come to think of it, there was really  never another reviewer or set of reviewers that managed to become as socially relevant as those two, including Ebert alone.

Now, Ebert is suffering from the inability of being able to speak, and his articles are all we have, and it’s just not the same. Movie reviews are becoming 20th century artifacts, and it’s very hard to get anyone to even care what one has to say when it comes to a review.

Nowadays, it’s pretty hard to even go to see a movie because you really can’t trust anyone’s opinion. Reviewers are sporadically relevant, but mostly interchangeable and incapable of achieving a sense of usefulness. I recently went to see Kick Ass, realizing that the reviews were pretty much all over the place, so I had to make a judgment of my own. And with movies being so expensive these days, and so many remakes of remakes, it’s really hard to even trust a trailer because those thirty second soundbytes can sometimes be the best 30 seconds of the entire film.

A new movie is coming out tomorrow that is getting all of the hype, and that’s Iron Man 2, and already the reviewers are all over the place with this one. I’ve heard some saying it’s great, others saying its rehashed old stuff with lots of special effects, and others saying that it’s just not worth our time. The old days of relying on the two thumbs up or down are gone, so we pretty much have to fend for ourselves.

And that’s pretty scary.

Survey results indicate that people lie a lot

Uncategorized

Coredata did a survey in Australia the other day where their results indicated that if people had better access to TV shows, movies and music, in a method much like bit torrent (how they illegally download them now), then they’d be more likely to pay for the stuff they currently steal. Yeah, right. Let’s unpack this survey a bit to see what was really being said here.

First, it was conducted in Australia, so let’s put that part into perspective. The survey results people want to cross apply this to everywhere, including the US and Europe, but the survey was conducted in Australia, meaning that people who don’t have steady access to a lot of western material, especially US shows, movies and music, are, of course, going to have to turn to whatever mechanism they can in order to get the material. When I was in South Korea, I couldn’t get US shows, so the only way to get them was to either buy them through iTunes (and lie that I was actually in the states at the time I got the material), or to download it illegally. Not much of a choice. Yeah, if it was legally available, I would have probably paid for it that way. But it wasn’t, so I did without (unlike others who would have pirated it).

Now, let’s unpack another part of this and pretend that this survey was done in the US. Sure, if I was a pirate, and someone asked me what it would take for me to buy my stuff legally, I’d say that if they made it more available, and easier to obtain, I’d probably buy it. But if I’m already doing it illegally, chances are pretty good that when they produced it in an easier way for me to get, I’d probably still steal it because I’m a piece of crap already, so why would I suddenly gain a moral backbone and start doing things legitimately? Answer…I probably wouldn’t. And that’s what’s not being discussed in this survey because what no one wants to admit is that people today have an expectation that intellectual property should be free, so they’re going to do what they can to keep getting that stuff free.

Unfortunately, the cart is already out of the stable, or whatever metaphor seems to work. Today’s generation doesn’t see anything wrong with piracy, or at least enough of them that are already pirating stuff don’t seem to see a problem. The RIAA’s attempts to stop illegal downloading of music isn’t a deterrent to these people; it’s an inconvenience. To them, the RIAA is outdated and being stupid in its actions. I don’t see any sort of process that is going to change that opinion because the Internet was developed with the idea that it creates free information, and as a result, should be perceived as a free for all environment. Old styles of control are coming in direct contact with new media that has no central authority of control, so there’s going to be a battle for a very long time until one side wins completely. And unfortunately, I don’t think the old ways are going to win out because the old people, people like me who still buy the music they listen to, are slowly disappearing, and we’re not being replaced by enough younger people who feel the same way. Instead, we’re being replaced by people who think it should all be free, and we’re seen as stupid for paying for the products that we do.

Itunes is a good example of a market that is holding its own, but is eventually going to implode on itself. I still buy television shows every now and then on iTunes, but every time I do so, I feel stupid for doing so. Hulu.com offers television shows for free, sometimes the same ones I might actually buy. Little by little, Hulu is suffering for trying to be in the middle of this war, as was seen when Comedy Central pulled its shows off of Hulu, thinking it would just get the Hulu people to come to Comedy Central’s site. But that didn’t happen; people just stopped watching the Daily Show online, because their access to it through Hulu was removed. But the problem with the iTunes model is that the prices are sometimes astronomical. They still try to get $2.99 for a television show, which is ridiculous. I sometimes pay $1.99 for the weaker version of the same show, but even that seems like too much money. The problem with Apple is they are seriously greedy bastards who think they have such a great product that they can overcharge and get it. Read some of the comments on iTunes movies and shows, and you’d be shocked at how pissed people get at Apple for their control mechanisms they use to squeeze every dime out of their customers.

So, this leaves us still in a nether world of the Internet where we have people who think that all of this should be free, so they are basically pirating all of this stuff on the backs of the rest of us who are paying for it. But that can’t last as a sustainable market process because people like me start to get pissed that we’re being overcharged to pay for the pirate market. I”ve bought very few CDs in the last few years because the prices just haven’t been what I find myself comfortable with. The newest CD to come out, which I would have bought, was the new one from Court Yard Hounds, an offshoot of the Dixie Chicks. But to buy it on iTunes is $13, and that’s ridiculous when a long time ago we were promised that CDs would cost us $9.99. Itunes should be even cheaper because it doesn’t even require any packaging, but instead they decided to go with greed instead of attract their customers. So I won’t buy it. And that is why more people will end up pirating it, leading to prices going up even further until something happens, like the industry collapses.

Cause when people aren’t paying for it, that’s all that can happen. So unless people want to go back to the idea of music being wandering minstrels performing for the king and the local ale house, someone should really think about this because the old ways aren’t working, and too many stupid people are making the decisions for too many others, which means that if you understand game theory, the result is a bankrupt marketplace, and while those of us who like anarchy and chaos might like this, I’m going to go out on a limb and think that perhaps that’s the not the best alternative for everyone else.

The “end” of LOST

Television,

What’s interesting is that for the first time in a very long time, we’re closing in on the end of what has to be one of the most monumental shows in television history, and a lot of people don’t even realize it. This show has been going on for six seasons now, and it’s one of those that people either love or hate, and there really doesn’t seem to a lot of in-between there. The show ends at the end of this month on Sunday after a 2 1/2 hour conclusion.

I remember watching this show when it first came out, and I was apprehensive about it because all I kept thinking was that this was essentially a remake of Gilligan’s Island without the laugh track. But at the time, I knew nothing about the show; I was just making a spot assessment based on what I was hearing in the popular media. But to be honest, no one in the media had a clue what was going to happen on this show, so everyone was just acting like they knew more than everyone else, and the show aired as some kind of weird drama.

The first episode really should have told everyone what they needed to know: This show was going to be so different than you’d probably never see anything like it again. In the very first episde, we have people crash landing on an island from Oceanic 815, trying to figure out where they were, getting attacked by polar beers (in the jungle!), then attacked by a mysterious “smoke” monster, and then running into ghosts and mysterious people. No, this definitely wasn’t going to be a serious version of Gilligan’s Island.

What is interesting about this show is that everyone is a critic and convinced they know more about what was good and what was bad, when in reality some of the “bad” episodes were actually mega important when it came to the crafting of the overall theme. The third and fourth season is often seen as the low period for the show, when a bunch of bizarre characters get introduced to the island, but what was really happening was that a HUGE story arc was being created that was so necessary to bring the drama to where it is today. Without those really bizarre asides, the story we have now could never have come into being.

And that’s the problem with a show like this one because very rarely is a network going to be giving the show enough time to develop this kind of an arc, cancelling the show before it even has a chance. Had LOST been aired on NBC, there’s a good chance that it would have been taken off the air after the fourth season. Fortunately, it aired on ABC, which has a bit more of a backbone than NBC ever had.

LOST had to survive some pretty interesting times, as it was pretty much coming into its groove when the Writer’s Strike took place, an event that destroyed so many potential shows during its occurrence. It also had to survive Hollywood’s incest-like behavior whenever a ground-breaking show appears, and that’s the tendency that networks have to copy a show and try to capture audience share by trying to reproduce what an innovative show has already done. For every LOST you have, you end up with dozens of Flashforwards that try so hard to pretend that they are as innovative as the original but just pale in any comparison. One thing LOST does well is that it sets up a mystery and lets the audience experience the growth of that mystery through its eventual revelation once its solved. A show like Flashfoward screams “I’m a MYSTERY!” because it so wants to gain the audience that a show like LOST has. So instead of a lot of nuance and intrigue, it jumps right into the mystery, patting itself on the back as it recognizes itself for what it thinks it is, and then prods on as if it is the first to ever do so. You can even see it in the ad spots that they run for the show; they want so much to seem mysterious, but instead they come off as pretentious and stupid. Having watched Flashforward, that’s been my observation of the show as well.

Unfortunately, for a show like LOST to work, it has to eventually end, and it is doing just that. The mystery is being unfolded now, and we’re starting to find out more and more. Not only that but characters that have been with us since the beginning (and others that hopped on board in the process) are slowly being shown to be real and touchable, meaning that they can die at any moment now. We lost a few hugely important characters just last Tuesday, and it was done in a way that those watching still shake their heads and cannot believe those characters could possibly be gone. But that’s the beauty of a show like LOST, especially as it comes to an end. Anything can happen, and when someone watches a show with that thought in mind, it makes it that much more real. And in a show with such a fantastic premise, “real” is such a wonderful thing to achieve.

What is sad about LOST is that its end means that we will probably not have a show like it again. Oh, they’ll attempt to recapture this kind of show in many different variations in the near future, but it will take many years before we have anything that comes as close to being as impacting as this show was on the viewing public. You can probably list on the fingers of one hand how many shows have ever been that powerful that so many people are anxiously awaiting the outcome. Fortunately, those of us who watched LOST from the beginning can now say that we were there all the way through, and May 23rd, that journey finally comes to an end.