Tag: Media

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Media

You can’t stop the signal

Since we’re on a run of movie trailers…This deserves more than an “Interesting” link on my sidebar.

Serenity Logo

The amazing trailer for the new Joss Whedon film, based on the all-too-short-lived show Firefly. If you are any sort of sci-fi fan, and haven’t seen Firefly, do so immediately. It’s a sci-fi western, with great characters and backstory. I’m excited about this much more than I am Revenge of the Sith, and if you’d have told me that when I was 10 that I’d want to see another sci-fi film before I would the final Star Wars film, I’d have called you a scruffy-looking nerf herder.

Serenity Cast

Categories
Media Music

Crazy music video resource

Found this on my trek around the intarweb today…an absolutely insane resource for 622 different music videos. I’m especially fond of the Perfect Circle video for Counting Bodies Like Sheep.

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Digital Culture Media

Sci-fi Channel is teh hawt

So evidently, somewhere in the vast media conspiracy against fair use and copyright, someone bought a clue.

The Sci-Fi channel (naturally) has offered the first episode of Battlestar Galactica as a streaming video (the whole episode, commercial free). They also have a blog where the Exec. Producer Ron Moore updates the public on things and answers plot questions. And, to finish off the hat-trick of coolness, they just started doing podcasts of commentaries by Ron on each episode. You set up the podcast, or just download the MP3’s from their site, hit play at the appropriate time, and the commentary will overlay the actual episode. It even beeps when a commercial is about to come on so you can pause the playback. Such very cool technology usage…not only that they are doing podcasts, but they are doing them in such a new and different way. Real-time commentary on a broadcast TV show via podcast is, to put it simply, cool. And by cool, I mean something that I would never have thought of.

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Media Personal The Living Dead

Recovered from sickness

Well, I’ve recovered from the sickness that consumed me earlier in the week, although I don’t feel completely 100% yet…more like 98.3% or so. Missing nearly 3 days of work did put me far enough behind in a couple of projects that I’m struggling to catch up now, which isn’t any fun at all.

Here’s a few quicklinks to things that made me say “well…how ’bout that?” this week while I was recovering.

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Digital Culture Media

The ultimate failure of DRM

Here’s a fabulous exercise in why DRM is an absolutely ludicrous answer to tech media issues. This guy found a way to strip the DRM from Napster files, and save the resultant WAV’s to CD. The result:

14 day trial = 336 hours = 20,160 minutes of potential music = 252 80 minute CDs

And that’s free music, kiddies.

I’m sorry, but….BWHAHAhahahahaha. I can’t help it. The RIAA/MPAA hijinks are laughable at this point. I said years ago that they are going to get a new model, or they will die. “Rentable” music was a stupid option…wrong model.

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Media Personal

Something about my music…

From Shel, a few questions for me about my music collection:

1. Total amount of music files on your computer:
Well…on my actual computer, none. My laptop doesn’t have anything on it, everything is served off of the desktop in my office, with the music residing on an external HD. Bets and I use iTunes to stream to each of our laptops, and also to the Airport Extreme hooked into our surround sound system in the living room.

Well, that was a little tangent, wasn’t it? Ok, so total music available to us in the house is something like 9500 songs or so, about 57 Gigs.

2. The last CD you bought was:
The last actual physical CD? Probably Ryan Adams, Love is Hell part 2. Last album I paid for? Southern Culture on the Skids, from allofmp3.com. Last iTunes purchase? Morrocan Role by Ryan Adams.

3. What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?
In the car on the way to work: Mr. Pitiful by The Commitments.

4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:

  • Round Here by Counting Crows, especially the live versions. The song itself is the first track on their debut album August and Everything After.

    She looks up at the building / says she’s thinking of jumping / says she’s tired of life / everybody’s tired of something

  • Wonderwall, by Oasis. Overplayed and saturated beyond belief, this is just nearly a perfect pop song. Both Counting Crows and Ryan Adams have covered it, and it just sticks to my head in ways that I can’t explain.

    Because maybe / you’re gonna be the one that saves me

  • Lovesong by The Cure. Reminds me of the terrible and wonderful things about being a teenager, and still manages to be a song about how someone can change your whole world.

    whatever words I say / I will always love you

  • Black by Pearl Jam. Another love song, but this one about love that leaves you, and how that also changes the world. I could include a dozen Pearl Jam songs here, but this one was always special.

    I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life / I know you’ll be a star / in somebody else’s sky

  • Oh My Sweet Carolina by Ryan Adams. We discovered Ryan late in our tenure at UNC, and this song just seemed written for us. The first time I heard it, I was literally dumbfounded. I just sat there, struck by the beauty and wonder of it, and I bought the CD not an hour later.

    Up here in the city feels like things are closing in / sunset’s just my lightbulb burnin’ out / I miss Kentucky and I miss my family / all the sweetest winds they blow across the South

  • Hurt by Nine Inch Nails and Johnny Cash. Nihlism from the first, and sorrow and regret from the second, just a powerful song. Reminds me of the despair inherent in the human condition, and the pain associated with feeling too much.

    You can have it all / my empire of dirt / I will let you down / I will make you hurt

  • Judith by A Perfect Circle. When I’m feeling like I need to get some anger out, or am fed up with the world, this song does it. A paean against religous zealotry, or blindly following any belief system.

    You are such an inspiration / for the way that I would never ever choose to be

Hey, it’s my list. I’m allowed more than 5 if I want. đŸ˜›


5. What 3 people are you going to pass this baton to and why?
No idea! I’ll have to think about that.

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Media Personal

Ernst Mayr is dead

From the BBC:

Ernst Mayr, the evolutionary biologist who has been called “the Darwin of the 20th Century” has died aged 100.

Mayr was incredibly influential in evolutionary theory, and his definition of “species” is still the most prominent definition in use today for the concept. I read his work extensively while I was doing philosophy of science, and he was truly one of the great scientists of the 20th century. While he can no longer defend his positions, there are generations of scholars that will do his work for him. I can only hope to count myself in that group.

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Media Personal

Cool news

I was just notified that I’m having a mini-review that I wrote published in MAKE, the new magazine/book from O’Reilly. Mark Frauenfelder posted a call for reviews on BoingBoing, so I thought what the hell? Sat down, whipped up a couple hundred words on something, and got word from him yesterday that they were going to run it. What’s the product? Pick up issue two of the “mook” and find out. đŸ™‚

After thinking about it last night, after all the book reviews I’ve written, the academic papers, the random poems that got published during my undergrad days…this is the first piece of writing I’ve gotten paid for. That makes me smile a lot.

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Media

MirrorMask

For those interested, there’s an absolutely mad trailer for the upcoming Neil Gaiman/Dave McKean collaboration Mirrormask up now. Gaiman wrote it, McKean directed it, and special effects and such were handled by the Jim Henson Company…the trailer is amazing but hard to describe.

Think: Alice in Wonderland imagined by Dali while on an absinthe binge. Or, alternatively, Narnia if written by H.P. Lovecraft on a bad day.

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Digital Culture Media Personal

iTunes idea

As noted earlier in the blog, I was in Salt Lake City over the last week, at a great little hotel. Said hotel offers free, open WiFi, along with wired internet in some of its rooms. But the WiFi was open…I didn’t test it, but I would guess you could pick it up pretty well outside of the hotel edifice itself. There was a homepage redirect that I’m assuming logged your MAC and issued you an IP assignment, but that took just a second, and then you had a wide open connection.

So here’s my question/idea: Is there any reason that the hotel couldn’t set up its own computer somewhere on the subnet with iTunes running? Leave the iTunes sharing open, and rip music to the computer for whatever theme you wish…over the holidays, Christmas music. Perhaps focus on local artists, or bands that play in the clubs around the hotel. I read the iTunes EULA, and there are sub-licensed sections that are pretty picky about what it can be used for…but it’s not a directly commercial use to simply have the system sitting on your subnet, is it? I only focus on iTunes because it makes streaming so easy, and with more and more hotels offering free wifi/internet access, it could be a fun marketing point….streaming music associated with the hotel/area/season.

Now, there may be a dozen issues here, from broadcast licensing (is it broadcasting?) to copyright issues (it would have to be streaming only).

That said, I think there’s a great business opportunity here. Forego iTunes, and go straight for a cheap Linux box with streaming capabilities and a decent interface…there’s software out there that you can use to put something like this together for nearly nothing. Charge the hotel for support, and take payment from artists/record companies/whoever to include their content on the server. The hotel guests get free streaming music that they may not hear anywhere else, the hotel gets a great marketing point, the artists get extra exposure…and if you could get a chain to buy in, you could make a decent amount of money on this.

So: anyone know any venture capital/angels looking for an investment? I could make this happen if I could get a hotel chain on board.