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Archive for April, 2008
I’ve added a new song to my Missed Connections Collection and this one is called “cute nerd on bart!”
Thanks to hobnox.com and their audiotool demo for the cool 303 & 909 emulators & to Radio Shack for the dumb RCA cables & mic mixer I had to use to loop the audio out of my laptop & back in again to record it because apparently “Stereo Mix” recording doesn’t work on laptops. Whatever! Regardless, this recording sounds better than the last few because it was recorded on separate tracks (sort of) and not using the built-in mic on a webcam.
Some interesting analysis of the likelihood of & procedures for Microsoft’s hostile takeover of Yahoo.
So I got my first YouTube video pulled on account of “Copyright Infringement” the other day, and while I’ll freely admit that I uploaded infringing content, I find the specifics of the situation rather humorous, so I wanted to share them with people. So there was a discussion taking place on the forum for the company I work at, and in the course of the thread, somebody posted a link to this classic “Learn to Make Games” TV commercial which is fairly well known & amusing to people who work in the games industry. In a (perhaps failed) attempt at making a witty response to this post, I uploaded one of my favorite Simpsons clips to YouTube & posted that as a reply. Several hours later I noticed that the video was no longer present on YouTube and shortly after that I got an email warning from them about the alleged infringement.
A few things:
- There is this thing called fair use. Unless I am misunderstanding the concept, it allows the quotation of “reasonable” amounts of copyrighted material to be used as part of a review, debate or other types of cultural discussion. The clip I posted was 23 seconds long. Was that unreasonable?
- The clip that I posted was ITSELF an example of fair use reference, in this case of Homer Simpson performing a humorous version of a song (”Tighten Up”) by Archie Bell & the Drells! So… What’s their excuse?
- I saw an AMAZING commercial for the Discovery Channel on YouTube the other day & my first instinct was to post *another* of my favorite Simpsons clips (”Ladies and gentlemen, `Hooray for Everything’ invites you to join them in a salute to the greatest hemisphere on earth, the Western Hemisphere! The dancingest hemisphere of all!”) in response, but now… I guess I won’t.
- Attention Simpsons copyright holders: Have you seen South Park Studios?? It allows random access to every single full-length episode of the show along with tagged and categorized access to hundreds of clips! Do you know how often I have wished for this exact same type of access to the entire Simpsons series? I spent the better part of 5 years of my life speaking pretty much entirely in Simpsons references! Books have been written about the cultural significance of the Simpsons! WHYYYYYYYYYY are you so intent on building a wall around this content that wants so desperately to be converted more freely into cultural currency & make you even MORE money than you already have? This is GOING to happen, you jack-asses, it’s just a question of whether you’re in on the profit share between now and when it does.
In conclusion, Eat My Shorts!
Back when I used Movable Type on this site all the URLs for individual posts were in the form of 0000322.shtml or whatever & when I migrated to WordPress these changed into text based links i.e. /a-post-about-whatever. Anyway, it updated most of the internal links during the migration process, but any external ones that pointed at the numerical URLs ended up with a 404 error in the new system. After being annoyed about this for awhile I finally found a good plug-in to help resolve the issue today. Basically it lets me change any 404 error into a 301 redirect and point visitors at the appropriate new URL. Better yet, it keeps track of any 404 errors as they happen, so I don’t even have to go hunting around for broken links, I can just wait for them to show up in the log and take care of it at my leisure. (Of course I do have a complete list of broken links thanks to Google’s Webmaster Tools, but there are like 55 of them and I don’t feel like fixing them all at the moment, particularly since I’m sure nobody clicks on like 99% of them). As an added byproduct I think I will also be able to see if people are typing weird nonsense URLs like antinomian.com/secretpassword or whatever into my site. If any particularly funny ones come up, I’ll be sure to share them…
[UPDATE] Revelation #1: I need to make a favicon!
If you listen to broadcast radio you’ll notice that they keep playing the same songs over and over again for a month before moving on to another set of songs that they play over and over again and so on. I suppose it’s de rigueur to complain about this, but given the way that “popular” culture works I feel like it might be more interesting to speculate on whether a net radio service could save on bandwidth costs by caching the top 100 tracks on the client side each month. Or maybe bandwidth is so cheap that this isn’t even an issue anymore. (Though if this is the case then why are internet providers always bitching & moaning about it?) At any rate, it’s probably not even worth trying to pitch music labels on this, since they’d just assume you were trying to bullshit them.
It’s a commonly accepted fact among people who are myself that Craigslist’s “Missed Connections” section is home to some of the most incredible writing on the whole wide web. In light of this, I’ve begun a series of improvisational musical sketches based on some of the more arresting posts I’ve seen on there recently. Apologies for the general crappiness of these recordings, as I considered re-recording them with the vocals & guitar on seperate tracks, but my inner E Street Band has overruled my inner Bruce Springsteen and so I’m just posting these as-is, all Nebraska-style on your ass. Please also forgive any places where I stumble over a word or phrase; These were all take 1 (of 1) & in most cases I only read the first sentence of the ad before deciding to take a shot at it. I think the “Aaaaaugh!” one works the best out of these three as a song, but holy crap can that “Cherry Blossom” guy ramble! My favorite part of that ad was how he keeps vacillating wildly back and forth between lusting after random girls, being obsessed with some girl from his past, wondering whether she’s obsessed with him and ultimately deciding to stick with cooking & computers. I mean, who among us hasn’t been there?!!
Anyway, persons interested in further exploration of “Missed Connections” ads as a topic of artistic inquiry are referred to Adrian Tomine’s “The Connecting Thread” (in Sleepwalk and Other Stories) and I’m sure there are craploads of other similarly themed works but I can’t recall any at the moment. Suggestions?
