Tag Archives: Internet

I Got We Got That B-Roll

To anyone who ever wonders what’s the point of the Internet …

Pete Hill is a friend of mine on Facebook, and real life too. On December 6th, Pete posted a link in his Facebook status to a video on YouTube called “We Got That B-Roll”. It had already received 5000 views at the time I watched it (one week after it had been posted).

I enjoyed the video and thought it would be a great to screen for a live audience at Pirate Video Cabaret on December 17th in Toronto. So I tracked down the director in L.A. and emailed him for his approval. He confirmed with the creative team that I could screen it and sent me a high-quality version with end credits added. And bam, I had 2 more minutes of hilarious video content to deliver to the audience on the 17th.

I predicted it would hit 100,000 views by today. I just checked, it’s at 125,219. I love being mildly accurate about something.

There’s 2 lessons here :

1. The Internet eliminates geographical barriers and provides a clearer picture of a population by its trends.

2. Your friends are the people that you listen to.

10 Reasons Why I Will Not Attend Your Event

Please mind the subtext.

  1. I will not attend your event because you have given me no indication of what your event actually is. You have used a title for your event that contains no keywords. It is so cool that it no longer has any meaning. Furthermore, you have advertised ten to fifteen acts in your event. However, I recognized none of them; though 3 of them are certainly of Irish heritage. You have provided absolutely no points of reference for me to generate any expectations whatsoever. You should be congratulated for so deftly positioning your event within the ever-so-subtle realm of… Obscurity! (Exclamation mark added for increased irony.)
  2. I will not attend your event because of your text. Let me clarify. Every piece of text in your marketing is uppercase. All the text in your email or Facebook message, it’s all uppercase. I am really glad you did this. If it had been title case or even sentence case (you know, grammatically correct and all that), I would not have even noticed you existed. However, you used the wrong font and I just can’t support this Helvetica bullshit you’re pitching me.
  3. I will not attend your event because I received your email promoting your upcoming event. However, here’s the thing : I’ve already unsubscribed from your mailing list many times… You don’t know this because, upon deeper inspection, I noticed that you’ve got a faulty unsubscribe function on your spamvertising-ridden website. If I were you, I would think this “error” grants me some kind of plausible deniability should anyone ever have the spare time to royally kick me in my slack ass. If you actually contributed to culture as much as you leech off of it, I would still not attend your events, for there would yet be more talent within a diarrhea-stained foot stool that is missing 1 leg.
  4. I will not attend your event because you used the word “awesome” in the marketing of your event. 9/11 was awesome. Five minutes of an hour-long George Carlin routine is awesome. Those are two extremes of awesome that I have witnessed. Unless you’ve literally reinvented a wheel and it’s functional, your event simply does not track on that scale.
  5. I will not attend your event because I do not live in Buffalo and your Whitesnake cover band (so cleverly called Coverdale) offers me no incentive to visit Buffalo.
  6. I will not attend your event because your event takes place in a sports bar. Sports bars are not known for their taste in cultural programming. Actually, that’s not true. They’re very well known for their taste in cultural programming. Thank you for choosing a venue that says so much about your event.
  7. I will not attend your event because I do not pay to watch a rehearsal… Oh, that wasn’t a rehearsal last time?… Oh… Really?… Hmph.
  8. I will not attend your event because you chose to have the William Tell Overture auto-play when your web page loaded without providing me the ability to mute Rossini’s popular but obnoxious composition. I believe this needs no further explanation.
  9. I will not attend your event because you have indicated nothing original about your event. Nobody could point a finger at your event and say, “There. See? Like that.” Except me, just now, but I am merely demonstrating. Given the choice of attending your event or the equally sans originale event the next night or the identically carente de originalidad event the night after that, I have opted to write these words. While they might leave the reader with a bitter aftertaste, they do not even approach the magnitude of stale dyspepsia that you have chosen to generate in an unwitting and undeserving audience.
  10. I will not attend your event because… it’s me, okay? I’m the asshole. Right? I’m full of shit. I gotta open my big fat mouth and spew this acid at you. I’m a dragon. I’m an fuckin’ acid-spewing dragon. With my attitude and my opinions. It’s me. This is me: “Blah blah blah. I’m a fuckin’ dick with my big fuckin’ mouth.” You’re right! You’re absolutely right! I’M A FUCKIN’ ASSHOLE!… Y’know what?… Just keep sending me invites. Just piss me off even more, send me all your goddam’ invites… Fuck. Me.

Recommendations

I found myself watching a YouTube video that I didn’t really want to watch and I clicked away from it. But because I’d watched the first few seconds of it, the recommendations that then appeared on my YouTube home page contained content similar to the video that I didn’t want to continue watching.

While this bit of automated programming functions if I’m enjoying the content, it did not today.

Watch out!

And All The Ayatollah’s Men Couldn’t Put Him Back Together Again

picture-8

Why is it that the political right always castrates itself? Given that all they really have is balls, it seems painfully ironic.

Yesterday, in response to the recent electoral protests in Iran, Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i addressed a circus tent full of men who all looked relatively the same – much like a Republican convention, where even the women look like stodgy Caucasian men desperate to hang on to their semblance of Old World power. But I digress.

Thomson Reuters reported on the speech by Khāmene’i, excerpting several pieces of the monologue that seemed noteworthy, such as, “… I am urging them to end street protests, otherwise they will be responsible for its consequences, and consequences of any chaos…” and “… If there is any bloodshed, leaders of the protests will be held directly responsible.”

While – yes – Thomson Reuters is a Western news source that is not necessarily friendly to the Iranian establishment and – yes – these quotes are excerpted from their original context, neither of these facts affect the point I am about to make.

Cause watch me now; I’m going to except them even further.

“… they will be responsible for its consequences…”

“… leaders of the protests will be held directly responsible…”

Did you catch that? Did you hear what just happened?

Essentially, what Khāmene’i has done is placed all the responsibility for the outcome of these protests – all of it, positive and negative – on to his adversaries. No matter how many people are killed by riot police or secret police, no matter how many are left maimed or made into refugees, no matter how much bloodshed results, there ain’t no flies on the Ayatollah.

But if his adversaries have all the responsibility, then Khāmene’i must have no responsibility. And if Khāmene’i has no responsibility, then dig this – he has no power. Allow me to italicize this for emphasis – the Supreme Leader of Iran has abdicated all power. In much the same way, the wielder of a gun has no power if they cannot take responsibility for (i.e. control) their weapon. Eventually, they will shoot themselves in the face.

And like most right-wing extremists, he did it to himself. All that’s left to happen now is for several thousand individuals to be murdered so that these fundamentalist numb skulls can express their fear with bullets. Because the Ayatollah has no responsibility, I assume the triggers will simply go off by themselves. Good luck to all those in their line of sight.

Sayyid Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’i, the Ayatollah of… fizzle fizzle ssssssssss…

Why Piracy Will Eventually “Win”

Going after Pirate Bay for sharing BitTorrent files that refer users to copyright-infringing files is akin to going after the Yellow Pages for publishing the phone number to a restaurant owned by the mob. They are both nothing more than technologies that can be used either legally or illegally.

Everything any of us does online involves file-sharing. By sending an email, you’re creating a file and sharing it with the recipient. By surfing to a web page, the file that marks up that web page is being shared with you; the JPG and GIF files on that page are being shared with you. By viewing a video on YouTube, a Flash video file is being shared with you. The code of this web page now exists both on the computer that holds this website AND on your computer AND, unless they’ve all cleared their caches, on the computers of every other person who has read this web page.

The Internet was borne out of Arpanet, a Cold War system for information redundancy during the event of a nuclear attack. The Internet IS file-sharing.

Copyright is nothing more than a social agreement about who has control over the supply of an item. Because media conglomerates – studios, record labels, etc. – have in the past relied wholly upon supply control to achieve their goals (X copies going to Y outlets in Z territories) and are stuck in that archaic mindset, they are having difficulties with this new medium which exists solely through a lack of supply control.

The only thing media conglomerates have going for them is deep pockets, but all the cash in the world won’t make an iota of difference when you’re going up against the very essence of the medium itself.

As soon as the media conglomerates picked up their swords, they lost their battle. And somewhere Sun Tzu thought to himself, “Told you so.”