What a Beast! It’s is truly reasonable to spend a year of one’s life to build a costume that actually transforms. Imagine the possibilities. Before a halloween party you can just park yourself in front of driveway and then while every one is arriving, you can transform and say, “Oh is this the party?”
To get you in the mood for trick or treatin’, here’s a tasty video featuring Beck, Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, Smoosh, Feist, Peaches, Malcolm Mclaren, Devendra Banhart, Karen O, and Elvira.
The guys over at have made it their mission to at shows. How are they gonna do it? Sponsorships they claim, and so far it looks like it has worked out. Feel like this your long lost mission in life? Then .
And what is their motivation you ask? Because well you know, it gets ...
Just in time for the ol’ All Hallows Eve is a feel good comedy for the whole family. The Shining starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, and some adorable spooked-out kid (Haley Joel Osmond Osment [-wb]?) can be seen now in a masterfully done reinterpretation of the Kubrick Horror film. Robert Ryang was an editor’s assistant when he entered a contest challenging editors to re-cut a new trailer for any movie but with the caveat that it needs to be in a different genre. Little did Ryang know that his Shining trailer that he posted in a secret page would blow up to . The trailer itself is pure genius! There’s no surprise that Ryang is receiving multiple offers from production companies. Also of no surprise is the importance of a horror movie’s soundtrack. When “Solsbury Hills” came on I literally fell of my chair. After the Shining, other trailers surfaced from the same website for and the horror versions. So now all we need is an American Tale blaxploitation film.
This is associated with my recent : I never thought that I would argue that NIMF was being reasonable, but apparently no one wants the raving lunatic as their spokesperson. Jack Thompson’s recent behavior has made him some enemies in unexpected places, including his former allies at the , who recently asked Thompson to stop implying any connection with their organization, arguing, reasonably, that
Your commentary has included extreme hyperbole and your tactics have included personally attacking individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect. I believe that respect is essential in all our dealings, including respect for those with whom we disagree. Some of the people that you have publicly criticized are not only people of integrity, but are people who have worked to improve the lives of children.
Thompson wrote two letters in reply. They consist mostly of silly ad hominem attacks. My favorite passage is when he accuses the head of NIMF, Dr. David Walsh, of being a “liberal”, saying:
Liberals, like you, love to label things and then think that the labeling has accomplished something.
I guess calling people “liberals” isn’t labelling. I also guess that calling video games “Columbine simulators,” “murder simulators,” and “pedophile training” also isn’t labeling. You silly man.
Assuming sinister industries get to be sinister by being good at what they do, one might expect big pharma to be good at making drugs and good at convincing people to buy them at a pretty high price. And yet, as though insisting on intellectual property laws that make their prices noncompetitive and then complaining that they’re losing the competition wasn’t bad enough, there’s this: not only did a top pharmaceutical lobbying group think it might be a good idea to underwrite a pulp fiction novel with a far-flung plot about terrorists poisoning Americans via prescription drugs bought in Canada, the lobbyist then pulled out of the deal but acknowledged the whole thing to a .
The hypothetical* book’s plot is, of course, offensive, both for the obvious racism and the fact that it’s so thinly veiled and opportunistic it’s just condescending. It reportedly tells a thriller of a plot about a Croatian terrorist network trying to kill Americans by poisoning Canadian prescription drugs, and also spends some fluff time with the head terrorist’s wife, a former Miss Mexico. Corporate ethics aside, that’s possibly the worst plot ever. No one should ever admit to having anything to do with the creative process that went into that plot writing. I know the world thinks poorly of the pulp fiction crowd, but they are people, and do have some sense about them.
So some have decided to take things to the streets and are on Tue, Oct. 25 Thurs, Oct.27, 7pm at the Virgin Megastore in Union Square, NYC. They plan to stand in front of the store and hand out about how our rights are being compromised by the use of Digital Rights Management on CDs.
What is their reasoning behind it? DRMed CDs restrict users’ abilities to:
Play them on some computers Make backup copies Rip to MP3s
Apparently Sony is looking to have all of its CDs “enhanced” with copy protection in the near future. This is not only bad for consumers, though; it is bad for creativity in general. DRM often makes no exception for —the lockdown technology can essentially take away our rights to certain legal, unauthorized uses.
Of course the DRM put on CDs can often be fairly easily circumvented (by , , etc), and some bands have even . In a bizarre twist of fate, Sony has also for its own DRMed CDs. This, then, begs the question of whether the widespread use of DRM will further alienate music consumers or perhaps they will just “hack” (with Sony’s instructions?) their way around it…
This is not new, it’s perpetual. Actually, perpetuity is part of its nature.
Con Edison has, for years, been running a large advertising campaign, buying up and maintaining billboards and full-car subway ads in NYC with ads like the one above. Con Ed also has a state-stipulated monopoly on power distribution in New York City.
Yes, it’s normal for energy companies to sink millions (and more) into persuading municipalities to grant them a monopoly. But once they get it, they usually stop—otherwise, it just feels like propaganda, and creepy, like this description ConEd gives of itself (emphasis added):
We have seen major changes to the utility industry, and Con Edison has changed to meet the challenges of the new age of customer choice. We have sold almost all of our power plant capacity in New York City to encourage a competitive power generation market. Since November 1999, all of our customers can choose their electricity and/or gas suppliers through the Power Your Way program. But no matter which supplier a customer chooses, Con Edison will continue to deliver that energy safely and reliably through its distribution system.
No, not the actual Olson twins, but Lynx and Lamb (who names their kids that?) Gaede are spreading their through their music. , as their group is called, has songs devoted to subjects such as or a
The girls even —but only the white ones. Apparently it didn’t go over too well with the intended victims, who rejected the racist message that came along with the donated goods.
Not suprisingly, it seems like the girls’ family is feeding them with all of the hatred—their mother is home schooling them (no doubt from a white revisionist perspective) and their father even uses a swastika as his cattle brand. Hopefully one day they will grow up and realize the complete and utter unreasonableness of it all. Or you can what you think yourself…
Well the second amendment is now “the strongest it has been in decades” thanks to the . Hailed as the most significant victory for the gun lobby since the 1986 re-writing of gun control laws, the just couldn’t be happier.
Bush himself said the bill would:
further our efforts to stem frivolous lawsuits, which cause a logjam in America’s courts, harm America’s small businesses, and benefit a handful of lawyers at the expense of victims and consumers.
Silly me. Now I thought the would be the ones helped in any legal action against the gun industry. Leave it to good ol’ Bush to convice us otherwise… Now let’s all go out and and shoot each other to celebrate!
This is part of a post that I made on a discussion board a few minutes ago that I thought was relevant to the reasoner. As background, I had asked a question about whether Comcast, who technically does not allow servers but doesn’t enforce the rule in general, had suddenly taken steps to block certain server ports. I later figured out what was wrong myself, but in the meantime, I received the reply:
What part of not allowed to run a server do you not understand? Yes they will stop you from running a web server.
Here’s what I had to say to the first question, with some typos corrected (I actually made a lengthy post about what was wrong, and also about why they probably won’t actually stop me, or at least shouldn’t if they’re interested in making any money, but I won’t include any of that here.):
I’m going to make this as short as possible, which is not actually very short, because it contains what should be several posts and updates. I think it makes sense to put it all together, though, because it’s really a single story. Also, it’s worth reading through to the end.
On October 10, (NB: this site was apparently designed to be read using .), famed for his outrage over and Grand Theft Auto, that he would pay $10,000 to the favorite charity of Take Two CEO Paul Eibeler if a major software company would make a video game in which a man whose son was killed by an avid gamer goes on a rampage, brutally killing members of the video game industry. First of all, that’s crazy, and it proves that Mr. Thompson has the mind of a child. But then again, what would you expect from a megalomaniac whose life work has been medical malpractice suits (read: ambulance chasing) and muckraking (unless Janet Reno really IS a closet lesbian under the mafia’s control…)?
Top Ten Reasons Why M.I.A.’s October 5, 2005 Concert in San Francisco was Unreasonable
10. Made us wait an hour to see the show, AFTER we sat through the opening act, a mediocre rap crew whose only distinction was that one of the DJs liked to throw records on the ground like plates at a Greek family gathering.
9. We had to pay Ticketmaster 10 bucks just for the privilege of paying 20 bucks for a ticket.
8. They stopped the music between each song, kindly waiting for the entire performance, and the entire audience, to grind to a halt before continuing.
7. She only played for 45 minutes, including the encore!
6. The opening act played for longer than she did!
5. M.I.A. basically rapped over backing tracks to “Arular.” (At one point, the DJ dropped in “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics followed by “Push It” by Salt ‘n’ Pepa. And he played ONE track from Piracy Funds Terrorism. That was it.) Thanks, but I’ve listened to the album a bunch because that’s all you’ve produced.
