Eric Margolis. One of the only journalists I have ever admired for his courage and intestinal fortitude. Almost everything he writes I find I agree with, and that is significant for someone as contentious as me.
I'm too tired to get into a big rant right now, so I will give the link to his recent story instead (click this blog entry's title), along with a couple of brief statements of my own..
Israel - as a nation you are morally bankrupt. The sins committed against Jews in the past can in no way justify your actions of the last 40+ years any more than the perceived wrongs done to Germany after World War I can justify what they did in World War II.
Palestine - please, stop killing yourselves to try and get your rights and your land back, and begin massive peaceful protests. Put the guns away and sit down. Anywhere and everywhere.
Friday, February 18, 2005
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Cheesy Art
You know, I have only been on a site called SheezyART a few days. I haven't done a lot other than upload pictures, but I did go and read a couple of things by the site’s admins. To be completely honest, when I read some stuff I thought "WTF, are these people on crack?" All I wanted to do was have a place to post my pictures and get a little feedback, more than anything from friends and family than anyone I knew from there. Now I have found that it’s also nice to meet some new friends with similar interests, especially since my friends and family don’t really give a rat’s ass about anything I take a photo of, being the lazy ne'er-do-well I am (that IS Sarcasm with a capital S, for those members of my family who may not understand that - I'm saying you are way out of fucking line in your judgements, but that's another rant altogether).
Now, having looked around a little more, it is giving me some pause - not because of a direct effect on anything I might do or not do with my photos, but because it is an injustice. I hate injustice. I hate immaturity as well. Most of all, I hate censorship.
There is a stupidity about the word "porn" and what "porn" is. Well, I can tell you - porn is SEXUAL material. That isn’t some kind of “special” liberal interpretation, that’s what it means. Some people think that anything can be interpreted as sexual, even a nipple, but that's just crap. If someone takes a picture of their own genitals, that is not really porn, unless it is in a very specific context. If they take a picture of their genitals while masturbating – that’s porn. Breasts are not porn in even the remotest sense unless they are being portrayed as part of a sexual act – they are for feeding babies. Yeah, they look nice. I like ‘em. I’ll stare at ‘em for hours. But I like eyes, too… you can convey more with eyes than you can with breasts. Doesn’t that make eyes pornographic? How about hands? Don’t most people use their hands to perform sex acts of some form or another? BAN PICTURES OF HANDS! AND EYES! All those awful perverted hand and eye pictures are ruining our society’s family values. Should I even point out that you wouldn’t have a family at all without having sex? Somewhere, sometime, someone has to have some kind of sex to make a child. Even adopted children are products of that horrible dirty sex. Test tube babies? Well, the sperm had to come from someone having sex with their hand, right? While they fantasized about sex? Maybe they were fantasizing about eyes while they did it?
The nude human body is NOT porn no matter what some uptight evangelist or the Republican Party of the United States would tell you. How can you even consider "moral judgements" from a completely immoral government? These are people who think it is evil and wrong for someone to see or even hear about you sticking your penis into any orifice on another completely consenting adult, yet they stick their big phallic military equipment into any country they feel like, any time! Hey you, don’t fuck your boyfriend in the ass that’s wrong – now, bend over, Iraq, while I lube up my missles. You’re next, Iran, better get ready.
How can anyone even think that it's OK to show our kids killing, death and violence EVERY DAY on free television, but oh no, the world will end if they see a woman's breast? What kind of a sick world is it that kids learn at 4 years old how to beat people up with Martial Arts Mighty Morphin' Power Ranger moves, but when they get to be 16 they have no idea how babies are made, or if they do it is because they have already been practicing in secret because they are afraid that someone would find out and punish them??? What's next, do we find some old Nazi War Criminals and ask them to decide what books can be published based on their "unbiased insight"?
Maybe it’s a sign that I don't really belong on SheezyART after all. Maybe I don't belong anywhere.
It is hard to find a place where you can concentrate on the stuff you do without having to be able to write HTML code as well (I can do it but it wears me out nowadays). I am on another site called “DeviantART” – what a stupid name for that site, since there is nothing actually Deviant about it – no nudity (except in one category) or sexuality is allowed, and violent acts which are portrayed are often censored. The only thing Deviant about DeviantART is the fact that they are making money off the backs of artists while the speed and quality of their servers indicates that not much cash is being cycled back into improving service. They keep half of anything you might make from something sold from their “store” using the artists work, and that is after they have already recovered their expenses. If I sell a print for $50 that costs them $10 to print, I get $20. They get $30. Ok, yeah, recover your costs. But why the heck should you get HALF of the value of MY WORK in PURE PROFIT? I don’t believe there are any other agents that would have the balls to ask for more than 25%. But then, maybe I am naïve. But that would go with the fact that I have never had an agent, I suppose. They aren’t really interested in making 10% of nothing.
Now, having looked around a little more, it is giving me some pause - not because of a direct effect on anything I might do or not do with my photos, but because it is an injustice. I hate injustice. I hate immaturity as well. Most of all, I hate censorship.
There is a stupidity about the word "porn" and what "porn" is. Well, I can tell you - porn is SEXUAL material. That isn’t some kind of “special” liberal interpretation, that’s what it means. Some people think that anything can be interpreted as sexual, even a nipple, but that's just crap. If someone takes a picture of their own genitals, that is not really porn, unless it is in a very specific context. If they take a picture of their genitals while masturbating – that’s porn. Breasts are not porn in even the remotest sense unless they are being portrayed as part of a sexual act – they are for feeding babies. Yeah, they look nice. I like ‘em. I’ll stare at ‘em for hours. But I like eyes, too… you can convey more with eyes than you can with breasts. Doesn’t that make eyes pornographic? How about hands? Don’t most people use their hands to perform sex acts of some form or another? BAN PICTURES OF HANDS! AND EYES! All those awful perverted hand and eye pictures are ruining our society’s family values. Should I even point out that you wouldn’t have a family at all without having sex? Somewhere, sometime, someone has to have some kind of sex to make a child. Even adopted children are products of that horrible dirty sex. Test tube babies? Well, the sperm had to come from someone having sex with their hand, right? While they fantasized about sex? Maybe they were fantasizing about eyes while they did it?
The nude human body is NOT porn no matter what some uptight evangelist or the Republican Party of the United States would tell you. How can you even consider "moral judgements" from a completely immoral government? These are people who think it is evil and wrong for someone to see or even hear about you sticking your penis into any orifice on another completely consenting adult, yet they stick their big phallic military equipment into any country they feel like, any time! Hey you, don’t fuck your boyfriend in the ass that’s wrong – now, bend over, Iraq, while I lube up my missles. You’re next, Iran, better get ready.
How can anyone even think that it's OK to show our kids killing, death and violence EVERY DAY on free television, but oh no, the world will end if they see a woman's breast? What kind of a sick world is it that kids learn at 4 years old how to beat people up with Martial Arts Mighty Morphin' Power Ranger moves, but when they get to be 16 they have no idea how babies are made, or if they do it is because they have already been practicing in secret because they are afraid that someone would find out and punish them??? What's next, do we find some old Nazi War Criminals and ask them to decide what books can be published based on their "unbiased insight"?
Maybe it’s a sign that I don't really belong on SheezyART after all. Maybe I don't belong anywhere.
It is hard to find a place where you can concentrate on the stuff you do without having to be able to write HTML code as well (I can do it but it wears me out nowadays). I am on another site called “DeviantART” – what a stupid name for that site, since there is nothing actually Deviant about it – no nudity (except in one category) or sexuality is allowed, and violent acts which are portrayed are often censored. The only thing Deviant about DeviantART is the fact that they are making money off the backs of artists while the speed and quality of their servers indicates that not much cash is being cycled back into improving service. They keep half of anything you might make from something sold from their “store” using the artists work, and that is after they have already recovered their expenses. If I sell a print for $50 that costs them $10 to print, I get $20. They get $30. Ok, yeah, recover your costs. But why the heck should you get HALF of the value of MY WORK in PURE PROFIT? I don’t believe there are any other agents that would have the balls to ask for more than 25%. But then, maybe I am naïve. But that would go with the fact that I have never had an agent, I suppose. They aren’t really interested in making 10% of nothing.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
The Jolly Roger and the Curse of the Black Pearl
Pirates. Ain't they cool? Well, it depends on who you ask about it, doesn't it. If you ask the Movie Industry, pirates are cool if they want you to go and see them at the theatre. But... they aren't cool if they are downloading movies off the internet. No, we aren't talking about the mass-produced foreign DVD copies of movies distributed for profit. We are talking about them going after Joe Average who decides he'd like to invest the patience in trying to get a movie from the 'net that he is not sure he wants to spend the money on.
Fact is, I have downloaded a movie or two in my day. I've borrowed them from the library and made copies. I've also paid for a lot of really really shitty movies in theatres that were not worthy of being released. Some stuff I have done is perfectly legal, some may not be although sometimes I can't be sure. For example, you can legally watch Night of the Living Dead online for free... are you allowed to save it? Watch it again? Transfer it to a videotape so you can see it on your TV? Hard to tell, in spite of "Fair Use" laws. What I do know is that I am not putting movies online for others to download, nor am I gaining anything financially by exhibiting them to people for an admission charge or copying them en masse and selling the copies.
So... if someone downloads a movie, does it really make your ticket price rise? Not likely. If some third-world country rips-off a movie, makes a DVD of it and sell 10000 copies of it in the supermarket parking lot? Probably.
If you really like a movie, you are likely going to pay to go see it. If you download a movie that you aren't sure about and you really like it and want to see it as it was meant to be, you are also likely to pay to go see it or buy a DVD of it.
If people are expected to pay $12 a head or more to go and gamble whether or not a movie is a piece of crap or not and not know if they are flushing money down the toilet... well, all I can say is that the movie companies have largely made themselves victims of their own hype and false advertising and poor production values by artificially inflating the value of what they do to the point where people don't feel they are getting their money's worth any more.
You can liken it to a situation that occurred a few years back here. The government thought they could reduce smoking. So, they increased cigarette taxes. Smoking went down marginally. So they thought, "Hey, paydirt!" and increased the taxes again, this time by a substantial amount. Smoking went down marginally again. So they tried it one more time. Then they hit the sticker. Sales of cigarettes fell. Substantially. They almost dislocated their shoulders patting themselves on the back. Prematurely. Because where did all those cigarette sales go? Well, people didn't quit. It just reached the point where even the most law-abiding smoker was not willing to pay $8 a pack when they could get illegally imported or grey-market "native" smokes for less, even if the less was only a buck less a pack. Law enforcement officials were swamped by the massive overload of smuggling. People were getting hurt. The government wasn't getting ANY money on the sales of the smuggled cigarettes. They had just taken aim, a deep breath, and shot themselves squarely in the foot. They broke down, lowered the taxes... sales went "back up" - legal sales that is. The smuggling market fell apart because it lost its cost-effectiveness. Of course, you can still get illegally imported smokes if you want to - but the fact is: why bother, when they don't cost enough less to be worth the risk?
The movie industry has priced themselves out of their own market. Even at a discount movie theatre I have to pay $7 for my 3 year old to go to a movie. She sleeps through the thing half the time! Do I get my money back for that? No. Do I get my money back if I feel a movie was rated less than a 5/10? No. Can I afford, like I once did, to go to the movies a half dozen times a month? No. Did anyone download movies when bandwidth was limited to 33.6K, in spite of the movie industry using downloading to justify these price increases in recent years back to before that speed being the benchmark? Are you KIDDING - of course not.
The movie industry's logic is flawed. They assume that every movie downloaded is a lost ticket - not true. They assume that there is no other way for people to see a movie for free or cheap - also not true (ever borrowed one from a friend or the library? Ever got a freebee at Blockbuster because the guaranteed one is not there?). They also fail to recognize that in spite of all this piracy, movies still set records in attendance - and I mean in people numbers not in inflated dollar-price ticket sales. They also obviously have not ever looked closely at a downloaded movie that is currently in the theatre shot with a camcorder or some other way - I had a friend who used to do this, and they were horrible to watch, especially if it was something you wanted to see. It is not worth the time it takes to download or the hard drive space or the cost of a CD, I assure you.
Rest assured, any movie I want to see, we take money from our extremely limited budget and go see. Anything that is just not worth paying for, I don't go rushing out to pay for, I borrow it or get it from a library or find some other way to watch it. An example? I wanted to see Farenheit 911 out of curiosity. Not enough to pay the $25 or so it would cost to go to a theatre. A friend turned up one day with it on DVD. So I borrowed it from him. It appeared legit enough, until we played it. Sound was OK but the video was... odd. It was like it was full screen but with the top and bottom cut off in letterbox. I turned on captioning and we almost died laughing - they made no sense at all. One memorable line was something in the dialogue saying "went to bed in clean linen sheets", and the caption said something like "Wet the bed with creamy lemon treats". I went online and looked at the release date on the IMDB. I noticed my calendar and it was NOT October 5th yet, if you know what I mean. But, seeing it satisfied my curiosity. Might I buy it someday in a legit, discount pile? Maybe, as a nostalgic memory of this time. Would I have paid full price to see it or own it? Not in a million years. DOes this make me a nasty, evil thief? According to the MPAA, it should.
When they figure out some better system... I know I will likely spend more on movies. If I can buy a ticket for a reasonable price, I will. If it costs $12 to see a movie but I can come back and see it again as many times as I want if I like it and see another movie for free later it sucks, maybe I'd be more likely to go more knowing it was a sort of investment more than a crap shoot. If I can pay to own a movie on my computer for $10-15 and watch it as much as I want in the privacy of my own home, I'd also go along with that - and I say that price is maximum because I'm not taking up any of their real estate space, heat, oxygen, labour costs or anything else in a theatre and they have to do nothing but make a digitally available download so it costs them nothing in media but the server. If I know I am going to want to own the DVD of a movie, if they even let me apply half of my ticket prices to the purchase of that DVD I'd also be less reluctant to go and pay several times for the same thing.
Get with the times - sell me a personal LICENSE to a movie for a reasonable cost, so I can make fair use of it. I promise, I won't pass it around the internet - why would I? Of course, this kind of enlightened and forward-thinking philosophy is not likely to come from the same dumbass industry who tried to have VCRs outlawed because they would "infringe on their rights"... they didn't complain too much when people started buying movies on tape, did they? Idiots.
Try and continue live in the glory days of the silver screen, when there was nothing else for people to get entertainment from (no TV, no Internet, no video stores) and sooner or later, your market WILL begin to fade even if it has not already. The day is coming.
Fact is, I have downloaded a movie or two in my day. I've borrowed them from the library and made copies. I've also paid for a lot of really really shitty movies in theatres that were not worthy of being released. Some stuff I have done is perfectly legal, some may not be although sometimes I can't be sure. For example, you can legally watch Night of the Living Dead online for free... are you allowed to save it? Watch it again? Transfer it to a videotape so you can see it on your TV? Hard to tell, in spite of "Fair Use" laws. What I do know is that I am not putting movies online for others to download, nor am I gaining anything financially by exhibiting them to people for an admission charge or copying them en masse and selling the copies.
So... if someone downloads a movie, does it really make your ticket price rise? Not likely. If some third-world country rips-off a movie, makes a DVD of it and sell 10000 copies of it in the supermarket parking lot? Probably.
If you really like a movie, you are likely going to pay to go see it. If you download a movie that you aren't sure about and you really like it and want to see it as it was meant to be, you are also likely to pay to go see it or buy a DVD of it.
If people are expected to pay $12 a head or more to go and gamble whether or not a movie is a piece of crap or not and not know if they are flushing money down the toilet... well, all I can say is that the movie companies have largely made themselves victims of their own hype and false advertising and poor production values by artificially inflating the value of what they do to the point where people don't feel they are getting their money's worth any more.
You can liken it to a situation that occurred a few years back here. The government thought they could reduce smoking. So, they increased cigarette taxes. Smoking went down marginally. So they thought, "Hey, paydirt!" and increased the taxes again, this time by a substantial amount. Smoking went down marginally again. So they tried it one more time. Then they hit the sticker. Sales of cigarettes fell. Substantially. They almost dislocated their shoulders patting themselves on the back. Prematurely. Because where did all those cigarette sales go? Well, people didn't quit. It just reached the point where even the most law-abiding smoker was not willing to pay $8 a pack when they could get illegally imported or grey-market "native" smokes for less, even if the less was only a buck less a pack. Law enforcement officials were swamped by the massive overload of smuggling. People were getting hurt. The government wasn't getting ANY money on the sales of the smuggled cigarettes. They had just taken aim, a deep breath, and shot themselves squarely in the foot. They broke down, lowered the taxes... sales went "back up" - legal sales that is. The smuggling market fell apart because it lost its cost-effectiveness. Of course, you can still get illegally imported smokes if you want to - but the fact is: why bother, when they don't cost enough less to be worth the risk?
The movie industry has priced themselves out of their own market. Even at a discount movie theatre I have to pay $7 for my 3 year old to go to a movie. She sleeps through the thing half the time! Do I get my money back for that? No. Do I get my money back if I feel a movie was rated less than a 5/10? No. Can I afford, like I once did, to go to the movies a half dozen times a month? No. Did anyone download movies when bandwidth was limited to 33.6K, in spite of the movie industry using downloading to justify these price increases in recent years back to before that speed being the benchmark? Are you KIDDING - of course not.
The movie industry's logic is flawed. They assume that every movie downloaded is a lost ticket - not true. They assume that there is no other way for people to see a movie for free or cheap - also not true (ever borrowed one from a friend or the library? Ever got a freebee at Blockbuster because the guaranteed one is not there?). They also fail to recognize that in spite of all this piracy, movies still set records in attendance - and I mean in people numbers not in inflated dollar-price ticket sales. They also obviously have not ever looked closely at a downloaded movie that is currently in the theatre shot with a camcorder or some other way - I had a friend who used to do this, and they were horrible to watch, especially if it was something you wanted to see. It is not worth the time it takes to download or the hard drive space or the cost of a CD, I assure you.
Rest assured, any movie I want to see, we take money from our extremely limited budget and go see. Anything that is just not worth paying for, I don't go rushing out to pay for, I borrow it or get it from a library or find some other way to watch it. An example? I wanted to see Farenheit 911 out of curiosity. Not enough to pay the $25 or so it would cost to go to a theatre. A friend turned up one day with it on DVD. So I borrowed it from him. It appeared legit enough, until we played it. Sound was OK but the video was... odd. It was like it was full screen but with the top and bottom cut off in letterbox. I turned on captioning and we almost died laughing - they made no sense at all. One memorable line was something in the dialogue saying "went to bed in clean linen sheets", and the caption said something like "Wet the bed with creamy lemon treats". I went online and looked at the release date on the IMDB. I noticed my calendar and it was NOT October 5th yet, if you know what I mean. But, seeing it satisfied my curiosity. Might I buy it someday in a legit, discount pile? Maybe, as a nostalgic memory of this time. Would I have paid full price to see it or own it? Not in a million years. DOes this make me a nasty, evil thief? According to the MPAA, it should.
When they figure out some better system... I know I will likely spend more on movies. If I can buy a ticket for a reasonable price, I will. If it costs $12 to see a movie but I can come back and see it again as many times as I want if I like it and see another movie for free later it sucks, maybe I'd be more likely to go more knowing it was a sort of investment more than a crap shoot. If I can pay to own a movie on my computer for $10-15 and watch it as much as I want in the privacy of my own home, I'd also go along with that - and I say that price is maximum because I'm not taking up any of their real estate space, heat, oxygen, labour costs or anything else in a theatre and they have to do nothing but make a digitally available download so it costs them nothing in media but the server. If I know I am going to want to own the DVD of a movie, if they even let me apply half of my ticket prices to the purchase of that DVD I'd also be less reluctant to go and pay several times for the same thing.
Get with the times - sell me a personal LICENSE to a movie for a reasonable cost, so I can make fair use of it. I promise, I won't pass it around the internet - why would I? Of course, this kind of enlightened and forward-thinking philosophy is not likely to come from the same dumbass industry who tried to have VCRs outlawed because they would "infringe on their rights"... they didn't complain too much when people started buying movies on tape, did they? Idiots.
Try and continue live in the glory days of the silver screen, when there was nothing else for people to get entertainment from (no TV, no Internet, no video stores) and sooner or later, your market WILL begin to fade even if it has not already. The day is coming.
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Its A Groundhog... er... Boy!
Please say hello to our new addition. 8lbs 13 oz/4000 grams, 20"/51 cm long, born into my hands at 4:38 pm EST 2/2/05. His big sister got to cut the cord... for real, too, not just the cut the cord for show thing they do in a hospital.
Then there were 4.
His appearance means at least 6 more weeks of night feedings.
No, I Will NOT Open My Eyes:
One HUGE Yawn:
One HUGE Yawn:
Then there were 4.
His appearance means at least 6 more weeks of night feedings.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Oi Vey
First kid, 7 hours total. 45 minutes of real labour and she was out.
Second kid, we are at 30+ hours with no clear indication of when things might end.
Groundhog day baby, maybe?
As long as they don't stick their head out, see their shadow and decide that there should be 6 more weeks of labour.
Second kid, we are at 30+ hours with no clear indication of when things might end.
Groundhog day baby, maybe?
As long as they don't stick their head out, see their shadow and decide that there should be 6 more weeks of labour.
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Here Comes The Son... or Daughter...
Well, we're in labour here... the wife is progressing along nicely. Its been about 6 hours or so, approximately at this point.
We'll have baby soon... the pool is full and Mommy is floating in it comfortably. We aren't at transition yet but it should be soon.
I'll post again as things change...
We'll have baby soon... the pool is full and Mommy is floating in it comfortably. We aren't at transition yet but it should be soon.
I'll post again as things change...
