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...know what so far every single one of them have in common?
Yeah. None of them download stuff. One guy was selling illegal DVD's from Indonesia, some guys were selling knockoff clocks and shoes, stuff like that. The guy with the DVD's made over 330,000£ a year on the illegal crap alone. And how did he get them? Imported illegally from a guy called "Ivan" in Indonesia, who most likely bought a copy of the discs from someone working at the distributors and then burns copies by the thousands. At no point in this did anyone visit a torrent site or P2P program or similar.
So why, if this is true, does the MPAA and RIAA and their ilk only chase after online downloaders? Simple. It's easier. You can't nab a guy in Indonesia for copying and selling your movies, since the Indonesian police is corrupt and will happily take a minor bribe to pretend he doesn't exist. For example.
Compare this to some grandmother unaware that downloading an album is illegal, who lives in your average lower income suburb, and can easily be traced by the simplest of programs.
Guess who the industry goes after?
The second reason is that the real losers aren't the artists, or even the record companies (they're making money like always, usually more than before, and the claimed losses are from *projected profits*, which are, in layman terms, fantasy bullshit profits invented by the companies, that probably will never see the light of day even if piracy was shut down forever this very moment), it's the second and third-hand retailers. Many artists of the later generations offer free songs online, and downloadable for dollar-albums, and make the majority of their money through that and through concert gigs and the likes.
Thing is, artists have always made more money by simply going out there and performing live. I remember a scene from the music documentary Depeche Mode: 101, where the boys of the band are presented with their profits after the concert. It's more money than they've ever seen at this point, and they're already huge in Europe and starting to be so in the US. They're world artists already, and one concert brings in more simoleons than anything they've ever done, and all their record sales.
When Lars Ulrich opens his mouth next, ask him what the sales of "...And Justice For All" were next to the proceeds from a single one of their world tours.
And the industry *knows* this. It's not news. They're basically just fighting a new chain of distribution because they still don't get that time and technology demands new approaches. Most artists who have adapted to the internet are doing quite well for themselves.
Think about that the next time you or someone else wants to bring up the "but the artists suffer!"-argument. And when a movie studio complains about camera-recorded movies torrented all over, go print out the numbers that tell another story, namely the box office proceeds. Avatar may be one of the most torrented movies right now, but it's also in the top 5 list of biggest box office proceeds ever. After four weeks.
So much for piracy bringing down the movie industry...
...aren't you supposed to get little red warnings first? It was fine yesterday, today it's dead.
Fuck.
- Mood:
gloomy
There, that's over and done with. No, I made no resolutions. New Year's Resolutions are things you make so you can feel guilty when you break them.
Anyway, allergies.
They're a source for comedy in most media. After all, allergies aren't *real* illnesses, are they? They're just imaginary, a figment of the hypochondriac brain, a wimpy reaction to stuff that Real, Manly Men (or Real, Womanly Women) don't react to. Unless it's food allergies, in which case it's used to kill someone in a detective show.
But here's what *my* allergies mean, to me:
I can never pet a dog, or cat, or any other pet with fur.
I can never hug any animal with fur.
I can't visit any homes where pets live, for more than a few hours before I have to leave. This includes my sister's house.
I have to check my sister's clothes for cat-hair before hugging her, or spend the rest of the evening scratching and pouring cold water on myself while waiting for the meds to kick in.
I have to vacuum my apartment 2-3 times a week to avoid reacting to the dust.
I have the sniffles, and sometimes whole cold symptoms most of spring, summer and autumn because of grass pollen. By that I mean every single day I have backed up sinuses and red, itchy eyes. Only in winter am I spared.
...
What I'm trying to get at is that people don't quite understand that allergies are a very real thing, they're not hypochondria, they're not imaginary and they're never *mild*. If they were, they wouldn't be allergies.
Let me illustrate: I found out I had become allergic to furred animals when I was about 23-24. I grew up in a home without pets for most of my childhood, and then had two rabbits (one was so over-testosteroned that we couldn't handle him and had him put up for stud, he lived until he was at least 8, making many female bunnies happy). The second rabbit I had until I was 21 or 22, at which point he died of old age (13 years old...no, seriously).
At this point, I was living in Hofors, studying at a comic book art school (to which I will be returning this year, with luck, for a real 2-year education), and I was in my studio (pupils shared small studios, two for each room). Someone let in a cat. The cat was a pet cat, with collar and everything, and very, very friendly. It comes up to me and pushes her head against my chin. Awwww.
Ten minutes later my throat is red with rash, itching like poison ivy and constricting my airways. I stand in the bathroom pouring cold water on it, hoping it'll go down, and eventually it does.
That was the first reaction. Not the last.
The following few years I discover that environments with a lot of animal fur or hair (such as clothes drives, the homes of people with pets), dust or grass pollen tend to make me break out in various symptoms. Rashes, difficulty breathing, swelling and itching of nose, face and eyes, coughing, sneezing, sinuses clogging up...nose bleeds...
Finally I get tested, and it's confirmed that I have allergies. So what's the reaction of most people? Well, most people really only know what they see on TV, so to them, allergies aren't too bad. After all, it's not a "real" illness, is it? Usually they treat me like a hypochondriac up until the explosive nose-bleeds.
That's what allergies are.
And I don't even have a fatal one.
Think about that the next time you smirk at someone who sneezes and apologizes for his allergies. He's not a hypochondriac. You're being a dick.
Stress, stress, stress.
These days...? Not so much.
Christmas dinner is lucky to have eight people, including the little niece (she's 2½, she'll be 3 in March), and all the food is done slowly over a 30-day period before Christmas Eve (the 24th...we Vikings mostly celebrate on the 24th, unlike the Southerners), which means much of Christmas Eve is quiet, calm, and not very stressful. Presents are usually bought about a month or two in advance so as to avoid the Christmas riots, and nobody shops beyond their spending limit.
Christmas among the poor and newly parenthooded seems less big than it was, is all I'm saying.
The loot this year? Gift cards for about 700 SEK (circa 70€), my sister and her hubby got me a handbook on how to be Spider-Man (by the same publishers that did the Action Hero's Handbook, I believe, which I already have), and my brother has promised a bit of cash when he gets his paycheck. I spent my allotted Christmas money on my little niece, she loves Duplo LEGO, so she got a Duplo dinosaur (a Diplodocus and baby, I believe) since she got a different Duplo dinosaur last Christmas (the T-Rex). She likes her LEGO. The one type of toy she always goes back to, though now she's a little older, she doesn't just build to knock down as much as she used to.
The last remnants of the concussion are fading, though most of the memories of that Wednesday will probably be gone forever even as I have regained parts of it. Goes with the head-bump, I suspect. The last sore spot is gone too, and the cut didn't even leave a scar (no wonder, since it didn't really bleed very much).
...and now New Years is approaching fast. Thank Random Agnostic Deity-Replacement I don't drink, or I wouldn't be able to enjoy all the free time as much. :-D
All hail the Emperor of Muzak.
Took a break from Dragon Age, and downloaded Saints Row 2 on X-Box Live, it's a fun, mindless sandbox game that takes sometimes better twitch-skills than I have (especially driving missions where you have to chase someone, avoid traffic, and shoot the chased, seemingly invulnerable bastard at the same time). It also, sometimes, have hilarious coinkydinks with the idle-animations.
...like how I've turned my entire gang into ninjas (it's funny, shut up), and today when my character returned from a mission of blowing up Jamaican gangsters, the couch in my gangster pad (a student house looking suspiciously like the Delta House), had four ninjas, neatly, primly seated and reading the paper. In a row. With the fifth talking on his cell.
I just bust up laughing right there.
There are big gaps in my memories of Wednesday night, but I went to the hospital, got a CT-scan, at least two doctors and three nurses checked up on me (and CT-scans aren't very interesting when you're busy keeping the world from doing tailspins around you whenever you open or close your eyes), and finally I was sent home with the advice to take it very easy for the next 6-7 days or so. My folks had me stay over-night so they could keep an eye on me, but after that I've been home.
A concussion, in short. I still get a bit dizzy if I do a lot of walking, moving too rapidly or just standing or bending over too quickly, but in a few days I'll be fine. On the downside, I've had to curtail gaming a bit. Dragon Age beckons, but I dare not heed its seductive call. ;-)
On the upside, I finally got to finish inking a piece that I'll be posting on DeviantArt in due course, though not quite yet.
Dizzy greetings from a concussed man.
PS: First thing I did when able to do anything but lie in bed and watch the world spin? Cleaning the bathroom floor. I'll be damned if I'm gonna let it beat me. :-D
Edit: And y'know what? The hospital visit only cost about 30 Euro. Suck on that, public healthcare opponents.
But capitalism doesn't really work. Not unchecked. The free market is a horrible idea, because as communism showed us, a free market is never self-regulating. A society is made out of people, these people are neither numbers nor trends but actual living, breathing individuals of which, yes, some are always trying to get more for themselves at the expense of their fellows.
It would do well for government-hired economists to remember that. A market is not an abstract. It is people. People are weird and greedy and selfish, and only a few try to do right by others.
I've been..."available for work" for 10+ years now, on and off. I've done internships, I've done various employment projects meant to put me in a better position for getting a job, I've even gone through business start-up courses (though my idea for a hobby-store/comics-store/webcafé was turned down by the guy who was supposed to help me start up, and six months later some guys who didn't even care about the idea start up exactly my concept in town...with the support I didn't get).
None of this has gotten me anywhere. The real reason for this is because to the county economists, I'm not a person. I can't be "unemployed" and at the same time be working hard for my own dreams. I'm an artist, but to the pencil-necks in charge, I'm not because I've never been published or shown at a gallery. Tell the social welfare or unemployment agency peeps that I want to work on my art and not chase jobs I know I won't get (this is a county with over 5,000 people unemployed at all times...and about 100 jobs available at any one time, give or take) and they translate this into "this guy isn't doing anything". To them, either I look for some shitty job that'll take all my time, or I'm not doing anything at all.
And the employers are exploiting this mentality like crazy. It's a golden age for anyone with an established business and no scruples. The government is so busy making life lovely for them that they're getting tax breaks, funding, free labor even (interns, which they use for the allotted time, then go "Sorry, we can't hire you" and then get another intern for the same job). It's a racket, and it's done by the very people the government insists should help everyone: the businesses.
The market.
Which, as we already know, is not a happy paradise community where everyone is helping their fellow human being. In fact it's a cutthroat piracy, kill or be killed, no prisoners get-the-money-and-run community where the fellow man is only good for what he's paying you, preferably without any kind of hindrances as to your price levels.
The market hates torrenting and anything open source, public domain or free. The market hates mass employment. The market hates regulations, rules, taxes.
Because the market does not have anyone's best interest at heart except themselves.
This is basic human economy 101. Human economy, because the market is made by humans. The market does not make itself. It is not an abstract deity economists should pray to, it is not a new Garden of Eden where money grows on trees and everyone is fed automatically because socialism is EVUL.
Capitalism needs socialism. Socialism needs capitalism.
And for those who want to see a country where the market is truly free: go to Somalia. I hear it's lovely there at this time of year. Just bring your bullet-proof vest and don't carry cash.
I'm an artist. But until I get published, the unemployment agency won't help me get a job. So I work hard on my own time, except the current economist-run government thinks anyone not taking any job (which can't really be done anyway due to mass unemployment) is a lazy slob who must be punished. I have to spend all my free time chasing non-existent jobs and internships that will take me nowhere fast. "But Olof", they say, "look, there are lots of people who got jobs lately!" Sure. They had the credentials for it. They had the ability. I can't take most low-education jobs because of my health issues. This is fact, I got the doctor's writ and everything. And the jobs I can take are the ones the most people are hunting.
But enough whining. I'm working hard to realize my dreams, and damn if I don't feel sometimes better equipped to handle rejection than most artists who got the easy ride to fame. Because I know how to soldier on, whereas they've barely ever been turned down. Sucks to be them.
...except for the said head of medicine, who said it was a sad mistake.
Well, no, Mr. Diplomatic. It's not *a* mistake. It's several, huge mistakes. The guy who died was denied care three times. Three.
First time, he's having difficulty breathing, can't even respond to being asked his name. We're not talking a bit of pneumonia here, we're talking incoherent and bubbling at the mouth. Literally.
Second time, the dying guy is lying in bed, going in and out of consciousness, and any medical personnel who didn't get their licenses in a cereal box should know that when people are *repeatedly passing out*, they need emergency care. This is not strange or unusual, in fact, most of the time when people pass out they should get immediate care of some sort. But no. The emergency call center...refuses to send an ambulance.
Third time, his wife (who is herself having a bad case of the swine flu) manages to call a cab, get him inside with the help of the cabbie, and drive him to the emergency room. Where it takes ten minutes for anyone in the staff to even bother responding.
A few days later, the guy is dead, after finally getting all the care he should have gotten in the first place.
This is not a mistake, Mr. Head of Medicine. This is three mistakes. Your staff killed this guy by simply not giving a shit.
Now, before anyone says this has anything to do with Swedish socialized health care, I want to pre-emptively say: Go to Hell. This has nothing to do with how we fund our health care system and everything to do with the nurses and doctors not giving a crap and not having paid attention when told about what the swine flu can do to those who are elderly or have medical conditions. When a guy is bubbling at the mouth and can't answer his own name, this is when you call a doctor. When a person tells you the individual they're calling in the emergency for is *passing out repeatedly*, this is when you send an ambulance, top speed. You don't tell them "Whatever. Give him an aspirin, call back tomorrow."
Now, my own opinion is that a lot of medical staff are underestimating this flu. Sure, this isn't the Spanish disease or tuberculosis or anything like that. It's a flu. But some flus kill. This is not news. They don't kill *often*, but some do kill. But I see doctors and nurses and other medical staff going "Oh, people are over-reacting..." and I want to slap them upside the head, because yeah, people are being a bit hypochondriac about the Swine flu, but when a guy is unconscious and bubbling at the freaking mouth, you send help!
It's not rocket surgery, folks. Or even brain science. If I'm lying on the ground passed out and bubbling at the mouth from being hit by a car, having double-sided pneumonia, having steel rebar shoved through my chest or from flu complications does not matter. I'm still freaking passed out and bubbling at the mouth and need emergency care. But I bet the moment the emergency staff heard the words "Swine flu" they went "Oh, yawn, another hypochondriac." This is dangerous. This is really freaking dangerous.
And in further news, a guy in my old home town of Simrishamn started a company called Pickea, with the sole purpose of helping people cart home and assemble IKEA furniture. He asked the local IKEA if they would mind (and he did make the name and logo different enough to not be any kind of challenge to the trademark), they said no. So he starts it up, and a few weeks later IKEA's dutch (!) lawyers send a cease-and-desist order.
Is it just me or is Holland becoming the center for irresponsible law suits against people in other countries, with barely any care for actual laws and practices? They've been caught falsifying evidence against torrent-sites, too...
The reasons for leaving are trivial and kind of silly, all low-grade drama and a general feeling of being unwelcome (which, after 10+ years on the forums you'd think would make me sad or morose or even angry, but no). One of the mods, a fairly right-wing sort, misinterpreted a comment of mine as a general attack on all Republicans instead of the fringe group nutjobs I mentioned in the post, and when I felt unfairly singled out and asked what the heck was up with that (especially since the whole thread was calling said nutjobs names and mocking them in general) I got only token support from one mod, and downright hostility and veiled threats from another.
In the latter mod's defense, he's gotten a very dark view of the average poster in the years he's been moderating. I kind of wonder if maybe he doesn't need to ditch the forums more than I did.
Anyway, tl; dr, I decided that my general feeling of bemused apathy might be a sign of something, and bid the forums adieu.
And now I'm feeling great. Which is kind of weird.
I've only had to suppress the urge to surf them once.
In the words of Jonathan Coulton: "I feel fantastic!"
- Mood:
relieved
Slap me silly and call me Roy.
Haven't slept right in over a month now, money trouble, worry about the future, general stress and possibly mild depression haunting me. Nothing serious, nothing really worth complaining about. But the net result being that I get, on average, 3-4 hours of sleep, tops. Night between Sunday and Monday I slept one and and a half hour. Total. But I managed to get about 9 hours last night, got up at about 8.30 this morning and I intend to stay up to about ten in the evening then going to bed (with an Ibuprofen because they make me sleep heavily), so hopefully I'll get some sleep tonight.
Wacka wacka wacka!
...no, not the movie with Gregory Hines and Baryshnikov. That's White Nights you're thinking of.
No, I'm thinking about how people constantly use white lies even when they're unnecessary. It's like some kind of habit, where you grow up learning to spare feelings no matter what and then when adult you use them constantly even when the other party is practically begging you to stop. It's like nobody wants to just pardon themselves politely anymore. Everyone keeps acting as if there's a black and white thing, either you give a white lie or you tell the truth as bluntly and rudely as possible...and it's just silly. I mean, what happened to just saying "I'm sorry, I just don't feel like [insert activity here] today, can we take a raincheck"? Instead they'll go "Oh, um, I have to wash my hair/do something totally unrelated/tapdance with Fred Astaire", and yeah, usually as transparent as that. It's a blatant lie, and it kind of feels worse to the one being lied to than the truth with a slight apology for not being social.
It's an odd behavior, and one I'd like to see go away. After all, if everyone keeps lying to spare other peoples feelings, won't we end up with a society where no-one can take even the slightest normal rejection or criticism?
Up next: how to make a nuclear-powered death-ray using only household items and three gallons of lead-based paint!
Jebus save me, I really don't want a third bout. Twice was more than enough.
...but I don't think it'll get that bad. Hopefully.
Is it just me, or should the guys behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz be given the movie rights to Terry Pratchett's novels? I think they'd get along famously. Like a house on fire...and good lord, now I'm imagining Nick Frost as Sergeant Colon, and Simon Pegg as Rincewind...
On the upside, I won 75 kronor on some lottery tickets. So life isn't totally bad.
..which is, in my opinion, quite the insular way of looking at it. I know there's a whole school of criticism claiming that you can judge a work on the work alone, and nothing related to it, but it's a bit like an archaeologist finding a three-thousand-year-old pot-shard in China that looks like Hellene pottery, and claiming it has no possible connection to Hellas in spite of the tiny Chinese script saying "This pot was made by Lu the Potter after instructions from a weird round-eyed Westerner" or the likes (or vice versa). No media exists in a vacuum. No artwork was made without outside influences (inspiration comes from within, but we are shaped by our experiences).
So when a movie critic complains that, for example, Hellboy 2 has a bunch of weird characters in it, I find that instead of mocking the nerds who go "Say what?", we might want to listen to their commenting that "Well, yeah, it's based on a pretty weird comic book inspired by pulp horror from the past two centuries..."
