You Biatch! You Stoleded My Link!*
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on August 3, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010Ever get a weird possessive feeling about the links you share? Me too. That’s because they’re ALL MINE. I just haven’t been sharing them. Help me name our new weekly “link dump” column.
I get depressed sometimes when I realize that my life is just a bunch of web links strung together with occasional real-life discussion, but mostly just connected by written commentary and link sharing on Facebook. It gets REALLY depressing when I find myself having an emotional response to someone sharing a link on their Facebook “wall” without crediting me, as if somehow it was MY link. Or if they get more comments in spite of posting it when it’s already a week old. “Stupid link sharing friend! I shared that link LAST WEEK!” This is one of the unfortunate side effects of maintaining a site like Dissociated Press. As I said to a friend once: “The Internet. I have seen it“. Out of the literally dozens of sources I comb regularly to bring you interesting stuff, I OMIT infinitely more than I share, because, well, they’re JUST LINKS. So I’ve finally decided to put this wasted pile of weekly links to use, with a regular “link dump” section. I just need a name for this new section on the site. “Linkdump” somehow doesn’t sound like something that would generate enthusiastic user engagement. So if you have an idea for a name, feel free to share. But enough delaying. On with delinking! Read the rest of this entry »
Apple Gets EFFed In Court While Al Greene Runs For Senate
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 26, 2010 by admin in Politics
Monday, July 26th, 2010While both the EFF and Alvin Greene have scored their own little victories recently, we’re still waiting for the Alvin Greene Day & The Chipmunks mashup.
I love it when the day’s news converges in such a way that politics, pop media, copyright law, and comedy collide in an amorphous mass of inanely entertaining foolishness. Like today. While the EFF scored major victories allowing you to jailbreak your iPhone and remix YouTube video content, the PR firm “Frank Strategies” forced a YouTube takedown of the Alvin Greene campaign rap video because it used a few seconds of crappy Tea Party protest footage from one of their videos. Except it wasn’t actually Alvin Greene’s campaign video , and and you can still find it on YouTube, ironically on the Fixed News Channel, which parodies Fox News. If you haven’t followed this story, Alvin Greene is an unemployed felon who lives with his mom, who in spite of these minor handicaps was also the recent victor in the South Carolina Democratic U.S. Senate primary race. Many believe he was a GOP plant. Just another campaign season in America, I guess. Given the media mashup nature of this story, the biggest surprise here is that there still is no “Alvin Greene and the Chipmunks”* parody. Until then, the only Al Green video that gets my vote is featured below…. Read the rest of this entry »
Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir
[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 9, 2010 by admin in Music
Sunday, May 9th, 2010Id’ like to teach the world to sing, but it sounds like they already know how.
The Britlin Losee clip that started it all |
If you saw the video at left on its own, you might just think “Aw, what a silly sappy little fangirl with a sweet voice”, or, if you’re a weepy little crybaby like me, you might actually tear up a bit. She does have a lovely little voice, and she seems like she’s on the verge of crying as she does her introduction and then sings an a capella piece. But what makes the whole thing more touching is that her simple, unsolicited video clip inspired American choral composer Eric Whitacre to assemble his Virtual Choir (clips below), which is a project that uses 285 singers from 12 countries to perform his work. So what’s so inspiring about that? Well, it’s all done through YouTube! On his how we did it page, he describes how a friend sent him the Britlin Losee clip, which inspired the rest. Although the inclusion of Whitacre “virtually conducting” a couple hundred YouTube clips floating in darkness detracts a bit from the video production (it lends a slightly “John Tesch” vibe), the resulting music is gorgeous, and embodies the sort of thing that’s rarely achieved but always hoped for via the web: international sharing of creativity, passion, harmony, and beauty. It also proves something that I’ve always believed but am willing to ascribe to my perceptual disorders, which is that everyone has a song in them. I am almost always hearing a choir in my head, and this music sounds like part of it. Now I know what some of the people look like! More clips below. Read the rest of this entry »
Red Letter Media – Brilliant, Hilarious, and… Annoying?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on April 6, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010It would just be silly for us to review a preview of a review of a movie, so we’ll let you decide for yourself what to think about YouTube celebrity critic Red Letter Media.
What’s one half brilliant comedy, one half insightful critical analysis, and one half annoying? The movie reviews by Red Letter Media, that’s what. Yeah, I know that’s three halves, but the math just feels right. I’ve never been a big fan of critics and movie reviews; there’s something intrinsically annoying about someone who doesn’t know how to do something sitting around telling you how someone who does didn’t do it right. We’ve mentioned the “meta” nature of recent pop media before, and this is where the Red Letter Media reviews of films like Star Wars: The Phantom Menace shine. If you haven’t seen them before, the reviews are a strange mix of childish complaints mixed with brilliant insights, delivered with a simple-minded but self-aware lowbrow humor. All read in a contrived voice that sounds like a cross between Strong Bad and Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs . The reviews are sometimes almost as long as the movies they’re skewering, and sometimes worth the marathon, sometimes not. It would just be too meta even for my tastes to review a review of a movie, so I’ll let you decide for yourself. So who’s behind this madness? Surprisingly, it’s not some tormented nerd with a video camera like CopperCab, it’s an indy film actor/director/writer named Mike Stoklasa, who apparently collaborates with fellow indy filmmaker Jay Bauman. Read an interview Stoklasa here, and explore the reviews on Red Letter Media’s YouTube channel. Read the rest of this entry »
So It’s Canadian Pirates vs. The RIAA, eh?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 20, 2010 by admin in Music
Saturday, February 20th, 2010Not content with suing dead people, old ladies who don’t own computers, and their own artists and distibution channels, the record industry is going after those archvillains of the arctic, CANADA.
In their never-ending quest for most absurd litigation to make its way into the apparently oblivious judicial system, the record industry is stepping it up a notch. No, it wasn’t enough to steal from their own artists and corrupt the legal system, or to sue a single woman for $80,000 per allegedly pirated song (oh wait, it got reduced to a mere $2,250!), or sue dead people, people who don’t even own computers, and the entire radio industry. No, now they’re taking on the country that – as we all know – is home to the most ruthless criminal networks of the Americas. You know, Canada. Who knew that aside from being a country full of pretty nice people whose greatest crime may be occasionaly finishing sentences with “eh?”, Canada is also a hotbed of profit-robbing music piracy? As far as I knew, the only threat that Canada had brought to the established music industry recently was a really awesome indy scene, but the RIAA sees things a little differently. Fortunately, this may be one of the last times that you’ll have to endure wingnuts like me ranting about this; dinosaur labels like EMI are soon likely to be laying about in massive heaps gasping for their last breaths like their metaphoric counterparts at the end of the Jurassic period, as they continue to blame their $2.7 billion losses on piracy rather than their failure to adapt to competition. I tend to get a little over-the-top when I discuss this topic; for a much more sane overview from an artist’s point of view, check out this New York Times piece by Damian Kulash Jr. of the band OK Go, in which he calmly describes how EMI’s disabling of the “embed” feature on YouTube has probably lost them exponentially more than what they made by “protecting” their property.