Monthly Archive for July, 2009

MG Siegler Destroys the English Language – Episode 3

MG Siegler Destroys the Enlgish Language

Today on MG Siegler Destroys the English Language, MG seems to be having a better day in terms of competence. But in “The Mac Versus PC Debate Has Never Been Clearer“, he proves once again that he has no idea what an em dash is supposed to do. Oh, and some other things.

The point MG makes in the article is a great one: the Mac vs. PC debate is very much like a Porsche vs. Camry comparison. But that doesn’t make his writing any less aggravating to read.
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    RIAA Declares Death of Digital Rights Manufacturing, Causes Everyone’s Head To Explode

    TorrentFreak reports that the chief spokesperson for the RIAA has gone on record saying that DRM is dead:

    Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the RIAA declared DRM dead, when he was asked about the RIAA’s view on DRM for an upcoming SCMagazine article. “DRM is dead, isn’t it?” Lamy said, referring to the DRM-less iTunes store and other online outfits that now offer music without restrictions.

    DRM, which advocates claim is an acronym for “Digital Rights Management,” stands for Digital Rights Manufacturing, and refers to a number of technological methods by which media companies can manufacture legal rights for themselves out of thin air. These synthetic rights allow the gigantic corporation to prevent a legitimate buyer of a song, movie, video game, or other piece of media from doing anything particularly useful with it. It has been used by music distributors throughout the 00s as a sales reducer.

    The RIAA, or Retrospectively Irrelevant Association of America, has long championed the use of DRM on music, asserting that la la la la la, I can’t hear you, la la la la la. The sudden change in attitude has so far caused 40 deaths and 900 injuries worldwide related to high-decibel emissions of “wait, what?”

    Update: Actually, no, they didn’t. They just said it’s not on iTunes and stuff anymore, so that means something. Oh well.

      MG Siegler Destroys the English Language – Episode 2

      TechCrunch writer MG Siegler is certainly no stranger to “innovative” grammar. While experimentation in writing style and the bending conventional rules is often a wonderful thing, MG’s methods cause his articles to read quite awkwardly. It seems he hasn’t learned a thing since I first, shall we say, “critiqued” him, as he has once again brought out the Strunk & White supremacist in me. I get the feeling these incidents aren’t going to stop very soon, so I might as well start keeping count.
      mgsdestroy
      Today on MG Siegler Destroys the English Language, we turn our attention to MG’s piece “FasterWeb Wants To Make The Entire Web Up To Ten Times Faster In 2010“. Once again, MG can’t get two sentences out before screwing something up, and one sentence later proves that he can’t finish his opening paragraph without misusing the em dash:
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        In Which Zacqary Compels The Internet To Force an Innocent Man To Dance in a Kilt

        One of the things I missed at Anthrocon this weekend were the consequences of leaving a spur-of-the-moment comment on the Wolfire Games blog. The dire, dire consequences.

        Just…watch this video…

        I am so, sorry, John Graham. I never meant for this to happen. Please forgive me.

          Anthrocon: It’s Like WWDC, But With More Animals, and No iPhone Announcements, and Not Like WWDC At All

          Well, folks, it’s that time of year again. The time of year when the entire economy of the city of Pittsburgh is sustained by about 3000 crazy people wearing tails. Once again, I will be one of them.

          This, of course, will result in another musical video mashup that will draw the attention of lots of people and get an attempted takedown from YouTube by the Copyright Mafia. Like this one from last year:

          I’ll hopefully be able to confuse the Content ID robots this time around, and perhaps have an even more clear-cut case of fair use, by mixing a few different songs together, altering some of their tempos and pitches at various points and resampling and inverting and slershkergerber. That’s totally a word. Shakespeare said it. In his sleep. Once.

          Every day, I’ll attempt to do some kind of short writeup. It’ll probably amount to summarizing whatever I tweeted that day, though. If you’d like to keep track of my Anthrocon experience up-to-the-minute, just search for tweets from @XerxesQados tagged #AC09. Or click the link in the previous sentence if you’re lazy.

          See you there, if you’re going, and reading this, and stuff.