Archive for the 'Commentary' Category

According to Netflix, Paul Blart: Mall Cop is a “Suspenseful Movie”

Image of "Paul Blart" listed under "Suspenseful Movies"

That is all.

Why a World In Which Movie Piracy Were Legal Would Have No Drawbacks Whatsoever

Why a World In Which Movie Piracy Were Legal Would Have No Drawbacks Whatsoever — Average US movie ticket price: $7.50; Time the decision to pay this price is made: Before the movie; Total US gross of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: $402,111,870; How much money would it have made if the decision to pay $7.50 were made AFTER the movie? See? No drawbacks.

Sources:
» Ticket Price
» Gross

No, Indie Musicians, You Do Not “Deserve” To Be Paid For Your Work

Justin Timberlake - Cry Me a River Album Art
Every time I see some down-on-his-luck independent musician ranting about how nobody wants to pay for music anymore, and how it’s hurting their livelihood as well as the labels, and why are people such cheap bastards who won’t pay me, and blah blah blah, it makes me very angry.

Yeah, I feel your pain, guys. People don’t pay for movies anymore either, and if they did I’d have a clear-cut business plan that anyone could understand, and I’d be rolling in investment money by now and going full speed ahead on a bajillion-dollar live-action-CGI-blend-extravaganza about space pirates or something. But that’s just not the way the world works anymore.

Now, I understand the need for a coping mechanism. Blame the cheap bastards who just want to download all of your hard work that you worked so hard on for weeks and months and years. Maybe they’ve got a point when they say the big record companies shouldn’t keep making money, but you, nooooo, you’re indie! You make less money than a part-time fry cook at McDonald’s, and if people steal from you, then they’re bad, bad people! You deserve to be paid for your hard work!

No you don’t. You’re indulging in your own creative vision; nobody asked you to, and you’re not providing a service to anybody. You are creating all the pretty music in your head because you feel like it, and you are not inherently entitled to anybody’s appreciation and certainly not monetary compensation.

If you’re good, though, and people like your music, then you don’t have to tell them that you deserve to be paid for it, because they know. They’re your fans now, and they’d love to throw money at you.

So, I’m sorry to break it to you, impoverished indie musician, but if you’re not making money from your music, then you’re either not good enough or you haven’t put a god damn PayPal button on your website.

Slash rant.

In Which The Geeky Political Drama Regarding HTML5 Video is Explained By a Kindergarten Crayon Drawing

Okay, you see, there are some major advances to watching videos on the web that everyone would be able to experience right now, except all of the browser makers are fighting over what type of video standard to use. It may be confusing to you, so I drew you a picture to explain it in the distinctive art style of Zacqary Adam Green at age five:

You see, Theora and H.264 are shooting guns at each other and Theora is shouting about freedom and H.264 is talking about money and Firefox is a fox and he likes Theora and Opera is a singing fat lady and she likes Theora too and Apple is an apple with leaves and a bite out of it and it likes H.264 and Google is a rainbow and it likes both of them and Dirac is hiding in his room and crying because nobody pays attention to him.

There. Now you know.

The iPad Might Mean the End of Intel Macs, and That Scares Me

Yeah, yeah, the iPad wasn’t all that great, and it’s underwhelming, and it won’t cure cancer like we thought it would, blahdeblahdeblah. We all know that, and that’s not what I’m going to rant about right now.

The iPad is the first device to use an Apple-designed processor. This is something one could easily have predicted when Apple bought PA Semi in 2008, but now that Apple’s finally gone and used their newly acquired chipmaker to actually make their own chip, the potential ramifications begin to sink in. Now that Apple makes their own processors, what’s to say they’ll still be putting Intel’s in their Macs?

One can see why they wouldn’t want to. Continue reading ‘The iPad Might Mean the End of Intel Macs, and That Scares Me’