Of course, Bobby was pretty rank, so everytime he'd go back on the set, we'd ask Scorpia to come out with her Chanel and her wacky body chemitry to defumigate the hallway.
My vote for "Top 10 Weird Slashdot Sentence."
You've been reading too much Thomas Pynchon, though.:)
Pyongyang, February 14 (KCNA) -- Despite sensible efforts by the DPRK "moderators" to halt repetitive Slashdot postings, one poster continues. This poster should behave himself. Thanks to Slashdot.org's deep love for the people, the poster will be allowed to continue but DPRK recommends that poster should "cease" and be sensible. It is clear to all but the warmongers that such postings are a mere ploy to build upon humorless foundations.
Greetings to Mithras the Prophet
Pyongyang, February 13 (KCNA) -- President General Secretary sends greetings to Mithras the Prophet. We hope Mithras continues to reap common sense. Thanks to Mithras's deft critical abilities, such posters as Didion Sprague remain in check. We commend Mithras and are happy he is behaving himself.
Funniest -- weirdest -- damn thing I've read all morning.
Whoever mod'd this as 'Offtopic' is a moron.
I'll agree it doesn't address the actual situation as specified in the topic, but the idea here -- the anger, at least -- has a ring of truth not heard on Slashdot on a long time.
Funny shit!
(BTW -- on topic -- what happens to the DRM files when you need to reinstall the OS? Do you lose everything?)
And that's the point: why should I care about something that doesn't benefit me? I'd much rather support a cell phone *ban* that benefits me, the movie consumer, than a slow, technological paradigm shift that will (a) raise prices, (b) create new glitches, and (c) be cracked within weeks and will only benefit rich guys like Valenti wearing Italian suits.
Anyway, I'll agree. The idea of 'jamming' camcorders is insane. How many times have you actually been bothered by someone with a camcorder?
The answer is none. Anybody desperate enough to film the movie is gonna be as low-key and low-in-the-seat as possible.
It's the mobile phones and beepers that oughta be jammed -- in movie theaters, restaurants, and anywhere where you, the cell phone owner, are surrounded with people who are not using cell phones and aren't even thinking about cell phones.
My parents took me to see all three movies. It wasn't a big deal. So Riley probably had the same experience.
A couple days ago I posted about seeing Saturday Night Fever for the first time. It rocked my world. A few years later I sat in the same theater with my dad and saw Apocalypse Now.
The interesting thing is that I saw the version of AN when they blew up Kurtz's compound at the very end. (The *alternate* version.) I'm not sure how or why I saw -- since Coppola indicates that he very quickly deleted the explosions at the end -- but I *do* remember how the ballsacks at the theater decided to *close the curtain* during the explosion. They thought the film was over and were eager to sweep up the popcorn and shit strewn all over the floor.
Well, my father got pissed off. He stormed up the aisle, went into the lobby, and demanded they open the curtain. "The film's not over!" I heard him yelling. A moment later, he came fuming back down the aisle, plunked down in his seat, and said we weren't going anywhere until those curtains opened.
Sure enough, the curtains opened. We watched the silent explosions. The film faded to black and the curtains closed again.
That was my Gen-X, Apocalypse Now experience.
Re:I want to grow up a Blogger just like you!
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The Weblog Handbook
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· Score: 2
Wait...
I know this is bad form, but I caught the narcissism bug. So I made my own blog:
Usenet remains one of the last nuggets of the pre-corporate internet, and it's also one of the *best* nuggets.
Yeah, it's a waste of space and bandwidth, but there's still enough craziness and wackiness and sheer fucking value in usenet to make it seem like a soon-to-be ghost-town on a rapidly vanishing corporate-free frontier.
Re:I want to grow up a Blogger just like you!
on
The Weblog Handbook
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· Score: 2
I see your point, but I think it's safe to assume that Blogging -- at least when it's at its most narcissitic -- is like the little pressure valve in those stove-top espresso makers. If the valve wasn't there, you'd pour in the water, put in espresso, put it on the stove, and after two minutes, you'd be digging IKEA shrapnel out from your stomach.
Blogging, I think, works much in the same way. Imagine if these people only had Linkin Park or Avril Lavigne to listen to -- and no way to release the pressure? (Or, worse, imagine if they only had that Linkin Park remix album to listen to? You think 'In the End' is bad in its original incarnation, wait'll you hear what happens to it when Mix-Master Flash and Grand Diddy Funk 'N Funktastic start scratching on it.)
Of course, I experienced a similar situation back in the days of my youth. But thank god the Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever came to my rescure. There I was in 1977 -- eight, maybe nine years old -- and my world pretty much consisted of all the fading patriotic hoopla from the Bicentennial, a couple of Scientific American magazines which I read over and over again because I was fascinated with the Voyager Mars missions, and a little beat-up AM radio that every night tuned to the local station in my small town so I could hear real live DJs play stuff like Bobby Hebb's 'Sunny' and Glen Campbell's 'Rhinestone Cowboy.'
Anyway, I caught wind of this new movie -- Saturday Night Fever. No one in my fourth grade class had seen it, but everybody was talking about it. Of course, thanks to Jack 'Maddog' Valenti, it was Rated R, so that meant I had to be either 17 or in the company of my old man to go see it.
(I sent Valenti a letter not long after that, explaining that it should be up to kids and parents to make decisions about movies -- not some dumb ratings board -- but I never got a response. For that I still hold a grudge. But I digress...)
Anyway, the Old Man had heard good things about Saturday Night Fever so he decided to take me. We caught a matinee -- on account the old man was a fucking cheapskate -- but that was okay. Wer hustled down to the movie theater and were able to get into see the 5pm show. ("All shows before 6pm are $1.75")
That movie changed my life. I'm not kidding. The music, Tony Manaro ("Attica! Attica!"), the whole downtown atmosphere -- it rocked. The only thing that profoundly disturbed me was the fucking Annette in the car. I was seven, of course, so this was all new -- the "making it" -- but I guess these days it's not so new. But then -- back in 1977 -- making it with Annette in the backseat of the car was rocked my little world. And rubbers? Don't get me started. It took a little bit of detective work to figure out what Tony was talking about when he wondered why she didn't have no rubbers.
But this is story about blogging and pressure valves, so flash forward about two weeks. I finally scrounged up enough allowance to by the double album of the soundtrack. I can see the brownish 'Casablanca' label on the record spinning around on my little turntable. That record -- especially the first record -- was my little pressure valve.
The old man would leave on a Saturday or Sunday, and I'd creep downstairs, put the record on the big stereo, and turn the volume up high. "Night Fever", "Jive Talking," and "Staying Alive" blasting loud and clear while I danced around my living room in my sweat socks doing knee-splits and the statue-of-liberty-like-pointing-at-the-sky moves that Tony Manero did in the film. I slicked my hair back, put on my best Brooklyn accent, and made an invisible friend named 'Annette' with whom I'd try to 'make it' on the sofa.
That was my pressure valve.
Nowadays it's blogging.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Last I looked the RH ISOs were on nearly every CD group, just waiting to be snagged.
This is off-topic, but lately I'm finding that more and more people have absolutely no idea what usenet is. I mentioned this to one of our new IT guys here -- a so-called "hot-shot" just out of college -- and wondered if usenet "sells DSL because he can't get it through AT&T."
Re:White hot world of web logs?
on
The Weblog Handbook
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I had the same question myself. But after searching a few blogs this morning, I realized that the bloggers are bonkers.
I mean, I came across some guy's site (I think his name was Rannie -- it was a Photography/Read the stories of my life Blog) -- and found him talking about "blogging meetings" and playing some sort of "survivor" blog game, and then bemoaning all the popular new Blogs these days because they're forgetting about the Blogger Old-Schoolers (and then he named a bunch of Bloggers who, I guess, are incredibly famous in the world of blogs.)
Anyway, I was surprised to stumble on an apparently thriving little (big?) sub-culture.
Me, I suspect the deal with Blogs is that when they're good -- they're really good -- but when they're bad, they're wretched exercises in navel-gazing narcissism. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, however.)
Well, honestly, I haven't seen a lot of great digital photos -- at least none that readily admit that they are *digital*. Andreas Gursky is an exception. Gurksy's photographs are these huge -- massive -- prints of ordinary (and sometimes not so ordinary) things: apartment building facades, highways, warehouses, you name it.
Gursky claims that he uses a large-format view camera, touches up the negative digitally, and then prints on massive sheets of papers -- upwards of 40 feet by 40 feet. Sometimes even bigger.
I think much of the "digital is better" debate won't be settled for years and years. I say that because digital is a way of seeing, too. No one much talks about this. I mean, sure, shooting digital ad copy and catalog copy is just like shooting film copy, but once you leave the "business" of photography and get into the "art" of it, you start to realize that digital does engender a slightly different mindset.
I mean, I find myself shooting more real film than I do digital film. With digital film -- on my D100, for example -- I'm fall into the "slave to the controls" menality. I become sorta hypnotized by the histograms and levels and camera feedback and I try to get everything *right*.
Of course, with my Leica M6, I pretty much set the shutter on 1/125, adjust the aperture for whatever kind of light I happened to be looking at, and off I go, snap snapping away. I shoot through Tri-X like there's no tomorrow. (And if you use a Leica, you know it has a, uh, quaint loading mechanism that requires you actually turn knobs and spin things and hold things in order to load the film -- not anything like the digital and "whizbang" cameras that suck the film into their innards as if they're sucking the last of a Slurpee from a Kmart cup.)
Other folks, though, have a different rhythm with digital. They shoot like mad, delete the stuff that doesn't look good, and then start all over again. For them, film is anathema -- an outdated dinosaur. Good riddance, they say.
But the stuff I'm talking about here -- the "talismanic" qualities -- is a lot of mystical hooey. Folks more pragmatic probably think this is crazy -- rhythm, weight, the sounds of the shutter, the tactile feel of the shutter dials, the aperture ring -- and that I'm just blabbing on and on about a dying "media".
Maybe.
But I'm a writer, too, and I always write my drafts in longhand on white typing paper punched with three holes. I store all my drafts in half-inch thick black binders, and I like nothing else than to fill up one binder with drafts -- notes for stories, complete first drafts, character sketches -- stick it underneath my desk, and then go to Home Depot to get another half-inch thick black binder and start the process all over again.
I do this -- write in longhand -- because there's a definite rhythm to it. And I find that the physical movement of my arm and hand across the paper engages my brain. The rhythm helps me think. Peter Elbow -- a writing teacher -- used to call this "free writing" -- the idea that you physically move your pen across the paper, writing as you go, but you don't worry about *what* you write. The theory is that the physical movement begins to engage your intellect -- and that once everything gets in sync, you start thinking of stuff you didn't know you wanted to think about.
Weird, but -- for most folks -- it works. But you have to be patient.
Any sort of archiving is expensive. I don't doubt film is expensive. And certainly the preservation of motion pictures is *obscenely* expensive.
It's tricky, though. Archival arguments can go either way. When the twin towers fell in NYC, thousands of negatives of JFK were destroyed. I suppose digital might have helped out here if people make copies of their analog media and store them in alternate locations. One location's destruction wouldn't mean total destruction.
But I fear not all photographers think this through. Or, if they do, they think it through when it's too late -- after their hard drive has crashed and they lost the 216 wedding photographs they took for a gig they'd just come from. (It happened to a pal of mine recently. He's sending the HD off to a data retrieval place to see if there's anything left on the HD that can be salvaged.)
Now, yes, you can attribute this to stupidity or ignorance, but that's the main problem I hear about digital photography -- a little stupidity can cause a *lot* pain.
The same thing can happen in a darkroom, of course. More than once I've mistakenly poured fixer instead of developer. It's rare, but it *has* happened.
Most pros I work with have found a comfortable hybrid workflow. Folks with rush jobs shoot all digital, but for jobs that they care about -- and jobs that don't need to be finished yesterday -- they still shoot some film, just to have a back-up.
It's a weird time for photography. I've sold all my Nikon SLR gear, but I absolutely *love* my Leica M6 and will never, ever part with it. Apart from a fine picture taking machine, it's a fine machine, period. For anyone who's ever held a Leica or had a chance to use one, you'll know what I mean.
It's built like a rock and feels good in my hands. It has a weird "talismanic" property, too. I carry it -- and shoot with it -- because it feels right. It feels like this is what I'm supposed to shoot. Yet, I shoot digital, too.
I suspect my own middle-ground is much like the middle-ground I found with digital ebooks. I understand ebooks and will occasionally sit down on a train or a bus and read one on my Palm. It gets the job done but it's nothing like reading a book. Much like the Leica, I realize that if you're a reader -- and if you are really a *reader* -- you'll appreciate this. There is a weird talismanic quality to a book. It feels right in your hands, and if you're reading for pleasure, there's nothing else like it.
Yet I know ebooks have their uses. I understand that, and I appreciate it. I just don't care for them, although I'll read them if I need a text and if the only text available is an ebook.
Sorta like me reconcilation with digital photography, I guess.
First, the D30 is not exactly a high-end camera. It might have been two years ago, but now the D30 is decidedly mid-level. It's a prosumer camera, at best.
But that brings up an interesting point -- one that I continue to struggle with. Digital equipment remains a difficult investment -- especially if you're a working pro. Just because a camera is 4/8/11/14 megapixels doesn't necessarily mean it's better than "film" or better than "last year's camera" if you have to pull two or three times the job to cover the cost of the initial investment.
There's no doubt digital is here to stay. And there's no doubt that many folks have proclaimed digital to be "better" than film, but "better" can mean all sorts of things to all sorts of people. I suspect folks mean "better quality" when they say "better", but I'm not sure what that means either.
I can show you Winogrand photographs taken, oh, in the 1950s that are, in fact, "better quality" than anyone's digital photograph. Anyone's. And Winogrand used a beat-up Leica M4-P without a meter!
I can point to a grainy, dim Salgado print and say, well, that's grainy and dim, but it's "better" than anything I've yet to see reproduced digitally.
Yet I can also point to a hybrid print -- analog film, digital manipulation -- by someone like Gurksy (the guy who makes those massive prints) and say, well, in Gursky's case, the hybrid approach works wonders.
And I can, of course, go to a site like Photosig.com and Photo.net and point to any number -- literally thousands -- of "digital photographs" taken with prosumer gear like the D30 or the new Nikon D100 and say they're absolutely dreadful -- despite the fact they are *crystal clear* pictures of dogs and cats and babies with sticky oatmeal on their face.
So you have a D100 and are able to take crystal clear pictures of baby drool that can be blown up to 16X20?
Great.
The other issue -- much more serious -- is that digital cameras simply won't leave behind the sort of "archeological" records that film cameras leave behind.
This is an unpopular argument, however. Folks always say, well, you can burn whatever you want on whatever medium you want -- CDROM, DVD, you name it.
But as someone who has spent many, many hours in dimly lit photoarchives, I can say without hesitation that if someone like Garry Winogrand shot digitally, there would *be no* Garry Winogrand. Ditto for someone like Cartier-Bresson. They might have one or two great pictures but there would be no beagtives -- only old, outdated media -- most of which (possibly) cannot be salvaged.
Winogrand, for example, had stacks and stacks of prints and negatives in his little NYC apartment. You'd come in for a visit, and he'd toss you a stack of workprints.
His was a "record it all, no matter what" mentality. Now that's both good and bad, but for sifting through an artist's work, I suspect it's bad if you use digital. There's a permanence to a negative which may or may not be the case with CDROMs burned today. There's also a *bulk*. Negatives took up a lot of space. And that fact alone prevented many boxes of negatives from many photographers from being tossed out or misplaced.
Don't underestimate *bulk*. Physical product. In art, it's very important. Maybe not now, not today when the artist is alive and struggling, but when he or she is dead, bulk of what remains -- the presence of his or her remnants -- play a siginicant role in preservation.
And if you want to get really geeky, go ahead and pick up a copy of Inform -- an IF authoring system. (IMHO, Inform is the *best* system, but that's open to debate...)
The days of 'Aladdin's Castle' at one end of the mall, five dollars, and 25 tokens.
And each game was one token! (This was around 1983, give or take. The days of Defender and Pac Man and Donkey Kong.)
And my personal favorite... Wizard of Wor.
Of course, playing Wizard of War or Tron or Bump and Jump or Mappy or Spy Hunter on MAME is nowhere near the same experience at those early years in the arcade...
I'm curious about the 'interdiction' that they're talking about:
"...interdiction, which would attempt to suck up a user's outbound file sharing connections with repeated attempts to download a copyrighted file. Interdiction would prevent human users from downloading that file, eventually frustrating them and forcing them to move on, he said.
Isn't this notion of "interdiction" essentially a DoS attack?
And if I'm getting DoS'd -- or if my corporate firewall is getting DoS'd because the RIAA is mistakenly 'interdicting' me -- then I could care less who's doing it.
Will the RIAA get some sort of legal, uber-exemption? And if so, do I receive warning before I'm DoS'd?
I dunno, all this seems frightening. Who controls the RIAA's interdiction efforts?
Furthernet is interesting, but because it purports to share only those bands *who encourage sharing* it effectively limits its audience and usefulness.
Granted, it's attempting to do the right thing, but in the world of P2P, the right thing is murky at best.
There's nothing worse than do-good moralizers on either side of the issue, and Furthernet seems like one those do-gooders that sound (to me, at least) like nails against a chalkboard.
OTOH, I don't advocate theft. But I'm not entirely sure these days what's theft and what's not. I'm not convinced of RIAA's stance, and I'm irked by someplace like Furthernet that takes a moralistic approach. Besides, I'm not sure that Furthernet is any *more* legal than, say, Kazaa when it comes right down to it.
Just because a band encourages taping doesn't mean that the RIAA will abide by this. And it doesn't mean that sharing is legal. It's all nice and great that the Grateful Dead and all the aging hipster bands think they understand this cool crackerjack technobabble and want to give back to their fans for the many years of support and encouragement, but the RIAA could care less what the bands want.
I wonder how all this stuff with the piracy and RIAA is playing out with the classical music market.
I know the market was fragile long before Napster made its mark -- budget cuts at labels, artists being forced out of contracts, fewer and fewer recordings being released -- but I'd be curious to hear what the outlook is for classical music these days.
Dim, I suspect -- and getting dimmer by the year. Is Naxos still putting out budget CDs?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, Bobby was pretty rank, so everytime he'd go back on the set, we'd ask Scorpia to come out with her Chanel and her wacky body chemitry to defumigate the hallway.
:)
My vote for "Top 10 Weird Slashdot Sentence."
You've been reading too much Thomas Pynchon, though.
Pyongyang, February 14 (KCNA) -- Despite sensible efforts by the DPRK "moderators" to halt repetitive Slashdot postings, one poster continues. This poster should behave himself. Thanks to Slashdot.org's deep love for the people, the poster will be allowed to continue but DPRK recommends that poster should "cease" and be sensible. It is clear to all but the warmongers that such postings are a mere ploy to build upon humorless foundations.
Greetings to Mithras the Prophet
Pyongyang, February 13 (KCNA) -- President General Secretary sends greetings to Mithras the Prophet. We hope Mithras continues to reap common sense. Thanks to Mithras's deft critical abilities, such posters as Didion Sprague remain in check. We commend Mithras and are happy he is behaving himself.
Funniest -- weirdest -- damn thing I've read all morning.
Whoever mod'd this as 'Offtopic' is a moron.
I'll agree it doesn't address the actual situation as specified in the topic, but the idea here -- the anger, at least -- has a ring of truth not heard on Slashdot on a long time.
Funny shit!
(BTW -- on topic -- what happens to the DRM files when you need to reinstall the OS? Do you lose everything?)
You're right.
And that's the point: why should I care about something that doesn't benefit me? I'd much rather support a cell phone *ban* that benefits me, the movie consumer, than a slow, technological paradigm shift that will (a) raise prices, (b) create new glitches, and (c) be cracked within weeks and will only benefit rich guys like Valenti wearing Italian suits.
How does a guy get a name like 'Winky?'
Anyway, I'll agree. The idea of 'jamming' camcorders is insane. How many times have you actually been bothered by someone with a camcorder?
The answer is none. Anybody desperate enough to film the movie is gonna be as low-key and low-in-the-seat as possible.
It's the mobile phones and beepers that oughta be jammed -- in movie theaters, restaurants, and anywhere where you, the cell phone owner, are surrounded with people who are not using cell phones and aren't even thinking about cell phones.
My parents took me to see all three movies. It wasn't a big deal. So Riley probably had the same experience.
A couple days ago I posted about seeing Saturday Night Fever for the first time. It rocked my world. A few years later I sat in the same theater with my dad and saw Apocalypse Now.
The interesting thing is that I saw the version of AN when they blew up Kurtz's compound at the very end. (The *alternate* version.) I'm not sure how or why I saw -- since Coppola indicates that he very quickly deleted the explosions at the end -- but I *do* remember how the ballsacks at the theater decided to *close the curtain* during the explosion. They thought the film was over and were eager to sweep up the popcorn and shit strewn all over the floor.
Well, my father got pissed off. He stormed up the aisle, went into the lobby, and demanded they open the curtain. "The film's not over!" I heard him yelling. A moment later, he came fuming back down the aisle, plunked down in his seat, and said we weren't going anywhere until those curtains opened.
Sure enough, the curtains opened. We watched the silent explosions. The film faded to black and the curtains closed again.
That was my Gen-X, Apocalypse Now experience.
I know this is bad form, but I caught the narcissism bug. So I made my own blog:
http://kelsolundeen.blogspot.com/
Text and photography by Kelso P. Lundeen.
What does the "P" stand for? Good question.
That's true.
Usenet remains one of the last nuggets of the pre-corporate internet, and it's also one of the *best* nuggets.
Yeah, it's a waste of space and bandwidth, but there's still enough craziness and wackiness and sheer fucking value in usenet to make it seem like a soon-to-be ghost-town on a rapidly vanishing corporate-free frontier.
I see your point, but I think it's safe to assume that Blogging -- at least when it's at its most narcissitic -- is like the little pressure valve in those stove-top espresso makers. If the valve wasn't there, you'd pour in the water, put in espresso, put it on the stove, and after two minutes, you'd be digging IKEA shrapnel out from your stomach.
Blogging, I think, works much in the same way. Imagine if these people only had Linkin Park or Avril Lavigne to listen to -- and no way to release the pressure? (Or, worse, imagine if they only had that Linkin Park remix album to listen to? You think 'In the End' is bad in its original incarnation, wait'll you hear what happens to it when Mix-Master Flash and Grand Diddy Funk 'N Funktastic start scratching on it.)
Of course, I experienced a similar situation back in the days of my youth. But thank god the Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever came to my rescure. There I was in 1977 -- eight, maybe nine years old -- and my world pretty much consisted of all the fading patriotic hoopla from the Bicentennial, a couple of Scientific American magazines which I read over and over again because I was fascinated with the Voyager Mars missions, and a little beat-up AM radio that every night tuned to the local station in my small town so I could hear real live DJs play stuff like Bobby Hebb's 'Sunny' and Glen Campbell's 'Rhinestone Cowboy.'
Anyway, I caught wind of this new movie -- Saturday Night Fever. No one in my fourth grade class had seen it, but everybody was talking about it. Of course, thanks to Jack 'Maddog' Valenti, it was Rated R, so that meant I had to be either 17 or in the company of my old man to go see it.
(I sent Valenti a letter not long after that, explaining that it should be up to kids and parents to make decisions about movies -- not some dumb ratings board -- but I never got a response. For that I still hold a grudge. But I digress...)
Anyway, the Old Man had heard good things about Saturday Night Fever so he decided to take me. We caught a matinee -- on account the old man was a fucking cheapskate -- but that was okay. Wer hustled down to the movie theater and were able to get into see the 5pm show. ("All shows before 6pm are $1.75")
That movie changed my life. I'm not kidding. The music, Tony Manaro ("Attica! Attica!"), the whole downtown atmosphere -- it rocked. The only thing that profoundly disturbed me was the fucking Annette in the car. I was seven, of course, so this was all new -- the "making it" -- but I guess these days it's not so new. But then -- back in 1977 -- making it with Annette in the backseat of the car was rocked my little world. And rubbers? Don't get me started. It took a little bit of detective work to figure out what Tony was talking about when he wondered why she didn't have no rubbers.
But this is story about blogging and pressure valves, so flash forward about two weeks. I finally scrounged up enough allowance to by the double album of the soundtrack. I can see the brownish 'Casablanca' label on the record spinning around on my little turntable. That record -- especially the first record -- was my little pressure valve.
The old man would leave on a Saturday or Sunday, and I'd creep downstairs, put the record on the big stereo, and turn the volume up high. "Night Fever", "Jive Talking," and "Staying Alive" blasting loud and clear while I danced around my living room in my sweat socks doing knee-splits and the statue-of-liberty-like-pointing-at-the-sky moves that Tony Manero did in the film. I slicked my hair back, put on my best Brooklyn accent, and made an invisible friend named 'Annette' with whom I'd try to 'make it' on the sofa.
That was my pressure valve.
Nowadays it's blogging.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Whoops.
I forgot the word "he" in the sentence above.
"... *he* wondered if usenet 'sells DSL'."
*sigh*
Ever heard of usenet?
Last I looked the RH ISOs were on nearly every CD group, just waiting to be snagged.
This is off-topic, but lately I'm finding that more and more people have absolutely no idea what usenet is. I mentioned this to one of our new IT guys here -- a so-called "hot-shot" just out of college -- and wondered if usenet "sells DSL because he can't get it through AT&T."
I had the same question myself. But after searching a few blogs this morning, I realized that the bloggers are bonkers.
I mean, I came across some guy's site (I think his name was Rannie -- it was a Photography/Read the stories of my life Blog) -- and found him talking about "blogging meetings" and playing some sort of "survivor" blog game, and then bemoaning all the popular new Blogs these days because they're forgetting about the Blogger Old-Schoolers (and then he named a bunch of Bloggers who, I guess, are incredibly famous in the world of blogs.)
Anyway, I was surprised to stumble on an apparently thriving little (big?) sub-culture.
Me, I suspect the deal with Blogs is that when they're good -- they're really good -- but when they're bad, they're wretched exercises in navel-gazing narcissism. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, however.)
Which brings up an interesting point. Why aren't the RIAA and MPAA going after places like Giganews and UsenetServer and Easynews?
Why aren't they raising a stink about usenet?
It's a goof, ya bag.
A mess-up.
And it's fixed.
Well, honestly, I haven't seen a lot of great digital photos -- at least none that readily admit that they are *digital*. Andreas Gursky is an exception. Gurksy's photographs are these huge -- massive -- prints of ordinary (and sometimes not so ordinary) things: apartment building facades, highways, warehouses, you name it.
Gursky claims that he uses a large-format view camera, touches up the negative digitally, and then prints on massive sheets of papers -- upwards of 40 feet by 40 feet. Sometimes even bigger.
I think much of the "digital is better" debate won't be settled for years and years. I say that because digital is a way of seeing, too. No one much talks about this. I mean, sure, shooting digital ad copy and catalog copy is just like shooting film copy, but once you leave the "business" of photography and get into the "art" of it, you start to realize that digital does engender a slightly different mindset.
I mean, I find myself shooting more real film than I do digital film. With digital film -- on my D100, for example -- I'm fall into the "slave to the controls" menality. I become sorta hypnotized by the histograms and levels and camera feedback and I try to get everything *right*.
Of course, with my Leica M6, I pretty much set the shutter on 1/125, adjust the aperture for whatever kind of light I happened to be looking at, and off I go, snap snapping away. I shoot through Tri-X like there's no tomorrow. (And if you use a Leica, you know it has a, uh, quaint loading mechanism that requires you actually turn knobs and spin things and hold things in order to load the film -- not anything like the digital and "whizbang" cameras that suck the film into their innards as if they're sucking the last of a Slurpee from a Kmart cup.)
Other folks, though, have a different rhythm with digital. They shoot like mad, delete the stuff that doesn't look good, and then start all over again. For them, film is anathema -- an outdated dinosaur. Good riddance, they say.
But the stuff I'm talking about here -- the "talismanic" qualities -- is a lot of mystical hooey. Folks more pragmatic probably think this is crazy -- rhythm, weight, the sounds of the shutter, the tactile feel of the shutter dials, the aperture ring -- and that I'm just blabbing on and on about a dying "media".
Maybe.
But I'm a writer, too, and I always write my drafts in longhand on white typing paper punched with three holes. I store all my drafts in half-inch thick black binders, and I like nothing else than to fill up one binder with drafts -- notes for stories, complete first drafts, character sketches -- stick it underneath my desk, and then go to Home Depot to get another half-inch thick black binder and start the process all over again.
I do this -- write in longhand -- because there's a definite rhythm to it. And I find that the physical movement of my arm and hand across the paper engages my brain. The rhythm helps me think. Peter Elbow -- a writing teacher -- used to call this "free writing" -- the idea that you physically move your pen across the paper, writing as you go, but you don't worry about *what* you write. The theory is that the physical movement begins to engage your intellect -- and that once everything gets in sync, you start thinking of stuff you didn't know you wanted to think about.
Weird, but -- for most folks -- it works. But you have to be patient.
So it goes.
Any sort of archiving is expensive. I don't doubt film is expensive. And certainly the preservation of motion pictures is *obscenely* expensive.
It's tricky, though. Archival arguments can go either way. When the twin towers fell in NYC, thousands of negatives of JFK were destroyed. I suppose digital might have helped out here if people make copies of their analog media and store them in alternate locations. One location's destruction wouldn't mean total destruction.
But I fear not all photographers think this through. Or, if they do, they think it through when it's too late -- after their hard drive has crashed and they lost the 216 wedding photographs they took for a gig they'd just come from. (It happened to a pal of mine recently. He's sending the HD off to a data retrieval place to see if there's anything left on the HD that can be salvaged.)
Now, yes, you can attribute this to stupidity or ignorance, but that's the main problem I hear about digital photography -- a little stupidity can cause a *lot* pain.
The same thing can happen in a darkroom, of course. More than once I've mistakenly poured fixer instead of developer. It's rare, but it *has* happened.
Most pros I work with have found a comfortable hybrid workflow. Folks with rush jobs shoot all digital, but for jobs that they care about -- and jobs that don't need to be finished yesterday -- they still shoot some film, just to have a back-up.
It's a weird time for photography. I've sold all my Nikon SLR gear, but I absolutely *love* my Leica M6 and will never, ever part with it. Apart from a fine picture taking machine, it's a fine machine, period. For anyone who's ever held a Leica or had a chance to use one, you'll know what I mean.
It's built like a rock and feels good in my hands. It has a weird "talismanic" property, too. I carry it -- and shoot with it -- because it feels right. It feels like this is what I'm supposed to shoot. Yet, I shoot digital, too.
I suspect my own middle-ground is much like the middle-ground I found with digital ebooks. I understand ebooks and will occasionally sit down on a train or a bus and read one on my Palm. It gets the job done but it's nothing like reading a book. Much like the Leica, I realize that if you're a reader -- and if you are really a *reader* -- you'll appreciate this. There is a weird talismanic quality to a book. It feels right in your hands, and if you're reading for pleasure, there's nothing else like it.
Yet I know ebooks have their uses. I understand that, and I appreciate it. I just don't care for them, although I'll read them if I need a text and if the only text available is an ebook.
Sorta like me reconcilation with digital photography, I guess.
First, the D30 is not exactly a high-end camera. It might have been two years ago, but now the D30 is decidedly mid-level. It's a prosumer camera, at best.
But that brings up an interesting point -- one that I continue to struggle with. Digital equipment remains a difficult investment -- especially if you're a working pro. Just because a camera is 4/8/11/14 megapixels doesn't necessarily mean it's better than "film" or better than "last year's camera" if you have to pull two or three times the job to cover the cost of the initial investment.
There's no doubt digital is here to stay. And there's no doubt that many folks have proclaimed digital to be "better" than film, but "better" can mean all sorts of things to all sorts of people. I suspect folks mean "better quality" when they say "better", but I'm not sure what that means either.
I can show you Winogrand photographs taken, oh, in the 1950s that are, in fact, "better quality" than anyone's digital photograph. Anyone's. And Winogrand used a beat-up Leica M4-P without a meter!
I can point to a grainy, dim Salgado print and say, well, that's grainy and dim, but it's "better" than anything I've yet to see reproduced digitally.
Yet I can also point to a hybrid print -- analog film, digital manipulation -- by someone like Gurksy (the guy who makes those massive prints) and say, well, in Gursky's case, the hybrid approach works wonders.
And I can, of course, go to a site like Photosig.com and Photo.net and point to any number -- literally thousands -- of "digital photographs" taken with prosumer gear like the D30 or the new Nikon D100 and say they're absolutely dreadful -- despite the fact they are *crystal clear* pictures of dogs and cats and babies with sticky oatmeal on their face.
So you have a D100 and are able to take crystal clear pictures of baby drool that can be blown up to 16X20?
Great.
The other issue -- much more serious -- is that digital cameras simply won't leave behind the sort of "archeological" records that film cameras leave behind.
This is an unpopular argument, however. Folks always say, well, you can burn whatever you want on whatever medium you want -- CDROM, DVD, you name it.
But as someone who has spent many, many hours in dimly lit photoarchives, I can say without hesitation that if someone like Garry Winogrand shot digitally, there would *be no* Garry Winogrand. Ditto for someone like Cartier-Bresson. They might have one or two great pictures but there would be no beagtives -- only old, outdated media -- most of which (possibly) cannot be salvaged.
Winogrand, for example, had stacks and stacks of prints and negatives in his little NYC apartment. You'd come in for a visit, and he'd toss you a stack of workprints.
His was a "record it all, no matter what" mentality. Now that's both good and bad, but for sifting through an artist's work, I suspect it's bad if you use digital. There's a permanence to a negative which may or may not be the case with CDROMs burned today. There's also a *bulk*. Negatives took up a lot of space. And that fact alone prevented many boxes of negatives from many photographers from being tossed out or misplaced.
Don't underestimate *bulk*. Physical product. In art, it's very important. Maybe not now, not today when the artist is alive and struggling, but when he or she is dead, bulk of what remains -- the presence of his or her remnants -- play a siginicant role in preservation.
Gordon Jump (Mr. Carlson from WKRP in Cincinatti) as Jack Valenti.
Kathy Bates as Hilary Rosen.
Jack Nicholson as David Boies (the lawyer who craves ice cream but hates fruit.)
Metallica jumped the shark with Napster, no doubt about it.
Ummm...and risk getting bombed?
Yes.
And if you want to get really geeky, go ahead and pick up a copy of Inform -- an IF authoring system. (IMHO, Inform is the *best* system, but that's open to debate...)
Ah.
... Wizard of Wor.
The days of 'Aladdin's Castle' at one end of the mall, five dollars, and 25 tokens.
And each game was one token! (This was around 1983, give or take. The days of Defender and Pac Man and Donkey Kong.)
And my personal favorite
Of course, playing Wizard of War or Tron or Bump and Jump or Mappy or Spy Hunter on MAME is nowhere near the same experience at those early years in the arcade...
"...interdiction, which would attempt to suck up a user's outbound file sharing connections with repeated attempts to download a copyrighted file. Interdiction would prevent human users from downloading that file, eventually frustrating them and forcing them to move on, he said.
Isn't this notion of "interdiction" essentially a DoS attack?
And if I'm getting DoS'd -- or if my corporate firewall is getting DoS'd because the RIAA is mistakenly 'interdicting' me -- then I could care less who's doing it.
Will the RIAA get some sort of legal, uber-exemption? And if so, do I receive warning before I'm DoS'd?
I dunno, all this seems frightening. Who controls the RIAA's interdiction efforts?
Furthernet is interesting, but because it purports to share only those bands *who encourage sharing* it effectively limits its audience and usefulness.
Granted, it's attempting to do the right thing, but in the world of P2P, the right thing is murky at best.
There's nothing worse than do-good moralizers on either side of the issue, and Furthernet seems like one those do-gooders that sound (to me, at least) like nails against a chalkboard.
OTOH, I don't advocate theft. But I'm not entirely sure these days what's theft and what's not. I'm not convinced of RIAA's stance, and I'm irked by someplace like Furthernet that takes a moralistic approach. Besides, I'm not sure that Furthernet is any *more* legal than, say, Kazaa when it comes right down to it.
Just because a band encourages taping doesn't mean that the RIAA will abide by this. And it doesn't mean that sharing is legal. It's all nice and great that the Grateful Dead and all the aging hipster bands think they understand this cool crackerjack technobabble and want to give back to their fans for the many years of support and encouragement, but the RIAA could care less what the bands want.
I wonder how all this stuff with the piracy and RIAA is playing out with the classical music market.
I know the market was fragile long before Napster made its mark -- budget cuts at labels, artists being forced out of contracts, fewer and fewer recordings being released -- but I'd be curious to hear what the outlook is for classical music these days.
Dim, I suspect -- and getting dimmer by the year. Is Naxos still putting out budget CDs?