Virtual Thought

Yes, it’s true! I like how snarky this guy gets. At first she blamed her band… which is a real class act. However, she has now owned up and said it was her fault.

Okay, c’mon: who is surprised about this? Whether it was full on Milli Vanilli lip-synching or it was a “vocal backing” track that performers use to amplify the strength of their voice… don’t tell me you didn’t know. Don’t tell me that you thought the music media machine would let highly-produced bubble-gum teen sensations out in the wild with no “help”. People used to scream about sequencers on keyboards, that using them violated some sort of “spirit of live-ness”. Nah. You are watching entertainment. You are not judging people in a flurry of schadenfreude because they “made it” and you didn’t. I don’t expect people who perform on stage to adhere to my standards of quality… I can only hope that I have a good time. Can we stop asking for super producers and then being pissed that they continue to produce during stage performances?

And, hey: at least it was Ms. Simpson’s voice on the track, and not other underpaid unbeautiful people like what Milli Vanilli did.

Went and saw Ferry Corsten last night at Element here in Austin and it was fanfuckingtastic. Here are some pics from the end of the show when the lighting was good enough to use the ol’ camera phone:

And look who I found by the crummy light of the bar:

Two articles that got posted to Slashdot that I really, really liked (they both happen to come, orginally, from Wired):

The first article talks about the invention of the TV-B-Gone, a small keychain device that will power cycle any of about 200 different TVs, starting with the most popular so they turn off first. No more annoying TVs in any of the places that annoying TVs tend to be! The amount of mischief this could cause is fantastic, too… you can be sure that I’m going to buy a TV-B-Gone as soon as the guy’s webpage comes back up after getting (you guessed it) slashdotted by the Slashdot/Wired story.

The second article speaks to India leading innovation in the world. I used to know this guy who really, truly feared offshoring in software development and justified his fear with strange, mostly racist logic—including my all-time favorite, that “Indians won’t be innovators; innovation will stay here in the U.S.” That’s because Indian people cannot innovate, just like minorities can’t do well on the SAT. Both of these are examples of people not looking at root causes—India didn’t innovate because it was really frickin’ poor and minorities can’t take the SAT because of its racial slant. Boy that makes me mad!

Oh my frickin’ God this is great.

I’d love it if someone would make something like this about the Democratic National Convention… just to, y’know, see.

There’s an article on CNN about how Jon Stewart is “getting serious”. This article is making reference to Jon Stewart’s comments on CNN’s own Crossfire, where he blasts the show as being “bad for America”. He says that there is a lack of real political discourse in the media as media outlets are more interested in ratings than informative news stories.

I could not agree more. I think, at heart, is the issue that cable news channels must live on ratings, must get money from advertisers based on ratings. In such a system, the cable news program that has more flash than content wins out over, perhaps, the more informative view because it feeds back into our own fast-forward culture giving us what we want, whether it is good for us or not.

I want a news station where an editorial staff makes a call and shows stories that they consider important: world politics, US foreign policy, important domestic affairs… wouldn’t it be great to see a news program where the anchors said, “Slow news day, here’s some catching up we’d like to do. We didn’t cover these stories in enough depth the first time so we’d like another shot.” But that doesn’t up the ratings, now does it?

Showing, as Stewart puts it, two “political hacks” duking it out but not resolving anything, not putting anything new out there, not even really making a point so much as trying to score them seems to me as though we’re giving the American public exactly what it wants—a little escapism cloaked as political informativeness. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that, no, you are not well-informed if you watch these shows because these shows, strictly speaking, do not inform so much as entertain. I’m not saying it’s not valuable, but it certainly doesn’t hold as much value as, say, reading The Guardian.

UPDATE: This guy has great things to say. Here’s the iFilm link if you haven’t seen it (even better than the transcript!). Wonkette.com lists a bunch of places to get the video (including a BitTorrent link).

“It’s a goofy day here. On the one hand, I enjoy working with lunatics, because it keeps things fresh. But on the other hand… they’re lunatics.”—Jim

Today has been one of those days when I feel like one of an infinite number of monkeys trying to produce, if not “Hamlet”, at least “A Midsummer’s Nights Dream”. Lots of running around and scratching of my head. Too much buzzing around inside my head to settle down and enjoy it. However, tonight I get to watch the last entry in the Farscape mini-series after some bowling. Life is Good, Especially With Goofiness.

I blame work and the curiosities of modern life.

And I’m a lazyass.