Month: July 2007

links for 2007-07-09

summer projects

In the interest of making the summer useful, a couple of things are under way around here.

Since three of us who live here are big fans of the graphic novel form (actually all of us have read and enjoyed them but only three of us seek them out), I kicked off the idea of making one of our own. I doubt much will come of it but some sketches and some story ideas are all I really want. Trouble is, when you read monstrously good works like Castle Waiting or Bone it’s a lot of work to even contemplate. Inspiring, yes, but daunting at the same time. So I am just trying to get characters drawn and plot/story ideas. At present, everything looks to be, um, heavily influenced by the works cited above. Ahem.

I may have finally settled on a way to convert a stack of cigar boxes I picked up a while back into small portable guitar amplifiers. I’m very slow at figuring these things out, but I learned that a long time ago so I’m no longer disappointed. Now to find a good place to get electronic parts that isn’t Radio Shack®. I’ll probably use the Little Gem design from Runoff Groove. Hmm, looks like there is a new variant on this, called the Ruby. And it seems to be more extensible as well. Decisions, decisions.

And my status as America’s Worst Gardener (word to the wise: do your gardening in a public garden, not at your own house, if you’re not all the proficient) is solid. Short season gardening is hard to get used to. I really need a calendar/timeline of what needs to be done when in the early going, or I stay behind for the whole season.

And there’s summer baseball and summer swim league and boating and fruit picking . . . .

So what are you doing this summer?

genres, pitfalls of

Walter Jon Williams Is a Truly Excellent Writer, but…:

According to these highly-qualified professionals, people only respond to things that look like other things that they already like. That’s why, whenever I write a book like Days of Atonement, which was the world’s first (and, so far as I know, only) Gothic Western science fiction police procedural, a book which I fondly assumed might appeal to readers outside the normal SF audience, the publisher made sure to put Death Rays on the cover, to assure genre readers that this was a thing that looked like other things that they already liked, and to make sure that all potential new readers were discouraged from so much as glancing at the book.

Guilty as charged. I see spaceships and skintight spacesuits on pneumatic female cosmonauts, I keep my hands in my pockets. I know it says more about me than about the genre. Just one more reason why books should just come in plain covers.

breaking: software sells hardware

All Shook Up, Right Down to the Musical Core – New York Times:

[T]he Universal Music Group let Apple know that it would no longer grant the company guaranteed access to its coming releases. Officially, Universal had no comment, but an executive briefed on the negotiations said the music company was merely interested in keeping its options open as it does with most other retailers in the brick-and-mortar world.

The upshot is that Universal will provide music to iTunes on an “at will” basis. Thus, if someone offers Universal a boatload of cash for the right to sell the latest Bon Jovi or Rihanna singles exclusively on a rival download service, Universal is saying that it is open for business.

It will be interesting to see what requirements Universal puts on any rival service: I assume it will require some DRM or other “protection.” If the rival service offers less flexibility, will it sell as many tracks?

[T]he label chiefs might still hold out hope that Apple will share someday the spoils of each iPod sold — along the lines of how Microsoft agreed to pay $1 for each of its Zune players, introduced last year. But only a million Zunes have been sold, while iPod sales have topped 100 million.

Hope that million dollars has been helpful . . .

Asking why the RIAA cartel thinks they should get a cut from iPod sales is rhetorical: they’re greedy. (You’d think their motto could be “we make money the old-fashioned way: we extort it.”) They have contributed nothing to the development, sales, or marketing of the product — it’s not like you see an iPod promotion in ads paid for by the cartel. True, the iPod is useless without recorded music but so is a radio.

I wonder what the breakout is of online sales vs physical media sales: iTunes crossed the 2 billion track milestone a while back, all while CD sales have been on the decline. And an analysis of sales since DRM-free tracks have been available would be interesting[1][2].

1. Early sales indicate that DRM-free music is noticeably more popular than DRMed music, EMI senior VP Lauren Berkowitz recently told Bloomberg. The world’s third-largest music label began selling its music without copyright protections last month through Apple’s iTunes Store and reports back that sales have been “good.”

Berkowitz said that sales of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon were up 350 percent in the week after iTunes Plus launched. That has since leveled off, but sales of the album are still up 272 percent since going DRM-free. As music industry blog Coolfer points out, digital sales for other EMI artists have risen as well, such as Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream (17 percent), Norah Jones’ Come Away with Me (24 percent), and Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head (115 percent). During that same time period, CD sales for those same albums dropped by 15 percent, 33 percent, and 24 percent, respectively.

links for 2007-07-07

The Authoritarians

The Authoritarians:

Let me ask you, as we’re passing the time here, how many ordinary people do you think an evil authority would have to order to kill you before he found someone who would, unjustly, out of sheer obedience, just because the authority said to? What sort of person is most likely to follow such an order? What kind of official is most likely to give that order, if it suited his purposes?

The book is free, unless you want a bound copy.

<sigh> why do I think I’ll read this and realize I already know how it goes? I’ve read Milgram and I’ve followed the news of the past 5 years. I’m complete aware that there are millions of people who, willingly if not cheerfully, would kill someone if they were told to do so and the act were contrived to look important. Even if it’s 1 in 100, that’s 3 million people — the population of Kansas or Arkansas.

Friday Random Ten

HaloScan.com – Comments:

Tell Me, Momma • Bob Dylan • The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live, 1966: The Royal Albert Hall Concert [Live] [Disc 2]
(In The) The Midnight Hour • Roxy Music • Flesh + Blood
Les Boys • Dire Straits • Making Movies
Trauermarsch. In Gemessenem Schritt. Streng. Wie Ein Kondukt • Abbado/Berliner Philharmoniker • Mahler: Symphonie No. 5
Shot by Both Sides • Magazine • Real Life
Chinese Bones • Robyn Hitchcock • Globe of Frogs
The Ocean • U2 • Boy
Kanga-Roo • Jeff Buckley • Grace (Legacy Edition) CD 2
Doctor Jazz • Squeeze • A Round And A Bout
Let It Be • The Beatles • Let It Be
Bonus: Getting Better • The Beatles • Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Check out some of the others as well. Some nice assortments.