WillWybrow.com

If I could drive, then I could bitch about driving!

As a foot-bound pedestrian, I feel like I am missing out on a huge and common source of rage that everyone else is getting to dip their fingers into. While there are times when I am in a car and feel the frustration of the driver, I can’t really lay claim to any of that fury, even though I’ll be on the same journey, because I’m not in control of the car. I can’t really justfy rolling down the window and yelling profanities at drivers.

It’s not just driving that I’d feel cheeky complaining about. I talked a few years ago about those crappy little signs that you get in the back windows of cars — “baby on board” and such, all their variations (”mother-to-be on board,” “young person on board,” “daddy’s little princess on board,” etc.) too, were all unnecessary and useless and just annoying. Do drivers think they are somehow less likely to get into an accident by informing the person behind them that there is a child passenger in the car? Are people going to take more care on the road because they don’t want to get into a crash that might hurt someone else’s child (as opposed to a crash that might only endanger their own life)? I don’t think so. If anything, drivers will be more likely to rear-end you because they were distracted trying to read the little yellow square you’ve got dangling in your back window and not noticing when you brake. Slam. Game over.

Anyway, the point is that unless I’m a driver, you can all disregard everything I have to say about experiences in the car because I am not part of your exclusive club. Whatever. Enjoy your global warming, faggots.

I don’t know if I really have the dedication to keep this up… Lately I’ve not been passionate enough nor able to concentrate enough to get much down on the site; I just want to bask in my doom and quietly feel sorry for myself a lot.

I’ll probably do something big to the site soon, overhaul it and archive the blog to a subsection if I can’t keep it up. I’d hate to be one of those people who sits around with an unused blog. It’s not like I’m going to be able to carry on with it for longer than two more months anyway. We’ll see what happens.

I kinda miss the pseudo-anonymity that I used to have before the domain change. When I get out of this mess I am going to resume writing under an anonymous guise and leave this site as something more professional looking.

You’ll know where to find me. Just look for my colour.

The things I did last night include:

• Worry about a meaningless wild bird that lives in the guttering on our house
• Write a reverse-anonymous note to someone (where instead of the recipient not knowing who sent the note, they’ll not know that it’s meant for them! My life is thrill after thrill)
• EV trained my new, young Pokémon Platinum Pokémon by trading them to my completed Pearl and fighting tediously for hours on end
• Discussed the distinction between atheism and what could be called antitheism

Things I Did Not Do Last Night

• Go to sleep

Silly me!

A Boring Reflection on Art, Rights and Laws

There’s no doubt about it — piracy is an increasingly discussed topic in the media these days especially in light of the recent Pirate Bay trials.

Today I want to focus on the specific topic of music piracy. A definition would be as good a way to start as any, so let’s take a shot at that. How do we define music piracy? It’s wrong to think of “pirating” as synonymous with “downloading” — the acquisition of music delivered via the internet does not necessarily imply anything against the law or against the wishes of an artist. There are subscription services and song-purchasing services and internet radio stations that all provide music through the internet, as well as the oft-condemned peer-to-peer methods. So there are ways of legally getting music from the internet. There are also ways of obtaining music that don’t use the internet, so we’re talking about something much bigger than just firing up Limewire.

So let’s start calling piracy by its other, less appealing name, copyright infringement. The idea of copyright law is pretty simple. Its job is to stop someone taking another person’s music (we’re just dealing with music today, remember) and using in a way that wasn’t intended, such as performing it yourself or selling it as your own work. The person who came up with that piece of music deserves to get the credit for doing so, and should be allowed to say who gets to hear it or use it.

Musicians who enjoy expressing themselves through their music will probably want people to listen to that music. If they didn’t, why bother playing it out loud, anywhere other than in their own minds? To that end, copying and distributing music to a large number of people would be beneficial to the musician’s aims. Their expression of whatever message they want to send will be heard by anyone and everyone who wants to hear it.

Music, of course, is an art form. As we all know, the appreciation of art is an entirely subjective matter. Some will love a piece of music, while others will consider it garbage. That’s fine, it’s to be expected. As humans, we’re a diverse bunch of creatures and we’re usually pretty happy about that.

But when an artist wants to charge money for their music, we start getting into trouble. The musician is veering off the course of wanting to express a message, heading for a collision with profit-making. It’s a safe bet to say that big musicians and related businesses (the RIAA, for example) who are outspoken against copyright infringement are outspoken because of their desire to make money.

When an artist or a record label or anyone else puts a price tag on a CD, aside from the negligible cost of the materials and manufacturing of the physical media itself, the artist is making the claim that a certain piece of music is worth a certain amount of money. That claim can’t really be challenged. Appreciation of art is subjective, so you can’t posssibly say with any objective reasoning what a piece of music is worth. Some people will consider the price of a CD in a music shop fair, while others will see it too high (and some may even think it’s too low). Enter: copyright law. If the artist wants to charge money for his or her work, it’s now against copyright law to distribute it for free. The artist hasn’t given permission for it to be handed out without charge.

If you don’t think a CD’s tracks are worth the price tag, it’s too bad for you; sorry. You don’t get to have the CD and listen to that music because you won’t pay what the artist is demanding of you.

Musical artists who are against distributing their music to people for a price that is agreed on by both the artist and the consumer (even if that price is free) must therefore be more concerned with making profits than they are with making music. They must be at a stage where if nobody bought any of their CDs or paid to see them in concert, they would stop making music.

Now imagine for a second that all commercial artists were in that mindset. Imagine they’d stop making music if nobody bought their CDs. Imagine then that everyone suddenly stops buying CDs. Would we still have music?

Of course we would. Plenty of artists make music for reasons other than profit. They’d be the ones left if the whole world stopped paying for music. It’s no great loss, if you think about it. The recording industry would hopefully go under, as it’s comprised of corporations built on greed, and we’d just be left with a world full of free music.

Greedy, profit-seeking artists don’t realise that we don’t need them; they need us. They need consumers so they can make a living off a glorified hobby. All their protests and bitching about copyright infringement are unfounded and wrought from pure greed. Not that I am preaching against greed — this would make me a notorious hypocrite. Problems arise when you throw a tantrum because you’re not getting your way, such as customers refusing to pay the arbitrarily-set price for music.

Making music is always going to be something that certain people love to do. There will always be those who do it for free without any expectation of a monetary reward. There will also be the wise artists who give consumers the choice about how much to pay. I am not unsympathetic towards musicians who want to make money with their music, but to me they differ very little from buskers playing music in a public place. If I am not enjoying the music, I can listen to it for as long as I want and not pay a thing. It’s unlikely to discourage the busker, and even if it did, it’d only discourage him or her from playing in public. They’d still practice playing if they enjoyed it, just like people who love to paint will still paint and people who love to write terrible, tedious, long articles on their websites will still continue to write. Even if it costs money and there’s absolutely no reward.

I am not suggesting that all music should be free and that copyright law is evil and should be abolished (as an aside, though, note that the UK’s copyright laws are archaic and in dire need of a reform). I am merely suggesting that those musicians who happen to, by chance, make music that appeals to a large audience should stop expecting said audience to lie down and accept arbitrarily set pricing when there are always going to be more fairly priced and free alternative sources of music to enjoy.

And because I’ve gone an entire post without a single curse word or immature rant, here’s a bit of exactly that:
Fuck the RIAA, those faggot cunt recording industry knobcocks. They should just fucking shut up about piracy and stop laying lawsuits down on people. They’re a bunch of fucking wanktards and should all have their faces ripped off and then be launched out of a catapult into a brick wall so they splatter like a water balloon brimming with ketchup. Cunts!!

Nightlong conversation. Overdue coursework. English.

Nightlong conversation. Dawn-timed fire alarm. Duel.

Nightlong conversation. DVDs and viri. Failure.

Nightlong conversation. Degenerative self-loathing. Death.

Morrowind was such an amazing game when I first played it. It was my my biggest venture into RPGs at the time (except for Pokémon on the GBC), and what a game to choose to venture into. The sheer epicness of it was overwhelming. Some people have told me that Fallout is a better series than the Elder Scrolls, but I haven’t tried the Fallout games, so wouldn’t know. But I think for an RPG, magic and old-timey-ness is probably more my style than futuristic.

Bethesda also made a game called Sea Dogs, which I’d played before. One thing I noticed across both games is how atmospheric they are. The music alone on Sea Dogs is pretty stirring.

When considering level design, out of the handful of games that I’ve played, I’d have to say that still not many have stuck in my mind. One that most certainly has is the game spin off of Disney and Pixar’s A Bug’s Life. It was out for the N64, PC and PS1, I believe, and its levels and music were really incredible.

Although, I haven’t played it in a really long time. So I am downloading the N64 rom. Maybe I will review it later.

I am also probably going to reinstall Morrowind in a bit, too, since my encounter with Oblivion was a huge let-down. I already completed the main storyline from before, so maybe this time I’ll start off by modding in ridiculously powerful items based on designs from Dragonlance books I’ve read. I made one once, did some rudimentary 3D modelling in 3dsmax, too. Self-taught!

These are just some low-priority, disjoint thoughts that I just needed to share.

I’ve been checking out some stand-up comedy DVDs recently to investigate whether any of the good and well-known comics of the day (including Mr. Carr, Mr. Gervais, Mr. Minchin, Mr. Bailey, Mr. Moran and a few others) hold views that are respectful or in any way sympathetic towards religious believers.

They’re not. Put plainly, if you believe in any non-trivial definition of god, you can’t laugh at jokes at the expense of the irrational, be they theists, psychics, “new age spiritualists,” etc., without incurring a hefty hypocrisy penalty and losing all credibility.

This tweet in reply to my glib observation of the above point suggests that my ability to laugh at humour that’s at the expense of “White [sic] people” is analogous to Christians’ ability to self-deprecate by enjoying comedy at their expense. No prizes for telling me why that doesn’t make any sense.

If you are religious, you are widely considered to be wrong. It takes some very shaky reasoning to justify even the most vague claims about a god without throwing questionably-sourced specifics in as well (read: Biblical claims). Any nonreligious person who is even vaguely aware of the damage that irrational faith, childhood indoctrination and religion as a force in its whole all cause to humans as individuals and humanity will look down on those who choose to accept religious beliefs. No matter how nice and tolerant they might seem to come across as, if nonreligious folk accept that religion is damaging then they must accept the religious are the root of the damage.

Stop laughing at our jokes belittling you. You don’t get to laugh, you are all too mired in your own self-sustaining incorrectness to laugh. God will smite you if you laugh.

Ewan McGregor stops the antimatter bomb, but turns out to be the bad guy all along.

This film doesn’t deserve its present IMDb rating of 7.1, since it was a bit of a shitpile. I haven’t read the book but if I had, I’d probably have thought even less of this film.

Go and see Star Trek instead of this. Angels and Demons was at least better than Wolverine, but not by very much. Hell, stay home rather than make the effort.

Staggering up highly polished, smooth marble steps, the man covered in red clutched his stomach painfully. The red was everywhere. Was it his clothes? Was it his blood? He couldn’t tell; there was red in his eyes as well. Was that his blood? Was it his anger? All he knew was that he had to press on. The solution to everything was inside the white marble palace before him. At his back was a hideous forest that stretched in all directions. A light haze lay over the land, but through it, the man in red could have, if he’d wished, spotted the heights of other, less bright, castles. They protruded from the forest of thorned, black-leaved bushes and evergreen, dark, musty-smelling trees. None of them resembled another, but they were all unmistakably stone buildings of some variety.

If he’d wished, the man in red could have fought back through the vast and frightful wood behind him and visited any one of the other stone structures. But he did not have access to any of them. He could enter this one, however. This was the palace of his birth.

Once up the short flight of stairs, the man in red collided with a heavy, black iron portcullis that was immovably lodged in the huge archway at the front. The archway opened up into the castle’s grounds, over which one would tread on one’s way to the keep, and over which Red would hobble in order to reach his goal, which lay inside.

Instinct took him by the hand, and righted him from his collision. It pulled him sideways, away from the portcullis and towards a heavy iron door to the left. That instinct reached into Red’s clothes and, from some secret inner pocket, withdrew a tiny golden key. Red set the key into the lock on the black door and turned it, feeling the soft gold bend as it grated against the stiff, rusty mechanism in the lock. After some creative persuasive force was summarily applied, the lock gave. A satisfying metallic click resonated from within the door as the locking bar was freed. Leaning heavily on the door and its handle, Red stepped into the grounds.

The seconds passed agonisingly as Red hurriedly shuffled towards the entrance to the keep. The oaken double doors were not locked, and the hinges were quite rust-free. They opened with a sturdy tug. Red did not knock.

Doubled in agony and blinded by the bloody haze in his eyes, Red could just about make out the man at the desk in the middle of a huge stone courtroom. Alternating marble and granite flagstones were angled at forty-five degrees to the walls. White pillars reached up far higher than any room needed to reach. The foyer was clean and well-kept. No ill smudges marred this front to the castle. Its cleanliness might have been suspicious to an observant visitor. One could infer that the bowels of the palace were not so well-kept as was the building’s attempt at a first impression.

Clever positioning of windows of various colours of stained glass meant that a shaft of sunlight would always point down upon the man at the desk. He was illuminated at all times. Thus, even with the dizzying effects of the chequerboard floor nauseating Red and causing his head to spin, he was able to haltingly approach the desk. With a grunt of exhaustion, he collapsed onto his knees and face on the flagstones, his arms clutched over his belly, from whence a large quantity of dark red liquid was eking out onto the clean stone floor.

The man at the desk was perched serenely and neatly upon a finely carved wooden chair. He was dressed in a bright but not vivid green, that glowed very softly in the halo of natural light that surrounded him. Upon his desk was a bound parchment book, its leather binding having been somehow dyed to match his clothing. A shallow pot of jet-black ink and a long crow’s feather quill lay within the man’s easy reach, though his arms were presently folded across the edge of the desk.

Spectacles were balancing at the end of his nose. His face was wizened but not frail. It had a touch of distinction to its aging features. Shoulder-length grey hair was combed neatly but not tied back. His eyes twinkled with unconventional knowledge and unspeakable clarity of thought. Gazing down at the man who knelt on the floor, his faced pressing into the cold stone as his life’s blood sought escape, the man calmly spoke. “Greetings, wayward traveller. My name is the Chronicler.”

I don’t want to change human history. I don’t care much to be remembered after I die, even if it is just in the minds of my “loved ones.” I don’t care about contributing to society. I just want what everybody wants: periodic bursts of happiness (I guess, seratonin) that are regular enough to keep me from being depressed and bored but scarce enough so that I don’t grow accustomed to them. I can achieve that shit by sitting here watching terrible TV shows that I’ve torrented and playing video games while eating terribly unhealthy food that takes advantage of our evolutionarily-developed sense of taste to be enjoyable. I think everyone could probably go about being happy in much simpler ways than they are.

We’ve burned through a quarter of our candle and all we’ve done is fallen into line behind everyone else, jumping through the hoops we are expected to jump through by people who have already jumped through theirs and need to feel validated by it.

Enjoy your fucking worthless day everyone.