We Should See Other Blogs

True story.

I have written the greatest post-rock ever!

Except it’s just me and my electric guitar and my foot pedal and my microphone and Ardour and Hydrogen and Jack on Ubuntu. But it works!

This weekend, someone asked me what my favourite bands are. I didn’t really know what to say, except that I love Radiohead and everything else flows out from there. Today, my curiosity piqued, I began to wonder what, statistically, are my favourite bands?

Last.fm and my scrupulously collected statistics to the rescue. I present for your consideration the top fifteen or so.

1. Philip Glass
2. Band of Horses
3. Sufjan Stevens
4. The Books
5. Boards of Canada
6. Snow Patrol
7. Derek Webb
8. Radiohead
9. Death Cab for Cutie
10. Iron & Wine
11. Modest Mouse
12. Bright Eyes
13. Steve Reich
14. Grandaddy
15. Andrew Bird

That Boards of Canada is on that list surprises even me. I had no idea.

• I don’t get stat holidays. I really don’t. If every person gets a certain number of days off per year for government-mandated vacation, why are there additional days off? I’ll probably understand this when I’m older and slower but for now they just annoy me. They throw a monkey wrench into my normally placid finances (I don’t have much money, but what money I do have is somewhat consistent), throw a hyena wrench into production at the shop (a four day week in which to do five days of work! hooray!), and just generally throw off my sense of time.
• Fourteen hours. I worked fourteen hours yesterday. Just to be clear, I’m not a workaholic, I actually don’t like doing that. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, right?
• Why do we make word that end in “aholic” when we mean to say someone is addicted to something? It doesn’t make any sense. It should be “workic”, not “workaholic”. One of those has much less snap, of course.
• Clicking on the tag buttons is much easier than writing out tags. If they had keyboard shortcuts, it’d be even better.
• For the love of all that’s good, don’t keep apologising to me. Don’t be sorry, do your job properly. Then we’re both happy.
• Ever have a night of tossing and turning? I had one of those last night, only to roll out of bed and discover Laura slept like a babe in arms. I suppose that’s okay, though. I’ll give up my sleep for her in one of those mystical marital transactions that seem to happen with some frequency. We’re rarely both sick, or both hungry, or both interested in watching the same film; life is strange that way. People are strange that way.
• I’d like to observe that even lukewarm coffee is better than no coffee at all, which pretty much blows that whole “warm, cold, lukewarm” example of Paul’s out of the water. Of course, he didn’t really have coffee. I try to imagine Paul of caffeine, and I sort of imagine him like, “We’re going to North America, beeyotches!” I think he might get quite annoying, actually.
• Last night Laura and I read from Luke where Jesus talks about the end times, and I have to say that scripture confuses me sometimes. At one point the passage says that the end times (if it was actually talking about the end times) will come when people are eating and drinking and getting married, just like in the days of Lot and Noah… and says that these signs are like vultures gathered around a carcass. Which is nice imagery, but doesn’t help me much, because I see people eating and drinking and getting married right now. Maybe I’m just getting confused about nothing. I just don’t get it.
• I love Talkdemonic’s “In the Machinery of Night”. It’s like they took equal parts IDM, hip-hop drumming, and awesome and mixed it all together to get an amazing song. Note my use of superlatives here.
• The Dilbert comic about the guy who has no skills but compensates by “raising issues” resonates with me this morning. I won’t tell you why because that would be mean.

Well, I got the itch tonight and had to relieve it. The result is the following song, a very rough demo type thing. Before posting, however, I have to express thanks to the people whose work enabled this:

• Ubuntu, the best operating system for me, bar none. Seriously, try it out, see if you like it.
• Hydrogen, a wonderful little drum machine. One of my favourite applications.
• Ardour, a digital audio workstation. Free, open-souce, and I’m pretty sure I’m only using about 1% of its functionality. Is better for me than Audacity was ;)

With no further ado (as none is needed) I present the song as both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.

Ghetto (OV)
Ghetto (MP3)

This work is licensed as per:

David Pogue writes an article in the NYTimes in which he relates an anecdote that seems to illustrate a generational difference in copyright morality. It’s an interesting article, though the comments are much more revealing than the article itself.

In that vein, let me comment.

There are several important factors to take into consideration here. First, I don’t think young people today have less of a moral bent than their parents. But let’s assume they do for a second, and ask where this dubious shift in morality comes from. Obviously, parents shoulder part of blame, as does society at large for situational morality. Yet, one can point to the big media companies who have for years put out product that glorifies every manner of immoral behaviour (showing, of course, these companies’ lack of moral fibre: they’ll do anything to make a buck, sell anything as long as it turns a profit), and I think you’ll feel a lot less sorry for them as they lie in the bed they’ve made. I think we call this, “sowing the seeds of your own destruction”.

Whether or not today’s youth have no moral compass, while an interesting question, is less pertinent to me than simple market economics.

When I buy something, it belongs to me. This is a central understanding in most of history’s transactions, except where otherwise stated, or where it’s obvious that you have to give it back.

When something belongs to me, I can do what I like with it, within reasonable limits. This is true of everything I own, from my house to my car. However, when media companies sell you something, they seem to believe it is still theirs, that they can tell you what to do with it, and even though you never have to give it back, that they can somehow control its use. This runs against human nature, though, and they should be thoroughly unsurprised when people invent tools to enable them to do what they like with what they own. This is one market, the ability to do what I like with what I own (device-shift, share, lend, et cetera).

Another market is in obtaining media. Right now the easiest way to get media is on the internet. Content owners saw this coming and did nothing to corner this market, for whatever reason. Another market a black/grey market sprung up to distribute media. When the content owners eventually came to their senses they were relegated to a ghetto of their own making, and with the lackluster efforts thus far, will continue to be. Not to mention that the media distributed by these content owners tends to be low-quality and locked into a specific device/format. Doubly ironic is that file-sharers can get a better copy (and keep in mind that this has not been historically true in many other black/grey markets) and a copy that they can do with as they see fit. Those who keep the law are penalised by the content providers and legislators who give them an inferior product, and those who break the law are rewarded by better availability and a better product.

The media companies have done their monopolies unimaginable harm in not taking the internet seriously. Much like IBM ceding control of the entire personal computing market to Microsoft, the content providers have dropped the ball so hard and so far that they seem unable to even find it to pick it up again. If anything, they seem to be hellbent on securing their place in the dustbin of history.

People take the path of least resistance. This isn’t about morality. It’s about the who will provide the best market for goods. And the content providers still don’t get that.

Add to this that (obviously) illegal and immoral are not bound at the hip. Plenty of things become illegal without being immoral. And when media companies begin to (obviously) buy the allegiances of politicians to see draconian laws made to limit how people may use what they have purchased, the immorality of file-sharing (for instance) becomes even more of a grey area.

The causes of this “moral shift” are many and varied. The internet is not an easy thing to adjust to, especially for monopolies (see Microsoft as an example). However, if the content providers made a better product, if they had more availability, and if the price was reasonable, they would be doing a roaring business on the internet. This is not a hard concept to grasp, and not a terribly difficult thing to implement in these days of almost-free bandwidth. The question become whether or not they’re not giving the market too little too late.

Human behaviour is economic behavour, and the content providers are stuck in a decade-old market with very few paying customers.

I’ve been socially liberal (at least in contrast to my surroundings) for a while, but I can’t remember ever tracing that philosophical shift to its roots before. I certainly didn’t get it from my parents, or from my communities at the time. I didn’t get it from the books I was reading. You couldn’t squeeze a drop of liberal out of the Contemporary Christian Music^[1] I was listening to even if you had industrial equipment.

Well, for the most part, anyways. There’s one line in one song that really poked me in the head when I was about 18: Caedmon’s Call singing This World. The part that says, “And the least of these look like criminals to me, so I leave Christ on the street.”

That might be it. I can’t be sure; my memory is a terribly threadbare fabric. But that’s the first thing I can honestly point to. Maybe it woke me up a little bit, I don’t know. Can’t you see why “this world has held my hand and has led me into intolerance” might do that?

You want to do something interesting? Start a netlabel. Start giving away music. Let those enterprising people who will give away music for free for whatever reason do so. And be picky.

I made a little something tonight, as my wife looked on, giggling. You may judge for yourself what it is, as I believe it’s rather un-classifiable.

What? (MP3)
What? (OGG)

Here’s a little something I composed in Notion. It’s fairly straightforward: violins, violas, cellos, basses, and a xylophone. I call it Brutus Comes Home. Please note that it’s not finished, it is in fact still in heavy development.

So, my iPod Nano 1G is now running Rockbox with the Ipoud theme. Looks good. Plays Ogg Vorbis. Functions nicely. That’s all I really care about.