That fat, old clown is fuckin’ right, yo.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Here are some pics of the products.

Take a look at this rather good half-hour doc about Detroit from Al-Jazeera’s English station. This one is hosted/narrated by Avi Lewis. It’s a little too newsy and focused on the auto crisis for my tastes, but it’s pretty excellent. Isn’t Grace Lee Boggs a total champ?

Not that I’m a massive Nader fan, but he apparently has a point about GM using bankruptcy to move its operations to China, which is actually fairly scandalous. Anyway, take a look.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Saw this for the first time on YouTube today:

My copywriting mind went immediately to how police state/patronizing this sounds, and how it could be rewritten to sound less so. “This audio track violates copyright laws, so it has been disabled” seems slightly better, but there’s no way around it seeming like a dick move by YouTube. Because it is. A better mechanism might be to disable copyright-breaking works* only once they breach a certain viewership, say 100,000 views. This video has only 450 views – why bother messing with that?

*At that point, it seems like everyone is better served if an ad-revenue sharing deal is worked out, and the work kept intact.

Holy shit. This just rocketed up to the top of my must see list.

I still remember seeing the original in the theatre. Awesome.

UPDATE: replaced YouTube embed with one that’s still there, I think.

Sometimes I wonder if life isn’t procedurally generated.

I find it endlessly fascinating to think about how one medium is going to influence another. Right now, there are so many media spilling into the same pot that it’s hard to imagine how the stew will taste. But in this AV Club year-in-movies retrospective, Tasha Robinson makes an apt observation:

To me, the trend there seems to be less about people filtering the world through their pop-culture experiences—apart from the occasional extreme iconoclast, who in this industry doesn’t?—and more about people filtering the world through camera lenses, seeing every experience as something to be caught on video and shared with a hungry voyeuristic world. I recently watched Martin Scorsese’s 2008 Rolling Stones concert doc Shine A Light, and I laughed at the way Scorsese’s cameras capture people in the process of capturing Mick Jagger’s cavorting on their phones. He’s making his movie—a big, shiny, energetic, polished production—and they’re making their low-fi versions in the middle of it. Or looked at another way, they’re in the front row at a Stones concert… and they’re watching the experience on tiny little screens held up in front of their faces, because capturing it for later is more important than living it.

That attitude has its benefits—for one thing, it gave us Trouble The Water, which rides entirely on the amazing from-the-ground footage two New Orleans residents shot to document their own lives before, during, and after Katrina. I suspect we’re going to see a lot more of that in 2009, as people continue to turn their cameras on themselves and their neighborhoods. Given that so many of our favorite 2008 movies were little lo-fi films about ordinary people rather than the pricey escapist fare, I’m suspecting this might ultimately be a good thing, and I hope it continues.

One of many interesting ideas here is that with so many cameras out there capturing footage, there’s a potential for a new kind of cinema that is both theatrical and collectivist. Imagine a room full of people at an event; you stage something going on in the room, and count on the people there to record it for you. You then sort through the footage from the event and assemble it. Or, you could post all the collective footage for anyone to assemble their own edit. It’s the sort of production that would have been completely inconceivable 15 – 20 years ago.

It’s also the sort of production perpetrated by none other than The Beastie Boys, with their awesomely titled Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That in 2006, the year Google bought YouTube, and conceived well before YouTube opened for business.

I don’t know the moral of this story – it’s ongoing, as they say. Perhaps it’s that the Beasties are awesome.

Without all that rap, courtesy Mr. Show.

THIS is the best TV I’ve ever seen.

This week there was news that Bell is slowing down P2P traffic, i.e. bitshaping, even for their resellers. And there was information on Rogers’ new fee structure, with the highest plan costing $100 a month and still subject to a bit cap.

Meanwhile, in the US, Comcast is backing down from bitshaping after a public outcry. What the hell is going on?

At issue here is net neutrality, and in the US there is public debate on the issue, whereas here there has been none. In brief, net neutrality is the principle that the network should treat all content and devices equally – that internet access should behave like electricity or your water supply. And generally that’s how it’s gone up until recently, when gradually the internet providers have been introducing bitshaping (slowing down certain types of traffic, most often BitTorrent) and bitcaps (a limit on how much you can download before incurring extra fees).

Don’t be distracted by the current focus on piracy – the idea that ‘a few bad apples’ are slowing down the internet for everyone else. The real issue is internet video in all its forms: bittorrented TV shows, youtube, and pay-per-download services like iTunes and Xbox Live. Video takes a lot of bandwidth and with the explosion in online video, suddenly ISPs are seeing people actually use some of the bandwidth they are paying for. And they’d rather not, you know, make less money. Let’s not forget that both Bell and Rogers sell TV services, and online video threatens their profits in that business as well. The last thing they want is someone canceling their cable to download shows off iTunes – but if that happens, they want to get their cut. Despite the fact that their broadband services are sold on the promise of fast, rich media.

Another issue is competition. We have less of it here, and so our telecoms can beat up the consumer to their hearts’ content without fear of consumers jumping ship, as there’s no ship to jump to. What they’d love to do is sell you access to pieces of the internet like they currently do with TV channels: wanna play games online? $15 a month. Facebook? $15 a month. Yeah, Rogers already does exactly that with its phone service (the facebook part, that is). It sucks for the little guy, yeah. But it sucks for our entire country as we watch Canada become a technological backwater in an age when high-tech competitiveness is more important than ever. We have 60% cellphone ownership here compared to 80% in the US. Typical broadband speeds in Japan are nearly 10 times faster than the Canadian average. There are a lot of amazing things that can be done with ubiquitous high speed access if we’re not paying through the nose for the ‘privilege’.

So what should we do? Amongst other things, join the net neutrality Facebook group. By getting 40,000 members, Michael Geist’s Fair Copyright group was able to forestall brutal DMCA-style legislation up here, so it could very well work. Also check out this site although it hasn’t been updated in some time, the petition has 6000 signatures already. In general, just get the word out and let’s make this an issue that more people know about.

So my friend Helena recently bought a cajon drum. It’s basically a box you sit on and you can make it sound like so many drums just from a small tap of a finger, it’s totally awesome. What’s more totally awesome is the video featured below.

Remember that crazy fast ukulele guy who did that George Harrison song on the ukulele? Well there’s this cajon player, Djaloyan Sylvain, who has taken that video and mixed in his drumming alongside it. Sylvain blows my mind as a cajon player, but what tickles me even more is the fact that people are playing together on youtube and other video sites. I mean they are adding to each other’s content in creative and beautiful ways! (Or adding to their perfection…it’s so very Borg) That is crazy! Like if you really think about it, we are incredibly social and cooperative animals, we ache to create together. I find that melding of technology and human nature to be very heartwarming.

Yet, there is a certain “holy crap what the hell” going on as well.

Lore Sjöberg of Brunching Shuttlecocks fame is doing videos for wired now, and you can watch the first one. If you like shark astronauts, this one’s for you.

Also entertaining is reading the comments and seeing how the internet is unable to imagine humourous videos about games as anything other than Zero Punctuation. My favourite:

I’m also agreeing with other commenters that Zero Punctuation is a very obvious influence, which is fine in my book.

In light of that, really appreciate the homage. Looking forward to future instalments, keep it up! However, please trim down the script a bit and speed up the delivery by about 400%.

Remember Dark Castle? I sure do. Well, you can play it in OS X now. Awesome.

Superheroes in Real Life, aka comic book fans whose membrane between real and make-believe shriveled up in a jaw-dropping way. Awesome. (via Z)

And via Penny Arcade:

Awesome doesn’t really do it justice.

Ars: Video-sharing site use surges as writers’ strike goes on. Yeah, that would happen, wouldn’t it? As Nate Anderson points out, the data both supports the writers’ position that online revenue is important, and warns the studios that people can live without their output. Last thing they want is a baseball strike scenario, where the sport itself never really recovered its following.