Displaying Category: Pondering

Why does it look like the Winter Olympic medals have been left in the oven too long and have gotten all melty?

I wrote this for posting on another site, so while the context is a bit vague, I think the message is still worthy.

And just to alleviate any potential confusion that post title may generate in readers, I am not referring to myself. Though, while I am a people, I am not awesome. Now, I have read a lot of profiles on here and elsewhere (dating sites or otherwise) and there are so many interesting people out there who talk about their travels around the world and how many people they've helped and all of their awesome adventures in being awesome people and hell, some of these people just sound like modern day heroes/heroines. They're awesome. Actually, too awesome. You spend half your life in other countries using your supernatural healing abilities to cure sick children and turning dirt into Twinkies for starving babes while drinking wine with your best friends over sushi and Ethernopian foods (though, I don't see as many people going "Yum! Kitfu!") how is your life not completely and utterly satisfying? And I know it isn't satisfying because you're on a dating slash social networking site looking for partners (in the not gross one-night-stand-sense, not that I'm judging...), so that can't mean everything is completely awesome. See how I used my powers of deduction there? You can call me Holmes.

Let's face it, life isn't about what you do, it's who you're doing it with. Dirt to Twinkies is a great trick, but unless someone is there to help you hand them out (or at least take pictures) then how satisfying is the experience? I'm not trying to minimize the joy of helping people out, that's great and satisfying in its own way, but it isn't shared with that one person you really want to be sharing it with. Am I right? So here we are, alone in our otherwise perfect lives waiting for our voices screamed out into the darkest night to finally reflect off something and maybe find purchase somewhere in someone else's head. I'd like to think it's working out for some percentage of the populace, anyway. Me, not so much.

The thing is, I'm really not a very attractive human, and humans in general prefer to avoid the unattractive people. I know, I do it myself. Which may have some of you scratching your heads because at the beginning up there I talked about my extensive conversations with myself that I like to have when it's quiet. Well, obviously I don't have those conversations in front of mirrors. Moving on... What do unattractive people do to be heard? Or, if we really want to get pop-culture deep, I could take an example from the movie Avatar which raised this concept of being "seen" not in the literal sense, but how another person sees you for who you are. Not on the outside, not on the inside, but the whole person. I want someone to see me. I'm pretty sure that's all anyone really wants, right? (That's Sherlock Holmes.)

Even these perfect people with perfectly amazingly awesome lives? Yes, even them. And I don't know, maybe they have trouble too. Maybe people just see their awesomeness but still fail to see the whole person. Fail to see the flaws, fail to see the inner monologues. Fail to see the personal tragedies in their lives. Fail to see their appreciation for obscure pop-culture references. Fail to understand obscure pop-culture references (kids these days...).

So here's the point I've managed to avoid for the last four paragraphs. Awesome people who seem to have their life together, turning dirt into Twinkies and such, they play this game like "oh, I am so independent and awesome *holds up some dirt* I don't need anything else in my life!" Except they do, because whether you are awesome or just a 4, you're still human (maybe?) and it's a fairly consistent component of humanity that we crave social connections. Not just "oh, I'm helping the childrens!" social connections, but real, true, honest, "let's hold hands" social connections. Someone to share crappy mornings with and Cheerios with and bad weather and promotions and day trips into the city to visit the zoo and yes, even dirt Twinkies.

And right about now I'm realizing there's no way to bring this back to being about me without it getting stupidly awkward. Oooo! Shiny! ...

I was pointed toward an article that explains Comcast's interest in buying a majority stake in video streaming site Hulu and probably changing that over to a pay-for service. Because Comcast and the other cable providers and broadcast networks seem to be clueless, I'll do them a solid and clue them in on how television programming is going to work in the future.

The key point to always remember is that information and media is always free. Not because the world is full of cheapskates or because those young punks just want to buck the system, but because humans transfer information freely between each other. Constantly. Every instance of communication between people is a transfer of information and that can never be universally controlled without leakage. Other forms of media, be they written, recorded audio, recorded video, or live streams, whatever it is, exists in a world only a hairs-breadth from our native forms of communication. The dividing line between them is the medium in which they reside. In the ancient days this media was on bulky cartridges, cassettes, or reels of tape or film that required expensive equipment to view or record and wasn't generally available to the average consumer. As technology matures, access to these media forms naturally grows more and more accessible to just about everyone with access to electricity. And even those without hard line access to electricity can pop out a small solar cell array to recharge their iPod or laptop. Media is everywhere and anyone can access it.

I am not advocating world-wide piracy here, I am simply explaining the world we live in. A world in which, the moment a television program is broadcast over the air or transmitted by cable to a residence, someone is on the other end recording it. Once that program is recorded it can and will be encoded into some format that can be transmitted digitally to anywhere in the world. There is no protection possible that can prevent this. So the question is, Mr. Cable Company, do you bury your head in the sand and pretend none of this is real, or do you accept the world we now live in and get creative with your business plan?

Here's how the future of media distribution is going to go down: First, everything will be available on the Web. For free. The living room television will no longer care about over the air signals or digital cable or any of that nonsense. Instead, the TV will be a media portal to web sources. Users will subscribe to these sources (think something like Hulu, but set up for access in the living room similar to Windows Media Center or MythTV or Miro) to get show updates and reminders or set up personalized schedules and playlists. For most users these services will be free and ad-supported. Users will be able to sign up for paid subscriptions to view programs ad-free and get access to whatever interesting premium services the portals can come up with.

If you're thinking ahead, then you've probably realized this means the death of any other service that provides these videos. The broadcast networks will cease to broadcast in traditional terms. They will certainly continue to produce programming, which they will then sell to the portals. So in effect, the portals are the direct customers, the subscribers to the service. The networks are no longer making money on advertising, they make money instead on selling their program to services that then do the distribution for them.

This will also mean the death of traditional cable television. Cable providers will become simple broadband providers and by this time, broadband will be CHEAP and also regulated by governments the world over to guarantee minimum service quality following in the footsteps first laid down by countries like Finland. I expect the cable providers will either have large stakes in these media portals, or just own them outright. I can see it now, the "Comcast Network" is now just a site on the web where people go to get the content they used to access through their set-top boxes and DVRs.

The most significant benefits to the end user should be obvious. Generally free ad-supported access to any program in the world including live news feeds. Access through your television to your personal audio repository that exists out in the cloud somewhere. These would be tracks you have purchased through services like iTunes or Amazon music that get tagged for you to use and access anywhere, be it your TV, your phone, your portable audio device, whatever. They'll all be able to access your personal media stores. This also means asynchronous viewing of programs. No longer do you have to consider a broadcast schedule and be forced to watch at that time... Of course, many of us abandoned this long ago with the introduction of DVRs, but in the future you won't even have to worry about programming those things. You just subscribe to a program and it becomes available to you as soon as it gets posted. The only schedule you have to consider is the release schedule of each program you subscribe to. Of course, you still have to consider live feeds, but those probably run 24/7, think CNN, C-SPAN, BBC News, and so on.

Clearly this isn't all going to happen tomorrow, but I would say it would be a pretty safe bet to develop over the next 10 to 15 years. In the meantime, I have no doubt broadcast and cable networks are going to continue to try and charge everyone for oxygen ignoring the fact that we can pretty much get oxygen anywhere just by inhaling.

Update (2009-10-21): Just found an article about something called Keychest being developed by Disney: "The technology would allow consumers to pay a single price for permanent access to a movie or TV show across multiple digital platforms and devices—from the Web, to mobile gadgets like iPhones and cable services that allow on-demand viewing. It could also facilitate other services such as online movie subscriptions."

Alright folks, this is your chance to poke fun and ridicule, because I am right now watching Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, recorded off Lifetime, and I am really enjoying it.

After watching District 9 and seeing the trailer for Avatar and thinking back on the Matrix movies, we've definitely seen pretty good on-screen representations of land-walking, manned, robot-like tanks or "Mechs." So where is our Battletech/Mechwarrior movie already? And yes, I am totally ignoring Robot Jox and Robot Wars. Seriously, we need an American studio to finally produce this...

You have to say that title as if you are Frankenstein's monster waving his arms at a lit torch in order to get in the spirit of Southestern Conference's (SEC) soon to be announced social media policies. The policy posted earlier this month read:

Ticketed fans can't "produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or disseminating) any material or information about the Event, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the Event."

So basically, if I were at a game (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!1!) and I posted a tweet (HAHAHAHA!!!) saying "We're ahead by 3!" the SEC could... what... wave their arms and yell "social media baaaaad!!!" I mean, seriously, what are they going to do? Would they even know, by the tweet, who posted it? Would they get a court order to view my cell phone records or Twitter account history to verify I posted the offending update to the four and a half users subscribed to my Twitter feed? Would they issue a take-down notice? Do they really want to prevent people from getting interested in their events?

This is reminding me a lot of the record labels' fight against online radio stations like Pandora, because you really can't calculate the the massive damage caused by fans discovering your artists music and using these new mediums to purchase albums/songs and rave/rant about these artists. After all, it's all about ensuring you maintain the smallest audience possible in order to guarantee your collapse in the unavoidable world of the Internet.

Way to go asshats.

You can read a more thorough presentation of the issue over at mashable.

Update: I heard on the radio a few minutes ago that the policy has been revised to only ban live video streams. I haven't yet found an article explaining this.

Have you ever thought about why people who wear face concealing masks/helmets are always evil? Examples: stormtroopers, Darth Vader, Cobra Commander, all of the soldiers in Cobra, uhm, Scarecrow, Dr. Doom? I think that's all I've got, but feel free to contribute your own!

Hmmm... But Iron Man isn't evil. Nevermind.

Also, people with mustaches are generally portrayed as evil.

So I started thinking... If you had a choice, what would you prefer: a life of guaranteed great physical health, or a life of guaranteed romantic happiness?

I know what you're thinking, fortune cookies, but that's actually where stupid "...in bed." jokes and lucky numbers come from. True wisdom comes from webcomics. One of my favorites is Questionable Content, but now, thanks to Jeph of QC, I have discovered Girls With Slingshots. I've spent several days working my way through the archives (and I'm still a long way from catching up), during which time I have come upon dozens of funny and relevant comics. And today, this one is particularly poignant.

Not because I pay off bartenders to keep my secrets, but because I want what I expect everyone wants: to be loved. And while the opposite of loved isn't very nice, the worst is finding yourself outside the scope of that particular spectrum. To be invisible is to be nothing. That is what loneliness, and that is where I find myself... If finding oneself while invisible makes any sense at all.

Anyway, GWS is a really great comic, I hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

I am swiftly growing annoyed by the increasing flow of "tweetshaking" that I see going 'round. Or maybe it's a "tweetconomy?" Wherin, some person or company says "Tweet about me and you can download something cool!" or "People who tweet about us can win something great!" And I have nothing against Imogen Heap or EVGA, quite the contrary, but when the people/companies I like the most are now jumping on this bandwagon I start to see the pervasiveness of these trends that, to my eyes, seem to be fleeting. By fleeting I mean evolving. I am sure tweeting will evolve into some new social networking trend within the next two years, bringing about the gradual decline of "tweets" as we know them. I'd say that's good, but I shudder to think about what comes next...