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Gay Marriage: Frankly, Miss Scarlet, I Don’t Give a Damn
Today the ninth circuit court overturned the voter-backed Prop 8 law banning gay marriage in California. In the ruling of 2-1, they upheld the interpretation of a judge in a lower court who ruled it a violation of civil rights of gays and lesbians.
Prop 8 was voted on by the people of California in 2010 and has since been battled from the left and the right and has slowly been winding it’s way through the catacombs of the judicial branch of the government with it’s final decision almost unquestionably ending with an eventual trip to the Supreme Court one day.
Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in a statement on the ruling:
“Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.”A fine ruling I suppose, and it makes sense to me, but as I’ve watched this unfold over the years and seen the issue come and go from the forefront of the news cycle, I have always had a couple of qualms about this being an issue at all.
In deciding if gays can get married, it does not negate the lawful marriage of opposite-sex couples. It in no way impedes their rights to marry; nor does it make the union of marriage, both legal and spiritual, less than what it is and what it represents.
We are not, in this ruling, approving of gay marriage as a society. This is not a case of deciding whether it is sinful, immoral, or an abomination under God. This is not a ruling that says we all need to love our neighbor, cast the first stone, or judge lest we be judged; we’re just saying that if you want, you can legally get married to another human being. You can still be a homophobe, which is exactly what you are if you don’t approve of gay marriage. You can say you don’t care if someone is gay, but if you think gays should not be allowed to get married, that just comes from a place of hate. Let’s just call it what it is.
I have always had a bone to pick with the “sanctity of marriage” argument. People, pundits, politicians argue that the institution of marriage (between a man and a woman) is the foundation of society and to allowed same-sex marriage would destroy what the traditions and the institution stand for. Hmmm. Someone should tell Newt Gingrich this (Mr. GOP candidate for President, thrice married. Mrs. Gingrich would be the Third Lady of the United States).
Well, I have always held the position that if gay marriage should be illegal, then so should divorce. If gays can’t get married because of the sanctity of a tradition, then I say we make divorce just as illegal, to further defend the institution. If divorce should stay legal (and continue at a national average of about 52%) then I say we make adultery criminal instead. You can get divorced, but if you’re going to philander that’ll get you 3-5 in Lompoc.
My last assertion has always been my favorite: Who gives a shit? This doesn’t effect me and my eventual marriage and I certainly am not one to want to limit the rights of a particular portion of the population. If we want to change gun control rights, that applies to everyone, and then I’ll take a position. If we want to make abortion a criminal act, that is different, it’s only a law for a portion of society. Do you see the difference? We should not pass a law limiting the rights of only part of the population where only some are affected by it’s inception.
In the end I really think this is a non-issue. Let gays get married. I am all for equality, and never for limiting the rights of a minority of the population. Straight people, you get to keep beating your spouse, getting divorced, and getting trim on the side. Nothing changes for you. You get to keep raising straight and gay children at random. You get to continue to fuck kids up psychologically and emotionally as you have for hundreds of years. You get to split up your stuff or stay in a loveless marriage praying the other person dies before you; your choice as a heterosexual. You get to keep your 72 hour marriages and your annulments. You get to keep spitting in the face of the hallowed institution you champion in the most ironic manner. All I’m saying is that let the gay people in on the party. Gay or straight, the sanctity of marriage was sullied a long time before the Stonewall Riots…let gay people in on the institution-sullying party, or pass laws finally restoring and truly protecting the sanctity you cloakatively hold so dear. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, straight people.
All Photos by Wesley Bauman, ©2010
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SOPA. PIPA. Lets Call the Whole Thing Off.
The blackout has come and gone for the digital protest of potential censorship and criminalizing the memer and the blogger. SOPA and PIPA represented another front for the unwashed, outspoken masses to rail against over-regulation and broad stroke legislation.
Little was accomplished with our silence and “off-line” statuses on Wednesday. Poppycock joined thousands of bloggers, websites like Reddit and Wikipedia, and many other sites in protest of hastily written bills before the House and Senate to #protectintellectualproperty and #combatpiracy.
I suppose one might have to admit that the widespread protest did at least as much as to raise awareness to potentially dangerous bills before Congress. Bills designed to protect, but will, if enacted, do more harm than good; like the seat belt that saved your life on impact only to trap you in your burning car turned four-wheeled coffin.
Author of SOPA, Lamar Smith
As written, as far as my research and limited legal mind can infer, the bills are written in such vague and interpretable language as to allow for prosecution of parent search engines and sites facilitating user-generated content. In essence, Reddit could be on the hook for potentially illegal content found through their site that is posted by a third-party; it’s charging the gun manufacturer with first-degree murder where an unregistered weapon was used.
I applaud the idea that protection of personal property be it real, digital, literal, or intellectual, needs to be a priority for those who create it; but the simple writing of just something over doing nothing is no answer at all, yet it’s one used by legislators with growing regularity. Some clunky and slow swinging sledgehammer does little to help a situation that calls for more surgical precision that we designed scalpels for. Right tool, right job.
Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of the ravenously popular Reddit, said it best in an interview on G4 Tuesday. He said that the bills are too vague, and were clearly not written with technologists at the table. Had SOPA or PIPA existed when he and Steve Huffman were launching Reddit, it never would have gotten off the ground; it would have been largely illegal.
I am all for protecting the rights of entrepreneurs, writers, photographers, musicians, filmmakers, and the like. As a writer and photographer, I know that what I create has both a monetary and intrinsic, emotional value to me. Someone passing off my work as their own, plagiarism, should be punished. As a production studio, artist, or creator of any kind, I know there is a very clear and numerical monetary value placed on every illegal download and theft of copyrighted material. SOPA and PIPA are just not the answer.
The internet is a being, a living creature that we have created and have no idea how to control or regulate. It is amorphous and doesn’t fit in to the structure of any of the confines and very meticulous laws that we have set forth in our many years. It is not a “real” world. Police don’t exist there. It is, for the most part, the last Wild West frontier that certainly needs taming for the civilized folk to want to live there. Who would make the move west if all we are going to get is robbed, raped, and murdered? Certainly not me. Well, I do live there, but my business doesn’t really have anything worth stealing, so I don’t really worry about locking my doors at night.
For everyone else, trying desperately to lock things up tight and keep from getting robbed, I fully support some Pinkertons coming to town. Hey, I’ve got nothing to hide. Well, I did pull some photos off the web that MIGHT be subject to copyright, but that’s not a big deal, right? Okay, I’ll come quietly, but this is all a big misunderstanding…
Regulation is necessary, so what can be so bad with SOPA and PIPA? We’ll refine them as we go along, but for now, we need at least something. This is dangerous thinking that is probably what got those bills written. The problem with laws of such a nature as these bills, is that it almost encourages corruption and potential censorship equally harmful to that of the illegal practices of piracy. A classic tale of woe, replacing one evil with another.
I suggest regulation, but it should come from within. Much as the MPAA rates its own films, and much as the gaming industry rates and regulates the sale of its games, despite that M-rated material can legally be sold to a minor (thanks, Supreme Court!); these industries took it upon themselves to regulate out of a moral conscience for a greater good and a responsibility to society.
This has nothing to do with web regulation, but it shows that an industry can regulate itself, so why not a marketplace? What’s the harm? Could it be worse than it is? Wall Street went highly unregulated and has screwed the US pooch more times than we can keep track of; the market pops more bubbles than a herd of 6-year olds at a birthday party. We saw the pop of the internet startups bubble in the nineties, but it never crippled the worldwide economy. If we’re not going to regulate the stock market and companies therein in any significant manner, then why must we throw the yolk of fear and culpability on the internet?
We could potentially appoint a committee to oversee internet activity and potentially illegal activity, but it is truly unrealistic. The net is not a brick and mortar city, it cannot be governed by a committee, a city council, or policed by a force of men that can catch pirates in a speed trap and hand out tickets on the internet super highway between Sidereel and Wikipedia. You can’t send SWAT in to a blog, kicking in the door and arresting everyone inside for FCC and copyright violations. There are billions of doors in hundreds of countries. It’s just unreasonable.
Let the onus of copyright and protecting their material be on that of the business or website that is posting for consumption. When you’ve got an apple cart on the sidewalk at a Saturday market, it’s up to the retailer of apples to keep an eye out for five-finger discounts. It’s not good for business to have a police officer leering over said produce enthusiasts.
A marketplace like the internet is too diverse and too ambiguous and anonymous to call for traditional laws. Each company, site, or business, has a responsibility to protect their property. If they find signs of theft, or catch a thief, then good for them, but laws governing everyone and everything on the web does no more good than a law governing every person in the world; your laws don’t apply here.
If there must be some overall governing laws specifically tailored to the web, then we need to work with the entrepreneurs that tamed this wild frontier. Who better to advise a layman on the pressing matter of lawfulness than an expert? Get everyone involved that thrives in this world, in spite of piracy and unlawful activity.
A perfect example of where there is a disconnect between the digital world and reality: “You must be 18 years of age to view these materials. If you are under the age of 18, click NO, if you are 18 years of age or older, click YES.” Have we figured out a way to verify the age of a user yet? Is there a sure-fire algorithm devised that can verify the age of the finger clicking the mouse? Not that I know of. I always clicked YES, and I started clicking it when I was 14 or 15. Never got my door kicked in by a SWAT team. Maybe this is step one, but I suppose that figuring out a PIN for all adults required to view sensitive material would be too much to ask. Something like 431-629. It’s not a huge leap, but most kids know how to click a mouse, and can do simple math to pick a birth date that will get them access to porn and or violent material. Just saying, but hey, lets worry about the bottom line and how much money people are losing instead of the welfare of our impressionable children. Ahhh, American priorities.
There is no easy answer of how to combat piracy and internet fraud and theft. It is a tricky devil. IP addresses aren’t quite as solid in court as fingerprints and DNA. “Someone must have hacked my computer” is a completely legitimate excuse for having stolen material on a hard drive. Instead of starting with a vague law, why not start with what and who you want to prosecute and then reverse engineer a law applying specifically to that activity. Still more layman thinking, I guess.
I am no techno savvy nerd. My skills run more in the vein of movie trivia, video games, and to a lesser extent the written word. So, no law makers will be calling me for advisement. There are experts out there with useful, insightful experience for a congressman who can’t even design their own campaign website or write their own tweets #howdoicheckmyemail.
Regulation will come in one form or another. It may be by the SOPA and PIPA jackboot of vagary under the sledgehammer of totalitarian anti-piracy. It might come from self-governance and businesses investing in better security, clever coding, and well written and prosecutable end-user agreements…not to mention a man-sized safe or two. It may, and least likely, come by way of incremental, levelheaded change from the bottom up; both structural and lawful changes that protect the end-users and the entrepreneurs from the “illegal” acts of a mere fraction of the customer base. Whatever the form, we must be both hesitant and ever thoughtful of the worst case scenario. Civil liberties are constantly jeopardized today, and a bastion of near apparent lawlessness like the internet could easily become over regulated as to push out invention and creativity and stunt the growth of the real world in the process. It is all about the big picture, and some restraint now can pay big dividends far greater than the example that can be made by a blacklisted site or some poor schlep in cuffs over aggregating political links and movie poster pics for some stupid blog on WordPress (he wrote with a darting glance and a lump in his throat).
Crime occurs in the real world in every facet even with the overbearing micromanagement of common moral fiber that we live under now. Why would the internet become any cleaner, safer, or more productive if we regulate it? A war on piracy? We have lost the war on terrorism and that good old war on drugs and will lose the war on cyberbullying and our frontal assault on Christmas; why would piracy end any differently? I already must pay a toll to get on the internet by companies, must my civil liberties and fear of prosecution for retweeting #wearethe99percent? A digital police state, indeed, and that is a far worse fate than the binary wild west we live in now.
The National Defense Authorization Act
My buddy asked the world on facebook why they weren’t all up in arms about the recently passed legislation that would make it legal to detain or even execute US citizens without cause or proof. Just reasonable suspicion that the accused is part of Al Qaeda or a similar organization would be enough to take away his/her right to due process. Read up on it at wikipedia.
Well friends, this is me getting up in arms with the only weapons I’ve got. Photoshop and WordPress…not bad as far as weapons go. Please jump in, make funnier images, do your thing..
I think Obama has promised to veto this act, but spamming the shit out of the internet with these couldn’t hurt the cause.
Your Life on a Hard Drive
or: The Cloud Model…Extrapolated
We here at Poppyc**k love technology, and have for years welcomed the idea that one day our future robot overlords will see us for the dangerous and unpredictable variable that we are and decide through complicated algorithms that the course of elimination or enslavement far outweighs the dangers of tolerating our wild behavior. This is an inevitable course of events that we have decided is the most probable end to our lives on this planet. In the meantime, we are seeing the first steps toward a Matrix-like world so eloquently illustrated in the first installment of the trilogy by Andy and Lana Wachowski (two and three were shit, let’s be honest). As the idea of ‘the cloud’ marches on toward an inevitable reality that consumes every nook and cranny of your life, the next step is one that is disconcerting for current models of business and life. Though there will always be a set of humanity bringing up the rear in adopting the next logical step, it will all eventually lead to the conclusion that digital material will one day replace all analog material in the mediums of film, music, video games, and beyond.
The shift has happened already as we try to reconcile a world of ones and zeroes with the physical world we have all known throughout our entire lives. Look at what we’ve seen in the last few years alone. We’ve seen the rise of subscription and free services spanning everything from news outlets to movie services and streaming music sites. We’ve seen the rise of iTunes moving not only music, but every film and TV show you can imagine. We’ve seen ‘smart’ TV’s and the rise of downloading services like Steam in the video game community. Some brick and mortar buildings have closed their doors from the Rocky Mountain News to now Blockbuster claiming bankruptcy and even some magazines seeking refuge in cutting hard copy printing all together and instead shifting to a completely digital business model. The signs all point toward the fact that one day, sooner rather than later, your only source for anything you want, will be viewed through the pixels on a screen, not on a page of any kind.
It all makes sense to me. Why continue with the crushing overhead of DVD’s, CD’s, paper, delivery, shipping costs, purchase orders, presses, employee work forces, and all the other issues that go along with distributing in the three-dimensional world? It is all cut down to near zero overhead when it goes digital. What it used to take thousands of people to accomplish from beginning to end of a process can now be accomplished by three guys jacked up like drug addicts in a dark room with no windows. Just plug those kids in and let ‘em code. Hell, they don’t even need health insurance plans; more savings!
So what is the new business model? What will the landscape look like once there is literally no ‘hard copies’ of anything? Well, I suggest we take a look at the three major industries I highlighted earlier. The three areas where this move will be easiest to make and the major changes that have already taken place. It’s like getting fat, it doesn’t happen overnight, but one day you realize after looking at an old photo, shit, how did it come to this?
Music
There have been a lot of issues surrounding the music industry in the digital age, dating back to Napster’s unveiling (ask your parents, kids). The idea of property rights in a digital age really started here and this is where DRM questions really came to light. Well, if I own it, why can’t I share it digitally with a friend? When I bought CD’s I was allowed to let a friend listen, this is just like that, but on a scale of millions of people. Who really owns the music? I’m not selling it for money, I’m just sharing it with strangers. Where’s the harm? Someone bought it, since I am downloading it, they already got their money, but I just am borrowing it from someone I don’t know, where’s the harm? Well, it was decided there was harm and Napster went away for a while after lawsuits and…forget it, just watch The Social Network.
Now, after the crushing eye-opener that was the Napster business model, digital media is still pirated and illegally downloaded. Hell, if you’re really savvy you can get an album off the net weeks before it’s even released to the public; that’s a real digital pirate, right there. The model for music production and distribution has changed as the technology has improved. The great thing about today’s landscape is that, through social media and cheap music programs, anyone can make an album and distribute it across the world. Technology for the consumer has caught up with what used to take a multi-national label to achieve; and a fucking 14-year old boy in Iowa can have an EP online in a matter of days when his mom buys him a Mac and Fruity Loops for Christmas.
With the advent of technology finally trumping the once touted label powerhouses, small indie labels and truly independent artists have been carving out their corner of the net to the tune of real cash money through a completely digital product. They don’t actually make anything. After initial cost, the music they made and put up on the net for sale, which people will pay for, cost them nothing but time. Zero overhead! No one is taking a cut, there is no advertising blitz, press junkets, or CD release parties. They just tour performing shows and then eventually press ‘Enter’ and BAM, they have an album. There are so many avenues for personal promotion. From WordPress, to Facebook, to SoundCloud, to CD Baby, to iTunes, to Amazon.com, to privately hosted website and PayPal, there is a distribution network already set up for anyone with a beat machine and a crack pot pipe dream of producing their own music.
It doesn’t stop there. With free streaming mega giant, Pandora, you don’t even need to pay for music to hear it. It’s just like the radio, but it’s a radio that only plays what you want, and there are no annoying fucking crank calls to celebrities on the local morning drive show where assholes are supposedly entertaining you. Play some Goddamned music already! With Pandora, you pick the music you want on the station, and it will play that and anything else that preprogrammed algorithms think you will also like based on your tastes. Sure, a short commercial or two, but for a few bucks a month you can make that go away with the free station’s premium package.
Speaking of paid services of music libraries, how about that MusicUnlimited? Or maybe you might have heard of Spotify? Well, these are just the tip of the iceberg for accounts with limited listening for free, or for a reasonably affordable upgrade, you can have access to millions of songs without actually paying for any of them individually. This trend is three-fold. Down goes the old model, like Ortiz from a Mayweather cheap shot. Not buying albums anymore? Who gets the money? How does an artist make a living in the digital milk crates with all the other artists? 
The second fold is the terrifying realization that you will probably never stand out if you are nobody, and becoming somebody will be that much harder when no one is buying digital albums anymore, let alone hard copies out of the trunk of your car or at the merch booth after your set. How are the talented and unknown masses supposed to get your attention when people stop buying a new artist’s music SPECIFICALLY?If people are downloading tracks from an artist in particular, they are far less likely to draw an interest in that artist if they are just a part of the Spotify catalog. Third fold is the complete elimination of money going directly to an artist. When I buy music (I never pirate music) I am doing so because I love what that artist is making and I want to support people, groups, or musicians so I can continue to hear them create with the dollars I give them. I am directly supporting the cause for more good music to come out of that person. How much is going to them in the catalog subscription model? They are already touring in a van and eating Vienna Sausages out of a can. The shoe-string can’t take that kind of tension, friends. Do you want to see your favorite artists quit the game because they can’t make a living on the subscription model? I didn’t think so. Be weary. But I guess there is always Kickstarter…but that’s a WHOLE ‘nother article.
Movies
Films have seen so many advances in technology, and still employ so many of them it can make your head spin. From reel to reel still used in filmmaking and projection at movie theaters, all the way to 3D technology and digital editing and distribution in DVD and Blue Ray formats, this industry is still using just about everything it did at it’s advent at some point in the process. It is the oddest thing.
Want a real world example of how the industry is unable to make the full leap forward? The advent of the digital copy. Not only will they not relinquish complete control of the film’s rights through safeguards in copying movies to hard drives for streaming to iPads, mobile devices, and computers, they are now going to provide you with a copiable copy of the movie with the purchase of the film in DVD and/or Blue Ray format. Couldn’t we just do that with the one disc I already paid for? This is a losing business model. What if Henry Ford had rolled out a promotion of getting a free horse and buggy with every Model A sold? Maybe Verizon should throw in a free pager with every Android-powered phone they sell? One more example? OK. I can’t wait for my doctor to give me a free Leach treatment to get out all the ‘bad blood’ next time I get a flu shot. I mean, c’mon.
Movies have always been protected in usage rights. We’ve all seen the scary FBI warning before a film. Who can blame them? With movie costing hundreds of millions of dollars when you factor in promotion, advertising, production cost, buying a script, rewriting a script, screen testing, lawyers fees, actors pay, union pay, and on and on, it is a wonder movies even get made anymore. The investment up front is so huge and the cost of producing DVD’s on the back end (with more promotion), it is astronomical cost that is met with great venom if anyone beats the system and shares a film online or sells bootleg copies. (side note: movies are bootlegged but music is pirated? Why?) They sink so much liquid and borrowed capital into the production and release of a film that it can be catastrophic for a movie to be bootlegged even a few thousand times, let alone downloaded through Bit Torrent sites by millions.
Movies have also seen the fall of rental stores and the rise of Netflix. This is another shift in an industry not unlike that of music. A massive library of hundreds of thousands of TV shows and films to which you have 24-hour access. No longer do you buy a movie. You stream it or rent it through the mail service of Netflix; well, Quikster now, but that is a WHOLE ‘nother article to itself. Fuckin’ Netflix. Anyway, people are no longer buying movies at 20 to 40 bucks a pop. They are just renting as part of a service, or skipping hard copies all together and just streaming it to their TV through an online service. Sure, the quality of the video and audio depends on your internet connection and the availability of HD for any particular title, but the result remains the same: No one is buying the title outright at Best Buy.
Those that are buying movies specifically are the quickly dwindling folks on iTunes who want to buy a movie, or a season of a TV Shows. Yes, people are still buying movies. I don’t remember the last movie I bought. I think I got a used movie at a Blockbusters “80% off because we are fucked” sale a few years back. The titles online are cheaper than the actual hard copy version, and you do have the option of just renting the title. You can also watch the trailer for the film before you do either of those and even read peer-reviews of the film by those that think their shit smells like Roger fuckin’ Ebert’s (that’s me by the way, three reviews deep).
What can large production houses hope for, best case scenario? They still need to blast your face with advertising like their movie is a GOP candidate for President. There needs to be more advertising for this film than your brain can handle. They need big Hollywood names, and you gotta pay for that. You still need key grips, union guys, set designers, wardrobe people, craft services, extras, insurance, equipment that’s not getting any cheaper, special effects guys, stunt doubles, rooms of editors, interns, assistants, trailers, marketing guys, screen tests, script writers, and the rest of the world’s biggest enchilada. The best they can hope for is that streaming sites will be able to cut them in deeper on the pie and costs keep rising in those fees. You’re gonna cut out hard copies to only maybe 20% of DVD sales in the next five years. It will mostly be subscription services and digital downloads in HD. Oh, did I mention HD digital copies cost more than standard definition copies? Well, they gotta get you somehow, right? Since they can’t get you with the price of popcorn in your living room, you’ll pay for a clearer damned picture…the movie is better in HD, right? Picture quality has gotta be worth at least one more thumbs up from MovEENerd810.
Video Games
Ah, one so near and dear to my heart we could write all day and night about this industry and never be done. This is my bread and butter, the jam on my toast, and the wiggle in my walk. Literally, I think I have a deformed tail bone from all my hours sitting in a chair with a controller and a bursting bladder waiting to pee until I reach the next checkpoint.
The gaming industry has always confused me. Well, not always, just in the last five years or so. Why are AAA-titles costing me 60 bucks a pop!? I know they cost a lot to make, but then again movies generally cost more…so what gives? The money invested and the man hours are on par with a film, but it costs three times the price for a copy of a game that costs less to make? I never got that. Where does all that money go? They always have multiple titles in development, on the shelves, or in my collection and you still charge me sixty dollars for a title? I never got that explained to me.
That said, this is a multi-billion dollar industry that shows no signs of slowing down. Kids keep being born, and in this digital age, they’re not satisfied with sticks and cardboard boxes to play in, they want real entertainment. They want entertainment it took a team of a few hundred people two years and 60 million dollars to create. They want entertainment so vivid and visceral that movie producers and script writers are jumping ship and joining the gaming world pitching new IP’s and joining development houses. Games have gotten so good that I would pit the script and storyline of any video game trilogy up against the likes of any of the best movie trilogies of all time. Frankly, our stories are better, and you get to fucking be IN them!
Gaming has seen the advent of many technologies since it’s inception, too. Unlike the movie industry, they have adopted new technology and let the old stuff die a slow and painful death. Well, not a death, but they fall in to the category of nostalgia, not dead technology. I doubt you still watch movies on a reel to reel on the wall of your garage in 8mm, but there are those that still love the feel of an NES controller in their hands and live their life in 8-bits, gladly. With new systems, new graphics engines, and extremely talented minds, the gaming industry went from nerdy to chic pretty damn quickly. Have you seen an after party at E3…that’s like any Emmy after party out there…star-studded.
As internet connectivity has given way to multiplayer expansion, DLC, and now media streaming like ESPN and Netflix, the console has taken on a whole new meaning. With the internet hooked up to your XBOX or Playstation, you can download music, stream movies, play game demos, watch sports highlights and live games, can download indie titles from the arcade, play games with friends across the country, and oh yeah you can even purchase full games without leaving your chair. Just like with movies and music, you don’t need to leave your house and drive to the store to get a title, you can just press a button and have the title at your disposal before dinner is done cooking.
This idea of live and on demand has gotten to video games in a big way. The DLC was a huge leap. Wish there was more ‘movie’ in your movie? Well, you can now have more ‘game’ in your game! With DLC (downloadable content) you can buy another chapter to the story, another side mission, another part of the world that was weaved for you by all the people that made the game. Game developers are no longer limited by the space on a disc, they can just keep adding things on and new content to keep people buying copies and spending money through the digital marketplaces.
Things are progressing further and the talk of strictly digital sales is slowing growing from grumbles by gaming futurists to a dull roar from all involved. This could have both dire and profitable ramifications. Say goodbye to Gamestop, for one. Without hard copies of games, trade-ins, used titles, they are out of business. The chain should already be figuring out a third-party business model to work in the coming analog-apocalypse. With no hard copies, GameStop would go the way of the Dodo in lieu of the larger chains like Target, Best Buy and Wal-Mart offering consoles at a cheaper price and more conveniently in their omni-specific outlets. Also, with digital distribution it would require an upgrade to the skeleton system of servers that keep the online marketplace and multiplayer universe going. A switch to digital-only would result in a better user infrastructure, fast forwarding the slow development and minimal servers in place now to handle increased traffic. I would hope it would lower costs for AAA-titles overall, but I fear that the savings would be only minimal in the range of five to ten dollars a title.
There are already some services out there that are the first-adopters that see the wisdom of investing in the inevitable shift early, so they can be on the cutting edge of a working model while everyone else is just getting their pants on. Steam is quickly gaining, well, steam, as a progressive and successful gaming model for PC-users today. It is not just a gaming marketplace with over a thousand titles available for download, but is a community of savvy gamers with forums, automatic game updates, Steam-only special offers, chat services, and up to the minute industry news, but it is a successful model with full transparency. From stats on how many people are playing, achievement stats, and a lot of open information, it is a model for what might truly be the next step in the gaming process. I know we are still at a mostly hard copy stage right now. But just as with music, small gaming publishers and simply just dudes with coding skills and some free time, are able to create and distribute fun and exciting new IP’s in a cost-effective and explosive manner. Do you think Limbo was possible even five years ago? Not a chance. Digital is where it is at with the video gaming future. We already did away with user manuals for the most part. GOW3 was just north of directions scribbled on a used cocktail napkin, but at least it came with stickers. Yay for the digital future in gaming.
So where does this leave us? I could go on about book sales, newspapers, the inevitably shaky future of standard programming on cable, the advent of on demand streaming sites like Hulu and Sidereel. I could have dazzled you with massive statistics to back up every point I have made, but that’s not the Poppyc**k way. I could continue to prattle on about Omni-tools and devices and the attention span of an ever busier and ever more impatient and uninformed world. I could keep moving toward the simple idea that we don’t have enough hands to carry it all or the time in the day to drive somewhere and buy it all. We need it on demand, at our fingertips, and at a reasonable monthly price. We want less stuff but access to more things. It’s all about the digital.
We sit in an odd ethos right now, as consumers. You go and rent a movie, and buy a video game. Most people have moved on in their music to the digital world with a mix of iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify. As we move forward some stuff will stick around for nostalgia’s sake, and for high quality viewing. Blue Ray will be replaced with something, smart and 3D TV’s will be standard. Books will be a quirky thing it is chic and trendy to buy from a corner shop in downtown LA. Textbooks will be a thing of the past as tablets and Kindles become more cost effective.
We are straddling a very odd time where we have on foot in the age of analog and one foot in the age of a digital (r)evolution. The (r)evolution won’t be televised, it will be downloaded and streamed on demand. It will end up in our Netflix Queue between Uncle Buck and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It will be shared on our FB profile and synced with Tumblr and Twitter as we watch sports highlights and news videos while we download the big video game title of the year and search through the complete Beatles anthology on Music Unlimited. I feel like we’re currently in a scene from the video for A-Ha’s “Take on Me.” We are in a sketched, standard definition world. Walking behind the window we are in full-color and 3D. We’re on our way to the other side, but right now, we’re just leaning around the window; we’re both sketched, and real. I don’t know what the motorcycle guys with wrenches represent in this analogy, maybe DRM rights, but all I know is that it is an inevitable change, the cloud idea, because everyone wants to make just a little more profit, and overhead is just such a dirty word today.
Biden is a Goofball, Not an Idiot
May 10
Posted by Wes
Question: Do you believe that Vice President Biden’s statements on gay marriage rights were yet another in a long line of gaffes by the VP, or a clever ploy in the campaign for reelection?
VP Biden on NBC’s Meet The Press
On Sunday Vice President Biden revealed that he saw no difference between homosexual and heterosexual marriage during a visit to NBC’s Meet The Press. President Obama quickly followed suit saying he supported gay marriage. It has since come out that Biden’s comments were not some clever set up for the administration leveling the gay marriage issue in the upcoming general election battle with GOP nominee-in-waiting, Mitt Romney; but a mistake on Biden’s part revealing a future stance the administration planned on taking later in the general election.
White House officials said that Biden’s slip up has brought the issue to light prematurely, forcing the administration to address the issue under the glaring light of public opinion.
The administration is proffering that Crazy Joe let this one slip in the interview, right before he went on to praise the former hit TV show, still in syndication, Will & Grace, for everything it did to open the dialogue and to normalize the lifestyle and acceptability of homosexuals in the mainstream eye. The praise of a primetime TV show’s social efforts helps the administration’s case, but that is just Biden ad libbing from the script he was given. The questions in interviews are known before hand and statements are prepared. There are no curveballs on Meet The Press. The oversight or preparation is surgery, not freeform, interpretive dance.
I have a hard time thinking that Joe Biden is such a gaff factory that he let something like the proposed time of releasing the hounds of gay marriage war slip his mind. This is another in an upcoming line of social issue trumpets that will be sounded as the president ramps up his reelection campaign.
By saying Joe forced their hand, White House officials are admitting that there was a particular time and place where they planned on playing the gay marriage card. There is no reason to think that Obama and his team don’t have a very particular plan in place for reelection, and to think Joe isn’t on board with that plan is to give the guy too little credit.
The Obama administration has been on the campaign trail for a while, and I think they are trying to rouse the populace troops as they bank wins wherever they can get them. Signing a plan for peace with Hamid Karzai helped, but before that they ran an apparently contentious ad hinting that Mitt Romney wouldn’t have found and killed Osama Bin Laden since he is quoted as saying that spending all this time and money to “scour the Earth” for one man was pointless. Now letting slip the comments on gay marriage only galvanize a voting base that is near impossible to get as a Republican, especially behind the likes of Mitt Romney.
The Obama administration, just as with all that came before it, is clever, cunning, and not as stupid as the voting public thinks that they are. You gotta give credit to the people who got to where they are, and to say that they are idiots admits that you elected stupid people. To assume that Biden made his statements out of turn, without a grand design, is to underestimate the minds cranking the cogs of politics. The Obama reelection team has a plan in place, and more than a few Biden contingencies, if the Meet The Press gaff spoiler wasn’t in the plans already. Obama championed change in 2008, he wants more of the same in 2012, and he’s doing it with sheet music and the world’s finest political orchestra…and crazy Joe Biden’s comments were just a key change in the tune.
To get more your fill of what the Obama administration needed to do, as of the one year mark in 2009, click here.
For my take on what the administration needed to do to avoid getting ousted after one term, click here.
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Tags: Biden, comments, gay marriage, meet the press, obama, rights