7 Digital is selling EMI's catalog as 320kpbs MP3s for UKP0.50 -- about $1. Apple is selling the same music as lower-bitrate AAC files, with s33kr1t information hidden in them that Apple won't discuss, for 30 percent more. 7 Digital works with any browser, so you can buy this music without needing to use iTunes, which doesn't exist for Linux.
Buy EMI's catalog as MP3s for 30% cheaper than iTunes
7 Digital is selling EMI's catalog as 320kpbs MP3s for UKP0.50 -- about $1. Apple is selling the same music as lower-bitrate AAC files, with s33kr1t information hidden in them that Apple won't discuss, for 30 percent more. 7 Digital works with any browser, so you can buy this music without needing to use iTunes, which doesn't exist for Linux.
Good Copy, Bad Copy: superb copyright documentary on the remix wars
I just watched Good Copy, Bad Copy, a stunning Danish documentary on remix culture and copyright, available as a free download. The film skips around the world, showing the changing attitudes toward art and culture in Nigeria, Sweden, Brazil, the UK, and the US, answering statements about incentives and creativity by the MPAA and IFPI by showing us real artists (like Danger Mouse and Girl Talk) making wonderful art that, according to the gangsters in the entertainment industry, no one will make without copyright.
The movie has a very light touch, and a lot of humor. This has been a banner year for copyright documentaries, but this is the best looking of the lot, with superb production values. This is a masterclass on the copyright wars crammed into 58 minutes of video -- a must-see. Link
What steampunk means
Henry Jenkins, my favorite pop-culture scholar, has just posted the first part of a long essay dealing with the theoretical origins of steampunk. Jenkins connects steampunk to the eBay retro-collectibles urge and dead media -- themselves products of inhabiting a high-speed world where the things we love go obsolete fall to rot in the blink of an eye.
We might take two big ideas from Jameson's account of retrofuturism- that past imaginings of the future need to be understood as historical artifacts of older ideologies about human progress and that their remobilization in the present can be used as a means of reflecting on the failures of those dreams to become realities. While Jameson's work on postmodernism suggests that the redeployment of these older images of the future might amount to little more than an empty nostalgia, he seems to be hinting here that these images might function as vehicles of historical consciousness and thus as the basis for critique. Jameson's contemporaries were quick to explore the idea that "yesterday's tomorrows" might provide important clues into earlier moments in the history of the 20th century, a project reflected not only by the contributors to Corn's collection but also by essays like Andrew Ross's "Breaking Out of the Gernsback Continuum." But far less time has been spent exploring the contemporary deployment of earlier science fiction iconography as a way of working through the gap between an anticipated future and the lived reality of the late 20th century.Link
World's most expensive cities, 2007 edition
Mercer has released its annual ranking of the world's cities based on how expensive they are to live in. New York is the baseline, at 100 percent. The tumbling US peso has changed things up, knocking every US city except New York and LA off the list, and making everything else more expensive by comparison. London has climbed to second-most expensive (after Moscow). Gulp: I'm moving back there in a couple months.
1. MoscowAn interesting comparison in the Quality of Living survey, which ranks cities based on the quality of life there:
2. London
3. Seoul
4. Tokyo
5. Hong Kong
6. Copenhagen
7. Geneva
8. Osaka
9. Zurich
10. Oslo
11. Milan
12. St Petersburg
13. Paris
14. Singapore 15. New York
1. ZurichLink (via IZ Reloaded)
2. Geneva
3. Vancouver
4. Vienna
5. Auckland
6. Dusseldorf
7. Frankfurt
8. Munich
9. Bern
9. Sydney
11. Copenhagen
12. Wellington
13. Amsterdam
14. Brussels
15. Toronto
Gareth Branwyn has produced a wonderful steampunk photo-gallery for Wired News, featuring lush professional shots of some of my favorite homebrew projects.
HOWTO make glowing inkjet ink
This Metacafe video shows a simple method of making your own glow-in-the-dark inkjet printer ink, in any color you choose. Pretty sassy. My most-favorite-ever Haunted Mansion souvenir was this postcard showing a straitlaced man that had been painted with transparent glow-ink; when you turned the lights off, the glow-ink turned the picture into that of a ferocious werewolf. Alas, I lost that card the same night I got it (rental car broke down on the way home and I was sleeping in the back, I forgot it there and it never resurfaced) and I have been searching for a replacement since 1977. I'm wondering if I could do spot-color with this and make my own.
Link
Tulsa's buried car exhumed
On Friday night, a time capsule buried in Tulsa, Oklahoma was exhumed. One of the things inside was a then-new 1957 Plymouth Belvedere Sport Coupe. Apparently the concrete sarcophagus wasn't as water-tight as they thought. From Todd Lappin's post at Telstar Logistics (photo from Michael Bates's flickr set):
Previously on BB:
β’ Time capsule with 1957 Plymouth Belvedere to be unearthed Link
LinkWhen civic leaders unveiled their freshly-unearthed 1957 Plymouth Belvedere last night in a gala ceremony involving plenty of colorful lights, draped curtains, and Enya-like music, they were no doubt horrified to discover that the car had been reduced to a giant, tailfinned paperweight...
As a monument to 1957 technology, the time capsule must be deemed a failure. But as conceptual art, it's varsity-level stuff.
Previously on BB:
β’ Time capsule with 1957 Plymouth Belvedere to be unearthed Link
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth wins the Locus Award!
I could not be happier right now! My novella, When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (published in my collection Overclocked) just won the Locus Award for best novelette of 2006. A million thanks to everyone who voted for it -- I've got a 12h plane ride coming up, and this'll keep me warm the whole way.
Also: check out the awesome company I'm in: Vernor Vinge and Ellen Kushner and Charlie Stross and Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett and Naomi Novik!
This is the third Locus Award I've won in a row. A million thanks to Eileen Gunn for delivering this acceptance speech on my behalf: "Systems administrators are the unsung heroes of the twenty first century, our tireless morlocks who keep the entire universe running. The best sysadmins I've met treat their jobs as holy callings. They understand that they're keeping the infrastructure of the information age alive and functional. Many thanks to my sysadmin, Ken Snider, and to all the other sysadmins who make my life possible. And many thanks to Jim Baen and Eric Flint for publishing this. "
Best Science Fiction Novel: Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge (Tor)LinkBest Fantasy Novel: The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner (Bantam Spectra)
Best First Novel: Temeraire: His Majesty's Dragon/Throne of Jade/Black Powder, Naomi Novik (Del Rey; Voyager); as Temeraire: In the Service of the King (SFBC)
Best Young Adult Book: Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperTempest)
Best Novella: "Missile Gap", Charles Stross (One Million A.D.)
Best Novelette: "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth", Cory Doctorow (Baen's Universe 8/06)
Best Short Story: "How to Talk to Girls at Parties", Neil Gaiman (Fragile Things)
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