Tag Archives: captain america

More of Everything from the Past Few Days

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This entry is part 81 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Yep. Up too late again, trying to catch up on non-day-job work that I didn’t get to last week (or the week before) because I was so wiped out by the day job work.

Much needed fun over the weekend, but my sleep schedule is still recovering.

Yeah, that’s the excuse I can use for at least one more day.

(We all know that the reality of it is that I’m naturally nocturnal and, left to my own devices, would rarely be up before noon and usually be going to bed around sunrise.)

Ah, well… so much stuff in the feed from the past few days. You’d best just take a scroll through it to see for yourself. (Since this is all going to be quick and haphazard as I should be asleep now… except I crashed out on the couch earlier in the night… which does exactly nothing to “fix” my schedule.)

Here’s the feed…

Politics, SciFi, Comics, Comedy, and, well, Pretty Much a Little of Everything

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This entry is part 73 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

I’ve really got get back on track to do posts on Fridays… or any of the times over the weekend that I think “Gee, I should probably post something to my actual blog…”

Because by the time Monday night rolls around, I’m usually doing so many other things that I put this off until the last minute and then find myself at a loss for something even vaguely meaningful to yammer on about. (Which is likely why I don’t do videos.)

Instead, as usual, I’ll just say there’s a lot that went into the feed since Friday morning. Some of it sparked some really good discussions, some of it is just really awesome in and of itself, and some of it has likely gone completely unseen–so you could be the first to discover it! (Or, uh, something like that.)

Anyway… here’s the feed…

https://www.facebook.com/kierduros/activity/10152191008695981

Heroes (in real life and otherwise), A Bad Way to Kill a Spider, Questionable Editorial Decisions, and Just Plain Bad News

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This entry is part 64 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

The week continues to be… odd.

The rapid oscillation between lull and panic at the day job just kind of left my head spinning. I’d been hoping to make a bit of progress on some other projects, but one just refused to die quietly. I’m sure it will resurface again soon enough… likely right when I need to be doing something else.

That lead to the continued trend of just zoning out when I got home.

So now I’m not at all where I want to be on any number of non-day-job things (including clearing out my lingering TV episode queue from Hulu and other places). Doing nothing ceased to be actually relaxing when it became the only thing I could manage to do.

And, based on the news reports coming through various feeds, it looks like things are heating up again between Israel and the Gaza Strip area. That’s unpleasant, to say the least. Especially when, a few thousand miles away, a civilian plane seems to have been shot down by Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine.

I really don’t want any more large scale wars for a little while (at least). We still haven’t finished pulling all the way out of the last bunch of messes in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere that we were involved in.

Anyway, there’s some good news and fun stuff in the feed, too… but.. well.. yeah…

Tarot History, Takei Respect, DRM Woes, Work Tunes, Illusions in Motion, and Comic Book Stuff

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This entry is part 50 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Hopefully, after today’s utter insanity and stress, things will fall back into a more “schedule-friendly” rhythm at work. We should be past the point where a project that should have ebbed has continued to flow… right over top of a new project that was planned to start in the down-time.

In the feed, there’s what I consider a nice story about the insistence on DRM (Digital Rights Management) has come back to bite the company that insisted upon it in the ass. Seems a publisher that vehemently insisted Amazon only sell it’s ebook editions with DRM in place, is now in the sticky situation where it’s no longer happy with Amazon’s terms and charges, but can’t pull out without more or less using it’s entire customer base–because they’re locked into only being able to read the books on Amazon readers… because of the DRM.

Even more “fun” is the tidbit in the article that mentions Tor Books, which dropped DRM from it’s ebooks a couple years back. Ostensibly, DRM is in place to prevent piracy. Well, it seems that since dropping DRM, not only has Tor not seen an increase in piracy, they’ve actually seen an increase in sales.

Same thing happened when Amazon really jumped into the MP3 game… challenging iTunes by offering DRM free downloads. That may not have been a clear-cut victory, but Amazon’s music sales aren’t too shabby.

DRM has always treated legitimate customers like criminals and done little to nothing to deter, let alone stop, actual criminals. In most cases, it seems that it’s created more who break the law–by stripping out or otherwise circumventing the DRM so they can use their products freely.

People pirate stuff because they can’t get it legally in the form they want to make use of it. This is a lesson you’d think everyone would have learned when Napster was the biggest thing. People went there to effectively steal music because there was no legal way to get it in that format.

Ebooks are popular because people love the format. It’s bad enough that there are so many competing formats (which offer very few differences when it comes to the actual content… outside of which device you can use to read them). Adding serious DRM to them does nothing but open the door for things like a content producer getting screwed over by their DRM provider.

Maybe this time around, companies will learn.

Probably not.