Tag Archives: frank miller

Stupid Humans, Bounty Hunting, Bad Geography, and Aquaman

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This entry is part 79 of 100 in the series Today's Tidbits

Another busy day at work, but some interesting things in the feed.

Some interesting interactions in the feed today.

A tragic story about some parents with some really poor judgement (which lead to them falling to their deaths in front of their children) stirred up some comment controversy. Two very different angles on humor and ways of dealing with tragedy among the friends and friends of friends who posted there. Not totally unexpected, knowing the people involved, but likely a bit confusing and disconcerting to those who don’t know everyone.

The much more unexpected and interesting thread is the one about Dog the Bounty Hunter going after MMA fighter War Machine (the latter of which is, officially, a fugitive from justice after beating his ex-girlfriend nearly to death). That little ditty was one of the “trending” stories on Facebook and, it seems, my post (likely because of the high amount of interaction I’ve engendered among my list) was showing up pretty high on the listing of people posting about it. This, of course, brought in a number of people with no discernible connection to anyone anywhere near my circle of friends.

Sometimes, I forget just how… different… those a few steps out of my various circles are from the people I interact with regularly.

A number of the comments were outright all-caps screaming about how awful one of the other main people in the story was. A number of Dog fans offered their (sometimes poorly spelled and grammatically challenged) support for the “hero” to go out and get the “bad guy.” Others lamented the lack of “good guys” in the story (with equally bad spelling and grammar).

I’m almost surprised there was no knock-down, drag-out fight in that thread.

It all subsided quickly enough as, no doubt, something else tabloid trashy caught the attention of the general population.

Ah, the Internet… you never cease to keep me entertained.

There are a number of other interesting news bits that didn’t garner anywhere near the attention they should (really, I think that Dog thread, one about suicide, and the casting of Aquaman for the Superman v Batman movie were the three most active threads today) down there that are definitely worth the read.

And with that, on with the feed…

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.