Archive for ‘Uncategorized’
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IS ARCHIVE
When I was pretty young I was usually interested in owning things. Especially I’d look forward to owning Nintendo games, books, VHS cassettes, and DAT cassettes and eventually CDs and things like that. Then one day the internet became a pretty common part of my daily life, and everybody else’s. Not much happened back then, except that information was passed around on the web, UseNet, and Gofer to a lesser extent. Eventually and sometimes people would pass around porn this way. This was when storage and graphical capacities had developed to the point where porn was interesting on a computer. This was the first example of not owning something. Previously people had owned porn on VHS cassette and most commonly magazine format. However now that it was being transmitted as information which a computer could decipher it no longer really existed. But people still wanted to own a lot of it.
Several years later audio and video compression and a whole host of other funny ways of shrinking information and removing ideas from their physical concepts of storage started to happen. Suddenly it was simple to transmit music, movies, or even NES ROMs around the world as ideas. So people started collecting these too, trying to own more of them. But the problem here is that none of these objects actually existed. They’re simply ideas ripped free of the only thing that gave them any objective real world presence and concept of possessability: their distribution media.
While it was once certainly possible to own a record that contained a physical representation of a song, now the song was amorphous in its sense of tangibility. While this is not much of a problem with music, as songs are temporary broadcastings of information encoded in pressure waves produced by sounding instruments, it’s more troubling regarding photographs and optical data. Photographs are recordings of the travel of paths of light in a very simple and narrow path. Once a photograph is scanned into a computer it’s deconstructed in a sense, and the image created and hurried along on electron streams to various email addresses is an entirely different image. This is somehow more troubling to me than the concept of dot printing in a newspaper or magazine or comic book, which is fundamentally altered from the image it maintains likeness to.
The grand effect of all this information being removed of its earthly shell is probably a decrease of the understanding of copyright laws, particularly among the youth of today (in the parts of the world that have electricity and computer network access). It becomes difficult to attach a sense of ownership to something that doesn’t tangibly exist and is freely and easily cloned and passed along or otherwise shared and/or deconstructed partially or fully. While the progenitors of these sources of information could be imagined to be the ultimate authority on the needs and necessities of copyright laws and how they should function, the former group composes the audiences of these “artists,” if you will. This gets harder when you consider that information is only completely of value when it is transferred – when it has an audience. Information is integral to one’s survival and daily life. So I haven’t got an answer here.
So is this information even finding anybody? What the fuck is an audience?
Love,
Captain Cussy Pants.
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IS ARCHIVE
Way back when Animal Crossing first came out, Nintendo chose to advertise it in the USA by parodying MTV’s the Real World in their commercials. This was pretty funny and shit, but I was a bit left going “what the fuck?” Reason? Season: Autumn 20something, and the mention that one of the Real Crossing housemates was spending his days fishing instead of helping out around the village. For those who care, this is basically what I did once I actually had Animal Crossing, and basically what I heard from my girlfriend at the time. Nevermind, right? She’s in the past, and the past is shit. The past is shit! Hooray the shit past!
Alright. Got me to thinking, once I played the game – this isn’t so great. Sure, Tom Nook needs things and um…fish or…seashells. Hang on, I could sell him fruit or whatever…uh…furniture maybe. What’s this currency? Bells? You want HOW much for a punching bag? Fuck you, I’ll go down to the…there’s only one shop in town. That was the experience.
Thusly I present my new game idea: Do Some Shit. It’s a “sandbox” game in which you, true to the title, do shit. And things. And also stuff. In my ideal game of Do Some Shit, my character waddles down to the river, equips his iron boots, and fishes a la the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. There’s no Hylian Loach, sure, but maybe there’s a loach of some sort? How about garbage eels? Maybe catfish. The point is that I don’t just have to hit A when my controller has a fit. My character spends all day fishing loaches of a non-Hylian nature and drinking Strongbow. If you don’t dig that, then maybe you can dance or something? You can arrange furniture as well. If that’s your thing, do that. But if you move my guy’s loach tanks, he’ll probably come back home and punch you in your cartoony nose. You’d pay a subscription for that feature. Admit it. And just remember, while you’re playing, Do Some Shit is free minus the one time fee of $49.95 you pay me on purchase. Also maybe there’s sex?
Cats and kittens, I missed a post this week. I’ll make up for it this weekend. No violence related excuses this time. I was just lazy. Also the new bosun is REALLY easy to beat.
Love,
Captain Cussy Pants.
IS ARCHIVE
I was thinking about how to open a door with only one arm and a bag full of delicately fragile groceries when I realised that this is arm racism! Okay, some people only have one arm. They either start with one arm or they somehow lose one arm, which makes it sound like they leave it on the bus the way I left my wallet one time. Don’t ask.
So if you have one arm you wander around looking at two armed people all the time. The two armed people try not to mention your one arm, mostly, or some of them might say, “Hey! What happened to your arm?!” Clearly it’s arm racist to mention the lack of an arm. But is it arm racist to open the door for a one armed person with a bag of delicately fragile groceries? Probably! If I don’t point it out when somebody has one arm, I’m just politely trying to ignore the fact and that’s also probably arm racist! So maybe one armed people can just enter rooms and announce, “I have one arm.” Why not? You don’t have to answer the announcement, it’s just there for your benefit. From now on I’ll announce the number of limbs I have. I’ll say, “Nine limbs!” Thusly I have escaped more racism?
I also want to point out that USA Independance Day/Fourth of July is an excellent holiday! And it could probably provide you with the opportunity you need to answer my arm racism questions! I call it: The Explodiest Holiday.