11.29.2007

intertubes championship online edition 4: mystical crystal arena

I've recently returned from a Thanksgiving holiday excursion to Annandale, VA, where production work continued on the Everything, Kansas documentary. The footage looks pretty great and our hosts were excellent interview subjects so my pleasure with the progress of the project continues to grow.

Seize Them! is scheduled to start recording drums for our upcoming EP this weekend. We'll be traveling out to Rene's stepfather's house in wildest New Jersey and transforming the drum room there into a recording studio. We hope to get three to five drum tracks laid down and then we'll take it from there. Exciting! I can't wait to have some decent-sounding recordings.

To support this project I bought myself an inexpensive large-diaphragm condenser microphone (the MXL V63M) primarily for vocal recording, but it's also useful for guitars both acoustic and electric. I've really only tested it to make sure it survived shipping, but I hope to actually record something with it in the next day or two. My fantasy is to start a Demo-A-Day project in which I come up with at least one part of a new song every day... this is not likely to happen, but we'll see. Last night I wrote a pretty fun soul-style bassline that may become something bigger.


R.U. Sirius is proposing the creation of an Open Source political party organized around antiauthoritarian lines. Looks fairly interesting and I'll be curious to see how it develops. Will they address the obsolescence of the nation-state?


The WGA strike is still on, and more power to them. Their demands are entirely reasonable (how shocking that a content creator should be paid when a parent company uses that content to sell advertising!), though it's a little ironic to me that the state of labor unions in this country has collapsed so completely that the only unions left with any real power are those populated by sports stars and creative brainworkers. Here's hoping, however, that my below-the-line friends out there aren't losing too much work over this.


If you're interested in one of the most ridiculous "linking policies" I've ever seen, head on over to the relevant page on the Vancouver 2010 Olympics site. I'm pretty sure absolutely zero of this is even vaguely legally enforceable, and my favorite part I will excerpt here (thereby violating their rule about not reposting any material they don't provide as part of their RSS feed! OH NOES!): "The posting or creation of any link to the VANOC Website signifies that you have read this Linking Policy and agree to abide by the terms and conditions contained herein." Wow! So any of us can "agree" to a laughably overbroad policy without even knowing what that policy is! Nice try, VANOC intellectual property lawyers. Next time why not stick with a nice, simple instruction that VANOC trademarks are not to be used without permission? Easier to not look like a total idiot that way.

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