Blackmoor Vituperative

I picked up the TV series “Invasion” on DVD at Kroger, from a bargain bin. I am up to episode 5 or 6. This is a weird show.

There is clearly an alien invasion going on, but it’s not clear that the aliens are even aware that they are aliens. I had always assumed that pod people would know that they are pod people. But what if they didn’t know?

What if you were a pod person, and didn’t know it? What if you just felt… off, somehow?

Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for ’tis better to be alone than in bad company.

(From George Washington’s Rules of Civility)

George Washington’s Rules of Civility is pretty cool, in a Victorian sort of way.

It appears that the Digital Rights Mafia and the media robber barons have successfully done in Britain what they failed to do in the USA in 2003 — bullied the broadcasters into allowing the robber barons to control not only the content, but the devices used to play that content.

In my latest Guardian column, “Why did Ofcom back down over DRM at the BBC?” I look at how lamentably credulous both the BBC and its UK regulator, Ofcom, have been in accepting US media’ giants threats to boycott the Beeb if it doesn’t add digital rights management to its broadcasts. The BBC is publicly funded, and it is supposed to be acting in the public interest: but crippling British TV sets in response for demands from offshore media barons is no way to do this — and the threats the studios have made are wildly improbable. When the content companies lost their bid to add DRM to American TV, they made exactly the same threats, and then promptly caved and went on allowing their material to be broadcast without any technical restrictions.

How they rattled their sabers and promised a boycott of HD that would destroy America’s chances for an analogue switchoff. For example, the MPAA’s CTO, Fritz Attaway, said that “high-value content will migrate away” from telly without DRM.

Viacom added: “[i]f a broadcast flag is not implemented and enforced by Summer 2003, Viacom’s CBS Television Network will not provide any programming in high definition for the 2003-2004 television season.”

One by one, the big entertainment companies – and sporting giants like the baseball and American football leagues – promised that without the Broadcast Flag, they would take their balls and go home.

So what happened? Did they make good on their threats? Did they go to their shareholders and explain that the reason they weren’t broadcasting anything this year is because the government wouldn’t let them control TVs?

No. They broadcast. They continue to broadcast today, with no DRM.

They were full of it. They did not make good on their threats. They didn’t boycott.

They caved.

Why did Ofcom back down over DRM at the BBC?

(From New column: Why is Ofcom ready to allow BBC DRM?, Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com

What the hell has happened to the once-great Britain? They gave us the foundations of our society — the rights of free men to bear arms, the rights of a jury to decide not only if a law was broken, but whether that law should be enforced at all, and the basic right of the governed to expect their government to treat them justly… all of this is due to our country’s British origins.

I have to say, I am a little disappointed with what’s become of them.

Excessive use of Internet can lead to depression

This is just too cute.

You need to listen to this, all the way to the end. This is more than a bit of audiophile trivia. It is a compelling statement on our cultural future if we do not take action — decisive, sweeping action — to break the stranglehold with which the media robber barons and the Digital Rights Mafia have gripped our cultural heritage.

Gamers, let’s band together and see how much we can raise to help the people of Haiti.

Donate $20 and get a coupon for over a thousand dollars in RPG titles. After you make the donation, you will receive the coupon code in your email. It will also be available in your order history.

A listing of the free products available with this coupon can be found on our Gamers Help Haiti page.

(from Drive-Thru RPG)

We watch a lot of bad movies. Some are good, most are bad, and some are so bad they are funny (I laughed the whole way through 2012). I expected Arachnia to fall into the “bad” category. I was surprised to discover that Arachnia is actually a fun, low-budget monster movie.

The monsters in Arachnia are large spider-like stop-motion creations, like something from the 1950s. Other than a lack of color (the monsters are uniformly grey-brown), the stop-motion effects are reasonably well done for a low budget movie. The characters are distinctive, the acting is not too shabby, and the writing is actually pretty good. We chuckled several times, not just at the movie, but with the movie. There are even a few nude scenes (which I like, in principle), but rather than the awkward, uncomfortable to watch, overtly sexual and yet completely non-erotic scenes you get in movies like Final Examination, Arachnia has a sense of innocent fun. One of the times we laughed was actually during one of the nude scenes, and this was not a “laughing because it is so bad” moment, but a moment of intentional humor. How rare that is!

So, for monsters, humor, and fun nudes scenes, I give this movie four out of five stars.

Trivia: Arachnia was made by Edgewood Studios, the same Vermont folks who gave us Time Chasers.

We watch a lot of movies. Most of them are not very good. We recently saw a Belgian-French-German movie called Daughters of Darkness, which was really quite good. Images has a pretty good review of it.

NEW YORK – The home of superheroes including Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men sued one of its most successful artists Friday to retain the rights to the lucrative characters.

The federal lawsuit filed Friday in Manhattan by Marvel Worldwide Inc. asks a judge to invalidate 45 notices sent by the heirs of artist Jack Kirby to try to terminate Marvel’s copyrights, effective on dates ranging from 2014 through 2019.

The heirs notified several companies last year that the rights to the characters would revert from Marvel to Kirby’s estate.

The lawsuit said Kirby’s work on the comics published between 1958 and 1963 were “for hire” and render the heirs’ claims invalid. The famed artist died in 1994.

(from Marvel sues to keep Spider-Man, X-Men copyrights – Yahoo! News, Yahoo)

It’s no surprise that Disney (of which Marvel is a subsidiary) would oppose the loss of any of its copyrights. Disney has built its empire on appropriating public domain works and then twisting our copyright laws so that they never lose control of them. What is truly absurd about these dueling lawsuits is that anyone owns the copyright to work created over fifty years ago, the creator of which died over a decade ago.