Yes, two months without posting is enough to drive anyone away. I’ve moved back to Stockholm, started working at a final project and right now I’m in Amsterdam again looking for work. I’m staying at a hostel for a few days, since i have exhausted mu source of friends (or rather, they are hosting other, better, friends). The price seemed reasonable, but then someone stole 100 euro right out of my wallet. WTF! The person even left the wallet! Though I’m grateful for still having my credit cards and that stuff it broke mu budget for the week. No new jeans for me. I’m going to write more about ipred in a bit.
So the Pirate bay trial is going on in Sweden and I have been listening to the SVT (Swedish Public Television) audio stream of the spectrial for the most of it. And besides my new opinion that the Pirate Bay kids are dicks I’ve came to the following conclusions:
1. The Prosecution must have been on holiday for the last two years, they are completely lost on all technical matters.
2. It’s a shame that PRQ didn’t get the non-pirate bay servers back since it took about one week to confirm witch machines hosted TPB. This effetely led a company into bankruptcy.
3. Peter Althin and Monique Wadsted are the only two lawyers who seem to know their jobs. And since they are on opposing sides we should have some good legal fighting to look forward to.
4. The pirate bay kids are dicks… oh wait I already said that.
5. There is a gap between generations that no side seem interested in passing over to ensure some proper communication.
I also thought that I should say something about the value of a copy.
I own more DVDs then most other people that I know; I also download a lot. In a traditional economic viewpoint a movie that I own is worth as much as a movie that I download. For me, on a personal level this is far from the truth.
The DVD’s have three kinds of value while the downloaded things only have one. When I download a film the production of the copy that this whole legal matter concerns is of no interest to me, I have no use of storing films on my external hard drive but I need to keep the information somewhere. I download to experience the film in question and then delete it, unless it’s a rare film, most often documentaries that wont be for sale or that will cost far more then I can afford to pay for them. The DVD’s on the other hand contains to about 90% films I have already seen when I purchase them.
I pay for the value of having the films in question on access just a few seconds away with a quality far superior to a downloaded copy. The physical manifestation of the film serves as an instant memory link (a Madeleine) to the experience of watching the film. I only need to take my copy of The Crow out of the book case to get the general feeling of the flick, exploring the back of the DVD I remember some of my favourite quotes and how much the clip where The Crow leaves the incendiary grenade in T-Birds car (We killed you dead, there ain’t no coming back…) used to scare me as a kid when I saw it on Filmkrönikan. When writing this I had to take a break to watch the scene on youtube. A Blade runner for the 90’s as the Swedish reviews said.
Annyways the third value is of course the value of ownership. The DVD’s are mine and they, like all products serve to give me a stronger feel of identity and social branding. Just like my (a bit to worn) Nike Air force one’s and my Crumpler computer bag.
The copy as information burned on a digital versatile disc is close to worthless. Lets say the disc enabled my DVD player to receive the movie magically trough a gateway in space/time I’d still like my DVD of the crow the same (or maybe more since it would use magic space/time technology). The main value is in the packaging.
Comparing this to a (purely theoretical) case of the film Cloverfield that I watched lately, from a digital copy that had taken up my valuable hard drive space for far to long. I watched it and removed it. Now I neither have nor desire any link to the film. It was a copy without value to me. I didn’t go to the theatre to see Cloverfield and a sure wont buy it, and if downloading would have been impossible I’d probably would have been watching the crappy action flick of the night on TV6 in its place. With a bit of luck there would have been ninjas in it.
In this (still fictional) example, just as in the previous one, the copy is of almost no value. In fact the magical space/time technology would be a lot more desirable since my hard drive would be able to store valuable information (maybe a completely legal rip of The Crow, so I wouldn’t have to bring my DVD library with me when I travel. Or move. My DVDs take up an entire Claes Ohlsson Moving Box).
I pay for my internet connection and a pay TV licensing for my television, nether of these costs goes to JJ Abrams in any way. One goes to my ISP and the other to the governmentally funded public television (the same one that streams the pirate bay spectial).
Then we have the way of watching TV shows. I watch about 3 shows a week, one of these airs on television in Sweden in the pace that I’m watching. However I watch none of these three shows on television. Supernatural is just far to slow and airs weird times (i.e. not when I’m having dinner) Dollhouse doesn’t air at all in Europe and finally På Spåret that I watch hung over in bed on Sundays trough SVT Play (STV’s online broadcast). If Supernatural and Dollhouse would be available at a high quality stream within Europe I would watch the stream, but they are not and I have to download them. It’s the only way for me to access the shows I want to watch. Yes, I know Dollhouse is on HULU, but not for us Europeans, and it’s far easier to get the torrent then to stating up some kind of ip-blocking software.
And that’s what it comes down to. I utilise a service I pay for to break the law to watch television I wouldn’t have to pay for if I watched it in a traditional way that don’t suit my 00’s lifestyle at all. Simplicity turns a legal encouraged behaviour into a criminal behaviour. For us end consumers there is no change in experience. We see ourselves as paying; we can’t put our finger on the difference of recoding a show and watching it later from skipping the recording step and just watch it later.
What we lack is proper distribution of money (so the author of Cloverfield would benefit of me watching it), proper distribution of television (so I can watch supernatural in stead of Cops; the without a shadow of a doubt worst show on TV) and a reformation of Copyright to ensure that the normal behaviour of normal people (something done by 2 million Swedes at any given time is in this case considered normal) is legalised. We simply can’t fight more over these matters when we all should work for a brighter and better future.
Since my visit to Doctor Cambridge last week I’m eating antibiotics, this has made me unable to drink during this weekend and instead I’ve spent my time trying to understand what the thing with Doctor Who is.
Last February when I visited London and went to Forbidden Planet for comics I realized there was a phenomenon around the show, they had more Doctor Who merchandise everywhere, and since the show has never aired in Sweden (it might had been on ZTV before I had it, i missed out on a lot of stuff by not getting ZTV before it was “over”, like Knesset. I never saw Knesset) all these elderly men fighting saltshakers puzzled me.
So far I’ve seen a few episodes of the 2005 season and its noting special, it doesn’t have a series lingo like a lot of other long running sci-fi/action series does. And the episode where they find the last surviving saltshaker and fight it was quite good, or at least the saltshaker was: it had a laser, a toilet plunger, jet engines (to climb stairs) and screamed EXTERMINATE! in a 80’synth voice while it killed buckloads of people.
I think everyone who works with or knows British people should watch that episode. I think it gives some sort of insight in the cultural mythos of just as great importance as Bamse is for us Swedes.
Yes. Its true. I just realised that I forgot to ad the google analytics thing in my code. I’ve had 0 visitors since I started with the wordpress update. It’s so sad.
In other news I’m waiting for the first episode of Dollhouse. Some people who are on the show have said that it doesn’t get in shape for the first few episodes but that the end of the season is the most amazing TV they ever worked on.
Since updating my wordpress left my theme (a true example of what we Swedes call Fulkod) broken I’ve made the decision to rebuild my homepage to the page that existed behind the idea all the time.
A site that sums up my online presence.
It will have two major parts, the professional and the more relaxed personal part.
I intend to make a better interaction design, making it a all over better experience for the visitor. The major problems with the old design were that a lot of people didn’t get it and didn’t understand how it worked before I explained it to them. It was clear and logical in my head but ended up clumsy and behemoth-like; hard to navigate and hard for me to display my desired content in.
The lading page will show a brief portfolio excerpt, a partial post from the blog, maybe a twitterfeed, shared items from google reader and a flikr thingy.
The goal is to have a platform where I can put everything, whatever form it may take, from a recap of a zombie flick to a link to a recent project at work.
Also: there hasn’t been that many posts about the projects I’ve worked on at Tribal, since nothing has gone live yet and there is a lot of secrecy involved. Hopefully I’ll be able to ad some sometime this spring when things start to go live.
Feedback anyone?
I’m about to update wordpress, this might destroy the site but I’m confidet it will work out. If it dosn’t I’ll start making a version 2.
See you in a bit. Or not….
Edit:
OK, the update fucked up the sidebar. Thats sad.
Edit #2
Trying to update K2 (the theme) aswell. wish me buckets full of luck.
Edit #3
Everything failed.
I have had a cold since christmas, a cough that has stated to be character defining and today I’ve lost most of the hearing on my right ear. This is just crazy. Colds are ment to get better after a while.
Ok. As we all (all 7 of you if my guesses are correct) know I don’t update the blog that often.
My inspiration for the grand and clever posts that I dream of writing has been gone lately, but today I’ll at least give you something to read.
I’m thinking about virals today, we are doing yet another Philips project and I’m on some kind of assistant/intern duty. Scanning things making easy Photoshop cut and paste jobs, image hunting and so on.
There are two Dutch freelancers who are doing the creativity bit and frankly their ideas are good. Not excellent, but good. However most of their ideas don’t seem that digital, their only digital idea I’ve seen has by far been the best but the majority of their stuff is just TV spots put on the web and expected to go viral all by themselves.
I don’t think it works that way. I’ve been trying to dissect some virals of the last few years and hopefully it has made me smarter and better. I’ll talk about two virals you shold have seen and one you might not have noticed at all.
Never Hide: Never Hide hits the spot in so many ways, it’s my favourite viral movie clip and has been since I saw it the first time. Two guys doing something sort of impressive and clever together. It’s still clever when you see trough the illusion and understand how they do it. This really nails what youtube is about, if we look at several memes on youtube we can se that a lot of them is about doing something unexpected with a friend, sibling or something like that.
The strapline Never Hide is written in the dust of a car window in the end and that’s all the product information we are provided with. A quick internet search tells the curious viewer (if there was any) that Ray-Ban is behind the stunt.
SFW Porn: The most important part with this one is the sender, Diesel and to keep their brand values up. Diesel has had a lot of good TV spots during the years. Like this one, with crazy japanease people, and look at the date! 1994 people didn’t know that the Japanese was crazy back then, we only thought they where polite and effective.
But in this day and age of the internet they need to take it a sep further, people don’t watch the same things on youtube as they watch on TV.
Going for shock value everytime is not a good strategy, Celebrating your companys 30′th birthday with shock value is exellent.
The Cake Is A Lie: A viral site for the game Portal (the game won buck loads of awards) where the visitor navigate trough a text based site, to find himself applying for a job or something at Aperture Science. Answering a long list of strange and meaningless questions eventually gave the clue to write a specific command in one of the text screens. this provided a security camera screen of the staring area in the game. Nowadays there is a screen at the entry page showing the viewer that this has something to do with a computer game but before release it wasn’t there.
Portal is a game with loads of nerd appeal in it and the site hit the target audience just in the right spot to build an even bigger hype. The game was a hit in the whole gaming world but struck hardest at the nerd crowd. The ending song Still Alive was played on 4Chans /b forum on entry and Felicia Day, new crowned queen of all nerds (The Guild, Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog). sang it on PAX 08.
And whats my final thoughts?
It’s all about knowing the medium, knowing your audience and pushing the border just a little bit.
The future, right here. Today.
I got a web-blog-challange-thingie from a fellow human being. Since I’m lazy I did it in Swedish. Read it and weap!
1, Tre namn du lyssnar till: Efter som jag jobbar I ett annat land än Sverige finns det ingen närvarande förutom några enstaka exilsvenskar som klara av att saga vare sig Jocke eller Joakim, så tre namn blir Jokah-im, Jo-kim och Joaquin.
2, Tre saker som skrämmer dig: Svensk nutida integritetspolitik, att misslyckas med livet (i det här ingår mest att bli som mina morbröder, som jag tycker är två misslyckade småskurkar, inklusive rent fysiska tillstånd da de båda har psoriasis och jag tydligen har anlag för det) och avslutningsvis parasiter, det obehagligaste naturen har att erbjuda särskilt all form av inälvsmask.
3, Tre saker du har på dig: Glasögon, chip-knip (det är som cash kortet om ni mins det och Holländarna är som galna I dem), ett par numera nedgångna Nike pjuck.
4, Tre av dina favoritlåtar just nu: P3 Dokumentär podcasten, Spanarna podcasten och radioserien Den allvarliga leken (P1).
5, Tre sanningar: 1. Jag har näst intill autistiska kunskaper om populärkultur och kan t.ex. komma på varifrån filmcitat är, förklarar hur såna där medium som talar med de döda gör när de talar med de döda, berätta om alla numer av Spindelmannen som Todd McFarlane tecknade och recitera texten i signaturmelodin till Bröderna Olsson. Jag har även gjort såna där Internettest för att se om jag ligger i riskzonen för någon slags autism (en ide jag fick av att läsa jPod), det gjorde jag inte.
2. Jag tycker att E-prime (googla) verkar vara en bra ide och tror att många missförstånd skulle kunna undvikas om vi inte slentrianmässigt sa att en sak är en helt annan sak. Jag lever inte som jag lär på den här punkten.
3. Min favorit konspirationsteori är den helt fantastiskt wacked out teorin om att någon slags reptilmänniskor styr världen, men de ser ut precis som vanligt folk. Konspirationsteorin får syre på youtube av klipp där folk som inte är ur fokus är ur fokus (mycket misstänkt beteende) och klipp där folk som får strålkastarljus-reflektioner i ögonen får strålkastarljus-reflektioner i ögonen (Häxkonst!).
6, Tre hobbys: De flesta skulle nog tycka att jag borde lista serietidningar som en hobby, men då blir böcker, film, musik, iPod:ande, laser, tv serier, bloggar och radio också hobbys och det kan vi ju inte riktigt gå med på. Heldagsfika är en klar hobby, Läsa kvasi- och pseudovetenskap är en annan; jag är skeptiker i själ och hjärta, men det blir mycket bättre böcker om författaren typ förfalskar bevis för att människan uppstod på den nu förlorade kontinenten Mu eller ägnade sin fritid åt att köra bil genom USA och ge kids LSD. Min sista hobby är roll- och konfliktspel och det har jag knappt ägnat mig åt på ett och ett halvt år, sen jag började plugga på hemlig ort.
7, Tre saker du vill ha: Pengar på riktigt. Så mycket att jag hamnar på Forbes lista över folk med tjock plånbok och får ett eget finansimperium att leka med, alternativt en egen oljestat att styra över.
Självdisciplin, jag skriver den här listan på jobbet i stället för att jobba med en grej som borde vart klar i torsdags, absolut senast och som fortfarande är långt ifrån klar.
Avslutningsvis skulle jag vilja var bäst på någon slags förmåga typ spela gittar, skriva böcker, karate, fiskodling, heikopterbygge eller ögonmått. En ren och oförfalskad skryt-skill alltså.
8 Tre personer du utmanar: Jag vet inte om någon bloggen regelbundet, och om den personen i så fall kan Svenska, och sen chansar jag på att Simon aldrig skulle anta utmaningen och att jag inte får tillbaka-kaka Sofia. Jag drar till med Carl ”Tjabo” Bergman, Yvonne ”Lu” Lu och Anna ”Kungen av Danmark” Thomsen.