Do the X-Play
hosts ever give less than a 3 out of 5 rating to a game? I’ve watched them
verbally thrash several games and then give them a 3 star rating. What’s the deal?
Do they have some sort of behind-the-scenes deal with the game publishers that keeps
them from giving out less than 3 stars? What the heck?
I’ve never thought much of Oprah’s book club, having tried to read one of her horrible recommendations
seems her latest “must read”
autobiographical. I wonder if she’ll admit she’s been had.
I’m thinking about putting together a PVR
PC from an old PIII 866 with 768Mb RAM. Eventually, I will probably buy a Hauppauge
PVR-350 because it has hardware MPEG2
encoding and decoding. In the meantime, though, I’m stuck with a crappy ATI
TV-Wonder for video capture. I do have a Creative
Labs DXR3 (aka Sigma
Designs Hollywood Plus) MPEG2 decoder board. Unfortunately, the PVR software
I’d like to use, MythTV, doesn’t
support the DXR3 for video output. Do any of you fine folks know of either a way
to make DXR3 work in MythTV or PVR software that supports the DXR3? Thanks in advance.
I didn’t get around to posting this yesterday, so I’ll tell folks about it now. Actually, I’ll let BoingBoing explain.
Today is Dean Gray Tuesday, a net-wide day of protest over Warner Brothers attempt to censor a stupendous noncommercial mashup album called American Edit that remixes Green Day’s album American Idiot.
For today, websites across the Internet are mirroring the American Edit album and/or turning their page-backgrounds grey. Mashup albums don’t hurt the sales of the albums they sample — at worst, they have no effect on sales, at best they can promote them. Artists who are signed to major labels can avail themselves of labels’ legal departments when they want to remix others’ work and get their samples cleared. Indie artists, hobbyists and fans don’t get legal assistance from labels’ high-priced fixers. This is pure patronage: in the old days you couldn’t make art unless the King or some bishop granted you permission; today you need permission from a studio executive.
The labels admit this. Last year, EMI made headlines by censoring DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, which remixed the Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album. I raised this with an EMI representative at London’s Creative Economy conference and she shrugged it off: "What’s the problem? We later hired Danger Mouse to make a mashup album for us."
The problem is that copyright law is supposed to decentralize the process of making art, moving the power to authorize art from royalty to the marketplace. Labels have no business setting themselves up as arbiters of what art can and can’t be made.
Happy Dean Grey Tuesday. Up yours, Warners. Link
Update: Matt cooked up this sweet Dalek/Warner lawyer graphic in honor of the day.
Here are a three more cool mashups for your listening pleasure. 🙂
The Kleptones – A Night at the Hip Hopera
Various Artisits – llegal Art
Various DJs – Flip the Swtich (Chemical Brothers Remixed)
I’ve added a button to my left sidebar with a link pointing to Banned Music. They have links to other mashups (like the infamous "Grey Album"). Check it out.
