“ For the millions of Americans who don’t subscribe to HBO, or who may not even watch shows on a television, this means there is no legal way to watch Game of Thrones. If you only watch TV on your laptop, there’s no way you’re going to pay $50/month for cable and another $15/month for HBO. ”
Whilst I’m usually the first to criticise the big copyright holders for their short-sighted and counterproductive attitudes towards the internet1, statements like this drive me crazy. Yes there is a legal way for Americans to watch Games of Thrones. The legal way is to pay for cable and for HBO. “I don’t want to pay $65 a month” is NOT THE SAME AS “it is illegal.”
For example, I would spend more money renting/buying movies on my Apple TV if the selection available weren’t so derisory. ↩
“ Then there was the “white” wine. This one’s aroma was slightly more earthy. Do you know that smell of grass right after it’s cut? That’s nice. I was just making chit-chat, because this smelled like rotten eggs tucked into the anus of a dead cat. ”
So, for $149 I can buy from Adobe a boxed copy or digital download of Lightroom 4 for Windows and Mac, with discounts available for upgrades from earlier versions, and discounted upgrade pricing for version 5, whenever that comes out.
OR, on the Mac App Store I1 can buy a digital download for Lightroom 4 for Mac-only, with no discounts for upgrading from previous versions, and most-likely no discounted upgrade pricing2 to version 5. The price?
Why not visit the World Tapir Day website to learn about the grave danger all four species of tapir face, or go read my post from 2009 for some more fun facts about these majestic beasts!
(Many thanks to redditor Secretsanta1979 for the use of his/her great photo.)
Whilst trying to find this wonderful funk track1 to declare as my jam2, I stumbled upon this fascinating article on the confusing history behind the great horn sample used by DJ Premier on the Christina Aguilera track, Ain’t No Other Man.
This Is My Jam is my current favourite “social” music site. My all-time fave is the sadly defunctListening Room. The only other contenders are, last.fm, which has a lot of potential, but currently is failing on the whole “social” aspect, and Spotify, which I’ve never really got into. ↩
With the recent deaths of Etta James and Whitney Houston, this 2010 article by Jay Caspian Kang keeps popping up in my head, and I don’t think I’ll be able to get it out of there until I’ve convinced you, dear reader, to take a look at it.
It’s an attempt to “scientifically” evaluate who should claim the title of “Greatest Diva of the Last 25 Years”. It is clever, educational, funny, and it has graphs1, and you should go read it now.
My only quibble is that in proclaiming “Whitney broke our goddamn National Anthem,” Kang seems to be forgetting Marvin Gaye. And, to a lesser extent, these other guys. ↩
This game is SUPER excellent: easy to learn, hard to master, contains surprising DEPTH of tactical gameplay, given the extravagantly simple concept. Story mode is a wonderful addition, and adds a good 3-5 seconds of extra narrative content to each run-through. It’s funny! Polished! Well designed! And it’s FREE! How can Asmadi Games cut a profit at this price?! It is truly a mystery for the ages.
HOWEVER, I am DOCKING a banana. Only FOUR bananas for you, Win, Lose, or Banana! Why? For the following omissions:
No Game Center? Are you kidding me, Asmadi? How can I know if I’m having fun if I can’t COMPETE against my friends?
Should include variant ruleset: Who’s the Banana? I can’t believe you are RIPPING me off by holding this back, Asmadi.
Remedy these INSANE missteps, and I’ll award that elusive fifth banana. Sláinte!
It’s just a little too late for Nice Pass Week, and the video quality is terrible, but I just can’t NOT post this nice pass. If you’re super pressed for time, skip to 0m 45s.
There is a lot of spam on Twitter. And there are a lot of people complaining about the spam on Twitter. Many of those people point out that it would be easy for Twitter to detect this spam, because, in the vast majority of cases, spam accounts on Twitter have very few followers and vomit out hundreds of near-identical tweets at a time. Often they haven’t even changed their avatar from the default egg.
But I wonder if Twitter’s inaction is maybe deliberate. Because if they actually implemented some kind of auto-spam detection, then the spammers would inevitably up their game and create more intelligent, less obvious spam accounts.
And that, in turn, would make it harder for me to see at a glance whether a slightly mysterious 140 character @-reply is from a spam account or not. I can even envisage a situation where I cannot actually tell whether a reply is spam or not without clicking on a link in the tweet. And that is a situation I don’t want to have to deal with.
So kudos to you Twitter. Your utter failure to tackle spam is making my life easier.
Yes, the final pass before the try was a bit forward. But did you know it is an actual rule in rugby that when a sequence of play is that good you are allowed one forward pass? True story. ↩
So! It is the final day of the Six Nations tournament. Today, Wales take on France, at home in the Millennium Stadium. If Wales win, they will have won the Grand Slam for the third time in eight seasons! If they lose, I am going to be grumpy for the entire rest of the weekend/month/year. As usual, WYWG will be liveblogging all the action, ably assisted by First Mate Tom, whose salty contributions will be [notated in a manner similar to this.]
[Taking WYWG’s lead, the BBC offers an] All-Welsh commentary team today: Eddie Butler and Jonathan Davies. Well, all-Welsh apart from Eddie Butler, I guess. [Boom! This commentary combo will also give us some excellent compare and contrast moments between the ostentatious over-pronunciation of Eddie “I did French at Cambridge” Butler and the tortured and baffling mispronunciations of Jiffy.]
The English members of the BBC team keep calling the conditions in the Millennium Stadium, “greasy”. Racist.
Inverdale: “The noise mounting and mounting to a crescendo.” So it’s getting louder and louder and then… it gets louder? Actually maybe that’s a fair description.
