Fit And The Conniptions LJ Page

Pro-SOPA Soundtrack

2012-01-22T23:59:46Z

(Previously posted to Google+, posted here on request.)

So here's a couple of links that have been bothering me today.

First up, pro-SOPA (and award-winning, apparently) songwriter Helienne Lindvall's mindblowing article in The Guardian explaining why it's worth shutting down the internet in order to preserve the business model of major music labels: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/jan/19/behind-music-anti-piracy-legislation

But that article has a soundtrack. It's this song, co-written by one H. Lindvall: Daniel Lindström - Got to be you.

Not sure if that's the one that won an award. I'll say this though - if you can make it both to the end of the song and the end of the article, you deserve an award yourself. (Comments on the article are worth reading also, except mine.)

Posted via email from I Am Taking My Ball And I Am Going Home

This Again - A Response To My Friend Who Was Concerned About Illegal Downloads Of His Music

2012-01-19T11:22:43Z

(Over on Facebook, I got into discussion my friend David Goo, an excellent musician and songwriter, over SOPA and the piracy issue. After he posted to the effect that pointed out that if he had received 50p for each of the 30,000 downloads of one of his songs, he'd be able to make a whole new album, my response got a bit long, so I thought I'd reproduce it here.)

David, I too am a copyright owner and content creator, and I too have had my music downloaded thousands of times over the last few years. That doesn't make me angry at all. It makes me happy. Very very dancing off the walls happy.

So happy, in fact, that my response is to accept it, to work with it, and to deliberately make my music available for free download via Bandcamp over on music.conniptions.org together with an option to pay. This model is working pretty well for me, and here's why.

First, some basic economics. When the marginal cost of reproducing a thing drops to zero, the intrinsic value of the thing also drops to zero. Period.

Recording "Wayne's Awesome Song" might have cost me years of blood and sweat and broken strings and sleepless nights and studio time and arguments with myself and musicians about arrangements and production and all of that malarkey, but in the end, none of that changes the fact that the file WaynesAwesomeSong.mp3 is now just a string of bits that can be reproduced at no cost and its intrinsic value is £0.

Everything is now both digital and networked. There is no more scarcity of digital media. There is no technological solution this without breaking the network, and it's not at all clear that that's even possible. Before the internet, yes, you needed a physical copy. Taking one was stealing. Now you don't. If you have a copy of my latest album it costs you nothing to make a copy for a friend. That's not stealing. At worst that's copyright infringement, but actually, I don't see it as a bad thing at all.

In fact, if you do have my latest album, let me urge now you to make a copy for a friend, preferably one who might like it. Seriously. Do it.

What the hell am I saying? Have I lost my tiny mind? Do I want to die starving and penniless?

No. I'm very clear about why I'm doing it this way and why it works. It's like this:

If you've never heard of me or my music (that goes for pretty much all of you), and you download WaynesAwesomeSong.mp3 on spec, one of two things will happen. Either you love it or you don't. If you don't, that's fair enough. Not everyone loves my music. You wouldn't have bought it anyway, and I have lost nothing.

But you might love it.

Now everything changes. You're in love with WaynesAwesomeSong.mp3, you think it's fucking great, and you're really excited to discover that I've got a website containing not just WaynesOtherAwesomeSong.mp3 but - oh my god - WaynesGreatAlbum. You can still download all of that for free if you want, but you'll have to type in £0 in order to do so. Chances are - you're an honest character - you find yourself paying £5 or £10 for the 'free' download.

Why? Because now there is value to you. The intrinsic value of the bits are still £0, but it's not just any mp3 we're talking about here, it's one of Wayne's. You have a relationship with my music now and you're prepared to pay for it. (You're not an honest character? Fine. Then you wouldn't have bought it anyway and I've still lost nothing. Oh, and screw you, dishonest character.)

This happens on my Bandcamp site all the time. Payment is optional, and loads of people choose to pay. They're the ones who actually like my music and want to support me to make sure I make more of it. The others? They're downloading on spec. They don't know me from Adam and if they had to pay, they wouldn't bother.

Those free downloads aren't lost sales and they cost me nothing. Some of those downloads will lead to sales in the future - the ones who actually like it. Others don't. I guess they just weren't that into me. But I don't care because it didn't cost me anything.

It's a great time to be a musician. We have more access to more music and more recording facilities and more distribution channels than at any time in history. There's also rather a lot of us. That's ok, because there's even more music fans than ever before, and they're out looking for the stuff they love. There's a lot to sift through, and that's why they're downloading things for free, on spec.

Bluntly, if people aren't downloading your music for free, you've got a problem, and your problem is that the music isn't good enough. Go practice. (David, you do not have this problem.)

Now, my Pay-What-You-Want model doesn't work for everyone. I'm hearing from musicians who have grown their listenerships from the hundreds to the thousands and the tens of thousands that at a certain point you do want to charge for downloads again. Those people still stream everything for free, though, and they make damn sure that if Blogger A likes their new album, Blogger A can stream it from their own blog. This leads to new listeners and new sales.

I'm saying all this out of love, David, because I love you and your music and I want you to thrive. Unauthorised downloads are now a fact of life, like death and taxes. It seems pretty clear to me that unless you embrace this fact and work with it, you'll be in trouble.

In the old music industry, everything was based on scarcity. Studio time was scarce, vinyl was scarce, music magazines were scarce, radio - decent radio - was scarce. A very few people made an awful lot of money, but - it's not hard to find the stories - most of the musicians and content creators made fuck all. That old industry is basically dead now, though the zombie-like corpses are still bumbling around walking into things and trying to break stuff.

In the new industry everything is available. Too much, even. Tiny one woman music blogs with a readership of less than 500 have a backlog of new albums to review going back a year. If you make your album artificially scarce by refusing to let people even stream it, they'll just go 'meh', and move on to the next thing. If it's one click away from an email, they'll have a listen. They'll write about it. They'll stream it on their blog. People will discover your music who never heard it before.

It's all about discovery. That's the bottom line about free downloads - you lose nothing but you gain listeners. In a world with ten thousand bands in every town, the question is not 'how can I get every single bugger who downloads my music to pay.' The question is - how can I get them to download my music at all.

And the answer is - by letting them.

Posted via email from I Am Taking My Ball And I Am Going Home

Bush Of Thorns Remix Project #1

2012-01-15T12:13:35Z

About ten years ago, back when I was still calling the band Fast Freddie Fourier and the Transforms, I recorded an EP called Bush of Thorns at Bonafide Studios in London.

The performances from the other musicians involved were great (Brian Hedemann was on drums, Alero Scott on backing vocals, Kevin G Davy on trumpet) but I was never all that happy with the final mixes - the drums were all way too loud, especially on Sleeping Beauty. That was entirely my fault. Waseem Munir, the engineer from Bonafide, had done a great job of tracking everything, but the mixes were all made in a big hurry, as I didn't have the money to pay for extra studio time to have them done properly. Not only that but we'd only managed to finish four of the eight tunes I'd started - I remember insisting that the last hour be spent burning all the stems to CD so I could finish it off at leisure some time.

That time is now. Today I finally dug out the old data CDs from 2002 and started trying to transfer them to the computer. The ones I'd made myself - the guide guitars and vocals and the backing tracks - all of which were recorded at home on Linux, all worked fine. The ones from the studio? Would. Not. Mount. Could not read them. Nothing worked.

Arse.

To cut a long story short - and if you too should have mysterious CD ROMs from circa 2002 burned by a Mac which you can't seem to get Linux to read - here's what I did to fix it.

First I had to install cdfs.

Doing so revealed that the CDs in question were indeed HFS of some sort, though mount -t hfs was still refusing to work. A bit of Googling turned up the existence of HFS+, which I'd never heard of. Trying mount -t hfsplus didn't work either, though, and left my system with an unkillable mount process, forcing me to reboot. Bummer.

Here's what did work:

First I mounted the CDs with cdfs:

sudo mount -t cdfs -o ro /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdfs

Then I mounted the HFS file that produced with hfsplus:

sudo mount -t hfsplus -o loop /mnt/cdfs/3.2.Apple_HFS /media/cdrom0

And bam - got my data back.

Now to load the lot up in Ardour and start mixing...

Posted via email from I Am Taking My Ball And I Am Going Home

Stop SOPA

2011-12-22T05:47:27Z

It's so easy to take your eye off the ball.

And there are so many balls to keep an eye on nowadays - the death-throes of global capitalism as we know it, the constant protests and riots in major world cities, the shrinking polar ice-caps, the weird and extreme weather, the dismantlement of the NHS and Welfare State in the UK, Israel's descent as a state into increasingly open and belligerent racism, the collapse of the Euro, the turmoil of the increasingly misnamed Arab Spring, the spectacle of a dysfunctional nuclear armed state without a leader in North Korea and the equally alarming spectacle of the dysfunctional nuclear armed states with leaders in the US, Russia and elsewhere, and the fact that despite having the most demonstrably punchable face in British political history, no-one has yet laid out George Osborne. Yet at the same time there are so many shiny things to distract us - Charlie Brooker's new series, Minecraft, Twitter, Glitch, that great video of cats someone posted on Facebook or somewhere, that really interesting essay on Greek metallurgy on Metafilter, the Christmas display on Willesden Green High Road, and so on. This is not to mention the small matter of keeping going from day to day, going to work, keeping food on the table, making plans for the future, figuring out ways to stay sane and positive in a brutal and uncaring universe and so on. And, of course, not forgetting... ooh, shiny.

So I nearly missed the whole SOPA thing, until a friend posted this video of Dan Bull's excellent SOPA Cabana song on Facebook.

In short, SOPA is an attempt by US Congress to allow corporate copyright holders to demand the shutdown of any site they believe to be participating in or even just facilitating copyright infringement. That could include Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or any site based on user-generated content. This isn't hyperbole. Google and Facebook (as well as Ebay, Twitter, and just about every major web based company you can think of) are taking the threat very seriously.

If you're in the US, you can do various things about this - there's information here on LifeHacker and more here from the EFF, plus (as usual) some great discussion on the subject on Metafilter and pretty comprehensive coverage on BoingBoing. If you're not in the US? I honestly don't know.

So I drew a silly cartoon. And now - it being arse AM - I'm going to bed.

I hope the internet is still there tomorrow.

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Plus Ca Change

2011-03-24T19:02:41Z

I am absurdly, childishly pleased with the redesign of the conniptions.org website that I did last night.

Certainly there are several improvements yet to be made - the rounded corners on the box in the middle need sharpening up, the banner image across the top is much wider than it needs to be on most pages and is shifted slightly to the right on the Posterous blog page for some reason, I have yet to add a commenting facility to the cartoons and the lovely bandcamp widget with the new album in it has a tendency to crash if you reload it too many times to soon, such as by reading through the cartoons.

On the other hand, the process of replacing the previous look and feel, which was based on artwork from the Live At Monkey Chews release from 2008, with something based instead on the new Sweet Sister Starlight release, turned out not to be the world of pain I had feared. Surprisingly few files had to be edited; mostly it was a question of deleting things that were now out of date.

Using a large top banner with an image map for navigation meant that large amounts of cruft and wrongness could be removed from the rest of the design - basic page to page navigation no longer needed to take up space elsewhere and important things like links to Twitter and Facebook could be placed discreetly yet visibly at the top of every page using icons from a free icon set (I got mine from here but the internet is full of them right now). It also meant that integration with parts of the site hosted elsewhere - on services such as Bandcamp (the music page) and Posterous (the blog) - was much much simpler than I'd thought it would be.

And I have a box with rounded corners! Welcome to 2003 (1998?), Wayne - nice to have you, since you missed it the first time. (Nested divs. Huh. Still sure there must be a better way.)

Inspiration, as ever these days, came largely from Steve Lawson, who has been using the top banner image map thing to integrate bits of web presence across multiple services since just about forever; the clarity and brevity of the icon thing came more from Laura Kidd - see She Makes War - but I am seeing customised social media icons all over the place at the moment. It is clear why - anyone who already knows what, for example, the exciting new Facebook-killing social media site Plonkr actually is will recognise the logo; mentioning the site by name isn't going to help and takes up far more space.

I deliberately chose not to use the icons for Myspace and Last.fm, as while I still have pages there I hardly use them any more and am suspicious that hardly anyone else does either. Do you? I could well be wrong.

Also, while I am banging on about how terribly clever I think I am, it is highly likely that I have screwed something up somewhere that I don't know about yet, so if anything seems borked on the site beyond things I have already mentioned, please do let me know about it so I can get it fixed.

In other news, the new album Sweet Sister Starlight is now finally available online to stream or download, and I am pathetically and profusely grateful to those of you who have already downloaded it, streamed it and/or clicked the 'like' button.

I'm equally grateful to Tom Robinson of BBC 6 Music who played Mistress Song on BBC Introducing on Monday and to Nick Tann, who played Sweet Sister Starlight on his Is This Thing On podcast the other week. Nick is also a very fine singer-songwriter whose latest project - well worth checking out - involves actually making a proper record out of vinyl. Not a bad idea that.

Now that my album is done, I'm back gigging again - I had a great time playing at Phibbers in Islington last Monday night - thanks to everyone who came down to that one - and there's a bunch of gigs coming up in Croydon, New Cross and Brick Lane to which I am also looking forward. Plus the Ashley Wood Festival in Tisbury, Wiltshire, in July.

I say 'done' of course, but I haven't had the actual CDs made up yet - that's going to happen over the next few weeks in preparation for a 'CD launch' towards the end of May - if you're really keen you can go to the Music page and pre-order one. That's because I'm also absurdly, childishly pleased with this album - so much so that I am releasing it twice, once online, and then again, some months later, on CD.

I hope that isn't an insanely wrong thing to do.

Posted via email from I Am Taking My Ball And I Am Going Home

A Short Note To My Spammier Musician Friends On Twitter

2011-03-06T01:31:55Z

Hello My Spammier Musician Friends On Twitter,

I'm worried that you haven't read this excellent short essay by Steve Lawson about how musicians can best use Twitter.

Twitter is a chatroom. It's the biggest chatroom in the world.

And you, your music is great. I like you and your music. We met once, I don't know how, through mutual friends or at some gig or other where we shared a stage; we stayed vaguely in touch, as musicians do. Myspace, Facebook, the odd further gig etc. And later, because this was a while back, I found you on Twitter and started following you.

I stopped following you soon afterwards, because you pretty much only tweeted links to your own stuff. Constantly. Nothing else. Or almost nothing else.

I don't really know you well enough to write and say 'hey, stop doing that'. That would be weird. The way you choose to interact with people online is your own business.

But seriously, Twitter is a chatroom, and no-one likes a spammer in a chatroom.

If all - or even the vast bulk - of what you have to say is links to your own promotional material, that's going to come across as very spammy. I wish you wouldn't do that. I like your stuff and I still wish you wouldn't do that.

I'm not saying you shouldn't talk about your work or link to the stuff you've done. We all do - it's inevitable. It's what we're doing.

But getting the balance right is a question of how much, how often, and whether there's also a sense that you are entering into the idea of Twitter as a chatroom where you are having conversations with people on a range of subjects extending beyond yourself and your work, or whether you are using it purely as a marketing tool.

If it is the latter, you really need to go and read both the above link and this other essay by Steve Lawson on how musicians can best use social media.

Essentially it boils down to this: Twitter is a chatroom, not a rolling billboard.

Stop being that guy.

I still like your music. I do. Really I do. That's precisely why I want you to stop spamming your Twitter followers with it.

Love,

Wayne

Posted via email from I Am Taking My Ball And I Am Going Home

Random Music Discovery Game

2011-02-24T14:23:14Z

Today I thought of a random music discovery game, as follows:

Choose a word - any word. Google it, along with 'bandcamp'. Click
until you find some music you like.

I tried it with 'elephant' and got this:

Wow.

When The Worms Dry Up, The Birds Turn To Ashes, by Elephant was the
first result. I couldn't stop listening to it. It's broadly folk punk,
by turns fragile and violent, occasionally both at once, and it
totally pinned me up against the wall and wouldn't let me stop until
I'd listened to it all.

See what you think. Or choose your own keyword and see what you find.

Please do let me know if you find anything good, and I bet you will.

Posted via email from I Am Taking My Ball And I Am Going Home

Dave Winer's Third Rail And Rape Culture

2010-12-22T23:39:25Z

Who would not want to live in a world without rape culture?

Judging by his post on the rape allegations against Julian Assange, Dave Winer does, or at least thinks he does. His piece is an honest attempt at something relatively non-incendiary which - to be fair - manages to avoid many of the squares on the Assange Rape Apology Bingo card, though it does hit one or two them pretty squarely. Winer also makes it clear that he is open to discussion: at the end, he writes: "I look for charged issues like this one to explore, because these are the places where the greatest growth is available."

His writing has a utopian sheen to it, as if all the battles of feminism had finally been won and true equality in all things across genders had been achieved. Underlying the text is the idea that sexism is genuinely now a symmetrical two way street - that we live in a world where women were just as capable of discriminating against men as men are against women. And most importantly, he writes as if he has never heard of the idea of rape culture.

It is hard for men to accept the existence of rape culture. As a man it has been hard for me. It's not something men like to think about. We tend to see it as an attack on ourselves and we brush it away as such. But we are wrong to do so.

Men don't like to think about the fact that around one in four women will at some point get raped, or that the overwhelming majority of rapes go unreported, or that when a woman does report a rape she is always - 100% of the time - accused of lying, and must endure the kind of close examination of every detail of her life that makes it seem as if it is her, the victim - not the attacker - who is on trial, while study after study shows that false rape accusations are actually incredibly rare, or that the vast majority of rape cases do not end in a guilty verdict, or that the vast majority of rapists get away with it without being prosecuted, or that the vast majority of convicted rapists have committed the crime of rape multiple times before they are finally found guilty by a court, or that penalties for rape are often bizarrely weak, or that a large proportion of women who are raped know their attacker very well and are often in a relationship with them, or any of the other horrible facts about rape widely available online and backed up by study after study into the astonishing - to men and not to women - prevalence of rape among human beings.

Being human, since men don't like to think about those things, we tend not to think about these things. We forget about rape culture, because it is not something that we need to think about every day when we are just popping down the shops or meeting someone for a drink. We forget about rape culture because we can.

When Winer accuses some of 'condemning men in the cause of feminism', talks of 'simply flipping the genders', and says 'it's never as simple as one gender doing it to the other', he is going one step beyond forgetting about rape culture:
he is showing either that he has not heard of it or, if he has, that he does not believe it exists.

I have outlined my views on the Assange rape allegations before - once in this cartoon, and once in this longer post on the subject. I agree that Winer is quite right that it should be kept separate from Wikileaks, and that the timing of the whole thing stinks. But he is dead wrong about the context, and - which is key - he is also dead wrong about the presumption of innocence.

The presumption of innocence is incredibly important and should be maintained in rape cases just as with any other. But if there is to be a presumption of innocence for the accused, how much the more so should there be a presumption of innocence for the accuser.

In rape cases, the accuser is always presumed to be guilty of lying until proven otherwise. That's what makes them so difficult. That's also the reason that most rapists get away with it. Any woman accusing anyone of rape is always and immediately counter-accused of making a false claim. This idea is so deeply embedded in English speaking world that there is even a phrase for it: 'crying rape' - the assumption is - always - that the claim is false. In order to prove her case, the victim has to prove that she is innocent of 'crying rape'. This is why many rape victims never bother reporting the crimes against them in the first place.

This lack of presumption of innocence - for the victim - is the central plank of rape culture.

And this is why people are getting so exercised over the Assange affair. As with every other rape case ever in history, people - mainly men - are lining up to say that the women involved are liars and waving their bullshit detectors around proudly. That's exactly the problem.

In the case of rape, it really is as simple as "one gender doing it to the other". If there is one good thing that comes out of the Assange affair, it is that it has caused many people - including myself - who have previously either dismissed, ignored, or not been aware of rape culture - to really sit down and think about it a bit. Or even a lot.

If Dave Winer really is looking for the place where "the greatest growth is available", here it is. To eradicate rape culture, or at least start, is something that goes way beyond feminism. It is something which is only connected to feminism in the sense that it was feminists who first raised it and it is largely women who write about it; these women still find themselves not being listened to or dismissed - bizarrely and ridiculously - as 'sexist' themselves. But if we ever are to eradicate rape and rape culture, it will require men first to become aware of it and to work in some small way towards stopping it.

Then we'll finally have the world without rape culture that Winer believes he already lives in.

Posted via email from I Am Taking My Ball And I Am Going Home

Assange and Wikileaks: The Best Way To Frame Someone Is For Something They Actually Did

2010-12-17T00:53:50Z

Do you believe that more or less most women have been or will at some point be raped or sexually assaulted?

Do you believe that most men tend to underestimate the ubiquitous reality of rape and immediately question any allegation of rape outside of the stranger-attack jump-in-the-alley context? That victims of rape must expect to undergo such a humiliating and debilitating process from police and lawyers in order to get justice for the crime committed against them that many simply do not bother? That rape and victims of rape are routinely joked about and trivialised both in mainstream media and popular perception to the extent that there appears to be such a thing as 'rape culture' - a culture where all but the worst and most violent rape offences are effectively condoned and, where possible, brushed under the carpet for the sake of protecting the offender at the expense of the victim?

If you believe these things, it will be clear to you that the allegations against Julian Assange - like all rape allegations - must be taken very seriously and that he must go to Sweden to answer them in court.

Do you believe that there is something deeply rotten at the heart of most, if not all Western democracies?

Do you believe that the secret services of Western democracies effectively operate outside the jurisdiction of the law and are quite prepared to do absolutely anything - including murders, smear campaigns and honeytraps - to further their own ends? That even democratic states such as the US and the UK will do whatever they believe they can get away with behind the scenes - regardless of international or domestic law - in order to further their own interests? Do you believe that the culture of secrecy in government is the key factor protecting this kind of behaviour, and that Wikileaks is the first organisation to truly strike a blow against this culture of secrecy, something that has genuinely scared the living daylights out of powerful individuals, governments and institutions across the world, and that has caused them to react accordingly.

If you believe these things, it will be clear to you that the rape allegations against Julian Assange are nothing but a particularly blatant honeytrap smear campaign designed to stop his active participation in Wikileaks, and hold him in place, either in the UK or Sweden, until grounds can be found to extradite him to the US, where the life expectancy of his activity in Wikileaks, if not his actual life expectancy in general, will be pretty short.

It will be clear to you, that is, unless you also believe in the first set of things, in which case, like me, you've probably spent the last little while with your head on fire, trying to balance the two sets of ideas.

The circle has been squared by several writers: Johann Hari, Cath Elliott, Amanda Marcotte, Laurie Penny and Kate Harding have all written excellent essays attempting to explain why - given the existence of rape culture - there are serious problems with all attempts to pre-emptively defend Assange against the rape allegations even in the face of the explicit, public, US-led threat to 'get him' at all costs.

Other writers - people that you might perhaps have thought would have known better - such as Craig Murray, Michael Moore, John Perry Barlow and Naomi Wolf, have written defences of Assange that all have one thing in common - they trivialise these specific rape allegations in order to defend Assange.

The problem has perhaps best been summed up by Katrin Axelsson of Women Against Rape, whose letter to the Guardian on the subject is here. The key phrase is this: there is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with women's safety.

If you support Wikileaks but don't accept the existence of rape culture, of course, sorting out the Assange case is easy - it's all a honeytrap smear campaign straight out of the CIA Dirty Tricks textbook. If you do accept the existence of rape culture, however, you'll realise that misguided ideas about what is and is not acceptable behaviour and what is and is not rape are so widespread - even among those ostensibly committed to social justice - that it is not in any way reasonable to rule out the possibility that Assange actually might have done it. After all, the best way to frame someone you want to frame is for something they actually did. The full power of the State will - not wrongly - get behind you in seeing the person you want eliminated put away.

That's the chilling answer to Craig Murray's litany of political whistleblowers who mysteriously have subsequently faced allegations of sex crimes - such things are so widespread that it's perfectly possible that all those allegations are actually true: in a world where most sex offenders get away with it, only those who also act against the interests of the State are in trouble.

If you're paranoid about what organisations like MI6 or the CIA might do to people who they see as enemies, don't think for a single moment that they would bother wasting time setting up a brand new honeytrap for a guy they already knew to be a little bit off when it came to the boundaries of consensuality in sex. They'll just use that knowledge instead - even if - purely hypothetically - both women involved were actually big supporters both of Wikileaks in general and Assange in particular.

Two final points. Firstly, the underlying mechanism and philosophical underpinning of Wikileaks has now effectively been open-sourced. There already exist other organisations based on the same principle: in order to force so-called democracies to operate with just governance, it is necessary to provide whistle-blowers a method for safely and anonymously leaking secret and damaging documents which can then be sent to the press and publicised. To that extent, while it is clear that Wikileaks specifically has yet to release every document in its possession, its major mission has been accomplished. Kill Assange tonight, and you will still have a constant stream of no-longer secret documents being released from now until the heat-death of the internet.

Secondly, those who are aware of the existence of rape culture have an enormously long way to go in order to persuade people - even on the progressive wing of politics - that such a thing even exists. There's an awful lot of eye-rolling going on on feminist blogs at the moment; an awful lot of 'I really can't be bothered to explain any more.' And that is understandable. But there's an awful lot of explaining left to do.

Because most guys - even on the left - don't yet get it.

Most guys don't yet know that more or less most women have been or will at some point be raped or sexually assaulted.

Posted via email from I Am Taking My Ball And I Am Going Home

Did You Read That Really Annoying Column This Weekend

2010-12-06T01:56:03Z

Well did you?

I don't mean Charlotte Metcalf's piece in the Mail about how hard it is to afford Christmas when your income has dropped to £26,000 a year. That was not annoying at all: I found it hilarious. What annoyed me was Christina Patterson's attack on Wikileaks and Julian Assange in the Independent, to which the rest of this post is my response, also posted on the Independent website as a hideously over-long comment. I've edited it a bit to remove the parts that don't fit with it being a blog post rather than a comment. You might want to read Patterson's piece first, if the below is to make sense.

The claim that Wikileaks has put the lives of Afghani (and other) informants in danger by releasing their names has been widely repeated. I have repeatedly looked for and failed to find evidence for this claim. All I can find is articles like Patterson's, which repeat the claim but provide no evidence.

Meanwhile, the US and its allies continue to pursue their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in which thousands of entirely innocent men, woman and children have been and continue to be maimed or killed. No further evidence need be released for this to be an unarguable statement of fact, whether you support the wars, and believe these deaths to be acceptable collateral damage, or whether you oppose the wars, and believe such deaths not to be acceptable.

These wars, moreover, which some claim to be illegal, have been entered into or continued by politicians who, according to Patterson, are 'accountable to the people who elect them'. One would expect, in that case, given that the wars continue, that the wars have widespread support. Yet they manifestly do not: polls differ but all show that while there is a good deal of support, there is also a good deal of opposition; some show that there is more opposition than support.

Some might conclude from this that perhaps our politicians aren't quite as accountable as Patterson suggests.

Given that Assange and Wikileaks have acted and continue to act in a way that the Pentagon and the CIA do not like, it is no surprise that there have been many clear statements of intent from members of the US government to have him stopped, and the site shut down. As such, Patterson's response to Assange blaming "the Pentagon, and the CIA" for the rape charges seems highly disingenuous.

"I thought that that was the kind of thing that someone would say if they had something wrong with their head," she writes, as if, rather than threatening his life and his project, both the Pentagon and the CIA had in fact released statements to the effect that if they ever met Julian Assange they would clap him heartily on the back, shake his hand and buy him a drink.

Some might think that Patterson's response is the kind of thing that someone would say if they were being highly selective with their facts in order to construct an argument.

Finally, Wikileaks being a project involving at root a general infrastructure for supporting the release of information that various Powers That Be would prefer not be released, it seems both churlish and ignorant to call it 'just a website'. I don't know about Christina Patterson's, but my website does not do that. Even the Independent's website is only capable of doing such things up to a certain degree: one of the points made by many people examining Wikileaks is that it and other projects like it fill a necessary journalistic gap left by the often over-cosy relationship between press, politicians and business leaders.

That makes the conclusion of Patterson's article on Wikileaks somewhat tenuous, given that several if not most of the points in the argument leading up to it turn out not to hold. "Freedom of information," Patterson concludes, somewhat out of the blue, "is quite likely to make people less free."

Power without accountability is indeed dangerous, which is why politicians abusing that power and avoiding that accountability are currently being attacked by men and women with websites who would like to make people more free and to remove power without accountability. Those men and women are naturally quite secretive, since they are taking direct aim at very powerful organisations that want to keep us less free.

It is true that 'what some people called "freedom of information"' is 'quite likely to make people more paranoid', but only some people, specifically, those people in government who are engaging in behaviour that needs to be kept secret in order to continue. That sounds a lot like 'power without accountability' to me, and if there is one thing that Christina Patterson and I can agree on, it is that power without accountability is dangerous.

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Chomsky, 9/11 and Conspiracy Theory - Do Not Be Deceived

2010-11-07T22:29:10Z

The following headline is going round and round the internet: "Noam Chomsky: No Evidence that Al-Qaeda Carried Out the 9/11 Attacks"

It seems to me to be pretty misleading if not downright wrong.

Chomsky is very careful in what he says about everything, and if he were really saying that there was no evidence Al Qaeda carried out 9/11 he would have been quoted directly as saying so. I don't think he did: if such a quote exists, I cannot find it.

See eg the Press TV page on this: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/149520.html

They would have provided a money quote had there been one. They did not. Compare the headline to the text.

Rather, what Chomsky is actually saying - which is far more important - is that there is no evidence the Bin Laden, quite specifically, was behind 9/11, and that as such, the war on Afghanistan - ostensibly a response to 9/11 - is therefore without basis and illegal. That's the important bit, not the conspiracy theory sidetrack.

Take eight minutes to watch Chomsky's takedown of 9/11 (and Kennedy) conspiracy theories here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7SPm-HFYLo

His point is compelling: in the end, who cares? The important thing is not whether or not an extremely unlikely-to-be-successfully-hidden conspiracy - 9/11 as an inside job - was pulled off. The important thing is all the obvious shit that various governments of the world, particularly the US, actually are pulling off, quite overtly and directly, all the while being very happy that much energy on the left is diverted into did-they didn't-they bullshit around this or that alleged conspiracy. The real conspiracy is the stuff that is actually happening right out in the open, which, sadly, many people are prone to being diverted away from by bullshit conspiracy theories.

See also this long interview with him: http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200408--.htm

The important quote relevant to this discussion is this, towards the end: "The best book on that is by a British investigator, Jason Burke, called Al-Qaeda. He confirms in detail what Eqbal predicted. He reviews a whole series of acts in the development of al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is not an organization; it’s a loose network of very loosely affiliated, mostly independent organizations that have a kind of a similar ideology. He calls it a network of networks. And as Eqbal predicted, it became a major symbol and bin Laden himself became a major symbol as a result of these bombings. Before, it hadn’t been."

If Chomsky anywhere denies that the people who carried out 9/11 were Al-Qaeda, I cannot find it. As a loose network of loosely affiliated independent organisations 9/11 could have been masterminded by any one of many Al-Qaeda groups. Which one is not so important. What is important is this: if there is evidence to show that it was Bin Laden's group specifically, Chomsky does not have it. Nor do the FBI. Or anyone. And as such, the war in Afghanistan has no basis or justification.

It does not look to me like Chomsky is finally coming out and saying 'Al-Qaeda were not behind 9/11'. Instead he is making a much more important and perhaps more subtle point - that Bin Laden, specifically, was not directly behind 9/11. What is important is not who was or was not behind 9/11 - rather it is that our governments continue to pursue an illegal war in Afghanistan (among other places).

Chomsky's key point on all this is as follows: conspiracy theories are incredibly convenient to those in power, as they divert attention from the shit they are really pulling, right out in the open.

Do not be deceived.

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I Can Quit Myspace Any Time I Like

2010-10-27T13:24:10Z

Quit Myspace Day was on the 24th October this year. Did you quit? Are you thinking of it?

If you didn't hear about it, Quit Myspace Day came into being with this superb article written last year by music industry academic Andrew Dubber. In it he outlines the root cause of the one thing about Myspace on which everyone can agree - it's a bit rubbish. He also gave them a year to clean their act up, failing which, he declared that there should be a Quit Myspace Day where we all up and leave.

Due to the flocking nature of social networking, Myspace has, as Dubber puts it, every fricking band on the planet, to say nothing of a large proportion of the promoters, studios, merchandisers and other ancillary music types. With the right strategy it could be the best music site in the world, both for musicians and music fans. But it is not.

Instead of choosing to leverage that userbase in order to provide a service focussed on the needs of the music world, the Myspace strategy seems to remain bound up with general social networking, deals with major labels, TV tie-ins and the sale of advertising. Or something. All I know is that whenever I log on there is an awful lot of complete crap I have to mentally filter out in order to find the bits which are useful to me.

Dubber expands on this in his excellent follow-up piece, in which he examines the case of drummer, songwriter, and - during the day - Myspace Music Project Manager, Steve Clark. Clark, apparently, has been championing Dubber's ideas within Myspace, but, frustratingly, has been getting absolutely nowhere. It's pretty clear why not: their business model has nothing to do with music. It's about advertisers. Users aren't the customer, the advertiser is.

From this perspective, there is no need to actually supply the user with anything more than a bare minimum of what they might want - just enough to keep them there. They already have the critical mass of users - even if it is just "every fricking band on the planet" plus ancillary types, that's still a very large number to woo advertisers with. And as Dubber admits, in the section of his follow-up where he lists the remaining advantages that Myspace has to offer, this weight of numbers does give excellent SEO. A completely new band setting up both a Myspace page and a website may find that it takes a long time for their site to start appearing at the top of search results for them; not so with the Myspace page. This alone is not to be underestimated as a feature.

Yet their site remains butt-ugly, brain-numbingly frustrating and awkward to use. It's an embarrassment when compared with what is offered by the likes of Bandcamp and Soundcloud, newer services aimed squarely at meeting the needs of online musicians and doing so incredibly well. The best you can say about the recent changes on Myspace is that they are not quite as clunky and awkward as they used to be, but that's only because they had such a piss-poor starting point. Simple things are still hard; hard things are impossible. It is still the opposite of how it should be.

Myspace did not clean their act up in the given year, so a few days ago, as I type, Dubber posted this: the time has come. Der Tag. Quit Myspace day. There was a hashtag - #quitmyspace - on twitter, which made interesting following. A few people did quit. Others, like myself, mused about it and did nothing. Mostly, nothing much seemed to happen.

Trombonist Andy Derrick wrote an interesting blog post opposing the idea. It is not at all clear that Derrick understood a single word of Dubber's writing about Myspace - the most charitable view is that he didn't read any of it, though why he felt the need to be so rude about Dubber is another mystery. However, Derrick does make one good point: while the advantages of staying on Myspace aren't nearly as good as they should be, there is equally no particular advantage in leaving. His key point is this: "promoters will happily look at a myspace page to find suitable acts to book, they just want to hear the music."

The people he is talking about have never heard of Bandcamp. They don't care about Soundcloud. They aren't interested in the future of music on the internet - they don't want to know any more about the internet than they absolutely have to, and they are quite happy that way. They just want to find a band to book, and being as it does (mostly) still have every fricking band on the planet, they see Myspace as the catalogue. They use Myspace as a verb.

I too did not quit Myspace. The next day I got an email there out of the blue from a promoter I have never met, offering me a gig at a venue in Camden which I wouldn't mind playing in. Mind you, the same email was spammed to about fifty other bands, so I don't feel particularly special or anything.

That's Myspace for you all over.

It's a reverse tragedy of the commons. I'd love to quit Myspace, knowing that I wouldn't damage myself in doing so. But until everyone else does, I risk shooting myself in the foot. Those who have quit all seem to have one thing in common - they are doing fine without it. I'm not. And if all it takes for the occasional random gig to get chucked my way is for me to not delete my account, that makes sense to me. Even if I only take some of those gigs.

I'd like to quit myspace, and maybe one day soon I will. But I'm going to wait. In the meantime, in the spirit of Dubber, I would like - redundantly - to declare today, and every day, Not Using Myspace Any More Than Absolutely Necessary day. I can quit any time I like.

Honest.

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Facebook Apps Steal Your Phonebook - Do They Also Corrupt It?

2010-10-08T20:40:58Z

If you haven't already, go and read this article by Charles Arthur in the Guardian, where he explains how Facebook apps on the Android and iPhone platforms now copy your entire phonebook back to Facebook without asking or notifying you.

So even if you have not given Facebook your number yourself, all it takes is one Facebook friend who has both your number and a smartphone, and they'll get it anyway. Regardless of your privacy settings, they'll then give it out to anyone else you have friended on Facebook, so long as they have managed to match it up correctly.

The privacy issues are obvious. What about the data integrity issue? The Guardian article already covers the problem of incorrect matching, which is bad enough. But what they do with people like me who are a bit slack about deleting old defunct numbers?

Say I have an old non-working number for Alice, who I haven't been in touch with for years anyway. My friend Bob is still close to her, and so he does have her new number in his contacts list. We both log into Facebook on our phones. Facebook grabs Alice's old number from me, which it has not seen before. Since Facebook thinks this is a new number, it helpfully updates Bob's phonebook with it.

Unless Bob's phone is smart enough not to trust Facebook and adds the new number as a secondary rather than overwriting the old one with it, Bob has now lost Alice's actual number.

Does anyone know what happens in this case?

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HTC Desire Gripe #1 And Solution - Call Confirm

2010-10-08T19:08:23Z

I've just got my shiny new HTC Desire phone. It's my first touchscreen device and while it is utterly gorgeous in many superficial ways there are numerous issues with the way the thing actually works.

(Boy do I feel old right now.)

The worst thing so far is the number of people I have called by mistake. It is not a large number, but it is a non-zero number, and as such, unacceptably large: that sort of thing has never happened to me before with any previous handset. Here's how it happened.

It didn't take long to copy my contacts over from my previous phone, as I had already backed them up to the PC. That was easy and quick. After I had done so I found numerous numbers in my contacts list that I had no idea I had - these appear to have been automagically gathered from Facebook.

I was curious, so I tried scrolling through my whole (now rather large) list of contacts to see how many new numbers there were. I didn't get very far through the list before I called someone at random. A friend, thank god. I hung up immediately, as it was a bit late to call that person really, but I knew I could explain if I had to. Still embarrassing though

Like a fool I went back to scrolling through the list - how stupid of me to want to scroll through my contacts list on my own phone - why would anyone want to do that? Of course, it happened again, this time with someone whose number I happen to have but who I really really did not want to miscall at 1am UK time. Or ever.

This was now seriously, seriously embarrassing. I was feeling physically sick at this point.

I was lucky, as I only miscalled UK numbers. It could have been much more costly than mere embarrassment: now, via the black magic of Facebook, I have phone numbers in there from internet friends all over the world. I really can't afford to miscall Australia.

Here's why it is so easy to call people by mistake on the HTC Desire: the touchscreen action required to scroll through the contacts list - sort of drag your finger up and down on it - is incredibly similar to the touchscreen action required to call someone in the list. Tapping a list item does not merely select it - it actually goes ahead and calls that number.

This is a serious problem.

The sensible fix would be to make it so that tapping a list item just selects it. If I want to call someone I'm happy to press the big green 'Call' button. I can't find a way to turn the call-on-select feature off, and I can't understand why it is there, unless it is a deliberate and cynical ploy to get lots of people to make lots of potentially costly random unwanted calls to friends, family and random people they happen to know on Facebook.

Android being android, there is an app that fixes this - it is called 'Call Confirm', and I just installed it. It intercepts the 'select to call' thing on the phone and brings up a dialog box saying 'Really Call Y/N'. Great, problem solved.

But this problem should not have been there in the first place.

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Quantum Chess May Or May Not Be Chess (It Isn't)

2010-09-08T13:53:58Z

I've played chess all my life. I'm a pretty average strength club level player and like many experienced players I've always enjoyed chess variants. This quantum variant is an interesting idea (each non-king piece has a dual identity in pseudo-quantum superposition, changing state on black squares - see the Wired UK article on it) but I'm not really sure about a couple of the implementation details. My feeling, after one game, is that too many of the normal chess rules have been abandoned.

Firstly, the board is oriented differently to normal chess, with a white square in the lower left hand corner and the white king on the left hand side. That may have been a deliberate design decision but setting the board up that way is also a typical beginner's mistake and it is not the decision I would have made. I've not come across another 8x8 board chess variant that does this; it doesn't inspire confidence.

I played and won a game before having read over all the rules and was quite enjoying it until I had a piece captured by the king while it was protected by a quantum knight on a white square in the knight state. To win the game I had to actually capture the king. This astonished and disappointed me.

Finally reading the rules page I found that major rule changes have been made in addition to the quantum piece variance rule: moving into check is allowed, there is no requirement to move out of check, and checkmate does not exist; capturing the king is the win condition. There is no mention of the non-standard board orientation. Additionally, en passant and castling have been removed.

I can't see why any of these extra changes have been made. Castling could easily be retained, substituting 'piece that starts in corner' for 'rook'. En passant could easily be retained, perhaps with the proviso that it only applies if both quantum pawns remain in the pawn state. Simply abandoning these rules comes across as lazy more than anything else, but they are not game-changers, so to speak.

Changing the rules about check and checkmate, however, is a very big deal. Checkmate is the object of the game of chess; the rules around check play an enormous part in all aspects of standard (and variant) chess strategy. Remove check and checkmate and, to me at least, it is just not chess any more.

I can see that there is a hard question which arises when devising quantum chess rules: what do you do when a piece in a quantum state may or may not be giving check? Surely the game would work just as well if a straight answer either way was arbitrarily given to this question as a further rule. Given that a single move can consist of touching a piece and putting it in a quantum state that gives check, it would make sense that the rule be 'a piece in an indeterminate state cannot give check.' After that, normal rules of check and checkmate can apply. You would then have an actual chess variant.

In sum Quantum Chess is a fun idea but the thing that makes other chess variants such as exchange, mini-chess etc work, for chessplayers, is that as much as possible of original chess is retained - the variant rules add spice but the game itself remains intact. This game may use a chessboard and chess pieces but without check and checkmate it just doesn't feel like chess any more, and I am left feeling slightly cheated.

It's a shame because right now I'd really like to play a version of quantum chess using these piece changing rules that actually also retains the rules of chess. A further variant might be to have the pieces change state on every move, not just on black squares. Why not?.

(An earlier draft of this appears, without formatting, as one of the comments on the Wired UK article.)

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Scrapping NHS Direct Is Hard To Swallow

2010-09-02T11:18:11Z

A couple of years ago, I had a bad case of tonsilitis.

I went to the doctor, got prescribed antibiotics, went home and tried to rest.

Over the next couple of days, it got a bit worse, and I began to find
it hard to breathe. But I'd seen the doctor, it was all being treated,
and I told myself not to worry.

One morning, still ill and in a bit of a panic, I used the self-help
symptom guide on the NHS Direct website.

To my extreme surprise it told me to call an ambulance. Immediately.

That's why I'm not dead now.

(My tonsilitis had become quinsy: you can read the full story here:
http://fitconniptions.livejournal.com/12686.html )

David Cameron wants to scrap NHS Direct as a cost cutting measure:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11120853

If NHS Direct had been scrapped a few years ago, I would be dead today.

That's why, for what it's worth, I've signed the petition to try and
get Cameron to change his mind on this:
http://www.savenhsdirect.co.uk/

Perhaps you would like to sign it too.

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Live So Far - Steve Lawson and Lobelia

2010-06-13T16:10:39Z

Really enjoying this new album from Steve Lawson and Lobelia on Bandcamp:

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Why The Gaza Flotilla Attack Proves That I Am Right About Israel / Palestine

2010-06-02T13:42:35Z

There can be no doubt that Israel's botched attack on the humanitarian activist flotilla marks a significant turning point in the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Yet commentators from both sides, as well as those trying to take a more balanced view, have all missed the most important point. What the attack shows, plain as day, is that my own opinions on the issue are the only correct ones, and everyone else is painfully wrong. The failure of everyone else to see how right I am can lead only to tragic consequences.

First, a little historical background. The side of the conflict that I support comprises nothing but honourable and courageous men and women. They are motivated by nothing more than a desire to defend their own families and rich culture. Their cause is right and these people are completely justified in every action, no matter what they do. By contrast, the other side is composed entirely of amoral murderous thugs who will stop at nothing to achieve their ends. Far from achieving a just settlement and a lasting peace, these thugs are only interested in perpetuating the cycle of violence and brutality.

I will admit that there are some innocent casualties on the other side of the conflict, and this is to be regretted, but let us look more closely. Just how innocent are they? It is clear that these people are giving succour to what is nothing more than terrorism, plain and simple. Their losses frankly pale into insignificance when compared to the tragedy of the truly innocent lives that are blighted daily on the side that I support. These are just ordinary people trying to go about their daily business in the face of increasingly vicious and brutal violence.

That violence must stop and it must stop now. Of course, until it does, it is hard to see how the side that I support can be blamed for responding to violence with violence. Everyone has the right to defend themselves.

This is the context in which the flotilla attack must be understood.

It should by now be blatantly obvious that every account of the attack given by the other side of the conflict is nothing but a pack of lies designed to pull the wool over the eyes of the international community. This will not work. The facts of the matter are plain – yet again it is those on my side of the conflict that have been brutally wronged. It is hard to understand how anyone cannot see this. The voices of those who support the other side of the conflict would be tiresome were they not so dangerous. The result is business as usual, as a cowardly British government and utterly ineffectual UN capitulate to those voices in an entirely predictable way. This is nothing more than a recipe for more violence and bloodshed.

The biased reporting from the BBC should come as a surprise to no-one. Time and again they give those on the other side of the conflict an easy ride. At the same time they twist the words of those speaking for my side in order to make them look ridiculous, belittling the importance of our just cause. This is an insult - the facts of the situation are clear and easily found on Google. Yet the BBC seems to ignore facts, preferring instead to act as if they are actually part of the other side's own propaganda machine. Is this what we pay our licence fee for?

The newspapers are no better. Only yesterday the Guardian printed an editorial article in the Comment Is Free section of its website which made me more angry than anything I have read on this subject in weeks. Unbelievable though it may seem, this article was actually trying to defend the indefensible. The piece made it seem as if the side of the conflict which I do not support had some kind of justification for its actions. There may be merit in this kind of thing as an abstract thought experiment, but not at a time like this when lives are at stake. It is sad to find such sheer moral bankruptcy from a paper with a once proud tradition.

There is a sense of urgency here. I call upon everyone who supports the other side of the conflict to stop doing so immediately and to realise that actually it is my side of the conflict who are in the right and who have always been in the right. Only in this way can peace finally be achieved in the Middle East.

(After adequacy's classic article here)

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Music You Will Probably Like - Rena Jones / Steve Lawson

2010-05-24T20:44:05Z

I've been looking for ambient / downtempo type good stuff on Bandcamp and there's no shortage.

Here's two albums I really enjoyed and highly recommend:

Indra's Web by Rena Jones, which I only found last night but which is the kind of thing you don't realise you've been missing listening to until you find it - sort of drum and bass meets classical and jazz and it all Just Works. Listen:

For The Love Of Open Spaces, by Steve Lawson and Theo Travis is one of a number of albums involving Steve Lawson I have downloaded and have been listening to repeatedly for some while now without even beginning to tire of them:

If you like that, there's a bunch more over at music.stevelawson.net - it's all good. By which I mean, I've listened to it all and it's all good.

Please to enjoy.

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The Shochu Bar

2010-04-30T18:31:24Z

This game is lovely.

The Shochu Bar (via jayisgames) is a short, unashamedly sentimental room-escape type game about a melancholy woman pottering about on her own in a flash Japanese bar. It might be too cloying for some tastes, but the graphics and music are nothing short of lush and the puzzles not too complicated.

A highly pleasant diversion on a Friday evening.

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Filesharing Is Not A Problem - A Response To Sarah Teather MP on #debill

2010-04-13T11:33:32Z

Dear Sarah,

Thank you so much for taking the time to write to me. No need to apologise for the delay - I understand that your workload must be particularly heavy at this time and I very much appreciate that you were able to find a moment to write to me on the subject of the Digital Economy Bill (now Act).

I am glad that the Liberal Democrats chose to vote against the bill
and I agree that the way it was railroaded through without adequate
consideration was by itself good reason to vote against. However, I
would like to suggest to you that there are serious issues around the
substance of the parts of the bill regarding filesharing. In
particular your assertion that filesharing is 'a serious issue that
has been waiting a very long time to be addressed' is controversial.

There are those - including many ordinary musicians like myself - who
argue that filesharing is not a problem at all.

Ben Goldacre has written an excellent piece which demonstrates that
the figures on which the assertion that filesharing is a problem is
based are themselves highly problematic:

* http://www.badscience.net/2009/06/home-taping-didnt-kill-music/

To (partly) summarise Goldacre: any research that equates a download
with a lost sale is fundamentally flawed. I have yet to see any
research from the BPI that does not do this. It is obvious that people
download far more than they would ever be able to buy - falsely
assuming otherwise is part of why figures for lost revenue as a result
of filesharing are grossly exaggerated.

Downloaders often delete much of what they download and buy legal
copies of the rest. In this way, some downloads can lead to greater
sales. That is not wishful thinking - here is some hard research
showing that those who download more also buy more:

* http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/study-p2p-music-downloads-increase...
- summary
* http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/vwapj/IndustryCanadaPaperMa...$FILE/IndustryCanadaPaperMay4_2007_en.pdf
- paper

The industry has got it wrong on filesharing, and it is a tragedy that
artists unions have uncritically taken the BPI line. Musician Steve
Lawson has explained to the MU why attacking the internet will hurt
him and other musicians:

* http://www.stevelawson.net/2010/04/my-letter-to-the-musicians-union-about-the...

He is not alone. Writer Nathaniel Tapley is deeply concerned about the
bill and the Writers Guild support for it:

* http://nathanieltapley.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/why-my-union-is-wrong/

During such debate as there was in the Commons last week, it was
repeatedly claimed that the filesharing parts of the bill were aimed
at protecting artists. In fact, as Cory Doctorow points out, industry
figures show that artists are making more than ever:

* http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/13/labels-may-be-losing.html

This may explain why Mo McRoberts' open letter to MPs supporting the
bill was signed by so many artists and musicians:

* http://nevali.net/post/501647501/an-open-letter-to-sion-simon-pete-wishart-david

That letter contains assertions that far from being damaged by
filesharing, the UK music industry has research to show that it is
currently growing. Here is some of that research:

* http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090723/0351345633.shtml -
summarises PRS research
* http://www.prsformusic.com/creators/news/research/Documents/Will%20Page%20and...
- PRS research
* http://www.bpi.co.uk/press-area/news-amp3b-press-release/article/2009-is-reco...
- this is from the BPI themselves

Certainly business models are changing in response to technology and
there will be winners and losers over time. Of course large-scale
commercial piracy must be tackled - though I believe that it is
already well covered by existing law. New legislation on filesharing
that cuts into basic freedoms and which could actually damage the real
digital economy needs more than scrutiny - it should be thrown out in
the absence of actual hard evidence that filesharing is actually a
problem in the first place.

I know you are extremely busy right now - you have an election to
fight and there are many other issues which are of equal or greater
importance than the Digital Economy Act to deal with. For what it is
worth, following your letter, I am planning to vote for you in Brent
Central and will encourage like-minded others to do the same - this is
the most important issue to me at the moment and Dawn Butler, your
only serious opponent, actually voted for the bill.

Cheers and wishing you all the best for the election,

Wayne

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Dear 1999 Wayne

2009-12-31T02:18:17Z

This post is part of a group blog event organized by MusicianWages.com. The topic is: “If you could go back to 1999 and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?”

Dear 1999 Wayne,

You won't be expecting to read this and even if you do I know damn well it'll make not a jot of difference, but never mind that. I'm here to tell you what you need to be doing so as not to make 2009 Wayne sad. Yeah, this is a letter from the future. Deal with it. Roll another jazz woodbine and read on. You're an obstinate bastard just like me, so I know you'll ignore every word, but still. This is more for me than for you. Recommended soundtrack: LTJ Bukem, Earth Volume Two. Oh, is that on already? Same here. Heh.

First off, you are allowed to take your music seriously.

In fact, the sooner you do so - and allow yourself to do so - the better everything will be. Forget what your friend's dad told you when you were a kid. You know, that guy. The embittered ex-session guy who mentored his son's semi-pro covers band you joined at 13. The guy who simultaneously encouraged you all and helped you out while constantly warning you not to even bother trying to write original tunes or to try and make a living from music. His encouragement and his practical on-gig advice was his real teaching. You will be forever grateful to him for that. He gave you a leg up like no other music teacher you have ever had. His warnings? Not so much. You always ignored the warning about writing because you are writing for yourself and no-one else and because you have to. The longer you listen to his other warning the harder it will be when you finally grok that you are utterly unemployable in any other field because music will always take over. Block that shit out. Go for it. Allow yourself to go for it. The only one holding yourself back is you.

Secondly, in a month or so, you are going to get a job offer. It's a really good straight non-music job, well paid, with a world-famous organisation that no-one could reasonably object to working for. Don't take it, though I know you will.

You'll even enjoy it for the first few years, while you simultaneously pursue serious music projects. But then you'll stop enjoying it. The music will suffer too. You'll be drained. Then there'll be a girl - it'll end badly and suddenly. At this point you'll have a complete breakdown. You'll lose the job, your flat, everything. Everything except the instruments, pretty much. You're a lucky sod, so your family will be wonderful and will help you pick up the pieces, but it'll be hell for everyone near you for a long while, particularly you. Eventually you'll finally start focussing on doing music full time. Do me and all those close to you a favour. Turn the job down and go for the music now.

Ach, why do I waste my breath.

Remember that band you left when you went to uni back in 1990? Some time around 2008 you'll listen back to those tapes and realise what a mistake that was. You were in a shit-hot arse-kicking band at 18, full of youth and energy and strong original material. You still think you did the right thing then by turning the band down but you so didn't. And what difference does it make, to realise this in 1999? Well, you aren't thirty yet. You can still allow yourself to go for it. Because nothing else will really come right until you do.

Thirdly, I want to talk to you about practice. Sure you have talent and all, and manage somehow to pull shit out of a hat without really working at it, but that just isn't good enough. That shitload of Robert Anton Wilson books you're always reading and rereading? You know how you have a strong sense that there is some seriously deep wisdom in there that you need to learn? Remember that bit about the basic magic formula to everything being 'Do It Every Day'? Yeah you do. 'It Becomes Who You Are'. You haven't got it yet. I know you haven't. But here's a clue.

That is the meaning of practice.

And you can start now. Every day. You're not thick, for all your other faults.You know you're pretty ok on the bass even without practice, though your piano and guitar skills need serious work along with your singing, to say nothing of your theory. How about you do that work, fill in those gaps, starting now, and see what happens. Do it every day. Start now. The sooner the better. Because Every Day is the most powerful magic formula there is. It really works. Try it. Don't leave it another five years. Try it now.

Fourthly - and I know this will sound insane to you - but start playing the saxophone. I don't care how you do it. Find a way. (There's a clue in your aunt's attic). And start now. As soon as you do, the rest of your music skills will improve. I don't know why. It's just like that. The thing is enchanted or something. Or maybe you really need to learn a monophonic wind instrument in order to help you understand all the other polyphonic ones. I don't know. All I know is, the longer you leave it, the older you'll be when that magic starts to happen. Even if you never get any good at sax, at least you'll have a glimmer of understanding of what the horn players in your band are up to when you tell them to work their magic and they do. Plus it might encourage you to give up smoking sooner. That vow of yours to give up at thirty? You'll need an incentive. Blowing a lot - physically - might be part of that. I'm just saying.

Finally, and I know I've been on your case here for a while, but I want to thank you for something. Even through all the mistakes you have made, are making, and will continue to make, you never gave up and you never allowed yourself to even think about giving up. Irrational though it seemed sometimes. More than anything else, this is what is carrying you through ten years later.

So, yeah. That's all. I now return you to your largely self-inflicted misery.

By the way, that girl who just left you was not the love of your life, so get over it. Write the songs and then forget her. You haven't met the love of your life yet. Again, I'm just saying.

Cheers,

Wayne

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Music in 400 years

2009-12-13T12:37:14Z

David Morgan-Mar asked an interesting question in the notes to his latest Irregular Comic (NSF Duran Duran fans):

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2513.html

Do you think 400 years from now people will still be listening to any of today's pop music?

He suspects that people might still listen to the Beatles, but points out that 400 years ago, there was no Beethoven, Mozart or Bach, and suggests that most people would have a hard time naming any music that dates from circa 1600. He goes on to suggest that we have almost no hope of imagining what our society and culture will be like 400 years from now. How can we possibly say what parts of the transient musical legacy of our age will even be remembered then, let alone still listened to by the masses.

What is interesting about the question is that it cuts to the quick of what music is for and how it works.

Music as a cultural artifact is passed from person to person by those with the tools to do so. Four hundred years ago, there was no such thing as recording, so the only way that music could be transmitted was directly, by musicians. Forms of notation existed for those who could read them, but other than that, you could only pass a tune to someone else by singing or playing it. They could then only pass that tune on by singing or playing it themselves.

Morgan-Mar is a scientist and not (so far as I am aware) a musician, so he may be forgiven for leaping from 'pop' in the question to 'classical' in his attempt to make his case. By doing so he hops directly over the genre which destroys it - folk music. Folk music is handed down from musician to musician across generations, and while it is extremely hard to pinpoint just how old some songs are, many well-known folk songs are clearly at least a few hundred years old.

Take Greensleeves - which Morgan-Mar does mention as a sole counter-example. Wikipedia suggests was already a well-known tune in 1603 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensleeves - though sadly the article points out that there is no evidence for the myth that it was written by Henry VIII.

The version of Whiskey In The Jar popularised by Thin Lizzy has lyrics about a highwayman - making it at least a couple of hundred years old - but since the nature of folk music in the true sense is for individual singers to update lyrics for their own time and place, who is to say that this version is not itself a rewrite of something much older.

Ritchie Valens' 1950s hit La Bamba was already a very old song when he recorded it. No-one knows exactly how old, but this article - http://kathmanduk2.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/black-history-month-la-bamba-and-its-african-roots/ - dates it to 1683 and argues that it was itself at that point a reworking of an earier form.

Scarborough Fair can be no older than 1253, when the original Scarborough Fair began, but Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarborough_Fair - tells us that there was already dozens of versions by the end of the 18th century. Widdecombe Fair, as we know it, is dated - according to this page - http://www.mysongbook.de/msb/songs/w/widdecom.html - to some time around 1794 - when the historical Uncle Tom Cobleigh died. She Moves Through The Fair is another extremely old song - there is interesting discussion here - http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=869 - which clearly demonstrates the rolling person-to-person nature of folk music, as while the lyrics as we have them are around a century old, the tune itself appears to be much older.

Many nursery rhymes - a sub genre of folk song - are of a similar vintage. Lavender's Blue dates to (at least) the seventeenth century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavender_Blue . Ring A Ring O Roses may not after all date back to the Great Plague but is at least eighteenth century - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_a_Ring_o%27_Roses . The Grand Old Duke Of York - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Old_Duke_of_York - can be dated back to 1642.

And so on.

All musicians know there is no such thing as genre in music. Not really. The boundaries blur and change over time, everyone borrows from everyone else, and these ancient folk tunes are widely used in classical and pop music. Yet it is clear that many of the well-known songs we have today are indeed hundreds of years old. And all that is before the advent of recording.

Here as in all other aspects of music, recording changes everything. Folk music history is by nature a bit woolly due to the paucity of evidence and the shifting nature of the material being researched. But the music of today is largely being recorded, and not merely recorded, but recorded in a digital format. It is difficult but possible to transfer older recordings on wax, tape, wire or vinyl to new formats, but with digital formats, the technology to continue to update old file formats to new is as ubiquitous as the computer itself. As long as computers exist in some form, it is hard to see why there is any reason for any digitally recorded music to be lost.

And that also changes everything. In 400 years time, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that some people may be listening to some of today's music, though as to how many people and which of today's music will survive, no-one can say.

There is of course another, perhaps more pertinent question: is anyone actually listening to today's pop music today? But that would be a different essay.

=end

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Outstanding Online Orrery

2009-12-04T02:09:22Z

I've been waiting for this for ages:

http://www.gunn.co.nz/astrotour/

It's the serious business. Via MeFi, like everything else this good.

Totally does what it says on the tin. Could possibly be improved by addition of a background starmap, or the spaceship to go with it, but we'll have to wait a little longer for tech capable of properly implementing those I think.

Meanwhile, please to enjoy.

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Too Many Good Things All At Once

2009-12-01T23:38:18Z

I should probably get into the habit of trying to post eleven little blogettes rather than one big linkdump. I will maybe start doing this at some point in The Future. For now, here's eleven things that have been mainly sitting in a sticky note on my desktop titled 'Blog Ideas' for too long and which I want to tell you about.

Twelve, actually, because the first thing is the sticky note app itself: Xpad: http://mterry.name/xpad/

Xpad is a simple sticky note application for Linux. There are millions of these, for all platforms, and I've been aware of them for ages. But I've only recently started using one, and Xpad is the one I am using. It has changed my life. It is now possible for me to jot down notes usefully on my computer in a way that it hasn't been before. I am definitely being far more productive as a result.

On the face of it, that seems crazy: what's wrong with just firing up a text editor and jotting those notes in a file?

I did this for ages. Doesn't work. You have to name the file. You have to remember the file is there. You have to remember where you put the file and what you called it, and which random note is which. You end up with lots and lots of crap hidden in files you never look at and don't go back to.

Sticky note applications are about the interface, stupid. And I am stupid, for having taken so long to start using one. Different incarnations of these apps have different features, including To Do list stuff, auto-browser-clicky goodness and whathaveyou, but the key feature is none of those things, which xpad doesn't have anyway, and I don't care. The key thing is extreme simplicity of use.

No naming of files. No saving of files. Two click opening of a new or saved note. No click adding to an existing open note. It's all just there, waiting for you to have something to type into it, and it saves it all behind your back.

Being a geek, I have hunted down the location of the directory where the xpad files are stored ($HOME/.config/xpad if you must know) and confirmed that it more or less autosaves everything as you type it. But that is all as irrelevant to you as it is to me. If you don't already use a sticky note thing, find one that works on your system and start using it. If you do, you can stop laughing at me now, thanks. Or, you know, eventually.

Anyway. Herewith the contents of the sticky note marked 'Blog Ideas', slightly expanded from note form:

First, the best game I've played in ages, 'The Company Of Myself', over at http://jayisgames.com/games/the-company-of-myself/

If you've already played Yoshio Ishii's Cursor*10 (see http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04/08/who-on-earth-is-yoshio-ishii/ for that and more) you will be familiar with the idea of a game where you need to die multiple times and collaborate with your own ghosts to complete a level. That's a great idea and Cursor*10 is a great game. But the Company Of Myself takes this idea and adds a story and an emotional component. It's a bit hard as platformers go, and a bit bleak but it is utterly wonderful. First game to actually make me cry in over 30 years of gaming. You should play it.

Next, some music stuff.

I played a gig with Hadar Manor ( http://www.hadar.co.uk/ ) the other week and also on the bill were a superb seven piece live acoustic hiphop outfit called Free Peace.Their music is made of pure joy and pure win: http://www.myspace.com/fre3peace

A friend sent me this YouTube video of Etta James and Dr John's live version of I'd Rather Go Blind:

Almost as amazing: Hendrix fooling around on an acoustic at a party:

(That came, vaguely, via http://www.metafilter.com/86830/Earliest-Known-Footage-of-Jimi-Hendrix-Performing, which links to a quite different Hendrix video from his very early days playing with other people's bands. That one is worth watching too though.)

Also there was this excellent and highly thought-provoking article on Thelonious Monk - http://www.openskyjazz.com/blog/?p=201

If you are gigging in London, there are some promoters you should be aware of and avoid: http://drownedinsound.com/community/boards/music/4184800

Finally, a dose of reality and perspective, via the excellent saxophone forum Sax On The Web ( http://forum.saxontheweb.net/ ). SOTW member and excellent sax player Steve Neff - http://www.neffmusic.com/blog/ - has survived and written about his brain tumor. Start here: http://www.neffmusic.com/blog/2009/08/as-funny-as-a-brain-tumor-part-1/

To end off with, some completely random stuff, which you may or may not have seen before:

Stormtroopers on their day off: http://wildammo.com/2009/08/09/what-stormtroopers-do-on-their-day-off/

Awesome interactive star map: http://server1.wikisky.org/?locale=EN

Tackiest item with smuggest advert: http://community.livejournal.com/vintage_ads/1489225.html

An oldie (in internet years) but goodie - Jon Ronson on the worst swearword in the world: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2007/jul/28/weekend.jonronson

That's probably enough link dumping from me for now.

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