The Friday Drabble #15: The Fantasies of Youth

Time for another drabble already? Concoct your own 100 word story, and tag it with “friday drabble”.  Link to it in the comments and/or on Twitter with the hashtag #fridaydrabble. Happy Drabbling!


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Did you ever want to run away and live in a museum?

Not me! Although I enjoyed “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” as much as the next kid, the MoMA always seemed like an impractical choice for a stowaway.

No, I’d run away to THE MALL.

Picture it: Spend all night playing the arcade games, stuffing yourself silly in the food court, reading in the bookstores until your eyes crossed, and finally, crashing on a Serta mattress.

What do you mean “You’d get caught”?

Why do you think I took this job as a night watchman?

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You May Be Experiencing Longer Than Normal Wait Times. Please Be Patient.

Just a quick note here to point out the following:

  • Even when you try to take care of tech problems in a proactive manner, they’re still a pain.
  • Hard drives click when they’re angry. They chirp when they’re sick. When they take 2 hours to transfer data to a backup that should only take 20 minutes, you better dig yourself a hole because you’re going to be holding a burial service very shortly (either for the hard drive or the first unsympathetic person who makes a comment about how you should have backed up more often.)
  • Having a backup is great. Even better if it is an automated one.  But knowing how to properly restore from said backup without accidentally deleting your data is key.
  • No matter how much backing up you do, you’ll always overlook something.
  • Settings and applications don’t get backed up. Make sure you know what was installed and how to restore your computer the way you like it or you’ll be pulling out your hair for hours days weeks. I recommend running Belarc Advisor (Windows only) to generate a list of everything you’ve got installed so you don’t overlook anything later.
  • It’s OK to feel naked without your computer. It’s not OK to go around naked without your computer. Unless you’re in a nudist camp or the comfort of your own home.
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The Monday Morning Haiku #21

Meetings are God’s way
of ensuring overtime.
(That, or the Devil’s.)

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The Friday Drabble #14: One-Way Ticket

Must be about time for another drabble! Dig deep within your brain for your own 100 word story, and tag it with “friday drabble”.  Share by linking to it in the comments and/or on Twitter with the hashtag #fridaydrabble. Happy Drabbling!


 

They say you can’t go home again.

They’re wrong.

In fact, with that D-Hopper you’re holding there, sliding through dimensions is as easy as falling off a log. Easier even, given how hard it would be to find a— no, strike that. You still have trees, here.

I could go home at any time. Back to the thick, choking air, noxious and burning in your lungs. Back to the toxic swamps under blood red skies. Back to the cancer that awaits, creeping inside you with every breath.

Yes, I can go home again. But why would I ever want to?

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SOPA and PIPA are bad, but there’s a reason they exist. And they’re NOT going away.

Back in college, I may or may not have run an mp3-sharing FTP site off my computer that was registered on Oth.net.  My roommates downloaded bootleg “cams” and “screeners” through IRC, and we watched them on a modded Playstation that could play VCDs. I thought nothing of it; we were poor college students.  Everyone was doing it.  This was the age of Napster and college-wide network shares.

In my first apartment after college, in 2001, I had my computer connected up through Time Warner Cable.  One day, they shut off my internet.  When I called to inquire, they said the a record label associated with the RIAA had reported me as in violation of copyright infringement for sharing copyrighted music files.  I think they had a list of about 40-50 tracks they specifically had called out as hosted by my computer available for people to download.

This was before all the RIAA lawsuits started. TWC told me to remove any file sharing software and public access to my music and they would reinstate my internet connection.  No harm, no foul.  I got off with a warning.

Had this been 2-5 years later, I could have been hit with a $3000-$5000 “settlement fee” for the same offense.  Or if I fought it? I might have ended up with a $2 million judgement against me, like Jammie Thomas-Rasset in 2007.  I got lucky.  I don’t download or share music anymore.

Piracy today is rampant.  If you could persuade teenagers to be honest with you, most would tell you they don’t buy music – they have tools to rip the tracks off of the audio in Youtube videos, or they torrent them, or download from sites like the recently-shut-down MegaUpload. Some people boast of terabytes of music in their archives – an amount which would cost any normal purchaser thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars to acquire “honestly”.

SOPA and PIPA are obviously flawed measures, and would do a much greater order of magnitude of damage to the internet than any benefit they’d provide to the RIAA and MPAA.  But lobbyists and lawmakers are going to continue to push and push for these kind of regulatory actions because of all this piracy.  The recording and motion picture industries are mired in old technology, and they believe they cannot survive if the piracy continues.  (Whether they actually can or not is something I’ve not seen enough information on to have a firm opinion about, but I suspect that there are enough innovative groups and labels out there that are getting by without the frivolous lawsuits that the RIAA and MPAA’s whole arguments are thrown into a doubtful light.)

So if SOPA and PIPA won’t work, can we eliminate piracy by means other than legislation? Probably not. Especially not if the public mindset continues to be “Everyone’s Doing It”, and people believe they’re immune from reprisal because they’re “just one in a million”, or they’re “just downloading one movie only, and not even a good one at that” (both arguments I’ve actually heard for justifying piracy).

Killing piracy is like curing poverty – idealistically, it would just require enough people to care enough to take action (or stop taking action, as the case may be) to effect change.  Realistically, if parents don’t govern their kids’ behavior, colleges don’t crack down on their students’ activities, and ISPs don’t punish ALL offenders, the number of incidences of piracy is not going to decrease.  And the only way to really get ANY of that to occur is to make piracy not only so illegal, but so prohibitively costly to NOT monitor and protect against it that ISPs, college campuses, and individual families begin to comply.

The men and women in Congress know this.  Every day, lobbyists from the RIAA and MPAA hound them with this truth.  And so they work to develop bills like SOPA and PIPA to fight back.  Yes, these bills are horrendous and could break the internet as we know it today.  If they do come to a vote next week, they probably won’t pass.  But that doesn’t mean they’re going to just go away.  Just like music and movie piracy, the legislation to combat piracy is going to keep popping up, rearing its ugly head until the lobbyists can ram through something to help out the record and movie labels (assuming anything can, at this point).

So stay strong, stay informed, and keep fighting against censorship, but be aware that it’s going to be a long battle ahead.  Oh, and if you can, consider obtaining your music and movies legally instead of bootlegging them.  It’s not going to end the piracy, but I’d REALLY hate to see your name on the next lawsuit filed by the RIAA/MPAA.

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Can YOU Be a Hero?

I put together a short video to explain a way you could be a hero and help save a life.  Will you spare 5 minutes of your time to check it out?

Now that you’ve seen my plea, will you take the first step to becoming a hero?  And if you aren’t eligible or have already signed up, would you please consider sending this post to friends and family to help convince them to sign up, too?

Note: If you are not a US resident, you can still register with a Cooperative Registry. Over half of all transplants involve either a U.S. patient receiving cells from an international donor or an international patient receiving cells from a U.S. donor. Go to http://marrowdrives.org/bone_marrow_donor_programs.html and look for the “International Bone Marrow Donor Organizations” to see if there is a participating organization in your country.

Thanks to Ross MacLachlan for permission to use his tune “Obama Vitality Rag” in this video. Download the full track for free, and check out the rest of his work at http://www.notjustragtime.com/

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