February 2006
Monthly Archive
Last night was the final show for Season 1 of The Pink Horse of Whimsy. It’s been tiring and joyful and stressful and encouraging and intense, and totally and utterly rewarding. And now I am really looking forward to a weekend away with my beloved, to totally forget about the outside world and just do almost nothing.
A massive thank-you to everyone who was involved, whether performing, rigging, moving chairs, collecting money or turning the lights on and off. Shows like this require a lot of help to get off the ground, and I’ve been really surprised by how many people freely gave their time for what was really a very silly concept.
Over at ArsTechnica, they report (with glee) the outburst of one David Birch at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona. Birch asks the questions the whole world should be asking, both inside and outside the Telecoms industry:
“Why are you such a bunch of big girls?” asked Birch. “Why don’t you tell the content owners to just get stuffed?” He continued unabated: “You’re too seduced by the content industry, Hollywood is not even a $10 billion industry. Hollywood is small compared to the telecom industry. Why don’t you take a stronger line? Consumers don’t want DRM at all. You can’t sell DRM.”
The article goes on to compare the cost of a chip fab to the cost of a medium-priced, Brokeback-Mountain-esque movie (think: 340 to 1). If shoving DRM down consumer’s throats is such a pain in the ass for content providers and consumers, then why not just create your own content industry?
Gross over-simplification? Yes. Recipe for disaster? Maybe. But it’s still baffling that hairy behemoths like IBM and Google are so willing to alienate their customers for the sake of pleasing these backwards-looking, dwindling relics of a bygone era.
What Would Georgie Choose is supposed to be an unfettered explosion of cuteness and beauty, warming the audience’s collective heart with George’s dewey-eyed innocence.
Instead, on my watch, it has grown into a bulbous, highly-politicised filmic sledgehammer that rams my own philosophies down people’s throats without giving them time to chew.
(Okay, I must admit, I’m kind of chuffed with myself. Shut up.)
Observe, this week’s episode:
View full-screen or download
This has been a crazy-ass week. I almost feel like a working comic (and, consequently, a bit less like a working programmer, to the frustration of my boss) - Wednesday was my show, The Pink Horse of Whimsy. Thursday, Cut & Paste (improv), and tonight… more improv! Instant Order: Trial By Jury with The Crew.
It’s been really great, but it’s also quite tiring and probably unsustainable. Still, a good warm-up for the Adelaide Fringe.
On a completely unrelated note, the guy in the next office has been coughing all morning. But it’s not really a cough, but a sort of throat-clearing, mucus-raising growl, the sort that makes your eyes water just hearing it. The worst thing is that I realised: he does it all the time. It’s just that now it’s made its way into my conscious mind, where it will annoy and distract me forever.
I have to get out of this shitty-ass job.
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