Breaking the Chains of iTunes, and It Feels So Good.

Kudos to Amazon for getting things right when no one else seemed to be able. Their newly-launched MP3 service, featuring music that is truly free of digital rights management, is clean, expansive, and... did I mention DRM-free?

While other outfits, most notably eMusic, have long offered clear and free MP3s, their selection is fairly limited, and unless you're a huge fan of, say, Deerhoof and similar indies, you're often left out in the cold. Itunes, on the other hand, has just about any music you'd ever need, from the big labels and independents. It's just that it's, well, evil. {Evil, here, indicated by freedom-choking DRM limiting how and where you listen to music, as well as contributing to the growing design-trumps-all Apple empire where software doesn't have to work as long as it looks pretty.}

Amazon's MP3 downloads sound great. They're often 89 cents per song or 8.99 an album, beating out the usual 99 cent sale tags from competitors by walking away from the one-price-fits-all model. And they're ready-to-go, good old MP3s. No weird proprietary file formats, no 5 computer limitations, just straight-forward use-as-you-will goodness.

Thanks Amazon.
It's about damn time.

"Help! Help! I'm being repressed!"

Four things:

1. No one can honestly believe that that college student at the John Kerry speech was doing anything but making a scene to get attention.
2. He aggressively provoked the school police into handling him the way they did.
3. Tasers are the safest and quickest way for police officers to squelch altercations that could otherwise become far more violent and possibly fatal to the officers or the tasee.
4. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is bloody brilliant. Always has been. Always will be.

Themey

Recently, I somehow got it in my head that I'd like to throw a 1940's theme party ("somehow" she says, as though she has no idea... {coughbioshockcough}). Surprisingly, there's not a lot of wealth of information online about the subject.

On the other hand, if I wanted to do something based on the roarin' twenties or the rockin' fifties, I'd be set.

Curses.

Hipster Olympics

"Next up, the contestants will have a chance, at last, to review their appearances during a brief pit stop."
"Here they're looking to make sure they've maintained their own particular counter-culture aesthetic."
"It's a full-time job, isn't it, Neil?"
"Sure is, Greg."

Well-played, sirs.

Big Daddy Day Care

Fantastic.



Honestly, though, I have to get away from all things Bioshock. This obsession is becoming a bit scary.

I hear the silence of morning coming on.

The Way of All Flesh

It occurs to me that I was once aware of my mother being 27 years old.

As a 7 or 8 year-old I understood the concept that my mother had been alive for 27 whole years. An entire world history to a 7 year-old. It's an odd memory, one not of an event but of a notion, the fruition of a thought. And though I don't remember thinking of it in any more poetic terms than, "My mommy's 27," as if it needed to be recited to strangers, at the moment, it feels prophetic. I sit here now, age 27 myself, with time barreling through me like tiny cannonballs, destroying me one minute-sized piece at a time.

But once, I was 7.
She was 27.

I'm nearly moving past her, so that even my memory is out of time and... younger than I am.