An Open Letter to the Entertainment Industry

Dear Content Producers and Owners:

We lied to you. In the golden 80s and 90s we told you micropayments and content protection would work; that you would be able to charge minuscule amounts of money whenever someone listened to your music or watched your movie. We told you untruths which we well knew would never work - after all, we would've never used them ourselves. Instead, we wrote things like Kazaa and Gnutella, and all other evil P2P applications to get the stuff free.

Read the full original entry.

Found via boingboing

Petals Around The Rose

It's a puzzle. or a game. Or both.

Link

Something random found today: Some guy's gallery of comic-book (and other genre) characters as lego people

And, for those three people who haven't seen this before: The Fight Crime!

The guy who made the above javascript thingy (website: black-ink.org) had a link to some sort of online 'zine about comics. I don't follow comics much anymore, but apparently, Peter David is writing something X-Factor again. And according to a friend of mine, he's also writing Hulk again! Now if only I had the money and patience to start collecting comics again...

Celsius Desktop

This is one of my favorite desktop wallpapers, I've used it several times, I always like bringing it back:



However, I always forget where I got it from. It's from RPGamer's Theme Central

Things To Do

In order of priority:

• Study for the JITSE - I'm terrible at this. Frankly, it's quite boring to study, and it reminds me why I'm not taking any post-graduate studies. By all accounts, I'll probably be cramming those last few days before the exam, as usual. It doesn't help that some of my coworkers convinced me to tag along for a trip to Fontana 7 days before the exam proper. I may have to rely on SHEER GENIUS again.


• Study PHP, build a new website - I've been making websites for years now, but now I want to try my hand at starting and maintaining a dynamic data-driven website. I'd use JSP (since that's what I'm familar with from work), but it seems that PHP is the popular thing on web hosts, so I'll just spend some time to learn it. (Just keep on learning, heh)


• Master Street Fighter III: Third Strike - well, not quite master, since I don't think I'll ever be able to master 360s/720s, but at least to know the game as well as I knew SFA3 and CVS2. I think it's an important indication of my priorities in life that a video game ranks third, next to learning. :P


• Get Cheese fixed - Cheese is, of course, the other computer, that's been busted for months now. "System failed memory check", apparently. I know, I should just buy some new RAM and try it out, but I've burnt so much money replacing parts for that PC that I'm uber-cautious; I want to be sure what's wrong with it before doing anything. I need to find some free time to take the thing to a shop.


• Buy a cellphone - Apparently, I am now the last Filipino to not have a cellphone; the main problem is that I want a phone that I won't be bored with in a few days, so I'll probably need a smartphone of some sort, but that conflicts with the other problem: I'm hella cheap.


• Catch up on Reading - currently: Cryptonomicon. Enqueued: The Alchemist, American Gods. I have a feeling I won't be doing much reading 'til after the JITSE though.

Hmm...that's it for now.

Liberated Games

Note to self: Don't forget to check out the games at Liberated Games sometime in the future. They host commercial games which have been released for free to the public...some with source code. I mean, c'mon, they apparently have the source code for Star Control 2! (I say apparently because their download page seems to have a problem right now, hence I will get back to it later.)