Hot on the heels of a Copyright Royalty Board decision that could potentially kill internet radio as we know it, a possible hail-mary save. The CRB decided earlier this year that webcasters and internet radio stations, who’ve been paying royalties on the songs they play as a percentage of revenue, should start paying strictly enforced fees per song and listener. The formula is simple but deadly: take a base rate per song (11/100ths of a cent, but potentially increasing over the next five years), multiply that by the number of songs played in an hour, multiply that by the number of listeners in an hour, and you have the cost in royalties per hour of airtime. With this revamped metric, smaller broadcasters were shocked to discover their royalty costs swallowing up their revenue and then some. No less than NPR filed an appeal, saying the vastly increased fees were capricious, but to no avail.

That’s why if you support sites like Pandora, Last.fm and the mighty NPR, and you live in the United States, you’ll want to get in touch with your representatives and ask them to support the Internet Radio Equality Act, which would reverse the Royalty Board’s decision and return to a flat-fee-plus-revenue-percentage model. As someone who grew up listening to tons of internet radio—I owe my musical tastes to a guy in Portland named Rich and a site called indiepopradio—I know full well the impact rising costs can have on internet radio, and the power of internet radio to reach people and expose them to music, culture and opinions outside what’s available on the local dial. We lose these stations and webcasters and we might as well go back to the bad old days when Clear Channel ruled everything.

What happens when you’re a video sharing site and the leading competitor gets bought out by Google? You make your own material, that’s what:

I believe this is the sort of thing I’m supposed to snark out, but if they’re lip-syncing to a mid-90s one-hit wonder like Harvey Danger, then they are clearly my kind of people. Well played, Vimeo hipsters, well played.

A Toronto institution has been torn down. I honestly don’t remember what stores used to be on that corner, or really anything before the blue walls went up.

Howdy, neighbour. We’ve just discovered a planet, orbiting around a red dwarf star called Gliese 581, that’s about one and a half times the size of Earth with a mean temperature between 0 and 40 degrees celsius. That makes the new planet the closest thing we’ve found yet to an Earth-like planet—and potentially one that could sustain life.

This is kind of a pretty awesome concept.

Things I like: companies that make it easy for you to find print-quality product images to include in articles you’re writing for magazines. There are a lot of companies like this and they are a joy to deal with.

Things I don’t like: companies that make it difficult to find print-quality product images, or just plain don’t have them on their website. Bonus stupid points for not including PR contacts on your site, either.

Things I absolutely hate: companies that lock up their print-quality product images behind restricted media sites for Media Professionals only, and then reject you when you don’t fit their definition of Media Professional. What the hell else could I possibly be if I’m looking for access to your media site? What, you think I’m going to Photoshop penises and unicorns into your photos and get giant posters printed so I can distribute them across the city? Just how stupid do you have to be to turn away free PR, however limited, just because you don’t like the looks of the people that want to download your precious 300dpi images of portable electronics most people couldn’t give two shits about?

Your Scene Sucks, aka “man I feel so old.” Here’s why:

around 2001, i released a site called “how to dress emo.” the site had relatively simple instructions on how to fit the role in what i assumed would be a passing trend. boy, was i wrong-the emo explosion is still in full force now, years later, and the fashion just keeps getting sillier and sillier. not only that, you can now instantly tell what music someone listens to by their clothing and vice versa.

someone recently wrote me and complained that my old “how to dress emo” site was incorrect because “that is how normal people dress.” for the most part, they are right. the term “emo” has become a thing of the past, now replaced by its the new term, “scene.” gone are the days of thick-rimmed glasses, sweaters, and jeans that actually fit. everything is completely androgynous in the myspace age; boys are playing dress up with mommy’s makeup; girls are attempting to look more and more like glam rock monsters.

Now I have something to point to whenever some uppity 16-year-old gets in my face about how I don’t know what “emo” is. Whatever, kid, neither of us know what emo is either (proof) but my emo’s better than your emo!

And then I remember that in the real world, no 16-year-old gives two shits about what I think because I’m OLD. Whatever. Get off my lawn, you little whippersnappers, or I’ll beat you with my cane!

SPOILERS AHEAD. Though if you’re like me, you no longer care.

Dear 24,

When President Batshitinsane Palmer launched a nuclear missile from the U.S.S. Vickery last episode, it was like you’d taken one bold step closer to fulfilling my fantasies for the show: all-out nuclear war, followed by a seventh season where everyone is either dead, dying of radiation poisoning, or eating rats off the street—in other words, a 24-episode version of Threads. This would’ve been some of the finest television ever to grace American shores, even if you didn’t necessarily buy into the belief that American aggression would cause a nuclear holocaust—but then, you’re watching 24, so you’ve already been asked to believe far more ludicrous things.

All of that fine nuclear porn has been completely undone in the course of ONE EPISODE. Let’s recap:

(more…)

Seeing as how I can’t sleep because the narrator of Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving disturbs my inner frightened eight-year-old to a fairly unhealthy degree, I might as well tell you what I spent three and a half hours on today: watching Grindhouse on a cold Saturday afternoon in a near-empty theatre. I guess gratuitous, over-the-top violence isn’t really daytime fare. Let’s cut to the chase: Planet Terror, directed by Robert Rodriguez, and Death Proof, helmed by Quentin Tarantino, are two very different paths to the same source of low-grade b-movie nirvana.

(more…)

Generally, installing webapps is a pretty painless process because the majority of them are written in PHP. Wordpress is a PHP app, as is Drupal, Mambo/Joomla, phpBB, and a bunch of other widely used applications. All you have to do is copy the package files to your web directory, make the database, run an install script, and you’re up and running.

Trac is a bug tracker, wiki and Subversion browser, all in one package. Trac is an oustanding piece of software, and very lovely to look at; seeing your code with syntax highlighting and line numbers on the web is a thing of beauty (well, if you’re into that sort of thing, anyways). There’s just one problem with Trac: it’s “really difficult” to install on Dreamhost. It’s no picnic. Especially if you’re not comfortable with Linux. Or building from source. As a certified Linux noob, I am all that and more. And yet I thought, hey, how hard could it be?

If you’re not insane or a nerd, you’ll want to step off here. For the rest of you, into the breech!

(more…)