You have got to be kidding me.

I was thinking I’d mosey over to their website, as much as I generally decry centralized media repositories, and see whether I couldn’t stream a bit of live coverage of the Olympics. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but the homepage seemed promising:

See that hopeful little tidbit about downloading clips in HD? Unfortunately that’s probably locked down with DRM, or at the very least a proprietary downloading application. Too bad I can’t tell you for sure, because the freaking page won’t load!

Does NBC really think it can keep going like this? This is the freaking Olympics. Firefox 3 was downloaded 8,002,530 times on the first day of its release, and still NBC doesn’t think it’s a priority that their website work with it.

I liked the article, despite its failings to disclose much about the dataset and investigate methodological flaws, because it offered an opinion on metal listening habits other than “metalheads are social scum.” Today, however, I found another article. I honestly wonder whether any research was performed at all, so closely does it adhere to stereotypes.

She said an Australian study of year 10 students had shown significant associations between heavy metal music and suicidal tendencies, depression, delinquency and drug-taking.

An American study had also shown that young adults who regularly listened to heavy metal had a higher preoccupation with suicide and higher levels of depression than their peers.

Who paid to have this written? It’s quite clearly cherry-picking. And lest you think I’m objecting to this article because my genre of choice is being presented in a less than favorable way, take a look at the aggregate findings.

WHAT STUDIES SAY ABOUT YOUR SOUNDS:

POP: Conformists, overly responsible, role-conscious, struggling with sexuality or peer acceptance.

HEAVY METAL: Higher levels of suicidal ideation, depression, drug use, self-harm, shoplifting, vandalism, unprotected sex.

DANCE: Higher levels of drug use regardless of socio-economic background.

JAZZ/RHYTHM & BLUES: Introverted misfits, loners.

RAP: Higher levels of theft, violence, anger, street gang membership, drug use and misogyny.

What stuns me about this is that the article author (or the researchers performing the study, but right now I’m blaming shoddy journalism) is clearly looking only for negative associations. What the hell is “overly responsible”?

The Dance category is particularly incendiary in that it implies that only poor people do drugs—unless the rich person listens to Dance music, in which case they don’t belong.

I really hope the article is substantially misrepresented by the media coverage. Maybe I’ll put in a request at my library to get access to the paper, and I’ll see for myself which party is at fault. I must admit, though, that part of me hopes that it’s not the journalist, because on some level I’m really looking forward to when l I get tenure and can jack off like this and call it research.

This seems like a good time to mention that Knol is a stupid idea and I’m against it. But I’ll probably also write a billion articles on all subgenres of death metal and try to make a buck.

What spurred today’s rant is that this morning I popped open my Netvibes page—before eating breakfast, as ever—and there was a damn Google search box cluttering up my junk.

Maybe that doesn’t piss you off, but it does me. Why do I need Google in my Netvibes? I don’t, that’s why.

Mashable has some coverage up about it, but the comment thread doesn’t have nearly enough pissed off people in it for my tastes. I’m all about a cool site like Netvibes making a buck, but can someone please partner with someone other than Google?

For the record, Flock is sponsored by Yahoo. That’s a point in their favor, I guess.

It still hasn’t cleared up yet, so I figured it’s Gay Awareness Week or something, but Googling for that hasn’t helped me very much. Can anybody explain this?

I mean, it’s raising my awareness alright.

Amazing, no?

It only bothers me because the articles are syndicated from years ago. If the writers at The Onion keep depriving me of relatively fresh sardonic content, I’m going to gather them up like bundles of sticks and burn them to death—not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Update:

There’s a banner big as life on the homepage that says “CELEBRATING GAY PRIDE.” Funny that because I only ingest media via RSS feeds, I never saw that. Ah, well. Still, I’d like to know why Googling for “gay week 2008″ doesn’t explain this cosmological event to me, and instead points me to:

Aspen Gay Ski Week

Another year, another great Aspen Gay Ski Week! We have hardly had a moment to miss all the fun times, great snow and friendships made during Ski Week 2008. …
www.gayskiweek.com/ – 13k – Cached – Similar pages

Best search engine my ass.

On a related note, my goal in life is to express every desire with deadpan sarcasm.

I do object, however, to having to deal with stupid customers.

Sometimes you get a customer that you just want to grab by the hair and slam their head against a table of cell phones, again and again and again. Of course, you’d have to resituate your grip every few blows, as their hair would be coming out in clumps. But you’d keep slamming, which gets easier as it goes on, because after the fifth blow or so (I presume), they go limp.

But you still can’t get over that they asked where the 0 key was on their cell phone. So you press ever onward, reveling in the burn of lactic acid in your arm. After about a minute, the bone around the temple softens, and things get messy. The display phones are covered in hair and brains, the counter now an altar to intolerance.

But the offering must be complete. You adjust your footing so as not to slip on the gore, now flowing off the table onto the floor. Customers who have yet to be addressed wait patiently in line.

After the splashing decreases to but a spurt every few hits, and the physical feedback becomes less satisfying, as what’s left of the head makes only a soft slap on the table, you situate the body on its knees. In that reverent posture, it is ready to be totemized. You smash the protective casing around a cell phone, any cell phone, and pick away any stray shards of plastic, so as not to taint the ritual.

Then, reaching carefully in through where the ear used to be, you place the phone in the throat of the corpse, while chanting the UMTS creed.

You wipe the the blood off the metal surface of your nametag, and turn to the next customer, addressing them politely in the honorific.

Seriously. He asked where the goddamn 0 zero was. When I showed him—without violence—he argued that it should come before the 1.

The New Yorker recently put up an article about some Al Qaeda hippie and made sure to draw some bizarre connections to death metal.

Death metal is a severe offshoot of heavy metal, a reaction to the superficiality of eighties popular culture. In the early nineties, bands that played death metal considered themselves part of an élite vanguard. They tuned their guitars in unconventional ways, and some, influenced by classical musicians, composed songs that required high degrees of discipline and technical virtuosity to play. Onstage, artists often wore sweatpants to demonstrate their athleticism and lack of pretense; the genre’s signature vocal style is a heavy growling chant. (“We like it when it’s simply rotten,” one musician told me.) It is a subculture in love with its offensiveness, and obsessive about guarding its artistic purity.

In case you missed it, I’m going to repeat that little gem.

Onstage, artists often wore sweatpants to demonstrate their athleticism and lack of pretense;

I know a fucking lot about death metal, and more than a bit about sweatpants, so maybe I’ll just come off as sounding like part of some “elite vanguard” when I say this, but that passage is a crock of shit and the author has to know it. Here I cite a legendary Facebook thread, in which some guy named Scött [sic] muses:

Florida Death metal is for fat guys who wear black sweatpants, eat Cheetos by the truckload, and get their hair caught in their guitars’ tuning pegs.

Amen, brother. I love Cannibal Corpse and Hate Eternal as much as the next headbanger wasted on too much cheap beer, but the scene is unfortunately fraught with, well, fat white guys in sweatpants and knotty hair.

The author of the New Yorker article doesn’t understand death metal, and I’m fine with that. But why lie so poorly that even the uninitiated can spot your idiocy? I’m as much an armchair anthropologist as my whole lazy wannabe-Web-3.0 generation, but even I find this lack of effort appalling.

By the way, as of today, Google reports 0 results for “Florida sweatpants metal” and only 7 for “sweatpants metal.” I’m proud to be contributing to this great cesspool called the internet.

(via Metal Inquisition)

Update: A recent post on Invisible Oranges references the sweatpants metal meme without an ounce of respect.

There was definitely a jeans era (thrash) and, to some extent, a sweatpants one (death metal).

The post itself is a moderately interesting look at the use of camouflage attire in metal getups.

Today, while poking through my feeds, I found this little gem.

Some people really do have the threshold on their appallingness meter set to the wrong value, don’t they? If we are going to use up the word “appalling” on a minute variation in orthographic conventions, what kind of adjective will be left to describe the taste of fermented soy beans in methylated spirits, or the sound of a cat being electrocuted during a child’s violin lesson?

The context was the “appalling” practice of capitalizing the first letter after a colon. It’s comforting to know that some people still respect the art of sound appallingness meter calibration.

I’ll refrain from stating whose calibration I find sound.

But what I didn’t know is that books are already toast. Steve Jobs recently told the New York Times his opinion on Amazon’s Kindle electronic book reader.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Ouch.

Truth is, I’ve been thinking about writing a book this year. I was approached by a publisher last year, did the prep work, and they pulled out after they found another author that had already written a book on a similar subject. After that experience I was thinking of self publishing in print or an ebook. Now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t record video and sell DVDs instead.

Yeah, because people still buy DVDs, you idiot. Somehow in the midst of perpetuating this whole “the internet is destroying traditional media” bromide the poster managed to miss the fact that distributing video via DVD falls under the same category taking out a contract with a publisher to place dead trees on store shelves. And that’s saying nothing of the dated economic model both industries rely upon.

First, to quote Jobs on the matter is absurd, as he’s obviously going to bash any consumer device that isn’t made by Apple. To suppose that the future of experiencing text isn’t portable digital devices is madness, and the extremely web-capable iPhone is only a testament to that. Apple will introduce an e-reader of their own, or at least greatly expand the reading capabilities of devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch–although I genuinely believe we’ll see a new device in the next year or two, sized between the iPhone and smallest MacBooks.

I don’t think there’s ever been a time when people haven’t been complaining about the younger generation’s lack of education, though the particular gripe about not reading is obviously only as old as writing has been standard practice for communicating knowledge. People will always ingest knowledge. I even believe that they will always read, too, just as humans still use speech and body language to communicate. We are diversifying our modes of input, not replacing them. We are at nature multi-taskers, as the very act of speech would seem to confirm.

Recently there was a new video posted by e-anthropologist extraordinaire Michael Wesch, trying to develop a dialogue on how to adjust education practices to harness new technologies. It’s not as good as his first, which has over 4 million views on YouTube, but it’s in the same line.

Also, I absolutely loved the dog in this movie. My mother has two German shepherds, and I’m quite a sucker for how expressively they can conduct themselves. They’re bright animals, and it’s usually quite obvious.

OK, so not all of them look bright enough to make it into the movies, but still, they’re neat animals. Trust me on this one. And the dog in the movie enjoyed the all-important role of keeping Will Smith’s character sane. I really liked that an animal was given a role of making or breaking a person’s mental wellbeing, as I’m sick of hearing “but it’s just a [dog/cat/I have no soul and cannot fathom having an emotional relationship with an animal]” when discussing the film with norms.

I sat riveted through the better half of the film, salivating over the gradual pace. The protagonist had to hunt food, prepare meals, bathe his dog, and work out. This lulled the viewer into complacency before the horror elements of the film were revealed, and presumably foreshadowed the protagonist’s struggle with maintaining sanity.

The film collapsed at about the 70% mark, and dashed away all my hopes of bearing witness to a turning point in Hollywood theater. I was puzzled by some of the writing decisions, as the actions of Will Smith’s character rapidly became inconsistent with his behavior earlier in the film. Not only did his behavior change according to what might be reasonably expected, it was also contrary to what was foreshadowed—presumably deliberately. I couldn’t understand it.

Then I spoke with some friends who are much nerdier than I, and found out why the last third of the movie felt so artificial.

FREAKING SPOILERS, DUDE

I did some research and found an explication of the ways the movie differed from the book. It’s difficult to find imagery to express how greatly the two differed. It’s as if the movie suspected it saw the book approaching on the horizon, then ran in the other direction and jumped off a cliff.

What I cannot piece together is how the studio execs thought the film would make more money if they radically altered the script, throwing in some “I love God!” moments and removing the absolutely unforgettable twist ending. If the original script for some reason wouldn’t be noteworthy enough in itself for generating a buzz around the film (and consequently high box office revenue), the fact that it wasn’t hacked to bits by Hollywood catering to some fictitious lowest common denominator would have been.

What a damn shame. Give me my Viking movies.

H. Res. 847: Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith

RESOLUTION
Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith.Whereas Christmas, a holiday of great significance to Americans and many other cultures and nationalities, is celebrated annually by Christians throughout the United States and the world;[...]

Whereas Christians identify themselves as those who believe in the salvation from sin offered to them through the sacrifice of their savior, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and who, out of gratitude for the gift of salvation, commit themselves to living their lives in accordance with the teachings of the Holy Bible;

Whereas Christians and Christianity have contributed greatly to the development of western civilization;

Whereas the United States, being founded as a constitutional republic in the traditions of western civilization, finds much in its history that points observers back to its roots in Christianity;

[...]

Whereas for Christians, Christmas is celebrated as a recognition of God’s redemption, mercy, and Grace;

Splendid! This is what we need to show the world that we’re up to snuff on cultural awareness, and that we’re ready to integrate with a global community, welcoming the exchange of beliefs and ideas.

Also, it shows a truly astounding grasp of history, and the resolution contains nothing which would make the Founding Fathers vomit in fits of shaking rage.

This pseudo-legislative über-canvassing turd has already passed through the House, with bipartisan support.