[ Saturday, November 29, 2003 ]
Un post en español para que se entiendaEn esta ocasión no hablaré de fijaciones gaypornosexuales con las orquídeas. Ni de Michael Jackson o vulpecula. Mucho menos de Knopixxx, era una broma, para capturar 2 clics de google. Cierto que es bueno cuando las cosas no le valen 5 a uno? Todo debería ser así. sencillito, gozable y no profundo. Es una forma de vida de la que he tratado (con mucho trabajo) de aprender, y no es fácil (después de que, por ejemplo, se ha escuchado y entendido con placer "Utopia Banished" de Napalm Death) cuando se ha buscado profundidad en lo que verdaderamente lo apasiona a uno, llámese música, literatura, trabajo, cine. Y pues si, puede ser el momento mas importante de la vida en el momento, y si al final no pasó nada que contar a los nietos (que probablemente nunca se tendrán) reconfortan 2 cosas:
1. Todo vale 5. O no?? O NO ??!?!?
2. En ese tipo de situaciones no queda sino reirse de uno mismo. (C) yo, ahora.
Las cosas son mas fáciles cuando nadie las complica.
Otras Irrelevancias:
QUE NO HERMANO, NADA DE KNOPISS O LINUX, O PINGUINOS DISEÑADOS PARA VENDERLE LINUX A LAS VIEJAS!
Hernan [2:40 AM] -
[ Friday, November 21, 2003 ]
When the mind is blank or Here comes the bullets or Mediocre posts that must rapidly be forgotten
Well, these last days I've been a victim to M$, as it made my PC hit rock-bottom. Windows XP finally managed to stop the video card's fan and so 0's became 1's and viceversa and there were lots of BSODs (Blue screens of death, we all love them -or then why are so many windows machines out there?). I made a list of my latest disperse thoughts.
- Type O Negative's last album "Life is Killing me" rules ass. It's honest Type O Negative, and it has moments from their previous albums, from Slow, Deep and Hard to World Coming Down. It has their biggest influences, Black Sabbath and the Beatles (when they sounded heavy), but not because of the sitar (like stated in amazon's review). Type O Negative's gothic style is not standard, they're not all about sadness and blood and vampires, they don't even look gothic. They're more like characters from the Crow. I opened wide my eyes to their lyrics (O__oU !!), because there's really unconfortable moments, that you have nothing else to do than just laugh with. And the Type O marks are everywhere (the "aaaah... huh"s and the plain "huh"s among others). If you like gothic run and buy it, I go with amazon's crowd, giving it 4.5 stars outta 5. Not bad for such a long wait! Also there's the most anti-gay song I've ever heard, "I like goils" (If anyone knows what that means, tell me, I'm nothing but an Iguazo!) and song about a sex-change operation gone wrong! 
- Flash MX 2004 is a nice effort, putting designers aside to suffer while they helplessly watch java developers build dynamic flashes. It's like when making web pages. All designers "make" web pages, but when they're asked to do something dynamic they've nothing else to do than run away scared (and it's hard for their egos, and we developers laugh like madmen). So now, designers' tool, Flash, it's becoming a tool for the developer of nowadays web sites. (Take that motherfuckers)
- When I came back from Girardot this weekend, my father informed me of the Beer Company's grenading, and the first person that came to mind was Siramthar (the sensei). I dunno why I didnt call him.. but is nice to see he's in one piece.
- I really envy Galactus and the first world countries for being able to asist to concerts of musical legends of such size as David Bowie, Type O Negative, Iron Maiden, Pink Floyd, Dream Theater, Joe Satriani, Air, Daft Punk, Underworld, The Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack, Yanny and so many great classical musicians..
- I was really dissapointed to know that the Evil Corp. has no competence at all and that it has stomped all over its rivals, either by buying/absorbing them or taking them to bankruptcy. I've heard they want to put out some online system to sell music over the Internet and crush iTunes, Napster, MusicMatch and the delayed MSN Music 2004 without even seeing the light! Maybe the Evil Corp. has planted a virtual reality in our brains in order to fulfill the Evil Robot's electric needs. I choose the red pill!
- TOLM 2 may be a good night, I'll let you decide where it's gonna be, and perhaps I'll go with Lanada. I look forward to meet some of the new bloggers, to see if I finally decide to read their posts..
- I gotta watch Kill Bill and the third Matrix.
- Some hate comes to mind by hand of the extinct band Impetigo: "I hate people man, I don't care... I just don't fucking care... I dont give a shit.. I dont give a shit about nothing.." etc.
Hernan [9:51 AM] -
[ Sunday, November 02, 2003 ]
Electronica for dummies 6: It's not a good time to be a musician. (Post inspired in viralex's conpiracies)And did we tell you the name of the game, boy? we call it "Riding the gravy train" , sang Roger Waters in "Have a Cigar", about the music business, back in 1975. This post's intention is not to disencourage anyone to get into the music business but, as a former music releaser and victim, I feel the need to communicate the war from my point of view.
Claim your copyright share in Colombia
Musicians should be meant to compose, rehearse, record, perform and earn according to their level. We all know this is far from a reality, because there's much more to the music business than the music. There's a full legal system behind it all to learn so, like in many businesses, the science of getting money out of it depends on your ability to exploit it. And you would be surprised at the amount of money stolen from people who dont even know a bit about music, but know the system.
I was once told "your band's music is now on rotation in this radio station". Naturally I had some satisfaction out of it, what everyone wants at first is some recognition, and I got a bit of it, I've met people who have heard my music and liked it, and it can really make your day. Anyway, I've failed to understand the true meaning of that phrase.
When you create your music, you can use scoring software to generate the scores or you can write them down, so you can get a copyright for the songs, and give sense to the "All rights reserved" statement in your demo CDs. Some guitar or piano, the voice melody and the lyrics will work. Next step after having your songs copyrighted is to get some assistance from a competent lawyer to collect the money generated by the songs when they are "on rotation" on some radio station. Radio stations pay a monthly fee to the state (in Colombia, they pay it to "SAYCO") for the songs aired, and they provide a full listing on the songs, so record companies can have their "editor" companies poking around on those lists to see what corresponds of the fee paid to their respective companies.
But the share of that paid fee for many songs (from independent artists) are not collected, mainly, because of the ignorance of the artists. A time passes, and if it is not collected, the "editor companies" simply steal it. The way to claim for your money is, in Colombia you need to be admitted as a partner to SAYCO to claim your share (go to SAYCO's site, spare the flash intro, click on "Beneficios Sociales" then on "Admisiones"), among the conditions stated, you need to have at least 10 registered songs. Maybe someday you'll claim 7000 USD like Rafael Escalona.
Selling music on the Internet
This is sometimes the preferred medium used by young musicians to publish and sell their music, through sites like mp3.com, or the new napster, but to sell big you need to be noticed, and featured, and that's publicity which costs a lot more than recording the music! Others simply post their music and wait for people to donate through PayPal.
War is waged this days in the Internet and in real life, where the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America, composed by the biggest music labels, Warner, Sony, Arista, EMI, BMG, Virgin, etc.) has fighted against piracy in the form of mp3 files through Peer 2 Peer networks primarily, first by taking down the mediocre Napster, then by hurting significately the music fans around the world by taking down the great Audiogalaxy (where I found the strangest songs and demos, and even found my own music which I didnt upload), and now against Kazaa. The problem with Kazaa is that it has no offices in the United States, but instead their servers are spread through the world, even in "countries" (and islands) that have no regulations for that kind of matters. So the new strategy is through terrorism, instead of attacking the companies and servers, they went for the end-user. The RIAA has announced that it will be issuing lawsuits against individuals in a monthly fashion (read here), people who the RIAA found out (how? sounds like privacy invasion) who shared 1000+ mp3 files. It all started in September with 204 lawsuits, a process famous for a sued old woman who happened to have a mac computer (macs dont run kazaa), and a sued 12yo girl.
This month, the RIAA targeted 261 individuals more. The strategy wants you to log into kazaa, and get reduced links to download music, at real slow speeds, thus killing the network. FastTrack network is the target now (clients like kazaa, grokster, morpheus, etc), I think if it works they'll go after eDonkey2000 and gnutella's network (Anyway, I think there's gonna always be a new P2P software and network to share files).
So, in an attempt to give music fans a legal and fair-priced alternative the monster of software are jumping after the crops of music. In this moment, 3 companies are after it, namely Roxio (with the new napster software), musicmatch and now Apple (with the iTunes software). When iTunes for Windows was launched, it only took 3.5 days to sell 1 million songs, and you can laugh at Micro$oft's reaction here. Napster is even launching pre-paid cards for people to buy music! So now you could say the big software companies are aggressively after the artist's money, the premise of these companies is "creating a system that gets virtually all of fans' money directly to artists", but as stated here, the musicians are getting paid a really small fraction of the whole sale and, as the cited article says, iTunes music store is like a web facelift for the same corrupt music industry.
How much you get from this selling method depends on how big you are, as usual, but it will never come close to what record companies and now software companies get from it. It's kind of a dead-end, huh?
This wars have damaged severely the quality of music. Through the 90's we saw how the music business began killing the genres and the tastes by getting formulas for music, and getting out bands and artists that sounded the same. People slowly decided to stop buying music because there's not much innovation in comercial (and advertised) music these days, the RIAA companies spit out new artists every day that sound and look like the former ones, and flood tower records with them, and good honest music from independent labels gets harder to get in real life.
Time will tell and we'll probably get to know how it all ended, and how music was damaged in the process.
Hernan [2:14 PM] -
[ Saturday, November 01, 2003 ]
Edo beats "nicolas" from Protagonistas de Novels, as brightest potencialIt (the potencial) is unlimited. Definitely, funier than Edo's posts is Edo. He got disguised as "Braveheart" (whatever that means), and it was the light: he should have long hair, he would have anyone he ever desired (included the famous "vulgarona"). It's like Wallace and Christ in one. Sick but true.
You really should have seen it, especially when his shield had a "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" Shield.
PD. Powerdesigner 9.5.2, I own your ass.
Hernan [3:23 AM] -
