GORDON: Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em, folks, this Wednesday Evan and I will be discussing our culture and smoking.
EVAN: This is largely due to us not putting up the poll until days after the last E> was posted, but what are you going to do.
GORDON: I will I take responsibility for this. But back to the topic at hand-
No one here is going to make the argument that smoking is good for you. But speaking as someone who occasionally enjoys a pipe or a cigar and the like, I can’t help but feel there’s a ridiculous amount of discrimination against smokers in our society.
EVAN: Ladies and gentlemen, children with surprisingly discerning taste, Gordon and I have managed to look past the weariness of a day of work to bring you a new installment of Evan and Gordon Talk.
EVAN: This topic arose organically, actually, due to a few posts by Gordon on piracy and my not being able to fully agree with them.
And no, it’s not that kind of piracy, though we did start a new pirate-themed D&D game just this past Sunday.
GORDON: And it shall be awesome- but back to the subject at hand. I’m going to start with some full disclosure:
I am not of the mind that piracy is, in and of itself, a great and noble thing. Any indication or implication of this on my part is usually just in reaction to the mainstream media’s portrayal of piracy as a crime on par with defacing priceless art, grand theft auto, and punching old ladies in the face.
EVAN: And in all fairness from my part, I will admit that I’m no saint when it comes to piracy. I stream a plethora of shows for my viewing pleasure, though I have [and this is likely the voice of Justification speaking] sworn off downloading full-length films, music, books, etc.
GORDON: And Evan, I will attest, is not some twisted chaos-worshiping miscreant devoid of honor or humanity, as the major media industries would have you believe. Well, not entirely, anyways.
Now, Evan, one of the justifications I’ve heard you use in the past is that you’re living in Canada. Many- if not all- US shows are simply unavailable outside of the States through any conventional means.
EVAN: This is true. And while I resided in the States for my post-secondary education I made frequent use of the free streaming service Hulu. I even watched, and somewhat enjoyed, the ads.
In Canada we cannot even watch the episodes on the channels’ respective websites [NBC.com, CBS.com, etc.]
GORDON: And you’re certainly not alone in that. The vast majority of the world is in the same boat, forced to choose between piracy or waiting a few years for the DVDs to come out and then pay an exorbitant fee plus crazy shipping costs. Better hope your purchase isn’t damaged en-route.
EVAN: Since we have been so good about being fair, I will point out that there are options- many television episodes are available to buy via Amazon, online. Before you ask why you should pay for something you would otherwise get for free I’d point out that you pay for these shows by watching ads, and that as someone not in the States you would not “otherwise get it for free” to begin with.
GORDON: And that’s something I can actually tolerate. In spite of my muting ads and/or talking back to them while giving the corporate pigs the finger, I’m perfectly willing to subject myself to ’em if it means cheap and convenient access.
EVAN: If I recall our time together in college correctly [which we both know I can, and do], I distinctly remember you blocking said ads with Adblock.
GORDON: Even though it meant the waiting time was ultimately longer.
EVAN: Which is besides the point. But let’s continue onwards: is piracy damaging?
GORDON: The continued existence of Hollywood, as well as the ever increasing budget of films, would seem to indicate otherwise.
There are people out there who might try to argue that piracy hurts new musicians, who can’t afford to lose profits like big businesses can, but that’s a flawed argument. Truth is, musicians only get a sliver of the profits they generate, and wind up losing the rights to their own songs in the process. Working independently with the consumer is generally a safer and more profitable move.
EVAN: I will not argue with what you have said about musicians for a second. The amount they make through selling single tracks on iTunes is deplorable.
What I will point to, however, are the other areas where piracy can [and does] occur. Television series live and die based on their ratings, and buying them does nothing to help what’s perfectly good [if not great] television. Similarly, if only 1,000 people decided to download a new issue of a comic book instead of simply paying the three or four dollars, that could mean the end of that series; titles that dip below 20,000 are typically cancelled soon afterwards.
GORDON: I agree wholeheartedly. But I think that speaks the whole reason piracy exists- not malice, but rather cost and convenience. These people- especially television producers- have got to understand that their old metrics for measuring the popularity of shows are dead.
It’s the equivalent of saying communication isn’t popular because house phones are dying out. No, we’re just turning to new, cheaper, and more convenient methods. Piracy could be dealt a deathblow if these major industries would just step up their game, rather than trying to use lobbies and buy off politicians to keep us dancing to their tunes.
EVAN: The thing is, I think in arguing for “cost and convenience” you run the risk of defending those who just a) want to get quality products for free b) whenever they want.
It’s not just that people want ease in accessing what they love, the truth is that when given the choice between paying and not paying people will always opt for the latter.
Not to bring it back to comic books [who am I kidding, it’s what I do], but you putting down a few dollars means that a talented writer or artist is able to keep on doing what they do: providing you with high-quality stuff. That’s an actual case where piracy can severely jeopardize both artists and their art.
GORDON: Again, I agree. I do believe in paying for what I love. My record collection stands as a testament to this, as does my choice to spend a few extra bucks buying beer produced by one of the few ethical companies on this blighted earth.
Tell me this- you like the show New Girl, right?
EVAN: Immensely.
GORDON: Would you pay fifty bucks American to watch the show at 4:12 (and ONLY at 4:12) in the afternoon?
EVAN: I would not.
GORDON: How ’bout ten cents to watch it whenever you so desire?
EVAN: Yes indeed.
GORDON: You and millions others, am I right? Ten cents for a crisp, working copy rather than some choppy, blurry pirated version where the sound and video are out sync?
EVAN: Oh, I stream at only the highest quality.
GORDON:That’s my point, I guess. Yeah, there will always be people out there who don’t want to pay the ten cents, but overwhelmingly, that kind of price and convenience will make such a minority negligible.
I assert again that piracy doesn’t exist because millions of people are art-hating maniacs, but because the business plans of these networks and companies are painfully obsolete and short-sighted, especially in regards to the international market. Heck, I’d say such changes could ultimately lead to these companies turning a healthy profit- especially if they just included some advertising à la early Hulu.
EVAN: Here’s the thing, the US already has a working model of what you just said. As I mentioned you can purchase episodes of stuff on Amazon, and I’m talking $2 an episode. That is reasonable. I don’t think your average American would look at that price and think, “There’s no way in Hades I am spending two dollars on a 45-minute episode of television that I can keep forever.”
Yet in spite of that, people in America still download TV shows all the time. If it doesn’t work for them, what makes you think they can extend something like that to the rest of the world?
GORDON: Firstly, I disagree that 2 bucks is reasonable for an episode. That’s the cost of an entire dinner right there. How much more so is that going to be true for the rest of the world, who have even less?
I mean, we’re not talking about a book or a record which goes through an intensive manufacturing process for each copy- we’re talking digital here. Every man, woman, and child on Earth could be given every book, movie, song, and piece of art on earth if the masters so chose…
EVAN: Gordon. It’s two dollars. The average American does not spend that much on a full meal, they spend that much on stuff they don’t need, like gum or coffee or inane tabloids. As a country America is more than able to pay that paltry amount and yet they do not. My point stands.
I’d further argue that since it’s digital that ease of access adds, not detracts, from its value. You can watch it whenever and wherever you want.
GORDON: What I mean about it being digital is that it doesn’t cost money (anything noticeable) to reproduce it, unlike hard copies of things such as books or art. With that mind, charging two bucks an episode seems to me to be unreasonable. I’d cite the fact that for 20 dollars you can get a season of a show with (at least) 20 episodes as proof of this. The cost can, and should, be lowered for great consumption.
EVAN: Like I said, we’re adding availability as a variable. Sure, you can pay 20$ for a full season of a show, but that’s waiting a year or however long it takes for it to come out. People are also paying for the availability of getting it when or soon after it airs.
GORDON: That’s gonna be different from company to company, but for the most part, that’s true. But I’d jump back to my complaint about how little the actual artists get in all this. If anyone- anyone– is gonna set a price, let it be the ones producing the work.
EVAN: Honestly, though, that’s an entirely different argument.
The fact of the matter is that if a writer/artist wanted to print their own comic book there’s no way they’d be able to do it on any significant scale on their own, the cost of printing alone would wreck them.
Different industries pay those who work in them different amounts, and it’s not the topic of our conversation this week.
GORDON: Again, my issue isn’t with the fact that we must pay; we can all get behind this. My issue is with the terms and conditions we’re subjected to- especially when big companies start throwing their weight around to slow progress.
If piracy is the rampant issue that they say it is- and I seriously contest that- then I submit that the fault is on their part for adopting inconvenient, pricey, and exclusionary policies. Let me put it this way: If you say apples can only be purchased by people who’ve climbed Mount Everest, you’re gonna create a lot of apple thieves.
EVAN: We’ve left you a lot to think about, even if you’re not someone who refreshes a website over and over waiting for a new episode of 2 Broke Girls to pop up [did you know I review that show?].
So with that ladies, gentlemen, and genius babies, we bid you a happy Wednesday. We came up with this week’s topic, but you can decide if next week we talk about . . . um . . . Dungeons & Dragons. How we’ve chosen to play it and why we think it works [better?].
GORDON: Alternatively, you may vote that we discuss the role of religion in our (relatively) secular society.
EVAN: Thank you, as always, for reading, and please vote!
There are certain things in life that can be avoided.
For all our howling about vapid, synthetic pop-songs we do, at the end of the day, have the ability to simply turn the radio off. For all our wailing about trashy, stupid television, we have the ability to just point our remote and switch off the TV. Even people who annoy us we can at least avoid.
But that’s not so much true when it comes to advertising. Unless you’re living in an underground bunker somewhere in Colorado, it’s not something you can get away from.
Why you’d even be reading this blog, I don’t know.
Between telemarketers, logos, TV and radio, billboards (including mobile ones, which we have in Vegas), and the internet, there’s really no escaping. Even if you’re sitting alone in your house, it’s all around you. You’ve got company emblems stitched onto your shirts. Manufacturer’s names written on your underwear. Go to your kitchen, and you’ll find advertisements on the back of pasta and cereal boxes.
I’m only here to offer some food for thought; I won’t be taking up myself the war cry that advertisements and commercials always play to the lowest common denominator. Sexuality in the crassest, most objectified form, greed, gluttony, envy, passivity, sloth (not the kind shown above)- it’s all there, and thrown at us every waking minute of every day of our lives. What does that do to us?
Most people who work with this line of thought point to the movie Idiocracy as a dark prophecy of the world to come.
In this movie, a man is (accidentally) cryogenically frozen and awakens in a dystopian future where advertising and trashy TV has resulted in the average human IQ dropping well into the double digits. While it’s not a masterpiece in and of itself, and it’s suggestion that dumb people have inherently dumb kids is just plain wrong, the fact that more and more our society seems to be moving towards Idiocracy is downright eerie.
I will, nonetheless, offer an alternative for you to ponder.
What if advertising is actually raising our BS awareness? Information on the internet is usually either (at best) misrepresented or (at worst) outright falsehood. We don’t seem dumber as a species for it- on the contrary, we seem more skeptical and discerning. Perhaps we are, in fact, becoming tougher to fool. Naturally I can’t point to any cause-and-effect relationship, but it’s certainly something to think about.
Of course, there’s the dark alternative to that as well.
What happens to our psyches and society when we’re constantly on-guard against everything? Is that paranoid cynicism really healthy for us? What does it do to us to hold everything in contempt as just another scheme to take away your money? Even if we tone that down a bit, what does it do to us to walk through life constantly being sold things? Cradle to grave, confronted by sales pitch after sales pitch- how can that be anything but damaging?
Again, this isn’t to simply rail against advertising. There’s plenty that advertising, well, I don’t want to say “does right,” but certainly does “well.” Managing to communicate messages or ideas in the shortest amount of time using the smallest amount of words and images is, well, impressive. The ability to remotely encode associations, emotions, and reactions in the human mind through slogans, catch phrases, campaigns and the like is undeniably clever, even if more than a little Orwellian.
Imagine if all that money, research, and manpower was put towards something actually constructive. Imagine even just a quarter of all advertising dedicated to communicating positive messages. How much more of an intelligent, healthy, compassionate society would we be? If nothing else, it would mean some telemarketers could do something more fulfilling with their lives than shilling out cruises in the Caribbean.
Normally, Thursdays here at Culture War Reporters is dedicated to “Fame Day,” in which Evan and I call attention to people, events, or trends we think aren’t getting the attention they deserve.
But not today.
Partly due to my illness, partly due to some unforeseen time constraints, and mostly because of the severity of the issue in question, today there will be no Fame Day.
Instead, we’ll be performing an emergency Shame Day on the subject of yesterday’s terrible news that five major internet service providers (ISPs) will be implementing a “six-strike” system on people suspected of copyright infringement.
Let me break it down for you.
Normally, when you sign up with an internet provider, exactly what you do or don’t do with your connection is entirely and exclusively your business. Whether it’s something as impressive as you doing an electric guitar cover of the hallelujah chorus or as lousy as writing a thousand comments calling that same YouTube video gay is all up to you. What you read, what you write, what you post, what you view- the ISP is simply there (as the name states) to provide internet.
Now you’re probably thinking “Hey- just don’t pirate stuff and you’ll be fine!” and you know what?
You’re right. You don’t have to pirate.
I’m taking over from this point on for a number of reasons. For the most part because although Gordon had good things to say, he didn‘t necessarily say them well, and in some cases didn’t make very much sense; we’re going to chalk that up to his recent illness. I will be relating to you what points of his that I can, while adding my own.
-Evan.
Gordon’s next point is that for the most part, many people pirate because of time and money. Focusing on time, the truth is that we can’t always guarantee that we’ll be at home on a Thursday night to catch The Office. Maybe we’re working another job [many of us need to], or maybe we just forgot. What options does this leave us?
For those of us in America, Hulu is always an option. The on-demand streaming site once provided a very broad range of TV programming, and Gordon points out that it’s a fantastic resource, or at least used to be. Nowadays, however, it’s a lot more difficult to use than it used to be. Hulu Plus, which requires a subscription, is needed to watch a lot of older shows, sometimes even episodes that aired a month ago, if New Girl is any indication. With one of the most convenient resources made less so, is it any wonder that so many people simply turn to torrents?
Gordon’s next point, and a very valid one, is this issue of the Six Strike System and how it relates to piracy. There’s an issue of what exactly is at stake here. Gordon insists that the answer to that is everything, and while I’m not fully with him on that, there’s some sense to what he’s saying.
The thing is that almost anything can be considered copyright infringement. YouTube covers, memes [which often use screenshots of shows like Futurama {see: our Shame Day image}], Gordon’s beloved gifs, even many of the pictures of this blog, in spite of being Photoshopped, don’t technically belong to us. Would we have our internet cut because we run this blog? [Answer: I wouldn’t, because I am Canadian.]
To finish off what Gordon wrote earlier today, the issue is that the people in question aren’t being penalized by an international agency, or even the state or federal government. The fact of the matter is that these ISPs are “using their lobbies to persecute and prosecute suspected users without due process” [quoting Gordon]. What truly incensed him more than anything, though, was the way they’re going about it. That they’re holding themselves up as Knights of Good when in reality they’re just proud that they’re “selectively picking off anyone their bosses deem a threat to their unending stream of profit.”
Piracy is not a subject I agree with Gordon on, and in fact I had a very hard time letting his last piece on the subject be put up on the blog. If people really, truly love art, whether it take the form of television or movies or video games they need to vote with their wallets and know that what they love is worth spending money on.
That being said, I do believe that what these ISPs are doing is wrong, particularly in that they have no one to be accountable but themselves. No business or corporation should have that right. Shame on these ISPs, and shame on the Center for Copyright Information.
What it does is speak volumes for the game’s publisher, Deep Silver, and those it hired to advertise the game. There was an emphasis placed on the feelings of terror and loss and the need to protect one’s family; it sought to set itself apart from other zombie games [of which there are so many]. Unfortunately the game turned out to be your fairly standard run-of-the-mill zombie hack and slash, but that’s not the point here.
The point is that this trend was actually continued in the promotion of the game’s sequel, Dead Island: Riptide, the trailer of which can be viewed here. The tone is once again consistent with that of the first, highlighting the terrors of a vacation gone horribly, horribly wrong. Which is great. And which is why the following seems so shockingly out of place.
“We deeply apologize for any offense caused by the Dead Island Riptide “Zombie Bait Edition”, the collector’s edition announced for Europe and Australia. Like many gaming companies, Deep Silver has many offices in different countries, which is why sometimes different versions of Collector’s Editions come into being for North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.
For the limited run of the Zombie Bait Edition for Europe and Australia, a decision was made to include a gruesome statue of a zombie torso, which was cut up like many of our fans had done to the undead enemies in the original Dead Island.
We sincerely regret this choice. We are collecting feedback continuously from the Dead Island community, as well as the international gaming community at large, for ongoing internal meetings with Deep Silver’s entire international team today. For now, we want to reiterate to the community, fans and industry how deeply sorry we are, and that we are committed to making sure this will never happen again.”
So no harm now foul, right? Dead Silver took back their horrible statuette and we can chalk another victory up for the internet! But why exactly were people upset? An article on Rock, Paper, Shotgun which I linked to but will link to again said this about it:
This is beyond disgusting. It’s as if someone were attempting to demonstrate the most misogynist idea that could possibly be conceived, in an attempt to satirise the ghastly trend. A text book example of the most extreme ends of misogynist fantasy, a woman reduced to nothing but her tits, her wounds hideously depicted in gore, jutting bones, and of course barely a mark covering her globular breasts.
It’s very prevalent in a lot of zombie imagery you can find nowadays, and it’s certainly present in this picture of a zombified Snow White on the left. Her body is mutilated [appropriately so, for a zombie] but her breasts remain completely untouched. There’s this sense of the grotesque from the image as a whole, but her chest remains an object of potential titillation.
I don’t think I have to say too much about how grossly sexist this is, and how prevalent it is in the society we live in. What I am going to say is thank God that on some level we can make enough of a public outcry to stop stuff like this before it happens. The bottom line is this: if we as a community [on the internet or otherwise] care enough about something, we really can do something about it. Even if it’s just stopping the production and sales of a tasteless statue.
This is going to be a fairly short post, you guys. I leave for a college reunion in about an hour, and am running a little short on time. Maybe stay tuned for a longer one tonight, though.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while [and really, who has?] then you probably know how I feel about movie trailers and previews. I was more excited than anything for this year’s The Avengers, but the amount of content they put out before its release was almost enough to rid me of a lot of my excitement for the movie.
On last night’s episode of Conan brought in director J. J. Abrams, and with him a clip from the sequel Star Trek into Darkness. Fans all over America huddled in front of their TVs in anticipation, only to see this:
The clip is all of three frames long.
Understandably viewers were more than a little disappointed. Honestly, I was as invested in the franchise as the average Trekkie, I imagine I would be too. Abrams lets us know leading up to the teaser that this is a scene where Spock is in a suit of some kind and is also in a volcano. Cue scene, cue outrageous applause from audience.
That might’ve been great for the studio audience, but not so much for people in their homes. Still, it’s good that a 2013 film has the restraint to not start bombarding people with footage.
And speaking of restraint, it seems like that’s what anyone who’s into film needs nowadays. It was my own fault that I found out exactly why the armour Stark wears in Iron Man 3 is the Mark XLVII. Do not look it up, it is a huge, enormous spoiler that will let you know a major plot point, as well as cause you to curse your need to know more and more bitterly.
With the way internet and the media work today, spoilers and leaks abound. It’s up to the viewers who want to preserve their theatre viewing experience to keep a modicum of self-control and not constantly keep checking comic book movie sites [this is more a message to myself than anything else].
What I’m trying to say is, be grateful, Star Trek fans. You have over half a year until Into Darkness comes out. Three seconds should be enough to tide you over for at least another month.
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