this is an elaboration of my Twitter and other such micro-blogs.

In regard to the title, I think it’s bullshit. I love Halloween. I love Autumn and I love carving Jack-O-Lanterns. In fact, I even love that other people dress up. And I’m not really even all that aggro about the assertion that Halloween lets everyone express their inner-whatever. I will say, though, that the default choices for women are either Sexy/Slutty [occupation] or princess is pretty lame. Ultimately it isn’t even about what other people are doing that compels me to retire from the concept of getting into a costume.

Rather, I just don’t like it. that really sums it up. And if I can use Halloween as an excuse to get people to do something once a year that they normally would prefer not to do, it’s watch an obscene number of horror movies. Or maybe tell ghost stories and do shots of silly Halloween themed drinks. If people want to get dressed up, shit, float your boat, man. Seeing as how Halloween is Christmas for me I should be able to participate in the holiday any way I choose. Hell, it doesn’t matter what Halloween means to me, I’m going to celebrate the season of the witch how I want, regardless.

To me, the spirit of the season isn’t about makeup. It’s about taking advantage of the beautiful weather and stunning color palette to really get into the “spooky” mood like no other time of year can offer.

Not as much of a hot-button issue like abortion or politics, everyone has an opinion about suicide. My thoughts on this don’t really justify a full sized blog, but it’s too big to Twitter. If someone you know is contemplating suicide, they’re essentially going to fall into two camps: they really want to die or they really want a hug.

If they really want to die, you probably won’t ever know until they’re dead and you have to read the note, if they left one, to find out why they ended their own life. They aren’t just depressed, they’re actually suicidal.

If you know they want to commit suicide, they probably don’t really want to commit suicide. I know, none of this is news to anybody.

I think anyone has a right to take their own life, and I think it’s sad that they don’t choose to weather the storm and see it through to better days. Having said that, if someone has no intention of killing themselves, perhaps they feel like they want to die but they really know that they could never do it (taking a greater-than-recommended amount of sleeping pills to off yourself isn’t a suicide attempt either), is disgusting and weak. I’m fairly callous on this issue. I have no pity for people who claim to want to kill themselves to get their friends to rally around them and make them feel wanted.

Digital Rights Management simply does not make life easier for the consumer. Let me add my DRM horror story to the rising din of discontent with this virtual gatekeeper of intellectual property.

Compared to most of my friends, my (digital) music collection is rather anemic. I’m still engaged in the process of ripping all of my CDs and I’m not even really halfway done with it. It’s so much easier to just buy new music digitally. I use the Zune marketplace and it is surprisingly accommodating to my somewhat esoteric tastes. I was just over two thousand songs or so. Note: I said “was.” Now I have slightly more than 800 songs. One morning about a month ago I woke up and an error message was centered on my monitor warning me that my Zune Pass had expired (Zune offers unlimited music for a monthly subscription fee). I do not have a pass, I do not want one. So I dismissed the warning and checked to make sure my music collection wasn’t effected in any way regarding this unexpected event. No problems until the aforementioned update, in which case the Zune desktop software would fail upon launch, post-update. Irritating. There was an error message with a long url of cryptic alphanumerics that I really did not feel like typing manually into my browser (conveniently, the string of text was not selectable). I relented to the long url and discovered that my DRM must have been corrupt. I was instructed to rename the directory (a Zune specific dir) and allow the Zune to create a new directory, which I did. A new version of that directory was automatically created by the Zune software as it did not crash. Good stuff. Where’s my music? I check the music folder – all the artists’ directories are still there, album art where it should be – no fucking music! What music remains has screwed up ID3 tags.

It’s important to this little entry to note the following: I have spent a ridiculous number of hours correcting ID3 tags, tracking down the correct album art for EVERY album should the Zune not provide it (I’ve even double checked the album art at Discogs.com, a great site for music discographies). I’m more organized with my music collection than I am with my house, my bank account and my own life.

Some of my music is so old that I don’t even remember where it comes from, whereas some of it is old stuff ripped from CDs that friends would let me borrow for 10 minutes. In other words, not all of it is replaceable, despite the nature of the electronic format (that is to say, “easily” copied or distributed). Additionally, all of that work I did ripping and tagging CDs must now be duplicated, all for DRM that was applied to all my music, including music that wasn’t purchased from the marketplace. Even worse, some of the music I purchased from the marketplace isn’t showing that I bought it – which means that I am now expected to buy it again. Well, I’m not going to. I supported artists that I liked and I shelled out real money for property I cannot now prove I really owned. Yes, I am going to torrent as much of my collection as I can retrieve, but I know some stuff I will have to break down and repurchase because they are too obscure and were not purchased in mainstream music stores (like, where the fuck did I get the Phantom Dust soundtrack from?).

My friend told me a story about a week ago about his Viva Piñata garden that was wiped out by malicious, um, piñatas. He described the amount of work that went into his garden and lamented its destruction after so much investment. The next day he called to tell me that it was a blessing in disguise, and that he applied what he had learned the first time to optimize his garden v2.0. The upshot was that he was able to start clean with much more knowledge to manage and grow a new garden from the ground up. I’m looking at my music collection the same way: it’s much easier to reorganize things by starting over with a more optimized system than it is to try and restructure the old foundation (changing the wheels on a moving car, so to speak).

So, now, with a drastically reduced library, I am forced to rebuild my music library. It absolutely sucks that I have to do this, and while starting over will, hopefully, yield a more organized collection, although I still wouldn’t choose to do things this way (I mean, really, with music, you just remove a song you don’t like and that’s that.) In either case, I will find DRM-removal tools and in the future I will kill all signs of DRM, I suggest you do the same.

Quote

McCain-Palin Rally Attendees: "Obama Is A Terrorist"

This is embarassing and aggrivating. It doesn't matter whether or not you are a Democrat, and Republican or any other affiliation; to be this ignorant, uninformed and mean-spirited is simply the most disgusting thing I can think of.

I bought a PSP recently, having changed my mind on two things, buying Sony hardware and portable gaming. I had entertained the idea of getting a PSP for around a year, mainly because I just wanted to play the GTA Vice City game. What finally sold me was the integrated internet radio which is awesome (and hopefully won’t go away). Initially, I didn’t think that there were more than a few fun games to play on the thing.

Turns out I am wrong. I’m buying more and more games for this thing, and while the quality is PS2-era (not bad, in my opinion, since I can remember when the Gameboy had no color, black pixels on a green background) the upshot is that, unlike the so-called next-gen/current-gen consoles, games are cheap to develop and cheap to buy. I’m not going to sell this thing, but a crappy game seems less crappy when you only spent nine bucks on it.

I've been listening to podcasts for four years now, producing them for three. In the beginning, it was a community of people akin to those people, like me, who would record their own "radio shows" on a tape deck when they were kids. Podcasting is unfettered social media; people creating relevant, entertaining, uncensored media, for free, for everyone.

One of the things I noticed, being a podcaster, was that despite the open nature of the media (anyone can do it, free software a little server overhead) there is no rush of people out there producing content. I thought that everyone would want to do something like this, but it turns out I was wrong. And that’s okay I suppose, as there are already enough half-assed shows out there to sift through just to get to the good ones anyway. But another problem crystallized for me the other day, and it wasn’t a lack of quality.

Traditional media wants to get in on the new media action. That’s okay too, because if there is one thing you can expect, the production on those shows is obviously very good. Of course, all we are getting with those productions is the made-for-TV content, so it’s bundled with censorship and maybe sometimes, a little over produced. While some podcasts are unlistenable due to bad editing, crappy recording equipment or just zero ability of the host to actually speak, some of the low-fi stuff has it’s charm, like old Misfits recordings.

But I’ll take the low fidelity, and I’ll even accept some commercials or in-show plugs. If you’re a podcaster and you can make money doing it, more power to you. But this new trend is emerging and I just don’t like it. It taints the podcast DNA. I’m talking about large media companies taking their shows and releasing truncated “teasers” of the broadcast programs to promote their shows. So you get 10 – 15 minutes of a show and it will just cut off. It’s a glorified trailer.

It seems like people have taken to the internet to get more control over how they watch and share their entertainment experiences, and the TV people just can’t stand it. They release a so-called podcast, and for a minute it seems like they get it, then you realize that, yet again, the TV people have don't what they do so well – wasted your time with advertisements. Thankfully we have the choice to not listen to their abridged, self-promoting content, but the fact that are here is creepy, waiting and watching for the moment they can jump in and “monetize” everything to the point where people will say “remember when all this stuff was free? And you didn’t need a license to podcast?”

I wanted to write and article about where I think social websites are going, but I want to blog the idea first, maybe get some ideas to text first. I don't know, maybe it's not even an idea worth exploring.

I hear the question (or I'm asked, when the discussion comes around to my own interactions with such things) "what is the point of social networking sites?" It's easy to see the novelty of sites like Facebook or MySpace. It's difficult, perhaps for some, to see the point.

If you look at social networking sites right now, as they are, all you are likely to see is a loose collection of similar services being offered by different websites competing for netizen mindshare. Videos, images, blogs and SMS broadcasting all being categorized, geotagged and cross-referenced by proximity, similarity, preference and genre. Millions of people getting to know each other better, not by direct contact but the distribution of personal affects. Memoirs, vanity videos and photographs mapping out a virtual identity more fully realized than the corporeal counterpart. The physical self is relegated to quotidian tasks such as labor, housework and other chores less interesting. Virtual identities are the playful, adventurous or just generally more interesting alter ego.

In the early Nineties the term "Fringe" was used a lot describe the emerging counter-culture of technology as it poised to explode into the mainstream. This was just before the popularization of the World Wide Web, when dial-ups were the norm and people would interact on a BBS via a phone number, not a forum with a URL. Those people were usually hackers and the discussions were usually tech-heavy or, as it may surprise some, philosophy. There was a lot of talk about "designer reality" which is essential Intelligent Design over oneself, controlling the perception of the self by means of managing what people know about you and how much.

Online personas give people the ability to do that, and social networks exhibit the desire. It isn't a matter of privacy, it's a matter of controlling perception. Certainly, there are gray areas there, but for the most part, those people losing jobs because of their party pictures are often posted by the owner, on the owner's social site. Exhibition in this medium is about creating a persona, and as more people become involved with social sites, what will wind up happening is that the sites won't be responsible for building the community, the community will simply migrate from elsewhere, or incorporate the site / service into the social community. It's already happening.

The future of social networks will obviously evolve beyond what it is today, it won't even be recognizable. Part of that evolution is the facilitation of the persistent virtual individual. Websites will be little more than services that offer streaming video and picture slide-shows directly to the desktop, presuming we have any idea of what that desktop might be like. But imagine a universal You, where you no longer write out a long list of "likes/dislikes" for every site because it will be integrated into everything that you do and everywhere you go. Somewhere between the 3D avatars of Second Life and the the flat landscape of data-driven websites is where we will exist, not anonymously (unless we so choose) but as a real person without physicality, and a reputation and identity that follows us to every locale on the internet. Some people won't be ready for that, but many people will be. That is the future of social internet.

Now it all seems excessively silly to me. Not the concept, of course. The open exchange of ideas is the hallmark of democracy, and the single most important characteristic in a social entity. For me, the definition of contemporary politics in America is a MacGuffin, in other words it's a public spectacle that everyone is invited to participate in to make American's feel as though they are somehow contributing to the Federal process of governing. To a degree it is, because I still vote and I encourage everyone to do so this November. But the American public isn't the driving motivation nor is it the significant influence over the decisions and actions of politicians. It seems to me that we only exist to serve as the audience to which the government officials perform. It just isn't amusing to me anymore.

As a younger man with perhaps more patience and less empirical knowledge, watching a politician tell bold-faced lies and then take a moral high ground while invoking the will of the American people was something that I could debate and argue until the sun came up. And maybe it wasn't the accelerated callousness of recent administrations that made me cynical, but the zeal of those who consider themselves the vessels of their chosen party's message. Listening to regular people pander and justify a politicians behavior simply because they are a Republican or a Democrat. In my mind, an intelligent individual makes a determination of what they believe and then uses that as a barometer with which to gauge the actions of others. This is not happening as much I would assume it should. A long time ago I pointed to apathy as the thing that would pave the way to an America that is far below what it could be, or should be.

Now I realize I was wrong, it isn't apathy that will corrupt us, it is conformity. I know some Republicans that HATE a Democratic politician that they never even heard of months ago, simply because of party affiliation. It's like watching sports: it's not about real issues, its about you team winning. Win, and Win at all costs. Politics was different, it seems, when I was younger. I was shaking my fist against the government and fair treatment of the people well before I was aware of any partisan battle of parties that would seek to destroy the other party rather than agree to disagree.

Politics has changed along with the evolution of information technology and inexpensive manufacturing of media. It's always been a little exhibitionist, but now it's full tilt entertainment. Go back and watch some older debates, then watch debates between John Kerry and George Bush during the 2004 Presidential campaign. Say nothing of the Republican debates broadcast along with hand-picked YouTube netizens. Politics now seems about choosing sides. Of course, everything gets old at some point, and this new media punditocracy will get boring for the YouTube generation and people will begin seeking real answers to their questions, and when party partisanship fails the government as a whole will have to answer for it's negligence, and on that day a true revolution will have occurred.

A slightly younger version of myself made it a point to be seen. I think that's good, if that's your goal. Certainly, it isn't everyone's. It's also why I think A) it's so easy and B) many people don't like it - they don't understand why it's so important. It isn't. But it is fun.

There are enough opinions, theories and books on the reasons and motivations people have to be the center of attention, so it's not even worth my time to dwell on that. But I very much sought the attention of my peers. Not only would I do just about anything for attention, I used that drive for the spotlight to experiment and learn some things. It was the best education I ever received, and I think last week I graduated.

The Combichrist concert at the Troc in Philly. A good friend of mine, Derek, looked over the balcony with me from the bar area. Watching the industrial culture evolve for survival was awesome. The audience, mostly between 5 - 10 years younger than me (which doesn't necessarily make me an elder statesman so much as just a little older), was almost like a different generation. In terms of culture, that's likely accurate. These were the genetic progeny of punk from the 70's all the way through to the electronica and pop-music mainstream of today. Skulls on black clothing and mohawks spliced with bright splashes of color and designer accessories. Things had changed, these possessed anti-authoritarianism with a polished Mtv self-awareness. That's what they grew up with, especially those who were a decade my juniors. And ten years ago, they would have been driven out of town for being fake or for trying to be hard. But this new cultural generation, it's what they know. For them, it is real. It's their reality.

Fifteen years ago and counting backwards, punks and weirdos of all walks probably all pretended that an invisible camera followed them, showcasing their plumage to an invisible audience of admirers who appreciated the effort that went into their outre appearance and behavior. Today, the new generation doesn't have to pretend. Mobile camera phones and reality shows have heightened our sense of awareness and participation in the observation of every single person who begs for attention. It's not pretentious or fake at all; it's a way of life.

As we observed this social offspring of Britney Spears and Al Jourgensen from atop our hanging beer garden, I was not surprised to find myself happy with what I was seeing. I understand that, as any organism, a culture must evolve to perpetuate itself in the struggle for survival.

I have a friend who never wanted to come to clubs with me because he said, in a manner of speaking, the people in nightclubs intimidated him. For years I mistook that to mean that the environment was overwhelming for someone who was new to it.

Thinking back, I believe I was wrong. For guys, there is some sort of unspoken, masculine conflict in clubs. Part of it is the obvious, alpha-male "I'm here to get laid and you better not get in my way" sort of testosterone non-verbal communication. There also exists a more specific, and somehow sinister, breed of male who projects an almost animal ferocity in these environments. Now, I could be off base here, but I sincerely do not think so. For some men, the alpha-male thing is simply knee-jerk, like flinching when an object whizzes by your face. But for some other guys, they are looking for some kind of rite of passage. I could easily characterize this sort of male, but I think it's best to allow people to maintain their own mental image of this guy, because everyone has met him, in one form or another. Empirically, I've seen drug dealers and small-time gang leaders exhibit this behavior. They look like they want to kill you, and they've never even said hi to you. You can see it, in the way they look at everything  -they believe they own it. And if they don't own it, they can destroy it.

Once, at a club with my friend Rob (he knew a ton of guys like this), went off somewhere to do something, by way of a typically vague explanation of implied shadiness, accompanied by the Alpha Male. The Alpha instructed me (Yeah, he fucking instructed me!) to look after his ridiculously gorgeous girlfriend while the two went on their inexplicable journey of importance. "Keep an eye on her." No Problem. The conversation was relatively limited, but I opened with "He seems like a nice guy, where'd you get him?" She missed the joke, and just said that he was an asshole that that she was surprised he was letting me "watch" her. Probably not a compliment. What I took from the ensuing dialogue was that theirs was a relationship of necessity and not of anything resembling genuine trust or emotion. Read: He was built like a brick shithouse and (from what I gathered) had money; she was dizzyingly attractive and shallow. She did mention that she admired his strength (which, no doubt, he never wasted an opportunity to demonstrate). So, power is an aphrodisiac and beautiful people must date each other, no matter how much they find happiness eludes them.

I tell that story to illustrate something, despite how judgmental is may be (please, we're all judgmental, so let's cut the bullshit): I know a few other relationships like this - more than a few actually. You get these predatory men, who seem to get off more on exhibiting their male dominance than the super-model-tier women they have snaked around their arms, and the women are so shallow and vapid that they'd rather suffer these emotionless relationships than to be seen in public with anything "average." You can distinguish these people immediately, by looking them straight in the eye. See, most people stare back at you. They see you. But not the Alpha Males and Alpha Females - they see through you, like they're hunting for something, something you can't see unless you were to ever get to their level. And if you do happen to get to that level, and they see you - you become a threat. Same reason you aren't supposed to look dogs in the eyes. Functioning on an almost instinctive level of urban-crafted behavior, these people have always given me the creeps. No ability to reason or rationalize outside of their rigid and uncompromising coda of territory and communication.

Coming to terms with your failures is very hard to do. Dealing with the consequences can seem damn near impossible. Sometimes it seems almost as if there is a ticker running through your thoughts: "What Am I going To Do? What Am I Going To Do?" and no answer forthcoming.

My personal reality is built around justifying my actions. It's probably like that for many people. The actions left unjustified are the one we never gave any consideration to, the little things. They build up, and blind-side you. Sometimes they can be dismissed, and other times you are held accountable. Since you never paid attention, you get a different perspective on them. No good reason for why they happened. Often times these little things painfully highlight our flaws as people and we are caught red-handed, embarrassed, and frustrated.

We can beat ourselves up for being careless, but we can forgive ourselves just as easily; and we often do. But when other people are involved, forgiveness isn't always as attainable. What happens then? Some will try to fix it, never knowing what good it might do. Others will walk away from it, no longer willing to get involved in the complicated and tangled mess of sorting out the problems.

Ultimately, when the mistake is ours, our best hope is to filter out that behavior and avoid similar mistakes in the future. Also, it helps to observe the little things, every day. Some of our biggest mistakes may be made not with a single decision, but a series of overlooked issues that may have seemed too small to deal with at any given moment.

Getting older has some built-in benefits. Beyond demanding that you accept it or find yourself forever lamenting "better days," the hormones find their equilibrium as you cross the threshold from the Twenties into the Thirties (apparently this is supposed to happen during a person's second decade of life, although I haven't found this to be entirely true - I guess the Thirties really are the new Twenties!). And to be honest, I don't think learned behavior from adolescence ever ends, it just lessens in frequency. So this self-fulfilling prophecy of thirty-something Zen lends an opportunity for some retrospection (I'd be lying if I said I haven't been doing this since twenty five). Looking back at my first ten years of true independence, I'm actually quite surprised to discover at how difficult I find it to consider those my "prime" years. No, not difficult, impossible. Certainly, I weighed less and was in far better shape, which is always preferable; and many of the adventures that were borne out of a sheer disregard for my well-being, safety and freedom from imprisonment definitely leave me with some stories to tell. However, I have not yet once looked upon those ten years with a desire to repeat them. Ever. Moreover, I think about the opportunities that I missed and bridges I burned. And I know that this is the exact summation of the adage "Hindsight is 20/20." But with a solid cache of experience to now draw from, I think the future also gains some clarity.

I'm just not sure I can fully appreciate the hostility that many of my peers seem to have towards marketing and advertising. Often referred to as "mindpsace," the exclusion of advertising from all public space, be audible or visible, so that while I'm walking around I am not unjustly subjected to the evils of advertising.

While I acknowledge the power of suggestion, I reject the notion that I am incapable of making personal decision as a result of commercial inundation. They are, after all, merely suggesting that I eat McDonalds for dinner (or what-have-you). Granted, advertising has a way of seeping into pop culture and actually defining certain aspects of it (or re-defining it, as would arguably be the case for Christmas). But still, I fail to see where there is an inherent evil in:

1. Someone or some company trying to sell me something based on target demographic research
2. The fact that just about every flat surface in any urban area, and many suburban areas, has some kind of ad posted on it

I actually like advertisements. Often times they can be colorful, interesting, informative, attractive, inspired, and even aggravating (my new hobby: rating TV commercials - without bad there can be no good!). And certainly, in a rapidly changing and growing capitalist economy, advertising can help keeps costs down, provided the advertiser is given some prominent address. So, in order to get things we like for free or inexpensively, all we have to do is put up with posters or commercials?

That brings me back to "mindspace." I take this to mean that people want to be left alone with their thoughts without the intrusion of some advertisement or talking head trying to sell them something. Or perhaps, the commercial acts as an intermediary between what the consumer wants to consume, and the media/product they want. A good example here is the 30-second commercials that have become commonplace with websites offering online video; a user clicks on a link to watch video footage, and before the video starts an ad for soda comes up. I've heard people complain about this "new" paradigm (it's really not new at all). Yet, the user fails to take into account the cost of the server to store the video and the bandwidth to broadcast that video to the many people who will view it (plus the cost of technical people to get the video web-ready, build the site and the video player along with all the other nuance involved). Traditionally, those costs would be offset to the user, but now they simply throw in a commercial for advertisers willing to buy airtime for people's attention (ie, "mindspace" - as if peoples' attention span requires it's own room!) and the user no longer is required to buy into a subscription plan - it's free. The real problem is that people have very limited ability to pay attention, and 30 seconds is about all they can focus on for anything, so by the time the commercial is over they've already lost interest in the content they were waiting for!

Ads are designed by networks of people who find employment by it. Many ads offer creative outlets for artists, models and actors who can actually make a living in a medium (art) traditionally reserved for heroin addicts, the hungry, and trust-fund kids who want to piss off their parents. And I would gladly let sponsors and advertisers slap ads on my house, car and clothes if they paid for things like... my house, car and clothes.

Personally I'd like to play it. Sounds interesting. Anyway, the Christians have a certain perception about the world they live in, and this game reflects that. The game sounds like it caters to the hard-line Christian dogma and I, for one, am not even remotely offended. It's really and truly amusing.

But I still want to see this game take a beating in the press. Not because people like me are being murdered in Post-Rapture America by Christian Crusaders because we have views that differ from those avenging Christians. No, I want the game to get as much shit as the Christians give other violent video games because they subject matter is supposed to be deleterious to the minds of impressionable, and presumably sheltered, children. Any argument henceforth proffered by those Christians who see the value in the game could then be used as a metaphor for why they should lay off of other video games (GTA comes to mind). Does a certain media-obsessed litigator from Florida find this game amusing or wholesome? Or is this a murder simulator as well? If it is, does this mean that Christian zealots find violence acceptable when training their army for God?

For the record, I don't even believe that. This game isn't trying to train kids to be killers for god. Some Christian developers are trying to find a synergy between what kind of games the kids like and the Christian philosophy. Strange bedfellows to be sure, but these people are just trying to get kids' attention by speaking their language - violent video games.

Whether or not this game takes a media beating, I doubt the more stoic Christians will ever see the correlation between this game and anything similar yet strongly decried, such as GTA. Ideally, this situation could bridge the gap that some of these religious groups may need to understand that a video game is not a training ground - it's just meant to be fun (something I'm sure the developers of this game mean for it to be) and maybe learn a few harmless stereotypes along the way (are the Jews on the "Good" side or the "Bad?").

I've finally entered the portable media market. Shit, I was late to the CD party too, still clinging to my dusty, chipped cassettes. I don't drag my feet for any specific reason, as that would betray my compulsively early-adopter tendencies. The fact of the matter is that, obsessed with technology as I am, I still maintain a modicum of pragmatic consumerism. I just never needed an MP3 player.

That has changed now and for my first outing I went with the Zune. I chose the Zune for a few reasons: Microsoft has done an immense about-face with their product offerings. They just had to, or more ambitious upstarts like Google would just bury them in hyper-evolved business models. MS has taken some tremendous strides in building a cohesive product experience across the board for much of their offering. I'm of course referring to "X" Live. Starting with XBox Live Microsoft has consistently impressed me and has won me over as a bona fide fanboy. This is reason #1 I went with the Zune. That, and I just don't like Apple. Not the products, but the people who use them. Apple fans share the same kind of in-your-face zeal not to different from the Vegans who haunt Rittenhouse Square and insist on holding "Meat Is Murder" pamphlets only inches from your face with a determined diatribe intended to heap guilt upon your soul for eating an animal and wearing it's hide. Even if I ever considered a meatless diet, I am overwhelmed with the need to counter that dogma by representing an opposing force to it. Thus, I have no love for Apple.

The second reason I chouse the Zune, and the ultimate purpose for my writing this, is the Wifi. And it's important to note that I understood from the beginning that the wifi was, at least for now, intended to beam songs to other Zune players with a limitation of 3 days or 3 plays, in which the song could then be flagged for purchase via the Zune desktop software. Not too bad, considering that the record labels were probably frothing at the mouth at the thought of being able to sue MS for building a device that supported and encouraged P2P filesharing. MS played it safe and even offered the record industry (the actual name of the governing body escapes me) a dollar on each sale of the Zune while limiting the wifi so that the record industry would back off and let MS build this network aspect.

Yet, we have every Zune detractor (re: iPod lovers who insist on prefixing "Microsoft's would-be iPod Killer" to the word Zune) flailing their arms about the obvious and inevitable demise of the Zune, along with a litany of reason that it has no hope of survival. And the biggest complaint has been the wifi. It just surprised me that, for something that apparently sucks - people are talking a lot about it, and ultimately looking twice to find that it is, in fact, a good media player.

The original Xbox certainly received its fair share of doomsday forecasts only to evolve into a trendsetting console by it's second iteration. The Zune, too, will come unto it's own and there will be a time when people can't recall a time when anyone thought the Zune actually sucked.

Quote

George Bush: Mistaken
''Every time you criticize the government, a terrorist gets a foot massage.'' -hategun


Courtesy of IFILM