Posts by Russell Brown
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A busy boy with more pressing matters:
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2007/04/twins_1.html
Seems to be no risk of being kicked out of bed for farting at Kiwiblog.Wow. That is banal. And quite the crowd in there too.
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I'd wger that some of the left sympathy for Islam is more of an alliance of convenience - you know, they are clearly focused on their traditional enemies in the centre or right, and anyone who is not of the latter is a potential ally to be co-opted.
I don't have sympathy for Islam, any more than I have sympathy for Christianity. I have sympathy for people, especially if they personally haven't done anything to piss me off.
That's what guided my view on the Danish cartoons. I don't care a fig what a mad mullah thinks, but I thought it was unnecessary for a fellow New Zealander to have to open his or her morning paper to see something they'd find wounding and offensive. Or, I guess, sell that paper from their dairy ...
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I still have fond memories of young Jimmy amassing a decent score in our back yard a few years ago. He had a decent eye on him and knew when to nick a run.
As I recall, he threaded a succession of boundaries through point.
And he didn't black my eye with a straight drive unlike you Mr B!
Oh. Yeah. Not the best way to thank your host, was it? Still, at least we weren't playing with a hard ball ...
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__Simon- the April fools may turn out to the people who who aren't thinking this laterally. It looked more like a sound business structure than most anything I've seen.__
which I think was Bob Lefsetz's point and its one he makes in non April 1 posts quite often. He tends to ramble on a lot in his emails (and sometimes you get three a day) but amongst the rambles there is much truth and sense.
As a radical idea, it's a step off the cliff - who knows if you'll fly? The main problem I can see is conversion. The experience is that the moment you make a free content service paid you lose at least 90% of your audience.
What's to stop the Limewire audience decamping to free services? Maybe that wouldn't happen here (and Leftsetz' point about universities taking bulk licences to cover their assess is insightful) but it's not guaranteed.
Maybe some emusic-style halfway house where your fee gets you x number of downloads (you can upload as much as you want), but can be topped up, would be more palatable.
Advertising income shouldn't be discounted either, if it can be accomodated. It has the massive benefit of getting people paid without (usually) breaking the fundamental dynamic of the network.
But that also has its problems: in the case of TV, it's hard to see how a distribution model provides the kind of advertising revenue that pays for news operations and top-flight dramas.
Something is going to come out of leftfield and nail this, though. It's just a matter of when.
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A micropayment or traffic based system is also problematic, if I've understood you correctly. I think perhaps you may be over-estimating the sophistication of our ISP's or their back office systems if you think it could be easily created or monitored.
Lots of people have looked at this kind of idea. One of the problems is that if you paid out on the flow of content, the porn industry would pocket a whole lot of the money.
The idea that you find a way to monetise without destroying the internet dynamic is really appealing, but it's pretty hard to to do.
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However I don't agree that providing complainants with anonymity had a dampening effect on the media. I saw both print and TV examples along the lines of "Look, the report says this terrible thing happened in 1983, and another terrible thing here in 1985, and yet another in 1986..."
Of course. And I looked for that stuff in the report too. But it makes it more about what happened - rather than having the likes of Steve Cook chasing people and trying to get them to talk. I was actually thinking of Fran O'Sullivan's column, which implied the whole thing would be useless because it didn't name names.
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as I know better than most, you can't run a record label on fumes. Only two NZ hip hop albums have ever really sold any real quantities and sadly neither are on Dawn Raid. It's also not smart to go on TV and boast about how much money you've made...
Indeed. They had three #1 singles and several more Top 10, but that just means they got a lot of radioplay.
But I thought the clothing and studio businesses and the Boost Mobile sponsorships were providing the income to support the business. Clearly not.
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well said bro.
Have you noticed how right on the comments in the Herald views have been? The public's not as silly as some people think.....Actually, I'm really quite struck by the liveliness and quality of the discussion here __and__there. People think about this stuff, clearly.
Although the morons who sniped at Bic Runga need to get a life ...
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professional sports involves the likes of Sky convincing people that sports are something you watch on TV, not something you spend your Saturday doing.
One thing that never gets said when people bitch and unfavourably compare New Zealand's sporting attainment with Australia is that our participation in sports is notably higher than theirs.
It bugs me when people blather on about schools not making kids compete hard enough; playing sport's meant to be healthy and, above all, fun.
My kids are never going to be cut out for organised team sports, but we've spent plenty of time playing cricket and frisbee in the park.
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Books and drugs ...
Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, for obvious reasons.
D.T. Suzuki's Introduction to Zen Buddhism: For a while, I always had it in my ex-army gasmask bag when I was tripping in London. I never got past the first few pages, but it felt nice having it there.
Mezz Mezzrow's Really the Blues: The life's story of a trouble-prone 1920s white jazz player and chronic bullshitter who thought he was black. Perhaps the greatest marijuana book ever. Even more than ...
Jack Margolis and Richard Clorfene's A Child's Garden of Grass: A daft but incredibly funny book.
Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters: One of Kerouac's girlfriends has her say. I read it in a no-sleep night, on trains, and back at my folks' place, after a Wellington journalist gave me some of her diet pills. I felt very Beat.
Plus The Tao of Physics and other pop-quantum-physics books that made perfect sense when I was high, and more Jung than is probably sensible.
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