tantastik dot org

I woke up early on Saturday hoping to get a head start on the weekend. There was much to do this weekend, including visiting my parents and downloading New Moon. Yes, it’s probably only available in shaky camcorder TeleSync, but there are times that you might crave a Tim Horton’s double-double coffee and even though you know fully well that you are lactose intolerant, you still just have to have it. The aftermath of these decisions are altogether rather similar.

Imagine my surprise when I went to mininova.org and all I saw were globally available and legal torrents. Boring! But of course, I wasn’t that surprised. How surprised can you be when yet another popular torrent indexing site goes down. In fact, I was usually surprised when I would go to the site and see that it was still up. And profitable, despite its .org designation. I never did find out which charity it was supporting.

They didn’t even bother being discreet, since they based their domain name on suprnova.org — its original predecessor. You can’t run a bit torrent indexing site and expect it to be kept a secret for very long (I tried to keep it to myself for as long as possible). Even oink.me.uk, a referral only and registration-based music distribution site couldn’t remain hidden for more than a week. Of course, there’s also the golden rule of the Internet: If you want to keep something a secret on the Internet, don’t tell Google.

Mother BREIN

I’ve actually been following the ongoing saga on Torrent Freak for the past year or so. I started following these cases since oink went down. These legal battles interest me, more because I am continually amazed at the blatant idiocy of these giant lobby groups like BREIN.EU, the most recent public enemy since the RIAA stopped suing dead grandmothers. Once all the torrent sites moved to Europe, BREIN revealed itself to the public and joined in the whack-a-mole game, that these recording industry lobby groups love so much, of trying to take down every single web site that even mentions torrents.

File sharing and torrents have instantly capitalized on the distributed nature of the Internet and suddenly you have a global distribution network overnight. Why don’t recording industry executives like this? They can’t figure out how to make money from it and they can’t control it. The fear of not being able to control the distribution has caused them to deny its very existence and they will destroy what they don’t understand.

The irony is that the typical person that purchases CDs probably wouldn’t know how to use Bit Torrent anyway. Its not like Mininova had a user manual or a tutorial or even a 1-800 call center.

Try explaining how Bit Torrent works to your mother, and by the time you’re done, she’s already at Zellers buying Season 2 of Quantum Leap for you for Christmas. “Stop wasting your time, you need to get me a bag of rice,” she says. She’s right though. Trying to download Season 2 of Quantum Leap when there are only 3 seeders (and they’re all in Sweden) is a daunting task.

So now what? Am I to watch G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra TS camcorder edition for the 10th time? I can barely make out Sienna Miller with all this pixelation and I missed a tight-spandex moment when someone’s head bobbed up and blocked the projector. What kind of shoddy video recording workmanship is this?

How should we rally to go against giant lobby groups like BREIN? The more I read about these legal cases, the more discouraged I am at the disorganized nature of my fellow revolutionists; a group of dissidents that can’t even agree on how to pronounce “warez” (is it two syllables or one?); a group of rebels who take great pleasures in typos that are ruining the English language. To think that some day, “pwned” or “noob” could be added to the English dictionary. That would be ‘teh suck’.

As much as I would hope for an end to the BREINs of the world, I can’t help but wonder  how this particular group could ever become organized enough to make a real stand, let alone be capable of withstanding a cross-examination without reverting to anxiety attacks, several games of Halo and consequently bad-mouthing their enemies on mIRC. After all, I use to be –and still am to some extent (but I suck at Halo)– one of them.

I have been working on my writing assignments for my feature writing class. I’ll soon post it up, but in the meantime, listen to some music.

Mix Tape v2.0

It took me a while to realize what exactly it was rubbing the back of my leg. Something pointed, knobby even, jabbing consistently into my hamstring. A half-quarter turn of my head revealed my tormentor as he screamed out, “WEEZEERRR!!” He topped it off by lifted his arms high into the air, while simultaneously making the ‘W’ symbol with his hands. With a sinking feeling, I knew that what stood behind me could only be the sweatiest Weezer fan ever.

Two hours ago, I was standing outside on Granville Street on the steps of the Commodore Ballroom, patiently waiting for the doors to open. Standing by myself, amidst the pre-twenties fashion-aware geeks: geeks in thick black rimmed glasses and designer cargo pants.

Earlier in the week, I had scoured the magical Internet for tickets to Weezer. I found a ticket on eBay, a single, for something around $100 dollars. With only the briefest moments of hesitation, I placed my bid and waited. Two days later, I got a phone call from the auctioner and made arrangements to pick up the ticket at the show.

I was determined not to let anything stand in the way of the ultimate experience of what can only be described as emo-rock, all growed up. Somehow I had to get out of the house and get to this concert, and not just because there was nothing good on TV that night (Tuesday night is American Idol night, and every Tuesday I wonder if tonight will be the night that Paula finally admits to the world that she’s actually 13 going on 30), but mostly because this is Weezer and the chances of getting high from second-hand marijuana smoke was actually pretty good. Read the rest of this entry »