Notes on an Open Letter to Content Creators

Often times you will find yourself in a situation where there was something you wanted to say, something you wanted to express, but had difficulty in doing so. And then someone does it for you, better than you’d have done anyway.

This is such a case. The post, entitled “Why I Pirate, an Open Letter to Content Creators” off of Techdirt’s Step 2 community is an excellent read. I suggest it for anyone who creates content.

It isn’t so much about being ok with pirating, but about understanding the frustration that we, the consumers have with the products out there.

As it is said both in that article and several times elsewhere: one of the reasons we pirate is because the pirates offer a better product than the purchased version: Digital copies of movies without DRM or unskippable trailers; Ebooks that are properly formatted and in multiple formats; Games that have no DRM and will run offline (looking at you Starcraft); High bitrate music, available in places where people WANT to give you money but because of “Licenses” you won’t take it; no DRM; No DRM; NO F-ING DRM.

If you create content, I suggest you read that article and take note. As he says in the post “So let’s approach this from a different angle. How about we take a deeper look at why I pirate your content and how you can extract money from me.” This isn’t a rant about the **AA’s being bad, but rather a detailed analysis of one person’s view on content consumption. He spends money every month on content; do the creators want it?

And one final gem: “Stop pricing your content like a diva.”

*note, I don’t pirate content. It is worse than that for me: I don’t do anything. Not in a format I want? Not available how I think it should be? I’ll never watch/read/listen to it. So you don’t even get the benefits of someone who has consumed your content and will tell friends/buy the next one/maybe even buy that one.

A Month in the Life, November

November brought adventures, sadness and a bit of art.

I traveled abroad for the first time in November, spending a week in Norway and Sweden. I’ve posted pictures on my Flickr from these adventures, but among them is my new favorite pictures i have taken.

Alleyway

I thought about NaNoWriMo. I always do. I even started something… And by start I mean I thought about it, and even opened up Storymill a few times. In the end, this November, even more so, was not a good time to take on a project of that size.

There was still art, however. And I did start writing something I told myself I would not write… More on that in a while. Lots of pictures, it was defiantly a photography monty. And while my iPhone has fantastic camera abilities, my P300 remains my favorite toy. I still have yet to use the flash.

There were a few new edits to the April poems, bringing me closer to completing that project. There are a few in there that are proving to be more difficult to edit that they first appear. And let us not get started on Jacob’s issue with titles, shall we?

Final month of this 365 thing ahead. Funny how time moves these days. That one January morning I thought “This will feel like forever.” But it didn’t. Instead there was art.

PS: I know my Art 365 page is out of date… soon!

A Transformers movie that wasn’t

Furthermore.

I watched the third Transformers movie recently and it sucked. Ok, to be fair it was a very valiant attempt to remake the second Transformers movie with a coherent plot. And, in this respect, it succeeds in the sense that there is a mostly coherent plot. It combines the plot of a first season transformers cartoon episode with the idea that we found aliens on the moon.

And as an alien invasion movie, it wasn’t half bad. But that is the issue, isn’t it? That’s been the issue the whole time. They aren’t Transformer movies, they are alien invasion movies. Mikey Bay himself admitted that he had never seen any Transformers and thought the idea of making a movie about a toy was stupid UNTIL someone said “well think of it as an alien invasion movie.”

And he did. Now to be fair, the first movie almost gets it. While it is about an alien invasion, it still has, as its focus, at least one of the transformers: Bumblebee.

The second movie is the amazing adventures of Shia Laboof and his Air Force buddies with some fancy cars that show up at the end to fight something buried in the great pyramid.

By the third movie the fact that these large robots can transform is inconsequential to the plot as a whole. They are no longer Robots in Disguise, but Robots that are also their own transportation.

More importantly, they are not the main characters of the movie. I understand the desire to have a character that the audience identifies with, who in this movie is played by the LaBoof, but that should not overshadow the actual characters of the movie. You know, the ones the movie is named after.

Think of it this way. There is a movie coming out called BATMAN. And the previews all have a dude in a suit kicking some ass. But then you go see it and it is actually a police procedural with Gordon as a detective still hunting down a murderer in Gotham and sometimes this guy dressed up as a bat shows up and helps.* That isn’t a BATMAN movie. That’s a Detective Gordon movie with a cameo.

And these are not Transformer movies. Robot alien invasion movies with valiant humans fighting to keep their planet, yes. Movies about robots in disguise? not at all. And that is my real issue with them. Not the Bay-isms, the gratuitous ass shots, the exploding toaster ovens or even the off handed ‘humor’ that just sucks. It is that he didn’t even really try to make a Transformers movie.

So why bother? sure there is product recognition, sure there is a pre-existing audience, but they are all familiar with this world. And if there is anything to learn about nerdy fan boys is that we know our stuff. This is part of the fan-fiction discussion I made earlier. Even for Mikey Bay there are rules to this world of Robots in Disguise, and instead of making a great Transformers movie by living in them, he chose to make a mediocre movie about alien robots.

* BTW, i think this movie would kick ass. So if you are a DC guy with Batman pull and you like it, steal it, and make it.