But once you have a font on your computer, you can use it for anything, right? Well, it depends. Sometimes that $40 only gives you the right to display the font on your screen and print it out. Can you use it in an image on the web? Sure, unless maybe you can’t. I don’t know. How can they even prove you used their font, though? A lot of them look really similar. What are these things legally protected by, anyway?

Both the exorbitant prices and confusing legal situation make it difficult for anyone but professional graphic designers and/or established companies that employ them to use a particularly wide variety of fonts. The web, however, has given almost everyone who can read a CSS tutorial to be a graphic designer, but for a long time font licensing has stood in the way of using anything but nine free(-ish) fonts that everyone (maybe) has on their computer. Fortunately, this situation is being rectified; soon you’ll be able to pay $78467 to license a font for web use, once they’ve figured out how to deal with “illegal uses”. Whatever the method of preventing these illegal uses may be, some 16-year-old kid in Bangladesh has already cracked it.

But seriously, 40 dollars? For a font? And then maybe I can’t even show anyone what I do with it? Again, I know making fonts is hard work, but are they really that valuable? Especially if it’s the sort of font you use for one small project and then never need again. These prices might have made sense when fonts were the sort of thing that you’d take out of a box and arrange on your printing press, but that’s just not how things work anymore.

I’ve played games on consoles before, of course, but only because my friends always had them. Like any child of the 90s who had a life, I grew up on games, but not “video games.” Video games were on consoles (or, as they were called before I discovered proper English, “systems”). I played computer games. And I was a snob about that.

Mario and Sonic were not my childhood heroes because I didn’t have a Super Nintendo or Genesis like all the cool kids. And you know what, that’s fine. Putt-Putt can kick both their asses. As can Fatty Bear. Speaking of which, why the hell did Fatty Bear only get one game? I wanted to play more Fatty Bear games! Sorry, I’m going off on a tangent. Anyway, I was a PC gamer from the beginning, and Humongous Entertainment was the best thing ever conceived by humanity back then. Sure, I was interested in consoles. In fact, I wanted a Nintendo 64 so badly, and so did my brother, but my parents wouldn’t let one in the house, even if we raised money to pay for it. Why? Because it would somehow make us waste more time playing games than if we just had the option to play on the computer. Yeah, it didn’t make sense, but the concept of “logic” had been censored from our impressionable minds, so we couldn’t dispute it.

Spy Fox is fucking awesome. Anyone who disagrees is banned from the Internets.

That’s how I was for most of my pre-teenage and early adolescent life. I got into heated arguments with my console-playing friends about how inferior their toys were, and they responded with equally immature rants about how I was wrong and stupid and had no friends and picked my nose and ate it. But I was undaunted. My hatred of all things console was so great that I angrily tore up a Best Buy circular because it informed me that there was an Xbox version of Dragon’s Lair 3D. How could they put such an iconic DOS franchise on a console? No, I wasn’t aware that it was originally an arcade game.

So if I could go back in time and tell my 14-year-old self that one day I would grow tired of dealing with bad performance at the lowest graphics settings on my 3-year-old computer and purchase a console…well, I wouldn’t, because I don’t think I would survive the encounter.

Now, this isn’t my declaration of the death of PC gaming; I’ll still be playing PC games for sure. It’s just that some games inherently play better on a console. Or, in other cases, some games inherently play worse on my computer than on a console. Also Brütal Legend isn’t coming to the PC.

If the man who made this game were developing exclusively for a machine powered by human blood, I'd happily start bleeding.

In closing, this is kind of shocking when I think about how I was as a younger, more naïve person. I screamed about how terrible consoles were to everyone who’d come near me just five years ago. But you know what else I got angry about? When people downloaded music. Because it was stealing.

My how maturity changes people.

Why is it that we must tell everyone on the Internet that things are only our opinion?

Of course “I think” what I’m about to say. Why else would I be saying it? Of course it’s “in my opinion,” because I’m saying it. Anything said by anyone is, when you get down to it, inherently related to what they think, which is consequently their opinion. But now that they’ve been so kind as to emphasize that fact, it hurts their argument.

Here are two different statements a person can make:

A: I think that jumping off the George Washington Bridge can cause severe bodily harm. That could be fatal, in my opinion.

B: Nobody can get hurt from jumping off the George Washington Bridge. It’s actually very healthy and promotes long-life.

Now, assuming you didn’t know anything about the effects of jumping off a bridge, which of these two arguments would be more convincing to you? At first glance, without Wikipediing anything? Most of you will say statement B.

Adding language like, “I think” or “In my opinion” (or IMO or IMHO) to your arguments weakens them. You will sound less sure of yourself, or at the very least like you don’t care as much. This applies to actual speech as well as online discussion.

Some might argue that such disclaimers are common courtesy, but to the audience you’re addressing, they’re common sense. It’s not impolite to omit needless words, and doing so makes the remaining words stronger.

So, naturally, Google is showing Cyanogen their thanks for increasing the Google-use of 30,000 people by sending him a Cease and Desist letter. Wait, what?

Well, apparently some of Google’s applications aren’t open source, such as the Android Market (which allows you to give Google money indirectly by buying apps from developers, who then give a portion of their money to Google). Sure, you can easily download and install these apps yourself from the freely available developer repository, but Cyanogen had the audacity to save 30,000 end users the trouble of doing all that just so they could continue using Google’s products and making them money. That constitutes “distribution,” which only licensed developers who sent in $25 and the filled-out form from the back of the comic book work for Open Handset Alliance members can do. Never mind that there aren’t any alternatives to many of these applications, and they’re kind of essential for a lot of Android’s usefulness.

Admittedly, under the current Jurassic-era copyright law, Google has the legal right to do this. Cyanogen does not have the resources to license their software, thus he does not have the license to distribute it. But considering that Android, as a whole, is a free and open source operating system, and that Google has nothing to lose from CyanogenMOD and much to gain, this is a real dick move by the “Don’t Be Evil” company.

Often with these videos I run into editor’s block. There’s always one point where I just can’t figure out the right clip to match the song, and it stalls me. Then I stop and decide to come back to it later. And despite how much I really want to get it done, “later” sometimes means months later.

But it’s here now, so…

You can also watch it on YouTube if you’re on an Android phone or iPhone, but only because you can’t watch Vimeo on those. Seriously, only click that link out of necessity. If I catch anyone watching this on YouTube because they actually prefer it over Vimeo, I will smack them in the face with the Internet. No joke. I will literally pick up the Internet and hit someone with it.

Béla Tarr is the director of cult classic Hungarian films such as Sátántangó. Hideo Kojima is the designer of massively popular Japanese video games such as Metal Gear Solid 4. These two men actually have quite a lot in common, save for the medium they work in, their popularity, and their pretentiousness when discussing their craft.

Let me describe Sátántangó to you, briefly. The opening consists of an eight minute shot of the camera doing almost nothing while watching a bunch of cows:

The film continues with these similarly lengthy shots, some of which have literally nothing moving for minutes at a time, for seven hours. The film could have been a series of still photographs, and not much would be lost.

Metal Gear Solid 4 opens with a 20 minute cutscene, during which the player has no chance to do anything meaningful with the controller. Here’s a snippet of it, presented Mystery Science Theater 3000-style to make it more palatable:

The game continues with these similarly lengthy cutscenes, interrupted occasionally by short interactive sequences which are heavily scripted and offer the player no chance for creativity, for 40 hours or something. The game could have been a Japanese animated film with giant robots and guns and explosions, and not much would be lost.

The key difference between Hideo Kojima and Béla Tarr is that Tarr has gone on the record saying that he doesn’t want to adhere to the conventions of “good” filmmaking and storytelling. Kojima, on the other hand, is trying so hard to prove that you can tell wonderful stories through interactivity, when in fact the interactive elements of his magnum opus add nothing to the storytelling.

Fuck Tweetdeck so hard that I’m not even going to do that middle-of-word-capitalization thing that its creators insist on (It’s supposed to be “TweetDeck,” which is fucking stupid so fuck that, you fucking fuckers).

Normally, I’d just switch to another Twitter client that doesn’t suck, like Nambu, except I switched away from Nambu because the one thing that did suck about it ended up driving me nuts: multiple account support. Tweetdeck, however, solves the problem with Nambu by being a piece of fucking shit.

Recently, I signed up for a second Twitter account, @omgpurplefox. If you click that link, you’ll notice that it’s a protected account, and you need to request my permission before any of the things I post there are visible to you. You see, sometimes I feel like shooting out 140 character blasts of information I don’t want my mother to read. Oh, and about 99% of the planet, too, don’t forget them. Now, naturally, since I’m used to updating and reading Twitter via a client, I’d like to be able to manage the private account from a client as well.

Nambu allowed me to do that, but that, in turn, made one of its best features a pain. It tells you, in numbers, how many tweets from people you follow you haven’t read yet. But if you have it track two accounts which follow some of the same people:

If I have Account A and Account B following Person C, and Person C sends one tweet, Nambu tells me that I have two tweets unread. Thus, I have to mark things as read about 39725686 times, which becomes a chore. This problem was annoying enough to force me to switch to Tweetdeck.

Tweetdeck, on the other hand, doesn’t inform you of the same tweet twice. It just doesn’t tell you anything:

Well, okay, it does. Whenever it determines that you have unread tweets, it shows you a message in the upper right corner of the screen saying “(number) Tweets) or something. This goes away after about five seconds, so if you’re not staring at your computer right at that moment, there is no fucking way to know if there are any new tweets.

Oh, and it pulls the exact same crap for your @Mentions and Direct Messages, which, for Twitter purposes, are basically the equivalent of email addressed to you personally. You kinda want to read them when they come.

Actually, I’m lying. Tweetdeck does tell you if you have any unread tweets. Here, see if you can guess which of the tweets in this Tweetdeck column are marked as “unread”:

The unread ones are the first two. The ones with the tiny dot next to all that tiny text. WOW, HOW OBVIOUS. Now imagine five columns of that, each seven boxes tall. Yeah, it’s totally easy to see which ones are new at a glance. Real easy.

Now, Tweetdeck does have some other nice features. You can create “groups” of people you follow, for instance. Except about 10% of the people I follow are inexplicably not available to be put into groups, while about 50% of people I followed in the past but unfollowed are still on Tweetdeck’s list. And there is no way to fix that.

Ultimately, I hate Tweetdeck, and wish I could use something much, much better. But I need a Twitter client that lets me:

• Tweet and send DMs as either of my two accounts
• Track people I follow, as well as @Mentions and DMs for both accounts
• Notify me, in a way that actually works, how many tweets and messages I have unread
• Not drive me insane when the two accounts follow some of the same people

Because I prioritize necessity number 4 over number 3, I’ve had to abandon Nambu in favor of Tweetdeck, which is the only other client I’ve found that achieves my other needs satisfactorily. Seesmic Desktop is, from what I can tell, more of the same, so there’s no point in switching. So until Nambu at least gives me the option to fix its redundant notification system, I’m stuck with this crappy thing.

In closing, what the fuck is this shit that keeps popping up:

I keep getting that fucking thing for no reason and it takes 3656867357 presses of “Continue” to make it go away.

Consumers hate DRM—all that “phoning home,” the outside control over one’s behavior, the fact that you can’t resell encrypted digital media, the worries about activation servers dying. But what if digital rights management could be turned into “consumer rights management” and people could actually own and fully control the digital content they purchase? That’s the dream of Paul Sweazey, who’s heading up a new study group on “digital personal property” at the IEEE.
[...]
Digital personal property (DPP) is an attempt to make consumers treat digital media like physical objects.…[DPP files] can be freely copied and distributed to anyone, but here’s the trick: anyone who can view your content can also “steal” it irrevocably.

And why would anyone want something like that? Well…

Digital content lends itself easily to the creation of identical copies, so crafting a system in which digital content can be “stolen” is trickier than it might sound. The idea is to make it a “rivalrous good,” one that, after being taken, deprives someone else of something.

Which is exactly what DRM attempts to do; DPP, at its core, amounts to nothing more than changing two letters. Of course, that’s not just because it tries the same thing. It’s also because it fails spectacularly in the exact same way. Much like every DRM system ever, “the scheme will be cracked, and once it is—even if only a few technically-savvy people can do the necessary work—content will flood P2P [file-sharing] networks,” says Ars.

The fact that people who have actual jobs and educations still consider these kinds of ideas is absolutely baffling. I mean, they’re presumably sapient enough to know how to wipe their own asses, so why does the fact that DRM doesn’t work continue to elude their common sense?

Given that digital content just isn’t like physical content, I ask Sweazey why we might want to force it back into that model…His answer is that such freely-copiable [sic] goods breaks the basic business model of human commerce by making goods nonrivalrous; it no longer has aspects of a private good, and this makes it difficult to sell.

You know, Mr. Sweazy, you’re right; freely-copyable goods do break the basic business model of human commerce. That’s certainly a problem. Now, you go run along and play, because us adults have to go back to accepting reality and coming up with a solution that works outside of Magical Unicorn Fantasyland.

To clarify, the word I am referring to is not “kun-TENT,” which is an adjective (or less often, a verb) related to a state of peaceful satisfaction. I am referring to “KHAN-tent,” the noun, which is quite appropriately pronounced similarly to an evil dude that makes William Shatner scream loudly. This word, a bastardization of “contents,” is a generic term for some generic thing that you shove into a generic container, generally speaking. But lately, as part of media conglomerates’ transformation into Digital Rights Manufacturing companies, this generic product term has come to refer to cultural works: music, movies, news, games, photos, and anything else containing some form of digestible information and/or artistry.

It groups together everything creative in this world as some mundane product like a dishwasher or a lampshade. Casablanca is not a lampshade.

Well, of course it’s not. Isn’t that obvious? Nobody who watches movies thinks of them as generic objects, nor do they think that of news articles or Facebook photos. So why is anyone referring to them as if they are?

Perhaps from a business standpoint, it makes a lot more sense to consider something you’re trying to sell as a product or commodity. That jives with economic theories of supply and demand: you have a supply that you sell to meet the demand, at a price determined by whether demand is higher or lower than supply.

This makes sense.

Uhhhhhhh...

But again, this is obvious to anyone who isn’t in the business of “content creation”. That is the preeminent reason why this horrible word needs to stop being used: it doesn’t make sense in any context.

So what generic lump-together term should we use instead? How about we, uh, don’t? A video is a video, a song is a song, a film is a film, an article is an article, and a photo is a freaking photo, god dammit. And in the context of video games, it is not “downloadable content.” It is add-on levels or skins or models or whatever.

“Media” is a word guilty of most of the same things, but it’s not nearly as awful. “Media,” after all, refers to something that’s in a medium (i.e. film or sound or pixels or words or the ashes of your dead grandmother), as opposed to the “content” of some shipping crate in a warehouse. It’s still not great, but at least it’s palatable.

Keep in mind there are appropriate uses of the word “content,” such as “explicit content,” “violent content,” etc. This use is permissible; it’s more dignified than the word “stuff,” and it’s used to describe something that is harmful to our children.