My rage at discovering that our new Comcast internet has a 250gig monthly cap got me thinking about my own media consumption habits and how stereotypically-'modern' they are. None of this is new or original, it's simply my own musings on how far we've come and why old-media is dying.
I consume a lot of media - I need music to concentrate, and when working on largely-manual tasks that require little thought I listen to or watch podcasts or audio books (tech-news and comedy primarily). And my media is almost-entirely internet-delivered. Music and podcasts are obviously all online-delivered (I hate CDs - too much junk to lug around every time I move - I'm in my 4th residence in 7 months and will be moving again in 3 months). Video is almost-entirely online (streaming and torrents - largely anime and obscure shows that aren't available domestically anyways) and I don't own a tv (my computer has a much nicer monitor and it's all on-demand - I hate watching broadcast tv, too many commercials, too expensive, and it's never at a convenient time). Gaming is largely online-multiplayer. Most of my reading and all of my news is online (newsblogs, design, planning, and architecture blogs, and the like - much better content from far better writers and more legitimate reporting than anything in dead-tree formats anymore) - I ditched all of my train magazine subscriptions even because I never bothered to read them - the paper format is just too inconvenient and not shareable, sortable, or easily-archived (plus the writing and editing of the major magazines has really gone downhill in the last 5 or 10 years).
I love the new possibilities for media creation and distribution that the internet has enabled - I am consuming far more content of far higher quality than ever before, and I can share it with my friends. CD and DVD sales aren't falling because of piracy - they're falling because they're being out-competed - we have access to more interesting, convenient and higher-quality content than possible before and nothing 'they' do to fight it will change this.
Showing posts with label Journal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Journal. Show all posts
6/04/2010
4/13/2010
whelp, I've moved, again
and may be moving in a few weeks yet again...
thoughts on my new apartment
-good: has windows!!1! place itself is halfway decent and not all ghetto and breaking housing codes. doesn't flood out constantly. fairly-priced. no crazy landlord drama (I hope??). no pot smoke drifting into your room. no crazy screaming from the landlords over your head as you try to sleep (I never thought I'd consider the Mary Lyon dorms to have good sound-insulation...). i seem to get along well with my new roommate.
-bad: walls are even thinner!! Did not think it was actually possible to make a building so that when the neighbors open their door it sounds like someone's opening your front door! Can make out distinct words from the neighbors chatting at conversation volume upstairs. hot water is a precious commodity (15-20 minutes max). I've seen messier rooms as an RA than here, but not by much... anything you take out of the fridge retains the fridge perfume permanently and I don't know what the living room floor looks like - but my rooms nice at least! the internet is... problematic... and of course I have to drive or bus to campus since is a town away in the sticks. (Sunderland is a weird town - it's all farms and apartment complexes for students commuting from UMass)
so yea, I'm loving my new place! (not actually being sarcastic there)
thoughts on my new apartment
-good: has windows!!1! place itself is halfway decent and not all ghetto and breaking housing codes. doesn't flood out constantly. fairly-priced. no crazy landlord drama (I hope??). no pot smoke drifting into your room. no crazy screaming from the landlords over your head as you try to sleep (I never thought I'd consider the Mary Lyon dorms to have good sound-insulation...). i seem to get along well with my new roommate.
-bad: walls are even thinner!! Did not think it was actually possible to make a building so that when the neighbors open their door it sounds like someone's opening your front door! Can make out distinct words from the neighbors chatting at conversation volume upstairs. hot water is a precious commodity (15-20 minutes max). I've seen messier rooms as an RA than here, but not by much... anything you take out of the fridge retains the fridge perfume permanently and I don't know what the living room floor looks like - but my rooms nice at least! the internet is... problematic... and of course I have to drive or bus to campus since is a town away in the sticks. (Sunderland is a weird town - it's all farms and apartment complexes for students commuting from UMass)
so yea, I'm loving my new place! (not actually being sarcastic there)
3/25/2010
a look at my life right now
My master to-do list:
GET HEALTHIER - take care of self - get healthy derek back
((gender identity?? feh...))
$$$ - find new job, don't starve
Shelter
-Apartment w/ friends summer/next year
-Apartment for last month of spring sem.
Current Classwork - don't fail!!
Incompletes
-do the shit
-talk to profs, fill out forms, petition peoples
Plan rest of Undergrad - classes next sem - summer class? - urban planning major vs 5 College Arch - dual-major or single?? - talk to Thom - ((grad school??)) - $$ - GPA, credits
work way into 'real world' design
-'online persona' - fix webpages!!
-network that shit up! (Architizer, Arc5, 5-collge profs, etc)
-Boston Design Museum!?!?!?!
-portfolio/freelancing/just make stuff
-::magic::
personal projects
-acunninghat --> WordPress/ComicPress, update
-webcomic --> WP/CP, Draw!!1!
-traingeek.com --> WP, sort/clean up tags, de-suckify
-photography --> beyond Flickr?, shoot more, stock photos??, library management, 35mm stuff
all that other random stuff - pile o books - train magazine stack - computer projects - anime list - cosplays - model trains - pwn n00bs - procrastinate - etc - etc
be awesome
steal His-Jobsiness's soul --> take over the world
GET HEALTHIER - take care of self - get healthy derek back
((gender identity?? feh...))
$$$ - find new job, don't starve
Shelter
-Apartment w/ friends summer/next year
-Apartment for last month of spring sem.
Current Classwork - don't fail!!
Incompletes
-do the shit
-talk to profs, fill out forms, petition peoples
Plan rest of Undergrad - classes next sem - summer class? - urban planning major vs 5 College Arch - dual-major or single?? - talk to Thom - ((grad school??)) - $$ - GPA, credits
work way into 'real world' design
-'online persona' - fix webpages!!
-network that shit up! (Architizer, Arc5, 5-collge profs, etc)
-Boston Design Museum!?!?!?!
-portfolio/freelancing/just make stuff
-::magic::
personal projects
-acunninghat --> WordPress/ComicPress, update
-webcomic --> WP/CP, Draw!!1!
-traingeek.com --> WP, sort/clean up tags, de-suckify
-photography --> beyond Flickr?, shoot more, stock photos??, library management, 35mm stuff
all that other random stuff - pile o books - train magazine stack - computer projects - anime list - cosplays - model trains - pwn n00bs - procrastinate - etc - etc
be awesome
steal His-Jobsiness's soul --> take over the world
3/12/2010
long time no blog - random updates on my life
So life has continued to be interesting and busy, resulting in a sad neglect of my internets. Nothing terribly vital to note, just some continual flooding of my appartment, the usual frustrations of the job and appartment searching, and struggles with the incomplete. Been making painfully-slow but very significant progress on the medical fronts, exploring teh genderses some more, and been having a blast meeting new people at several cons and nerdly events of awesome.
I've been spending some time trying to decide what I want to do with my various sites - for now I've settled on migrating the blogs/photojournal to wordpress hosted on A Small Orange, with a static Rapidweaver page for my base landing page. I'm very tempted to use Squarespace, but I can only have one base-level domain per account, meaning I'd have to have everything redirect to subdomains (and meaning that nothing could be isolated off...). The nice thing is Wordpress has lots of available plug ins and themes, the problem is that I have to learn enough CSS to muck my way through making them look/work the way I want, and my photojournal is proof that I'm not very good at that... Oh how I look forward to the day i can hire a professional webdev...
(Oh, and I haven't forgotten acunninghat.com, I just haven't gotten around to uploading my recent photos - there were a couple weeks where my Aperture library was out of commission during the migration to my clean OS X install...)
Once I muck my way through the Wordpress/Comicpress enough that I feel the site is presentable I'll start posting my webcomic ^_^ - it will invariably be highly irregular in updating and experimental in style/format, but I can't wait to get it out there (and spend more time experimenting with my drawing).
I've been spending some time trying to decide what I want to do with my various sites - for now I've settled on migrating the blogs/photojournal to wordpress hosted on A Small Orange, with a static Rapidweaver page for my base landing page. I'm very tempted to use Squarespace, but I can only have one base-level domain per account, meaning I'd have to have everything redirect to subdomains (and meaning that nothing could be isolated off...). The nice thing is Wordpress has lots of available plug ins and themes, the problem is that I have to learn enough CSS to muck my way through making them look/work the way I want, and my photojournal is proof that I'm not very good at that... Oh how I look forward to the day i can hire a professional webdev...
(Oh, and I haven't forgotten acunninghat.com, I just haven't gotten around to uploading my recent photos - there were a couple weeks where my Aperture library was out of commission during the migration to my clean OS X install...)
Once I muck my way through the Wordpress/Comicpress enough that I feel the site is presentable I'll start posting my webcomic ^_^ - it will invariably be highly irregular in updating and experimental in style/format, but I can't wait to get it out there (and spend more time experimenting with my drawing).
1/27/2010
random personal journal update
So this has been a crazy few weeks - in no particular order:
I got my ears pierced on monday
I lost the RA job: My GPA fell too low due to several medical-accomidation incompletes and they refused to hear an appeal even by my boss. Just another example of how UMass Reslife is the most disrespectful, discriminatory, incompetent organization I've ever worked for (and I've worked for a museum who's director was embezzling funds...). I miss my residents and the job itself terribly, but I can't get away from that institution fast enough.
I was let go 4 business days before RAs moved in for the spring semester, giving me about a week to find housing...
Through an incredible stroke of luck I stumbled on an apartment just 6 houses up the street from campus. I'm closer to the center of campus than the parking lot my car lived in was (though um, that's not really saying much...). It's a ghetto-ass basement with functionally no windows and we've had flooding already from the rain, but my roommate is awesome... it's decent for now, but yea, I definitely need a better place this summer... it's more or less a hole in the ground... The past week and a half have been dominated by cleaning up the place and making it more habitable... and then rushing to prevent flood water damage... and cleaning up the results... and being woken up by my landlords upstairs being louder than my Freshman...
With all the stuff I have to make up and my meds still on the fritz I'm going part time and taking only two classes this semester. One's an anthro class on inequality and oppression - rather obvious and 'no duh' but some interesting connections, and the other's a civil engineering course on the relationships between society and structures like bridges and towers - some of the material is presented too narrowly and misses the bigger picture, but fun to get the perspective from the engineering mindset instead of the usual anthropologist/architect mindset that I'm used to.
The other weekend we went to Arisia in Boston - was very shiny! Spent too much money on pretties as usual...
This coming weekend some friends from home are coming out, and there's the massive Springfield train show...
To do: incompletes, find job(s), stay sane, look for summer appt, etc, etc, etc...
I got my ears pierced on monday
I lost the RA job: My GPA fell too low due to several medical-accomidation incompletes and they refused to hear an appeal even by my boss. Just another example of how UMass Reslife is the most disrespectful, discriminatory, incompetent organization I've ever worked for (and I've worked for a museum who's director was embezzling funds...). I miss my residents and the job itself terribly, but I can't get away from that institution fast enough.
I was let go 4 business days before RAs moved in for the spring semester, giving me about a week to find housing...
Through an incredible stroke of luck I stumbled on an apartment just 6 houses up the street from campus. I'm closer to the center of campus than the parking lot my car lived in was (though um, that's not really saying much...). It's a ghetto-ass basement with functionally no windows and we've had flooding already from the rain, but my roommate is awesome... it's decent for now, but yea, I definitely need a better place this summer... it's more or less a hole in the ground... The past week and a half have been dominated by cleaning up the place and making it more habitable... and then rushing to prevent flood water damage... and cleaning up the results... and being woken up by my landlords upstairs being louder than my Freshman...
With all the stuff I have to make up and my meds still on the fritz I'm going part time and taking only two classes this semester. One's an anthro class on inequality and oppression - rather obvious and 'no duh' but some interesting connections, and the other's a civil engineering course on the relationships between society and structures like bridges and towers - some of the material is presented too narrowly and misses the bigger picture, but fun to get the perspective from the engineering mindset instead of the usual anthropologist/architect mindset that I'm used to.
The other weekend we went to Arisia in Boston - was very shiny! Spent too much money on pretties as usual...
This coming weekend some friends from home are coming out, and there's the massive Springfield train show...
To do: incompletes, find job(s), stay sane, look for summer appt, etc, etc, etc...
6/30/2009
Tonsilectomy bleeding followup
So apparently I was just one of those unlucky 1% who have a bleedout and the camping had nothing to do with it. It would have happened if I was at home too - just bad timing. Luckily I'm still allowed to fly out to visit dad in CA this weekend - we'd been worried I'd be stuck here. So, all good news.
6/28/2009
back home, doing fine
They released me from the hospital this morning - yay! Feeling good. Annoyed and guilty at making my friends deal with all that...
Apparently I'm a bad patient - obstinate >_> ... yeah... about that... I was good to the nurses!! promise. just kinda might maybe ignore some of their commands like not eating toast behind their back...
But anyways, back home, wanting to head back to western MA to do some railfanning (though i'll need a radio scanner first... darn.)
Apparently I'm a bad patient - obstinate >_> ... yeah... about that... I was good to the nurses!! promise. just kinda might maybe ignore some of their commands like not eating toast behind their back...
But anyways, back home, wanting to head back to western MA to do some railfanning (though i'll need a radio scanner first... darn.)
6/27/2009
Stuck in the hospital...
Yeah, so this morning around 4 or 5 I woke up with blood in my mouth. The wound from my surgery had started bleeding again.
(backstory: had my tosnils out and deviated septum fixed almost two weeks back to fix my sleep apnea. I seemed to be recovering well and decided to come on my friend anual camping trip - this year to Savoy national park in western MA. I took it easy, got some pretty pictures, etc.)
But apparenrtly it was a mistake to come :-(
So now I'm stuck in the north Adams hospital with nothing to do feeling perfectly f ine but they want to keep me for observation. Luckily I do have my iPhone and wifi access so I can enterntain myself reasonably well I guess. Mom's on her way out with Sophie - they're gonna be so bored. Meh.
I feel so bad for making johnathan drive me here ^_^
(backstory: had my tosnils out and deviated septum fixed almost two weeks back to fix my sleep apnea. I seemed to be recovering well and decided to come on my friend anual camping trip - this year to Savoy national park in western MA. I took it easy, got some pretty pictures, etc.)
But apparenrtly it was a mistake to come :-(
So now I'm stuck in the north Adams hospital with nothing to do feeling perfectly f ine but they want to keep me for observation. Luckily I do have my iPhone and wifi access so I can enterntain myself reasonably well I guess. Mom's on her way out with Sophie - they're gonna be so bored. Meh.
I feel so bad for making johnathan drive me here ^_^
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