Pleasant Porous Days 28 December 1999

6:09 PM: Wow. Long time. Not long enough, though. Away from work, I mean.

Well hey looky, the Pope'll do a plea bargain to reduce my time in Purgatory if I just give up smoking. Isn't that thoughtful? "What do you get the man who has everything? How about - Salvation?!" eIndulgence.com, coming soon.

Meanwhile, in France, the real herald angel is singing. After stopping off in Venezuela for some snapshots, of course. Read these stories, learn the vocabulary, buy a coat. And waders. Maybe a rowboat. That would be one way to clean the city up. Blub.com.

On the Communist front: the DVD Copyright Control & Parade of Anuses Association (I may have that wrong) has decided that, darn it, it just wasn't fair for those kids to come along and point at the emperor's peepee like that. So they're suing the hackers who figured out how to decrypt DVD disks - and all the websites that have posted the source or even linked to other sites that posted the source. And your mom, but she wasn't home. This is starting to smell like the theme for the Year 2000: Lawyers vs Geeks. Or as some clever fellow on Feed said, I think, the big kids were starting to be hurt too much by the terms of the game changing to fast vs slow; they want to change it back to big vs little, and lots of expensive lawsuits are just the way to do it. In other words, it's the usual Rapacious Corporate Land-Fuckers sort of activity.

This business of trying to go after every site that mirrors or links to the code, though. Duh. How fast can you say, "My name is Spartacus"?

9:41: What? What did I do on the holidays? Oh, just stuff. Bought a ton of books, 4 quarts of CDs. Penny brought pot roast & rice to the bar, that was Christmas dinner. The production of Metamorphoses was fucking incredible, to coin a phrase. One of the most beautiful collection of moments I've ever experienced. Quite a thing. (Plays through 1/16/2000, hint hint SF Bay Area people.) Lola's out of town. Sarah's out of town. Fred & Penny are off to Dublin for Y2K. Office crush is out of town. I'm not out of town. New Year's Eve is going to be boring and/or stressful. You know, just all the usual crap.

I'm having a lot more fun looking up communist propaganda on the Web. (Note: I am using these words in a very very loose sense. Boneless, even.)

For instance, this guy: Roberto Verzola. He's my poster child intellectual for the Nots. Filipino, smart, anti-corporate, sound-bitey - what better credentials could you ask for? I remember reading this article - Cyberlords: The Rentier Class of the Information Sector - when it came out about 2.5 years ago, and hearing those little bells go off that sound when someone has point-blank nailed the essence of something. If you want to know why these lawsuits are just going to keep happening, take a read. Or browse through any of these fine pinko tracts:

• The Internet: A Second Opinion - 7 May 1999
• Colonialism to Globalization, five centuries after Vasco da Gama - 5 February 1998
• Our Economic System: Badly Designed? - 9 January 1998
• Labour and the Internet - a moderated discussion from February 1997
• It's Only Piracy If You're Poor - November 18, 1996
• Towards a Political Economy of Information - from 1995, I believe, but this site is down (ah hah! RCLF suppression!)

Willfully blind self-indulgent nebbish or amusingly quirky old coot? And how bout that local sports team? Discuss among yourselves.

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