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Saying: Gonna make you my bitch

Usage: “I’m playing racquetball with Pete from over in accounting tonight. Oh yeah, I’m going to school him on the court. Gonna totally make him my bitch.”

What it means: Men in American prisons anally rape other men. This probably happens in other countries too, but the problem is so bad in the US that it makes the lists of international human rights watch organizations as one of the world’s great atrocities. The important thing to understand is that this is by no means a “gay” thing. The men who perpetrate these acts would most likely kill you for suggesting that they were homosexuals. During the act, the victim is “made into a bitch,” symbolically transubstantiated into a woman, thus making it an acceptably heterosexual act.

Why you should stop saying that:You’re essentially announcing, “I’m going to have anal sex with you against your will, but it’s okay. While I do it, I’m going to pretend you’re a woman, so don’t think I’m gay.” Is that what you really wanted to say? Furthermore, you’re agreeing that rape is acceptable when it’s done to a woman. It’s offensive to women, and to gays, and it’s an all around stupid thing to say.

What you can say instead: You’re really trying to announce that your skills are superior to your opponent’s. You could say, “I’m going to wipe the floor with you,” or “I’m going to win this game. But really, if you have any class at all, you know that the proof is in the doing, not the saying. Just shut up and prove that you’re as good as you say you are!

In France, the government actually pays artists to create art. Not just the bigtime artists who are already making money as artists like the ones who get government grants in the USA, but real artists.

This is a real tragedy. When I have more time, I’ll expand on why subsidizing artists would be of great benefit to the US economy and not just a “feel good” sort of move. But right now I’ll just say some of the best artists are working as administrative assistants or lugging packages around for UPS or washing dishes for a living. I don’t mean to be insulting to anyone who does those things, because I have great respect for people who do. I just think that it’s a tragedy whenever anyone dreams of becoming an artist (or other profession), has the talent for it, and winds up forced into working a job they don’t love due to economic realities.

It’d be easy to pass off these “deferred” artists by saying they just weren’t good enough and couldn’t cut it. Unfortunately, the real story is that it takes a lot of time and expense to get established as an artist. There’s just a whole lot of work to do that you don’t get paid for, both in creating your portfolio and shopping yourself around. Unless you have a trust fund or someone to support you through this stage it is incredibly difficult to get through it.

So you take a job to pay the bills. Maybe you hate it, and this is bad because it drains the life and creativity out of you, and you wind up never being creative. Maybe you got lucky, and you actually like what you do. This is bad in its own way because the security can also take you away from creativity. Especially as you move up the ranks and make more money. You become unwilling to risk your lifestyle to become a starving artist.

I mention all this because today I went to take a look at Electric Sheep Comix and found one of those “This Domain for Sale” signs perched where it should be, like a vulture on a corpse. Electronic Sheep Comix was the site of Patrick Farley. Patrick was (and, I hope, still is!) one of the most creative and talented pioneers of Web comics. Don’t take my word for it. See for yourself here. Yes, the original site is down, but thanks to the magic of The Wayback Machine, you can still read it. Delta Thrives and Spiders are particularly amazing.

My point is, Patrick Farley is someone who should be creating art. His work was great but always slow in coming because he had to pay the bills. Now he’s abandoned that completely, apparently. That’s a shame. Rumor has it he’s gone to work in Hollywood. I hope it’s somewhere he’ll be able to do something he loves and get paid for it.

Saying: Free as in beer.

Usage: “Microsoft Word is horrible. It should be free, as in beer.”

What it means: Free as in beer actually has worthwhile origins. In the English language, the word “free” makes no distinction between “doesn’t cost anything” and “has complete freedom.” There’s also no other adjective that makes that distinction. Context can often clarify. If one says, “That prisoner deserves to be free,” we generally think that the prisoner should be liberated, not given away at no cost. When speaking of software, the meaning can be extra-ambiguous. Software can be “freeware” (free as in beer) and it can be open source, (free as in speach) open to development by anyone.

Why you should stop saying that: The general reaction to “free as in beer” is, “What do you mean by that?” It distracts from the main point of the argument, and starts you thinking about beer instead. Beer is also rarely free, and on the rare occasions it is, it crap beer not worth drinking. As Daniel Jalkut astutely points out, there’s are many reasons why beer might be free. People often have very good reasons for saying “free as in beer,” and it is an important distinction to make, but ultimately, the saying is self-defeating

What you can say instead: Try substituting something that more accurately says what you want to in the first place, instead of adding a qualifier to explain the word you just used. “That software shouldn’t cost anything.”

The latest issue of Callithump! is now available in the Lord Hall entryway. This time it’s totally buttons, at a special 50%-off price of 25 cents! Why all buttons? Lots of reasons, but basically, because we love buttons. I also wanted to challenge myself to see if I could come up with 1,000 different designs in a short period of time, and the 7/8″ button format was a fun medium to work in. Yes, as a matter of fact, I can come up with that many designs, I’m happy to say. It did require incorporating/remixing/reusing a whole lot of public domain work, however. I’m pretty happy with the results. See for yourself at the Art Department in Lord Hall at the University of Maine in Orono.

To celebrate the launch of the new issue, we also have a new website, Callithump.org. We’re finally breaking down and letting people buy Callithump! content online, so people who aren’t near Orono or Belfast can get in on the fun. The store doesn’t have much in it right now, but it will!

Saying: Le Grand Guignol

Usage: “I loved Natural Born Killers, but then again, I’m a big fan of Le Grand Guignol.” (pronounced “lay grah geen yol”)

What it means: Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol was founded in 1894 in Paris, France. It specialized in horror and graphic depictions of over-the-top violence, as is evidenced by this poster:

Since then, Le Gran Guignol has come to mean any depiction of horror and graphic violence for entertainment purposes.

Why it’s good to say: Sure, Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol is, perhaps, an even more obscure reference than “jump the shark” or “more cowbell” but when you figure out what it means, you’ve actually learned something worth knowing. Pundits often decry violence in the media, blaming it for all of societies ills. Always, there’s a subtext that this violence is something new, that in the good old days entertainment was good and wholesome. But violence has been part of entertainment forever. Centuries before Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, William Shakespeare’s bloodbath, Titus Andronicus was the bard’s most popular play while he was alive.

By adding Le Grand Guignol to your vocabulary, you’ll either sound pretentious, or intelligent, or both, and you’ll also be raising the awareness of the connections between violence and entertainment that have been with us forever and probably shouldn’t be scapegoated for society’s ills.

Saying: More cow bell!

Usage: “You know what this music needs? More cow bell!”

What it means: It’s from a 2000 Saturday Night Live skit wherein someone claims that a certain piece of music needs more cow bell when it doesn’t.

Why you should stop saying that: It’s from a 2000 Saturday Night Live skit, which was long after everyone stopped watching, and long before people started watching again. It was stupid the moment the phrase was uttered, and it doesn’t become clever or funnier with repetition. It only serves to announce that you have nothing to bring to the discussion, and that you just want attention that you’ve done nothing to earn.

What you can say instead: A good rule of thumb for when you have nothing to contribute is to remain silent until you have something to say. Saying something for the sake of saying something can only make you look bad.

Saying: Jump the shark

Usage: “24 totally jumped the shark when they added Janeane Garofalo to the cast.”

What it means: Back in the 70s there was a TV show called Happy Days. It was popular for a little while, but then ratings dropped. In an effort to boost ratings, they had the show’s most popular character, “The Fonz” jump over a shark on water skis. Decades later, this became a term for a move to increase popularity of a thing through stunts or gimmicks, rather than through improving quality. More generally, it describes the moment where something that was once good becomes obviously, undeniably bad.

Why you should stop saying that: For the phrase to make sense, you have to understand the historical context. There isn’t anything wrong with that, per se, but when you make people work for understanding, you want to be sure that it’s something worth while. As appealing as it is from a nostalgic standpoint, Happy Days just isn’t all that relevant. If you’re old enough to use that phrase and have it be personally meaningful, then you’re dating yourself. If you’re not, then you’re making yourself look like an idiot, imitating something you’ve heard the big kids say, without understanding it. The subset of people who understand the phrase is limited to people who a) were alive in the 70s, b) were old enough to be aware of the decline in quality of a media product c) were watching a TV show that had become unpopular. Thus it doesn’t really communicate effectively.

What you can say instead: “Wow, the quality of that show has really declined, and they’re stretching for ratings. Did you hear they’ve added Janeane Garofalo to the cast?”

Isn’t that better? The meaning is clear, and you sound like you’re trying to communicate an actual opinion instead of just trying to be clever!

Oh, and for the record, adding Janeane Garofalo to the cast most assuredly is not jumping the shark. Janeane is talented, attractive, and has actually played FBI agents and police officers in the past.

A recent poll revealed that 60% of Photoshop users are pirates. While this study may have been limited to the subset of Photoshop users who read the Epic Edits Weblog, I think it’s probably an accurate number across the board. I also think that this is the key to Photoshop’s continued status as the industry standard for image editing. If Adobe were to do something to prevent this piracy, Photoshop would soon fall.

There’s a “software cycle” where a piece of software is introduced, becomes an industry standard, and then falls from grace. At the start of the cycle, software gets adopted because it’s the best option among software packages. It stays the standard because it’s what everyone uses, in spite of the fact that there may be better options out there. It falls when the creators of the software believe they’re position is invulnerable.

Take QuarkXPress, for example. In the 1990s, QuarkXPress held an estimated 90% share of the professional desktop publishing market. If you wanted a job in the publishing industry, you had to know QuarkXPress. Nowadays, people say, “What’s this Quark thing?” It was Quark’s game to lose, and they lost it through arrogance. This manifested itself as failure to innovate, devaluing their customers, and paranoid anti-piracy measures.

The “last” release of QuarkXPress was version 3.3, in 1996, although technically it’s up to 7.3.1. After 3.3, the changes had more to do with maintaining compatibility with changing operating systems than anything that would make it easier to use or enhance productivity. As a user you can’t help but feeling insulted for paying for the ability to keep using something you’ve already paid for.

At the same time, Quark became notorious for bad tech support. There were rumors of them responding to customer’s complaints with, “Well, what else are you going to use?” They had a point. At the time there were no other serious alternatives to QuarkXPress.

One other “innovation” users paid for in versions after 3.3 was piracy prevention. This was so extreme that it punished legitimate users of the program. For example, the program was constantly “sniffing” the network to see if there were other copies out there using the same serial number. Lots of programs do this, and usually if you’ve got a legitimate copy it isn’t a problem. However, with Quark, if you dropped off the network while the program was running, it would stop working! This only needed to happen once before you decided that if there were any alternative to Quark, you’d use it instead.

Piracy prevention had another effect. It prevented the user base from growing. All piracy prevention measure can be circumvented with enough effort. The question is, is it worth it? Do you go through the effort, or do you just decide that a lesser-featured but easily available app such at PageMaker?

Then, Adobe introduced InDesign to Quark’s userbase of people who were using XPress not out of customer loyalty, but because it was their only choice. Independent designers rapidly jumped ship, while big businesses kept using it for a while, simply because it’s what they’d been using. But even that has changed rapidly.

Adobe stands the risk of becoming the new Quark. While I don’t know the numbers, I’d bet Photoshop’s market penetration is over 90%. People use the term “photoshopped” instead of “image edited.” Currently, Photoshop really is better than any other image editing app out there. However, this can change. Like Quark, Adobe seems to have lost their ability to innovate and come up with something better than what they released already. Since version 5.5, which came out in 1998, updates have had more to do with OS compatibility and “feature creep” than with enhancing usability and productivity. And Adobe is growing ever more arrogant. The latest version of Photoshop, CS3, actually took away features while raising the price! To do everything with Web graphics that you once able to do in Photoshop, you now need to buy Dreamweaver (for another $399) or Fireworks ($299) on top of the $999 that Photoshop now costs.

With moves like this, it’s only a matter of time before people start looking for alternatives to buying Photoshop. Right now the best alternative is a pirated copy of Photoshop. Adobe actually is more benefitted by this than harmed. When Photoshop gets pirated, Adobe isn’t actually losing $999 (to spite propaganda to the contrary). They’re just not getting paid the $999 that they probably wouldn’t have been paid anyway. I believe that most software is pirated by people who aren’t using the software professionally. While I don’t have any data on this, it’s a logical assumption. If you aren’t using the software professionally, $999 is a ridiculous price to pay. If you are, you’ll make that money back rapidly. Pirating = hassle. Finding the software, finding hacks to circumvent copy protection, keeping it updated… that ends up costing more money than buying the software in the first place!

Adobe benefits from the piracy because it maintains a HUGE userbase for Photoshop. This means that businesses have a constant pool of new hires who already know Photoshop. If you start learning Photoshop as a pirate, there’s a good chance you’re going to keep using it legitimately as a pro.

If Adobe were to find a way to cut off that 60% of pirated copies, it would be Adobe’s suicide. A handful of those users might buy legit copies. Right now the alternative to Photoshop is illegal Photoshop, but it’s still Photoshop. What happens if you send 60% of your potential future userbase in search of alternative software? Photoshop is better than the free alternative, the GiMP. Is it $999 better than the GiMP? If you’re not a professional image editor, it really isn’t worth all that extra cash. Plus, Photoshop is only a better app right now. Third party applications are improving at a much faster rate than Adobe’s products are, but Adobe apps have a huge lead. If Adobe stamps out piracy, third party applications will get a huge influx of new users, enough to push them over the top to create a superior product to Photoshop.

It’s Adobe’s game to lose right now. You’d think they would have learned a lesson from Quark, given that they were the Quark-killers. But really, I think it’s only a matter of time before people are saying, “What’s this Photoshop thing?”

I reckon that virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life are getting more and more popular because what we’ve traditionally accepted to be the “Real World” becomes more and more fictional every day. Case in point: the Nevada primaries.

Read these two articles on the primary results and answer the following question: Who came in second for the Republicans? Who came in first for the Democrats?

New York Times

Reuters

From the NYT article, we know that McCain was first and Huckabee was third, but there’s no mention of who took second. The Reuters article says that McCain beat Huckabee, which, to me, implies that Huckabee was second. Actually, Ron Paul took second!

Ron Paul supporters have claimed media bias against their candidate throughout the whole campaign, to the point where they seemed like obnoxious crybabies and fanatics. But now the media has become so blatant with their bias that I can’t help but admit that the Ron Paul supporters must be right! This is just disgusting! How do you report on an election without mentioning who came in second?

But wait just a minute…. McCain was actually THIRD! Mitt Romney really won, followed by Ron Paul! Something is clearly, painfully wrong when Al Jazeera reports the primary more clearly and accurately than our own media:

Meanwhile, Clinton CLEARLY won it, didn’t she? Well, technically, no, since she picked up 12 delegates to Obama’s 13, If this were a presidential election, Obama would have won.

Media manipulation is nothing new. It’s been around for as long as we’ve had media to manipulate with. I just don’t remember ever seeing it so blatant. Not in this country. It’s something we read about happening in other countries that weren’t as free as ours. It honestly terrifies me.

Taking it’s lead from Radiohead’s “pay what you want” album (who took their lead from the model Magnatune pioneered years ago), Paste Magazine is now offering “pay what you want” subscriptions. Well, almost anything. The minimum is $1. I gave them $1.37. I have no idea if Paste is a good magazine or not. I hate corporate music with a passion and Paste looks like just another industry shill. On the other hand, I like getting stuff in the mail that’s not bills, so I figure I’ll be able to get at least 12 cents worth of entertainment from it!

Get yours now!