A taste of things to come, and thoughts on my Snippets

Here's a taste of something I started working on back in Virginia but never managed to finish.

Some called him 'science's greatest achievement.' A witty few called him 'Mister Roboto,' or 'the real Million Dollar Man.' Most, though, called him America's Most Wanted, sought for over twenty three brutal homicides.

There's quite a bit more that I wrote, but it's meandering and dull. I hope to make a true Snippet out of this piece, but it'll take time that I don't have to spare, at least not until this weekend.

I was just going to post that there and let it mull for a bit, but it got me thinking and since I'm not-quite avoiding sleep anyways (one day I'll have to examine why I do that sometimes), I figure I'll share.

I like writing. I really, really do. I like some of the things that you can talk about in writing, in the actual words and story that you're writing but even more so in the subtext underneath that.

I've had a few readers applaud me for this or that, and some really want to hear more about one character or another. And I really, really like to write more, but a lot of the time... More often than not, I get a flash of inspiration, a scene or a quote or some thought that I want to express. I like writing something that makes the reader think, or feel. I was once told I have something of a poetic style to my prose, and I think that desire to move my reader is where it comes from. The trouble is, once I've hit the punch, once I've laid my scene, I'm usually out. I'd like to write more about Heather and her Angel, for example, but I don't really feel I have anywhere else to go.

There are a few characters who I do have developed enough to go somewhere with. Revelation216 and Diastole are characters I made on The Matrix Online, and in the context of that world I've spun a nice little history for them. Added to my love for the cyberpunk genre they fit in and The Matrix's facility for transferring philosophic ideas, I could write a whole bunch about them. Similarly, I have the workings of a crew of Mages set in the World of Darkness with slightly-less-than-enough development to support them on their own. (In particular, I'm having trouble imbuing my hero with a personality, and developing a plot that will take him from where I want him to start and lead him to where I want him to end, allowing the other characters to fall in their appointed roles as well.)

And then there are some, like Mr. DuLac, where I only know enough about the story to know that I really, really want to find out more. One of my favorites along these lines is a certain old man who borders on being moved into the group with Diastole and the Mages. We'll see if I ever get around to that.

Reading Google News Again

I plan to come back and say more on this later, but really, what more needs to be said than "The RIAA is trying to tell us CDs prices are much lower than they should be"?

Apple for DRM-free Music

Ok, so this may just be him covering his ass, but I like Steve Jobs a lot more after reading This. From the article:

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.

The Ecstasy of Influence

Thanks to circuit_four for pointing out This: a very long article about writing and plagiarism and -- I presume because of circuit_four's comments, as I haven't yet finished reading the article entirely -- copyright. It starts out going on and on about how books and movies and music are constantly, and often actively, borrowing from each other. A line here, a phrase there, sometimes whole story ideas, as in the book Lolita, first by von Lichberg and later by Nabokov.

Which, I think, brings up a pertinent point about art, copyright, and plagiarism. Who here has ever read von Lichberg's Lolita? Who here has even heard of it? I'll concede that a number of academics may have, but the article points out that nothing which makes Nabokov's Lolita great can be found in it's predecessor. Even working on the same idea, Nabokov just did it better. He had something von Lichberg didn't. And whatever that something was made Nabokov's writing a classic and von Lichberg's forgotten.

I don't like copyright, and I find it particularly distasteful when applied to so-called intellectual property, almost entirely because of this sort of thing. If Artist A write a song that no one listens to because his style sucks, where is it written that Artist B ought not try his own hand at it? In a less whole-sale example, what's wrong with referencing each other, taking this line or referencing that title? It adds to the art, it doesn't take away from anything. And as much as I hate Vanilla Ice, what was wrong with the fact that he used a certain baseline? The songs are completely different pieces (trust me, you will never, ever mistake 'Ice Ice Baby' for 'Under Pressure' after the first 20 seconds).

I guess there might be some argument for the poor songwriter who can't play worth a dime trying to sell music that other people steal anyways, but... I don't know, maybe I just believe in the "don't be an asshole" rule too much. It at least occurs to me that something as community oriented as music culture (or art culture in general) would do just fine without all the legalistics and grabbing for money, and... -shrugs-

Anyways. When I set out to write this entry, I was just going to point it out, and then give a meaningful look at surichan who, if she doesn't now, complained for years about how her writing sucked because she didn't have an original thought in her head. I say, that's art. It's not about being original so much as it's about expressing something in your own way, from your own perspective.

And now I'm done.