Month: February 2004

In his normal tradition of not giving instructions until after the fact, my dad frustrated me a bit today.

I have a piece of wood drilled through and sanded according to all the instructions he had given me at the time. From what he’d said so far, I thought the next step would be to pull the wire through, so I asked him for help doing that. Half an hour later he helped me pull the wire through. And just as soon as the wire was pulled through (by his own hand), he proceeded to explain to me the three or four things that needed to be done before trying to pull the wire through. Steps some of which I was vaguely aware needed to be done but wasn’t sure what order they should occur in, as well as steps that hadn’t occurred to me. So we pulled the wire back out again after fighting for several minutes to try to get it in.

And then, after I started working on the other steps, he also confronted me with the fact that we do not, in fact, have the hardware that it takes to complete the lamp (ie: the parts that actually make it a lamp), and that I need to decide what I need so he can order it. He tried showing me the sort of parts I’ll need, and tried to explain how it all goes together, but my brain just doesn’t seem to be able to visualize things the way he wants it to (or perhaps just in the way he explains them), so I had to give up for a bit. Partially because what he was explaining seems to mean that in order to properly fit all the lamp parts, I have to prepare the wood for them first and make other decisions like where to drill the hole for the electric &c. later in the process. In fact, from some of the things he’s said, the several days of work I’ve already put into this particular table lamp may turn out to be useless; this piece of wood I’ve been working on may actually be just a pretty piece of firewood.

And the floor lamp I’ve been trying to put together for a month may also be quite wrong.

Oh, and the soonest we could actually get the parts is perhaps a week or two from our order, so really, no matter how hard I work I can’t get a single fucking lamp done for two more weeks!!! Grrr! Argh!

I’m thinking of switching over to tables or something that doesn’t require me to buy extra hardware for it to be complete. I mean, sure, tables will cost more and sell slower, but maybe I can get one out for sale before the end of the month if I start now!

Did I mention lampshades? My dad thinks all lampshades are too expensive. We don’t really have any I could use with these manzanita lamps, and he doesn’t want to buy any. Sigh. So I have to figure out exactly what lampshades I want and convince him to buy them, somehow. Or sell lamps without shades.

Ooh! Or tables! No need to “waste” money on lampshades when making tables!

And in addition to little steps that come up after I need to know about them, other things keep popping up in conversation with my dad as well. Little things that aren’t what he’s been saying since he first started talking about all of us doing furniture, about how the business would run, and it basically comes down to more and more ways he’s taking chunks out of my share of the retail price of each piece. Now, I understand that the cost of lampshades and lamp parts and finish (and the cost of wood, were we not working with someone else’s garbage) all get subtracted from the gross income from the sale of a piece. And when he told me he would take 20% of every sale to cover business and equipment costs, I thought that was reasonable, since I’ll be using some amount of equipment on each peice and maintenance and replacement of disposables costs money. But now in addition to that I get to pay for all disposables (ie: sandpaper, small tools, drill bits, &c.) separately, in addition to the 20%. Plus he’s said that I’m going to have to figure out all my own income, sales, &c. taxes on my own, including … I don’t even know what … deductions and … I have no idea… as though I were running my own separate business. Which I simply cannot do. Just sitting here writing about it right now has got my pulse up around 120bpm and I’m sure my blood pressue is up, because I’m beginning to hear the blood in my ears. I do not want to “be my own boss and run my own business”, I do not have a business degree. My dad does, on both counts. I have no experience dealing with all those little money details of running a business, all the little governmental concerns and forms and procedures, and my dad has twentyfive years’ experience with it. I don’t understand.

If he actually tries to make me do all that stuff, I’ll just stop working and if I have to, go find someplace else to live.

That shit isn’t good for my health and well-being.

I don’t ever want to be anybody’s boss, hardly even my own. I don’t want to have to face the ridiculousness that the government has made running a business have to be. Worse, I don’t want to deal with my dad as a manager if he isn’t going to be doing any managing. ie: if I have to buy all my own supplies with my own money, report my taxes separately, and oh yeah, figure out how to do everything he already knows on my own because he won’t fucking tell me the things I need to know to get it done. Fuck

I’m going to go shop for lapshades and lamp parts now.

If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.

-Emile Herzog, writer (1885-1967)

My TV just asked me “what celebrity would you like to go dirty dancing with?” My mind’s almost immediate response was “Uhhh… I don’t kno— Jack Black.” Yes. Jack Black.

Now, before that distracted me, what was I going to post about?

I don’t remember right now … must have been something – I wasn’t even online when I came over here. I was over there (points at bed), reading and making notes in LaNF for the final edit. The more I read it, the more I seem to like it. I hope the same is true for you, when you read it.

I’ve been thinking about, trying to figure out, how many “complimentary” copies of LaNF I’m going to have to give away. At the very least, one to Zoe and one to Angela, who purchased the special advance “Pre-Birthday” edition. One to the person to whom the book is dedicated. At least one for my own collection, though that’s fairly silly. I should probably send one each to the women at the Arizona Republic and the East Valley Tribune who interviewed me for NaNoWriMo 2002, and who review books. (You know, so I can get started with the negative reviews quickly.) One to anyone who buys me a copy of Lost in Translation first (which could end up being me again, I guess), as promised. Who else?

If I can afford it, copies to the several people who promised to help me with editing it by reading it and offerring feedback but never did. You know, because they had good intentions. And then, I supposed, I’ll find out what the guidelines are to try to get my book reviewed by other newspapers. Wouldn’t it be a lark to get a review in the New York Times and/or Entertainment Weekly? More so if they like it! And then maybe more people will order it! And then … uhh.. maybe … uhhh… yeah. I won’t have spent untold hours working on a new something that only ever costs me money, but instead will have a sort of revenue stream! Whee!

But that wasn’t what I wanted to post about… I don’t think.

Nor was it going to be how cold it’s getting in here since I ran out of firewood. I guess I just underestimated how much I’d need. I’ll do better tomorrow… Of course, tomorrow I’ll be sure to get not less than three days’ worth of wood up here. ’cause they say it’s going to storm again all weekend, and I don’t like trying to move firewood around in a downpour.

I don’t know what I was thinking, exactly. I’m getting tired now. I’ll probably think of it, whatever it was, right after I lay down to bed. And then, knowing me, it’ll keep me awake longer than I would have been if I’d just been able to post it right away.

Have I mentioned I’m going to be in town the weekend of the 14th? Yeah. Whee!

Hey. Can anyone explain car insurance to me? Is it calculated per car or per driver or what? If I don’t have a car in mind to insure my driving, can I get insurance? If I have to have a car in mind and say, use my dad’s, then am I insured for other vehicles? Logically, it should either be insurance per vehicle or per driver, and if per vehicle, then regardless who drives, the vehicle would be covered, and if per driver, then regardless of the vehicle, the driver’s actions should be covered. That’s what would make sense. If Occam’s razor could be trusted, one of those would be true. Thus, I assume it is something else, probably something totally complicated and ridiculous. Please explain it to me. I have never had a car or been insured.

In fact, I’ve never bought insurance of any kind. No medical, no dental, no rental or home or property insurance, no car insurance, no liability for anything insurance, nothing. I agreed to a life insurance policy my bank offered me once, but it was simple; as long as I pay them a couple of dollars a year, on event of my death they pay out $30k to my father (beneficiary changeable if necessary), which should more than cover any debts I have ever had. Nothing complicated, and I haven’t much thought of it since. It’s like $30/year, so I’d have to live more than 1000 years for it to cost me more than it pays out. Anyway, yeah. I’ve never had insurance. Didn’t really see the point in that particular form of gambling; what fun is it to bet that you’re going to suffer a great loss, injury, or death? With the life insurance I have, it’s a safe bet that it’ll pay out well before I’m on the losing side, so that’s not really even a gamble; I could pay my ~$30 in every year for the next 75 years and it would still pay out around 12 times more than I paid in. Sigh.

Anyway, yeah. If you could explain the whole car insurance thing to me, that’d be great. I don’t get it.

Heck, if you could explain women to me at the same time, that’d be good to. I’m sure I understand them less. What do they want? What are they looking for? What is going on in their minds and hearts? How can I make it me?

Perhaps more confusing; why is a movie about breakdancing the number one movie in America right now? What did I miss?

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll dream of it. ‘night.

I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of negative sentiment floating around the web these days regarding iTunes, though for most it actually seems to be related to larger concerns and merely inaccurately focused on Apple’s music distribution service. I’ve just spent a couple of hours reading through a few people’s opinions on the subject (link link link link link), and there has been some discussion on it in the past that I’ve seen as well, but I’d like to address this all from my point of view.

It may or may not seem rational to you.

Here goes: First, there are the people who say that giving away free songs with bottles of Pepsi is just encouraging kids to rot their teeth out by drinking sugar water. My exceptions to that include such obvious counters as “Kids are going to drink soda whether they get free music with it or not” and the clear reasoning on Pepsi’s behalf being that the kids make their dollar votes for Pepsi instead of something else in hopes of getting something “free”. If Pepsi had teamed up with an ostrich farm and was giving away free ostriches, would the ostrich farm be attacked for promoting “sugar water”? Oh, and another exception, in my opinion, to the argument that this give-away encourages people to drink sugar water is that Diet Pepsi (sugar free, of course) is an option as well as specially marked 7-11 Big Gulp cups which could be conceivably filled with fruit juice (you know, if your local participating 7-11 has fruit juice on tap). So there’s that.

The whole thing has looked to me like a Pepsi promotion, not really an Apple promotion, since last I heard Pepsi was paying full price for every song redeemed, and paid for the Superbowl ad. Saying Apple is selling sugar water is silly.

What’s next? Oh, yes. People are critical of the iTMS because it doesn’t revolutionize music distribution enough.

You see, if an individual artist who owns the full rights to their music sets up their own website and sells their music directly, even considering overhead of bandwidth and paying a web developer, they get a whole lot more of every album sold than they would if they distributed their music through one of the “Big 5” of the RIAA. ie: the average artist who has a deal with one of the RIAA labels earns between 10 and 14 percent of the adjusted cost of each album sold (after the label recoups the cost of producing the album, of course), or around $1 per album sold, give or take, but even assuming the 35 percent overhead for digital distribution that some sources are saying iTMS charges every label big and small, an artist selling their album directly could double their per-album income while only charging around $3 and album! Wow!

That sure is something.

But what does it really mean? Let’s take a look, for instance, at all the music that has been produced via a major label between 70 years ago (ie: not in the public domain) and tomorrow: For the most part, the major labels still own the rights to all of that music, and will until it reaches the public domain. So for every bit and byte of music produced under a major label to date, if an artist wanted to take the prescribed route of digital distribution above, it would be illegal for them to do so. It’s not their music anymore.

But what about all the music produced by so-called “independent” labels? Well, it’s on a label-by-label and artist-by-artist basis that that is being decided, and in some cases music is being sold by methods similar or identical to the above described methods and artists actually are making more money per album sold. Which is great. In fact, because the “independent” music is available along side the major label music in the iTMS and the iTMS cut is the same across the board, if the “independent” labels choose to offer their artists a better deal, they could be making a whole lot more per album than they otherwise would. Glad to hear it.

But some of the people out there believe that RIAA = EVIL, and anything that could possibly help the “big 5” labels survive is just as EVIL. What about that? Personally, I think that each thing should be looked at separately, for fairness. So, whether or not the RIAA is EVIL, let’s take a look at the iTMS business model:

It’s a reseller.

Yep. Like the music store down at your local mall, iTMS buys music wholesale from labels and resells it retail to individuals. iTMS is not licensing the music, it’s simply buying it wholesale, repackaging it (on a handy digital format), and reselling it to consumers. Let me say it a third time in the same paragraph: the iTunes Music Service is just a reseller, like any other store you buy music from, they just happen to be offering one format: AAC files instead of CDs, cassette tapes, or minidiscs.

That’s not EVIL, is it? Huh. What else?

The iTMS does not allow purchased placement or advertisements. That is; whether a label is large or small, wealthy or not, they all get listed and filed and linked and searched and sorted the same ways. The decisions about what music is “featured” on the “splash” page of the iTMS are made by Apple employees independently, much like the arrangement of new music on the wall at your local independently-owned and operated music reseller. No one can pay Apple to put their music first.

That sounds like the opposite of EVIL to me. What’s next?

Apple works directly with music labels, and when they first met with the “independent” labels around a month after the launch of the iTMS, they told them flat-out that there would be no negotiations, every label would get exactly the same deal. That is, the independents and the “big 5” pay Apple the same commission on each sale and have to agree to the same, standardized pricing structure. Also, in case you missed it when I said “Apple works directly with the labels”, Apple does not work directly with the artists. When Apple makes a sale they take their cut (I have seen 35cents on the dollar reported in more than one place) and leave the rest up to the label to distribute. Sites that say that iTMS should report the “Artist’s Cut” of “11cents per song” are not clearly representing the issue; there is no way for the iTMS to show each artist’s cut, since they are no longer part of the transaction by the time the artist’s cut gets calculated and paid, and in fact do not know what it would be. Saying that the iTMS is not “fair to artists” is silly, because Apple doesn’t deal with artists. That’s like saying auto dealerships aren’t fair to the companies that produce the bolts that auto manufacturers use when building the cars they sell; it’s silly, because the auto dealerships work with the auto manufacturers, not the 3rd-party companies producing nuts and bolts.

The iTMS doesn’t seem EVIL to me at all, even if they do happen to do business with the RIAA, whose EVIL-ness I will not address here.

What other issues?

Well, some people are altogether anti-DRM. But they seem to be the same people who are altogether anti-Copyright. And I’m not prepared to discuss the entire copyright issue at length, but I will say this: As long as DRM doesn’t make using the products I spend my own money on harder for me to use, I don’t care. If they make it harder for people who didn’t pay for a product to use it, that’s fine, too. Now, if DRM gets to the point (as I have heard it described approaching) that I cannot listen to music I have purchased the way I want to listen to it, on the device I want to listen to it from, or if I cannot watch a movie I have purchased on a movie-playing device I own because of some restrictive or brand-sensitive DRM, I would object. That’s going too far. If the people who are willing to pay for media are not allowed to enjoy it the ways they please, DRM has gone too far.

Okay, okay, one little thing on copyright: there’s no way copyright should last 70 years, and especially not 70 years after the death of the artist. Copyright is supposed to be there to protect the artist, and how much sense does it make to try to protect dead artists’ rights? That’s just silly.

Uhhh… Hmm… did I miss anything? How about the fact that iTMS is not alone in “perpetuating the oppression of artists” by distributing music owned by RIAA members, or that Napster and MusicMatch are working on promotional deals similar to the one Apple and Pepsi have now? Or that even at 35%, Apple loses music on every song? Wheee!

Here’s an interesting thing; I just received the following email:

On Feb 3, 2004, at 9:24 AM, admin3@the-insight.com wrote:

Hello,

I am creating a web directory, The-Insight.com, and would like to include your website Fyth.modernevil.com under the “health/massage therapy and bodywork” category. If you’d like to be added, please follow this url:

http://www.the-insight.com/add.cgi

We shall put all our efforts into having your link up in less than 24 hours; and if you find our site useful for your visitors, please add a reciprocal link.

Link Back : The-Insight.com – A Spirituality Web Directory.

Thank you very much,
James T. Monaghan
webmaster

Now, what I didn’t realize was that this site, this blog, this “Fuck Yourself To Hell” is actually in the “health/massage therapy and bodywork” category. No idea. Did anyone else notice this? Have I been posting in my sleep about health, massage therapy, and bodywork? Maybe I should cross-link with “A Spirituality Web Directory”!

Wow.

Where does this stuff come from? Surely some human must be involved over there. I wonder what they read here that made them email me.

*Looks around for posts made while sleeping*