Atomictumor

About 10 minutes ago, I did something that is so monumentally big, and different, and huge, and earthshatteringly against the norm, that I expect that, much like the work of the impressionsts back in the day, people three generations from now will discuss it’s influence.

I downloaded music. Legally.

I know. Take some time to let it sink in.

I downloaded Vampire Weekend’s eponymous album because, well, as an indie rokk guy, I tend to do everything that Pitchfork tells me to do (not unlike the way that housewifes the world over go out and immediately buy a book, or a blender, or facial cream, or, I dunno, cutlery because Oprah told them to do it), and they said it was good, so I listened to it, and was like “damn, that is good”. So I downloaded it from AmazonMPG.com.

Now, I know the whole downloading music thing has been legal for some time, but the reason that I have flat out refused to do it, and continued to, ahem, obtain MP3s in another fashion, was because all of the music that you would by from iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, whatever, isn’t music. Its a restriction package, like one of those plastic bubbles from hell, surrounding a sub-standard quality MP3 rip. Its telling your computer “this is what you can do with this thing you just spent money on, and all THIS stuff is what you can’t do. Aren’t you glad you bought this instead of downloading an unrestricted music file that you can do whatever the hell you want to do with?”.

Essentially, being legal meant that you could ONLY listen to this music file through THIS software, on THIS computer, at THIS time, and maybe, if you’re good, you can burn it to one CD that might not work in your car. You certainly aren’t allowed to copy the thing onto your new phone to use as a ringtone, or to listen to at the gym, or put it on your laptop to take to work.

Screw that noise.

Except for some time now, Amazon has been offering DRM-free 256 bitrate MP3s for about 2 bucks an album less than iTunes (who, admittedly, is starting to sell music that isn’t only non-drm’d, but also CD quality FLAC downloads), and word is coming on that DRM is on the way out, with something like 4 out of the big 5 RIAA record labels agreeing to sell non restricted music, they way they should be.  Really, its the only way to compete with free, non restricted music.

And the CD?  Its freaking awesome.  Totally worth my seven bucks.  Maybe worth yours too.

I saw a link on my googlie homepage that caught my eye. The link was to a Wired magazine article about how Sci-Fi is the last bastard bastion of big ideas literature.

If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.

I think the guy is spot on, especially when he starts poking at high-brow, realistic fiction.

From where I sit, traditional “literary fiction” has dropped the ball…. Why? I think it’s because I was reading novel after novel about the real world. And there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality. After I’d read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, “OK. Cool. I see how today’s world works.” I also started to feel like I’d been reading the same book over and over again.

Anyhow, I’d never really heard of the Sci-Fi author referenced in the wired article. So I plugged his name, Cory Doctorow, into google to see what I could find. Lo and behold, he has his own website! Imagine that. Turns out Doctorow’s soap box is digital rights information type stuff. He even lets you down load his books for free which is great!

Digital rights is an old saw here at the Tumor, but why not have some food for thought.

Cory Doctorow:

I believe that we live in an era where anything that can be expressed as bits will be. I believe that bits exist to be copied. Therefore, I believe that any business-model that depends on your bits not being copied is just dumb, and that lawmakers who try to prop these up are like governments that sink fortunes into protecting people who insist on living on the sides of active volcanoes. [citation]

Doctorow, again:

 …as Woody Guthrie said:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

Here’s the quote from his book, After the Siege, that really got me thinking.

The USA was a pirate nation for the first 100 years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from with blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the US revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.

Hmmm, Thoughts? The US of A, a pirate nation?? Was the Stars and Stripes once just a glorified jolly rodger? It’s hard to believe.

So, we’ve all agreed that the new Bed, the one that came today, behind the closed bedroom doors not 20 feet away from where I’m sitting right now, has to be capitalized.

Because its freakin awesome.

See, I had a decent bed. Sure, it was old, and lumpy, and handed down, and it had been flipped a dozen times trying to bring that lump/comf ratio back even, but it was good because it was a goliath California King sized monster of a bed, and I got some long legs.

Now, I was on that thing by myself for a good long time, and when I laid in it, it was like I was the ruler of a giant, industrious world of bed. The industry was, well, sleep, I guess, but it made it in spades. And I was King AT. Actually, I prefer El Presidente AT. Or maybe Duke AT. But then you get into brown humor, and nobody wants to go there.

I digress.

Anyway, that bed was the cats meow, and I slept on it like a mighty man. It was big, and cold, and pretty lonely, but the big makes up for most of it, so I had plenty of room to stretch out, or roll around, or jog in place, or whatever I fancied.

When the Lady came into the picture, and the time came to consolidate my stuff into her house because it made all sorts of sense (still does), we both totally agreed that moving a big ass industrious world of bed was probably not entirely needful, and in fact, would lead to all sorts of problems. So, I Craigslisted that bad boy, and got me like 75 clams. Score.

The Lady, now, she had had a little bed adventure (ooo, that sounds bad too…) of her own, and went out a year ago or so and bought a nice cherry bedroom set with a pillowtopped queen bed, the kind of thing that makes little puffs of cotton brag about being tuff. It was a massive ass sleigh bed, but as it was a queen, it wasn’t quite a world, and I don’t know that it was very industrious because, well, the pillowtop was a little too soft, and the mattress kept in that body heat so that your body was a bit of a scale representation of the planet Mercury, with one side (the side facing the bed) boiling hot, and the other side (the side that you’ve ripped all the covers off and fastened a lawn sprinkler to) very, very chilly. A poor compromise indeed.

But, hell, we sold that bad boy too. Now, this is where our logic seems a bit hazy. Neither of us really dug on the big ass sleigh footboard, because it liked to kick you in the leg when you weren’t paying attention, and the mattresses issues have been well documented, sure, but we ended up selling the mattress and box springs, and moving in the old family mattress that had adorned her former guest room (which was now the kids room) for us to sleep on.

The guest mattress was a queen, and had no real flaws, but a distinct lack of comf. It was not industrious. It produced sleep, but the kind of sub-quality sleep that had you pouring coffee in your hat and stretching your back against all sorts of interesting things to work out the morning kinks. We slept on that thing for a good few months, me, the Lady, and Mikey (the Beagle), and every night dreamed little dreams about the magical day when an industrious world sized bed would come into our lives.

So, we bought one. We went out a couple weeks ago, shopped around, and found a bitching headboard and mattress. The mattress is a combination of my old beds bignitude and general thermal reliability, and the Lady’s queens newness and not-old-and-bustedness. We were picky, now. We laid in many beds in the course of our shopping. We discovered that apparently california king beds are, despite the fact that they really kinda make more sense, not easily found in places that aren’t California. We found that most bed frames have foodboards, and are ugly. We found that furniture shopping is an facinating industry, filled with mazelike showrooms that lead to dead ends, leaving you prey for the slow but relentless salesperson to try to hit you with their latest financing offers, despite how many times you explain, in english, that you’re buying your bed with cash.

Finally, we found our Bed.

So here it is:

And let me tell you, its friggin sweet.

“But AT, why’s the door closed to your bedroom?”

Oh, thats because the Lady and I have fully agreed that we are not going to get on The Bed until its bedtime tonight. Because how often do you get to lay down for bed for the first time in a brand new sweet ass world of industrious and beautiful comf? Not often, man. Not often.

But the problem is, that sweet ass Bed calls. Its all like “AT, dude, she won’t know. Seriously. Take a nap.”

So I closed the door.

Keeps the cats off it too.

Friggin cats.

Quick, I’ll cut to the chase. I got a laptop, again. You can see a picture of the back of it and me and the kids looking at it here.

It’s fun. It’s tiny.

It’s what I was looking for.

It’s called an Asus Eee Pc.

Word around the campfire is that the paper of choice up here, the Oak Ridge Observer, is about to abandon it’s current business model of giving away papers and subsiding off advertising and subscriptions in favor of a paid paper.

Its a ballsy move.  The thing has some good word of mouth right now, but you never know if its that way because its a well written and managed independent paper, or because its a well written and managed independent free paper.   That four letter f-word can bring a lot of goodwill.

Personally, doesn’t matter to me, because I subscribe to the thing anyway.  I like the idea of it being around, and I figure it wouldn’t go paid like this unless the needful was there.  I have a bad feeling about the move, simply because its going to completely throw a monkeywrench in the works as they’ve been standing for 4 years or whatever, but hell, who knows.

Personally, I’d much rather write a story about how they’re starting up an online edition so that when I link to local stuff, I can throw it their way…