My rainy day craft box

As you may have heard, Myspace is all but dead in the water and now Justin Timberlake is buying it.

I tried to use Myspace when I first got my fiction published but I couldn't keep up with it. The site's heyday as a promotional forum for artists was already long past and it was just a less user-friendly version of every other blog site. Surprisingly, as its popularity waned and it faded from the public eye I've found myself visiting it a lot more. Now that every 13 year-old and their tit-flashing college-aged big sister isn't the star attraction it's actually become a really good forum for discovering music again. I'm constantly searching for new bands to like and Myspace is awesome for this. It's one-stop shopping for tracks, tour dates, and photos that's a lot less buggy and faster-loading than many a band's "main" dot com site. To this end, I want to see it continue. And to this end I'm kind of excited about Justin Timberlake acquiring a majority share and wanting to take an active, day to day leadership role.

I respect Justin Timberlake a lot. Obviously, the musical genre he operates in is hit-and-miss for me at best, but he's a terrific actor and he always comes off as taking his work seriously whether it's acting or music. He says he wants to help other musicians get noticed via Myspace and I believe him.

What worries me, of course is the age-old truism that artists are not business people. Even if the have both the desire and the aptitude to be business people they typically just flat-out don't have the time. (Try making some art sometime. It eats a big chunk of your day.) And Timberlake's not exactly a guy who has long, empty weekends to fill with running a business while he's sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring. I believe he really can get Myspace back to where it needs to be... if he actually can stay involved in it like he's talking about. And that's a big if. I want to believe in the guy. But my fear is it will wind up a discarded toy once he loses interest in it.

I guess if Myspace never recovers and goes away forever we'll have learned a valuable lesson: Don't waste your time developing thousands of page layouts designed to appeal to suburban white teenager's fantasies of the urban gangsta life style when your competitors are developing apps and content. And if it does never recover, well, it made Rupert Murdoch lose a ton of money and that ain't too bad at the end of the day.

Yesterday I scored a used copy of Kate Bush's 1989 album The Sensual World. I got it mostly for the lead single "Love and Anger" which is just one of "those" songs that gets inside you and stays with you through the years. But it also contains a very interesting song called "Deeper Understanding." This song tells the story of a lonely, emotionally isolated woman who uses a computer program as an escape from her dreary life. She gets so obsessed with it that she stops eating, sleeping, or getting up to go to the bathroom until finally her family breaks into her home and saves her. But even afterward she's changed, habitually talking like she's in her virtual world when trying to interact with real people.

Keep in mind this song was released in 1989, well before most people had any idea what an internet even was. And now we live in a world where what she's singing about actually happens and people wind up dead or in mental health programs because of it. It's hardly the first time someone has written a science fiction tale only to have it come true just a few years later, and it won't be the last. But the way she sings about it just gives it this creepy anachronistic property that makes it the more disturbing. When you read a Heinlein or Aasimov story from the 50's you can tell its from the 50's even though it's full of stuff we see every day now. "Deeper Understanding" just feels a little too contemporary to have been written so many years ago.

Oh, and for extra brutal irony it's this really upbeat, optimistic-sounding song. If you weren't paying attention to the lyrics you'd think it was some happy story about two lovers who have found a "deeper understanding," as the chorus says. No, it is about a woman surrendering herself to a Lotus Eater Machine.

I suppose I could go see if someone's posted the song on Youtube or something and share it but I'd really just rather not think about it anymore right now.

( Nah, just kidding. I totally didn't write this. )

Real authorship credit apparently goes to one Chip Zdarsky. Mr. Zdarsky, I salute you, peeny in hand.

Well the flap came and went about LJ allegedly forcing you to specify your gender. Turns out it was a coding mistake or some such. Imagine that! LJ did something that actually wasn't part of a nefarious plot to anger their user bse. Oh wait, actually that turns out to be the case with just about everything that gets people threatening to leave LJ.

I honestly don't understand the flap because I can't get my head around the idea that you don't have a gender. I'm sorry but I just don't buy it. I've gotten to the point where I can accept believing you're the opposite of what you are physically, but I don't think it's possible to not have one at all. And I'm sure I'm offending and alienating people by saying that, but that's my belief.

But fine, other people believe that it is. And you can live your life however you want and I'm okay with that. But people who consider themselves that way have got to make up a minuscule fraction of the population at best. So small that I doubt anyone at LJ would ever one day proclaim "we must purge ourselves of these miserable androgynes! Remove their option box at once!" It's something that unless it's an issue you immerse yourself in that most people are never going to think about. And by all accounts I'm seeing, once LJ received complaints that the notion was offensive to some people they responded very courteously and very professionally.

I don't know what point I'm trying to make here other than that we're very quick to assume the worst of people and assume cruel motives where there are none. And we all get so immersed in our own corners of the universe that we forget that our big issues are not big issues to everyone else. I don't think it's insensitivity just to fail to take into consideration an issue that is everything to some, but beyond even thinking about for most. If LJ hadn't reacted as kindly as they seem to have, then I would say they were insensitive.

I don't have a lot of time for LJ anymore so I've decided to do a cut, mostly of people who haven't updated for a long time or with whom I just don't seem to much in common. Please comment if you want to stay on. Thanks.

Is it just me or does it seem like LJ is slowly dying out altogether?

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212700652

Not that I think any of you are the types to be sending tweets to Fox News or Britney Spears, but the information is good to have.

For the record, I hate Twitter. If it works for ya great, but all these entries full of "tweets" that you people keep posting, most of the time I just scroll past them. They look like gibberish. It's like trying to read James Joyce's blog. But that's just my opnion of it. Carry on.

I'm cranky today. I don't know why. I don't think I slept well last night.

Pop quiz: What does "The Unforgiven," Metallica's classic dirge of bitterness and isolation, have to do with pink confetti, guys in Mario Puzo gangster suits, and bouncing, hoodie-wearing European bubblegum pop starlets?

If your answer was anything other than a barrel-chested roar of NOTHING! then you must have seen this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m9wd2dMXA4

What makes it all the more tragic is that the girl actually has a really decent voice.

I feel sorry for the backup band. They're flailing away back there like they're actually *in* Metallica, only to be replaced by an anemic drum machine beat and an occasional guitar jangle that likely originated out of a piece of software.

Tom Brokaw and Tax Cunts.

Tom Brokaw and bukkake.

Thanks to megiloth from whom I stole these. Ah, the instant and irrevocable regrets of live television and the eternal and irrevocable shame of Youtube. They are the bleach and ammonia of the internet age.

She strikes again! This time her subject line promises !!!!BOOOBS  SHOOWING MOODELS!!!

Not only can she not spell, but I think she's also a little confused about how a few things work...