The next day was when I binned a bunch of toys and found some stuff I'd lost in the process (e.g. the serial cable for my currently broken palmtop, and the power adaptor for it, which also works on my piano keyboard - the original adaptor for that is yet to be found), and the day after that, I actually threw most of my collection into a rubbish bag, and the rest into a box (along with a lot of books - mostly fiction - and several stuffed toys).
Out of those in the box, I took back four today. These were Christian artists, of which the CDs were given to me. It helps to balance out all the mostly secular stuff (yes, I am referring to the free, mostly instrumental stuff). It would be nice to get some free stuff out there which could bring hope to others or something without people having to get stuck into the consumerist culture or something. I know that there are "Christian" artists out there who are actually spreading rather contradictory messages.
Some user on YouTube was singing one of these songs to himself as it came out, the one about "A couple dents in my Fender, a couple rips in my jeans", and a few days later, his jeans ripped.
Lyrics quoted off a blog, which I think is the official one:
‘Cause I got a couple dents in my fender"But perfection is my enemy"... perfection is supposed to be our target. Didn't Jesus say at the end of Matthew 5, in the context of loving your enemies, "you must be perfect - just as your Father in Heaven is perfect"? That should give you an idea.
Got a couple rips in my jeans
Try to fit the pieces together
But perfection is my enemy
On my own I'm so clumsy
But on Your shoulders I can see
I'm free to be me
OK, back to the point of copyright and consumerism. The recording industry makes out that downloading music illegally is what they don't want you to do. Perhaps that is what they truly believe, and that it's something rather demonic which is driving the whole system. Whatever it is, there is an agenda. They want to see an end to "illegal downloading"... eventually. Once they get you hooked on consumerism, they'll want to see you play it by their rules. The answer here is not "piracy", but a change of attitude.
What is copyright for? The first copyright act, known as the Statute of Anne, had a 14 year term (and a 21 year term for those works already in print). This was about allowing authors to retain rights over their own work instead of having them ripped from them by the printing companies. Now it appears to have been turned around the other way as the music industry and the like force the authors into contracts instead, and hold tight to the copyrights they have authority by from their artists by contract.
This is the same deal with a quantity of software, although nowadays it appears to be changing, and I think most software that aren't games are free these days.
I repeat: most software that aren't games are free these days.
Why would one "need" Windows, anyway? To play the latest games. Which are all first person shooters these days, anyway. And yet a subset of the same type of people are going to knock me for believing a "violent, nasty book", as to which I have two things to say:
- Why do you play games which involve killing everyone and then attempt to attack the Bible for the same thing? Aren't you a hypocrite for doing this?*
- Since when were you God‽ We have authorities on earth who are able to use force against other people. They're called the Police.
TVTropes.org has a trope entitled "Rated M For Money". The title alone sums up most of the trash you get today. And yet people are sucked into paying for this trash.
I am not encouraging "piracy" here. I am encouraging something much more damaging to the industries but also much more legit. I'm encouraging you to be free from this sort of garbage they feed you.
The same applies to movies, really. The "Rated M For Money" principle also applies here, and everyone's killing one another with most of your action films. Horror films are guaranteed to have at least one specific type of blasphemy moment. I'm sorry, but that's what happens. Thrillers are the horror equivalent of action films. This leaves comedy and drama to taint. Some drama can be quite active and lively. Nevertheless, these can also be tainted. Hey, let's portray homosexuals as completely innocent and pure, and all those horrible Christians as nasty mean horrible bleeps. That's an example of tainted drama. Then there's comedy, which only need two words to explain the idea: South Park.
(I should also mention romance. Romance could teach rather bad things about sex. Also, all pornos are wrong by definition even if there any truths in them.)
I'm not saying all films are bad. I'm not even saying that all of the films in any of those categories are bad, but many, many are. Nevertheless, we have short films... and some very long short films, if it is necessary to make a new category. These usually express an idea that we could learn from. Of course, these can still be tainted, too, but they usually don't suffer from consumerism.
If there appears to be a whole bunch of hype about some film, album, book, game, software, sports game, fish tank, or anything else, and the hype is everywhere, it's got some A-list actor in it or it's written by a great author or it's by a world-class publisher or something like that, theoretically you could get involved. Or, alternatively, you could do what I do: don't. You don't need it. Eventually, you won't even care about it. That's usually the guideline.
I'm going to have to assemble a checklist, aren't I?
See how many of these you encounter.
- Is it something with a beginning and an end? (With games / TV shows, it's often preferable to not have an end when the next item is applied)
- Do I have to pay something each year/quarter/month/week/day/millisecond just to keep my subscription going?
- Is it actually achieving something, other than making me "feel good"?
- Does it receive much media attention?
- Do you hear it on the radio?
- Is it marked as copyright by a particular distributor as opposed to the author / band / group which is labelled whereever?
- Films: Is it an action, horror, thriller, or porn film?
- Software: Is it a game?
- Music: Is it about sex, violence, drugs, or "I got what you don't" (e.g. the "I'm so two-thousand-and-eight, you're so two-thousand-and-late" trash track I've heard where someone's showing off plasma screens... I heard it for the first time half way through this year, 2009)?
- Books: Is it fiction, and not "illustrative fiction"? Same could also apply to films, too.
- TV shows: Do I find an impulse to watch this one particular show every day/week/whatever at that specific time?
- Toys: Is it of a particular film / game / book / whatever character?
- Fish tanks: Does it... Well, I don't know.
- Does it have a huge franchise revolving around it or is part of one of these franchises?
This should give you just an idea of what is most definitely "consumerist".
I'm going to finish this off with a request. Please, whatever you do, do not use any of the Microsoft Office formats. At the very least, do not send me anything in those formats. Note the "not"s there. I'm not saying "don't use Microsoft Office"; I can say that another time. I'm also not going against you sending me RTF files or anything, despite it originally being a Microsoft format; at least it's human-readable. Ideally, if you can, use PDF - Microsoft supplied a horribly broken "Save as ODF" option in one of their latest patches of MS Office which doesn't even follow the standard properly, so I advise that you use the Sun plugin instead, or alternatively use something like OpenOffice.org, like I do - it's free, and more free than just "freeware".
So, uh, have some links to some pages on the Free Software Foundation website:
And finally, I am not saying "don't support the artists". I'm saying don't buy into the culture. If there's an artist you would truly like to support, try buying it straight off them, bypassing the distributors if possible.
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