#JeSuisCharlie
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#JeSuisCharlie
Category / Culture
Bah Humbug Day 2k14
Merry Christmas-Or-Whatever-Winter-Solstice-Festival-You-Celebrate, dear Hypothetical Audience, and a Happy New Year to All Y’All!
–Ndro
On Creative Block
This may not be immediately apparent, dear hypothetical audience, but beyond blogger and graphic designer I have aspirations of being a writer. I know I’ve written about narrative subjects before, but my actual fiction output has been, to be frank, a little lacklustre of late for various reasons. So in an effort to try and dislodge the creative malaise that’s afflicted me I’ve decided to write about it, and it’s creative block ilk, and how I occasionally manage to shake the damn things. Look, I never said I’d win any points for originality did I?
On Ultraviolet and Further Adventures With DRM
This isn’t what I originally intended to write this week, but goings on on Sunday changed my mind a bit, and people who follow me on Twitter may guess where this is heading. Anyway, if you cast your mind and browser back, dear hypothetical audience, you’ll remember I’ve spoken about the problems Digital Rights Management software and their effect on consumers in the past. Well, I’ve now experience their icy grasp in a medium other than video gaming. Recently I decided to wake up and join the mid-2010s and finally start buying BluRays. Progress and all that. Anyway, thanks to this I’ve come across the “Ultraviolet” scheme where in addition to the physical media you just bought, you get an additional download copy to play on mobile devices, computers &c. In theory anyway. This is, if you ask me, a brilliant idea on paper. The actual execution? Whhhoooo boy is that a whole different story.
On Christmas Adverts
Do you know what time it is, Hypothetical Audience? Well, as I write this it’s half two on Sunday, but that’s not what I’m getting at all. It’s actually that specific time of year, just past Halloween and Remembrance day, where the retail sector in the United Kingdom cranks into high gear with it’s marketing engines and bombard us, the consuming public, with christmas adverts until Boxing Day. It happens every year, obviously, and each company seems to try to out do both each other and themselves year on year. We get a whole cornucopia of thirty-seconds-to-a-couple-of-minutes films intended to sell us stuff, some directly by rubbing their products in our faces, others by desperately trying to pull at our heartstrings to make us forget it’s an advert. All in the name of crass commercialism, you see, for an event appropriated from Christian tradition that was likely appropriated from elsewhere ad infinitum. What fun!
Ndro's Adventures in Reality 