Our Director Writes:
Notes from the CD Mines, Volume 4
So an end is in sight, although what was a labour of love became a Herculean task relatively quickly.
Basically, all the easy stuff is now done. All the CDs that were sorted - i.e. in their own cases, etc - have been either sold or given to charity shops.
This leaves quite a few CDs not in their own cases.
And I know this isn't riveting stuff, but it's been kind of a strange afternoon; the re-uniting project has meant that CDs which haven't seen their cases for years - up to a decade in some cases, I suspect - are now warm and snuggly in their right place, etc etc.
It was the point at which I found an entire CD collection of Michel Thomas' teaching French that I thought things might be on the up-and-up, and now I only have about a hundred CDs to process before the end of this terrible, strange project.
Now, of course, we're into the weird territory. Or, at least, the weirder territory, because having traversed the plains of the normal, cased CDs, we're now into the realms of the uncased, the free, and the magazine promotional copies. The last of these promises to be the most annoying, primarily because they may have rare tracks or versions of tracks, but iTunes will probably refuse to legislate their existence. Still, if this is the worst thing about today, then today is a good day.
I know this is not exactly a fascinating topic - especially for a film student - but it is kind of pertinent, as we're talking a massive switchover from harcopy to digital copy on every single piece of music I own. The only reason I'm doing this with the CDs and not the DVDs is because it's free to do with the CDs; if owning a DVD meant having access to a digital copy, you can bet most of my DVDs would be gone now too, because, hey, the future is now, apparently.
On a film-related note; I keep hearing good things about Inception. Hearing good things about a film is not exactly a rarity, thanks to hype and press etc, but the good things I'm hearing are from film graduates and film students. Remember, however, that this in itself is not necessarily a good thing, because it's something being recommended on merits that only a select population think they know about, and I've seen many films that have been recommended by people who think they should be recommending the film.
In the old days, it was called wanting to look cool. There's probably some new youth slang for it these days that as an old, decrepit person I don't know. My bones are weak and my mind is feeble, etc, etc.
But I'm going to go and see the damn thing just because it looks interesting. This too is a double-edged sword, because it's not difficult to make something look interesting, but it is difficult to make it be interesting and because interesting is a moveable feast as far as terminology goes.
So maybe once I've digitised my life, I'll take a break from staring at a small screen to go stare at a bigger screen...
Tuesday, 20 July 2010
Monday, 19 July 2010
I live in a land of crass hypocrisy, we're gonna win the national lottery...
Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Things I Have Learnt This Summer
... E-i-addio, I don't think so (to finish the title quotation).
So yes. I may not be able to find any work, but I have learnt a few important things recently.
Things that will fit in the back of a Nissan Micra
- A tumble dryer
- A single mattress
- A king-size mattress
The last one was kind of a stretch, and involved some duct tape, but nobody was hurt in the making of that film, so hey.
My music collection was bigger than I ever thought.
Put it this way. Before I even began this lunatic crusade to digitise my music collection, I sold around somewhere between fifty to a hundred CDs to my local CEX, forever earning their enmity primarily because that meant they had to check each and every one before they could admit it, and all for about thirty pounds worth of exchange value.
Since then, I discovered a further two boxes of CDs, which have comprised the majority of this digitising effort. The albums I'm going to try to sell - although the social contract means I should probably not use my local CEX anymore, primarily because they have my address and will probably send around ninja assassins if I turn up with another bag full of CDs and no intention of spending my money in their actual, y'know, shop - and the singles are going to charity shops. (I know, I know, lucky them.)
But put it this way. Looking through my music collection, I note that it appears that in the past I bought [or received as a journalist] an album or a single every one-and-one third weeks for the past fourteen years.
And what bugs me is that I don't quite know why it mattered so much back in the day to own so much music. Don't get me wrong, it was a long, torrid, sweaty, passionate and at times angry affair, and I still love music, but forty CDs a year for over a decade?
Hmm.
Even my DVD collection isn't that obsessive.
Naturally, everyone has their passion, from geologists to fashion designers. But for someone who only wrote about music semi-professionally for a third of the time period they were obtaining CDs for, that's... Well... That's not bad.
See, I'm kind of proud to have found proof of a passion for something, because the six years prior to my re-attaining Student Status were good years, but quiet, professional, and perhaps even slightly grey years nonetheless. So at least this helps prove that prior to that I had something that mattered, something to follow, and something to do.
That's why Student Status makes me happier now than it did that mythical First Time Around. The first time, I was doing it because it was the expected next progressional step; preschool, school, sixth form, university, job. The university was a waystation in my life - a lot like I see happening to the current crop of students - between the end of school and the beginning of The Working Years, during which one is supposed to 'find oneself' and work out exactly what sort of a human being you are in order to better fit into the wider world.
That kind of didn't happen for me the first time around, much to my chagrin.
This time round, it's a better fit but a different time, because I'm happy with the where and the what but not necessarily with the when, but hey, you can't change the when so why worry, as they apparently say.
So it's a positive experience, digitising all my music, because it proves to me that there was a time when I had that kind of misguided passion and that need to follow something, and sport never did it in the way that music could, so music was the world for those pretty years 95-05. So don't get me started on Britpop.
No, really. Don't get me started.
Diary of a Mature Student: Things I Have Learnt This Summer
... E-i-addio, I don't think so (to finish the title quotation).
So yes. I may not be able to find any work, but I have learnt a few important things recently.
Things that will fit in the back of a Nissan Micra
- A tumble dryer
- A single mattress
- A king-size mattress
The last one was kind of a stretch, and involved some duct tape, but nobody was hurt in the making of that film, so hey.
My music collection was bigger than I ever thought.
Put it this way. Before I even began this lunatic crusade to digitise my music collection, I sold around somewhere between fifty to a hundred CDs to my local CEX, forever earning their enmity primarily because that meant they had to check each and every one before they could admit it, and all for about thirty pounds worth of exchange value.
Since then, I discovered a further two boxes of CDs, which have comprised the majority of this digitising effort. The albums I'm going to try to sell - although the social contract means I should probably not use my local CEX anymore, primarily because they have my address and will probably send around ninja assassins if I turn up with another bag full of CDs and no intention of spending my money in their actual, y'know, shop - and the singles are going to charity shops. (I know, I know, lucky them.)
But put it this way. Looking through my music collection, I note that it appears that in the past I bought [or received as a journalist] an album or a single every one-and-one third weeks for the past fourteen years.
And what bugs me is that I don't quite know why it mattered so much back in the day to own so much music. Don't get me wrong, it was a long, torrid, sweaty, passionate and at times angry affair, and I still love music, but forty CDs a year for over a decade?
Hmm.
Even my DVD collection isn't that obsessive.
Naturally, everyone has their passion, from geologists to fashion designers. But for someone who only wrote about music semi-professionally for a third of the time period they were obtaining CDs for, that's... Well... That's not bad.
See, I'm kind of proud to have found proof of a passion for something, because the six years prior to my re-attaining Student Status were good years, but quiet, professional, and perhaps even slightly grey years nonetheless. So at least this helps prove that prior to that I had something that mattered, something to follow, and something to do.
That's why Student Status makes me happier now than it did that mythical First Time Around. The first time, I was doing it because it was the expected next progressional step; preschool, school, sixth form, university, job. The university was a waystation in my life - a lot like I see happening to the current crop of students - between the end of school and the beginning of The Working Years, during which one is supposed to 'find oneself' and work out exactly what sort of a human being you are in order to better fit into the wider world.
That kind of didn't happen for me the first time around, much to my chagrin.
This time round, it's a better fit but a different time, because I'm happy with the where and the what but not necessarily with the when, but hey, you can't change the when so why worry, as they apparently say.
So it's a positive experience, digitising all my music, because it proves to me that there was a time when I had that kind of misguided passion and that need to follow something, and sport never did it in the way that music could, so music was the world for those pretty years 95-05. So don't get me started on Britpop.
No, really. Don't get me started.
Thursday, 15 July 2010
I was with him, he had seven jack-and-cokes in him
Our Editor Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: The New Digital Revolution continues
So after discovering how easy it is to buy music online, the time now comes to upload all of the old music into one place and then give away the CDs.
(I would sell them, but who'd want them?)
So I now find my music collection providing a fascinating window into the past.
[Do you want to import Touched into your iTunes library?]
The past is, as we know, a distant country, and they do things differently there. It was a time, apparently, when a CD single - with two tracks on - could be legitimately sold for £4.49 on 'import'.
Don't misunderstand me, I remember vinyl (kind of) and cassette tapes (yep) and minidiscs (...) and then CDs.
But when did I buy / receive (bless Student Journalism) so many of the damn things?
Today's efforts, so far, have yielded 120 albums (mostly singles, however) uploaded. Of which one has proved to be so obscure as to now be known by iTunes -
[Would you like to import the CD The Everlasting into your iTunes library?]
- and of which at least forty so far have necessitated me ferreting out the artwork myself and asking iTunes to pretty please accept it.
And when it's done, the CDs go - to charity shops, I should think, because selling this many to CEX would be sisyphean, to say the least - ~And there'll be that little bit more weight off of my metaphorical back.
I say it again; I envy the digital download generation, because physical media will have a new kind of cachét that it rarely did before. Alright, there were special editions and limited editions and promos, but once you remove the necessity of the physical element of a piece of music, or a movie, or a book, then its' presence becomes, by default, something interesting. And won't that be nice?
Of course, being old-school with regards to media, I'm going to have to back all this up somewhere in case something happens - nothing like good-old-fashioned paranoia - but...
... It's a little strange.
It's strange because music mattered to me so much ten or so years ago that owning these CDs was like a prerequisite for existence. Compared to the modern world, actually listening to them - physically finding the CD, putting it in a player, waiting for it to load, finding the track you want - would take longer than loading up this computer and going to Youtube or spotify. (This is primarily because my laissez-faire attitude to CDs being in their right cases meaning finding the right CD could take hours if not days, to be fair - it's an admission of untidiness rather than a boast of speedy ability.)
[Would you like to import the CD Big Night Out into your iTunes library?]
If you're reading this now and you're, well, under 20 years old or so, try and understand just how far things have come in the last ten years. When I was at university for the first time, mp3 players were just starting, and they were a pain in the arse. Technically, I'm from the pre-iPod generation, which is kind of nice, but it was CDs all the way. Now, you can torrent hundreds - if not thousands - of mp3s overnight, but...
[Would you like to import the CD See this through and leave into your iTunes library?]
... I'm going to deploy the excuse the previous generation applied to CDs instead of vinyl. Downloading is - and it pains me to use this word because it sounds so oddly patronising - soulless.
I get it. I really do. I was on Napster back in the day, with all the old p2p networking and such meaning free music. And then, like that, I stopped, partly because Napster stopped but also partly because I thought it was the right thing to do.
And I know this sounds like preaching, and that taking any sort of moral stance is frowned upon in the world of downloading, but... I just don't get it.
Then again, I worry about The Law - capitals intentional - because of the way I was brought up. Like everyone else, I happily mock the You wouldn't steal a car anti-piracy adverts because they're so histrionic - but, sadly, they're true. I wouldn't steal a car. I wouldn't steal anything. This is primarily because of the belief that if I did, there would be a policeman waiting behind me at just that moment, rather than some sort of social commentary.
I'm surrounded by torrenters - and I get it, because being a student means, functionally, having no money. But the scales aren't balanced - back in the day (another phrase I don't really like using) file-sharing, p2p and torrents were in their infancy, so I really didn't have the option of Mass Downloading. If I were a student today - more accurately, if I were an 18-year-old student today - I would be downloading things, I suspect, like a hyperactive bastard.
[Do you want to import the CD Under Rug Swept into your iTunes library?]
But I'm not. So I don't. This is because I'm really, really old-fashioned. I know what an album on CD looks like and how much they cost to buy, and in my head I equate downloading with going into a shop, picking up the CD and leaving without paying. You may see it differently, and, if so, more power to you - there's always the Bruce Sterling way of looking at it, whereby music is, now, functionally data, and data wants to be free. And there are plenty of arguments to state that people wouldn't hear a musician's work if they couldn't get it for free. And there's spotify, and youtube, and all manner of places that show stuff for free. (Or, at least, for advertising revenue, a portion of which is then fed back to the record company.)
So please, go ahead and download. I'll not tell you not to, and I'm not taking the moral high ground, but if it's all the same to you, I won't do it...
... And in return, I have days of uploading ahead of me. And fairly soon, a nearby charity shop will most likely curse the day I walked in and dumped a bag full of CDs on them. And eventually, the songs I like out of all of this uploading will find their way to my iPod, and my past will catch up with me. In a good way, I hope, and I kind of hope my iPod has enough room for all this history. But for now...
[Do you want to import the CD For Your Ears Only into your iTunes library?]
Diary of a Mature Student: The New Digital Revolution continues
So after discovering how easy it is to buy music online, the time now comes to upload all of the old music into one place and then give away the CDs.
(I would sell them, but who'd want them?)
So I now find my music collection providing a fascinating window into the past.
[Do you want to import Touched into your iTunes library?]
The past is, as we know, a distant country, and they do things differently there. It was a time, apparently, when a CD single - with two tracks on - could be legitimately sold for £4.49 on 'import'.
Don't misunderstand me, I remember vinyl (kind of) and cassette tapes (yep) and minidiscs (...) and then CDs.
But when did I buy / receive (bless Student Journalism) so many of the damn things?
Today's efforts, so far, have yielded 120 albums (mostly singles, however) uploaded. Of which one has proved to be so obscure as to now be known by iTunes -
[Would you like to import the CD The Everlasting into your iTunes library?]
- and of which at least forty so far have necessitated me ferreting out the artwork myself and asking iTunes to pretty please accept it.
And when it's done, the CDs go - to charity shops, I should think, because selling this many to CEX would be sisyphean, to say the least - ~And there'll be that little bit more weight off of my metaphorical back.
I say it again; I envy the digital download generation, because physical media will have a new kind of cachét that it rarely did before. Alright, there were special editions and limited editions and promos, but once you remove the necessity of the physical element of a piece of music, or a movie, or a book, then its' presence becomes, by default, something interesting. And won't that be nice?
Of course, being old-school with regards to media, I'm going to have to back all this up somewhere in case something happens - nothing like good-old-fashioned paranoia - but...
... It's a little strange.
It's strange because music mattered to me so much ten or so years ago that owning these CDs was like a prerequisite for existence. Compared to the modern world, actually listening to them - physically finding the CD, putting it in a player, waiting for it to load, finding the track you want - would take longer than loading up this computer and going to Youtube or spotify. (This is primarily because my laissez-faire attitude to CDs being in their right cases meaning finding the right CD could take hours if not days, to be fair - it's an admission of untidiness rather than a boast of speedy ability.)
[Would you like to import the CD Big Night Out into your iTunes library?]
If you're reading this now and you're, well, under 20 years old or so, try and understand just how far things have come in the last ten years. When I was at university for the first time, mp3 players were just starting, and they were a pain in the arse. Technically, I'm from the pre-iPod generation, which is kind of nice, but it was CDs all the way. Now, you can torrent hundreds - if not thousands - of mp3s overnight, but...
[Would you like to import the CD See this through and leave into your iTunes library?]
... I'm going to deploy the excuse the previous generation applied to CDs instead of vinyl. Downloading is - and it pains me to use this word because it sounds so oddly patronising - soulless.
I get it. I really do. I was on Napster back in the day, with all the old p2p networking and such meaning free music. And then, like that, I stopped, partly because Napster stopped but also partly because I thought it was the right thing to do.
And I know this sounds like preaching, and that taking any sort of moral stance is frowned upon in the world of downloading, but... I just don't get it.
Then again, I worry about The Law - capitals intentional - because of the way I was brought up. Like everyone else, I happily mock the You wouldn't steal a car anti-piracy adverts because they're so histrionic - but, sadly, they're true. I wouldn't steal a car. I wouldn't steal anything. This is primarily because of the belief that if I did, there would be a policeman waiting behind me at just that moment, rather than some sort of social commentary.
I'm surrounded by torrenters - and I get it, because being a student means, functionally, having no money. But the scales aren't balanced - back in the day (another phrase I don't really like using) file-sharing, p2p and torrents were in their infancy, so I really didn't have the option of Mass Downloading. If I were a student today - more accurately, if I were an 18-year-old student today - I would be downloading things, I suspect, like a hyperactive bastard.
[Do you want to import the CD Under Rug Swept into your iTunes library?]
But I'm not. So I don't. This is because I'm really, really old-fashioned. I know what an album on CD looks like and how much they cost to buy, and in my head I equate downloading with going into a shop, picking up the CD and leaving without paying. You may see it differently, and, if so, more power to you - there's always the Bruce Sterling way of looking at it, whereby music is, now, functionally data, and data wants to be free. And there are plenty of arguments to state that people wouldn't hear a musician's work if they couldn't get it for free. And there's spotify, and youtube, and all manner of places that show stuff for free. (Or, at least, for advertising revenue, a portion of which is then fed back to the record company.)
So please, go ahead and download. I'll not tell you not to, and I'm not taking the moral high ground, but if it's all the same to you, I won't do it...
... And in return, I have days of uploading ahead of me. And fairly soon, a nearby charity shop will most likely curse the day I walked in and dumped a bag full of CDs on them. And eventually, the songs I like out of all of this uploading will find their way to my iPod, and my past will catch up with me. In a good way, I hope, and I kind of hope my iPod has enough room for all this history. But for now...
[Do you want to import the CD For Your Ears Only into your iTunes library?]
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Helter Skelter in the Summer Swelter
Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: So here we are and here we are and here we go...
You see what happens, Larry? You see what happens when you mention a movie? This is what happens, Larry. Okay?
The summer period is a weird time to be a mature student. Not that there's a good time to be a mature student, unless you like everyone looking at you like you're crazy, but hey, that's par for the course. But being unable to find work and having a lot of time on your hands means, well, that you notice a lot more things than you otherwise normally might.
Let's take a step back away from the mature student thing for a moment.
Diary of a Mature Person -
Wait. That doesn't work either, for obvious reasons.
Diary of a Pre-digital generation remnant, summertime.
Here's the thing. I envy the current generation because they don't have to carry around so much shit.
I'm happy to admit that I'm a pop culturewhore commentator. Less so these last few years due to a general slowing down and growing up, but between, say, '96 and '06 I followed music, films and books with a passion, which meant, for the most part, buying the fucking things. It's not the buying I resent - so don't get me started on torrenters, we'll be here all day - it's more that now, slowly approaching my third decade, I have boxes and boxes and boxes and even more boxes of irrelevant shit.
Don't get me wrong - not only was it very relevant to me at the time, but I still like to go through what can wistfully be called a library (in that I have more CDs than my current university library and more books than the English section). I like owning or having owned some of this stuff.
The stuff I don't like owning or having owned mas made its' way, therefore, to a series of charity shops, or to the dump, or has been sold via Amazon or, occasionally, eBay, an experience that taught me never to offer international postage again.
Something like ten dustbin bags' worth went to charity shops, although that includes clothes, so there may be some unlucky bastards wandering round in some of my fashion faux-pas-s from the last ten years or so. Another ten bags worth went to the dump to be recycled into something more useful, like tennis shoes or compost. Oh, and I have reserved a special place for the unique kind of torment that is CEX.
Let's talk about CEX for a moment. I've sold them hundreds of pounds worth of CDs and DVDs over the last month or so, and they'll go on to offer them for, on average, four times what they pay for them. This isn't such a bad ratio; value has a curious differential when it comes to entertainment property, because as soon as you buy a DVD the value decreases, followed by a further decrease if you watch the goddamn thing, and an even sharper decrease if it's a popular dvd, because everyone wants to sell theirs too. It is not, as they say, a sellers' market.
But on the five or so occasions I've done this, it's never been exactly what you might call a perfect experience. Sure, I've sold 90% of what I've taken in, the rest being just to weird, American or otherwise ineligible for their mystical buyer-seller bond to take. But their staff appears to be made up entirely of disinterested teenagers - which I know automatically makes me sound old, but, alas, it's true - and for an exchange company, they don't actually seem that happy to be buying goods even considering they only need to sell a quarter of what they buy to even out their profit margin.
This is turning into a bit of a rant. I like CEX, and I like it even more that I've probably done all of the selling I'm going to do to them which means, functionally, that I won't have to deal with them again for a l-o-n-g time.
At the same time, my town always had another exchange shop for games. No, they weren't perfect - their range of titles relied entirely upon a dedicated but elusive band of people willing to sell on the latest games or on being able to buy the games on import and sell them on for a profit - but they were 'local', 'independent', and all these other nice little buzzwords people use when they didn't want to give money to the local Faceless Multi-store Corporate Conglomerate (tm).
That shop closed down a fortnight ago. Their lease was approaching, and with a remarkable prescience they decided that everything's moving towards digital downloads anyway so what's the point in keeping a bricks-and-mortar shop to sell physical units when fairly soon they might be obsolete?
A month and a half ago, my local bookshop closed down as well. They were 'independent' etcetera etcetera, but they also had a place in my heart because I worked there as a Saturday Assistant for a year. Granted, when I started it was pre-minimum wage, which meant that at £2.65 an hour I had to work for two and a half hours just to buy a book. But it was a good place - a nice place, although that's a wallpaper word - to be. They're gone now, although thanks to the manager giving me an 'ex-staff-member' discount on top of the 50% closing-down sale I now have journals for the next two academic years, which will remind me of the place whenever I make notes.
However, Yes, I think I had a Point somewhere when I started all this.
So even after an exhaustive purge of CDs, books, and DVDs, I still have box upon box of them in storage. The next project, in theory, is to digitize my entire cd collection, which may take the better part of a year and require a lot of data storage, and also may require the ability on my part to care about most of the music in the collection, which may be in short supply.
But if I were, say, an 18-or-19 year old now, I could in theory get all the music and movies I needed without ever having to own something I could physically hold in my hands. Sure, for mainstream culture iTunes takes care of music and movies. Even Kindle etc are now moving in on books, meaning you will be able to carry them around in one place rather than in hundreds of bound pulped-wood dead-tree copies.
And, contrary to what the majority of the generation before me thinks - and that the generation after will probably not have to think about much, if at all - this is a good thing. I would love to have every single one of my books in one place, alphabetized, ready at the touch of a touchscreen, or my entire music collection on one drive somewhere, or any movie I wanted without having to put disc to drive. And it will happen, in the next ten years or so.
As a film student, I like the idea of being able to carry around my body of work in one place rather than having to whip out DVDs to show people. Hell, if I could afford an iPad, I'd be able to bore no end of people with my work, showing them my films on a decent sized screen. One day, I suspect, I will. Look forward to that day, huh?
For now, however, I'm content to try an experiment. Confession time; I've never bought anything particularly substantial digitally before. An episode of Ashes to Ashes and two or three songs on iTunes notwithstanding, I've only really dipped my toe in the waters of Legal Digital Downloading.
So now it's time to take the plunge. (Although it's not exactly plunge-y, but hey.) It's time to purchase an album digitally.
Yeah baby.
So here's the deal.
Dog Soldiers
is a good film, bordering on a great film. And before you ask, yes, it does feel a little odd doing the Amazon Associates linking thing, but since nobody reads this, and nobody's going to link through, I don't feel so bad.
Back In The Day, the Dog Soldiers soundtrack was oddly rare on CD. In fact, to buy it in America (Dog Soldiers
) will set you back $75 - $120 dollars, which seems a bit punitive. If memory serves, pre-download, the CD would have set you back £32-£64 over here, which is, again, somewhat punitive.
Now, it'll cost you £7.49 to download. So I'm going to try it out. Cross your fingers, for I am old, and these concepts are new.
In fact, as a student, it curiously only costs me £7.12. Which is nice.
... And it appears to be as simple as that.
Suddenly, I'm impressed. And it only cost £7.12 to impress me.
Does that make me cheap?
Diary of a Mature Student: So here we are and here we are and here we go...
You see what happens, Larry? You see what happens when you mention a movie? This is what happens, Larry. Okay?
The summer period is a weird time to be a mature student. Not that there's a good time to be a mature student, unless you like everyone looking at you like you're crazy, but hey, that's par for the course. But being unable to find work and having a lot of time on your hands means, well, that you notice a lot more things than you otherwise normally might.
Let's take a step back away from the mature student thing for a moment.
Diary of a Mature Person -
Wait. That doesn't work either, for obvious reasons.
Diary of a Pre-digital generation remnant, summertime.
Here's the thing. I envy the current generation because they don't have to carry around so much shit.
I'm happy to admit that I'm a pop culture
Don't get me wrong - not only was it very relevant to me at the time, but I still like to go through what can wistfully be called a library (in that I have more CDs than my current university library and more books than the English section). I like owning or having owned some of this stuff.
The stuff I don't like owning or having owned mas made its' way, therefore, to a series of charity shops, or to the dump, or has been sold via Amazon or, occasionally, eBay, an experience that taught me never to offer international postage again.
Something like ten dustbin bags' worth went to charity shops, although that includes clothes, so there may be some unlucky bastards wandering round in some of my fashion faux-pas-s from the last ten years or so. Another ten bags worth went to the dump to be recycled into something more useful, like tennis shoes or compost. Oh, and I have reserved a special place for the unique kind of torment that is CEX.
Let's talk about CEX for a moment. I've sold them hundreds of pounds worth of CDs and DVDs over the last month or so, and they'll go on to offer them for, on average, four times what they pay for them. This isn't such a bad ratio; value has a curious differential when it comes to entertainment property, because as soon as you buy a DVD the value decreases, followed by a further decrease if you watch the goddamn thing, and an even sharper decrease if it's a popular dvd, because everyone wants to sell theirs too. It is not, as they say, a sellers' market.
But on the five or so occasions I've done this, it's never been exactly what you might call a perfect experience. Sure, I've sold 90% of what I've taken in, the rest being just to weird, American or otherwise ineligible for their mystical buyer-seller bond to take. But their staff appears to be made up entirely of disinterested teenagers - which I know automatically makes me sound old, but, alas, it's true - and for an exchange company, they don't actually seem that happy to be buying goods even considering they only need to sell a quarter of what they buy to even out their profit margin.
This is turning into a bit of a rant. I like CEX, and I like it even more that I've probably done all of the selling I'm going to do to them which means, functionally, that I won't have to deal with them again for a l-o-n-g time.
At the same time, my town always had another exchange shop for games. No, they weren't perfect - their range of titles relied entirely upon a dedicated but elusive band of people willing to sell on the latest games or on being able to buy the games on import and sell them on for a profit - but they were 'local', 'independent', and all these other nice little buzzwords people use when they didn't want to give money to the local Faceless Multi-store Corporate Conglomerate (tm).
That shop closed down a fortnight ago. Their lease was approaching, and with a remarkable prescience they decided that everything's moving towards digital downloads anyway so what's the point in keeping a bricks-and-mortar shop to sell physical units when fairly soon they might be obsolete?
A month and a half ago, my local bookshop closed down as well. They were 'independent' etcetera etcetera, but they also had a place in my heart because I worked there as a Saturday Assistant for a year. Granted, when I started it was pre-minimum wage, which meant that at £2.65 an hour I had to work for two and a half hours just to buy a book. But it was a good place - a nice place, although that's a wallpaper word - to be. They're gone now, although thanks to the manager giving me an 'ex-staff-member' discount on top of the 50% closing-down sale I now have journals for the next two academic years, which will remind me of the place whenever I make notes.
However, Yes, I think I had a Point somewhere when I started all this.
So even after an exhaustive purge of CDs, books, and DVDs, I still have box upon box of them in storage. The next project, in theory, is to digitize my entire cd collection, which may take the better part of a year and require a lot of data storage, and also may require the ability on my part to care about most of the music in the collection, which may be in short supply.
But if I were, say, an 18-or-19 year old now, I could in theory get all the music and movies I needed without ever having to own something I could physically hold in my hands. Sure, for mainstream culture iTunes takes care of music and movies. Even Kindle etc are now moving in on books, meaning you will be able to carry them around in one place rather than in hundreds of bound pulped-wood dead-tree copies.
And, contrary to what the majority of the generation before me thinks - and that the generation after will probably not have to think about much, if at all - this is a good thing. I would love to have every single one of my books in one place, alphabetized, ready at the touch of a touchscreen, or my entire music collection on one drive somewhere, or any movie I wanted without having to put disc to drive. And it will happen, in the next ten years or so.
As a film student, I like the idea of being able to carry around my body of work in one place rather than having to whip out DVDs to show people. Hell, if I could afford an iPad, I'd be able to bore no end of people with my work, showing them my films on a decent sized screen. One day, I suspect, I will. Look forward to that day, huh?
For now, however, I'm content to try an experiment. Confession time; I've never bought anything particularly substantial digitally before. An episode of Ashes to Ashes and two or three songs on iTunes notwithstanding, I've only really dipped my toe in the waters of Legal Digital Downloading.
So now it's time to take the plunge. (Although it's not exactly plunge-y, but hey.) It's time to purchase an album digitally.
Yeah baby.
So here's the deal.
Dog Soldiers
is a good film, bordering on a great film. And before you ask, yes, it does feel a little odd doing the Amazon Associates linking thing, but since nobody reads this, and nobody's going to link through, I don't feel so bad. Back In The Day, the Dog Soldiers soundtrack was oddly rare on CD. In fact, to buy it in America (Dog Soldiers
) will set you back $75 - $120 dollars, which seems a bit punitive. If memory serves, pre-download, the CD would have set you back £32-£64 over here, which is, again, somewhat punitive. Now, it'll cost you £7.49 to download. So I'm going to try it out. Cross your fingers, for I am old, and these concepts are new.
In fact, as a student, it curiously only costs me £7.12. Which is nice.
... And it appears to be as simple as that.
Suddenly, I'm impressed. And it only cost £7.12 to impress me.
Does that make me cheap?
Monday, 21 June 2010
"He's a bit... Billy Graham, you know?"
Our Editor Writes:
On making a successful trailer
Not that we here at the 'Crow know too much about this - our previous efforts have involved wooden swords, parasols, and lots of running - but let's talk about trailer music for a moment, shall we?
I like the idea of The Adjustment Bureau. I really do - the whole 'rebelling against a destiny not planned by you' aspect. It's not an easy sell to the general public, necessarily - quasi-science fiction based on Philip K Dick rarely goes well (see A Scanner Darkly
, for instance, or the troubles Blade Runner had in getting through production and out the other side, not least of which were monotone voice-overs). So, the film's destiny - even starring Matt Damon, Emily Blunt and Terence Stamp et al - is nebulous at best. Is it a love story? Or maybe science fiction? Or a contemporary science fiction love story? Something tells me that by the end love will have conquered the evil machinations of the Planners, but hey, I'm cynical like that.
Or is it the story of a mutant changed into an indestructible killing machine by the US government?
Funny thing, trailer music.
Go back to The Adjustment Bureau's trailers page. Watch the trailer from 1:23 onwards.
Now go here, and watch the trailer from the start.
Kind of similar, no?
Then again, both films feature protagonists confronted by shadowy conspiracies and who have to beat the conspiracy to find out the truth about their lives, their destiny and the woman they love.
It's just that one of them has an indestructible skeleton. So hey.
I know there's only so much music to go around, and that if a tune fits, work it... But seriously, do Universal want their viewers to subconsciously think of OTT fighting mutants instead of A Love Story That Defies Destiny?
On making a successful trailer
Not that we here at the 'Crow know too much about this - our previous efforts have involved wooden swords, parasols, and lots of running - but let's talk about trailer music for a moment, shall we?
I like the idea of The Adjustment Bureau. I really do - the whole 'rebelling against a destiny not planned by you' aspect. It's not an easy sell to the general public, necessarily - quasi-science fiction based on Philip K Dick rarely goes well (see A Scanner Darkly
, for instance, or the troubles Blade Runner had in getting through production and out the other side, not least of which were monotone voice-overs). So, the film's destiny - even starring Matt Damon, Emily Blunt and Terence Stamp et al - is nebulous at best. Is it a love story? Or maybe science fiction? Or a contemporary science fiction love story? Something tells me that by the end love will have conquered the evil machinations of the Planners, but hey, I'm cynical like that. Or is it the story of a mutant changed into an indestructible killing machine by the US government?
Funny thing, trailer music.
Go back to The Adjustment Bureau's trailers page. Watch the trailer from 1:23 onwards.
Now go here, and watch the trailer from the start.
Kind of similar, no?
Then again, both films feature protagonists confronted by shadowy conspiracies and who have to beat the conspiracy to find out the truth about their lives, their destiny and the woman they love.
It's just that one of them has an indestructible skeleton. So hey.
I know there's only so much music to go around, and that if a tune fits, work it... But seriously, do Universal want their viewers to subconsciously think of OTT fighting mutants instead of A Love Story That Defies Destiny?
Monday, 7 June 2010
Oh, it's on like Donkey Kong...
Our Editor Writes:
So, yes, by now you've probably realised that we sent our director to Film School.
I say 'probably realised', of course, as if there's anyone reading this. If there is, of course; hello! Thanks for stopping by. Pull up a chair and get comfortable, there's about forty or so plus entries to go through related to our slightly odd - charitably, 'idiosyncratic' - film company.
But I thought it a good idea to note that our director - such as he is - is, in fact, right. It's cheaper to pay his tuition fees than to hire him a camera and editing suite. Bear in mind that here in the Eton Crow offices we have two macs, one with final cut (express) and one with - Oh Lord - iMovie, and one or two consumer / low grade camcorders.
You can think of us as charmingly retro, or you can think of us as lo-fi, but in reality, we're cheap and we're proud. Well, I say proud. Kind of proud. The kind of proud that you can only really have when you don't have any other options.
But here's the thing. We have a sponsor. Not in the televangelical sense - but we have someone sufficiently interested in our Director to sponsor him while he does the learning thing and posting strange little blog entries with musical lyrics for post titles about being An Old Man Among Young People. This sponsor - hell, it's always going to be italicised - seems to believe that our Director has some potential of some sort, which is nice.
So here's a little secret. Right now, Eton Crow - as you've no doubt worked out, you smart cookie - isn't exactly a 'film company'. It's me and the director, and hey, I have a day job, so... I get to spend the occasional bit of time - evenings and weekends - reviewing the director's tapes. Don't get me wrong, he has to edit them himself 99% of the time, because, hey, he's being graded on them, but shit, even if Eton Crow is Me and Him and Him and Me (and we are all together), I do like to keep my hand in.
We do actually have stuff to show you, in case you were wondering if we're just an odd bunch of people talking about studying and filmmaking. So I figure it's time to show our working. Here's an example, in three parts;
So, yes, by now you've probably realised that we sent our director to Film School.
I say 'probably realised', of course, as if there's anyone reading this. If there is, of course; hello! Thanks for stopping by. Pull up a chair and get comfortable, there's about forty or so plus entries to go through related to our slightly odd - charitably, 'idiosyncratic' - film company.
But I thought it a good idea to note that our director - such as he is - is, in fact, right. It's cheaper to pay his tuition fees than to hire him a camera and editing suite. Bear in mind that here in the Eton Crow offices we have two macs, one with final cut (express) and one with - Oh Lord - iMovie, and one or two consumer / low grade camcorders.
You can think of us as charmingly retro, or you can think of us as lo-fi, but in reality, we're cheap and we're proud. Well, I say proud. Kind of proud. The kind of proud that you can only really have when you don't have any other options.
But here's the thing. We have a sponsor. Not in the televangelical sense - but we have someone sufficiently interested in our Director to sponsor him while he does the learning thing and posting strange little blog entries with musical lyrics for post titles about being An Old Man Among Young People. This sponsor - hell, it's always going to be italicised - seems to believe that our Director has some potential of some sort, which is nice.
So here's a little secret. Right now, Eton Crow - as you've no doubt worked out, you smart cookie - isn't exactly a 'film company'. It's me and the director, and hey, I have a day job, so... I get to spend the occasional bit of time - evenings and weekends - reviewing the director's tapes. Don't get me wrong, he has to edit them himself 99% of the time, because, hey, he's being graded on them, but shit, even if Eton Crow is Me and Him and Him and Me (and we are all together), I do like to keep my hand in.
We do actually have stuff to show you, in case you were wondering if we're just an odd bunch of people talking about studying and filmmaking. So I figure it's time to show our working. Here's an example, in three parts;
The band are called Kamikaze Practice, as you can probably tell. This is only a part of why they're interesting, though. See, our director loves William Gibson (hell, let's test this Amazon Associates thing out; books like Pattern Recognition
and Spook Country
lay around our office whether I like it or not). So the thing about Kamikaze Practice is that - according to our reputable sources, at least - they no longer exist. They glimmered brightly as a band since sometime towards the autumn of last year, played a few gigs, recorded a few songs, played the gig you see above and then broke up due to (a) musical differences and (b) one of their number apparently having other commitments, which we won't mention here.
This might explain why we never heard back from the band's singer about the videos that were edited and uploaded over the course of a month. (Well, the uploading took a week, primarily because our office broadband is capped at something like 2mb on a good fucking day, so that was a fun wait).
In Gibson terms, releasing a video of a band that's already broken up and reformed as someone else by the time the video was edited is, well, it's up there. W-a-y up high.
So while it's annoying that the video doesn't have the same meaning as, say, a video of a new band on to big things, it's still, to his mind, pretty cool.
To me, it's annoying. But I'm just the editor - i.e. the one who keeps the computers happy - so what would I know?
The director, by the way, is on a short holiday at the moment, but hey, he never reads any of the entries he posts anyway, so he probably won't even notice this one...
... But enjoy the videos. And if you like them, bear in mind that this may be the only exigent proof that the band in them ever existed...
Saturday, 22 May 2010
And oh God, I hope I'm not stuck with this one
Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Summer Daze
All the things I know right now, if I'd only know them then...
Currently, I have two things: a newly-working scanner and an extensive photograph collection.
I mean, yes, I've got my hands, got my feet, got my heart, got my soul and, yes, my freedom, but right now the extensive photograph collection is proving interesting, to say the least.
At a conservative estimate, there are photograph wallets stretching back at least twelve years in here. Some of them relate to previous scanning attempts, but since the majority of them were probably lost in the Great Computer Fuckup of '09, it's worth scanning them all in again.
Memories, so big you can get lost in them...
For instance, there are quite a few photographs, pertinently, of the end of my first year last time around on the degree merry-go-round. Even though experience tells me otherwise, I desperately want to call them Class of Cirrhosis '99, being as most of them have an alcoholic drink in there somewhere. This isn't exactly unfair, because at least one of them did end up with cirrhosis of the liver, and I did hang around with a boozy bunch, the whereabouts of precisely one - the sensible one - I can trace now, ten years on, and only then because (a) sensible and (b) memorable surname.
Of the others, I know at least one dropped out and off the radar, and the others, no clue. That was, to be fair, a particularly weird social group, based entirely around hanging around the union bar. Not even the union union bar, considering we were something like seven tube stops from the main campus; no, this was a satellite union bar, for all those who didn't fancy the journey to the main union bar. You can possibly imagine the quality and style of people this attracted. The word 'calibre' springs to mind, but only in the case of 'small'.
I think these photos are of the last night on campus before going home for the summer. I say this only because at the end of the roll there are some shots of London by Night circa '99, where myself and two friends-at-the-time drove into the heart of London and out again, watching the sun go down. It was just about as cool as it sounds - so your mileage may vary - but it's also a timely reminder that, for me at least, friendships seem to have varying half-lives.
... Oh god. I've just reached the Polaroids from an old Joycam (tm) - a polaroid camera that too teeny, tiny photos - and I've just had to clean up what I'm hoping was dried coffee from the front of all of them, because if it was dried blood... Well... fuck.
Still, some cold water later, all good. This is a very, very strange experience, though, all tangled up in weird skeins of emotions long forgotten or long-hoped-forgotten.
Here's something. Go here for a moment and read up. (See? Educational and informative.) I've said it before, but none of you believed it then, so I'll say it again; working with Young People every day is a strange struggle not to Cassandra them into catatonia.
Students of 2010, I offer you one essential piece of advice:
Don't buy so much stupid shit!
This is less of a problem for you now than it was for my generation, such as I have one. Put it this way; look at your iTunes or your WMA files. If you've bought or downloaded your music from legitimate or illegitimate websites, then you have one distinct advantage on my generation, i.e. not having to own the bastard things physically.
Picture this, if you will. For me, first, there were cassette tapes; the advantage of these was being able to record whatever you wanted on to the blank ones (and I still have a soft spot in my heart for mixtapes) but the disadvantages were easy of breaking and the need to rewind them manually, like videotapes, to the point you wanted. Then came CDs; no recording what you liked - yet - but no rewinding, either, what with the whole 'track' thing. Then there were minidiscs, but the less said about them the better, although in passing it's worth noting that they combined the worst aspects of tapes - having, at least to begin with, to record songs in real time - with the worst aspects of CDs, i.e. they were a bugger to record over.
Then came .mp3s, and suddenly, slowly, a shift began towards a world where the physical form of the media didn't actually matter any more.
Which means that the five hundred odd CDs and DVDs are now a massive pain in the arse to store, but not as bad as the cassette tapes, floppy discs and goddamn video tapes currently clogging up the garage. Add to this the books I read for pleasure plus the books I read to study and hey, you can see my problem.
I tried to alleviate this last year. Ten dustbin bags of clothes, CDs, books and videos went to the charity shops. Another ten went to the local municipal dump. Curiously, this only seemed to make things worse. Suddenly, the upstairs storage was filled with boxes from the downstairs storage, and the downstairs storage couldn't even be gotten into without crampons and hefty climbing boots.
Like I say, this is less of a problem for The Current Generation, raised as they were on .mp3s, torrents, filesharing, and anything other than having to actually pay for the damn thing. And, without condoning criminal activity, good for them, because it means that, in ten years time, they won't be spending hours of their lives going over everything they every bought and trying to work out why they bought it in the first place...
Diary of a Mature Student: Summer Daze
All the things I know right now, if I'd only know them then...
Currently, I have two things: a newly-working scanner and an extensive photograph collection.
I mean, yes, I've got my hands, got my feet, got my heart, got my soul and, yes, my freedom, but right now the extensive photograph collection is proving interesting, to say the least.
At a conservative estimate, there are photograph wallets stretching back at least twelve years in here. Some of them relate to previous scanning attempts, but since the majority of them were probably lost in the Great Computer Fuckup of '09, it's worth scanning them all in again.
Memories, so big you can get lost in them...
For instance, there are quite a few photographs, pertinently, of the end of my first year last time around on the degree merry-go-round. Even though experience tells me otherwise, I desperately want to call them Class of Cirrhosis '99, being as most of them have an alcoholic drink in there somewhere. This isn't exactly unfair, because at least one of them did end up with cirrhosis of the liver, and I did hang around with a boozy bunch, the whereabouts of precisely one - the sensible one - I can trace now, ten years on, and only then because (a) sensible and (b) memorable surname.
Of the others, I know at least one dropped out and off the radar, and the others, no clue. That was, to be fair, a particularly weird social group, based entirely around hanging around the union bar. Not even the union union bar, considering we were something like seven tube stops from the main campus; no, this was a satellite union bar, for all those who didn't fancy the journey to the main union bar. You can possibly imagine the quality and style of people this attracted. The word 'calibre' springs to mind, but only in the case of 'small'.
I think these photos are of the last night on campus before going home for the summer. I say this only because at the end of the roll there are some shots of London by Night circa '99, where myself and two friends-at-the-time drove into the heart of London and out again, watching the sun go down. It was just about as cool as it sounds - so your mileage may vary - but it's also a timely reminder that, for me at least, friendships seem to have varying half-lives.
... Oh god. I've just reached the Polaroids from an old Joycam (tm) - a polaroid camera that too teeny, tiny photos - and I've just had to clean up what I'm hoping was dried coffee from the front of all of them, because if it was dried blood... Well... fuck.
Still, some cold water later, all good. This is a very, very strange experience, though, all tangled up in weird skeins of emotions long forgotten or long-hoped-forgotten.
Here's something. Go here for a moment and read up. (See? Educational and informative.) I've said it before, but none of you believed it then, so I'll say it again; working with Young People every day is a strange struggle not to Cassandra them into catatonia.
Students of 2010, I offer you one essential piece of advice:
Don't buy so much stupid shit!
This is less of a problem for you now than it was for my generation, such as I have one. Put it this way; look at your iTunes or your WMA files. If you've bought or downloaded your music from legitimate or illegitimate websites, then you have one distinct advantage on my generation, i.e. not having to own the bastard things physically.
Picture this, if you will. For me, first, there were cassette tapes; the advantage of these was being able to record whatever you wanted on to the blank ones (and I still have a soft spot in my heart for mixtapes) but the disadvantages were easy of breaking and the need to rewind them manually, like videotapes, to the point you wanted. Then came CDs; no recording what you liked - yet - but no rewinding, either, what with the whole 'track' thing. Then there were minidiscs, but the less said about them the better, although in passing it's worth noting that they combined the worst aspects of tapes - having, at least to begin with, to record songs in real time - with the worst aspects of CDs, i.e. they were a bugger to record over.
Then came .mp3s, and suddenly, slowly, a shift began towards a world where the physical form of the media didn't actually matter any more.
Which means that the five hundred odd CDs and DVDs are now a massive pain in the arse to store, but not as bad as the cassette tapes, floppy discs and goddamn video tapes currently clogging up the garage. Add to this the books I read for pleasure plus the books I read to study and hey, you can see my problem.
I tried to alleviate this last year. Ten dustbin bags of clothes, CDs, books and videos went to the charity shops. Another ten went to the local municipal dump. Curiously, this only seemed to make things worse. Suddenly, the upstairs storage was filled with boxes from the downstairs storage, and the downstairs storage couldn't even be gotten into without crampons and hefty climbing boots.
Like I say, this is less of a problem for The Current Generation, raised as they were on .mp3s, torrents, filesharing, and anything other than having to actually pay for the damn thing. And, without condoning criminal activity, good for them, because it means that, in ten years time, they won't be spending hours of their lives going over everything they every bought and trying to work out why they bought it in the first place...
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