by ·Comments Off on Fighting Movie Piracy: The Smart Way

In our pre-apocalyptic days of fear and anarchy, where every pimply teenager equipped with $300 of CompUSA hardware and a broadband connection can contribute to sap the very foundations of our cherished capitalistic society, different people have different ways of fighting “intellectual property theft”.

For the RIAA, which is obviously not reticent about jailing half the 12-29 population in the US and abroad, it has meant hiring a lot of lawyers and turning to court settlement fines instead of record sales, as a source for profit. So much so that they are now being sued under the RICO Act (originally tailored to fight more traditional forms of organized crime and racketeering, but still seems pretty fitting in this case).

The MPAA is slowly coming up to speed in terms of random scare tactics and other useless gesticulations, but in the meantime, they have settled on whining and moaning the usual corporate way, with a touching chorus on their huge profit loss. At this rate, they might even *gasp* have to stop shelling out millions of bucks to semi-articulate actors so they can show their familiar face, bleached teeth, cancerous tan, silicon implants and overall incapacity to convey the slightest human emotion with an ounce of conviction. Come to think of it, they might consider diverting an extra amount of that cash toward hiring real screenwriters to replace the brain hemorrhaging hollywood hacks who come up with such mind-blowing ideas as “Glitter, Maria Carey: the real Story” or “Bring it on: a no holds barred immersion into the fierce world of professional baton-twirling competition”… yea maybe they will (hope is cheaper than most food and you can live on it for a while)…

All in all, the way these people dealt with the unavoidable evolution of technology mostly revolved around raiding kids bedroom and showering Capitol Hill with lobbying money in order to get inept, unconstitutional, protectionist texts voted into laws.

And then, there’s French director Jan Kounen and actor Vincent Cassel, who, in order to thwart the intense trafficking likely to arise around their soon-to-open new movie, decided to release it themselves on P2P networks.

Well, not the real thing, of course: just a very convincing fake file. The actual movie titles would start rolling for a few minutes and suddenly cut into a recording of the two men, explaining with a good-natured smile to the pirate-that-be, how their movie would be much more enjoyable with the nice crispy photography and surround sound of a theater, instead of the usual crappy quality you get with internet telesync rips. The rest of the file cleverly consisting of looped promotional materials (“behind the scenes” footage etc).

How not to be seduced by this smart and funny way to fight for your bread and butter: rather than sue everything in sight, try to appeal to people’s intelligence and expose your case with rational arguments.

Well, this approach does postulate that your intended audience is not essentially composed of gregarious dim-witted simpletons, something that might be hard to establish with regards to your average Hollywood movie…

by ·Comments Off on Valentine’s Day Bounty

Despite serious efforts and a mind-blowing sense of timing (do I hear “valentine’s day breakup”, anybody?), I still drew enough pity from the wonderful ladies in my life (well, the ones I had not just broken up with) to get my share of the chocolate lovefest that is Valentine’s day in Japan.

A quick look at the war chest gives:

  • 2 boxes of assorted chocolate
  • 5 chocolate bunnies
  • 3 Japanese confection cake
  • 1 king-size Toblerone
  • 8 “chocolate rocks” from Europe (Suchard: lov’em!)
  • 2 French dry sausages (not really a Valentine’s present, but Sarah brought me some food from Paris)

    Good news is that I won’t be starving this week. Bad news is that nobody has come up yet with a healthy diet based essentially on chocolate (and dry sausages).

    • by ·Comments Off on Kusama Yayoi at the Mori Museum

    Spent the afternoon with Sarah in Harajuku, then took her to Roppong Hills, in order to get a glimpse of the city from up-above.

    We were not particularly planning on going for the museum, but, as chance would have it, one of the temporary exhibition featured my favorite Japanese artist.

    I first got a glimpse at Kusama Yayoi’s obsessive and beautiful patterns in New York, a few years ago and saw more in Tokyo (the Hara-san Museum had a few great pieces). This new exhibition, though quite in the same vein as all her previous work, was definitely an amazing experience.

    Unlike a lot of other contemporary artists who, at best, cannot manage to rouse any more than a certain kind of intellectual curiosity toward their art, Kusama Yayoi’s structures are just pure emotions put into shape: they do not require subtitles or lengthy comments to be appreciated, visual stimulation and subconscious imagery are immediate with most of her pieces. And if putting them into the perspective of her complicated life and long history of mental illness certainly brings another dimension, one just need to walk through her arrangements of mirrors, lights and dots in endless patterns to get an idea of what mind vertigo can be, for better or for worse.

    So, if you’ve not done it yet, go check out her exhibit at the Mori Art Museum in Roppogi Hills. The other temporary exhibit (People’s Artist) is also very much worth your time…

    PS: for those of you not familiar with Tokyo’s skyline, this building that looks like a cross between the Eiffel Tower and a christmas tree is “Tokyo Tower”… and no, to the best of my knowledge, Gustave Eiffel’s estate has not considered suing for copyright infringement yet… though I do suspect the “parody” argument might be protecting the Japanese version.

    by ·Comments Off on A War President

    Performing a methodical dismantling of Dubya’s last interview to point out the usual million blatant inaccuracies and other flat-out lies, is a hopeless exercise, the futility of which doesn’t escape me…

    However, it is fascinating to note how, despite the widely-known fact that he very much dodged the draft, George thinks himself as a “War president“. In fact, he did not mind using the word “war” more than twenty times during the interview, the SF Chronicle reports.

    Some people might be tempted to point out that being a “war president” is not exactly a title of pride. But it seems that, in this man’s warped conception of the world, waging improbable wars and raising “alert” levels every other week so as to keep your people in a perpetual state of paralytic anxiety, is a perfectly fine program in itself for a presidential mandate. One would have thought that working on, say, keeping budget deficit under control, fighting unemployment and soaring poverty rates: these would be deemed worthy of making the first-place in a president’s list of achievement; or even: salvaging the last remaining shreds of environmental protection laws that have been so viciously dismembered by his administration over the past three years (like this one’s gonna happen…).

    But obviously, there is a much more important priority for the US: “War”.

    See, despite appearances, “War” is not just a good pretext to hide all your dirty influence peddling back at home, while a few hundred US GIs and ten times more foreign civilians get blown to pieces: it is also meant to “protect” the American people. From what? certainly not the categorically-imminent-but-not-so-imminent threat of Saddam’s WMD-that-exist-or-will-exist-as-soon-as-we-manage-to-plant-them-somewhere.

    From what then? but, why: from terrorism of course!

    Remember: all along, we’ve only been going after a single enemy: Terrorism. Protecting sacrosanct american values of [non-dissenting] free speech and right to bear an AK-47 while parking our gas-guzzling SUV, against evildoers from abroad.

    But, some may point: it’s now been more than two years, and nothing, absolutely nothing, has happened in the US, not the slightest attempt at bombing a Taco Bell or anything of any remotely symbolic value, in the name of Allah or some other unshaved non-christian pagan god.
    Of course, there’s been waaay more than 4,000 violent US deaths in the past year alone, but these were all due to good ol’ american way of crime, nothing involving nasty furriner’s plots.

    In this case, inquisitive minds may increasingly inquisitively inquire, why are we still talking about “war against terrorism”? when it seems so obvious “terrorism” has gone on vacation to some warmer coast and left it up to the US to kill themselves skillfully as they’ve always been good at.

    Well, rather than referring you to the painfully obvious truth or Dubya’s even more painfully contorted justifications, here is a little joke…

    There’s this guy carefully placing ping-pong balls every 5 feet on the ground around Time Square, when another guy comes up to him and ask ” – Say, why are you putting these ping-pong balls all around?”
    ” – to keep the rhinos away…”
    ” – but there’s no rhino here!”
    ” – see, it works!”

    You knew it? yea, me too… but apparently G. W. Bush does not, seeing as he’s been playing variations of it in every last one of his speech for the past two years…

    by ·2 Comments

    The translator is unavailable for a few days. I am currently porting it over to my new server, and rewriting it using PHP along the way… Stay tuned for an update some time soon.

    Like everybody here, I heavily rely on keitai mails for my communications.
    Unlike most people though (well, that is, unlike most locals), I have a really hard time deciphering the kanji-laden mails my friends send me. Especially given the evil pleasure some of them take into using particularly rare and nasty kanjis.
    Of course, there is Jim’s Breen awesome WWWJDIC dictionary out there, and it even has an i-mode version. But given the limitation of my phone (no easy way to cut and paste), it’s rather useless when I need to decrypt a whole email.

    Since I was only working like 27 hours a day this week (who need a social life anyway), I decided to write a small script to help me with that.

    In a nutshell:

    The script works by taking any incoming email and replying with a word-by-word translation, as provided by Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC. In order to make the translation a bit more legible on a phone’s screen, it strips any unnecessary text and replaces HTML tags the best it can.

    For the time being, I’m leaving it open for use by anybody as long as it doesn’t start hogging my server’s resources. I’ll probably even release the code for it, although it’s not that impressive and certainly won’t make it into this year’s best hack’s nominees.

    To use it, simply forward any email in japanese (kanjis and kanas) from your keitai to: jp2eng @ unknowngenius.com

    You should receive back a translation right away.

    It’s most definitely a beta version, so it might, and certainly will, have tons of bugs… if you encounter one, and you are so inclined, send me a note and I’ll look into fixing it.

    Any incoming mail is logged on the server for security purposes, which means technically I could read them (then again, so could your local ISP with your regular emails), though I certainly have better stuff to do with my time. Nonetheless, if you feel uncomfortable with the possibility of somebody reading the mails you translate, do not use this service.

    I’ll appreciate any feedback.

    by ·Comments Off on Who needs Professional Comedians…

    … when you have that:

    Japan Another Babylon
    Posted 05 November 2003 – 11:39 AM
    All of these things seem to be happening in Japan. Japan is possibly another babylon. Japan has frequent earthquakes too. Maybe also a sign. All of the worlds technology seems to thrive from Japan. The funny thing is, is that I feel led to goto the Japanese people. I am pursueing that right now. In the near future I plan on transfering within my company to Japan. God has laid them on my heart. I am currently studying japanese, and God has put me in contact with at least 3 japanese people who are in the US or Japan. Japan in very wicked, I don’t need to go into the Violence or sexuality they portray blatently in there movies and ANIME. As I stated in my “matrix” theory. Japan is a very industrialized nation. They have almost no forest left, everyone lives in apt. technology has taken over thier lives. And I fear America will soon be in the same boat. Pray for me as I strive to do Gods will, and reach out to the japanese people.

    OK. Granted making fun of hardcore literal-minded christians is like shooting fish in a holy water font. Especially the kind who do not mind using the word “wicked” in its non-second-degree, we’ll-burn-you-to-the-stake, medieval acception, while keeping a straight face.

    But nonetheless, it’s refreshing to know that there are people out there with real concerns about the direction things are going in this world and the soul of these “poor unsaved Asian people”.

    And by the way, which country do you think has the highest statistics for murders, robberies, violent crimes and other nasty things most definitely reproved by the official christian rules book and by any decent gentleman in general? And in what segment of this population can we find the most vociferous proponents of unregulated gun ownership?

    Yea, that’s what I thought too.

    by ·Comments Off on Keitai Snapshot


    Ever since I had to work there (thus taking that train every night and morning for a few months), this place is forever tied in my head to the hibya line recorded voice: “Roppp’ongi, Roppp’ongi” (note the overly accented middle syllable). It’s like a catchy jingle I cannot get out of my head.

    In other news: yes, it still blows beyond words. Even when going there for a good cause.