The video showing a controversial environment conservation advertisement
It's not really "one of the worst tragedies in history", honestly any natural disaster will cause more people to perish than this, but the 9/11 incident definitely caused one of the most serious consequences of terrorism in history. Aside from the international conflicts, the 9/11 incident has been (unfortunately) brought into mainstream culture as an icon of many things, from terrorism, racism, to the consequences of working in a highrise and power of airplanes.
What's interesting is that the advertisement shown in this video, about environmental conservation again, compares one disaster to another. The logic behind this, although quite clear, does not explain the motive behind creating an advertisement like this. Yes it is true that a tsunami will kill many more people than an airplane, but a tsunami is not an act of terrorism, neither is terrorism an act of nature. These are two completely unrelated acts that both resulted in tragedies. It is as if the designers of the advertisements are saying "car crash is bad, but genocide is worse". The severities of different tragedies is incomparable, because one incident of suffering of mankind cannot be worse than another. In all cases of disasters, people lose their homes, lose their lives, and lose their loved ones. Just because one disaster killed more people than the other does not mean one should be compared to the other.
It's also interesting to note that although 9/11 has been used to iconize countless things in mainstream culture, this is the first time I've seen it used as a comparison of severity to other disasters. Perhaps it's one thing that it's not effective at iconizing.
Although video games have long been considered for entertainment purposes only, the advancements in MMORPGs have turned many gamers into sly businesspeople selling in-game items or money for real life items or money.
Sites such as IGE are, to put into simple words, making money off of another company. They focus on selling in-game items and gold in popular online games such as World of Warcraft, Aion, Final Fantasy, or Lineage to players for real-life revenue. As to the method at which these companies, often referred to as "gold sellers" or "gold spammers" (when their avatars are seen in-game), they either negotiate underground deals with the online game, or use an army of bots to "farm" (collect) in-game gold and items. While it is usually slow to accumulate any wealth with only one in-game avatar, with multiple computers and hundreds of bots, these companies or individual sellers are able to accumulate unbelievable amounts of wealth.
Screenshot of the IGE website, one of the most popular sites for this market for video game commodities
Although many gamers secretly purchase in-game advantages through these external sources (mostly so they can power up their character and advance faster than normal grinding), most players look down upon these "shortcuts" to fame and glory in the cyberworld. After all most online games are based on the power of characters. Whoever is stronger will be able to defeat others, just as the same in real life. The "real" route as intended by the developers of the online games is for one to grind endlessly until he or she has a strong character. In other words, whoever spends more time on the video game will ultimately be stronger. With the introduction of these gold sellers, now it turns into whoever has more money will be stronger. Most online game developers also dislike gold spammers because, evidently, these spammers are making real money off of their game without paying them a cent, since it is almost always free to create multiple characters from the same game account.
A complaint form to Game Moderators about gold spammers
Although it is definitely annoying to have spammers constantly advertising their services, I have to admit that making money off of simply playing a video game is ingenious. Although it's not exactly original since video game tournaments with prizes have existed for a long time, such as Starcraft tournaments, those tournaments are mostly based on skill, and not unlike a chess tournament. However selling in-game items is based purely on taking advantage of the intention of most players to get their characters stronger quicker than others, at little or no cost (cost of running computers such as electricity excluded). This type of gold selling was most prominent in Asian MMORPGs such as Aion: The Tower of Eternity (Korean: 아이온: 영원의 탑), Perfect World (Chinese: 完美世界), or Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils (Chinese: 天龙八部), but have also spreaded to almost all free-to-play MMORPGs in the world.
Summarily, this is simply another business, and all businesses make money by taking advantage of consumer psychology and reducing costs to a minimum. This type of video game business does not offer a high rate of return (after all it's not too often to find someone who will spend several hundred dollars on in-game items), but has almost no cost associated. And this is all possible thanks to the cyberculture of online gaming, and gaming addiction.
Warning: this post contains information describing extreme maltreatment of animals, viewer's discretion is advised.
"Human Meat Search" - although very grotesque at first glance, the actual functions of this cult search engine is even more so.
The phenomenon of "human meat search engine" (Chinese: 人肉搜索) started with a group of very disturbing pictures posted on a popular internet forum. The pictures depicted a group of fashionable young women with high heels stomping a kitten to death, with the camera focusing on their heels as well as the bloody bits of the victim kitten. This immediately became a viral phenomenon not unlike the infamous Two Girls One Cup video as countless internet users began to search for the identities of the girls as well as the photographer. After a long searching involving journalists, bloggers, forumers, and even the police, the identities of one of the girls as well as the photographer were found.
The ultimate effect of this phenomenon was not the the apologies issued by several sadistic psychopaths. It spawned an entirely new form of internet search called "human meat search engine", where the internet is used for the spreading of personal information, tracking down specific individuals, or more often used for posting gossip, scandals, and shock news. In the words of many, it has "personified" internet search, moving from the traditional search for objects, ideas, and hard facts to the identities of every individual on earth. Anyone is able to post personal information on the web and it would be picked up by "meatified" search engines and forums, such as Baidu (largest search engine in Asia) and Maopu (Chinese social forum and search engine), whether the person wants to glorify his favourite celebrity, take revenge on a friend by posting his or her personal information and twisting them, or even track down a missing individual. This new form of internet search penetrates the layer of privacy that had traditionally been offered to all netizens, thus the name "human meat search".
Mop.com, one of the largest social forums for all kinds of purposes in Asia, including the human meat search engine.
Although the term of "human meat search" is new, the act of posting personal information is not. Human meat search simply tracks down the bits and pieces of personal information that we leave on the web, in sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Xiaonei (Chinese equivalent to Facebook), forums, online games, and even shopping sites. It connects everyone and makes searching for information more convenient, however it also lifts that layer of anonymity and security of netizens. The cost of being more connected and knowing more, is that someone will know more about you.
Warning: This blog post contains some profane (but censored) language and crude humour, viewer's discretion is advised.
Around two years ago, the "Baidu Ten Mythical Creatures" was born from an internet prank. It wasn't simply an internet prank aimed at making fun of the government (again), it represented the People's resistance against the iron fist of Chinese governmental rule, and the power of the internet community. "These hoaxes, ten in number, originated in response to increasingly pervasive and draconian online censorship in China, and have become an icon of citizens' resistance to censorship." (Phrase from Wikipedia)
Leader of the Mythological Beasts - the alpaca, or in hoax language, Cao Ni Ma (Chinese: 草泥马, lit: Grass Mud Horse), a homophone for the Chinese profanity "f*** your mother"
The hoax started when some person posted an article in the Wiki section of Baidu, the Chinese equivalent for Google, representing the largest search engine in Asia, writing about ten fictional deities that had no apparent source of origin. Upon closer examination, each of these names was a homophone to a profane word or phrase. The obvious purpose for this hoax was to circumvent the government censorship on internet communication (such as blocking various sites, banning use of profane language, etc) in a humorous way, showing that the internet community can easily find other ways to get around the censorship. By turning profanity into mythological creatures, the government can only watch as "new forms of profanity" are created right before their eyes.
The following list contains some of the creatures, for a full list see reference link:
Cao Ni Ma (Chinese: 草泥马, lit: Grass Mud Horse) - Icon is the alpaca. Homophone for "f*** your mother"
Fa Ke You (Chinese: 法克鱿, lit: French-Croatian Squid) - Icon is the small and agile sea squid. Homophone for "f*** you"
Ya Mie Die (Chinese: 雅蠛蝶, lit: Small Elegant Butterfly) - Icon is a small butterfly from Qinghai discovered in January, 2009. Homophone for "yamete" (Japanese: 止めて, lit: "stop it", commonly cried out by females in Japanese pornography during sex)
Da Fei Ji (Chinese: 达菲鸡, lit: Daffy Chicken) - Icon is a type of energetic rooster that resembles Daffy Duck. Homophone for the Chinese slang for masturbation, "da fei ji".
Ya Mie Die (Chinese: 雅蠛蝶), one of the creatures
The hoax represented one of the most successful "rebellions" in internet culture against censorship. These ten beasts have become so popular that they are now used in everyday slang language, have sprung other fan-made "mythological beasts", and even spread to the commercial market. Keychains, backpacks, and action figures of these animals are seen everywhere in gift shops (mostly online since it's safer) and represent a niche in Chinese cyberculture - the countermeasures against an iron fist government. It's pretty amazing what the internet community is able to accomplish, because the entire movement started out from nothing more than a small wiki article on an online encyclopedia.
It's relatively difficult to change one's identity in real life, due to limitations such as voice and appearance. However cyberspace has made it entirely possible to create multiple aliases of oneself, one for each day of the week, each of the seven sins and virtues, or simply creating imaginary egos.
The person behind the screen is not important, the only important thing is what person is projected onto the screen.
Because everything is digital, and stored and transferred in a non-discriminating method, the person behind the screen is no longer important. What we see and hear is the person that is projected onto the monitor, what we think s/he is. This created two things. False identity for the receiver, and a false identity for the creator.
Games like World of Warcraft is great for making online friends, doing online things, but it's also as unreal as it can get.
Without the need for identification, online chatrooms, games, and forums use virtual identities for communication. It could simply be a way to test out the other side of one's personality, or experiment new ideas and fantasies without the repercussions of real life, or it could be a way hide information that the person does not want to reveal. In video games, it would be for the purpose of roleplaying. The common thing behind all of these mediums is that real identity is no longer important. What one accomplishes in the virtual world rarely means anything for the real world, however it often does make one feel better about themselves. I call this internet ego, or internet pride. Hey at least I can accomplish something on the internet, be it flaming others, spamming, writing a virus, getting to level 50 in WoW, or getting a virtual girlfriend.
High level characters in the MMORPG Aion. A pretty nice virtual accomplishment... at the cost of RL time of course.
On the other hand, it is also easy for the boundary between virtual life and real life to thin out for the player. There are people to meet online, chores (surfing the web) to do, homework to do, games to play, and even develop relationships, what's the difference between this and real life? There are many instances of people who get lost in the virtual world and ends up neglecting their real lives. I found it amusing that this site actually teaches you how to fake an identity: [How to create a fake online identity]. Some pretty amazing but eccentric stuff, such as fake name generators. Although there are the less eccentric uses such as protecting privacy for surveys, offers, and online purchasing, mostly it is used for online games, chatrooms, or simulators such as Second Life.
It's hard to get that sense of satisfaction unless you actually do something in real life. It's so much easier in the virtual world to accomplish something and get that huge ego isn't it? It's a pretty pessimistic viewpoint, but a realistic one due to the addictive qualities of the cyberspace.
"Bloody pirates!", said by both Elizabeth and Ragetti in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, is one of my favourite phrases in the movie since it sounds funny, is short, and easy to remember.
After hundreds of years, piracy has evolved from stealing goods and killing innocents to "stealing" (debatable term) virtual commodities and "killing" (debatable term) people's source of income. The question of why anyone would spend money on something that they could otherwise obtain for free is something that I consider an open-ended philosophy. On one hand it may seem like virtual commodities is no different from physical commodities, and one is stealing if s/he obtained the item for free when other people paid for it. On the other hand, most pirates will argue that they indeed bought the good at full price, and is only "sharing" it with others, just like how one could buy a TV and share it with his friends, instead of having each friend buy a separate TV. Then the argument deepens into the fact there is no such thing as "sharing" a software, because each person could easily use it independently on his or her own computer, and according to the company's regulations he or she is supposed to buy the software package for that purpose. Then the pirate will respond with some legal holes indicating that companies have no right to restrict how one uses or modifies the software that one purchased. The argument goes back and forth with no end, not different from a tennis match, or two equally adept debaters in law.
It's a good thing at least their icon is a ship
As to where the final stand is, I'm sure everyone knows, that's why sites are closed and prosecuted (TV-links), sites are re-opened (The Pirate Bay - these guys must be seriously fearless or seriously stupid to name a site like this), sites go under different names twice a month (iDWANEO), and sites move their domains around and try to form a community of bomb-carrying kamikaze pirates who face prosecution at any time but is proud at what they're doing (apptrackr). It reminds me of the classic war movies, before rocket launchers and nuclear missiles; people would rush in to attack the castle with arrows, ladders, and rams, while the archers in the castle would shoot at the attackers. After all the attackers are dead the second wave would replace the first wave, repeating the exact same attack pattern. Pirates today are much like the infantry below the castle desperately trying to get inside. A soldier risks everything (his life) and gains nothing but a tiny bit of financial reward and lots of pride after a battle, so does a pirate who volunteers to crack code at the risk of being arrested. A pirate is proud of what s/he does, and in a pirate's own words, "making virtual commodities more accessible to everyone".
For all your iDevice needs, and much more convenient than iTunes
Accessibility, that's one of the main reasons why anyone would download a pirated copy of anything. If you didn't have to pay the $500 or so for Photoshop CS5, if you didn't have to pay the $150 or so for Windows 7, and if you didn't have to pay the $69.99 for the Starcraft 2 that you legally bought from EB Games (congratulations), or if you're really cheap, spend the $0.99 on an iDevice game, who in their right mind would spend hours searching for a working copy of a cracked software, then get a headache at trying to scan it for viruses, then spend even more time whenever an update comes out (most pirated software won't contain automatic updates)? I think the pricing behind these virtual commodities is really strategically planned out. They're priced in a way so that the companies actually take into consideration the amount of copies that will get pirated. We price it so high that it doesn't matter if you pirate it or not, we will always have a large group of genuine software loyalists who will buy it anyways at the high price (developers, businesses, etc). Better sell Photoshop for $500 apiece to a smaller target market, than $100 apiece to all the markets. This is great for the business, but bad for the consumers. Honestly (in my opinion), unless you seriously have tons of money to spend on a thing like software, I would really hesitate before spending $500 on Photoshop unless your job says that you need it. Editing that odd picture like once a day, or once a week, is not worth $500 in my opinion. Or take something much cheaper for an example. Sometimes I'd like to merge video files together, or trim them, or edit my music files. These kinds of functions, in today's programming standards, should be pieces of cake. But when I go on the web to see how I can do these, 99.99% of the search results leads me back to the same annoying page - $59.99 for a piece of software that can merge my .avi files together. That's just ridiculous, how many times a day am I going to merge .avi's together? Doing that once and you expect me to pay $59.99 for it? Even worse, most of these programs (won't name any names here) do not have a working demo. The thing they consider a demo will add a horrible watermark to your output, and trim the length of your output, making it completely unusable. The days of the 30-day evaluation period is nowhere to be seen. As you can see, this is the reason why I, along with many others, will look for a cracked version of these trivial software. It's a company people haven't heard of, charging an outrageous amount for a simple program, so most people will not feel that stab of guilty when downloading a leaked copy.
Ok so the "combined retail value of $80" is a bit far-fetched, but supporting indie developers who is trying to support charity sounds like a good cause... especially for a penny
On the other hand, I think there are serious issues concerning pirating really really inexpensive software. The prime example is the fab of iDevice applications. I'm not going to go to wiki and pull out some stat because no one will be interested in it, so I'm going to have a rough estimate and guess at least half of the apps in the entire appstore costs $0.99. This includes classic games such as Cut the Rope, Street Fighter IV (on sale for tsunami relief), and Helsing's Fire, to absolutely amazing apps such as Ocarina, Virtuoso Violin, and SketchPad. It is beyond me why people are willing to pay $50 for a PSP title, yet around half the iDevice population are unwilling to pay $0.99 for a game that is nearly (and sometimes better) as good, especially to developing indies whose income depends on their sales. One of the most extreme examples of "stealing" from indies is the case with the Humble Indie Bundle. It is a package of 5 simple games set to "open price", meaning buyers can pay any price they want, from a minimum of one penny to no maximum. You can't even buy a piece of paper for one penny, yet people are willing to spend the extra brain cells and electricity to pirate the games. This hints that it is no longer a mission to save money, but rather a more political role in that the pirates want to continuously enlarge their presence in the software community. Costs money? We hack it. Free? We still hack it. All of this just to let you know who we are.
It's true that pirates will generate traffic for the software that they pirate, and if the developer is lucky, might even make more sales due to the help from the pirates. But in most cases, all we see is indie developers who are left with a broken spirit and walk away from the scene due to lost sales. There's simply no point to continue developing if their work is simply going to be hacked within minutes of release. Sometimes I think that pirates should seriously be hired by the government, or at least Apple or something, with their superb computer skills. I can't even hack a piece of log in minutes, but they can sure hack a game in minutes.
Digital technology has created a whole genre of music - cybermusic. No longer is music a pure display of artistic talent and one's connection with the mysterious realm of music, it is now a display of how expensive your software plugins are, how great your digital recording equipment is, how familiar you are with digital composition programs and their complex virtual interface, and how good you are at virtually marketing your virtually created virtual commodities.
The beauty of traditional instruments - something digital technology can never simulate
Traditional music focuses on user interaction, Power of each pluck, force of each keystroke, movement of the arms, fingers, and mind, all affect the sound. The musician, in a way, is bonded to the instrument he or she plays. Digital music, on the other hand, uses VST (Virtual Studio Technology) plugins that act as “soundfonts”. Just as regular fonts make up each letter of the alphabet, soundfonts are digitally created fonts of music notes that can be stringed together by the user to create a tune. Digital music focuses on accessibility, as anyone is able to play around with said technology and create music. However, the musician is separated from the instrument he or she plays… the barrier is the computer screen and the incomprehensible lines of code that turns music into 0’s and 1’s. Digital music is rather like Lego, you take one soundfont here, one sound effect there, and you piece together various sounds in infinitely many combination limited only by the imagination… but each piece by itself is limited and artificial.
Quantum Leap - SILK, by Eastwest, a collection of very high quality Asian ethnic instruments such as the Erhu (二胡), Pipa (琵琶), and Yangqin (扬琴). With quality comes price... up to $1000 per pack. So if you're planning to get some flutes, violins, guitars, drums, maybe even a saxophone, you're looking at around $3000 in virtual instruments. Yeah you're trading binary code for a real antique violin.
Companies like Eastwest fully take advantage of this new cyberculture - digital composition and transaction of music, by selling virtual instruments. I admit that these sound ridiculously real... because they were recorded with real instruments obviously. The engineering behind these sounds are absolutely superb, and in my opinion no other software comes even close to the realism that these instruments provide, especially with harder-to-mimic strings instruments such as the violin and erhu. However when virtual instruments start to also simulate the pricing of real instruments... then there's a problem. Would you trade your antique violin for a virtual violin? Perhaps it is "easier to play" (I mean all you have to do is click buttons instead of breaking your neck trying to play a real violin)? Perhaps it is easier to distribute your music when it's created virtually? Or perhaps easier to edit or enhance your music when it's in digital form? All of these are selling points for the massive markets created for digital music.
You can't substitute a live performance for a digital one... no software can mimic the intricacy of the human imagination
Eastwest is only one of the hundreds of companies who excel in the digital engineering and distribution of music, although a very adept one at that. But you can never substitute a live performance of Pachelbel's Canon in D, by a performance artificially created in a software like FL Studio 9. The strength of each note, the fluidity of each arc, all of these come from the human imagination and emotion. The music feeds on the performer's thoughts, where each note is unique and only exist in that single performance. These simply cannot be digitalized by software, because human emotion and imagination cannot be transcribed into lines of code. As a result, any digital piece will immediately sound bland compared to a live performance. Although digital technology has made music more accessible (excluding prices), everyone now has the same set of tools, where people are no longer limited by their imagination, rather now they’re limited by what sounds these plugins can make.
