I'm feeling oh, so nostalgic...

Oh my god. I was just on the iTunes Music Store, my old standby, when I found the biggest possible news in the world: Warner Bros. Television has their TV shows on iTunes!!! They've got their new Aquaman TV show pilot (the one they showed at San Diego Comic Con if I remember correctly), they've got Friends, The Best of MADtv, Babylon 5 (sci-fi goodness that isn't Battlestar Galactica), and two cartoon shows they just so happen to own now that they have the Hanna-Barbera library. I'm not going to go into much detail on the whole H-B acquisition spree, as it is extraordinarily convoluted. These two shows are precursors to such hit shows as Family Guy, The Simpsons, Futurama, and Robot Chicken. Give up? Here's a hint for the first one: "Flintstones, meet the Flintstones, they're the modern Stone Age family". Here is a hint for the second one: "Meet George Jetson..." If you haven't guessed what these are yet, you have been living under a rock with no television since 1960: "The Flintstones" and "The Jetsons" are now on iTunes!!! Holy buckets! What did we cartoon fans do right to deserve THIS???

Warner Bros. also has Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain on DVD for the first time! Then, in a Triple Whammy moment, they FINALLY settled their big dispute with King Features and Popeye is coming out on DVD in 2007!!!! Is Warner Brothers finally getting the picture?

The only things that I want now are the Censored Eleven on DVD, the complete Tex Avery WB and MGM film catalogue on DVD, Droopy with a DVD set of his own, with scant amounts of double-dipping, Tom and Jerry Kids on DVD, and Tom and Jerry without the horrific censoring of Tom's black homeowner, and I'll be happier than Porky Pig!!!

BJ

OK, cleanup time...

Here's the deal. I have shelved Retro Fungi Radio permanently. I've also Cranky Disney Shareholder for now. Maybe (if I get into a deal with Shane R. Monroe) I'll un-shelve Cranky Disney, as he and his Dual Screen Radio buddy might want to do Cranky Disney with me, as they're Disney sluts.

Some changes at Muppetfandom...

Yes, folks, I have decided to make some changes to Muppetfandom. I have decided to jettison the automatic moderation of comments that I put into place after some dummy made an unrelated comment on one of my other blogs. It's too much of a pain in the neck to try to sift through all kinds of comments, some related, some not. I have decided this, and there's no turning back now. All I ask is that you either have something positive to say, that the comment is more than one line, or that your comments are related in some way, shape, form, or fashion to my posts.

Now, on to something else: I am making photoblogs for the Cranky Disney Shareholder show and the Retro Fungi Radio show. I need your feedback in order to see whether or not I should keep them up. I want to make these photo blogs separate from the actual podshow blogs. I am going to take photos anyways and publish them to a separate Blogger photoblog. If I get too much feedback to the contrary, I'll pull them. I will sample as many as possible to gauge how good or bad the reaction is. I am going to post on the podshow blogs to let people know what's going on.

BJ

Bram Cohen must be celebrating...

Wow, strange Mac OS 10.5 rumor making the Internet rounds. If true, this may have solved Apple's iTunes bandwidth issues for good. I'm going to go ahead and quote the MacOSRumors.com article:

"According to some of our oldest and most reliable sources within Apple's software development sector, Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" will include a system-level "BitTorrent" filesharing client that can be user-customized to 'donate' upstream Internet bandwidth for things like pushing Software Update packages to Leopard users, delivering iTunes Store content, and just about any purpose to which Apple puts its bandwidth.

The code in question was only recently developed, as part of a proposal that would probably not be part of the "Leopard Preview" delivered to third-party developers....but rather would be added to the operating system just prior to the "beta" stage that will follow later in the year.

Although implementing the code to secure the data traffic and break it up into pieces so small that individual users who enabled Sharing-Reward accounts would be unable to make any use of the data themselves is actually the easy part, getting Apple Legal and the executive suites to sign off on the concept will be a much larger challenge.

A somewhat similar p2p-based banwidth-sharing option was brought up during the 10.4 Tiger development cycle and dismissed out-of-hand because there were no good incentives for users to enter the shadowy world of peer-to-peer networking just to save Apple a few dollars. Now a group of developers at Apple think they have solved the most fundamental issues and want to bring the rest of the company on board.

Rewards would include credit at the iTunes Store and the Apple Store as well as other affililated offers like free airtime minutes for Apple's forthcoming "iPhone" and the like.

Uploads would use a unique port from other types of BitTorrent traffic so that network administrators can see it as separate and handle it accordingly."

Whoa. The movie industry will NEVER sign off on this, the bastards. Why must we be continually subjected to unintelligent retards basically saying the Internet is still a fad? I'm sorry, I don't get it. Comment if you have any kind of answers here.

BJ

Watch out for yellow snow, Nintendo fans...

OK, the snappy titles are getting worse and worse. Nintendo's next-gen console, codenamed "Revolution" because Nintendo did not like where the industry was going, "disrupted" the space-time continuum for some diehard Nintendo fanboys yesterday. The Revolution is now called: The Wii. As in "We" (as in you and me), "Wee Wee" (as in to pee), "Wee" (meaning small) and "Whee" (expression of fun by idiotic 5-year-old boys). Oh, boy. Let the juvenile jokes by PS2/PS3 and XXXbox/360 fanboys commence. I am going to be getting one of these, regardless of the multi-faceted name Nintendo gave the thing.

Wincing in pain, I have to give yet another update on my 2 podshows. I am currently trying to get through final exams and then it will be okay to play around with microphones. I still have to fix crib notes and everything. When I am in Chicago on the 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th of May, I'm going to try to find any opportunity I can to get E3 news (extroardinarily bad timing on their part). I was really hoping to go to E3 this year, but life intervenes yet again.

On The Cranky Disney Shareholder, I have decided to talk about Disney comics, a much-needed area of Disney podcasting that has not been covered yet (for some strange reason) on my first show, and at multiple times thereafter. Disney video games wil be another topic on the first show, and I'll talk about the recent annoucement about Disney's game publishing deal with Q Entertainment, makers of Meteos for Nintendo DS and the new Meteos in the pipeline, with me playing the E3 demo for that discussion on my DS if at all possible (flashing the firmware to get rid of that pesky health-warning screen has its benefits, you know).

On Retro Fungi Radio, I'm still trying to work out a deal between myself and Shane R. Monroe. If the deal goes through, I'll be on his show doing Nintendo-y things, and not be doing my own. I'm not quite sure just yet how it's a gonna work. My show has almost the same focus as his Retro Gaming Radio, save for the mostly Nintendo-centric content.

I will ask for donations and link to here when I mention it on my shows.

BJ

The DMCA, only MUCH worse...

Oh my god. Special interests make our lives a living Hell once again.

CNet put up a scary story that is very likely backed by the movie, music, and software industries. Apparently a new bill is going through that will obstruct our right to no DRM'ed DVDs and CDs, and will re-open the issue of the Sony rootkits. I'm talking about the Intellectual Property Protection Act (IPPA). This law will make it a federal offense to circumvent DRM on DVDs and CDs, punishable by TEN YEARS in prison.

If this law goes through, the movie and music industry will get no money from me. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Nada. I almost never go to the movies anymore because they overcharge for just about everything. I almost never buy actual CDs anymore because I am not going to support an industry that overcharges for CDs and DVDs that you can buy on spindles for pennies on the dollar.

All the stuff I'm buying will be digital, and if the iTunes DRM is ALL WE GET, i'll not only buy music online, but also movies. I'm not going to buy overcharged DVDs and overcharged movie tickets and overcharged CDs, and overcharged everything. I cannot and will not support overcharged steaming piles of crap that the movie, music, and software industry wants to shove on us.

If you want to lower the $30.00 a person price to go to the movies, then fine. Be that way. But if you want to not lower the price, but jack it up even further, don't expect me to go to the movie theatres ever again. And don't expect to put me in prison for ten years for your monopolistic business practices. I feel that monopolistic business practices are the highest form of evil. By the way, Microsoft, don't expect me to buy Windows Vista, or any Microsoft product, ever again. Until you either get out of the way of the common consumer or stop paying government officials to shut their pie-holes about YOUR monopolistic business practices, you won't see me buying any Microsoft products. When I move to Macintosh, you're going to feel the pressure. You are going to see me not purchase ANY Microsoft products, unless it's free.

Bram Cohen, you had the right idea. Now how about using your signature charm to get the entertainment industry to give us LEGIT free full length movies and LEGIT free software distributed over a new LEGIT BitTorrent client? I, being autistic also, am behind you 100%. One of the things you can use to sway them over to a new legit BitTorrent client will be so they can circumvent piracy in a legal way, without screaming and crying to the government to toughen the penalty for piracy.

In fact, there's going to be some limited DRM code that is uncrackable by the hackers (it'll be a hyper-encrypted binary code) and can be used in any device, plus being burned to DVD. Basically, we'll allow the users to do whatever they want, and they have to pay a ONE-TIME donation fee before they can use it. That is better than free, folks. Let the movie industry embrace technology, not fight it (like the Betamax Supreme Court case, comment if you know what the official name for that case was).

Hey, MPAA, ESA, et al: If you are so much of a pansy to not play hardball with regards to piracy, just GIVE US WHAT WE WANT. Nothing more. You unintelligent pansies are pretending that the Internet never existed. You unintelligent pansies are making our lives Hell just because you seem to think the Internet never existed. You unintelligent pansies want nothing more than to make it as difficult as possible so you can continue that "protect your intellectual property" b.s.

I say to you, if you aren't willing to cater to even the most basic consumer, whose money is increasingly tighter these days, then screw you. If you are unwilling to agree to my terms that I have listed above for you to set yourselves right to the general public, then you can dissolve those monopolistic organizations effective immediately. If you aren't willing to sacrifice profit to get more profits in the long run, then you are obviously screwed-up and the Federal Trade Commission will be on you like white on rice.

Now, why can't we get websites that actually let us KEEP the movies we download for a nominal fee? The MPAA just will not give up on the digital-rental crap like Movielink, et al, and in so doing, just dig themselves a deeper grave. If the MPAA just gave us what we wanted, digital downloads we could keep forever, then this wouldn't be such an issue. The MPAA themselves are making mountains out of measly little ant hills. Let's nip this problem in the bud, and we can eliminate issues like piracy, abortion, cloning, and other issues that are just fluff, like a mountain out of a measly ant hill.

Let's nip piracy in the bud, and we won't have to hear your whining about piracy cutting into your increasingly-shrinking profits in the news each day.

Yikes...stranger things have happened...

Oof. My old sleeping habits die hard. Anywho, I'm trying to make things easier for me, and I've decided to post here some status reports on both of the podcast shows I have in the works:

Retro Fungi Radio:

Dang, I am really pressed to tentatively finish my crib notes for the first show...I cannot believe what I have to do in order to get a relatively good sound quality right off the bat. I have to write down EVERYTHING that I have to say that isn't inside a flashback. That way, I can't have the excuse of not having copious notes...Although I show off my mad improv skillz (yes, with a "z") in the flashbacks, that isn't scripted half to death. I do, however, have to script the other segments to DEATH, and this is because this is what I am going to want, at the very least for the first couple of shows. If people complement me on my uber-confident delivery style, I'll continue doing it this way.

The Cranky Disney Shareholder:

Same here, but I haven't even started yet. I'll give another update later on, hopefully (as with Retro Fungi) divulging some of the contents of this month's show.

WRAP-UP:
So, I need to have some space to be my creative self, and knowing the full brunt of the next 2 weeks, it's gonna be a bitch trying to post here while I try to go into the "final push" toward the end of the year. College lets out early. Thank goodness for that though. Not my best stuff, trust me. Plus I need to get a sound setup so that I can record the flashbacks with very little sound disturbances. I'm going to use Radio Shack mics for now, at least until some kind soul donates a bunch of audio equipment for my use.

BJ

This is my last post for a while :(

Yes, you read that right. This is going to be my last post for awhile. This is only temporary, while I get my 2 podcasts off the ground: a Disney podcast and a retro gaming podcast. It will be very cool, and I will update when I finally get these podcasts off the ground.