The Farmstead

People may or may not remember when I commented back in April that my mum's souvenir, when we went to Berlin, was a set of Ampelmännchen pastry cutters... Neither of us were entirely sure when they were going to get used, but today their time came!!

( Proud Biscuit-Mum photos under cut... )

And they're very tasty too. Not that they're making me hyper, no no no.

AMPELMÄNNCHEN!!

Oh, the Romans... Sometimes Always they amuse me so. As part of trying to work out whether or not we can say whether there was any sort of moral/sexual geographical zoning in Pompeii (say whether there was a 'red light district', to quote an exam paper - I say not in literal terms, but in ideology/perception/phenomenology yes, definitely) I've been reading the records of inscriptions around the town - ie. the dirty graffiti, basically.

( Cut for NSFW Romans! (And more! Incl. street poetry!) )

Just about to go and get a few hours sleep, since I'm off to Berlin in the wee hours of tomorrow. (Yay, Berlin - I'm so excited! This'll be my fourth visit and I love it every time, though I'm scared that it's been two years since I've spoken German to German people and I think it's all fled to the back of my brain...)

I'll be back on Saturday, so I'll see you all then, if I don't happen to find myself online beforehand! I hope the comic isn't all sillybusiness.

(And there is a certain element of GIP to this post, because I can't resist. :D )

I find this kind of disgusting.

He clearly wasn't running a file sharing website - why has only he been brought to trial? Reading another article on it to day it seems there is a base fine for distributing copyrighted music (it was in the jury's hands to see how much higher than that he would have to pay) - why is it so disproportionate to the revenue that this man would have cost them? Say an mp3 download is 80p, then that means nearly 17,000 people would have had to download each of his thirty songs for that amount of revenue to be lost (oh, the name and the value, I suppose, which is such a joke). Maybe that many people did download them, I don't know, but frankly, at the very least, this guy is being made the scapegoat for a collective activity between tens, hundreds, possibly thousands of people.

Copyright theft = bad, wrong, nasty. But I've argued before and I will continue to argue that if the music industry intends digs its heels in and pretends internet culture doesn't exist things are only going to get worse. Somehow they've got to innovate around the fact that music no longer exists in objects, but in data. People have always let friends listen to records/tapes/cds; trying to stop all forms of sharing music over the internet and make people only listen to the music that they themselves have personally bought (or has been conveyed to them through specific, sanctioned channels) is madness. That would kill music far faster than BitTorrent is doing.

I don't use file-sharing networks, but I've got quite a few tracks that people have sent me over the internet. You know what else I've got? Albums I never would have bought if it hadn't been for being sent those tracks and getting into them. They're probably the majority of the library on my laptop (which is about two years old), considering all the other albums I've bought after getting into the other albums which I bought because of those tracks I didn't pay for. Maybe I'm not the norm, but I don't see why I shouldn't be.

In less ranty news(!), I'm going on holiday tomorrow afternoon/evening for a week. I'm not entirely sure what LJ access will be like, so I'll see you when I see you! Will definitely respond to comments as and when I can.

ETA: One more rant before I go, considering I really shouldn't make another post about it - YOU CUT AHRC FUNDING BACK TO PITTANCE AND THEN YOU BRING IN *THIS* USELESS-BUT-SPINNABLE SCHEME?? WHAT THE HELL, GOVERNMENT??