Disabling AdBlock

For several years, I've used the most popular Google Chrome extension ever, AdBlock. It does just what it says: blocks the ads you see in webpages and youtube videos. I've cruised along in ad-free comfort for nearly four years now. I no longer have to tolerate the obnoxious floating ads all over some websites. I'm no longer distracted by banners proclaiming "Wisconsin Mom Has the Disgusting Secret to Whiter Teeth!" or "21 and Single? Click here to chat now!" or "This One Energy Trick Will Save You Hundreds!"

I also have been free from the ads most people sit through before youtube videos. When I'm watching a quick 30 second tutorial on how to use toggle bolts in a plaster wall, I don't want to be forced to watch an irrelevant advertisement that lasts longer than the tutorial itself. But the other day I realised something. And it has a lot to do with one of the most ever-present companies in our daily lives.

Google seems like a giant Santa Claus. I mean, they offer me 15 gigabytes of FREE web storage, for me to store whatever I want for as long as I want. They've given me Youtube. They've made this blog possible. They provide a suite of web-based tools I constantly use, like Google Docs, Slides, and Calendar. When I want to drive to a place I'm not familiar with, I do it with directions from Google Maps. When I look at ANY WEBPAGE, it's in Chrome, Google's browser. And did I mention that they run the most popular and useful web search engine on the face of the Earth? No? Well they do. All of these things are free. Or at least, they appear to be.

But the truth is, Google is not a maps company. They're not a search company. They're not a storage company, or a calendar company, or a video sharing company. They are an advertisement company. The vast majority of their massive income is from advertisements. They offer us free things like Maps, Youtube, Docs, Drive, Calendar, the Android OS, etc, all in return for our clicking on their ads.

I was thinking about this the other day. The ads aren't really that terrible on lots of websites. I'm getting the benefit of the internet for free, shouldn't I be giving something back to the websites I like? AdBlock gives us a choice of what websites we want to support. That's why I've started disabling AdBlock on a number of individual websites I visit regularly. These websites have to pay the bills somehow, that's why they have ads up in the first place. However, the websites that support ads that annoy or offend me get the AdBlock treatment.

I haven't disabled it altogether, though. For instance, I still have it enabled for Youtube. Sorry, Youtube Content Creators, but as much as I love the idea of you guys getting a paycheck when I watch your videos, the ads that roll in front of Youtube videos are just too obnoxious. I don't mind the banner ads at the bottom of the video, or the ones that appear next to the video. But the commercials that interrupt the beginning of the video I'm watching have to stay gone.

That's why I love using AdBlock. Not to completely cripple the Internet as we know it by blocking every ad we see, but to give me the choice of which websites I actually want to support.

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That's Not Real Music

For some reason, I get into this debate quite often on the infamous Youtube Comments Section. It seems lots of people don't believe that a genre of music I enjoy immensely, EDM, is true artistry (i.e. not "real" music.) I disagree. Here's why.


People make a lot of statements and generalizations about Electronic Dance Music. One of the biggest ones:

'It's not "real" music because it all sounds the same.'

EDM (Electronic Dance Music) covers a huge range of genres, including Ambient, Ambient dub ,Ambient industrial, Ambient house, Dark ambient, Drone music, Illbient, Isolationism, Breakbeat, Acid breaks, Baltimore Club, Big beat, Broken beat, Nu skool breaks, Florida breaks, Nu-funk, Miami bass, Chiptune/Video game music, Bitpop, Bleep techno, Game Boy music, Nintendocore, Skweee, Disco, Cosmic disco, Disco polo, Euro disco, Italo disco, Nu-disco, Space disco, Spacesynth, Downtempo, Acid jazz, Chill out, Ethnic electronica, New age music, Nu jazz, Trip hop, Drum and bass, Darkstep, Drumfunk, Drumstep, Hardstep, Jump-Up, Jazzstep, Liquid funk, Neurofunk, Sambass, Techstep, Dub fusion genres, Afro-dub, Dubstep, Brostep, Post-dubstep, Trap, Wonky, Dubtronica, Electro music, Freestyle music, Electroacoustic music, Acousmatic music, Electroacoustic improvisation, Musique concrète, Electronica, Berlin school, Chillwave, Folktronica, Funktronica, Laptronica, Livetronica, Electronic rock, Alternative dance, Coldwave, Dance-punk, Dark Wave, Electronicore, Ethereal Wave, Indietronica, Krautrock, New rave, Nu-gaze, Space rock, Synthpop, Synthpunk, Hardcore, 4-beat, Breakbeat hardcore, Bouncy techno, Breakcore, Digital hardcore, Darkcore, Freeform hardcore, Gabber, Happy hardcore, Hardcore breaks, Makina, Rave, Speedcore, Trancecore, UK hardcore, Hard dance, Hard house, Hardstyle, Dubstyle, Jumpstyle, Lento violento, Eurobeat, Eurodance, Italo dance, House music, Acid house, Balearic beat, Chicago house, Deep house, Detroit house, Disco house, Diva house/Handbag house, Hardbag, Electroclash, Electro house, Complextro, Dutch house, Fidget house, Moombahton, Moombahcore, Euro house, Freestyle house, French house, Funky house, Garage house, Ghetto house, Hip house, Italo house, Kwaito, Latin house, Microhouse/Minimal house, New beat, Progressive house, Swing house, Electro swing, Tech house, Tribal house, Vocal house, Industrial music, Aggrotech, Cybergrind, Electro-industrial, Dark electro, Electronic body music, Futurepop, Industrial metal, Industrial rock, Neue Deutsche Härte, Japanoise, Power electronics, Death industrial, Power noise, IDM, Glitch, Jungle, Darkcore jungle, Hardcore jungle, Raggacore, Ragga-jungle, Post-disco, Boogie, Dance-pop, Dance-rock, Techno, Acid techno, Detroit techno, Free tekno, Ghettotech, Hardtechno, Minimal techno, Nortec, Rotterdam techno, Schranz, Symphonic techno, Tecno brega, Trance music, Acid trance, Dark trance, Dream trance, Electrance, Euro trance, Goa trance, Hard trance, Ibiza Trance, Full on, Progressive psytrance, Psybreaks, Suomisaundi, Progressive trance, Tech trance, Uplifting trance, Vocal trance, UK garage, 2-step garage, Breakstep, Future garage, Grime, Grindie, Speed garage, Bassline/4x4 garage, UK funky, and I've only stopped listing them because I think you get the point.

I can assure you that while some of these styles may sound similar to each other, each is different, with its own set of characteristics. Once you listen to a lot of EDM, you start to realize the vast range of sounds that are out there.

Another argument I hear quite often:

'EDM takes no talent or skill to produce. It's just a bunch of noises made with computers.'

That's a tougher one to address, if only because I don't even know where to begin. As someone who's dabbled in EDM production, even though I have only scratched the surface of the skills and practice necessary to create a compelling track, I can say with confidence that it's extremely difficult to just sit down at a computer with FL Studio or Ableton Live and churn out a track without at least some idea of what you're doing.

Take a look at this:

That's a view of FL Studio. This image doesn't even show most of the hundreds, if not thousands of parameters that must be adjusted and tweaked to create a unique sound. Many critics of EDM that I've encountered have never even used software like this, and if I were to plunk them down in front of it and tell them to create a track, they'd probably end up with something like this:

I doubt that's going to be topping any charts any time soon. I whipped it together in about 90 seconds. 

Creating a great track can take months. Each synth must be fine tuned to give the exact sound you're aiming for. Every effect must be programed. And I haven't even gotten to the complex art of mastering, the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to an exported track.

I'm not claiming to be great at all of these things, in fact I only know the basics when it comes to FL Studio.

One of my favorite genres is Electro House music (or Progressive House), one of the characteristics of which is a steady, four-to-the-floor beat, usually at 125-130 BPM. Take a listen to this track by one of my favorite producers, Deadmau5 (pronounced Deadmouse.)

At the surface, it may not seem all that creative to some, because of the repetitive structure within the main hook of the song. But there is so much variation and complex structure within that pattern. It's a really tough thing to get right, but Deadmau5 seems to have nailed it to some extent, considering the track's massive popularity on the charts.

Here's another example. I produced the track below, called "There." It took somewhere around two months from start to finish. It's a reasonably decent track (in my opinion at least), and I'm pretty proud of it. However, if you hand me a guitar, and tell me to create a really driving riff for a rock song, followed by a screaming solo, I'm not going to be able to make much of anything. Is it easier to use software to create music? Not exactly. That's just what I'm better at. For a guitar player, it's easier for them to create great music with a guitar than it is for them to use FL Studio.




So shut up and enjoy the music.

UPDATE: Here's a great video of a guy performing EDM live. Yes, it requires skill.

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Computers (According to Hollywood)

There are a lot of great movies out there. Some of them are quite credible, realistic, and engaging. I enjoy them immensely. But one thing bugs me: Hollywood producers don't seem to know anything about anything electronic.

In most modern-set movies, there will be a scene with a computer. And that computer is making idiotic bleeping noises every time someone presses a button! For me, it destroys the entire realism and believability of the scene when someone's reading a text message on their iPhone and all of a sudden an electronic din fills the room just because they're typing a reply. Directors and screenwriters know that the real world doesn't work that way. But they continue to insist on utterly wrecking the credibility of a potentially awesome scene by inserting corny, tinny beeping sounds into every single computer scene! Why can't movie computers be like real life computers? A pleasant "blinng" here and there when you get a notification is fine. But a constant racket is just obnoxious. Can you imagine if everyones electronics did that? Offices full of computers would be a nightmare.

One thing I've also noticed is that movie characters seem physically unable to operate a computer with a mouse. Seriously.  Everything is apparently controlled by typing, just like in 1985 when all you had was a command line!

(Good guy 1: "Oh, no! Looks like the bad guys are trying to access the main gate! Quick, use the computer system to lock it!"

Good guy 2: "Right away sir! Let me try to navigate through this supposedly modern operating system only by quickly hitting random characters on a keyboard! OK, got it!"

Bad guys: "Rats! Foiled again. It's locked!")

Speaking of bad guys, the go-to strategy for pretty much everything seems to be "hacking". Apparently. anything and everything electronic can be "hacked into". It's the same plot-hole filling spackle used in Star Trek (future technology), and Harry Potter (magic). If you're a good writer, you don't have to rely on stupid crutches like that.

(Movie Writer Bill: "Hey Frank! I think I've written myself into a corner! How am I supposed to get our main characters out of the bad guys lair?"

Movie Writer Frank: "I dunno. Have them hack into the light switches with their phones and sneak past the bad guys. Problem solved."

Bill: "Hmm. Seems legit! Okay!"

Frank: "Fine. Pass me another beer, will ya?")

Another observation is that a computer's interface is almost never true-to-life unless the company is paying for product placement. If anyone else has seen the movie "Independence Day" (if not then look it up on Netflix because it's great), you'll notice that at the end, the entire alien scourge is defeated with an Apple Powerbook 5300! Random coincidence? No. Apple paid for the product placement so that the entire culmination of the film is nothing but a cheap advertisement for a laptop.

So consider this an open letter to every movie director, producer, and screenwriter ever:

STOP IT! Just stop! Get back to reality! It's time to salvage any hope of releasing credible movies! Stop with the beeping. Stop with the keyboard commands. And the product placement. And please, please, please, STOP with the hacking. 

-Me

\\-end of rant-\\

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Instagram is not art.

Has anyone seen Instagram? Cute, isn't it? Did you know that the people who use it call their filtered, distorted, grainy photos "art"? I have four words for these people:

Instagram is not art.

You know what? That's not enough emphasis. Let's try this:

INSTAGRAM IS NOT ART.

Hopefully, an italic bold underlined over-sized typeface will get this message through to the fake-retro clouded brains of these pour souls.

For the benefit of those who don't know what Instagram is, let me explain. Instagram is a photo sharing service that lets those with smartphones, well, share their photos. At least, that's what it's supposed to do. In reality, what it ends up doing is destroying a lot of potentially great photos by slapping "artistic" filters over them. 

I made an instagram'd copy of the first painting you think of when you think "art". Here's my version of the Mona Lisa:

There! I made Art! See how I added that film grain, tweaked the saturation and contrast, and put it into a Polaroid frame? Now it's Art, right? Wrong. There was absolutely no creative process involved. I simply clicked on one of 17 available photo filters. The only part that took any effort was putting both photos in front of a background and adding text. (I did that in Gimp.)

Why do people use these filters? Well, the answer lies in the past. Things from the past are generally perceived as being somewhat magical. Your grandmothers typewriter? Cool. Great-aunt-Bertha's vintage record player? Cool. So if we just make all of our photos look aged, then it logically follows that they will be more authentic and interesting. But the problem is that the majority of Instagrammers weren't even alive in the era they're trying to portray. A picture of your Macbook Air (circa 2011) made to look like a Polaroid (circa 1974) does not add any artistic value whatsoever. These filters are a very lazy habit to get into. Most of the photos on instagram are of feet, food, and coffee. (No, seriously.) If I showed you an untouched photo of my foot or my plate of scrambled eggs, you'd just give me a bored look and continue with your life. But if I do something to those photos to make them look more interesting (such as slapping a filter on them) then suddenly they grab your attention! Except for one thing: They look identical to all of the other 4,000,000 photos of feet and scrambled eggs on instagram. These are ruined photos. They don't capture a moment. They have no character. Their only flaws were put there on purpose. I'll tell you what: If you take a photo of your coffee mug, print it out, and leave it in the desert for 19 years, and then retrieve it and display it with all its scratches and sun-bleaching, then you've made a piece of art. Just like using paint-by-numbers doesn't make you a painter, using Instagram does not make you an artist.

Another reason you shouldn't use Instagram if you claim to be an artist is licensing. With the recent changes to Instagram's terms of service, any photo posted can be saved and used for commercial purposes. That's right: You own the photos, but you have no rights to them. So if a company wants to take the photo you took of your hamburger and use it for profit, there's nothing to stop them. It's legal, and you won't get a penny for your "work".

Are there alternatives to destroying your photos with faux-character and mass-produced authenticity? Yes. Yes there are. For starters, if you'd like to create nostalgia in your photos, then you should do absolutely nothing to them. Sure, your eight-megapixel iPhone camera looks great right now, but in 15 years your kids are gonna laugh at how grainy and low quality the images are. That's real nostalgia. 

Changing the color of a photo of an everyday object such as a coffee mug does not make it unique. The only way to create truly unique photos is to take pictures of truly unique subjects, or use interesting techniques in your photography. That's a unique-ness that Instagram simply can't replace.

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The Loss of Apple's Class

I've been reading all the Apple rumors lately. I saw the usual fare: New iPad leaked parts, new iPhone leaked parts, etc, etc, etc. As we found out way back before the iPhone 5, Apple no longer has much of a claim to secrecy. You don't even have to watch Apple's highly choreographed "keynote" product releases anymore. Just check the leaks. Because most of the time, they're right. 

Just check out this video, uploaded on September 1, 2012, a full 11 days before the iPhone 5 was even announced, let alone the 2 week waiting period before it was available in stores.

You could go on and on. There were pictures of the iPad mini a full month before the announcement, there were leaks of the new iMac's thinner profile before most people had even heard of it, and no one can forget when a working iPhone 4 was found in a bar in 2010. Apple has long relied on secrecy before the product announcements in order to drum up hype to increase sales. But with spies on every corner and a camera in every pocket, that secrecy has almost ceased to exist. I've learned to believe the rumors like this one about upcoming products, because they're almost always right. For instance, I already know what the iPad 5 will look like. (Picture a blown-up iPad Mini.)
 So Apple has almost completely lost its secrecy. Has it also lost its class?

Let me explain. 

One thing Apple had going for it was class. And by class I mean the "cool" factor. Apple's products cost on average much more than equivalent products from the various competition. If you own an Apple product, you make it clear that you have paid significantly more for said product than someone who buys something from, say, Samsung. I'm not claiming that this is the reason that all Apple customers have for buying Apple's products. But you simply can't deny that this is a factor. Pride and status symbols have been a part of our human nature since, well, the beginning of time. So by appealing to the "elite" crowd, Apple gains not only a lot of wealthy customers but also an overall image of superiority. Class envy sells products. That's a fact that will never go away. Lots of people upgraded their perfectly functional iPhone 4S's to iPhone 5's not because there was anything wrong with the old ones, but because the iPhone 5 is the newest model. And it's not fun to have an "old" product when everyone else is walking around with something newer. I've experienced this myself, and it's definitely a hard thing to ignore.

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Presents

I got some great presents this year. As I get older, I find myself enjoying giving the presents even more than getting them. Strange, huh? It's interesting how every year, after Christmas I hear about how this friend got an iPod or this other friend got an Xbox or a $500 guitar pedal. It would probably be pretty easy to be dissatisfied with what I got, in comparison to the expensive and elaborate gifts that other people get. But somehow, I'm not dissatisfied. I guess that, even though my gifts may seem simple and even boring compared to an expensive piece of electronics, there is something else involved. It's really about the thought that went into choosing or making the present, rather than the present itself. Here's an example. This year my sister made me a blanket. It's an awesome blanket. It's warm, it's actually long enough for tall people like me, and it looks good. It didn't cost hundreds of dollars. But she made it herself. She spent time on it. She knew that I am in protest against the ludicrous Wisconsin winters. She remembered that I am perpetually complaining about being cold. And so she made this blanket for me. I'm going to use this blanket for a long time. I slept under it last night, and it was nice and warm. It's actually draped over me right now as I'm typing. I love my new blanket!

Several years ago, when I was nine or ten, I desperately wanted an Airhogs r/c jet. It was a little ducted fan powered airplane, and it was nearly indestructible, being made out of foam. It cost $50. I talked about it every day for a long time, and saved up my allowances to buy it. And then Christmas came and I received some money, which was just enough for that jet. I went to the store and finally bought it, and I was thrilled. I flew it around for hours and hours, and within about a year it was worn out. I put it in a closet, and two years ago I threw it away. It's sitting in a landfill somewhere next to a banana peel slowly decomposing. After the plane had lived its lifespan, I didn't care about it anymore. What I cared about was the time I spent in the gym flying it around, doing loops and rolls. That was the important part. I spent hours with my grandpa flying it back and forth.
A few months after I got that plane for Christmas, my parents gave me a multitool. It's a pair of pliers with screwdrivers, knife blades, bottle openers, and wire cutters on it. It cost a little less than that r/c plane. But the difference here is that I still have my multitool. I just used it about an hour ago to repair the radio that sits in my bed. I used it 3 months ago to build my computer. Again, the tool itself isn't what matters to me. It's the things I've made and fixed and taken apart that I remember.

The price or value of the gift really doesn't matter. It's the thought and effort that went into choosing it and buying it that matters. So if you ever find yourself looking at your friends and thinking "Wow, I wish I got expensive stuff like that for Christmas," just remember that whoever bought or made the gifts you got was thinking about you when they did it. They were thinking about something meaningful to give you. That's what matters the most.

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