General musings for the week 30th January 2011

If you're a movie fan and don't mind listening to three guys riffing on movies, life and other banalities then you could do worse than to tune in to the 3 mates movie madcast.

Created by Alec Chapman - a Supporting Artiste friend of mine - along with a couple of his friends, he likes to talk about one of his favourite topics - The Movies. (Another of his favourite topics is games, but that's a different story). The first of what I hope will be many podcasts last about an hour and discusses Tron Legacy on the whole. Personally I think he could do with a more stringent editor to cut some of the discussions down to size, but everything is pretty much on the nose, amusing at times and bodes well for the future. The Avatar 2 skit is also very well done. Covered in the next couple of entries will be my personal favourite movie of the moment 'The Kings'S Speech' as well as a few well meant jokes at the expense of 'Inception' - my movie of the year for 2010.

For those of you on Facebook: Sometime this week the New FB Privacy setting called "Instant Personalization" goes into effect. The new setting shares your data with non-FB sites & it is automatically set to "Enabled". Go to Account>Privacy Settings>Apps & Websites>Instant Personalization>edit settings & uncheck "Enable". If your friends don't do this, they will be sharing info about you as well. Feel free to copy this paragraph to your Facebook status update and let all your FB friends know.

An interesting discussion here on web piracy and the differing points of view out there. On the one side you have the author who's work is being plundered for free on the internet and on the other you have the plunderers who are, basically, saying 'The Internet allows you to do this and if you don't get with the program then you're losing touch with reality'. I think I have to side with the author on this one. Regardless of whether you feel that something you can copy from the internet is Theft or Copyright, the fact is that something that has been created by an individual is being taken out of that individual's control and distributed without his agreement, authority or recompense. That's wrong and I don't think you can morally justify it in any way shape or form. But - according to many of the comments I've read related to this post and others, I'm in the minority. Apparently once you put something on the internet neither copyright laws, morality,  common law or even decency don't apply. Such is progress.

The video of the week this week is The $300 movie. Made (surprisingly enough for $300) by a couple of guys with minimal acting skills but great editing and VFX skills it just goes to show what can be done with some time, ingenuity and talent.
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