this is all g.r.r.m.'s fault, anyway

[rone]

Let's be clear: i don't like The Oatmeal.  I found Matthew Inman's humor juvenile but inoffensive at first; even in the cartoons that had material that i liked, his delivery seemed off in the way that the dorkiest of nerds have when they overtell or overexplain a joke.  He finally lost me with his issues-revealing Utilikilts cartoon, and that's colored everything else that i've had the misfortune to witness (and you'd call me an idiot for continuing to follow links there, and you'd be right).  His approach to things in his life is relentlessly adolescent, and his current comic about how HBO has forced him to torrent the "Game of Thrones" series, which has been pounded across my social network with much delight by my so-called friends, is a prime example of this: entitlement and rationalization in the face of unenlightened self-harm (and, yes, the fact that it's about the much overrated "Game of Thrones", which book many of my friends inexplicably love and consequently turned them into morbidly obsessed fans of the HBO series, doesn't help).

Here's the thing: HBO doesn't owe anyone the "Game of Thrones" series outside of the terms in which they make it available (i.e., pay a shitload of money a month to the local cable monopoly and be glad that they deign to convey their munificence to your hovel).  Is Inman truly advocating that we should we bend or break the rules every time an incompetent business doesn't offer us their product in a timely fashion after we've declined to adhere to their idiotic terms and conditions, simply because we really, really want it?

If you're going to torrent it, torrent it, but don't waste time rationalizing it.  Just because the MPAA is acting like Javert doesn't mean that you're Valjean, and "Game of Thrones" isn't a piece of bread.

Comments

It's All About The Story

[thorfinn]

I've come up with a theory - screen and text are fundamentally about telling-tall-tales, i.e., making up plausible and/or interesting bullshit. So, the publishers are applying what they see as their game strength - "just lie harder and better, and we will win!"

After all, if they tried to hire some systems architects and software engineers and built their own internet sales delivery thingy, that's just difficult techno wizardry and magic, and they'll get hacked just like Sony. (Not a foregone conclusion, obviously, but certainly likely when you have clueless idiots trying to build something.)

Music doesn't have that fictional element to it as much, so the publishers are more reality based, and are happy so long as the cash rolls in, so they've just gone with the flow and are happily dumping everything onto every digital web shop that'll give them a reasonable cut.

Re: It's All About The Story

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

I like the theory... but could it also just be that music went through this much earlier?

Re: It's All About The Story

[thorfinn]

Yeah, I think that's part of it. The RIAA has certainly been historically laying the boot in as much as the MPAA and such. I think they pretty much stopped when iTunes came out (and was then followed by a bunch of other legit digital sales sites), because the publishers suddenly had a huge revenue source from online.

I think there's more going on with books and video though - they *should* be pretty clear that the business model of "just sell the download" works. It's not like there's a lack of evidence even considering only evidence within that media industry, not just comparing it against music. But, despite that, there's still massive intransigence and resistance to the idea of just making it convenient to buy stuff. Very weird.