I time every journey...to bump into you... accidentally

tTitle courtesy of a Franz Ferdinand lyric that's sticking in my head. This week is for me what is known as "hell week" to thespians. In three days Medea hits the stage. We have not yet rehearsed in the performance space, nor rehearsed with costumes, nor collectively memorized the play. Which means three days of exertion and stress and hairtearing(though not mine of course, it's too pretty) and the thought racing through your mind that not only is the sky falling but moreover it will land on your head specifically. And after Friday it won't really matter a lot whether it brings the house down of flops in the manner of an eager salmon plucked from its spawning route and placed on a flat stone. Anyways, I may wind up posting less frequently for the remainder of the week.

I totally forgot to mention Shayna's contest, which I judged in this space. Congrats to teh winnarz.

Ok, so it turns out that the RIAA is laying down some serious bullshit on college students. It levies fines that they know cannot be afforded, and in some cases that are entirely frivolous. And there's little recourse, even if one has been wrongly accused of filesharing, because in most cases it would cost more to take the matter to court than to pay the fine. And in most cases, the students can afford to do neither. And what does the RIAA say to this? According to MIT sophomore Cassi Hunt, they "encourage students to either go to community college or drop out of school." Cassi herself cannot recall ever downloading an mp3; she says that she uses i2hub, a popular college fileswapping tool, to download tv episodes that she'd normally have no access to. But she won't ever have her day in court, because she can't afford it. What then is to prevent the RIAA from randomly levying fines at students at random so long as it can be proved that they have fileswapping software on their machines? It's relatively risk free for them, because so few will be able to even challenge it.

It's clear to me now why those assholes have been claiming that filesharing hurts their business (when in fact it's been proven that if it effects it at all it is positive). By claiming injury, they've convinced the government to give them free reign to bilk defensless people for big cash.