Friday Night Video - Tired Of Waiting For You

For the last few weeks, posting has been light, mostly because I've been plugging away on some fairly giant posts. In particular, I've been working on a write-up of the CPC leadership race that's up around 5000 words, all of which require research, and only about half done. Between that, actually working for a living, and a perfectionist streak keeping one of my other posts under wraps, I haven't gotten much out the door. But that ought to change this weekend, because I figure you're all so tired of waiting for me. After all, I know that I have literally a reader who is looking forward to seeing what I have to say on this topic, and I'd hardly like to disappoint a crowd that numerous.

Friday Night Video - Resurrection

Not much to say this week, just figured I'd post this in honour of Easter.

A Radical Proposal For Alcohol

I. 
In Ontario, we have something of an antiquated alcohol distribution system. The only places to buy most forms of alcohol on a retail level are the Liquor Control Board of Ontario(LCBO), a government-controlled monopoly, and The Beer Store, a monopoly owned and operated by the three largest global beer companies. Needless to say, this has major issues - no competition, poor service, and on the beer side there's a lot of subtle ways that small brewers get screwed, because their only distribution channel is owned by their competitors. Some people are trying to change this, but there's been only very minimal movement since the time 15 years ago I was handing out pro-privatization flyers at a PC convention.

In 1927 when Prohibition ended, this wasn't a bad system to transition the province back to legal booze, but it's 90 years later, and the only real update to the system is nicer LCBO stores and a few private wine shops. We're so far behind the curve here that it's ludicrous. A beer-nut buddy of mine was on a brewery tour in the US, and asked the tour guide when they might be able to buy their beer. The guide asked where he lived, and when he heard that my buddy was Ontarian, exclaimed "Ontario? You guys are worse than Utah!". That's right - a state quite thoroughly run by a religion that prohibits alcohol is more open to brewers than Ontario is.

The interesting thing is that Ontario has a completely parallel system of alcohol sales that nobody talks about in this context, because it already works quite well. The Liquor License Board of Ontario(LLBO) controls the ability of restaurants and bars to sell booze, and it works on a perfectly sane set of rules. Servers need to be of age and trained in keeping alcohol out of the hands of the underage, the intoxicated, and so on, and there's a few basic rules on what sort of places can sell booze and a punishment process if the license-holders act badly, but that's more or less it. It's not perfect - nothing is - but it works.

So I have a radical proposal for alcohol sales:

How about we let people sell alcohol the way that we let them sell alcohol right now? 

Let the LLBO license retail stores, and let LLBO-licensed stores buy from any suppliers they want to without needing to go through the LCBO and Beer Store the way they do now. We already have a perfectly functional set of rules in place to ensure sales are done properly, and they're tested in practice literally millions of times a week. Just add retail sales of sealed product to the list of allowed things to do with an LLBO license, and then sell the LCBO for parts - I'm sure its distribution network and real estate portfolio will make the province a pretty penny. As for the Beer Store, they've fleeced the people of this province long enough, but they can keep selling if they want. They won't even need to sell their competitors' product if they don't want to. But they'll actually have competition, and I will shed not a single tear for their pain at the outcome.

II. 
There's a few objections to breaking up the LCBO system that I've heard, and some make more sense than others. People who talk about how we can't trust alcohol being sold by private retailers are living in a world I don't quite understand, and while the people who think alcohol sales should be actively restricted as a policy are folks I do understand, I don't agree with them. If we're going to have a society full of adults, we should treat therm like adults, and let them do things even if they're sometimes dumb.

The one objection that does deserve a more complete analysis is the concern about lost revenue. The LCBO earns about $1.7 billion for the province every year, and that's quite a bit of cash. Even people who aren't huge fans of the distribution model value this revenue source, because it's always good to have the provincial government funded by things other than taxes if we can - taxes are too high already, after all.

Thing is, when you're looking at a government-owned monopoly, "profit" is an odd word to use. Yes, it keeps separate books, but it's still a lot like calling car licensing fees a "profit" for the Ministry of Transportation. If you have to pay the government for something if you want to have it, then calling it a "profit" or a "tax" doesn't much change the outcome. Every buyer of alcohol has to pay a mandatory sum of money to the government, over and above the usual costs of distribution, in order to get alcohol. It's a tax already, it's just one that pretends to be a profit. So let's just spike that. Figure out what the LCBO profit per unit of alcohol is, and up the tax by that amount. Even if the LCBO isn't privatized, this will be a better representation of what's really happening - prices will stay the same, the amount of money being remitted to the government will stay the same, but we'll have an honest name for it. And once you're honest about the fact that the LCBO is a hidden tax, this argument disappears.

III.
I know it's a crazy thing to propose that we sell alcohol the way we currently sell alcohol - after all, a beer bottle that's been opened is a totally different product than a beer bottle that hasn't been opened, so keeping two separate distribution and licensing systems is obviously a logical approach to the problem. But I think it just might work.

(Footnote: The LLBO is technically defunct, and now part of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario. But everyone calls it the LLBO, so I used the traditional name)

Friday Night Video - The Dark

It's odd how some bands come to prominence. An old 80s metal band called Savatage made a Christmas tune for a concept album, and then made a side project for a Christmas album, and copied the song over to it. With the new name, it did impressively on the charts, so they took the side band and ran with it. Turned into a rather unique show - one part classical, one part metal, one part traditional Christmas tunes, and about 4.72 parts stage lighting/pyro/ridiculous flying stage bits. I've been to see them a few times now, and they always put on a great show.

Thing is, if you haven't seen it, I'm not sure how much of a chance you'll have, because apparently the band's founder, producer, and guitarist died a couple days ago. They've always been an ambitious collection of touring musicians, so I'm sure they could carry on if they want to, but it's still a sad day when a great musician goes into the dark.

Wishlist - VOIP-Equipped Cell Phones

Internet phones are nothing new - they've been in common use for at least a decade. You connect into the traditional phone network via internet, maker calls, have a phone number, and so on. But weirdly enough, that doesn't apply to actual phones. You have to choose which type of service you want. For landlines, this is no big deal, but for a cellphone, which can easily lose its cellular connection, it's a problem. Yes, there's apps for cell phones that let you do the VOIP thing, but they're completely separate from its baseline phone functionality.

Imagine if your cell provider had an app you could install that tracked when you lacked cell service but had a stable wifi connection, and automatically shunted your number from being a traditional phone number to a VOIP phone number on the fly - heck, mid-call if necessary. You'd have the same number for both, and it'd be completely invisible to the outside world - they call you, and even if you're in a bunker a thousand feet below ground, if there's a wifi network down there, you can take calls like you're sitting beside the tower. The major providers wouldn't get so much benefit from this, but for the second-tier providers with limited networks(Freedom Mobile[formerly Wind] being the most obvious in my area) it'd be a godsend. Get cheap service, use towers when they're around, and bounce back to the nearest wifi hotspot if you're out of range or in a dead zone. 

The technical issues with this are profound, I'm sure - they always are for this sort of thing. But I think it should be doable, and I'd love to see it. 

One-Page Books - The American Way of Warfare (Stephanie Carvin and Michael John Williams)

One of the joys of getting a job that's a subway ride away is that I'm getting a lot more reading in, so more OPB posts should be coming henceforth. This one is on Law, Science, Liberalism and the American Way of Warfare - The Quest For Humanity in Conflict by Stephanie Carvin and Michael John Williams.

Summary:

The United States has always considered itself a moral force as well as a traditional nation, and as such they feel that war should only take place rarely and for moral reasons. This means wars are crusades, and as such annihilation of the enemy is the only legitimate conclusion, but that they also need to be fought morally and legally. The tension between annihilation and restraint has dictated much of American strategy historically, and has led to using technology for quick victory as a common compromise. 

The first real challenge to the technological approach was poison gas in WW1 - deciding between effectiveness and perceived barbarism caused tension. It also illustrated an odd literalism in the American approach to laws of war - they never signed anti-gas treaties, despite being anti-gas, for fear that it may be construed as banning tear gas for police use, and instead called on "the general opinion of mankind" as cause to avoid it. 

The next great challenge was the atomic era. When total war is suicide, fighting without annihilation becomes necessary. Adjusting to this never sat right, but the best effort was heavy computerization, in ways that show a striking faith in Big Data even by today's standards. The biggest pitfall here was trying to make deterrence mathematical and simply assuming that the enemy would be deterred by the same things they were, which led to mistakes like refusing to bomb North Vietnam too much for fear of having nothing left to deter with. 

Vietnam illustrated that the only way to fight overwhelming technology is to fight a guerilla war. Americans regard this as barbaric, and they lash out and do silly things because they feel that an opponent who doesn't respect the law deserves no protection from law. This is a mistake that causes huge problems. The military's legal arm learned this and tried to enhance soldier's understanding of military law post-Vietnam, with moderate success. However, the brass wanted to pretend Vietnam didn't exist and plan for a conventional European war instead, with none of the difficulties of guerilla fighting. 

This worked for a time - the Gulf War in particular - but in most recent American campaigns, it's missed the mark. Iraq in particular was a victim of excessive optimism, where far too little thought was given to the state of the country post-war, and where the military was thus led into a series of problems technology couldn't solve. Law could, somewhat - troops acting better brings the locals onside, which is what wins guerilla wars - but the brass forgetting Vietnam meant that those lessons were applied weakly and too late, and legal training intended for high-intensity war falls apart in guerilla campaigns which leads to things like Abu Ghraib. 

Drones are the latest attempt to use technology to address competing priorities in war, particularly to lower the human cost to Americans, and while time will tell how they work out, the authors are not optimistic. War will never be "easy". 

Commentary:

This is a somewhat more academically-inclined piece of writing than I usually go for, but given that one of the authors is my cousin, and that it's a topic I'm interested in, I figured I'd give it a try. It's still quite readable, and I did enjoy it. I think it's a pretty comprehensive study of the topic, and a lot of the stories that came up really did illustrate things pretty well(e.g., efforts to turn strategic bombing as deterrence into a single mathematical equation, or a 2000s-era general being told about tactics that worked well for pacifying guerrillas in Vietnam exclaiming "This isn't Vietnam, this is Iraq!"). 

The overall thesis of Americans wanting to fight in the way that they consider decent and getting annoyed and lashing out when their opponents play by different rules does ring true(and while it's not just an American thing - the Japanese in WW2 did a lot of that as well, for example - they're the ones whose actions matter most today), and their sometimes-excessive reliance on technology leading them into mistakes. Acting decently towards foes, even when foes don't do the same, really is an important tool for improving the effectiveness of the military, as is keeping soldiers competent and controlled(which is one lesson the brass very much did learn from Vietnam). And sadly, wars will never be easy, and a crusading spirit will sometimes lead you astray. 

A few minor quibbles. One, the thesis seems a bit buried at times. I got the message the authors were trying to convey, and I understood roughly where it was going from the beginning, but it didn't quite become clear until later. I expected the broad idea to come up more strongly in the intro, while I felt that big parts of it didn't get mentioned until the appropriate chapter. For a book that is in large part a historical review, it seemed like a stronger effort to tie it all together would have helped.

Two, the title just seems really unwieldy. I suspect there was good reason, but my first thought is that it should be called simply The American Way of Warfare, with Law, Science, and Liberalism as a subtitle.

Three, I feel that too many books get footnotes and endnotes mixed up. IMO, citations should go in endnotes, while things that people will actually want to read while going through the main text should be in footnotes. Use footnotes like Terry Pratchett did, for digressions of interest, and stash the citations at the back of the book where they don't break up the flow. Almost no book does it this way, and I think it annoyed me in part because a few books I've read recently have gotten this wrong in just about every possible direction, but I do feel that the distinction is important - mixing them up either leads to pulling yourself out of the flow too often to check the notes, or to glossing over the content-containing notes because you get used to them all being citations.

Still, if this is a topic that interests you, I do think it's worth a read. It's not too heavy, and it covers a lot of ground pretty well. 

Friday Night Video - Sex, Drugs, and RRSPs

I make financial plans for a living, which makes it a bit surprising that I haven't talked money at all on here. There's a lot to say on the topic, and it's turned into a gigantic industry because it's both something a lot of people need and because it's pretty important. So, I'm going to do something a bit different this week(and I don't just mean posting my Friday Night Video on Sunday morning - those who have me on Facebook know that's nothing new). Also, ignore the rather obnoxious video portion here - it's the only version of this song on Youtube. If I ever decide to get into video editing, I may decide to upload this post in video form.

As a little boy I dreamed of playing Rock and Roll
Playing in stadiums with every ticket sold
Seven figure income from a six string guitar
Dating gorgeous women and drivin' custom cars

Well, who can blame him?

Then it happened when my record went gold
Then I'm thinking what'll I do when I get old?
Can't live forever as the King of Rock

Keith Richards disagrees, but 99% of the time he's right. This is quality planning, unlike the mistake so many people make when they get a lot of money. This goes double for an industry as fickle as entertainment, where it's easy to be making a seven-figure income from a six-string guitar this year, and be a "What ever happened to..." special on VH1 a few years later.

That's why I'm investing in some blue chip stocks

Those are a quality cornerstone to most portfolios. They generally shouldn't be 100%, but as we see below the singer has other asset types as well, so it should be fine.

(chorus:)
I got SEX, DRUGS, and RRSPs
I'm a rock and roller with financial security
SEX, DRUGS and RRSPs
I'm a guitar hero with mortgage equity.

I approve of the financial security, though "mortgage equity" has two plausible meanings here. Does he have equity in his own house from partially paying off the mortgage, or is he writing private mortgages to others as an investment? I should hope he's got the first, but for a millionaire(especially in 1995, when this song was written, with higher interest rates and lower house prices), the second can also be a reasonable investment. The risk can be higher, because it tends to be poorly diversified - giving a quarter-million to a single person is obviously a fairly high concentration of risk unless you have several million. But if he does, then private lending can make sense.

I'm a modern rebel with a cause
I like finding loopholes in the new tax laws

Today, that's pretty hard - the Canada Revenue Agency has spent the last several years closing loopholes fairly aggressively, and I haven't seen any notable new ones since I entered the industry. Every budget seems to find a new one to close. Still, as rebellious tendencies go, this is a far more practical one than most. A famous person talking politics may sway a few votes, but a millionaire distributing tax loophole info can easily sway government finances by hundreds of millions, which has a far larger effect on society, and in the form of directly opposing the most prominent power structure in society. Would that so many rebels had such a practical view of rebellion.

My fans are reading 'bout me in the Rolling Stone
While I'm talking to my broker on the telephone.

Even an enthusiast for do-it-yourself investing hires a professional financial advisor. Given the number of people I've seen who think financial advice is a scam, this makes me a bit happy.

On stage I run around like some animal
But all my money's in a compound annual

I think "compound annual" is a dated term for a GIC, which today is a painfully conservative investment, but in 1995 produced passable returns. If he literally had all his money there I'd have questions, but given the context of the rest of the song it's clear that it's only part of his portfolio.

This life is dangerous but I don't care
'Cause I got insurance on my guitar and my hair!

Insurance should, in general, only be purchased when either a) you cannot afford to pay the cost of replacement out of pocket, b) when you're a higher-than-average risk and the insurance company does not properly incorporate that risk into their pricing models, or c) when there's a tax advantage greater than the costs of paying the insurance company's overhead. If his guitar was something irreplaceable like the legends of some guitarists who have modified their guitars so far that they don't know how to recreate it(I think Brian May of Queen is the example most commonly cited here, but I'm no guitarist), then insuring that would make sense. Ditto the hair for certain hair-focused musical genres - you don't want to go from Duran Duran to Devin Townsend, you know?

(chorus)
We used to be such a happy band..
Phil and Nick and Bob and Stan
But Phil choked on his vomit
And then Nick choked on his vomit
And then Stan choked on his vomit
And then so did Bob.
WHAT A BUNCH OF IDIOTS!

Well, it's hard to argue with that.

Their deaths sure meant an awful lot to me
'Cause now I'm getting all their royalties

This implies some deeply unusual estate planning on the parts of Phil, Nick, Bob, and Stan. If the band was a group of brothers then this inheritance would make sense, though the singer's mockery of their deaths would be remarkably callous in that case. But if they're the usual group of buddies, the most obvious way for him to inherit their royalty streams would be for them to have all explicitly listed him(or each other generally) as a beneficiary in their wills, since intestacy laws don't give assets to friends under any circumstances I've ever heard of. That's a deeply strange thing to do, unless they all happen to be estranged from their families or something. Alternately, the band could be structured as a joint tenancy with right of survivorship, which is not the default state of joint assets under most legal regimes(and is not even legal in some, such as Quebec), but it's possible. I'm not sure how one would even go about structuring a band as a JTWROS, but I suspect it could be done.

This one, more than any other, proves the superiority of the singer's approach to financial planning. They could have had the money go to supporting their kindly mothers, or their girlfriends, or whatever. Instead, it's going to their smug jerk of a buddy who's mocking their deaths. Seriously people, getting a proper will matters a lot.

They would have spent them on women and booze
But me I got commodities that just won't lose!

It's odd for a guy who brags about sex and drugs no less than eight times in a song less than three minutes long to complain about his bandmates liking "women and booze", but perhaps he's a bit more frugal in his habits somehow. Also, he's rather optimistic about commodities. Unlike stocks and bonds, which are investments in productive activities that can generate a long-term stream of profits which can allow for a long-term appreciation of your assets, commodities are inert - if anything, they cost money because of the needs of storage, security, and the like. The only way for commodities to go up over time is for them to become scarcer, and while that does happen sometimes, it's basically a bet against the future economy on the whole to think they'll do so. So when Paul Ehrlich bets on commodity prices rising, he's being perfectly consistent(and when he loses, he shows that fearmongering on scarcity isn't exactly a slam-dunk). When someone who has money in the usual spread of financial assets bets on it, at best he's hedging his bets, and in most practical cases it's better to do that by dropping your risk allocation overall instead of gambling on offsetting assets like that.

The things in life that I appreciate
Are any stocks and bonds that won't depreciate

Those don't exist. Conservative investing is one thing, but there are no guarantees in life(even contractual guarantees, when they exist, are subject to the risk of the other person going broke and being unable to follow through). I understand the desire, but a sensible investor acknowledges the possibility of depreciation.

My stocks are healthy and my bankroll's high
Rock and roll and real estate will never die!

I could say some snarky comments about indie being the death of rock and roll, or about real estate asset bubbles, but in principle I do agree.

(chorus x2)
I'm a guitar hero with mortgage equity.
I'm a guitar hero with mortgage equity!!!

Overall, the singer's financial plan seems generally sensible - good diversification, solid understanding of the market, and good involvement in his affairs. He has a bias towards bragging, and minimizing the possible downsides of his investment choices, which could lead him to an emotional overreaction when the next market crash happens - he'll need to make sure he doesn't do anything dumb, and his broker may need to talk him down when it happens. But he's sure doing better than his bandmates were, even before the vomit-choking. And hey, a seven-figure income can cover a multitude of sins.

(Also, in case it's not obvious, this is an opinion piece intended for general information, and in no way represents proper financial advice for any individual's situation, the opinion of my employer, or anything else besides me thinking it'd be kind of funny and perhaps a bit informative to take a parody song seriously. If you need professional financial advice, hire a competent local professional financial advisor, not a self-proclaimed Internet wit.)

So Dense It Floats

I grew up in smaller towns. Not small in the grand scheme of things, but the town I spent most of my childhood in was about 20,000, and the city I went to university in was about 100,000. These are the sorts of places you drive a car to go somewhere, because traffic isn't a big deal 99% of the time(and because you may need to go to the next town over for something), and because they're not big enough to have good transit options, but too big to want to just walk.

Two years ago, I moved to Toronto. I'd always lived close enough to the city that I knew my way around it, but this was my first time living there. And it was surprisingly disorienting. Obviously the traffic sucks, and obviously there's a lot more people, but I expected that going in, and that wasn't what did it.

It took me a couple months to figure out why I felt so uneasy about moving around - the problem wasn't the density. The problem was the lack of density. It sounds bizarre to say that the biggest city in the country, and on paper probably the densest, lacked for density. But it does, and the reason why it does is interesting. See, I don't care how many people are around me. I don't care how big the suburbs are, or how many schools are around, or what have you. I care about my travel times. When I was living with my parents, 100km out of the city, getting to downtown Toronto took me about an hour. Now that I live in Toronto, getting to downtown Toronto takes me...well, almost an hour. It's a more comfortable trip in some ways, because I get to read on the subway, but it's not really much closer than it was before.

It used to be that just about everything I cared about was within 10-15 minutes of me, and now 10 minutes gets me almost nowhere. There's more restaurants in that circle, but I don't eat out much. There's more people, but I don't know them. I used to be able to cross town in the space of time it takes me to get to the subway. So as a result, the actual feel of it is almost a wasteland compared to what I was used to. It's a wasteland full of people and interesting things and nice shops, but it's like the ghost of civilization for my purposes - it looks the same, but it doesn't actually have any effect on me.

I don't live downtown, and it might change some things if I did, but I don't think so. Downtown means that a huge selection is close to you, but it cuts you off from everything more than a short distance away. I know people who refer to Bloor (which is about a 20 minute walk north of downtown) as "the wall", in the Game of Thrones sense of the term. So while the hustle and bustle is a warm cozy embrace, 90% of the city might as well not exist. I like that 90% - there's lots of interesting things there. But for a downtowner, getting to them is an ordeal. I have friends who are more likely to visit Montreal than Martin Grove Road, and I can't even really blame them. With the fact that both cities have airports fairly close to downtown, it may even be faster.

The funny thing is, I do like the city. One of the ways that having a lot of people around helps is that you can build strong subcultures more easily. My board gaming group gets like 50 people out every week - that'd never have happened back home. The bustling background does have bits and pieces that pop into my view sometimes, and I'm glad of them. Heck, even if I am going downtown, the fact that I don't need to park there is a relief. But as much as I like the city in a lot of ways, I just wish it was as dense as a small town.

(Urban planners of my acquaintance, I'm sorry for making your heads explode)

Art Is For Artists

It's not exactly an outlandish statement to claim that modern art is very, very different from what art used to be. If you look for masterpieces of 21st century paintings, you get images like this:

Classical paintings of ships, on the other hand, tend to look a lot more like this:

The modern one is stylized, fluffy, and vague. The classical one is precise, clean, and almost photographic. The classical artist was clearly far more technically skilled at drawing depictions, and just as clearly felt that he ought to. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, most people would also count it as a more beautiful image - more striking, more powerful, better-painted, and overall more interesting.

Most people prefer the old styles. You don't have to look far to see stones thrown at modern art, to see people who want paintings to look like something, to be real instead of vague and pretty instead of "inspired". And when you see excesses like this, it's hard not to agree. Paintings that could be made in ten minutes by a child selling for $100 million? That's unfathomable to most people. At least if you spend $100 million on a Rembrandt, you get something that might be worth looking at occasionally.

So what happened? I mean, a few artists getting experimental is no surprise, but how did the inmates take over the asylum? Why did beauty get sacrificed for weirdness?

I'm not the first to posit this theory, but I think the trigger was technology, primarily the photograph. In days of yore, rich people wanted pictures of themselves and their ancestors to show off, and they hired painters to do them. Now, people who want pictures of themselves get pictures of themselves. Outside art classes, just about the only people who get proper portraits these days are national leaders. That undercut the market dramatically, and lead to a real drop in incomes for any would-be portrait painters. You can't make a living on that these days.

But think about this from the painter's point of view. You go into it to create beauty, and you had to work drawing Uncle Moneybags again and again. Sure, it makes you good at drawing the human form. but it had to be incredibly boring. For some non-artist who sees one painting a month, boredom's not an issue, but if you think in watercolours and acrylics, it's bound to grate after a while. And then the shackles were off - sure, you were starving, but practical sorts probably didn't become artists in the first place. The only ones still paying for your services were the ones who truly wanted what you did, wanted something that a painter could provide but a photographer couldn't.

If you're full to bursting on the same thing for decades, novelty is a powerful drug. Experiment, free yourself, see what can be done. Maybe there's whole new approaches nobody has tried, maybe you can make a different form of beauty that nobody has ever seen before. I mean really, what do you have to lose? You're not making a living on this stuff either way.

Even in fields where you can make a living - music, film, architecture, etc. - you see a lot of this trend. As soon as someone spends too much time on a creative endeavour, the same old will not satisfy them. Cliche gets oppressive. You know what the artist was thinking when he draws the Virgin Mary, and you know what the director is about do do before you watch the episode where he does it.

This means that the art community isn't producing things we dislike just to be weird, it's producing things we dislike because we're not the target market. It's like complaining that country music is annoying when you've never so much as sat in a pickup truck. Yeah, it annoys you, but why should they care?

The creative endeavours that rely on the mass market's money to keep going provide the masses with what we want. Tom Clancy and Chad Kroeger and Steven Spielberg make millions by appealing to people who like books and music and movies but who don't live them every waking moment. Even in painting, if you get away from the people who call themselves "artists" and start looking at the people who call themselves "graphical designers", you can find some things that are quite appealing to normal folks. (I'll throw in a gratuitous plug to my personal favourite, Digital Blasphemy, an artist who specializes in computer wallpapers). I will happily pay money for things I enjoy, and have done so - I'm a lifetime member of DB, and happily so, and of course creators of movies and music and games make a pretty penny off me as well.

As with a lot of the instinctive reactions I had to things as a teenager, I realize now that I was being kind of a jerk. If you enjoy a ghost in a fuzzy orange canoe, who am I to stop you? A lot of my hobbies are pretty crazy to people outside the appropriate fandom(the time I had to explain what Magic cards were to a US customs guard springs to mind here). I don't enjoy it myself, but it's not there for me to enjoy. Those who do should have fun. If you're going to be weird and talk exclusively to enthusiasts, at least do it with passion and vigor.

Friday Night Video - Lament

The guy I stole the Friday Night Video concept used it entirely to discuss music videos, and to date I've generally done the same thing. But it can be a bit of a fuzzy line, and there's some interesting things just on the other side of it. For example, this video I originally came across because of the content, not the music. But the music is great, even if the band is a total no-namer act, and I added this song to my playlist pretty much instantly. Weirdly, the only audio source I could find was this video itself, meaning my copy of the track is full of rubber bands and laughter, but that just gives it character.