The Fishbowl

Misc.

1.

I saw a pointer on IRC to this article on ‘Cyber-Bullying’, then I saw it on Slashdot. Reading the article, though, I don’t really see anything new. It’s not like now, in the Internet age, children have suddenly discovered how to hurt each other or spread gossip. Exactly the things the article goes to great lengths to describe happened when I went to school, and when my parents went to school. Paul Graham has a very readable article about the way schools work that rings true in a lot of areas.

I’m sure kids deal with the always-on problem of IMs just like everyone else does: invisibility, or separate screen-names for different strata of friends.

Bullying has always been, and remains a problem. I just object to the way lazy journalists can get cheap sensationalism out of an ancient subject (pornography, bullying, copying music) by putting the word “Cyber” on the front.

2.

I watched the American Music Awards on TV last night, because I was being kept up waiting for Panther to reinstall, and I figured I may as well take the opportunity to throw stuff at the TV, and find out what size Britney’s breasts are this week. Like Australian Idol, the show was made more bearable by muting most of the songs.

Also like Australian Idol, you can’t convince me that either half of the American Idol product they had performing could sing. They were far enough out of tune to set my teeth painfully on edge, and they didn’t just kill the song they were attempting to perform, they sucked the life out of it, leaving a dusty, rotted corpse of a song on the stage behind them. (And as further proof that People Are Stupid, one of them still won the best performance of the night poll)

3.

The nominations for Favourite Alternative Artist were… Coldplay, Metallica and Linkin Park. Which I suppose goes to show how meaningless the ‘Alternative’ label has become. Coldplay might just qualify, at least having the distinction of being English at an American awards show, but the other two corporate rock whores? Metallica threw away all pretentions to being outside the mainstream with the Black Album, and that was twelve years ago.

4.

Metallica also played live at the end of the show. What a disaster. The “St Anger” single sounds like Lars and the boys sat around saying “Here’s a bunch of little bits of songs like we used to do in the 80’s. Does anyone remember how to piece them together?” Nobody could remember, so the song lurched from riff to disconnected riff without any cohesion or purpose.

5.

The LOAF joke is pretty much ground to dust by now.

<brittabot> hehe

6.

A while back, I thought HackNot looked promising as a source of nerdblog entertainment, but it seems to have turned into a one-trick pony. Sure, skewering XP is entertaining now and then, but variety is the spice of life.