At the apex of Nicholas Sparks’ unique brand of Nicholas Sparks-ness, The Notebook, a man proves his love for a woman by building a house for her. The house is a metaphor for the lives shared within it, an external marker of an internal sensation. It also Says Things about the role of masculinity in romance by placing value on an act that is not only representative of  total romantic devotion, but also of making a thing with your hands.  Romance, for Nicholas Sparks and the story-puppets who dance to his whims, is the province of artisans.

Unfortunately, iterating on the same theme over and over again produces diminishing returns. That is why the romantic handymanning that occurs in The Lucky One is far less grandiose. In The Lucky One, Zac Efron’s character [MARINE] fixes a boat as an outward sign of love for Taylor Schilling’s hard-working, sassy and often pantsless character [GIRL]. It’s hardly building a house. Indeed, all [MARINE] really does is get the engine going, both figuratively and literally.

As [GIRL], Schilling is a divorced mother running a dog kennel in a small Louisiana town with the help of her wise and brassy grandmother (Blythe Danner, swinging for the Georgia Rule fences in what is easily the most charming and affable performance in the film). [GIRL]‘s young son is harassed because he is scrawny, bespectacled and plays the violin. [GIRL]‘s ex-husband is local law enforcement, and his father is the town judge, so he can swagger around with impunity and threaten to have her child taken away from her at the slightest provocation.  She is emotionally adrift because her brother, a Marine, has died in action.

Meanwhile, [MARINE] finds a mysterious photograph in the aftermath of a raid on an Afghani housing complex. A mortar attack hits the spot where he was resting before seeing the picture, and he attributes some divine providence to the photo and its subject, which is borne out again when he is the sole survivor of an IED attack. At home in Colorado, [MARINE] suffers from PTSD and struggles to fit in with his sister’s family, who do not understand the horrors of war and love things like violent video games and disrespecting Men Who Serve. [MARINE] eventually learns where his lifesaving photograph came from and sets off to thank the woman in the photo. By walking from Colorado to Louisana with his dog. In the course of a single montage. Once there, he finds himself tongue-tied and ends up with a job at the kennel and, predictably, wins [GIRL]‘s heart while invoking the ire of her broadly villainous ex-husband. None of the cast shines as brightly as Danner. Efron, who is usually full of boyish ebullience and charisma, seems to vacillate between distant and vacant. Schilling is shrewish until she isn’t. Jay R. Ferguson’s bad cop Keith is successful inasmuch as I found myself aggressively wanting to punch him every time he was on the screen (a fantasy that is never realized by proxy – Keith experiences a nearly-literally last minute face turn before being killed tragically).

Whether conscious or unconscious, there is a sharp dichotomy in The Lucky One between Men Who Serve and Men Who Don’t.  The Men Who Don’t are swaggering bullies – the brother-in-law that casts disdainful looks at [MARINE], the rude, lazy nephews who don’t understand him, the kids who bully [GIRL]‘s son at school and, most importantly to the text of the film, [GIRL]‘s ex-husband and his corpulent crooked judge father. These men stayed home to torment women instead of going bravely off to war.

By contrast, [MARINE] and [GIRL]‘s brother are both sensitive-yet-rugged heroes with diverse skills and interests. [MARINE] studied Philosophy before enlisting. He’s an expert piano player. The Other Marine was close to his family. He loved magic tricks. It’s unstated but heavily implied that he was also an expert piano player. [GIRL]‘s son is made an ‘honorary Marine’ in the course of the film, giving the audience permission to feel positively about his character.

The most interesting thing I discovered during my viewing of The Lucky One is that, structurally, it’s a Western. Specifically, it’s Shane.  The film tells the story of a mysterious, troubled drifter who comes to a small town, finds some comfort for his world-weary soul and a new family, and helps them to find their hidden strengths and deal with the corrupt establishment that oppresses them. Unfortunately, it manages to tell this story while excising all the action, tension and drama that makes a story like Shane exciting.

However, where Shane must drift on, [MARINE] stays forever, a breathing and ambulatory ghost of his lover’s dead brother. That’s another way in which The Lucky One is worse. The parallels between the two Marine characters are presented in such a direct fashion that they are impossible to ignore, even as Efron and Schilling give in to their PG-13 physicality. [MARINE] is clearly a ghost, an avatar, of the loved one Schilling’s character has lost. He fills the same role for the family. Except that [GIRL] has fierce, urgent sex with him. The dissonance is startling and creepy. Instead of yet another story of true love, the latest Nicholas Sparks tale to make its way to film is only the story of a grieving obsessive using a lost soul who is sadly happy to be used.

Not too long ago, my girlfriend bought a new mattress. The stockboy at the mattress store brought the mattress out to the curb and that’s when he noticed that I was wearing a Fantastic Four t-shirt. And then, instead of doing his job, this happened:

“Fantastic Four!” he said.

I looked perplexed, so he pointed at my chest (or rather, at the Fantastic Four t-shirt covering it) and said it again: “Fantastic Four!”

I am, at this point, trying to tie a competent knot with piece of nylon rope to the roof rack on a Subaru, while he stands there pointing at me. My knot tying skills have atrophied since my Scouting days; you’d be surprised at how rarely you need to tie a sheep shank on a daily basis.  I say, “Yeah,” because it seems like the least painful thing to say in the moment.

I’ve miscalculated, because he takes that as an opening to say, “Any comic book fan is a friend of mine!” So now we’re friends. I’m still working on knots and he’s still just standing there, paralyzed by how cool it is that I’m here for him right now. He tells me, dude, did you hear that a copy of Fantastic Four #1 sold for, like, a million dollars, wow, that’s amazing, and you know, I used to have X-Men #1, Avengers #1, all of the number ones, basically, it’s so crazy. And then he wanted to show me his tattoo.

His own statement to the contrary, I am not this guy’s friend. That’s not to say that he’s not a great guy, or that I don’t want to see his decidedly lackluster tattoo of the Nemesis from the Resident Evil video games. I snarked this in a comment on Tumblr a few days ago, and I guess I really do mean every word of it:

There are moments when I allow myself to think of comics fandom as a community; then I realize that I don’t want to commune with most of these people.

I mean, Age of the Geek, baby, right?  It’s okay to come up out of the basements and talk openly about which Doctor was secretly a Cylon during our favorite seasons of Deep Space 9, right? I’m all for being open about liking what you like, but this assumption I encounter that We Are All the Same Because We Share One Thing in Common.

And this is comics – it’s a medium, not a thing. We make this mistake, culturally, where we equivocate all comics. Mattress Dude might have a full run of Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose (unironically) or share any number of opinions about the medium that I don’t share. I’m not saying he’s wrong to like what he likes, but I am saying that maybe it’s a stretch to assume that we’re comics bros 4 lyfe because I have a t-shirt with Ben Grimm on it.

Look at the fighting game community. Those guys are not my bros. But I own some fighting games. I enjoy them. That doesn’t give me common ground with the pack of malsocialized misogynists that represent the loudest voice in that ‘community’.

Let’s stop deciding who is worth our time based solely on the things they like. And get back to lifting mattresses.

This morning, a flurry of people sent me a link to a story about a four-year-old Saudi boy who shot his father in the head because he refused to buy a PlayStation 3 for his son. Every iteration of this story focuses on the ‘PlayStation’ part of the story and not the part where a father left a loaded firearm unattended in the presence of his four year old son while he was undressing. The PlayStation appears to be a bit of color added to the story, but the headline and lede alone would make you think otherwise.

The AFP reports, “An angry four-year-old Saudi boy shot and killed his father for refusing to buy him a PlayStation, Saudi media reported on Monday,” in an article headlined ‘Saudi boy, 4, ‘kills father over PlayStation.” Games are so bad for you that even wanting one will turn your child into a murderer.

Here’s a question for you: is it worth mentioning in this story that the Saudi government has a long history of being anti-media in general but specifically anti-gaming? So much so, in fact that an incredibly active black market and piracy subculture has grown out around its strict censorship of import games from the US and Asia? Does that sort of bias tinge the official reportage on this story, which has been dutifully picked up and regurgitated elsewhere as more ‘game are bad’ grist for the mill? And while we’re at it, why is this a drum that people still continue to beat when even the Internet trash heap that is the Forbes blog is willing to show you that the argument is statistically invalid?

Juxtapose this with the coverage of the Anders Breivik trial. John Walker at Rock Paper Shotgun has been writing about how the press has framed the Norwegian spree killer’s statements about gaming versus other topics. Like the AFP story above, anti-gaming sentiment is reported as fact, even when several other pieces of the accused killer’s testimony are written off as the ravings of a madman, with The Times going as far as reporting, “Breivik played video games for a year to train for deadly attacks” in direct contradiction with his journals, which cite his time playing World of Warcraft as a respite from the arduous work of planning his rampage.

What prompts sensationalist coverage like this? Is it the lazy reporting promoted by an online news industry that prizes hits and comments and shares and reblogs too highly? Is it the sort of ‘fucking gamers‘ reaction Imran Khan writes about in the context of the Mass Effect backlash?

If this Saudi father would have come home with a PS3 for his four year old son, would the shooting have been attributed to the violent influence of having received the console? If there was no gaming connection, how newsworthy would this shooting have been?

I don’t know. Tell me in the comments, maybe?

Note: This post discusses something happened two weeks ago. Shame on me.

Event comics are traditionally big, bombastic, dumbed-down affairs full of testosterone, kick/punching and illusory raised stakes. They are an annual ‘sweeps week’ for each publisher’s stable of fantasist soap operas. At their inception, events like Secret Wars or Crisis on Infinite Earths were fun, manic and at least temporarily game-changing. But everything fresh and exciting eventually either dies off or becomes old and reliable and, in the case of the event comic, it has become the latter. Because they are always expected to be major sales drivers that support a tsunami of tie-in material, the event comics of today lack any sort of verve and imagination. Avengers Vs. X-Men #1, which debuted last week after what feels like twenty years of build-up in house ads and the fan press, is exactly that sort of limp, lifeless thing, spending thirty pages belaboring a setup that everyone and their aunt Tilly was already aware of, while a committee of the best writers working for Marvel Comics scribe ham-fisted dialogue so ham-fisted that normal comic book dialogue seems nuanced. Like The Protector, an alien technology specialist, explaining to his teammate Iron Man, “I am an alien technology specialist,” or Captain America, the leader of the Avengers, being told by Iron Man, “Captain America, you lead the Avengers.”

Instead of big-screen, stakes-raising, senses-shattering stories, event comics are now tech demos carefully designed to cross-market apps and downloads. At least, that’s what it seems like after the integration of augmented reality into Avengers Vs. X-Men. Download the Marvel AR app and “Imagine sitting in your living room and seeing Iron Man leap from the pages or Wolverine extend his claws with in-your-face realism” according to a shockingly crass advertorial from Marvel’s fellow Disney brand, ABC News.

It’s to Marvel’s credit that they are trying something new that 1) attempts to integrate the print and digital experiences, 2) creates a value-add for print material (scanning the AR prompts would work just fine on a digital screen, but scanning a computer screen with your phone is literally the lamest thing in the world and nobody should ever do it) and 3) is substantially more forward-thinking than “let’s give everyone a mandarin collar and some extraneous seams on their costumes.”

Unfortunately, the implementation leaves something to be desired. On one hand, this is their first try, so some leeway should be expected. On the other, for a new launch in conjunction with a major-selling title, you should maybe bring the A-game.

And look, I know I’m coming off like a bitchy old man here, and I’m sorry. I’m not anti-digital; far from it. Digital is how I earn my living.  And I know, know, that the key to a great integrative experience, like what Marvel is aiming to produce here, comes down to commitment, quality, low barriers to entry and utility. A digital value-add like augmented reality has got to, at the risk of being redundant, add something that enriches your interaction with it. Otherwise, you’re just placing one experience on top of the other instead of creating real interactivity.

In addition to those four factors, there’s also a implementation to take into account: does the interaction create more immersion in the world of the text or does it make you more aware that what you’re reading is, in fact, artificial? To some degree, we’re always experiencing a little of the latter in a pre-Project Glass world, so planning content appropriately can be just as important as making sure that content is high quality and simple to access.

And mostly, Marvel does okay. I’d like them to be better, but despite my initial skepticism there are some truly good AR interactions going on in Avengers vs. X-Men #1.

Beyond the cover interaction, with its sturm und drang, motion-comic-esque pan and scan techniques and auto-play book trailer, there are two major types of interactions that happen in the issue:

1) Breaking the Fourth Wall – Whether this is Axel Alonso walking out onto the page to welcome you to the issue, Brian Michael Bendis chatting up how much he loves Nova the Human Rocket, or process animations that show a page’s transitions from pencils to final art, these are interactions that take you out of the action by reminding you that you’re just reading a comic book. This sort of content might appear in the back of a ‘Director’s Cut’ edition of a Marvel Comic (do they still do those?) or as web-based bonus content. They are not immersive, but many of these interactions do have their place. The only one I found myself feeling completely negative about was the introduction to Nova, which doesn’t serve much of a purpose.

2) The Ultimate Yellow Box - That’s Dan Slott’s take on AR from the Spider-Man panel at C2E2 last weekend – an editor’s box where you can share world-building information. When you scan the Jean Grey School sign in AvX #1, for instance, you get a comprehensive roster of the teachers and students in Wolverine and the X-Men, which is set at the school. There aren’t a lot of these interactions yet, but they are the ones that make the AR app feel useful. That introduction to Nova that I didn’t like above? Show me some turnarounds of the design while a voiceover explains the Nova Corps to me. Tell me Nova last appeared was central in stories like Annihilation or The Thanos Imperative and that a Nova named Richard Rider was briefly one of the Secret Avengers.

Disregarding the quality of the story in Avengers vs. X-Men #1, the AR experience was intriguing and mostly satisfying. I do think that Marvel has a lot of room to do better with its implementation, though, and hope that they try and experiment with using the format to pull readers into their books.

This is what happens when you try to watch the first episode of Ultimate Spider-Man legally on the Internet.

Incidentally, I found this page basically by accident after seeing a Marvel employee tweet it. Searching for ‘watch ultimate spider-man* episode 1′ or similar will give you a bunch of illegal options and not this one.

It’s not enough to give people the option. You also have to make it simple and make it visible. And make sure it works.

*Always the hyphen. even in Google.

Warning: spoilers for Mass Effect 3 abound.

The International Society of Supervillains Improved the Ending of Mass Effect 3 Considerably.

“There are many different endings. We wouldn’t do it any other way. How could you go through all three campaigns playing as your Shepard and then be forced into a bespoke ending that everyone gets? ”

-Michael Gamble, Producer, Mass Effect 3

“…it’s not like a classic game ending where everything is linear and you make a choice between a few things….”

-Casey Hudson, Executive Producer, Mass Effect 3

On Amazon.com right now, Mass Effect 3 – the final installment in BioWare’s trilogy of transhumanist space opera role-playing games – has an average review score of two stars, based on roughly 700 reviews. How is that possible, you might ask, when its predecessors in the series are – at bare minimum – lauded as well-constructed games that are beloved by a relatively large audience? How is it possible that BioWare, a developer so consistent that they’ve managed to earn a level of brand loyalty that is almost unheard of outside of a rare example like Nintendo?

It could be that the ending, which is not just the ending to one video game, but to a multi-game storyline that can easily eclipse 100 hours of play time (and that’s without considering the possibility of multiple playthroughs). This ending, right here (obviously, spoiler alerts on, folks):

Fans’ reactions are about what you’d expect: hyperactive howling that the for-profit company that makes their video game has betrayed them, loyalists clamoring to defend the endgame in the hope that defending it enough will fill up the void, and a small, strident corps of meta-apologists who have mobilized in an attempt over-analyze and theorize a sow’s ear into the silkiest of purses.

This is how fandom goes. I’ve like comic books and Star Wars since I could comprehend them both, so I know this rodeo, but Mass Effect is perhaps unique in this medium in that its particular brand of magic is how actively the games engage their players’ moralities. This is BioWare’s bailiwick (“Zaalbar, kill Mission”), but it’s a technique that became its most refined in the Mass Effect universe. There’s a price to pay for that level of intimacy with the player, though.

When I ragequit Final Fantasy XIII (‘just as the game was starting to get good’ after 30 hours of playtime spent walking in a straight line and listening to a dozen singularly unlikeable characters utter petulant, jargon-filled dialogue that was too-rarely interrupted by an interesting combat engine), I didn’t complain to the FTC that Square-Enix had lied to me.  When Assassin’s Creed III was announced a few weeks back and confirmed to be set during the American Revolution, there was a susurrus of discontent over the absence of the familiar towering architecture of Italy and the Middle East; however, devoted fans didn’t raise $75,000 for charity in protest of the change.

In creating an unprecedented level of investment in its story, the Mass Effect team also created an unprecedented sense of ownership in that story among its fanbase. The negative reaction that so many players have had toward the game’s ending are as much about a perceived disconnect between the “bespoke ending” that caps the final confrontation in Mass Effect 3 and the narrative that each player has constructed, as played out in friendships, romances, the lines they chose to speak and the countless small choices they made that rippled through three separate games over five years.

The controversy also came at a ‘perfect storm’ moment informed by the ongoing Occupy protests and the new creative patronage economy that is being birthed by services like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo. We are now more empowered to demand redress for our slights than ever, for good or ill, and by virtue of Mass Effect 3‘s platinum-selling success, this is the first place we can observe that phenomenon writ large in fandom.

Game industry analyst Michael Pachter weighed in on the topic, predicting, “There will be no impact on Electronic Arts as a company unless they cave to the vocal minority and create an alternate ending. Then, consumers will learn that they are wimps, and will complain about ‘Madden NFL’ because their quarterback doesn’t throw the ball far enough.”

It doesn’t appear that BioWare has taken Pachter’s advice, though. Co-founder Ray Muzyka announced earlier today that the team is “hard at work on a number of game content initiatives that will help answer the questions, providing more clarity to those seeking further closure to their journey.” While that sounds like a victory, it also sounds like a very carefully public relations-authored turn of phrase (possibly filtered through Legal for good measure). It’s easy to assume that this means “they are going to re-do the ending,” it could just as easily be something completely different and, in fact, I think it will be. Indeed, the official Mass Effect Twitter account confirmed today that “we will release additional content to address questions, not necessarily alter anything.”

It’s not a victory for either side, but it promises to throttle the developing PR crisis or at least pank down some of the ugly hyperbole and personal attacks that angry fans have been lobbing at BioWare’s staff.

The relationship between BioWare and the fans right now is, honestly, a bit like a relationship from Mass Effect lore – specifically the salarians and the krogan or the quarians and the geth. This means nothing to you if you haven’t played through the games, and I apologize. I basically mean ‘adversarial’, though there’s a bit more nuance to it than that.

And this is actually a segue into my own thoughts about the game’s ending, albeit a clumsy one.

One of the themes that has been prevalent throughout the series has been control vs. free will.  There’s this cycle where a civilization attempts to uplift another (or, in the case of the rachni, encounters something it doesn’t understand) and then backpedals into control and oppression when the latter becomes sufficiently advanced to be a threat. The salarians did it to the krogan. The entire galaxy did it to the rachni. The quarians did it to the geth. The protheans did it to basically everyone in the galaxy during their ascendancy and the Reapers, the gigantic machine-foes of the series, keep on doing it over and over again (and quite literally play on the control theme with their explicit ability to control minds and warp their captives into monsters.

Beyond even those external, violent conflicts, the theme of control vs. freedom informs everything – the Alliance’s political goals with the Citadel Council, Project: Lazarus, even the Normandy itself is a symbol of freedom (and that symbolism is made explicit in the third game). The sheer number of squad members that explicitly have serious issues with their parents and/or upbringings (Tali, Ashley, Liara, Jack, Miranda, Grunt, Wrex) is telling in this regard as well.

The theme is, in fact, built into the very mechanics of the games themselves – the player is free to affect numerous outcomes big and small by selecting different dialogue and triggering interrupt actions during conversations.

The other theme of the franchise has been that consequences come with freedom to choose. Throughout the series, Shepard is haunted by the squad member he chooses to sacrifice on Virmire. Compared to the ‘suicide mission’ at the end of Mass Effect 2, where it’s possible to achieve victory without losing a single life, the Virmire mission in Mass Effect explicitly forces the player to let a character die and makes you choose which one it will be (it actually does this twice during this mission – with Wrex at the outset and then with the explicit choice between Kaidan and Ashley later).

The major plot beats in Mass Effect 3 all play on these themes of control, free will and sacrifice and the toll it takes. However, it seems to abandon many of those themes in its final minutes, trading them instead for an insistence that the real conflict all along has been synthetic life versus organic life. There are possibly even playthroughs where this is a valid interpretation due to the player’s attitudes and choices involving characters like Legion and EDI and the geth.  But any close examination of the franchise reveals that its themes go much deeper than a simple man/machine dichotomy.

Based on a flawed premise that the game, which will normally let me do all manner of things, will suddenly not let me refute or refuse, the player is given one final choice between either two or three options that are all equally unpalatable: commit genocide, do the same thing you just called the villain crazy for suggesting or a third option which is apparently ‘everybody becomes a cyborg’. You’ve already had a stupid boss fight and then survived a meat grinder of a combat mission to get to this point. The final conflict here is internal, and that’s a decision that I respect immensely.

The good thing about this ending is how completely immersive it is. I spend twenty minutes thinking about which option to choose. In a game about choice and consequence, the choices and consequences that my character had already experienced were at the top of my mind as I deliberated. In that regard, the ending is actually a huge success. Unfortunately, I feel so sideswiped by the events that frame my final action in the game that I also feel like I’m unable to make the choice; my hesitation comes in part from my rejection of its premises. I’m simultaneously being given agency to affect an entire galaxy and being placed on a rail toward something I don’t want to do. The sensation is vertigo-inducing.

More surreality during the final sequence comes from The Child explicitly explaining to Shepard what the consequences of his actions would be. This is perhaps the only time where the player does not potentially walk into a choice blind to its outcomes. For once the game is telling, not showing, the player and it not only feels out of place – it also plays havoc with the player’s decision. Or at least it did with mine.

This alien feeling is what gamers are reacting to when they reject the ending – it is so tonally different from the core game in so many different aesthetic and thematic ways that it does not feel ‘real’, and then followed as it is by an overly simplistic final movie and a bit of a platitude about how the stars are full of imagination or something and hey that’s Buzz Aldrin (following on the heels of his appearance in Transformers: Dark of the Moon).

There’s an argument that, if you’re a proponent of games as art, you should just take the experience you’re given without complaint. And it’s also true that over-entitled gamers are not necessarily ever worth pandering to. But conversely, if you’re an artist, why put your name on something so thoroughly mediocre? Why defend bad art?

Note: A copy of The Man From Primrose Lane was provided for review.

This is one of those reviews that sounds like it’s sure to be a bad one at the start; it’s not. This is a book that’s fresh and weird and compelling. Keep that in mind.

Less than fifty pages into The Man From Primrose Lane, I found myself rolling my eyes at all the ‘meta’ going on in the text. The author mirrors his own protagonist in many ways – they wrote ostensibly the same book (one word differentiates the titles) and, based on my inferences from the dedication, each have a son named Tanner. They are both true crime writers from central Ohio. The motivating mystery in The Man From Primrose Lane is an awful lot like a real mysterious death from 2008.

At first, the confluences of the author’s life and the main character’s life seemed to weigh on my ability to enjoy the narrative, and it seemed at that early point, like the sort of metafiction that grates against my reading sensibilities. It seemed that James Renner was writing a novel about how James Renner (in his guise as David Neff) is more competent than all the cops and more appealing to every single attractive woman in the book than all the other men.  Sure, the narrative was well-paced and the novel’s hook (the mysterious identity of the titular Man from Primrose Lane – a mysterious murdered recluse who left behind a fortune but had no family, no heirs and no real identity) was intriguing, but I couldn’t get past my nagging sense that MFPL was a vanity novel. I found a few jarring bits of narration, too, and instead of wondering who the narrator was, I convinced myself that they were editorial inconsistencies.

Not even halfway through The Man From Primrose Lane, I was prepared to write it off as an ambitious but flawed first novel. The sort of novel that a fantasy author once told me that he’d written but never pitched  “in order to get it out of my system.”

It’s important that I felt this way at this point. I feel like I should even say that I was supposed to feel this way.

The Man From Primrose Lane is an arresting magic trick of a debut novel and, like any good magic trick, half of the work is mentally preparing the audience to get sideswiped, to look at the left hand while the author punches with the right. This intentional blurring of the line between fantasy and reality completely re-frames the revelations in the final half of the novel (there are plenty, in quick succession and they are all jaw-droppers). It is, as is fitting for a novel about obsession, nearly impossible to put down at the point when it finally reveals itself fully to the reader. I’ve read it twice now, and it continues to be lean, taut and captivating.

You can buy The Man From Primrose Lane here and/or visit the author on the web at jamesrenner.com.

Bruce Springsteen’s new album Wrecking Ball is available legally today but people have, of course, been listening to it for weeks. I’ve refrained. Support the artists, blah blah blah.

So, of course, I went to go and buy the album today.

This is, of course, not the ‘special edition’ of the album which features two additional tracks for a three dollar upcharge. Both the digital and the physical versions of this edition are priced at $12.99.

Look:

According to the chart, the more convenient, more cost-effective option costs either the same as or more than the other available formats (let’s not count vinyl, as it’s a small niche for serious collectors and so bound to carry upcharges that people will gladly pay). Essentially, you’re being assessed a download tax. That’s stupid bullshit – it’s difficult to perceive it any other way.

This is why piracy happens.

“Obviously there’s no censorship in the bill and no one can indicate any censorship whatsoever. It’s not censorship to want to stop illegal activity. That’s all we do. We’re trying to impede illegal activity by foreign websites.”

-Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas) to the Wall Street Journal

As I read legislators’ responses to the hue and cry that the tech-savvy public have raised against the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sister act, the Protect IP Act, a common thread that I see is an assurance that the intent of the law is not to censor speech but instead stop crime.

I take these lawmakers at their collective word. I don’t believe that Lamar Smith wants to erode our speech rights, not really. But I do think that the strict adherence to this particular talking point is willfully ignorant to the damaging unintended consequences of these proposed laws. It is also willfully ignorant to the legacy of any piece of legislation: the intent of the author is not the only intent that should be taken into account, and hand-waving away loopholes or potentials for abuse with ‘well, I don’t want to do that’ statements only papers over the problem. It’s safe to assume that at some future date, someone will want to abuse this power. I’d think that part of the responsibility of drafting a living document is future-proofing it against such behavior. But, as has been pointed out to me many times, I’m hopelessly naive.

The protest against SOPA and PIPA does not stop with the end of today’s mass Internet blackout. The blackout is where it should start. Our representatives in government don’t represent us anymore – they represent lobbies and special interest groups – and the second we stop holding them accountable for the laws they pass is the second that the lobbies and special interest groups will make sure that their agendas are serviced in the blind spots created by our lack of attention.

Natasha rightly provides some equal time for Mr. Arthur Brisbane in the comments to last week’s reductive outburst on the New York Times’ ‘Truth Vigilante’ flap. We had pretty candid debate about the ‘Truth Vigilantism’ issue during Grey’s Anatomy commercial breaks last week and, as a journalist instead of just a guy who is a bit of a dick, her opinion is the more reasoned, coherent, correct one.

Of course Arthur Brisbane is not asking ‘should we report factual inaccuracies’ – but rather wondering aloud where the line is between calling out a bad fact attributed to a newsmaker (“Despite these allegations, candidate Gingrich has never been charged with a sexual crime involving otters.”) and attempting some sort of omnipresience (“We all know Ron Paul intends his stance on foreign policy as the first step toward a one-world government controlled by reptilian aliens living on a sub-orbital bio-satellite that travels through time”). And there is a worthy discussion to be had on that topic.