Waffle

Continental European Deep Purple fans: Do not buy the Tour Edition of Rapture of the Deep by Deep Purple until the harmfulness of its "copy protection" is established.

Even though I already own a copy on vinyl, I'd been eagerly awaiting the Tour Edition of Deep Purple's Rapture of the Deep, because there's a whole CD full of bonus material including several live tracks. (BTW, I've warmed a lot to the record since my initial review.) Today, I finally saw it in the shops, but as I was waiting in line at the checkout, I noticed a "Copy Protected - Not Playable On PC" on the back, with a logo that I hadn't seen before, so I put it back.

80% of all my music listening is done on either the iBook or the home PC, which means that the "Copy Protection" (assuming it works at all) reduces the value of that bonus CD from € 19.90 (the price at which I was willing to buy it before noticing the logo) to € 4. And that assumes that the "Copy Protection" doesn't affect playback on my DVD player or Diskman (which "Copy Protection" on CDs invariably does in my experience), and that it isn't some sort of rootkit-based crap that would try to compromise my computers (they're likely to be immune but who knows), which would give the disc a negative value. So back into the bins it goes, and I'm warning Deep Purple fans in continental Europe to be very cautious with this disc, and, when in doubt, not to buy it. Does anyone know if the UK edition is clean?

A Proposal

If music magazines want to be useful to the listeners, they should incorporate the playability of the sound containers into their reviews, and cap the final star rating of CDs that have software compromising playback on them. I suggest that CDs claiming to have "Copy Protection" on them should never get more than three stars out of five; that CDs which are proven to have playback problems should never get more than two out of five; that CDs that are actually unplayable on a computer should never get more than one out of five, and that rootkit CDs and similarly dangerous items should get a big red zero and a warning under the review. That is about the degree by which the listener's enjoyment of the product is capped as well.

Update (March 20, 2006): Responses from the Highway Star Blog indicate that the "Copy Protection" doesn't prevent much of anything, so Edel records merely wasted their money. I've also noticed that the regular CD edition had the same "Copy Protection", at least in the Netherlands. Good thing I got the vinyl version instead. Meanwhile, both the regular and the Tour edition are available on BitTorrent, as are several bootlegged concerts.
Actually, the economics of record manufacture suggest that bootlegs are much more likely to suffer from file sharing than legitimate records. After all, bootleg CDs are more expensive and harder to find than regular CDs, and most of them don't offer the added benefits of good or even coherent artwork and that warm fuzzy feeling of giving 3% of what you just spent to the recording artists. Also, most of them are already of low quality even on CD so the quality loss inherent in converting the songs to MP3 won't make much of a difference. As Bittorrent offers nearly cost-free distribution, much-bootlegged bands like Deep Purple could finally put the bootleggers out of business by converting soundboard recordings from their concerts to MP3s and sharing them. There would, I am sure, still be a market for properly-mixed DVDs with good video quality even among those who have already downloaded the concerts in MP3 form.

Allright, allright.

So we can't rapidly naturalise soccer player Salomon Kalou until he qualifies according to the same criteria that apply to other immigrants. Kicking a ball isn't a compelling national interest even if you can add millions of Euros to the gross national product if you do it really well.

And apparently, Taïda Pasic sneaked back into the country after having returned to Kosovo with her mom, and then fibbed in her application for a temporary residence permit allowing her to finish school in the Netherlands. Or maybe she didn't - Minister Verdonk's public pronouncements on the matter have muddied the waters to the point where I for one no longer know who to believe. Well-played, Messalina. In any case, she's eighteen and pretty smart; she'll get by.

But let's not send Saba Rawi to Iran to be raped and tortured to death on the orders of Ahmadinejad and his mullahs for being gay, OK? We don't hate immigrants and refugees that much, do we?

[Via LGF Watch. NB: I would like to be pointed to Dutch mainstream media reports on this case.]
Update: RTL news and NOS at least give Verdonk's considered opinion, which is that gay people are safe in Iran as long as they don't have gay sex, do anything gay or mention that they are gay. Christians are also almost tolerated as long as they keep their religion a closely guarded secret. I also heard her quoted along similar lines on Dutch news. She insists that the two homosexual boys who were put to death in Iran last year were guilty of rape, as determined by a fair and impartial, not at all homophobic court of -

Enough of this. We know what kind of place we're sending this man back to, right? We know what the Iranian courts are worth? And Verdonk knows it too. She is trying to murder a man from her desk.

Edit by Jeroen:
Apparently Rita isn't going to impliment this policy untill it has been discussed in parliament. Which in other words, one week from an election, smells like politics. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if she's not really planning anything of the sort, but it does make her look like a tough bitch on immigration, which should get her party some votes. Let's not forget she has a habit of suggesting stupid things, like the "Dutch language only in public-law" she suggested not long ago.

In a shocking revelation, Reinder today provided us proof of an affair between Tamlin and Kel! We see them here, in a romantic hot tub together, with no sign of Jodoque in sight. Fans of the Tamlin/Jake, Jodoque/Kel, and Green Knight/Tamlin pairings have already begun to respond.

"What?! That's preposterous! How dare he misuse his characters so! We'll show him! We intend to be even stupider than some of those fellers in the Harry Potter Fandom! " said a Miss Andir.

"I'm alright with it, but then, the picture just supports my Tamlin/Beer pairing, doesn't it?" said Yair Roon.

"Bah! Should be Jake in there with Tamlin! But dwarves never get any love. No wonder we turn to sheep," said another, an I. Narr.

"You only like sheep because they're as woolly as you dwarves," responded Miss Andir.

The meeting then degenerated, and five fans are undergoing treatment at the Royal Gnomian Infirmary to remove the sticks from their arses.

I keep having to go back to Drawn to look for their entry on Katie Rice's Funny Cute blog with its lovely caricatures of girls. I've been unhappy with my inability to draw as wide a range of female faces as I want to - the main Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan cast pretty much exhausts my repertoire in that respect. Those simple character designs should merely be the beginning; they should be surrounded by more striking-looking gals.

I also like DeviantArt user Radicalstab's drawings of girls - her characters don't have that range of caricatural portraiture, but they are cute and have confident linework, good colours and a very strong "cool factor". She has a collaborative art blog in French.

Many artists, not just male ones, have trouble drawing more than one type of women, and while I do my best, I'm definitely one of them. So I'm throwing these links out as reminders to myself and hopefully to inspire others.

Alchemists has ended, and the project to bring the pre-web Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan stories online continues with The Death Warrant from 1993.
In The Death Warrant, Tamlin and his gang intercept the King's Death Warrant for their most dangerous competitor, Barnardus Pothelmus. When the courier who was carrying the documents escapes them, they are faced with a dilemma: should they deliver it themselves and risk capture, or miss the opportunity to get rid of their enemy? What they don't know is that the hanging, if it happens, will be the scene of a plot against the King.

The Death Warrant is black and white, and after 13 years, its faults are painfully clear to me. It's crudely drawn and often nonsensical. But on the other hand, it's fast-paced and joyful. There are a lot of laughs in it, with many fun characters and puns that can kill cattle at a hundred paces.

I've made some changes to the archives: Headsmen and Alchemists have been moved to the beginning of the archives where, chronologically speaking, they belong. If you've missed the final few episodes of Alchemists, they're here: Episode for Monday; Episode for Tuesday. This means that the filler story from almost a year ago has returned to the position of "last story before the current one". That thing keeps coming back like weeds!