Individuality is fine, as long as we all do it together.

[walkingshadow]

I spent a good chunk of my afternoon going the distance with a tangled skein of yarn. For anyone interested in the final score, it shook out to

Sentience/Intelligence/Patience/Opposable Thumbs: 0
Fuzzy Red Acrylic/Nylon Blend: totally the boss of me

I gave up when I'd gotten it into three unevenly-wound balls and went off to the gym. It'll sort itself out as I crochet toward it. Hopefully.

languagelog is doing an A-Z blog roundup and I'm not sure why they included this link, but the October 2004 Wired Magazine had a long and fascinating article on how Amazon, Netflix, the iTMS, and music subscription services like Rhapsody et al. are going to change our economic paradigm and the pitiful law of supply and demand, and it's going to mean an end to our "hit-driven culture": Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream. I take heart.

In this month's issue is an article explaining why Wilco is the future of music: "Music," [Tweedy] explained, "is different" from other intellectual property. Not Karl Marx different - this isn't latent communism. But neither is it just "a piece of plastic or a loaf of bread." The artist controls just part of the music-making process; the audience adds the rest. Fans' imagination makes it real. Their participation makes it live. "We are just troubadours," Tweedy told me. "The audience is our collaborator. We should be encouraging their collaboration, not treating them like thieves."

*bookmarks Wired for regular perusal*

What else should I be reading?

Comments

[tenebris.livejournal.com]

I've been enjoying my subscription to Wired for about half a year now. It's such a great magazine to read cover to cover, as it has a good balance of little articles/fun gadgets at the beginning, before the really serious stuff. Oh, and their letters page is a hoot, too. The layout could use some work, though.

Ah yes, why they'd have it marked? 'Cause these are techie linguists, I think, as most linguists end up being (especially if you're a phonetician or do corpus linguistics); a little while ago they were all writing articles on what's wrong with Google's search algorithim. Also, Wired does like to cover new science stuff in evolution, biology, etc. -- you know eventually they'll be talking about language in some way.

Oh! And I forgot the mention--I used the Haspelmath book for my morphology class. Bagelizeability, anyone?

[walkingshadow.livejournal.com]

They have some seriously cool articles. I might end up with a subscription myself.

Going back, I can't find what linked me to the article originally. I want to say it was the blogroll, but I was following an awful lot of links. Hmm. You're right though, I imagine Wired is going to be talking about language, along with everything else under the sun. I have noticed the techie leanings of the Language Log bloggers. ;)

Oh! And I forgot the mention--I used the Haspelmath book for my morphology class. Bagelizeability, anyone?

Hee! Is it required reading for the class, or something you brought in on your own? (And I have to confess—I didn't exactly read the thing cover-to-cover; I rely much more on lectures to get concepts down.)

[tenebris.livejournal.com]

There's a strange (and somewhat embarrassing) story to my subscription. But it's been an enjoyable addition to my reading materials!

They are quite techy; I like it. The whole "search Google for material thing" is so simple yet brilliant I find myself doing small analyses that way. In papers, even! (Well, footnotes to papers.)

It's required reading for the Morphology class here, though they may be changing the book soon (or may already have...dunno). And I didn't read cover to cover so much, either, so it's understandable why my two great memeories of it are 'bagelizability' and the word 'mazdar.' MAZDAR! I love that word. :) And that his language of study was Lezgian, because I have a middle school sense of humor...

I found his book somewhat boring, if I remember right; he redeemed himself by writing a wonderfully cheeky article on grammaticization and reanalysis (1998? Yes, that's it).

[walkingshadow.livejournal.com]

The whole "search Google for material thing" is so simple yet brilliant

My first thought when I read about them doing that was a kind of open-mouthed "can they do that?" followed by "hot damn! why not?"

I found his book somewhat boring, if I remember right; he redeemed himself by writing a wonderfully cheeky article on grammaticization and reanalysis (1998? Yes, that's it).

I'll take your word for it (and I'll look up the cheeky article, because that's my idea of a good time!).