Homeschooled children getting enough socialization is an argument that won't seem to die, and I'm not about to rehash it. However, I did have a random thought the other day.

I realized that the allegations of poor-socialization skills continue because most homeschoolers are different. On the whole, homeschoolers are generally less likely to have done at least one of the following:
1. Watched a television show regularly
2. Kept up on the latest blockbuster movies
3. Listened to all of the top-40 hits from the the last decade
and have probably spent more time in front of a book than a television set.

This does not make them less likely to be able to articulate their ideas to others, or less of a people-person. It does mean that they are less likely to be able to take part in a workplace conversation about pop culture.

I've spent plenty of time in the last few years consuming my share of pop culture, and what have I gained? The ability to state an opinion about a recent movie with a decent chance of someone else having seen it as well, or the ability to quote a popular internet meme and share a laugh with some of my nerdier friends.

If I were suddenly transplanted to another culture, all those hours watching Family Guy would have been in vain. I could either fall back on my homeschooling background and spend some time communicating with people I didn't share a background with, or wonder why everyone else was less socialized than myself.

If someone can't stand to communicate with you simply because you don't share the same knowledge of pop culture, that is a failure in their education – not yours.

I get most of my movies and music from other individuals on the internet using bit torrent technology.

I don't do this as a statement against "the man" (as much as I do loathe him), or because I am so poor that I have no other options. I choose piracy as my primary means of acquiring media because it gives me the best return for my input.

There are 2 things I consider when spending money on entertainment (mostly music, movies, video games). How much enjoyment I get out of it (or think I will get out of it) and how much investment it will take to get that enjoyment.

Using this formula combined with my own personal constants of what things I generally enjoy and what resources I have at hand, many of the regular options for media consumption don't make the cut – watching a movie in theaters costs around $8 in my city now, not to mention the investment of time spent finding parking. Plus I can only watch a movie when the theater feels like showing it, and I can't drape myself across a couch while enjoying it.

Television programming also falls short – I'm not willing to invest 1/3 of my media-viewing time watching advertisements (which aren't even being targeted to me personally!).

Purchasing DVDs is a reasonable option once in a while, but very rarely. It is not very often that I expect to get full retail price worth of enjoyment from any DVD movie.

Now when I talk about enjoying a movie, it's not always all selfish gratification (honest!). I am motivated, as a capitalist consumer, to support those who produce high-quality products with my hard-earned dollar. But in Duff-Land, the "media I support" budget is pretty low compared to the amount of media I consume.

At this point in my life, I would be willing to donate around $20 a month to those whose works I had enjoyed that month. If I was paying full retail for price for all the movies I enjoyed, I would probably be paying closer to $100 a month.

So what are my options? As far as movies go, Netflix is a great option. Excellent selection of movies, and for your convenience, many films are now becoming available to stream over the internet and watch within minutes. For less than $20 a month, you have some solid options for watching movies.

When it comes to music, I'm harder to please. I would be willing to pay about $5 for an album I enjoyed – and I don't mean a 5-track album. iTunes is a popular option, but (besides being more than I would like to pay), I would want to be able to download higher-quality tracks (most of their tracks are 128kbps), and I will not pay money for anything infected with DRM (Digital Rights Management, designed to limit your use of the file).

Thus, in most cases, I turn to piracy. I download my movies and music (and the occasional video game) because nobody is willing to take what I'm willing to pay for their goods. It's not that I don't want to pay the fine actors and writers of the television series House, it's just that I'm not going to pay $120 for the right to watch the first 3 seasons at my own convenience.

Not long ago, Nine Inch Nails released the Ghosts I-IV, four volumes comprising an album. Instead of releasing their album in a traditional way, the first volume was released for free on torrent tracking sites such as thepiratebay.org. The entire album was available to purchase from the official website in several different formats. One of the formats was digital download – for $5.

Now, a newly released 36-track album for $5 is a heckuva deal by most media standards. Plus, the tracks were available in several different high quality audio formats (including lossless) without any DRM attached.

I loved the idea, and purchased the digital version. The download servers were completely swamped, and I ended up downloading the entire album using bittorrent anyway – but that wasn't the point. I was given the option to pay the artist for his work, without having to worry about a record label skimming off the top.

The album was pretty good, and makes its way onto my playlist reasonably often. But since then, I've noticed a change in how I think of music. I still download albums without a second thought, but now when I find one I really appreciate, my first instinct is to go to the artists web site and PayPal them some money to show my support.

It's pretty annoying, really. I have daydreams about running into my favorite artists at some generic bar and buying them a round of drinks to show my appreciation. I can't afford to buy albums from all of the artists I support, so I'm stuck with my daydreams for now.

Until artists start breaking away from the record labels wholesale and releasing albums in a way that gives their fans better options, piracy will remain the best option for the regular consumer of media in most cases.

The artist
The dead guy (born same year)
The (more famous) drummer
The redneck

If you want some easy entertainment some day, go to GoDaddy and try entering random domain names to see what's available in the dot-com area.

Pretty much all the two/three word combinations that you would think of have been taken. But there's still some good stuff available, if you look hard enough!

IScareChildren.com is totally available, as is leethax0r.com (!). If you want to pick up the domain name flashydomainname.com, it's still available.

But if you were hoping to grab totally1337.com, or maybe awesomeblog.com, you're out of luck. Also worth noting: every combination of g + (any number of Os) + gle is taken.

Once you fully grasp how many domain names have already been taken, you get the urge to pick up the reasonable names that you might find available. After all, if it's only $9 a year to own the domain name with your given name in it… why not buy it, on the off chance that people who are interested in your life story will try visiting (yourname).com?

Not that I would, or anything.

Was reading Digg today, and found a link to an article about decency. Or more specifically, an interview of a person who wrote a book about decency in America.

The upshot of it all seems to be that there is a war going on in America. A Decency War (C). This war is taking place between the religious right (a crusade against sex and nudity and such) and people who want boobs on TV.

One of the basic premises of the book seems to be that this war has been increasing in intensity over the past 30 years or so. The author seems to think that, while the issue has been around for a while, people haven't cared about it much before now.

Now, sex has been around for a while. And for as long as it has been around, sex has been described in whatever medium men had at hand. I also think that there have always been people who cared about whether or not their children had access to this media.

The change that's happened over the last 30 years isn't with the issue, or with people's opinions on it. I think that the difference we've seen over recent decades is one towards reliance on our government.

To quote the author of the book in question, "the breast-baring accidents of Hollywood actors such as Faye Emerson and Jayne Mansfield did not result in any mass campaigns for 'family values.'" This is true, but not because people didn't care.

If people have a problem with what is on TV, they should turn off the TV. Media is not forced upon us. If popular media has become too objectionable – (and, for the record, I think that popular media reflects popular culture – not the other way around) – then we should disconnect ourselves from the popular media.

But Americans today (even the radical right-wing religious folks) have become too dependent on their government. They don't have the balls to remove themselves from the popular media – they want big brother to do it for them.

I am taking 3 classes this semester that require me to spend time in a classroom. Two of them are standard business courses (ECON 211 – Macroeconomics and COMM 311 – Business Communication) and the other is a computer science course (CSCE 235 – Discrete Mathematics).

There is a marked difference between the two genres of class.

+ Everybody shows up for the computer science course. You see the same faces in class every day, because the students in that class know that you just have to go to class to do well. Attendance is spotty in the two business courses, and some of those who do show up are obviously not paying attention.

+ In computer science, you have homework to do. As soon as one is completed, another one is assigned – if not sooner! It *will* take you at least 4-6 hours to do, and it does force you to learn the material. The business classes have no homework to speak of – the worst out-of-classroom work has been some truly stupid group work in my communications class.

+ There are a lot more girls in the business classes. Seriously. There's only one girl in Discrete Mathematics.

Students in both classes complain about the same amount for their assigned workload, but the students in my computer science class have a lot more reason to complain. They're all computer science or computer engineering – I'm the only business major.

I'll bet when you saw that my blog was named "I'm not going to type here" you thought I was joking, didn't you? Didn't you? Well, I guess I showed you!

It's another animated movie with Patrick Wartburton! Wartburton, AKA Kronk, AKA Joe Swanson, AKA Brock Samson, is as good a reason as any to see a movie. But this movie delivers on other levels, as well!

It's funny, yet clean enough to watch with the family. It's got characters you pretty much all know, without resorting to a rehash of old fairy tales or a straight-up irreverent spoof of their Disney equivalents (Shrek).

It's a quality children's movie, that manages to avoid fart jokes for an entire 80 minutes, and still remain cool enough to watch in the pad of some frat boy on a weekend.

I realize that this review gives no synopsis of the movie whatsoever, so if you want an idea of what it's like, check out the trailer on Apple's Page. This movie receives the Duff Seal of Approval.

Yes, I saw this movie.

It was directed by Kurt Wimmer, director of Equilibrium (one of my favorite movies)! It stars Milla Jovovich, who did a pretty good job playing an action-heroine in the Resident Evil movies. The trailers made it look good! Action and guns and swords and stuff… I was ready to pay $2 to see this one.

I really don't know what to say about the movie overall. There wasn't much dialogue, which is a plus, since the only lines were flat, worthless, and worse than predictable (I would have predicted less cheesy lines).

There were two basic fight scenes – in the first, a small army rushes in and surrounds her. She spins around somehow with a sword, and they all fall over dead at once. In the second, they run at her one at a time, and she slashes 'em down.

Either way, half the movie is taken up with those same two fight scenes played over and over again on mildly different sets.

Let's see, bad dialogue, bad fight scenes… those were really the defining points of this movie. It's hard to say too much about the acting, since the actors weren't really given much to work with, but they didn't appear to make much of an effort anyway.

There were some bad CG effects… shaky camera work… all those scenes where the picture was blurred to make up for a lack of effort in shooting… yeah, don't even get close to this one. If you ever feel tempted to check it out, go watch Equilibrium instead. There's a quality film.

It's pretty shocking to realize that it's been two and a half months since I last posted here. In my defense, I'd like to say that it only seemed like a week or so.

I'm finally done with classes, so I can concentrate on more important things – like taking classes over the summer, and working.

As the news clips on my home page change daily, there are a few issues that I have cared enough about to mention here.

As an off-and-on South Park watcher, I appreciate the writers' abilities to use satire to comment on current issues. I managed to catch Cartoon Wars Part II on Comedy Central the first day it aired. If you haven't heard anything about it yet, you can click the link, but long story short – Comedy Central censored an animated image of Muhammad giving a salmon covered football to Peter Griffin of Family Guy.

I really don't know what to say about that one – Comedy Central folded. I was disappointed. I could rant a bit about how much other stuff South Park has gotten away with without censorship, but that's not really the point. The cable channels should be able to show what they want to – if people don't like it, they won't watch.

What is disturbing is Comedy Central giving in to terrorist threats, letting them win.

I would recommend that you watch that episode (Cartoon Wars) if you get the opportunity.

Here is a direct link to a Windows Media Video of the unedited clip of Muhammad from Part II. (1.05MB)