OK. So finally I’m getting around to an explanation of the previous post.
My current - I’d use the word dialemma, but it’s not. It’s more a trilemma or quintalemma or something - is (somewhat) about copyright. The laws are fairly complex as what we’re doing here is basically a live theatre venue, church, theatre company, video, dance and creative arts training and production centre, bible-school, and a few other things too. The people who were supposed to be taking care of the whole copyright thing have been doing a really poor - or at least misled - job for a number of years now, either that or else no-one ever bothered even trying to figure out what taking care of it really meant.
We’re slowly getting there, I think, I hope. But currently I find myself saying more and more “no, sorry, you can’t do that, that’s illegal”, without really having much viable alternative to offer.
And that sucks.
Part of the thing is what is copyright law really saying?
“This is mine, for me, and not for you, or for God. It’s mine. Shove off.”
Which people object to, obviously. Thus an argument often raised is
“Well, the artist who made this is a Christian, and so wants to glorify God, right, and we’re trying to glorify Him too by using it, so we’re fine to copy and edit it…”
Well. If the artist wanted you to just use it for whatever you want without checking with them first, then they wouldn’t have put “Copyright 2003. For personal home use only. All rights Reserved” on it…
It gets worse with the internet.
“Hey, my pastor just sent me this really cool video I want to show in the programme tomorrow!”
“Well. The music backing to it I recognise, it’s a song by Hillsong UK, and there is no copyright notice anywhere in the clip at all, one of those opening still-pictures you can see has part of a copyright label in the corner, but half cropped out, so we can safely assume that many of the images are taken uncredited from the internet, and even the one you can half read it’s web address isn’t being credited properly. That interview clip with the kids outside the theatre is almost certainly just filmed without their parents consent, and you want to show this clip to paying public?”
“But they played it at my church last week!”
“So?”
“So it must be alright!”
“Wrong.”
“What can we do instead?”
Indeed.
So now the whole issue of making our own material. Last week a couple of the programme staff went out with a camera and asked a bunch of random people on the street questions, then asked me how to edit it (for 2 days later). So I kind of pulled stuff together, found an old recording of a couple on-board musicians jamming which kind of fit.
The end result wasn’t great. In any sense. It shouldn’t even have passed my own quality control.
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I always knew a few people who loved trains. I even knew one or two people who built model rail-ways at home, usually in some deserted far off loft or study.
I’ve suddenly discovered, much to my surprise, that this is not one or two isolated individuals, but in fact apparently a large percentage of the male population of this part of the UK.
I never expected to learn that.
They call themselves Anoraks, and about a third of the people I’m working with belong to this group.
OK, So trains can look quite cool, and I am working with the media and computers team of the company, so it’s no surprise, I suppose, that you find a higher pecentage of people here with high IQ / arcane / obscure hobbies…
But it’s not just little nerdy geeks with glasses wandering around with notebooks and flasks of tea getting all excited about 7.25" gauge K1 engines and 1937 liveries, it’s a lot of guys, of every background, upbringing, shape, size, character and personality.
We had finished setting up for one of those J.John conferences, and were hanging out round the back waiting for it to be time to start, when this anglican vicar looking bloke wandered up, and they all ended up chatting about trains.
And all the rest of the guys too: those few who don’t have a thing about machines that roll around the place on parallel tracks get excited by all kinds of other things.
There’s a bloke here who gets very excited about trucks, vans, busses, and other large automobiles.
When I say “excited”, I mean in the kind of “eyes light up, bounces up and down and starts talking animatedly and waving his arms around” kind of way.
And he’s not a tiny geek. He’s an (roughly) 8 foot tall construction yard manager from London.
I watched two guys across the room at a pizza evening last week. They were discussing the intricacies of the AT command set, and the fun to be had trying to fix router systems by logging in backwards through a modem to solve networking problems.
Let’s turnout to a diverging track for a few moments, and I’ll see if I can work us back to this rail at the next set of points.
I went out yesterday an bought a whole load of books at charity shops. I finally got a copy of St. Augustine’s confessions.
“Even now I cannot fully understand why the Greek language, which I learned as a child, was so distasteful to me… "
I found this sentence funny, in itself, but lets keep reading for a while, and a few pages later get to this:
“For I understood not a single word and I was constantly subjected to violent threats and cruel punishments to make me learn.
“As a baby, of course, I knew no Latin either, but I learned it without fear and fret, simply by keeping my ears open while my nurses fondled me and everyone laughed and played happily with me.
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One of the things I love about the “Peanuts” cartoons are the tiny little things that I love. If that makes sense. For instance, this one thing I love about the Peanuts cartoon, is Snoopy’s book that he writes occasionally “Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?” as part of the whole debate thing with Lucy. I love those books.
Anyway.
Has it ever occurred to you that you might be mad?
It’s been of late the rather disagreeable experience of mine to have occurring to me with disturbingly increasing regularity the possibility that I myself might be in a somewhat insanitous state.
I challenge anyone to diagram that sentence, and send me the picture…
Insanitous sounds rather unhygienic, but it’s not. I just mean “mad”, in a slightly more complex way of speaking.
To take simpler mode of address, I’ll quote Freddie Mercury:
“It’s finally happened, I’m slightly mad.”
Anyway, the current evidence I have towards this conclusion is The Strange Affair Of The Coffee Maker In The Daytime.
I feel remarkably Adrian Plassish as I type this, in a “this is dead serious to me, but I get the feeling people will laugh at me about it, because it’s so stupid…” sort of way. Like his paper-clip story.
Settle back, gentle reader, and prepare thyself for an epic journey into the mind of one convinced that he is no longer all quite there.
It all began like this…
This house is great. I’m really enjoying living here. right now, I’m sprawled across one of the *three* sofas in the living room, with my laptop, and a pot of Earl Grey tea.
Seriously, how can life get more chilled out than this?
What could there possibly be to complain about?
Well, there’s no internet at home. Is this a bad thing? Well, kind of. But also, it does stop me spending inordinate amounts of time online, which I did over the whole furlough, to my shame. 3 months to rest and do anything, and most of the time I spent online. Silly. So, it’s probably a good thing that I’m not online here, and can just write emails that I need to write, and then send them from the Shed. And spend the rest of my time at home cooking, reading, playing clarinet, and exercising. Oh, and sleeping, of course.
Secondly. And far more seriously. There is no coffee maker here.
I say it again, for emphasis.
There. Is. NO. Coffee. Maker. Here!!!
Shocking! But true!
There is a kettle, and a teapot, and plenty of instant coffee, of the “Fair Trade” and the “Nescafe” varieties - both of which are vile - but a brewed mug of the real stuff? Not a chance.
So, how can I solve this crisis, I wondered, then had the brainwave: I can buy a coffee maker.
In the UK they have this really weird store called Argos, where everything is in this funny HUGE catalogue that you can get, and then you write down the item order numbers, or SKU or something, give it to the clerk, and it gets brought in to you via conveyor belt, or so. No browsing around the store, just the catalogue.
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