I was going down memory lane in regards of learning languages (BBC’s The Big Muzzy Story), and had visions of a Disney game I had when I was very little. I just had a vague memory of an orange tablet-like machine that you used punch-cards with. It was obviously “interactive,” and was used to learn English. With this description, I ended up finding this thread on Reddit, with this one thump-up random link that was reprimanded for just being the link. But it was THE link we were looking for.
The Mickey Mouse Disney “Touch & Discover” by Texas Instruments.
Other than remembering Mickey Mouse English gibberish (I, of course, didn’t speak English as a child), I remember the Jungle Book card and the sound that you got when you pressed the Bagheera Panther and Shere Khan Tiger!
The options that seem available online are everywhere in terms of prices— from $25USD (no shipping) up to £285GBP.
I have vague memories of some of these cards— the Bambi one about forest animals, the Winnie the Pooh about the weather and seasons, the Mickey Mouse Apprentice about number memory, definitely the Mad Hatter one with his laughter. As I said before, the Jungle Book one with the jungle animals, the Snow White music fun one, the Peter Pan directions one, the shadows one, the Pinocchio one about telling the time (in clock needles!), and maybe the character order memory games.
It’s winter down here. My cold resistance has gone down since my not-even-cold Canada days. I even use an electric bed warmer because my room gets so cold, it’s got a breeze with windows closed. lol Anyway, since I’m on the topic, and calling for donations to combat the winter in the South is a yearly tradition that’s never-ending, I thought I would do a post on the Tibetan heating systems. I actually only saw these on various broadcasts of -probably- CCTV’s Yuanfang de Jia (远方的家).
This is a Kang (炕, from the Chinese “to bake or dry by the heat of a fire“) or a “bed-stove”.
Basically, you grill yourself in winter. Like I do with my electric bed warmer. xD
Like European ceramic stoves, Korean Ondol (온돌) underfloor heating, or… well, modern heated ceramic tile floor; a Kang is designed to keep you warm, especially in cold winter nights; like it is mentioned on Coldland People (寒地百姓吟, aka. Han Di Bai Xing Yin), the Tang Dynasty poem by Meng Jiao (孟郊) that starts with the following lines:
无火炙地眠，半夜皆立号。
冷箭何处来，棘针风骚骚。
霜吹破四壁，苦痛不可逃。
Translated on the Wiki page as: No fuel to heat the floor to sleep, standing and crying with cold at midnight instead.
Source: Baidu [includes a detailed explanation of the verses]
Appreciation for coal miners and heat aside; as fancy as floor-heating may look nowadays with ceramic tiles and electric heating. It all started with ovens built with brick and/or clay. A relatively more cost-efficient way to keep families in the South from freezing themselves to death.
There was a time, a long time ago, when I really took to streaming music. My music buying habits, but specially my music download habits, changed to basically streaming to the point when licensing and catalogs began changing, and I found my music collection shrinking. In the end, I started downloading once again.
I have come to the realization that I buy less and less physical albums, or it takes me longer to buy them. :(
As I found myself deeper and deeper into Kpop fandom once again, so deep into Mamamoo fandom that I begun to get irked by fans who publicly post about their illegal downloads AND complain about numbers of comebacks/group activities. I ended up writing this nonchalant post about music earnings, as well as other Mamamoo activities fans can support besides comebacks [1][2][3]. Yes, I’ve become that type of fan. The old one. LOL
As a grown-up who loves the arts, I always try to remind people that if they love and support their artists that they should buy instead of stream because streaming doesn’t pay. I was literally shook when Hyori mentioned that she had learned that PSY’s Gangnam Style only made $38k [1]; even though I knew some of the horror stories like the one of musician Lee Lang (이랑) who, during her acceptance speech for winning Best Folk Song at the Korean Music Awards, stated that she had only made $370 USD in total earnings on the month of January, so she decided to auction her award starting from the base price of her rent [1].
You can support Lee Lang by buying her album, Playing God (신의 놀이), on Bandcamp :)
And to my surprise, one of my favorite groups this year~~~ the lovely girls from Bolbbalgan4, who are considered digital monsters with their songs almost always charting within the Top10 of Melon, South Korea’s most used music site, had made only $61k USD by August this year [1]. Red Diary Page.1 didn’t drop until a month later, and all 5 songs in the album charted within the Top15. But that’s still besides the point. The point being that your faves don’t make money because you stream music on YouTube or Apple Music or Spotify.
So stop demanding expensive music videos that can cost from $100k-$500k for an average medium size budget, or go up to $1M for the splashy ones that we don’t often see nowadays. At the height of the music video era in the 90s, Michael Jackson and Madonna’s most expensive videos hovered the $5M budget without adjustments for inflation [1]. Stop demanding multiple comebacks a year with infinite number of physical prints (these cost production budgets AND storage budget for large stocks) that you will be waiting for price drops and re-sellers.
So now, let’s do some math~
Let’s say a physical album, a regular jewel case priced at -let’s say- $10 USD. According to prices in 2017— Apple takes a 30% cut [1], Bandcamp takes a 15% cut for digital sales and a 10% for merch [1], whereas CD baby takes a 9% cut off digital sales and $4 USD off physical sales [1]. That means that by selling a $14USD album, the independent artist makes $10USD. In the parallel universe in which your fave is an independent, they keep $7 of those $10 in iTunes, but if there’s a label, the artist (meaning singer) probably gets $1 of those $10. If they’re their own lyricist, musician, producer or sound engineer, fees are different.
Streaming is a whole different beast— according to this post on Digital Music News from 2016, to make a single dollar $1 in Tidal, Google Play, Apple Music and Deezer; you gotta play the song +180 times. 196, to be exact, for Apple Music and Deezer. Make that 279 times on Spotify, 483 times on Vevo, 766 times on Soundcloud, and… at the end of the list, YouTube, where you gotta play songs 776 times to make that one dollar. That means a song/music video that has 100 million views on its YouTube official channel, has made roughly $125k USD, which would be made by selling 12.5k physical albums on CD Baby.
So remember, the next time you complain about X official store prices or limited stocks, it’s because all adds up to the price. If you found a cheap album, it’s because someone along the way lost money.
Yes, I’m low-key talking about Bizent LOL I’ve compared prices with YesAsia, and since I don’t get YesAsia free shipping, that’s paying double shipping because the YA price includes the Bizent $20 shipping fee. I’d rather that money go directly to Mamamoo. xD
I’m not a social media fan, though I do spend a lot of time posting links on the YAM Magazine Twitter account. Less active on Facebook, though I regularly use my own profile. No Instagram or any other site. I’m mostly active on movie websites— still active on IMDb, because they make searching for stuff easier [year, country, language, etc. filters], still active on MUBI (and helping with profiles and database submissions), and Letterboxd coz they help keeping an orderly diary of movie-watching.
No longer have music sites, and Living Social FB apps have long gone.
I’ve always been reluctant in creating new profiles, new accounts, new emails and different passwords. However, my level of obsession with Mamamoo has reached such point that I finally logged in V Live with my real-life identity, and though I’ve only left like 3 or 4 comments (so far), I’m a Level 5. Each artist you follow starts with a Level 1, adding points by watching videos, leaving comments and who knows what else, but I digress~~~ I wanted to comment on V Live as a platform. I’m amazed by it. I don’t exactly know why. I’ve seen countless of web stream concerts [1][2], I’ve seen a couple of Facebook Live sessions, but somehow V Live sessions make me feel closer to artists.
Of course, they can start a random session just like in Facebook, though FB is always a 1:1 ratio, no? There’s comments, and the artist can actually reply to your comments, which is something V Live doesn’t have since comments are live, they scroll as they keep coming just like in a YouTube stream. But YouTube streams always seem so impersonal, more like online TV broadcasts, which is actually GREAT for TV broadcasts [KBS World 24][KBS World]. Add to V Live multi-camera broadcast, HD quality, multilingual subtitles and there’s just this added something to it.
I recently saw Brown Eyed Girls’ JeA’s Orgel Live with JOKER, a 50-min multi-camera phone shot in portrait. I didn’t watch it live, because the show began at 6AM, but the replay was available quite fast — in probably just a few couple of hours — with subtitles in English, Chinese, Viet and Korean; and available auto-translate for others like Spanish. They started reading some of the comments, I lamented not being able to say hi to JeA [this is what I’m talking about], and proceeded to perform a couple of songs, while also going through the live comments.
Fans are also allowed to give ‘hearts.’ Though, I haven’t actually figured out how to give hearts (it’s not by clicking the heart icon, lol), I supposed it’s just pasting hearts in the comments, and that’s why users can give multi-hearts all around. Since a video can have 200k views and one million hearts. :P
And apparently, if you have the V Live App, you can chat with your faves. I don’t have mobile, so……………….
If you could do this for movies, it’ll be amazing. About 8 years ago, I wrote a proposal for screening movies like this xD but I didn’t know how to go through with it. Imagine you have a screening event, fans gather online 30min. before the movie begins, they chat among them. The movie streams, and afterwards there’s an online Q&A with the cast/crew. Because videos from the Q&A and the movie to be screened are different video sources, you can only have the Q&A available for replay instead of the movie.
Too bad it’s over $400USD xD and it works with your smartphone. I’m waiting for the day smartwatches don’t use smartphones. xD Like- what’s the point if you still have to use both. Withings Activite works like a regular watch— it uses a changeable battery, works with dials and has leather straps. It also does all your health tracking even during your sleep (and in water because it’s water-resistant to 50m) … it basically stalks your every movement.
And because it’s linked to your smartphone, you don’t need to ‘adjust’ the time. Set your smartphone timezone, and your watch switches back and forth.
It’s also coming from Nokia, who have bought Withings [1][2].
Love this commercial… I could totally sit through this a couple of times if I saw it on TV. lol
I like the design of the watch a lot better than the Apple Watch, which seems kinda chunky and calls too much attention. But still shrugged at the fact that you need a smartphone to set it up.
Holy shit!? Is this a thing? I could only find the Frigidaire that changes the freezer into a refrigerator and vice versa [1], but they’re not giving you extra space… just switching one for the other. my kitchen tech is way behind the times, since I still use the same microwave we bought like 25 years ago, and our refrigerator is -at least- 18 years old. LOL
And this seems super cheap- the most expensive one (480L) is 65,000 Rupees, which at the moment is about a bit over $1k USD. That’s like half or a third of what one of those double-door refrigerators that waste a lot of space because they give you the illusion of giving you loads of compartments is. The 322L one is only a bit more than $650USD. THAT’S FRIGGING CRAZY.
That’s like buying an iPhone, no? FML. Two 64GB iPod Touch, and maybe two 16GB iPad mini 4. For that, you can buy an appliance. Geez~
Farah Khan’s and Shahrukh Khan’s latest Happy New Year [Español] just hit the market officially with VOD… or as they’re calling it DTF (Direct to Fans), which is less technical and much more personal. It’s also way cheaper than regular VOD too, which usually charges $5USD per one-time stream or 4-5-day rental. You basically get to download the movie for that price. I’m just supposing it’s subtitled (being aimed at all markets except India and China), but I could be supposing erroneously [1].
No cons, just pros really. It would have been much cooler and much more trailblazing if this had happened on opening week (or the week later), but it’s something. I’m just hoping UTV (EROSNOW had its one moment with the pretty horrible Lekar Hum Deewana Dil) gets their shit together with the distribution of films like Haider and PK, really because those two are my bias at the moment. Imagine if more European and other big Asian movies did the same. Isn’t THAT what they want? Piece of the Hollywood pie? You need to indoctrinate people first, get them on the habit of watching you. Hollywood’s been doing this to us for the past 70 years.
I never thought that I would actually, you know, really like a Hatsune Miku song. I had listened to a couple livetune tracks, but left them at bay until I saw Takashi Murakami’s Jellyfish Eyes where he used the song Last Night, Good Night to great effects during the ending credits. It was around 3-4am, so the effects of the song was perfect.
Too bad the only version available on my iTunes is the one done with Pharrell to promote the movie somehow, and nothing prior to 2012 is on.
On the topic of Miku, such a hybrid. I don’t know what to tag this post.
