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I was doing one of those random searches I do (every other year now) in search of an old show from early to mid-90s, which featured Canadian actress Lani Billard, who later starred on 1993’s Ready or Not alongside Laura Bertram. It was called F.R.O.G and it aired on Discovery Kids Latin America. The show, which apparently was produced by Toronto’s OWL TV (maybe PBS in the US?), was a shown now commonly known as “edutainment” -entertainment with an educational take- about a group of children that used to get together to discover or solve a physics/mechanical/nature/science issue of the day.

I clearly remember two episodes of the show— one featured electromagnetics, which were used to power racing toy cars. The other one featured hydronic heating systems, which were built with a water hose installed on the roof of a shed to “warm up” with the sun. Apparently, the show only featured 13 episodes, to the surprise of everyone’s brains who feels like shows used to last forever, but they were all miniseries (eg. The Storyteller, Mr. Bean, old Shogun, etc.).

My old scattered cable magazines must be somewhere around, but that’s basically the only hard copy I have of the show’s existence. I have never been able to find digital proof of the show ever existing, except for this low resolution picture I just found on one of the few videos that talk about old Discovery Kids Latino.

I barely recognized it, mainly because that’s Billard in the pink sweater. I suppose the kid in blueish green could be Gideon Arthurs, while the kid in red could be Ivana Shein.

I also found this Reddit thread saying it’s “Fully lost” and learned (finally?) that F.R.O.G stands for “Friends of Research and Odd Gadgets,” ha! I had no idea.

According to one of the links above, and the info on WorldCat, the show’s distribution is or was done by Bullfrog Films. For educational purposes, Bullfrog Films used to offer a VHS tape per 30min episode at $50 on a dedicated F.R.O.G page that is no longer available. I tried browsing through their catalogue and doing a search to see if I could find more info on the show, but no luck. I even went through all their YouTube archive to no avail, even though they are still releasing material. In theory, you should be able to order these from them.

In related things— I did find the whole original Ghostwriter series, which had been released on DVD back in the day, as well as a whole collection of Lost Telecourse, which includes a series on American Cinema, and a series about physics and mechanics (also done by TVO) called Eureka!. Outside the collection, I also found some episodes of Newton’s Apple, episodes of Art Attack, and episodes of Pingu.

On December, I wrote about a couple of my concert music DVDs rotting away.

And the YT algo just popped this on the feed, talking about a number of Warner Bros titles that are apparently being affected.

Somebody on forums (!!! They still exist!) posted a list of probable affected titles, and to my dismay, the Greta Garbo and (both) Joan Crawford collections are affected. I just popped Mata Hari and Possessed on the player and seem to be playing fine.

Another one of the fears with (new) media and products that developed in types of plastic is that they’re decaying faster than people expected. I’ve had older (retired) players that were kept on storage that have a general sticky texture after a while. However, this doesn’t seem to happen to players that are in general exposure, not directly with sunlight, but in a generally airy room that’s in use, unlike a display room. I also happen to live in the mildest of climates, though high in humidity, temperatures never go above 30C (above 90F) or lower than 14C (lower than 55F). So maybe these conditions are affecting the storage of physical media.

I did the vast majority of my library collection before 2007, though. I did buy a number of things in between the mid-2000s to late-2000s, so if disc rot is affecting a general batch produced in between 2007-2009, it is a concern. I’m generally more worried with collections I keep in drawers instead of a regular shelf display.

So Long, My Xiami

January 6, 2021 — Leave a comment

Greetings, my fellow lurkers, if you are lurking still. Knowing that I haven’t updated anywhere and I’m hardly active on social media, I just wanted to say that I haven’t died and haven’t been swallowed by the Earth. I hope 2020 didn’t wreck you, and that 2021 finds you in a more… calm path.

As I sit here making plans of wanting to do a lot of things, and then getting nowhere, I reminisce the days of internet freedom when roaming through websites was like the wild west. And that’s when I discovered Xiami— according to WP word search find, the earliest mention of the music site on the blog dates back to 2010… with an even older mention of forgotten HaoTing. lol Since then, over a decade ago and many an indie Chinese music discovery, Xiami had been part of my daily life for thousands and thousands of days.

I took a screencap for posterity! My Xiami account was supposed to last until the end of the year, and then an extra 4 months.

So it is with great sadness, but hardly any surprise, that I report that Xiami will be no more… on February 5th this year, to mark my 35ths birthday, nonetheless. End of an era for my music streaming, end of the era… of my youth, I suppose. With my only consolation prize that a lot of Chinese music is already available on not only iTunes and Spotify, but also on YouTube. I just need to re-find them and subscribe to whatever their channels are. It will be, of course, a lot more difficult to discover brand new Chinese music.

Oscar Ballot 2020

January 13, 2020 — Leave a comment

I’m probably two weeks ahead, compared to my Ballot posting last year, which means my Independent Spirit Awards ballot is still halfway done, but my Academy voting ballot is pretty complete.

I might end up watching The Two Popes, but all I’m really waiting for to open in theaters is Bombshell (which opens this Thursday), Little Women and 1917. Harriet is never going to open down here, but I really got a soft spot for this type of movies.

I’m really REALLY surprised Girl in the Hallway didn’t make the cut. You can watch the short on Vimeo.

I’m ready to vote! I received the most digital screeners this year so far, so it’s been easier (and it’s made it lazy-proof) to sit through dozens of screeners. Plus, Netflix has a lot of the nominated movies readily available too. This year is possibly my best award season ballot in my history of keeping up with ballots. lol

It’s not only my Spirit Awards ballot~

I also have a pretty complete Oscar ballot. lol

Continue Reading…

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. Got. So. Excited…

When I saw that there was a bluray release of The Murder Case of Hana & Alice with Spanish subtitles by Media3 Estudio, and it comes with a freaking disc for Hana & Alice too. I suffered so much when I realized, just a minute later, that the bluray release is Region B for Europe xD

And it looks so pretty too TnT

I had been looking around for an actual region-free bluray player, because I have a bunch of R1-DVD and R4-DVD discs that I’m too lazy to re-watch on my region-free DVD player, which used to be the norm players sold down here. I really don’t look forward to having to import electronics, because I can only imagine the headache it’ll be considering the headaches I get whenever I order my preferred shampoo. LOL

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……………….

jea-joker-live-v-live

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.

See? Someone make it happen.

1000 Days of Xiami

October 10, 2016 — 1 Comment

I’m about to clock 1000 days on Xiami logins xD

xiami-1000-days

Sad for this excitement, I know. LOL But I get obsessive-compulsive over these things easily. I took a screen grab because I don’t know whether the count will reset to zero or continue. Back in March when I went to Japan, I told my friend to login for me, so I don’t lose my clocked days, and there was a weird bug that made the counter go back to zero, so we thought for a while that it was done. A couple of days later, it went back to normal :P

I’ve been using Xiami for a lot longer, of course. And gone are the days when you could find everything on the site for stream and download :P Though you can still find stuff and download, it’s often the case when albums are empty. Recently, Xiami has taken to just be able to stream music (which is better than having blank albums), without download capabilities— Faye Wong’s most recent track is only available for stream, so you gotta find it elsewhere if you want it. The site is still a great source for Chinese music, especially from the independent scene. However, now Xiami-approved artists are allowed to mark their music as only-Mi tracks, meaning that you have to have Xiami credit on your account and not download music from your VIP free-tracks perk or use your red envelopes (points).

Having said that~~~ I have like +500 points (you get points for single days and months counted, albums added and music shared, etc.) and haven’t used them in so long. What the heck~ What are the perks of the VIP account if you still gotta pay for the Chinese music that you download; at least make it so that you use twice or thrice the # of downloads for those.

I still haven’t figured out what the note reputation is (eg. Re*), but I’m just a few hundred away from reaching the other level. Increasing my stars is a little trickier because English reviews don’t get as many likes or comments. lol

Also~ OMO! 1000 days on the 10 of 10. xD

Yo~ that’s one heck of a great teaser for an upcoming album. Looks and sounds epic.

The best? Kent gets us, songs are available for stream on YouTube. Thank you so much~

Looks like the album is available everywhere on iTunes but the US xD