Gotta get down on Friday, amiright?

In a lighter departure from my last post (regarding the rapacious cash-grab that is digital distribution), I thought I'd post a few tasty jams. After all, everybody's looking forward to the weekend, weekend.

Bag Raiders - Turbo Love (Original Mix) [YouTube link - download link soon]

Wolfgang Gartner - Undertaker (Krafty Kuts Re-dub)

Fucked

I know net neutrality is old news, but it infuriates me more and more. In the last few years, technology has leapt farther than I would have imagined. Merely 6 years ago, the Wii was just a twinkle in Reggie Fils-Amie's evil cyborg eye. PS3 wasn't even close to release. In these inhuman, nigh ancient times, playing DivX movies on the big screen required ingenuity and a smattering of elbow grease - to the point where actually paying for this sort of content on a VOD service was reasonable, I mean, unless you wanted to watch The Departed on my 15" Dell laptop. Nowadays, if you know where to look, absolutely everything is free and open. But tons of people are still paying out the ass for content that should be absolutely free - or at least streaming unlimited-ly, Netflix style. But a ridiculous amount of effort has been made on the part of Apple, Time Warner, and Comcast to monetize what should be free.

The fight over net neutrality is the latest turd nugget to be added to this gigantic crock of shit. If you're not familiar with net neutrality, it basically states that an ISP can't decide which sites / services have speedy transfers. Basically, Time Warner could extort a website into paying some kind of fee that guarantees that its transfer speeds won't be artificially diminished. The implications of a lack of net neutrality are obviously nauseating, more so when you note that the Republicans, champions of big business, are fighting tooth and nail to overturn the FCC's recent rulings that the net should be neutral. Not to mention that in North Carolina, a ruling was recently made that it was unfair to giant conglomerates for smaller cable companies to charge less for better service. Not to mention Fox demanding that TWC pull channels from its new streaming iPad app. Not to even mention that even though I pay Hulu $7 a month for the fucking privilege, I can't watch Archer or Community on my PS3. And I thought I was entitled to watch all the programs I pay to see. How naive of me.

These issues are a daily, relentless mindfuck for me. Why am I, the end-user, the ultimate bad guy for only wanting to pay once for for my music, movies, and TV? This kind of bullshit is so tragically far from uncommon, that I can't say it shocks me any more. The total transparency and remorselessness of it all- that's the real fucking shocker. At least when I was a kid they pretended to be looking out for me.