The Internet

U2 album on iTunes followup

For those of you who, like me, were startled to have an unwanted U2 album show up in your account library on iTunes, Apple apparently has received a lot of flak for this. Because the BBC is now reporting that they’ve released a tool to remove it.

I’ve just tried it and can confirm that it removed the album from my list of hidden purchases, so the tool does appear to do the trick. If you want to completely nuke the album out of your library, go to the link mentioned in the BBC article and follow its instructions.

I hope now that this will be a lesson unto Apple about not messing with user data like that in the future. And hopefully next time they want to do a massive promotional giveaway like that, they’ll actually, y’know, tell people. As I said before, if a massively famous band like U2 wants to give their album away for free, more power to ’em, but they need to make sure that recipients actually know it’s going to come to them BEFORE it shows up in their libraries, and they should make sure the recipients actually WANT it.

September 15, 2014 by
The Internet

This is not encouraging me to listen to U2

So there I was reading my feed of articles coming off the Mary Sue when I saw they’d put up this: “101 Things We Wish Apple Gave Us Instead of That U2 Album and How to Get Rid of It”.

And my immediate reaction was “wait, WHAT?” And I found another article on Ars Technica, here.

Because apparently not only did U2 hand their album out for free over iTunes as part of Apple’s big event this week, the album’s also now been added to everybody’s iTunes libraries.

And sorry, Apple, sorry, U2, but that’s just obnoxious. If the band wants to hand out their album for free, dandy, more power to them. Promote the hell out of it and tell everybody on iTunes ‘hey look! A free thing! Click here to get the free thing!’ And stand back and watch the downloads roll in, because sure, people like free things.

But you know what people don’t like? Editing their online data without their consent.

I just logged into my iTunes account and clicked on ‘Purchases’, and yep, there it is, right there at the top of my recent purchase list. Except I didn’t ask for the damn thing. I don’t want it. Even aside from the matter of how I’m not a fan of this particular band or of most rock in general–’cause as you all know, if your band doesn’t have a fiddle player and at least one bouzouki, I do not care–the thing that annoys me here is the editing of my account data. And giving me no way to delete it, either. It’s useless data to me. It’s taking up space in my purchase history, and okay yeah fine I can apparently ‘hide’ it, but my point is, you shouldn’t be messing with user data like that to begin with.

And okay yeah sure fine, the album does not appear to have actually shown up on my phone; I’ll need to check my computer to see if it showed up there. And I’m aware that there’s an easy answer here: “if you don’t want the album, Anna, don’t download it or listen to it”.

Thing is? If that album shows up on my computer without me having asked for it in the first place, that’s pretty much the equivalent of Apple not only standing on the street yelling FREE ALBUM GET YER FREE ALBUM HERE, but actually walking up to people and stuffing CDs into their pockets, no matter how you try to say “NO THANK YOU”.

It’s not a big problem in the grand scheme of things. It’s absolutely a petty first world problem.

But dammit, have some respect for the integrity of your user data, Apple. Don’t go stuffing things into our pockets that we didn’t actually ask you for. You wouldn’t do that if we walked into your Apple Stores in person, would you? (You’d BETTER not.) So don’t do it online either.

ETA: Okay, further investigation shows that this album does not appear to have actually invaded my iTunes library, no doubt because I do not actually have Automatic Downloads turned on. I am however hearing from friends that THEY have had it show up. userinfoscrunchions tells me it startled her quite a bit because she KNEW she hadn’t purchased any U2, and for a long bit there she was afraid she’d gotten hacked somehow until she saw the news going around about the promotion.

The takeaway here: I don’t care what you’re promoting. I don’t care if it’s the finest album in the history of music. Any promotion that alarms your users and makes them think their account security might have been compromised is seriously not cool.

September 11, 2014 by
Main

Are musicians better language learners?

I got into an interesting online discussion with Dara and our friend Rod, pertaining to recent research indicating that early musical instruction in childhood contributes to one’s language skills, by improving one’s ability to recognize meaningful sounds and reject noise.

As I am both a language geek and a music geek, you can imagine that this subject is of interest to me! So I went googling and found this article from back in February of this year, which talks a bit about this. According to this article, people who have early musical instruction have a better shot at learning languages even in adulthood.

Now me, I don’t know how well I match up to this, but it’s very interesting to consider nonetheless. I started playing flute in fourth grade, which would have been the year I turned ten. By age 12, I was in middle school band and I pretty quickly took over the first chair of the flute section, holding onto it until my eighth grade year when I was trumped by the girl who could play oboe.

I didn’t get to take language classes until high school, though. By then I’d had six years of school band, and it’s a very interesting question as to whether that musical instruction helped me out learning German. I had interest in German regardless–but it’s worth noting that I chose German partly because a) my dad had been stationed in Germany when he was in the Marines, and b) Elvis had been in Germany. He even had a bridge in one of his songs in German, and that was a not inconsiderable part of why I chose to take German instead of, say, Spanish. Even then, my language interest had a musical connection.

The language interest stayed with me into my adulthood and has certainly formed a significant part of my computer experience, since I do a lot of testing of stuff localized into other languages. A big part of that is pattern recognition, especially if the thing I’m testing is in Japanese–I have to rely on visual pattern matching just because Japanese characters don’t parse as ‘letters’ to me. So it’s a different kind of pattern matching than, say, on our German or French sites, where I know enough of the words that I can actually understand a good bit of what I see.

But that’s also visual pattern recognition. Part of what Dara and Rod and I talked about had to do with how this plays against aural pattern recognition in music–and whether the ability to learn patterns aurally in music affects your ability to match patterns visually, and vice versa. Does ability to read sheet music help you when you’re trying to learn to read a new language? Does ability to pick up on the structure of a song, or on a smaller scale certain repeated patterns of notes, help you identify recognizable patterns in spoken language? Do they all play well together in your brain?

I’m no researcher. But I can say this. It does all feel connected to me–I’ve absolutely noticed it all seeming to tie together as I’ve been studying French the last couple of years, as I’ve posted about before. Listening to a lot of Quebec trad improves my ability to aurally pattern-match words, and at the same time it’s got the song structure of the genre working in there too. Not only is Quebec trad heavily call-and-response driven, there are also distinct structures to songs, like the ones where you sing the last line of a verse and have that same line roll over to become the first line of the next verse.

And I’ve absolutely noticed that words or phrases I learn as part of a song have a much better chance at staying with me, too. They’re the ones most likely to pop out at me when I’m slowly stepping my way through reading something in French, or when I’m listening to a brand new song as well. Or if I’m reading the lyrics to a song, too.

Plus, I’ve been trying to use pattern recognition to learn to pick up tunes by ear in a session environment, too. It feels like a very similar skill to matching words–because there’s a definite grammar of how note patterns work in trad tunes, and I find myself slowly trying to learn that grammar and match it up with what I need to do on my flutes to make the correct noises. It feels exactly like trying to pick words that make sense out of spoken or sung French.

And I love the lot of it! Anybody else out there have similar experience?

September 11, 2014 by
Movies

15 Film Challenge meme, Part 1

I got tagged on a 15 Film Challenge meme on Facebook, and since I don’t tag people on memes as a general rule, and since I have Opinions on this in general, I thought I’d make this a blog post. A few blog posts, in fact, since like I said, OPINIONS.

So here you go, my 15 all-time favorite films, Part 1! Here are the first three!

Best. Movie. EVER.

Best. Movie. EVER.

1) Raiders of the Lost Ark

(Because in my house, it’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, dammit, not Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. I don’t care what it says on the Blu-rays. Which I do own. Because yes, I have this movie in multiple formats. Laserdisc AND DVD AND Blu-ray. DON’T JUDGE!)

This should surprise exactly NONE of you, particularly those of you who spent any length of time roleplaying with me on any MUSHes, and were accordingly familiar with my longstanding fangirling of Harrison Ford. This was the movie that did it, with a strong helping hand from The Empire Strikes Back.

I love every frame of this movie, and every single character interaction. Especially the characters, and especially Marion. Marion was the template for how I played Shenner on Star Wars MUSH. It doesn’t suck either that this was Harrison Ford at the absolute apex of his swoonability. There were reasons I spent a long span of time on roleplaying MUSHes swooning hardcore over characters who were based on Ford, and the first and foremost of these reasons was Indiana Jones.

Musically, this movie also has a strong and special place in my heart. John Williams did a splendid job on the soundtrack for this one, and every time I listen to it, I can’t help smiling. Especially because I have fond memories of playing the Raiders March in middle school band, because there’s a particular sweet, prolonged note on the violins in the final track that is the very first time I remember swooning to the sound of violins, and because I happily match up every note of the soundtrack to the corresponding action in the movie.

2) The Lord of the Rings trilogy

This would be #1 on my list if Raiders of the Lost Ark didn’t exist, and it’s a HARD call to make, I assure you! But if you’ve followed my blog or its mirrors for more than five minutes, you know what a big raving Tolkien geek I am. I have to take the whole trilogy together, too, because it is after all one great big story.

Suffice to say, I’m entirely on board with Jackson’s realization of Middle-Earth. I could devote entire weeks of posts to all the various reasons I love these films so much, but I’ve already recently posted about all the bits in them that make me sob. That I regularly re-watch them AND keep crying over them is all by itself a huge indicator of how much these movies have meant to me every since they came out.

And as with Raiders, the music is critical here as well. Howard Shore did masterful work on this soundtrack and I would give much to be in an orchestra that performs works from it, just once.

3) Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

O My Captain

O My Captain

Russell Crowe has been the only actor to date to ever surpass Mr. Ford for my fangirling affections, and while I’ve loved a great many films Crowe’s been in, Master and Commander is my hands-down, uncontested favorite. It beats out Gladiator, even though Gladiator was the first Crowe film I ever saw in a theater and what made me a Crowe fangirl to begin with, because I do rewatch this one semi-regularly.

Jack and Stephen are wonderful. The story is wonderful. And yet again, the music is critical. I always adored that Crowe made a point of learning how to make coherent noises on a violin to lend his portrayal of Jack additional weight, and I love the bits where he and Paul Bettany play their instruments. Mutual love of music is what made these characters become friends, and Crowe and Bettany do a splendid job of communicating their love of music throughout this movie.

The soundtrack’s a joy to listen to, too.

You may be seeing a common thread here to my top favorite films, and if you’re saying “music”, you would be correct. Just about all of my top favorites are important to me because of musical strength. But I’m also putting in a thought to how often I rewatch them, and whether they involve top favorite actors, and whether I’ve done any fan activity based on them (e.g., MUSHing).

Next post on this to come as I think about the next ones on the list! Expect more Harrison Ford, more Russell Crowe, Elvis, MST3K, and Superman!

September 10, 2014 by
Television

Doctor Who 08.03 “Robot of Sherwood” reaction post

After a bit of a shaky start to this new season of Doctor Who, it was a bit of a relief to have an episode that I actively enjoyed pretty much all the way through. It was certainly silly, but really, I was okay with that. And now I’m actually starting to like Capaldi’s Doctor as well. Don’t get me wrong–I’ve already found him compelling. But in this episode, I actually liked him too.

Spoilers are in the magic box!

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September 8, 2014 by
Rebels of Adalonia

For those of you who have read Valor and Vengeance

I need to do a post on Here Be Magic tomorrow, so I’d like to do a roundup of random interesting worldbuilding trivia about the setting of Valor of the Healer and Vengeance of the Hunter!

So if you’ve read either or both of the books, and you have questions about any aspect of the world, drop me a comment and I’ll include it in the post that’ll go up tomorrow on the Here Be Magic blog!

September 3, 2014 by
Television

Doctor Who 08.02 “Into the Dalek” reaction post

This was in our household’s consensus opinion pretty much not a good followup to the season opener. Which is a shame, because we like Capaldi, and we’re now hoping he’s not going to be wasted on inferior scripts.

My main beef with it? I’ve been hearing rumblings going around about how this season is supposed to be darker, and how this Doctor is supposed to be more morally ambiguous–except the questions raised in this episode are all questions we’ve seen raised before in far better episodes. And not to mention that we’ve seen the whole “shrinking down to go inside something” plot before. Hell, this thing even namechecked Fantastic Voyage!

Spoilers behind the fold!

(ETA: And oh hey, Dara’s got her own reaction post up. That she has chosen to illustrate her points with screencaps from Lost in Space pretty much sums up what you can expect in her reaction!)

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September 1, 2014 by