The Few, The Proud, The Pirates

What really makes a great movie? Actors, special effects, a great director, an amazing advertising campaign? Death surely needs to be up there. No midnight movie premiere has any business making $18,500,000 at midnight. Simple math would dictate that at $10 per ticket (average), 1.85 million assholes sat outside in lines to go see this movie, all because Heath Ledger, an actor who was never really praised for much other than Brokeback Mountain, and maybe 10 Things I Hate About You.

I’ll give the aforementioned Heath Ledger one thing, he did play a hell of a schizophrenic lunatic, which might not have been too far from the truth, considering he died from a mixture of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam, and doxylamine… Okay, when someone takes that many prescriptions in a short enough time for all of them to interact with one another, there’s an issue. Just look at the guy, the eyes, they’re crazy. No denying the eyes.

Now, in all honesty, Heath Ledger played a great part, and probably would’ve had a lot of hype had he not eaten a bucket of pills, but it definitely adds hype. Same with Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G., and Kurt Cobain. They all were nominally good, had decent followings, but after they died, everyone felt they needed to pay an eternal tribute to them.

Tupac Shakur, the biggest example of capitalizing on someone’s death, put out SIX albums after his death, even though he had only put out five studio albums while he was alive.  The Notorious B.I.G. had three, albeit one a Greatest Hits Album. Kurt Cobain had no studio albums put out after his death, thank Christ (the music sucked, seriously guys), but he did have a book of his “poetry”, ramblings, and random bullshit that only because popular because he popped his top off, a few documentaries, and thousands of Seattleites crying that he was actually murdered.

My main point in this blog is, why does death make everyone an icon? Especially Ledger and Cobain, who made irrational decisions to end their lives. Why do we make them heroic figures? Why do we buy their shit, further enabling the people capitalizing on their unfortunate deaths?

Ledger will win a few Oscars, an Academy Award, and every other award, only because he died. His performance wasn’t that good; it just had a mystique because we all know he died.

After getting to work and browsing my favorite sites and blogs, I came across this TorrentFreak article regarding Newzbin, a very popular index host located in the UK.

After taking a while, sitting back, and rationalizing this. I decided to visit Newzbin and see some of their services, I’m an admitted “intermediate” Usenet user, but I can navigate pretty efficiently. When I navigated over to this site, I immediately noticed all sorts of goodies laying out for the public to see.

Nothing is downloadable unless you register (by invitation only), which sends me to this thought. What is it about the MPAA (and their other *AA associates) that make them only care about the indexers? I’ve heard little to no bickering over the Usenet providers that charge you access to their servers, and usually have the most up-to-date content for all your pillaging needs. Is it the fact that they’re shielded from public view? Or is it just that the RIAA is too damn lazy to go figure Usenet out?

Whatever it is, I hope that the bullying of Newzbin doesn’t scare them into going offline, it’s about time someone stands beside ThePirateBay in the fight.