I know that the below Houston financial supporters of Prop 8 are likely proud of helping take away GLBT civil rights, so I’ve decided to acknowledge them for their efforts. Listed are their names, zip codes, the amount they gave and the date they gave in support of prop 8.
I’ve been a member of Audible.com for more than a year now. I’ve been very happy with the service until today. Now I think I’ll close my account.
For those of you that don’t know, Audible is an audio book retailer. Since I’m busy, I like to listen to books while I drive, clean, etc.
Recently, my computer crashed and I had to reinstall everything. Today I purchased a book and since I had not yet installed the Audible downloader program, I streamed the book directly from the audible site this morning while I went about my routine. Tonight I downloaded the Audible program download and itunes for my ipod and reinstalled them.
Tonight I thought I’d do some cleaning, so I try to listen to the book I bought. Upon trying to listen to my book, I got an error message that basically read, “To cut down on piracy, we only authorize 3 devices to pay your purchases. If you are seeing this message, you must unauthorized one of your devices.” I thought, “Well that’s fucked.” So, I went to the Audible.com site to unauthorized a device. After mucking through the support site, I found that they require that I have access to the offending machine… which is across town. The instructions tell me to call customer service if I don’t have access to machine I wish to unauthorized. So I call… Only to find out that their customer service office is already closed and won’t be open again until Monday. I go back to their site and find their help desk. So I fill out a ticket and submit it. I get an email saying that they will get back to me on Monday.
Since I couldn’t play the download file, I decided to go back to simply streaming it like I did this morning. I download the steaming file and… I get the same goddamn message telling me that the corporation will not allow me access to the content I own because they don’t want me to listen to it using this computer.
At this point I’m calling bullshit.
If I purchase a CD, I can listen to it on any player, computer or in my car. If I purchase the exact same content in a digital download format, I apparently have to deal with Big Corporate Brother telling me what device I can and can’t use. Furthermore, to use the particular device I want, it seems that I have to beg Big Corporate Brother to let me do it… when it’s convenient for them.
This is why people use pirated content. Apparently the way it works is, if I dish out money to buy things the right way, I get to deal with a corporation telling me when, where and how I can use the content I own. If I elect to use pirated content, it’s free and I get to use it wherever and however I like. At this point I’m pissed enough to start looking for copyright busting programs so that I can bust the copyright “protection” on the files I bought so that I can listen to the damn things instead of waiting until Monday morning so that I can call a corporation to get their blessing to listen to the book I paid for.
So, what’s the best program to convert aax files to MP3?
So, I recently bought some things for the TG archive. I chipped in to get the original Michel Marie Poulain painting, but I also picked up a few things that I wanted to donate to the community’s knowledge-base.
First of all, I like understanding pop-culture since it seems to serve as a explicit breakpoint in the culture, defining it from previous generations. In other words, pop-culture is, IMHO, a strong indicator of where the zeitgeist was during the evolution of culture.
A strong indicator seems of where the zeitgeist is heading can, I think, be found in teen pop-culture. I think this is the subconscious drive behind all the so-called "Save the children" BS. What do the fringe groups want to save the children from? Well, that’d be the removal of toxic-shame stigma from the GLBT community. They want to preserve heterosexism.
Anyway, I digress… I was interested in adding some of these TG zeitgeist indicators to the archive:
Mantra #1 – 23
Mantra was published by Malibu Comics in the mid 1990s, until it was purchased by Marvel Comics which promptly killed the publication of Mantra. The story is that a guy (wizard) was killed and reincarnated into the body of a woman with mystical powers. Gender, sexuality and social norms are all explored in the context of this comic.
Presumably, this is a Spanish remake of the German film, Viktor und Viktoria (1933) which later became the 1982 film, Victor Victoria.
Let Me Die a Woman, 1977
This is a fake(ish) documentary (kinda like faces of death) exploitation film. The film interviews Dr. Leo Wollman (an actual Dr that worked with TGs) as well as TG people. The film mixes the real interviews with fake surgical scenes that hooked people into gawking at the film.
Ranma 1/2 Cell
This is an actual production cell from the Ranma 1/2 anime.
Basara # 4 and 6
FTM manga – deals with themes of gender, sexuality, social norms and the trauma of pretending to be the gender that’s opposite to one’s real gender.
Penguin Revolution # 1- 7
MTF manga – About a boy (who’s actually famous) who goes to school dressed as a girl. The series deals with questions of truth, boundaries, trust and the personas.
Princess Princess #4
MTF manga – Another manga about boys who are put into a situation where they learn about cultural gender stratifications. I was only able to find this copy.
Nephilim # 1 – 2
MTF/FTM manga – This is about someone from a mystical tribe of people who live as male by day and female by night. A hunter of these people falls in love with the female version of this person. The manga explores assumptions about gender, sexuality and homo-transphobia
