Is this my life? Maybe so.

I told you it would become my motto! I'm typing this from my spacious new room, with a security camera watching me at all times, unless I go to the very back corner of the room. That's where I'll have to smoke my ganja from now on. The security camera is there because of what they temporarily turned the place into while I was gone -- the "high-dollar" merchandise area. It's unlikely that the powers that be will be wasting time watching me in here unless something is stolen, in which case they will probably look back at the tapes from the time in question and confirm that I indeed did not steal anything. So the camera means exoneration for me, unless they are watching me at all times and seeing me constantly posting to this blog. But they knew that already if they've been checking my internet logs like they should.

Last night I taped Alias and the season finale of Lost. As for Lost, I'm going to see if you can only watch 1/2 hour of a show's season and then pick up everything right when it gets interesting at the end. It should be an interesting experiment. My prediction? I'll give up 10 minutes into it. Alias should be fun, though -- it's a special double episode. Ooo dang. But unless there are only 21 episodes this season, I don't think it was the finale. That should be next week. And I should have my impressions of season 4 after the finale wraps everything up. So far, it's "different from but the same as" earlier seasons, which is right in sync with how the show usually is. They seem to have tried to make each episode more self-contained, with less umbrella story arcs.

For the second time in a couple of months, a site I like to download TV episodes from has cowered before the might of the MPAA. I went to the site and I saw an accursed godaddy.com splash page there instead of the usual friendly torrents. It's sick. If TV producers and execs would just embrace the technology of bittorrent* instead of fearing it (i.e., uploading some "official" torrents themselves with commercials -- which would effectively be "TV on demand"), they could make lots of money and make everyone happy. Instead, they're just being TV jerks about the whole thing. I found a site in Sweeden, though, that works because Sweeden's TV copyright laws work properly. I'm trying to get the Survior finale right now. Hopefully it won't be in Swedish. Although that would be funny.

*Bittorrent is a peer-to-peer technology designed to securely deliver huge downloads. It does not work by the traditional P2P search, it works through "torrents" that are like gateways to a particular file. The sites that are being closed down are "trackers", which are simply a listing of torrents. No content is hosted on these sites, it's being hosted on the computers of others who are downloading it. As you download, other people start to download from you. Cool, eh? TV doesn't think so. I suppose their main problem with it is lack of advertising revenue (since the files you get always have the commercials ripped out), but since they provide no on-demand alternative, what's a 5-nights-a-week working fool to do? Use 30-year-old VCR technology (currently my only alternative)? Why is TIVO legal but not P2P show trading? We need to make a distinction between actual stealing (making copies of a DVD and selling them at 1/3 the cost, for example) and helpful trading. The sad part is, I'm still going to buy the DVD's for Alias, The Simpsons and Arrested Development, and rent the DVD's of several other shows from Netflix. What kind of fool am I?