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every now and then, i answer some questions.

Lee, again, asks:

the glock comes in at like 1.5 seconds doesn’t it haha? … at 1:30 def some glock =D.

oh that. no i think thats some kind of bad electronic congo sound i pulled from some drum machine.

Eric asks:

Does listening to your songs grant me access to any musical “prestige classes”, or am i going to have to earn experience points by defeating Isaac Hayes with my +5 Vorpal Amplifier of Serious Smoothness first?

clever. i see what you did there, eric.

oh, d&d, how i miss you. my regular d&d group hasn’t played for around 6 months – one of the dudes went and had a baby and it RUINED EVERYTHING. no, that’s not true. i’m sure the birth was just a coincidence. still… a pox on you and your child.

my dungeons & dragons character is theo, he is a carmendine monk wandering the forgotten realms with his brothers. he comes from an order of monks known as the zealots of the written word, they combine kung fu knowledge with wizardry. technically, he is a conjurer. he carries a masterwork kama and has some messed up special abilities. like, four times a day, he can teleport 10 feet immediately in any direction. very handy in melee.

one of his favourite spells is glitterdust – one of the campest spells invented ever, theo rubs his fingers together and then his opponents are covered in glittery gold fairy dust, temporarily blinded. another of his favourite spells is belker claws – claws of smoke jut out from his hands and tear into a nearby enemy causing severe damage. i like to imagine him doing some kind of kung fu flourish at this point.

did i mention he bears a striking resemblance to an adult malcolm jamal-warner?

i’m a fuckin bad-ass

theo and his pals are currently poised on a cliffhanger – at the end of our last session we were about to have our asses handed to us by miscellaneous demons entering an evil church via recently opened gates of hell. should have seen it coming really.

if you want to play theo in your own campaigns – and trust me, you do – here is theo’s character sheet.

send your questions to asktim@iamfauxpas.com. i’ll quote your first name on the blog unless you request anonymity.

been quiet for a bit – if you’re reading this, it means i’ve successfully moved web hosts. iamfauxpas is now proudly slutted up against the unbearably fetishisable (mt), and we’ll see how that goes. so far, its sexy.

speaking of sexy. idol. i got into it this year. what fascinated me this year of all years? drunk astroboy? andrew g’s obvious battles with the wardrobe and hair departments – dude did his best to show how NOT to wear a suit as a man who isn’t stick thin like drunk astroboy. unbutton your jacket, dude, i kept screaming at the television. andrew g cuts a fine figure but spent most of the season looking like a barrel wearing a suit with an andrew g head stuck on top.

i was also bewitched by ricki-lee to some extent, i’m still not entirely sure why. strike that. i know exactly why.

did i ever tell you i wandered the streets of perth one night with a microphone and a cardboard andrew g mask? yeah that was ME interviewing you while we queued up to get into that bar

i didn’t really pledge allegiance anywhere during the show’s run but i think in the end my favourite was the husky melburnian foghorn leghorn.

i was as intrigued by his shocking resemblance to foghorn leghorn as i was disappointed by his failure to sing “campdown races” not even once during the course of the show.

for real. mark spano, your sex was on fire. buff dude from “the lost boys”, your sax is on fire. (thanks yerock)

a must-read article over at wired.com, surveying the effectiveness (or rather the damage done by) the RIAA’s five-year litigation campaign against individual p2p users. over five years, the RIAA has sued over 30,000 Americans for piracy – and only one case has actually made it to court:

Despite a fallow legal landscape, most defendants cannot afford attorneys and settle for a few thousand dollars rather than risk losing even more, Beckerman says. “There are still very few people fighting back as far as the litigation goes and they settle.”

“It costs more to hire a lawyer to defend these cases than take the settlement,” agrees Lory Lybeck, a Washington State attorney, who is leading a prospective class-action against the RIAA for engaging in what he says is “sham” litigation tactics. “That’s an important part of what’s going on. The recording industry is setting a price where they know you cannot hire lawyers. It’s a pretty well-designed system whereby people are not allowed any effective participation in one of the three prongs in the federal government.”

only one RIAA file sharing case has gone to court – that of minnesota mom jammie thomas who was last year ordered by a jury to pay over $200,000 for sharing 24 songs on her home computer. that verdict was overturned last month when the judge from the original case had second thoughts and declared a mistrial – so a court victory for the RIAA is still proving elusive despite having had 5 years to land a guilty verdict.

30,000 pirates settling out of court with the RIAA for a few thousand dollars each – that amounts to a sum of money but surely not even remotely enough $$ to cover the costs of their ongoing litigation campaign. never mind the fact that the money is not redistributed to the artists whose music is at the heart of the debate. the litigation was never about the money, but just about instilling more of that homespun fear into the already beleaguered hearts of americans:

The RIAA admits that the lawsuits are largely a public relations effort… Spokeswoman Cara Duckworth of the RIAA says the lawsuits have spawned a “general sense of awareness” that file sharing copyrighted music without authorization is “illegal.”

yeah, a “general sense of awareness” that if the RIAA decides on a whim to match your IP address to your kazaa profile, and you happen to have been sharing a couple of sade tracks and maybe something from lenny kravitz, you’ll be paying them a monthly stipend of $110 until february 2013.

the most surreal aspect of this – something absurd enough to make me think twice as to whether its some kind of piss-take – is that litigation targets can settle their lawsuit online at www.p2plawsuits.com:

This site will guide you through the settlement process for your case. You can pay the settlement by credit card, using either Mastercard, Visa or Discover. If you wish to pay the settlement by cashier’s check, you will need to telephone one of our settlement representatives.

In order to process your settlement, you will need to have your case identification number. That number appears above the salutation of the letter sent to you by the record companies.

is this for real? or are anti-RIAA crusaders subtly trying to undermine the litigators through the art of really lame web design?

here is the full wired article on the riaa’s 5-year litigation campaign.

a couple of great reads that i found over at the new yorker: a completely engrossing 8,000+ word interview with alec baldwin…

He bought a coffee at Starbucks, where a young woman said something nice about “30 Rock.” “I do feel I’m entering that Clinton phase,” he said after we left. “I’m fifty. There are women who’ll go up to a young movie star and they’ll look at him, like, ‘There are certain things I really want to do with you, and it’s pretty plain to anyone why I’d want to do them with you.’ And then there are people who look at me now, at my age, and they’ll look at me and the look is ‘I can’t explain why, because it’s kind of strange . . .’ It confounds and perplexes even them. ‘In spite of the fact that you don’t look like a young leading man anymore, I’d quite like to throw you down on this blanket right now.’ A bit of that.”

…and a particularly succinct (if perhaps a little breathless) pro-Obama editorial. if you know any swing voters, send them to this link…

By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.

i’m very excited that obama is going to be the president because he is going to fix climate change, terrorism, the economy and basically eliminate famine, injustice and evil. this will take about 2 weeks. then he will take us aboard the mothership and we will all transcend into the singularity.

something else that got my attention over the weekend: a new dvd documentary on arthur lee and love is coming out. hooray!

sorry for the silence. got real busy all of a sudden. normal transmission again soon.

in the meantime, check this out if you are near a computer in the next 8 hours or so:

As part of Melbourne’s Digital Fringe, Netlag sees Audiovisual collectives Plug N Play and Share Outpost, both of whom run regular Melbourne events, combining forces for one night, and extending their experiments to the internet – connecting to performances from other cities, as well as the net-connected roving Mobile Projection Unit.

its a big live audiovisual mish-mash across 5 cities (melb, perth, brisbane, tokyo, NYC). if, like me, you can’t make it to Horze Bazaar in melbourne tonight (or the Tiger Tiger Bar in perth) to see it come together live, tune in to the live webcast at http://netlag.com.au. featuring jean poole (http://www.skynoise.net/) and thugquota (http://www.myspace.com/thugquota) from melbourne, and over in new york – peter kirn, who is the man behind the formidable create digital music and create digital motion

EDIT: its all over now…