In case you haven’t seen it, the next Rolling Stone magazine has the girls from MTV’s The Hills on the cover.

Really? The girls from The Hills? That’s the best Rolling Stone could do this week? Wow. Really?

Look, I realize that criticizing Rolling Stone for abandoning their original music-oriented mission by putting actors, models and other non-musicians on the cover started in earnest over twenty years ago, when Jann Wenner started putting his Hollywood buddies on the cover, so this isn’t about that.

I don’t really have an issue with their long-ago morphing into a general pop-culture magazine. After all, had they stuck to just covering music, we wouldn’t have had Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe or PJ O’Rourke or Matt Taibbi, just to name a few non-music writers that they’ve featured over the years.

Nor do I have an issue with them trying to stay relevant for what is now the third generation of kids they’re trying to deal with. New generations have new popular culture icons, I get that. Maybe these girls are the Kurt Cobain or Johnny Depp of the Millennial Generation.

Maybe. So why does this week’s cover feel like a new low?

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Cambot! Edition

Todays links of interest:

• The surprising narrative richness of Grand Theft Auto IV
  This is just of an example of the types of reviews being written by this game, which currently holds an unheard-of score of 99 at Metacritic.
• Del Rey Offers Free Download of First Book in Legacy of the Force Series
  Note to Kirk: this will really help you with those annoying gaps in knowledge.
• WB Network to Return as a Web Site
  Unlike the CW, WB thinks maybe kids might be watching television on the their computers.

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Robot Roll Call! Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Did Hannah Jump or Was She Pushed?
  Kinda find the whole controversy a bit silly. Go to any swimming pool anywhere and you’ll see more skin on teenage girls than Cyrus showed in this pix. Of course she knew what she was doing, on every level.
• Audible Announces New Imprint and Exclusive Agreements with Orson Scott Card and Other Top Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers
  Neat! “It’s easy for great novels and novellas to get lost in the bookstore - not everything can get front-of-store display!” Card said. “That’s what I’ll be doing with ‘OSC Selects’ - moving new and classic sci-fi and fantasy right to the front, so fans will have a better chance of noticing terrific stories performed by first-rate readers.”

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Okay, I really don’t like the ABC video player. As we continue our living-without-cable/satellite/rabbit ears experiment, we’re trying out all the video services being offered by the major players. I’ve grudgingly conceded that Hulu does a good job, though it still has problems.

The CBS Innertube, while cleverly named, was a rank disappointment. Friends have assured us that you can pause without reverting to the beginning of a show (or a middle that makes no sense), so we might give it another go. I simply wasn’t that fond of the experience beginning to end.

Last week, in honor of the return of Lost, we decided to check out ABC’s version of free online video service. Like the others, this does what it does in an okay manner. Streaming video, especially across a cable connection, isn’t going to be perfect. We are in the nascency of this technology.
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Suck It Monkeys, I’m Going Corporate! Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Always Trying to Waste Me: The Rolling Stones’ "Cocksucker Blues"
  A long look at one of the most infamous rock documentaries never released. Also: I still miss "Deadwood."
• Battlestar Galactica Theme Redone a Cappella
  Neither as good or funny as hoped for. But still.
• Study: Teens say e-text isn’t writing
  But it is, it’s just a different type of writing for a different type of medium. Like how teens speak differently in front of each other than they do in front of their parents. In an era where the President of the United States tells the Pope of the Catholic Church that his speech was "awesome," is it any surprise this kind of informality rules? Nor is it necessarily a bad thing: languages evolve or die. The guess here is that some of those acronyms, short cuts, etc. will get absorbed into the larger language and some won’t.

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Pudding Power Activate! Edition

Todays links of interest:

• STARTREK.COM
  Still dead, though they fixed the image with the release date of the film, no doubt because JJ Abrams went down to CBS and screamed at some people.
• Create Your Own YouTube, Pray You Can Make Money
  As if there weren’t already enough YouTube clones. Still, we’re not ruling out LopeTube.
• PTC Takes Issue With CW ‘Gossip’ Campaign
  OMMFG! PTC STFU!

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A while back, Kirk wrote an article called “Prepare for the Worst: 4 Simple Digital Media Backup Solutions.” One of the options was the digital Music Locker at MP3tunes, where you could upload your music and store it, secure and password-protected.

This is not file-sharing. File-sharing is, of course, the digital equivalent of what music fans have been doing since the dawn of time: turning other people on to music they love. This is really the exact opposite: it is more akin to locking your music in a safe deposit vault, where only you have the key.

Apparently, EMI didn’t think so, and sued MP3tunes, essentially trying to shut down online storage of music for any purpose whatsoever.

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Making Plans . . . Very Slowly Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Into the Void: John Darnielle on Sabbath, Extreme Metal, and Indie Rock
  Personally, I think that Sabotage would have been the album to do, but that’s just me.
• UC Santa Cruz slated to get archives of Grateful Dead
  Ten years from now: "Dude, do your remember where the Dead Archives are?" "No way man, I thought that you had them."
• Google introduces brand-image ads for phones
  Golly!

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What Are We Gonna Do? Edition

Todays links of interest:

• DRM sucks redux: Microsoft to nuke MSN Music DRM keys
  Not long ago a "DRM expert" assured me that this sort of thing never really happens. I bet this feels pretty real to the people who are losing their music libraries.
• American Idol Betting Odds : Andrew Lloyd Webber week
  It’s Andrew Lloyd Webber week on American Idol?!?! Ahhh, for the halcyon days of Mariah Carey week.
• Life span shorter in parts of U.S.
  Apparently the primary causes are: The Bush Administration, DRM, Reality TV, Charter Cable, FOX News, Microsoft, the new TWoP Redesign, Zillionaires who sue their fans, the San Francisco Giants, the PTC, the endless Democratic Primaries, Big Oil, and that Muse song that sounds exactly like Styx that they keep playing on KROQ especially when I’m in the shower and can’t change the godsdammed channel!

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Into The Outerspace Edition

Todays links of interest:

• Artistic License
  Hilarious, and one of those "can’t believe that nobody thought of this sooner deals. (via Boing-Boing)
• Tiki Bar TV - Episode 17 - Space Cadet
  Part 1 of a thrilling two-part series. Posting this for two reasons: 1) it has Nicki Clyne — Cally on Battlestar Galactica, silly! — as an alien who needs to get back to her home in The Outerspace. 2) Kirk needs to know about anything called "Tiki Bar TV."
• Despite Talk of Ethics Codes, Airbrushing Is Here to Stay
  Phew! We thought we’d have to see our celebrities as they are in real life and, frankly, that’s too scary to contemplate.

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