Third Anniversary Special/2002

Web Sites You Should Be Reading

Never Mind the Pop-Up Ads, it's X-Entertaiment.com!

I know who reads Evil Robots, and I have a sneaking suspicion that not many people read my articles. I also know Evil Robots core demographic: the grown-up suburban children of the 1980's! Evil Robots does not cater to the N'Sync loving youths, or Gen-x'ers who were in elementary school in the 1970's. No, we are the kids who played with Staw Wars action figures, eat Smurfberry Crunch cereal, loved ninjas, Apple 2-E's, GI Joe, and the Transformers.

But alas, we publish monthly, not daily, and we waste time with stories about Gary Condit and city planning. We are a product of the decade in which we grew up, but we spend little time remembering it on this site. Part of that is because of lack of motivation, the other reason is because someone already does it, and better than we could.

More than any other site on the web I know of, www.x-entertainment.com gives respect to an era with witty and well written essays about TV commercials, shows, road trips, magical games of Candyland, and much more. Matt, the creator, updated almost daily. (He is known to be missing for long stretches of time, but that is because he has a life.) With additional short articles about animals or action figures popping up all the time, it is worth checking daily for updates.

Matt has been writing on a very regular basis for UGO.com as well, and you can find movie reviews and stories about movie premiers he has attended.

Any child of the 80's cannot afford to avoid this site.

A warning about pop-up adds. You will get one or two pop-up adds when you go to the site, but don't worry, it is not as annoying as the Washington Post or New York Times' infernal pop-up adds, and the site is a million times more informative. Also, the pop-up adds allow him to keep providing us with his terrific content without having to beg for money. So if you really like his site, go gamble some money away. It's for a good cause.

IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE:
Speaking of money, web-based radio stations will need tons of it soon. In 1998, the congress passed a bill which requires web-based radio stations to pay royalties to record companies for the songs that they play. The charge is by times played and how many people listened to the broadcast. The Librarian of Congress is going to decide the per song rate that these stations will be forced to pay to stay on the web.

For streaming music stations all over the world, this is going to be devastating. If the charge is too high, stations will disappear, if the cost is too low, executives may get angry and do evil things to children. I listen to a couple of stations on a regular basis. One of the stations, dublab.com is asking listeners to give them small donations, or Proton Grants, to help the station stay afloat. You should give a little - through PayPal - to help keep the music playing.

This is not like the Napster situation. While you get the music for free, you cannot copy it because it is streaming music. If you want to hear the music on demand, you still need to buy the CD (or get it on Audiogalaxy.) Regardless, the recording industry, with help from it's copious donations to their friends in Congress, passed a regulation to make small, independent streaming music providers pay to share the music they love.

I have nothing against artists wanting to get paid for the music they made. But individual consumers sharing music with other potential consumers does not appear to be a threat to me.

So before you write to congress to complain about the situation, you should make a donation to your favorite independent streaming music provider. Maybe they will last long enough to be around to see music be free again.