Sharing music over the Internet is almost a teenager these days. It’s turning twelve this summer, and a certain pubescent maturity is starting to kick in. There’s hair down there now.

And like all things reaching maturity, it’s suddenly not so easy for the adults to start bossing it around. This can be seen in Amazon’s new Cloud Player. Nilay Patel writes an excellent article explaining why the recording industry’s lawsuit against Amazon is, basically, groundless:

If you’re a Cloud Player customer, you get a defined 5GB or 20GB of storage, and the music that lives in that storage is your copy. Your copy that you’re allowed to make. It’s not “functionally equivalent” to a fair use copy anymore — it is a fair use copy. I’d even bet that additional purchased songs that don’t count against your cap are actually transferred to your storage and given extra space that doesn’t show up on the meter, because that way each user still has their own copy.

This is going to completely fuck the labels, since they can’t argue that Amazon is making unauthorized copies of songs.

For some time now, it has been clear that the traditional media companies have been fighting a losing battle by holding on to their old business models, trying to lobby and sue their way out of the problem rather than learning the new technology and building on it.

Twelve years in, it seems as though we have reached the moment where technology can check all the music industry’s arbitrary boxes, while still giving the end users what they want.

And the music industry? Still no new business model — it’s left clinging to Apple, with its reliance on overpriced devices and a seriously ill CEO.

Uh-oh.

Photo by Matt Sartain. Found at Smashing Picture.
Webcomic is Amazing Super Powers, by Wes and Tony.

On September 16, 2007, James Oliver Rigney Jr died. Rigney was better known by his pen name, Robert Jordan, under which he wrote the (unfinished) Wheel of Time fantasy series. The task of finishing this series was given to Brandon Sanderson.

Previously, we have derided the continued non-completion of the Wheel of Time here on the Big Bad Blog. Three Sanderson books to add to twelve Jordan books — and, well, we weren’t too certain about this Sanderson character, anyways.

A large part of our concern was that we were unsure of the point of reading a Robert Jordan book that was written by somebody else.

Well, now we have read The Gathering Storm, and we can stand corrected.

Over the course of twelve books, The Wheel of Time was starting to become a bloated monstrosity. The books, written by Robert Jordan, were becoming increasingly frustrating to read. There would be a chapter focused on one of the major characters — or (often, but not always) worse, one of the minor characters — in which they would have an internal dialogue with themselves (and external interactions) which mirrored the ten previous chapters featuring that character.

There would be no decisions, no action, the story would not move.

We like a little bit of character development and a well-developed fantasy world, but this continued non-stop from the fifth book to the twelfth book. Jordan seemed to have lost all ability to pace his story; new characters would be introduced regularly, further bloating the story and making it difficult to maintain continuity as the story jumped from character to character. Overall, the books moved from having the story move significantly with every chapter, to having it move slightly with every chapter (with a major event to end the book), to having the story move slightly with each entire book.

And then came The Gathering Storm.

Hats off to Sanderson. The story moves in a way that the Wheel of Time has not since The Shadow Rising (or perhaps even The Great Hunt). Nearly every chapter appears to have purpose — it drives the story further towards its conclusion, and makes that conclusion feel inevitable. The storm truly is gathering. Unimportant events and conversations are allowed to occur “off-screen”.

With each chapter progressing the story in some way, the series seems to reclaim the exciting epic fantasy label it earned with the earlier novels.

So, bravo, Mr. Sanderson, for breathing new life into a stale series, and reminding us why we found Jordan’s world to be exciting when it was first published, nearly twenty years ago. We will now eagerly read volume fourteen, and are excited about the last chapter in the series, expected next year.

Once upon a time, Keira Knightly played a character that was Natalie Portman’s double. The movie, of course, was The Phantom Menace.

Later, Keira Knightly played Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice.

So should we be surprised to learn that Natalie Portman is now slated to play an alternative Elizabeth Bennett … in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? I would think not.