For some reason, blogger.com’s busy; I’m writing this in OS X’s TextEdit. Time for a bitching session – what else is a blog for? I’ve been too busy recently finishing Maya Fiennes’s website to really do much else, but then I’ve never been much of a diary keeper, so the blog lies fallow. Oh well.

Anyway, back to the bitching. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 7, final season, really, really good. And here in the UK, if you want to watch it, your options are few.

1. Subscribe to Sky One (minimum 12 months, Murdoch-owned) and see it a while ago. It finished sometime earlier this year. With ads, some censorship, and maybe not in widescreen – not sure what their policy is these days. Certainly they never used to show anything in widescreen. And since Buffy is made in widescreen and we’ve got a widescreen TV, I damn well want to see it in widescreen.

2. Wait until it’s on BBC. Shown in widescreen, ad free, three nights a week, but even more heavily censored because of the time slot. And this year, no late night uncensored repeats. Not until 2004.

3. Watch it on VHS. Shit quality. Not widescreen. Costs money.

4. Watch it on DVD. Good quality. Widescreen. Unfortunately, because of the appalling business practices of FOX in the UK, the DVDs haven’t been released yet, and won’t be until sometime in 2004. So the crap quality VHS tapes are out, and the DVDs are held back. The only reason I can see for this is so they can sell it twice to the fans who just have to have it right now. Fuck the people who actually care about how they see something for the first time, or who don’t want to watch it over and over. No other new series being released now has similar format restrictions – why should Buffy fans be held to ransom for corporate greed?

No wonder there’s a huge increase in internet-based video piracy. If the studios aren’t going to even offer what people want to buy, they deserve everything they get.

Oh, that goes for the music industry too. I have avoided and will continue to avoid buying CDs that are copy protected. I refuse to be tied to one disc (scratchable, stealable) when I should be able to rip it into the computer, transfer it to an iPod or whatever, and listen to it where I want to. And when you state on the back of the packaging that your protected WMA format audio (not what I want anyway) won’t work on a Mac at all, then you’ve just lost yourself a sale. The CD isn’t too expensive, the assumption that I’m a pirate is not something I’m going along with. So yes, thanks, I will buy a pirate copy in a bar instead.