Music Freak!

First of all, I gotta tell you something: I don't have a favorite band, artist, whatever! I'm an eclectic person. I just LOVE music, anywhere, anytime, and for any reason . It's like a part of me and it has especial powers over me, that's why I just can't live without my iPOD or my guitar! ( yep, I can play :P) . I kindda have special songs for the days I'm extremely happy and the ones that I'm extremely sad. While writing this entry, I'm listening to "When Love Takes Over - David Guetta feat. Kelly Rowland" to get inspiration (ahaha), a fantastic eletronic music! Since the beggining of the week, I just can't spend one day without listening to Coldplay, mainly to : ' Viva la Vida', ' Life in Technicolor', ' Lovers in Japan' and ' Violet Hill' . I also like to listen to Pink, Alanis Morissette, Beatles, The Wonders, Blink 182, The Calling, Christina Aguilera, Jack Johnson, Johnny Cash, KT Tunstall, Lily Allen, Norah Jones, Oasis... WOW! just to mention some of the "English" ones... I'm also CRAZY about mpb ( Vinicius de Moraes, Toquinho, Maria Rita, Aline Calixto, Zelia Duncan, Ana Carolina, Tom Jobim, Antônio Nóbrega, Alceu Valença, Zé Ramalho, Geraldo Azevedo, Daniela Mercury, Lenine, Nando Reis...) and I enjoy french music too.

That's it guys... What about you? :)

by Juuuu Coelho

All about Music!

Get your guitars, tambourines, harmonicas and whatever else possible of producing melodious sounds: MeetUp SpeakUp is about to find its tune. If you’re a music freak, the kind that can’t avoid whistling a different song each minute, if you listen to music just to relax, if everything you do, you do it with a soundtrack playing on, or if like Shakespeare you believe that music is the food of love, for better or for worse, let’s play it on. Next MeetUP, we’ll sing, dance, jive, and dig music under the moonlight.

But as we still have a long time ahead of us, how about using this space to share what’s on our mp3-4-5-6-10s, iPods, cd-players and playlists? Create a post, introduce your artist, spread his/her music!

What if...

…every time you pushed a button you received $50,000...but someone you didn't know died? Would you still push the button? How many times? And if you could change one thing in the world, would you go global or local? What about one part of your body, which part would you change? And if you could have a superpower, what would it be? Would you rather be able to fly or be invisible? Would you prefer have all your thoughts and fantasies appear in a thought bubble above your head or fall in love with a different person every hour? And if you were given the power of erasing one person from the surface of the world, would you use it? What if you found a magic lamp, what would your three wishes be (wishing for three more wishes not being possible, of course)?

Beware!, next MeetUP we will be dealing with impossible wishes and cruel dilemmas! To warm things up, I challenge the first commenter to answer one of my questions above and ask another one for the following reader and so on. Let’s play evil, folks. =D

We, petty criminals

The warming up of this week’s MeetUP SpeakUP get-together is on the cover of Yázigi’s trimestrial magazine—the Ypsilon. Its second issue has given us some room to discuss the ethical implications of sharing, downloading and copying copyrighted materials from the Internet, such as songs, movies, software and games. After all, this is something almost everybody, most of the times, can’t help doing it. So may those who have never downloaded something from the web cast the first stone and leave the room: we, petty criminals, are about to confess our crimes. XD

But mind, we are not all that bad. We have our own rules—our ethics, if you prefer. I myself have a friend of a friend of a friend who downloads movies provided they are not released here in Brazil. Another friend of another friend of mine swears that he only burns audio cds when their cost is way beyond what he considers an acceptable price to pay (which is not much, truth be told). There's even some of us who are always trying to compensate our deeds by avoiding buying pirated DVDs and contributing to the big piracy industry (which is exactly my case).

Questions are: How far can we go unpunished? What precisely is piracy? When does the profitless pursuit for information end and the violation of authorship’s rights begin? To live without it: is it possible? What are the alternatives?

So, speak up!, brotherhood of downloaders, where do you stand?