User-Submitted Content and Other Topics of Salience

During the week, working at the Mount Aloysius College Office of Undergraduate and Graduate Admissions (the office itself lacks severely the prestige its name suggests), playing Magic: The Gathering, “shopping victoriously” on eBay for cards to build effective decks for the aforementioned game, and being a bum leaves me with little time to maintain my knowledge of and ‘blog about current events.

To potentially remedy my ignorance of current events (and to earn another seven dollars and fifteen cents each week), I agreed recently to aid Mount Aloysius further by ‘blogging on its Web site about events and occurrences around campus. Assuming I manage to maintain the weekly schedule on which the college asks that I post, I should have no difficulty maintaining my personal ‘blog on the side. In the end, ‘blogging might encourage me to listen to/read/watch the news for ‘blog material.

Until then, I intend to catch news stories via the “Web Clip” feature of Gmail, an e-mail client by Google, just as I have been for the past few weeks.

Yesterday, I noticed a link to an International Herald Tribune article concerning the legal battle between media conglomerate Viacom and Google-owned YouTube. Despite my anticipation of such an occurrence, I had no knowledge of the current situation before reading the article or other subsequent articles regarding the concerns and fears surrounding user privacy.

The result of the case bears great significance to Web sites that thrive on user-submitted content, including ‘blogs. In the grand scheme of it all, I hope the outcome favors YouTube. Although I oppose the idea of posting copyrighted materials, I support the concept of original, user-submitted content, the likes of which might suffer because of a “one bad apple spoils the bunch” sort of scenario. The decision could even affect ‘bloggers who post snippets of popular news articles on their ‘blogs. Fortunately, I’ve only ever posted a few videos that a friend and I produced in our spare time. Otherwise, my ‘blogs have never been notable enough to amass large numbers of readers. For Ben, on the other hand, Viacom’s lying when it says, “[user] information would be safeguarded by a protective order restricting access to the data to outside advisers, who will use it solely to press Viacom’s $1 billion copyright suit against Google.” They will get you, Ben. They will.

Oh, and there’s also this guy. I can only hope that Marty will do something similar in the future.

Welcome to the Cutting Edge

Welcome, everyone, to The Cutting Edge. Before I begin, allow me to preface the first post with a history of the origins of The Cutting Edge, its tag line, and its purpose.

Before I began college a little under a year ago, I was an avid professional wrestling fan. While I maintain my interest in and knowledge of the industry and its happenings to a degree, I have fallen away from watching professional wrestling programs consistently each week.

During my tenure as an avid fan, however, I worshiped Edge as my favorite wrestler, following him each week in his hunt to claim the championship title. From time to time, Edge, otherwise referred to as the “Rated ‘R’ Superstar”, hosted a talk show program called “The Cutting Edge”. Edge used the show as a means of exposing his opponents and obtaining relevant and entertaining information from them.

Around that time, I adopted the name of the program as the name for this ‘blog, intending to use it as a means to exhibit some of the information that I found relevant and entertaining. Unfortunately, I also fell away from ‘blogging around that time, leaving The Cutting Edge to become hidden away in the deep, dark recesses of the Internet, forcing it to suffer as just another forgotten project.

Upon rediscovering nearly a month ago that it still existed, I decided to revamp The Cutting Edge with new and improved content and a different design. In addition to changing the layout to its current style and even uploading a new image of myself to act as the banner of the ‘blog, I altered the tag line of the ‘blog to read “No rest. No mercy. No matter what.” Having explained the origins of the ‘blog itself, I will now delve into the origins of the tag line.

In addition to rediscovering The Cutting Edge at the beginning of the summer, I also rediscovered another passion of mine: a collectible card game (CCG) known as Magic: The Gathering (MTG). My friends and I began revamping our decks and even tried a new style of play, renewing our interest in the game once more. Akroma, Angel of Wrath, one of the cards that I used to construct a new deck, sported an excellent quote, namely my current tag line, as its flavor text. The quote, from Akroma herself, represents Akroma’s vow to destroy Phage the Untouchable, her sworn nemesis who continues to unleash darkness over the land. To me, the quote represents my vow to remain vigilant while ‘blogging, to write with conviction posts concerning topics about which I am most passionate.

Therefore, to address the third topic of my preface, I intend to write about my hobbies and other random topics of my own interest. In addition to MTG, my posts will likely revolve around video games, writing, music, and other like topics.

Having said all that, I just found a neat questionnaire offered by Wizards of the Coast, the owners of MTG, that determines which of the five MTG colors you are. It even provides code to place in a ‘blog or on a forum or whatever that indicates your color and a link to the questionnaire. Check it.

Take the Magic: The Gathering ‘What Color Are You?’ Quiz.