Greetings, loyal citizen! It’s the motion picture industry here. We’ve noticed you’re buying less DVDs than you used to. This is terrible news. Why might this nineteen-year-old technology be in decline in the age of on-demand video, ubiquitous Internet access and high definition mobile devices? Your turgid pirate faces have the answer written all over them.

Here are ten things we’re doing in 2012 to force you to buy DVDs. DVDs! O, glorious DVDs. So digitally versatile are you. DVDs DVDs DVDs DVDs.

We’re including two hundred and eighty seven unskippable copyright notices before each movie. We know that you may be unfamiliar with the law. That’s why you keep copying our precious intellectual property. So, in order to educate you into paying $14.98 for a legitimate DVD copy of Shallow Hal, we’re incorporating two hundred and eighty seven slightly different copyright notices. That’s almost 48 minutes of copyrights! Consider yourself educated – over and over again.

Introducing DVD dongles. In order to play specially protected dongle DVDs, you need to don a dongle™ on the back of your DVD player. Please note that don a dongle™ is a registered trademark, and that donnable DVD dongles may only be produced under a regional license representing no less than 3% of the retail price of your illegal pirate whore machines (TVs, laptop computers and DVD players).

Pixel protection. One of the leading causes of DVD piracy is the transmission of contiguous, related image components as part of a self-contained frame. Our innovative solution is pixel-only DVD sets. 345,600 miniature television sets (0.004″x0.015″) are placed in a rectangular array, and connected to tiny DVD players. Each one contains a cropped version of the movie exactly one pixel by one pixel wide. Simply hit play on each of the 345,600 DVD players simultaneously, and enjoy your movie. Bittorrent that, assholes.

We will fling poo at you. Our monkeys are primed, and at your windows right now. They’re watching you. Do not violate our intellectual property rights.

Pre-emptive piracy. In order to prevent the public from copying our content and uploading it to illegal file-sharing sites like The Pirate Bay and Demonoid, we will do these things before they have the chance. As we have the full licenses to the content and are in possession of applicable contracts, this will not be breaking any laws. This way, our entertainment products will legitimately continue to reach audiences, retain marketing buzz and royalties from the on-demand, rental, television and air travel markets, without interference from you pirating scumbags.

DVDs!

Spoken word beat poetry album (untitled)
Funding goal: $149,000. Time taken: 4 days.
An ingenious commentary on modern-day culture and the new aesthetic, Spoken word beat poetry album (untitled) eschews the poetic form by taking pages from public domain works and performing them in an authentic beat poet style. Tracks include Treasure Island (page 47) and The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria. Can be played on an iPhone.

A lovely cake
Funding goal: $20. Time taken: 30 seconds.
Reward for backing this project: a photo of the cake.

Night star
Funding goal: $12,100,000. Time taken: 7 hours.
Ambitious project to establish a satellite of the earth with a quarter of its diameter. Will have dry seas, craters, and plenty of dust. The idea is that it will reflect the sun at night time, when sunlight is traditionally unavailable: an ingenious solution to an age-old problem. Fully compatible with iPhone use.

Gamey gamey game game game
Funding goal: $1,000,000. Time taken: 1 day, 3 hours.
Gain a new insight into the world around you by playing Gamey gamey game game game, an indie product that takes game dynamics and applies them to the real world in a visceral way. String yourself out on bourbon and take to the streets, whispering obscenities to pets, while evading capture for as long as you can. Take beautiful tilt-shift photos of bewildered dogs and share them on your iPhone.

German
Funding goal: $450,000. Time taken: 3 days, 2 minutes.
For too long, Germany has been without a language of its own. This unique social project aims to establish a form of communication for Europe’s highest exporting nation, including a full grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation instructions. Reward for backing this project: contribute your own compound noun. German will be usable on the iPhone.

Dopamine Rush is a new web community that provides a dopamine rush to its users by pointlessly awarding points when someone clicks on your name.

Explanation:

Patent pending. By Hanjabanja.

Badgeclout: the gamified reputation system that’s pay to play. To assign whuffie to a person, you have to buy it, in the form of virtual gifts like Rolodexes and heart-shaped boxes of chocolates. These gifts can then be traded or assigned like currency. Obviously, the whole thing sits on top of Twitter.

Frolickinbrine: “curse” your Facebook friends. If they’re cursed, an increasing number of sorry events befall their profile, until seven days later it meets its doom. They can escape their fate by performing tasks, like “liking” a brand or cursing their friends.

Idcheckintothat: “check in” to your partners. Leave tips and ratings. Get recommendations.

Badgermatic: iPhone app that automatically inserts a badger into the background of any picture you take. $1.99. Further woodland creatures – and, inexplicably, a squid – are available via in-app purchase.

Teadar: location-aware mobile app for ex-pat Brits in America. Tired of having tea alone? Finds other British people in need of tea in the neighborhood, finds a place that doesn’t serve it in horribly-diluted form in a giant paper cup, and then negotiates biscuits for you all.

Urban Harmony: a mobile app that listens for those people who play music on their phone speakers at the backs of buses and trains, and then harmonizes with them, Barbershop-style.

At Rum & Monkey, we love our audience. You’ve been here with us since the beginning; on January 30, 2002, when we pulled the giant “on” switch and the city lights all flickered out – we like to think with joy – you were ready and waiting for the products of our fecund finger-tappings.

The Internet, however, has moved on. It used to be enough to tack up a page and leave it sitting there, winningly smelling up its corner of the web while people stopped by to copy embed codes into their MovableType weblogs. These days, you’ve got to throw up – literally throw up, projectile-style – brand pages on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, RedTube and Grindr, and ideally track the hell out of your visitors and sell inferred knowledge about the HIV status of their children to the dazed, pockmarked remnants of the KGB, operating (as everyone knows they are) from a warehouse loft in Sunnyvale.

With this in mind, some time ago, we added a Facebook “like” button to all of our pages. Most people don’t know this, but in exchange for doing so, Facebook provides detailed demographic information to site owners, using the profile details of people who didn’t log out of their site and happen to stop by our site. (Seems legit to us.) Our visits and pageviews are pretty awesome, but we’ve been stabbing in the dark – now, for the first time ever, we could analyze the demographics of our site and better serve you, the user.

This is absolutely true: the key demographic for Rum & Monkey is 14-year-old Indonesian teenage girls.

“No way,” we said.

As it turned out: way.

Shit.

We’ve been running this site for nine years, people. We’ve run articles about Sarah Palin, Robert Mugabe and George W Bush. We’ve called Ariel Sharon an evil criminal, we’ve discussed the finer points of New Labour politics in Britain, we’ve made web toys about the looting in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina (all in the best possible taste, of course). Our hope – nay, our plan – was to attract a disaffected audience with the same disjointed sense of humor.

Now, it could be that Indonesian teenage girls have a particularly adept understanding of global sociopolitical current events, and have been attracted by our intelligent but irreverent coverage of same. More likely, though, they don’t give a shit, and have been skipping right past all that stuff to the Name Generator Generator, rendering our tears, sweat and that time we locked a team-member in his room for three days entirely pointless.

Which is not to undervalue Indonesian teenage girls. I’m sure you’re all great, and you’re in an up-and-coming part of the world that’s rising beyond its troubled past and is sure to blossom in your lifetime. That’s awesome. We just don’t know how the shit to write for you.

So, girls, answer us this: what can we do better? How? Why?

Everyone else out there who’s tried to run a website: how do we pivot from this?

And finally, to the three people who have actually been reading for the LolPalins and the Señor Peegs and all the rest of it: thanks. It means a lot.