Category: Connections

February 12, 2005 /

So I lied. I still don’t trust that my funny-filter is better than yours, but I do think it’s better than Dog Bites Dog’s funny-filter (if not, alas, its funny-generator). It also occurred to me that a DBD weblog has a function other than filtering: I think it’s a good thing to archive and save the best bits for future humans, who won’t understand their context, because the links have rotted. But still.

Relatedly, like most postadolescent males, I have harbored in my gut the desire to start a satirical news publication. Since by far the best part of any such rag is the headlines, though, that’s all I ever bothered to produce. For the last few months, whenever I’ve felt particularly savage about something in popular culture, I’d come up with a headline and archive it. That wasn’t often enough to be a viable source of content on its own. Combined with somebody else’s generated headlines, though, it might be!

It is for these combined purposes that I’ve set up Dog Bites, a weblog in the vein of Spam As Folk Art. It should have new content every day or two, or more often if DBD is on a hot streak and I’m feeling hateful. I hope you like it! (And hey, my SAFA co-maintainers, let me know if you want in on some of this action.)

February 9, 2005 /

Ah, damn. Hitherby Dragons has 367 entries today–actually yesterday–which means it’s officially outstripped Anacrusis, with its mere 365. Anacrusis started first (July vs September 2003), but Hitherby posts on Saturdays, so that was guaranteed. By math.

What you have to understand is that Hitherby Dragons and Rebecca Borgstrom are superior to my writing and myself in every possible way. I live in Kentucky; Ms. Borgstrom lives in Seattle. I have nearly completed a Master’s degree in CS; Ms. Borgstrom has her doctorate. I took AP classes; she registered at UCLA when she was 12. I want to design games someday; she writes for White Wolf, and already wrote Nobilis, the greatest damn game I’ve ever read. Her daily fiction work is usually about ten times as long as mine, without feeling like it, and every one is invested with the kind of psychotic whimsy I’d love to capture once a month. Anacrusis has 40 subscribers to its LJ feed; Hitherby Dragons has 161. It was described as “a webcomic without words” before I even thought of Anacrusis that way.

So I nurse just this tiny little coal of envy in my heart for Ms. Borgstrom and her extraordinary stories. In case you can’t tell!

You should be reading Hitherby Dragons. I have run out of words trying to find superlatives for it. I will steal them instead, by quoting Penny Arcade’s Tycho (in reference to Checkerboard Nightmare): “It’s so good that it’s depressing for me to read it. I don’t really want to talk about it anymore. How am I supposed to stand out against that level of quality?”

Little epiphany

February 7, 2005 /

It occurs to me that I finally have a use for that old iMac on which I installed Yellow Dog Linux over a year ago: the Ultra Gleeper.

Also, check out this hilarious graph from Leonard’s official Gleeper paper, on methods of obtaining new links to recommend:

Method Link quality Limitations
Stumbling upon incoming links while following outgoing

links

 Pretty good Depends on serendipity
Google Web API (link: queries) Not good: ordered by

PageRank instead of recentness

 1000 queries/user/day
Technorati web API (Cosmos query) Excellent 500 queries/user/day, frequently down
del.icio.us screen scraping Excellent I tried this and Joshua Schachter got mad at me

February 1, 2005 /

I can’t remember where I saw this, but a nice human with an odd smile has created a pretty nifty scheme for serializing public-domain books via RSS. He claims it’s probably slow and buggy, and indeed I couldn’t get it to work the first time I tried, but now I am happily reading through The Well at the End of the World, which is way too dense to read in large chunks on a screen, but works perfectly at a page a day. (I’m reading this book in particular because it has several of the best entries in my Dictionary of Imaginary Places.)

Anyway, you can pick any of the many books on the site if you want to do this yourself, or you can even read along with me.

Obligatory intellectual property post

January 28, 2005 /

I always assume that most of my readership won’t like or care about this stuff, which is why I try to put warnings up front. But really, as far as I know, there are people who enjoy me talking about IP and DRM and CC and copyright reform. Who can tell! Whatever you do, don’t write me about it.

Onward! First there’s this illuminating analogy called DRM Is A Folding Chair, which maybe helps explain why I have such a destructive attitude toward copyright lockdown; if the snow-parking-folding chair situation the author describes had existed at Centre, I know the DBC and I would have made a habit of dumping jars of urine all over those placeholders. Second, and trading accuracy for humor, is Cigarro y Cerveza’s take on cookieright. (Both links via Copyfight, which is better when not everything on it is cross-posted to EFF Deep Links.)

My own contribution: Today’s Penny Arcade newspost points out some absurdities we’ve started taking for granted, as brought glaringly to light after some idiots–actually a lot of idiots–took Wednesday’s strip and its newspost seriously. Leaving aside the fact that this is a comic in which the two protagonists regularly kill each other, Tycho latches onto the key point here: we are rapidly accepting a society in which people with lots of money can secure and bind ideas, with little or no benefit to the people who came up with them, and take away all your money and property if you attempt to break those bindings.

He also mentions a lot of legal stuff in which he and the rest of the humans at Penny Arcade are involved, about which he’s not allowed to talk. This is not uncommon news, but it’s not terribly common either, so I’ll fill in further: a while back, PA produced a book called “Penny Arcade: Year One,” which was pretty much what it sounded like–digitally magnified prints of 72-dpi copies of their very first comics, with some commentary. Everybody bought it, including me; it looked like a great step for webcomics; then they never brought out another book, despite thunderous demand. If you read Penny Arcade, you probably already know this.

What you may not know is that KiwE Publishing, the print-on-demand company through which they produced the books, had a better idea of what they were getting than the PA guys did. This was before PA had any legal or business counsel–they were still selling a full site-month of ads for a tenth of what that was worth, shit like that, and so they tried to understand the contract themselves and then signed it. In return, they received metaphorical splintered broomsticks in their metaphorical you-know-wheres.

KiwE got, with that contract, the exclusive commercial-printing rights for the first five years of Penny Arcade comics. Once Tycho and Gabe understood what the demand for their books was like, and that KiwE was a shitty way to print them, they wanted those rights back. Ha ha! KiwE wasn’t about to give up that gold mine. In fact, I’m willing to bet they tried to get a percentage of PA’s ad sales, since one could interpret web-publishing them and selling ads as a commercial printing. Thus legal wrangling, et cetera, and here we are five years later with no more PA books.

(I should add that I know all this only fifth-hand, through interweb osmosis; feel free to correct me if you have better intel.)

Anyway, the situation’s not that different from what happens between musicians and RIAA member labels every day. Tycho and Gabe should be proud. They’re practically rock stars.

What’s most interesting to me about the situation is that such ripoffs can exist only under the behemoth that is today’s full copyright. Had the PA guys originally chosen to release their works under, say, a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license, any exclusivity clauses KiwE had tried to sneak in would have been invalid to begin with. Of course, this wouldn’t have been possible five years ago, since CC wasn’t founded yet, but I think it’s a point that needs making.

(One strong indication that they might have chosen a CC license: if you’ve been reading PA for a long time, you may remember The Bench, a PA-sponsored site which let anybody download Photoshop files with images of the characters and make their own “open-source” Penny Arcade comics–or, actually, any comics at all. The Bench even hosted them for free.)

The situation also could have been avoided with better legal counsel, but then putting some text on your web page is considerably easier and cheaper than hiring a lawyer.

And yes, under that license, some other company could conceivably have downloaded a bunch of PA comics, printed them up, bootlegged them and kept all the profit, legally. So what? Anybody who wants can already read any PA comic they want for free, and it’s unlikely there would have been much of an audience for a PA book produced by anyone other than PA. (How would they market it, anyway? Buy ads on PA’s own site?) This is the genius of loose licensing and web publishing: there’s no incentive to rip off work that’s already free, and yet, if people like it, they will still buy hard copies from its creators.

Pipe Dream #sRAND()

January 28, 2005 /

I want to open a game-comic-bookstore with two attachments: a set of rooms with gridded tables and whiteboards, reservable cheaply for gaming or brainstorming meetings, and a coffee and sandwich shop. The place would be called The Purple Hippo, possibly.

Problems with this pipe dream:

  1. The Purple Hippo is not as funny a name as I thought it was in high school.
  2. I know jack shit about running a store, a coffee shop, or a business in general.

Shockingly enough, #2 is the sticking point for a lot of my pipe dreams. (I also have no capital, but I assume that’s implicit.)

In an oddly appropriate segue, I should probably talk about The Louisville Game Shop now. I was lucky enough to find out about TLGS before it opened, back in December, and I even managed (through dint of extreme endurance and sharp eyes) to show up at its grand opening. It’s got a great inventory, and its owner (Colin) is friendly and helpful. Almost painfully so.

I really, desperately want TLGS to succeed. I want it to draw in thousands of customers and ignite a latent gaming esprit de corps in the Highlands. I want Colin and his business partners (if any) to be rolling in filthy lucre. I want them to experience so much demand that they have to buy adjacent buildings. I want there to be a real game store in Louisville.

I’m aware that no link on the interweb is really one-way, so I assume that Colin will eventually read this, and I wanted to make sure I said that stuff first. Consider it a preface.

Because it really doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. The place has “Nice Guy Tries To Start A Business, Goes Bankrupt In Under A Year” written all over it. I try to patronize it whenever I can, and most of the time I’m the only customer there. When I came to the grand opening, they didn’t take credit cards yet; I hesitate to think how much that cost them. Like I said, there’s some excellent inventory–I bought my copy of Nobilis there–but it doesn’t look like any of it is moving. (This is also the situation at Great Escape, but that’s because their game inventory is crap and they make their money on comics and DVDs.)

I don’t have the money to even be a good regular customer at TLGS, much less support it entirely myself, as I’d like to. I find myself thinking of ways to give in-kind, as if it were a charity project–I can host your website! I’ll print flyers! The advertising for the store is pitiful, by the way. I found one flyer in an engineering buildings at U of L, and I think there was a half-page ad on the back of LEO once. There appears to be a little interweb buzz, but in Louisville that’s really not worth much.

Anyway. I’m going to be crushed when TLGS fails, as I’m pretty sure it will. And even though I can think of things they could be doing better (1: don’t put your shop on the first floor of a musty double-zoned house), I know that the same or worse would happen to me if I tried to start a business now.

But now is when I want to start a business, because I have only myself to risk. When I’m thirty-five and understand business better and have capital, I’ll probably also have a family of some kind to worry about; I won’t have the option of living on ramen noodles for a year, or whatever, if I fail.

PS As if I needed another reason to be bitter, Fourth Street Live is doing great!

Watch, I’m going to make intellectual property activism cute

January 24, 2005 /

Because friends don't let friends elect legislators who support draconian intellectual property law while neglecting the public's rights and the social benefits of fostering innovation.

Okay, so it depends on your perception of “cute.”

I’m pretty much sold on iPAC now, and I’d send them money if I hadn’t already spent it on tsunamis. Even if you don’t think that’s funny, though, surely you can show respect for the Downhill Soldiers, who actually made good on their promise and sent the RIAA and MPAA 1558 pieces of coal for a belated Christmas present. Wildly pointless as a gesture, but it sent some money toward the good guys listed on the left. I am a sucker for goofy nonsense acts of protest, largely because the coal thing is something I could totally see the DBC pulling off.