I’ll let you be the judge of this.  According to this article, which cites campaign finance information collected by Maplight.org, 88% of the 94 Democrats who helped pass the new FISA bill last week (after previously opposing it) received an average of $8,359 in campaign funds from the telecommunication companies over the last three years.

I don’t know if it’s that simple.  All I know is that people need to call their state representatives before this bill makes it through the Senate.  If you’re a democrat, you need to make sure that your representatives know that you won’t tolerate them rolling over for the Republicans.  Let them know that you want change!  We don’t want politicians to keep wiping their asses with the constitution!

Wow I am drunk right now! This may be the best piece of political artwork I’ve seen in a long time…

Sorry for being absent for so long.  I took a summer class that kind of ate up all of my time for the last month.  Anyway, I have a few projects I’ve been working on, including a new weekly webcomic, which should be online within the next few weeks (I’m working on the website now).

In other news, I just downloaded the album “This is an Adventure!” by Uncle Monsterface.  The band has been offering the album for free via their website as long as listeners promise to review the album in return for the free music.  I thought it was a fantastic idea, so I decided to give the album a shot.  The following is the review I submitted to itunes for the album:

Let’s start with the details.  The lead singer’s voice reminds me a bit of Danielson with the heavy use of falsetto and his peculiar inflection.  The lyrics are mostly surreal and humorous, featuring lots of nerdy references to old school text-based adventure games, superheroes, robots, and Gary Gygax.  The production is pretty tight, with instrumentation ranging from spare electronic beats, tunes, and noises to thickly layered guitar and brass orchestration.  None of it comes across as unplanned or improvised.  Genre-wise, I’d class this album as electro-punk (a la Atom & His Package) with some indie pop, rock, and a little bit of ska influence.  Overall, this album is a fun listen - the music is good and the humor isn’t too overdone.  So far I’ve given all but one of the songs a 4 star rating in itunes, which basically means I like them, but none of them really stand out as a favorite.  I’ll definitely be paying more attention to this band in the future!

Arbitrary letter grade score: B+

I remember reading an article a long time ago about how ridiculous Superman was: an invincible humanoid who can fly anywhere in an instant, has almost infinite strength, heat vision, etc.; but what does he do with those powers?  Protect capitalism and continually save one incredibly stupid woman from death.  While he could potentially be stopping wars, working to end world hunger, and supporting many more far-thinking humanitarian causes, he instead chooses to stop a few bungling criminals from causing general property damage in and around Metropolis.  Whoop-de-fucking-doo.

Well, in an interesting turn of events, Superman is once again protecting capitalism in the way only he can, apparently - by being the center of a copyright lawsuit levied by Warner/DC against a man who attempted to hold a charity auction for kids with cancer.  Read the article here at BoingBoing.

Thank you, Warner/DC, for being a truckload of douchebags.  You’re helping to remind everyone how fucking ridiculous our current copyright laws are.

Trent Reznor will not stay out of the free culture spotlight!  remix.nin.com takes a sizable portion of Nine Inch Nails’ back catolog and allows registered users to download original multi tracks, which they can then remix however they want.  The only “rules” are that users share their creations on the site and that they not include any copyrighted material (unless they own the copyright).  According to the FAQs on the site, users may include any Nine Inch Nails song (which I’m assuming includes songs not included on the site) in their remixes.

The band has done this on a smaller scale in the past - the release of “The Hand that Feeds” in Garageband format was something of a first, although they experimented with a flash-based music editing system on a previous project (according to the note from Trent included with the download of “The Hand that Feeds”).

The band is also collecting geographical statistics from users (not required, but encouraged) for future “visualizations” that they claim will be “really cool.”  We’ll see what that means.  I’m hoping they’re planning on showing the record industry just how many people are willing to be a part of culture when they’re allowed to participate, instead of being treated like slaves and criminals.

Anyway, here’s a band who is not only giving away their music for free, but letting people remix and share it.  I’ll be paying close attention to how well “The Slip” does when they finally release the physical CD…  I’m going to propose, as a hypothesis, that it’s going to do really well, in spite of the millions of people who will have already downloaded it for free.  We’ll see how the RIAA feels about that.

The new Nine Inch Nails album, “The Slip,” is now available as a free download from the band’s website.

Trent Reznor deserves some sort of reward.  I don’t know what kind of reward.  It should somehow communicate both how ridiculously productive and embarrassingly generous he’s been so far this year.

For anyone here who doesn’t know a lot about marketing, there’s a concept called “reciprocity” (or something like that).  It basically means that if you give someone something for free and they like it, they’ll generally want to give you something back.  Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails both used this concept (to great success) when they released their last respective albums.  In this case, if you download “The Slip,” you’re given the opportunity to “pass it on,” emailing a download link to friends.  So not only are they taking advantage of reciprocity (letting people know that they’ll still be able to buy the CD in a few months), but they’re also taking advantage of the Internet’s “viral” capability - spreading the word about their album the same way people send out those stupid emails with pictures of cats and pointless petitions and stories about Jesus (send this to 10 friends in 10 minutes or a puppy will die).

I think we’re finally seeing a band trying to take full advantage of what the internet does best… and I love it!

I just read this article about a recent spike in RIAA and MPAA copyright infringement notices being sent to universities (particularly in the midwest).

This news corresponds to the following mass email sent out by the DIrector of Security Services and Information Privacy at the University of Illinois just last week:

The end of every academic year can be hectic with finals, graduation, moving out and wrapping up loose ends before leaving campus for break. Copyright holders are also staying busy by using this time to put in extra effort to track down people that are illegally sharing and downloading files online. At the end of every semester, groups like the RIAA dramatically increase the number of copyright notifications that they send to the campus to investigate. In the past few days the security office has received more copyright infringement notices than it received in the previous year. Clearly, the RIAA is watching the University of Illinois network closely right now.

If you are caught downloading or sharing files illegally, not only do you face the very real possibility of being sued for thousands of dollars this summer by groups like the RIAA, but your connection to the campus network will be immediately shut off. Access may not be restored until a formal disciplinary process has been completed. Take a moment to think about your finals study schedule and think if you can afford in these final weeks to lose your ability to access your email, Illinois Compass and even your ability to surf the web.

Music and videos can be obtained at no or low-cost and legally at sites such as Ruckus and iTunes. Please use these or similar services instead of limewire, bit torrent or other peer to peer programs.

Who knows what kind of game the RIAA and MPAA are trying to play? I find it extremely disturbing that they are not only focusing their attention on universities, but that they are apparently sending out falsified information. I can only hope that the fact that many of these notices are turning out to be false will somehow undermine their efforts in the long run.

All I can say is, “Bravo, you fucking fascists.” What better way to congratulate students for their hard work and perseverance in making it through another school year than to slap them with potential lawsuits.

My apologies for the silence recently.  I’m in full-throttle essay-writing mode right now.  I’m currently 12 pages into 35 pages worth of writing, all of which is due next week!  Once that’s done though, I’ll be posting here fairly regularly regarding $P@MM3R!!1! and other creative projects, as well as the progress in designing  the Writing Across Media class and redesigning my Desktop Publishing (now called Information Design) class for next semester.

Anyway, I read this today and wanted to share:

The controversial science fiction writer, Orson Scott Card, posted an editorial blasting J.K. Rowling for her lawsuit regarding the Harry Potter Lexicon published by a fan without her consent.  If we can disregard some of the highly problematic opinions OSC has expressed on various subjects in the past and his overly pathos-ridden rhetoric, I think he makes some interesting points about copyright.  Read the article and see what you think.

It’s late.  I’m tired.  I have to get up tomorrow and teach before presenting Spammer to the Writing with Video class.  As part of our final project, we were asked to comment on our creative process over the last several weeks.  I wanted to do this in the form of another “video production diary,” but I’m just too tired!  I may still post another one with some clips and a “trailer” for the film, but it might not be until next week due to my busy schedule!

Filming was done a couple of weeks ago.  Tonight I am done with the editing.  How does this make me feel?  Good, in some ways.  I’m happy with the way the project turned out, although I think it still lacks polish.  I didn’t have time to adjust any of the colors or make a soundtrack - those things will have to come later.  My goal for this class was to at least have a final, edited version of the film that I could present.  I believe I accomplished this.

I had a couple of minor set backs during the editing process

I ran out of hard drive space on the “loaner” Macbook that I’ve been using for the film editing.  To solve this problem, I had to basically uninstall anything that wasn’t completely necessary to complete the film.  I was working with very large clips to preserve the quality, so that took priority over anything else on the hard drive.

While trying to clear space on the hard drive, I accidentally deleted thirty clips from the film.  Luckily, these clips were all still on the camera, but it took me a couple of hours to find them and put them back in sequence.

I also had a problem with the climactic section of the film (where Spammer reveals his occupation to his date).  For some reason, every time I tried to edit that clip the computer gave me an error message, and not a helpful one either - it just said “General error” and stopped whatever I was doing.  To solve this problem, I ended up having to go back to the source material, reload the video from the camera and start that section over.

Overall, I would say that my process was fairly organized, but I tried to be flexible about things; in other words, I tried to maintain a balance between control and improvisation in all aspects of this film.  While I was filming, I focused on controlling the environment, the lighting, the camera angles, etc., but I gave the actors freedom to improvise for the most part.  There were very few pre-scripted lines in the film.  The entire date conversation was improvised by the actors, and Spammer’s phone conversation was also improvised (I was on the other end of the phone).  The only scripted line in the film was Spammer’s final statement to his date about the nature of his job, but even that was partially improvised.  My reason for choosing not to script the action more closely was that I wanted there to be a certain element of awkwardness to the humor.  I wanted it to seem natural and off-the-cuff.  I also wanted the actors to be a little uncomfortable, since that’s how their characters were supposed to feel.

When it came to editing, I had a strong concept of what I wanted to do floating around in my head, but I didn’t make any storyboards.  I kept fairly detailed notes during the process so as not to forget things, but these were more technical points.  Most of my time was spent synching up the multi-frame sections of the film, which I think worked out very well.  In fact, while I think some parts of the movie plod a little, I’m very pleased with the multi-frame parts, and think they were very successful.  In particular, there’s a segment where frames of spam messages overtake the screen and Spammer curses as he pounds his delete key to make them disappear.  This clip alone took me a couple of hours to get right, but I think it was worth it.

While editing the film, I had two priorities - I wanted to tell the story well, but I also wanted to be efficient with my time.  There were a few bits that I had to cut out (and more I may still cut out) that only served to make the narrative drag on too long.  My goal was to get the film down to fifteen minutes.  I was close (17:52), but didn’t quite make my goal.  It’s possible I’ll still be able to shave off those three minutes, but I’m not too worried about it.

Going forward with this piece, I have two goals:

1) to take advantage of whatever criticism I receive in class tomorrow and improve the editing, and

2) to add all the finishing touches (soundtrack, color correction, end credits, etc.

Hopefully, if all goes well, I’ll be able to have the final version online and available for download in early May.  I want the film to be available in higher quality than what Youtube allows, so rather than posting it there, I’ll probably make it available as a torrent that people may download through the blog.  I’ll have more details on that once everything is finished.

So… today is Earth Day. Just wanted to encourage everyone to take the time to think about what this means. We humans are all part of a very large ecosystem, but we have this ongoing habit of reshaping the environment to fit what we think we want at the time. We cover everything with cement, build houses out of steel and glass, clear forests and other natural habitats to grow our food and graze our cattle, and burn through resources with reckless abandon.

Overall, we take very little notice of our impact on the environment. We’re finally starting to see that this cannot continue. The planet can’t sustain unlimited human growth, particularly considering our current level of consumption and waste. Perhaps at some point in the future we won’t be tied to this planet any longer and can find resources elsewhere in our solar system. As it stand now, though, this planet is all we’ve got.

If each of us tried to reduce our consumption and waste even by a small amount, we could make a great difference and hopefully prolong our time here. Reducing consumption of meat (which requires much greater amounts of resources to cultivate than vegetables); reducing consumption of fossil fuels by walking, riding bikes, carpooling, or taking public transport when possible; reducing waste by recycling; and supporting research to develop more efficient technologies. There are many other things we can all do. It’s not impossible.