Earth: This time around

This life. This time around.
This blue-green gate of experience
is the place from where
our ancestors came and went.
It is our cradle and our casket.

This is the earth we stand upon:
We walk as creatures born of mud and dust.
We walk as creatures born as equals.
We walk in a miasma of existance, unaware of the life in which we tread. Look around!

Earth is.
Earth was.
Earth as will ever be.

We will break our mother's heart again and again
but she will take us back when we come to her.
We love her for it.

Wisdom of the earth is knoweldge incarnate, built of beauty, bone, peat and power.
On Earth, my friend, your virtue is reborn.

Jan. 25, 2010 \ Read it on Scribd \ Photo attribution

I've always wanted to publish something in the Onion-- the satirical newspaper born in Madison when I was wrapping up middle school. This week I have accomplished that goal. But not in a way I would have ever imagined.

A snapshot I took of a local deli and published on Flickr so that I could remember the name of the place was a featured illustration of the Onion AV-Club's review of the establishment.

I took the picture in May of 2007 when I was training at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on their goofy ass pagination system. Then I published the photo, (along with a handful of others) on Flickr added a modicum of meta data, and pushed it out to the Milwaukee - (High Resolution) Creative Commons group.

There are a lot of people-- pro photographers mostly, who would say that I've gone and killed their industry by letting for-pay publications run my photo for free. And I say, Adapt of be Killed.

I am assuming that given the option of paying me $10 or not running a photo, the onion would have picked not running the photo. I was a journalist for a long time. There's no cash on hand to pay for that kind of thing. That photography -- not even necessarily good photography-- is available on he web for free is just part of the new reality.

Regardless, I'm greatful to the Onion for plugging Writelarge.com in exchange for using that photo. Haven't really seen much benefit from the attribution, don't really expect to. But still nice to see none the less.

And Hey, I've had my work published in The Onion. Have you?

Edit for Clarification:The editor of the Onion AV Club Milwaukee obtained my permission to use the photo prior to publication. Just so we're clear. :)

So, My friend Bob put a bunch of pictures from an event I was involved in up on his Flickr site a long time ago and I really liked a lot of them and wanted to use them as wallpapers. And I saw that Bob releases his photos under a derivative friendly Creative Commons liscence. Sweet.

I spent almost no time applying basic photoshop filters to try to make the photos less photographic and more suggestive of the magical and special place in which they were taken. Because I can. I like my wallpapers to strike a balance between photograph and graphic design. Also, I'm a sucker for the cutout filter. Hey, Photoshop is easy!

I've enjoyed having these as wallpapers on my computers for the past few months, and I hope you enjoy them, too.

I've put my wallpapers into a set on Flickr, and you can see Bob's originals in his set, along with many other excellent photographs from Septemeber's event. Bobs photos are so good, it's hard to imagine these as improving on them, but I'm happy to share them back out to the world. I enjoy them, I hope you will too.

I’ve posted a few things at various and sundry locations around the internet that I thought it would be fun to call your attention toward.

1. Don’t write much poetry. Publish even less of it. Here’s a poem I posted at scribd entitled “Upon the Passing of my Paternal Grandfather.”

2. Here’s a set of Super Smash Brothers Brawl generated Desktops mixed up with some very basic Photoshop filters. I have no idea what is my legal obligation regarding the license of a piece of artwork created within a videogame. Actually, I suspect that since I have to decode the screenshots via a “decrypter” there’s probably a violation of the DMCA somewhere.

I use Creative Commons because I believe that it's better to share my creative works with people who can appreciate it than it is to die with a huge stack of unpublished works.

Creative Commons is not permission for you to make money off my work without compensating me. Creative Commons is not the same thing as dedicating your works to the Public Domain. Creative Commons is a way to let other artists know that they are welcome to see, enjoy, be a fan of, redistribute, and build on your work.

Raster and I played some good cop/bad cop on the Internet the other day regarding this subject. Here's a shout-out to the Creative Commons discussion going on here.

A side issue not being discussed here is the general emergence of the feeling that "the Long Tail" is bullshit. My opinion is that if you feel that the Long Tail is bullshit, I say you and I are probably talking about a different Long Tail.

Also, if you want to learn more about Creative Commons, I highly recommend this film.

It's strange. I can never predict which photos at Flickr are going to be popular.

Big shout-out and thank you to the folks at SeriousEats who were kind enough to call Gaia "Adorable."

I'll pass on the discussion over whether this is a correct application of the creative commons license in favor of simply basking in my daughter's new found internet fame.

It may be one of my proudest moments.

A few months ago, you guys may recall, I posted a photobooth snapshot of myself holding a note I'd written on a postie that I couldn't read. This photo was from the period where I was releasing photos on a creative commons Share Alike license.
So it turns out this photo was featured on an otherwise unremarkable productivity blog called Dumb Little Man , on an otherwise unremarkable productivity article called "12 Ways To Become an Utter Failure at Work."
Words cannot express how much joy this brings me.
Although Dumb Little Man doesn't release their content under a 'share alike' license, share alike only requires you re-license under a "similar" licence.
We'll call CC-BY-ND good enough, I guess. I would prefer that they'd use my work under a little less restrictive licence, but whatever. I'm just flattered that they liked my photo enough to use it.

In honor of International Pixel-stained Techno-peasant Day I'm releasing this new short-story on this here blog.

This is a short story originally written for Matthew Wayne Selznick's sidelined Wordhouse Anthology project. The idea was to pick a song you loved and write a story that captured some of the images and feelings from the song. I wrote "Nightswimming" based on the R.E.M. song.

The story is hosted at Scribd.

It's released under the usual terms.

Today's free TOR book is "Farthing." Go, click on that link and sign up and get a copy right now. You won't regret it. It's a great book.
I read it about 10 months ago at the recommendation of Boing Boing.
It's an alternative history story wherein peaceful terms between Hitler and Great Brittan were agreed-- but it's way sexier than that. It was one of those books where I ended up staying up to 3 a.m. reading so I could finish the night before I had to return it to the library. It's that good.

Anyway, TOR's free books thing is really cool. It's aways nice to get a copy of a free, DRM free book to have a look at and play with, however, Patrick Nielson Hayden pulled back hard on the emergency lever of the speculation train that Tor might be releasing it's whole catalog as such.

... the munificence of this offer (Slashdotted twice on its first weekend), combined with our vagueness in describing the actual site for which the offer is merely a build-up, has caused a lot of people to jump to the conclusion that the new site will be all about selling and/or giving away digital books. This isn’t the case... "

Frankly, this stinks of the kind of PR Blunder the likes of Harley Davidson's Secret 100th anniversary headliner.

Oh, ok. Maybe not that bad. But still bad. Look, Tor, you can't put the Genie back in the bottle. You've given us a taste of free, awesome, award winning books. Don't stop. Keep it going. Make it bigger. Offer your free, awesome award winning books under more and better terms. Add a creative-commons blessing. Let your fans enjoy your work. There is evidence that authors can make careers out of giving away free books. I believe publishers can to.

So, Nine Inch Nails is getting all the love these days. Nine Inch Nails offers it's latest album, Ghosts I-IV, under a Creative Commons license. The media reported, servers crashed, lavish "collector" copies of the album were scooped up by people with far too much disposable cash. NIN's site claims that the download is 36 tracks, but I only got 9. BoingBoing's; coverage suggests that all 36 tracks are available as remixes, and maybe they are, but not by clicking on "downloads" at NIN's site.

This is being heralded as a victory for "free music;" the mainstream media is glomming on to the idea that you can make a profit from giving your content away. JoCo would be turning over in his grave, only he's not dead. And Trent's not giving his content away. If you want to hear Ghosts II-IV, you've got to buy them. Or download them from someone else. But given the morose instrumental nature of Ghosts I (one BoingBoing commenter called it 'edgy elevator music'), why bother?

There are basically two things wrong with the Ghosts I-IV story. First, The nine tracks I've downloaded are only marginally ok at best, and if NIN were really embrasing the copyleft, why not make the entirety of the NIN catalog available? I could get into a free copy of Pretty Hate Machine. It's not like I didn't buy it once already anyway.
And secondly, by releasing Ghosts I-IV as CC-redistributable music, but not making himself the distributor (although there is evidence that NIN seeded the torrent themselves), people are going to be confused about the legality of grabbing a copy of the 36-track complete work off the torrents.

I'm happy for the increase in CC-awareness amongst Rock and Roll superstars, and, even though I've outgrown Nine Inch Nails, I want this venture to be successful for them.