NATO Phonetic Alphabet Book: S-T

Continuing on with the NATO Phonetic Alphabet Book (see previous post), I present to you the letters S and T.

Another map of downtown Montreal

Below: I've done yet another map of downtown Montreal. This one details parking lots (dark grey) and the newly defined high parking lot taxation zone (light grey). Visible trend: parking lots in areas with higher property values are discouraged through the use of higher taxes. This goes hand in hand with the current master plan, which aims to densify the central business district.

NATO phonetic alphabet book

I like alphabet books. I like A is for Apple, the making concrete of letters that is accomplished by associating them with things. And of course, I like standards. This is why I'm working up a set of illustrations for an alphabet book based on the NATO phonetic alphabet (you know, alfa, bravo, charlie and so on). Below, some of the first illustrations.

CO2 Emissions as smoke puffs

I know smoke stacks are a CO2 cliche, but they work so well. Below is a visualization of emissions from the top 8 worst offenders for the years (from bottom) 1990, 1997 and 2006.

Cory Doctorow: illustration and article

This is the last one, I promise. But I'm incredibly pleased with this illustration and article. The article, based on my interview with Cory Doctorow, appeared in this week's issue of The Link. It's called The Digital Backwater, referencing the sorry state of telecom policy and infrastructure in Canada. And here's the pretty picture that goes with it. The copy editor has dubbed the laurel the Wreathernet. This graphic is significantly bigger than the one on The Link's website, for your zooming pleasure. And, finally, if you want to see the article and graphic as they should be, check out the pdf of this issue.

Cory Doctorow interview: the full transcript

It's a little dense, but it's complete. Below, the full transcript of my interview with Cory Doctorow.

12 November 2009
13h15ish to 13h40ish

GC: You said a few years back that you couldn't move back to Canada because of the bad internet

CD: It's getting pretty bad in England. It's certainly pretty bad here.

GC: The CRTC just came down with a ruling on traffic shaping...

CD: Which was basically:you can only do terrible, immoral things in a limited way that we may police if we decide to. Yeah. It was a pretty awful ruling. I think the CRTC is generally asleep at the switch. I mean, the media consolidation in this country has been just disgraceful. So yeah, I'm pretty unimpressed with the CRTC as a regulator. The sheer amount of consolidation, both in media and telecoms and the cross consolidation between media and telecoms has been I think a total policy disaster for Canada. Canada's really lagging in the OECD in access, speed, cost and equality. They keep trying to redefine what broadband is in order to make us look better on the OECD stats. It's broadband if you can download a jpeg in less than a minute. This is not broadband. Broadband is Korean standard: 100MB. And up.

GC:Everyone's really proud of 21MB right now. On the whole 21MB thing, have you heard about this new thing Bell is doing? The turbostick? It's pretty awful. They're going for mobile internet, with a 500MB a month cap.

CD: I think the thing about caps is first of all, it's hard to imagine any other industrial sector that would say “there's a lot of demand for our product, how can we reduce it?” I think on the one hand, this represents a kind of failure of entrepreneurial imagination that's only possible where you have these monopolistic, badly regulated industries. The other thing about caps is what it does to network behaviour, network use. It punishes experimentation because you have to ration your network use. What this does is it undermines entrepreneurship. If you want to start a new Canadian networked business, your capacity to lure customers into your business is undermined by the fact that any customer who clicks on your web page will reduce their remaining bytes for the month. And bytes per month is a really hard measure for the average user, or even a sophisticated user to get their head around. Do you know how many bytes are in a web page before you click it? Or after you click it? We have a very hard time predicting the amount of bits that we have. So it's very hard to contain our use. So we would become even more conservative of our use. As a piece of national industrial policy, if you want to encourage the greatest amount of entrepreneurial activity on the network, the greatest amount of civic participation... Say you're planning for a pandemic swine flu outbreak and you want to produce a bunch of high quality health videos that will help people adequately prepare for the pandemic, do you really want people going “Well, I can spend my bits this month, my allowance, on looking at that health information, or I can spend it on downloading my banking information and I have to make that trade off, or I'm either going to get cut off or hit with some incredibly high overage fee.” Do you really want people making that decision? Is that good national policy? It would be different if the phone and cable companies were not subject to such enormous public subsidy. But they are. First of all, in the case of the phone companies, they got an enormous public subsidy in the fact that they exist at all. All that wire was laid with public expense. But everybody gets public subsidy in the use of the airwaves, in the use of rights of way, they essentially have de facto monopolies. I feel like the CRTC should say “If you don't want to allow a free and open network on these wires, that's your business. We'll either buy them from you at the scrap value of this copper, or you can take them out of our ground and we'll find someone else who'll run those wires. Somewhere out there, there's an entrepreneur who wants to provide the network that Canada deserves. If it's not you, that's fine. We'll have a competitive market. We'll have these guys who want to provide the network that Canadians want and you can provide the network that you think Canadians want. And if you're right and we're wrong, then Canadians will buy your service. But for so long as you're a regulatory monopoly, you have to act in the public interest.”

GC: Actually, how is it in the UK?

CD: It's not great. In general, the quality of governance in the UK is very poor. Partly because the political left has shifted so far to the right that there really isn't... I mean, I support the Lib Dems kind of generally because they're the only party that doesn't expect me to carry a biometric identity card. But as a left wing opposition goes, they're not very powerful and they're not very left wing. Labour, who are traditionally supposed to be the voice of the left, have shifted so far to the right that I think that they're... well... they're Bushites. Right? They went to war in Iraq. They are Bushites. Their policies are in line with those of George Bush. Including policies on civil liberties and so on. As a kind of microcosm of that, the network policy, the information policy is very poor. The government has been really reluctant to release information about its own operation. Quasi-governmental entities like the BBC are arguing for the right to put DRM on their broadcasts even though not only do they get public airwaves, but they get something like six or seven billion pounds a year out of the public's hands from the license fee, by governmental enforcement. It's really unseemly that they would argue for the right to DRM their signal. And now we have the copyright enforcement stuff. On one hand, you've got the anti-terrorism people saying that ISPs should be required to monitor and store all communications. That's also happening on the European level. Then you have the database nation where they're saying that we need, if not a national identity card, then a series of linked national databases that do the equivalent of a national identity card. And then finally, they're saying that we're going to have a three strikes regime where if anyone in your household is accused without evidence or conviction of three acts of copyright infringement you lose your network access and your name goes on a national register of people to whom it's illegal to supply internet access. This is really a dreadful piece of policy. I happen to live there and it's unlikely that I'm going to be moving away any time soon just for sheer inertia and the fact that my wife has a very good job, but they've got lots of network caps, they've got crummy networking policies. BT, who are the equivalent of Bell, really, in terms of being a legacy former national monopoly. BT got done for using something called Phorm, P-H-O-R-M, which I think may have had limited deployments here and in the U.S., I forget where. Initially, what they did was install Phorm as a piece of spyware on your computer without your permission. And what it did was inserted ads based on a tracking of every click you made on every page you visited. And then after they were told they can't install spyware on your computer without your knowledge, they went back and redid it as a piece of network middleware that tracks every click and does dynamic page rewriting again with these targeted ads. It's a revolting way of running a network. They're running it as an opt-out service. There's a huge amount of tracking that they're doing, a huge amount of monkeying with your network connection. It's very bad.

GC: You mentioned biometric ID cards. Of course, that's a pretty hot topic here right now because, of course, the border provinces need to comply with the U.S. Ontario is trying to roll out EDLs...

CD: Biometrics are an incredibly bad idea as a security measure. Partly because any good security token needs to be revokable in the event that it leaks. You need to be able to change your PIN if someone finds your PIN. You need to be able to get a new credit card number if your credit card number leaks onto the internet. What do you do if your finger prints leak? Right? And fingerprints leak like crazy. How many surfaces do you think you left your fingerprints on today? As a great example of this, the Chaos Computer Club lifted the fingerprints of the German chancellor, who was responsible for pushing for biometrics in that country, and made ten thousand copies of them on acetate, which would work in most fingerprint readers and widely distributed them. As a security metric, these are very very poor. And to the extent that we actually believe that we need security at the border, we should have good security, not bad security. That's one really important piece of it. But you know, the general linking of multiple databases, first of all, creates a false sense of security or certainty among the people who run those databases. There's a tendency to believe the database over reality. So if they say “well, the database says you were here and then here,” it's very hard to prove otherwise. The database becomes its own proof. And we know that those databases are very flawed and the more we link them, the more flawed they become. So there's that risk. In terms of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, it's the Tuttle-Buttle risk. If the database says you've done something bad, then you must have done something bad and it's up to you to prove that you haven't. It really shifts the burden of evidence in a way that's very contrary to the general working of liberal democracy. And then, in addition to that, there's the potential that things that aren't crimes but are private will leak out. And we tend to confuse private with secret. There's lots of stuff that's not secret but is private that becomes exposed when you have these big databases. For example, your parents did something private, otherwise you wouldn't be here. It's not a secret what they did, but it's private. It's not on the internet, unless you have extremely extraordinary parents. Everyone who went into that toilet did something private. We know what it was, but again, they don't have a glass door. There's a lot of stuff in our lives that's private, and we behave differently when our private sphere collapses. In terms of cognitive psych, I think that when we are doing stuff, we are cognitive, we think about what we're doing. When we are analytical, we're meta cognitive. We think about what we're thinking about what we're doing. And meta cognitive has its time and place as part of your overall process, but you can't be meta cognitive all the time. I don't think you can write while you're meta cognitive. If you're revising while you're writing, you just stop. It's like asking a centipede how it can walk with all those feet. It stops being able to walk because it's now thinking about how it's walking. If you want to teach someone a sport, say stickhandling in hockey, you say things like try and hit through the puck or try and be a little looser. If you say try and hold your wrist at a 45 degree angle or try and put your left skate forward and lead with your left, most of the time, the people that you're trying to teach fall apart. Coaching is all about being cognitive and not bringing people into a meta cognitive state while they're practising. When you're being watched, you're meta cognitive and there's a whole range of really important creative and daily tasks, everything from an honest conversation to just real learning, that you can't do when you're being watched. It's like trying to teach your kid how to write and looking over her shoulder while she writes the letters and going “no no no, a little steeper with the riser on that letter A, sweetie.” You can't learn to write that way. And you can't be a fully fledged citizen of a democracy that way. That's the second piece. And then the third piece is of course the risk of exposure for things that you may be marginally guilty of but that have historically been outside the import of regime. It's the equivalent of a traffic camera that issues a fine to everyone who edges one mile per hour over the limit. And the corollary of that is Cardinal Richelieu: “give me six lines of an honest man's hand and I'll find you a reason to hang him.” If you have to account for every single thing that falls into a database, it may be that there's things that you can't account for that are a mechanism to make you look guilty even if you're not guilty of anything. This is what the no-fly list has taught us, what Maher Arar has taught us. The database made him look guilty and the Americans won't take him out of the database even though he's been totally exonerated, the Americans still say that he can't fly. The building of a database state, however we conduct it, has these major risks to the common good. It needs to be really closely examined. Given that it won't secure the border, because biometrics are themselves a poor means of doing that, we need to really revisit this. And the fact that the Americans say that we need to do it... I mean, your mom had it right: if all your friends were jumping off a bridge, would you do it too? If all the other G20 nations were jumping off western democracy and landing in a boiling pit of fascism, would you jump with them? That's not a basis for good governance [shouted humorously]! Like Monty Python: Watery tarts lobbing scimitars is not a basis for good governance. That Bush says we need to do it, carried through to the Obama regime, isn't a good reason to do it in Canada.

GC: Your stock in trade is science fiction. You get to constantly imagine the world that you'd like to see. You imagine these really grim things. Some of it's beautiful, but it's pretty grim. What would you like to see in your ideal world? What would you like to see in our future?

CD: I would like to see a kind of information bill of rights that mirrored the UN declaration of human rights and that was widely accepted as kind of rote by people, where you didn't have to explain why privacy is important, why neutral networks are important. And I think if we got that, everything else becomes easier. I think that technology has this innate characteristic in that it disrupts the status quo. It's always easier to knock something down than to build it up. If you assume that both attackers and defenders have access to the same technology, which is a good assumption, then the defenders will always be at a disadvantage. That's good and bad. It's good if you want to make things better for people who the status quo have neglected historically: people of colour, people of alternate sexuality, women, kids, all those people have an advantage now that they didn't have before because they have the same organizing tools that the people who have historically tried to keep them down have access to. Only they don't have the baggage that those people have. On the other hand, it does in fact give an advantage to bad people. It gives an advantage to spyware creeps and indeed to terrorists and to people who are exploitative and to people who are human traffickers and all those other people who [mumble, 15:02]. We won't be able to take the technology out of those bad people's hands because they're criminals, so making it illegal doesn't stop them. What we can do is effectively marshal to reverse any gains they've made if people of good will can have access to the same technologies. So, my utopia, my clear eyed utopia, the utopia that I think is plausible, is one in which people of good will don't have the tools to defend themselves against people of good will taken away in the name of stopping bad things. And then we are able, people of good will, to continually organize to rebuff affronts to our dignity, to our security, to our families and so on, using those same tools. That's what I hope for. And I don't think it's an unrealistic hope.

GC: That's lovely.

CD: Thank you.

GC: So much of the world is about the status quo. You prosthelytize, well, prosthelytize is a strong word, you talk about this a lot. What do you do when you run up against people who are resistant to...

CD: Well, there are a couple of good aphorisms about the status quo. One of them is that all laws are local and no law knows how local it is. So the status quo tends to be something that's pretty new and pretty local and pretty contingent and very much honoured in the breach. Often times, you can get around people's [mumble 16:55] about changes to the status quo by pointing out that the thing that they characterize as some original, endemic state from which humanity is falling is actually like seven years old. There's a great William Gibson quote: the seventy year period during which it was possible to make money off recorded music may be at an end. It's seventy years long. It's not as though we've been selling records since the time of the bards. It's this seventy year blip. And it may be over. It doesn't mean that the music industry is over. It means that phase of the music industry's history, that tiny little seventy year blip in the music industry's history is at an end. That's one aphorism. The other is Jim Griffin's aphorism which is that if it's invented before you're eighteen, it's been there for ever. If it's invented before you're thirty, it's the greatest thing ever. And if it's invented after that it should be illegal. And it's often a matter of just helping people understand that those things they think of as having been there for ever and the greatest thing ever, it's just the latest thing in a long history of things. It's about pointing out that the Bronfmans may get to cry piracy now that they're record executives but a couple generations ago, they were drug smugglers, running rum into America during prohibition. That's how they got the money to become record executives. I'm speaking at Bronfman hall at the ROM tomorrow. I always make a point of mentioning this whenever I'm in Canada.

GC: What's the conference?

CD: It's the National Literacy Strategy.

GC: Lovely.
...
CD: I'm a UofT dropout.

GC: Aren't you also...

CD: a Waterloo and a York and a Michigan State dropout.

GC: You seem to have done all right for yourself.

CD: Who needs a degree?

GC: There's hope for the dropouts.

Lawbot is going to Brussels (without me)

The good folks at Constant are at it again. The Verbindingen/Jonctions 12 festival is coming up, with the theme "By data we mean." Among all the activities slated to take place, there's also going to be a fine array of artwork on display. Our favourite robot sleuth, Lawbot along with Copycat and the leader of The Cabal are going to be in attendance in their fine, digital, text based form. If you're in Brussels between November 21 and 29, be sure to check out what Constant is offering up.

Panopticoncordia

Because I've yet to kick the habit of drawing Concordia buildings, here's another: the Hall building as panopticon (okay, so it isn't actually a real panopticon, given that it's only looking in one direction, but I couldn't resist calling it Panopticoncordia).

Coping Mechanisms for the Young and Ambitious

Just over a year ago, I posted what I called "A Manifesto for ginger coons." Much of the text of that manifesto is back, in the form of a zine. Now, however, it's called Coping Mechanisms for the Young and Ambitious. Just in time for Expozine next weekend. Photos below.

Menacing PSA Posters

Ontario has some new legislation meant to penalize people who talk on handsets while driving. The two groups most likely to talk and drive are young people and taxi drivers. So, in the fine tradition of alarming and mean public service announcements meant to scare people into compliance, I've made a couple posters.

Popewood

Many authors and artists are said to have cult followings. Margaret Atwood is a fine example of such an author. So, perhaps she should be given the trappings of organized religion. Hence, a graphic I'm calling Popewood.

Isometric Concordia

The farther I get from Concordia, the more I seem to wind up doing representations of it. Below, the major buildings in the Quartier Concordia, towering above a flat downtown.

Student Occupational Hazard Icons

A series of graphics detailing some of the occupational hazards involved in getting a university education:

The results of excess partying on a week night.

The high risk of silly hats involved in excess party, any day of the week.

The crash that comes along with all-night study sessions.

Learn About Things I Know About

My traditional end-of-summer zine development time has come around again. This year, I think I've come up with quite a good idea. I'm working on a little imprint of zine books. They're going to be 5.5"x8.5" and either staple bound or sewn, between 20 and 40 pages each. And they're going to be accessible, understandable non-fiction. They're going to explain things to people who don't know about them. But they won't talk down to readers. I'm talking about literate, clever book zines for literate, clever people. The point is to broaden horizons and give people a comprehensive look at something they didn't know about already. The first one, about Open Source (cover pictured below) is underway. I'm also thinking of tapping someone to do one on gender. Expect to see these with me at Expozine 2009, whenever it rolls around.

Didactic romance novels

Romance novels make up the largest portion of the American book market (source). They're incredibly popular, but no one can argue that they're great literature. They tend to be 150 pages of escapism and wishful thinking, not to mention the implausible plots. Nevertheless, a large group of women read an awful lot of these books.

Can we get women to improve themselves by reading romance novels? Is it possible to use the common elements of these books (international travel, sex, relationships, and so on) to expand the horizons of their readers? For example, can we use a story with a jet setting heroine to teach world geography? Could there be some slightly more in depth (and accurate) details about the creative careers so popular in the genre? Can we use the constant chatter about relationships to teach basic elements of psychological theory? In short, is there a way to sneak a little extra education and knowledge into the fluff of romance novels?

Lawbot: done.

I've mentioned Lawbot and the Case of the Missing Copyright Infringers before. Well, now it's done. Or at least, it's in an intermediate state of done. If you click the above link, you'll find a pretty fun (if I do say so myself) text-adventure game that explains certain elements of Canadian copyright law. It may later get either sound or visuals. I'm not sure yet. Here's the little artist synopsis that I wrote about the project:

Lawbot and the Case of the Missing Copyright Infringers is, above all, a pragmatic project. The aim behind Lawbot is to broaden the public understanding of Canadian copyright law. Lawbot aims to do this in an approachable, perhaps even fun, and certainly accessible way. To this end, Lawbot borrows thematic elements from both adventure games and spy movies, weaving a slightly absurd, proto-futuristic kidnap-story narrative. Lawbot employs heavy-handed allegory and a pinch of copyright history to get across the point that a litigious approach to intellectual property protection isn't sustainable. Visually, Lawbot riffs off of early text based computer games. Lawbot is written entirely in HTML and JavaScript for optimal online usability and distribution.

Tactile interfaces for digital making

I've got a problem. I've had a lifelong obsession with building things by hand. I love the sensation of seeing something come to life through my efforts. In physical making, there's a certain amount of feedback and consequence. I actually enjoy having to clean the ink out from under my fingernails after screen printing. These days, however, the majority of my work is digital, with very few protrusions into the physical world and with little to no non-digital making. That's gotten me thinking.

I'm planning my day. On my to-do list, I've put the words "update website." I know that I have a meeting later that I'll have to drag myself away from my work to attend. Here's the problem: when I'm only working digitally, it doesn't feel as if I'm actually pulling myself away from anything. The majority of my life, work and leisure time involves interfacing with a screen. Fixing my website doesn't feel like an engrossing task. There isn't a feeling of immersing myself in one thing, mainly because I'm not. I know that in the browser I have open to test my changes, I'll also have tabs going for email and Twitter. I also know that when I leave to go to my meeting, there won't be any tidying up to do. I'll just have to fold down the laptop and go.

It may seem absurd, but I want a way for my digital activities to be a little more demanding. I want to actually need to concentrate and prepare. I want the little rituals that come along with more physical forms of making. I mark things on a physical to-do list because stroking out an entry with a marker feels more satisfying than just clicking on a box. I keep a drawing board because some things are better sketched out by hand than drawn on a computer. How can I make my digital activities more tactile, beyond the standard idea of drawing with a tablet? Why can't I hook a block of clay up to a 3D modeling program and work with hands and knife? And, the big question: what's the tactile analogue of a natively digital activity like web design?

Work in progress: Lawbot and the Case of the Missing Copyright Infringers

Do you enjoy text-based adventure games? How about copyright law? Well, I'm working on a text-based adventure game that explains the basics of Canadian copyright law. It's called Lawbot and the Case of the Missing Copyright Infringers, and the first bit of it is online, for your clicking enjoyment.

RFID in Montreal

Here's some linkage to one of the things I've been busy with. The STM's OPUS card is unsafe and unsound (The Link)
And for your enjoyment, the ever so pretty picture I did to go with the article.

Catbag

Here's one of my forays into the grunge-clipart aesthetic. The symbolism is a little heavy handed. It was late and the deadline was short.

Print has problems

I'm catching up on my reading, going through a textbook about advertising and promotion, reading the bit about social networking sites as promotional tools. As is so often the case with textbooks, the information is out of date. Here's the problem: the book was published in 2008. Important news for textbook publishers: It's impossible to write about the internet in print. By the time the books gets to print and into the hands of readers, what was good, current information is out of date and outmoded. Print isn't fast enough.

What's the solution to this problem, then? A couple things. Thing one, I'd like to see my purchase of the textbook give me access to a pdf of the book as well. (A good example of a publisher doing this is The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Ubuntu Kung Fu, for example, offers a pdf option, as well as couple other neat things that I'm about to talk about.) Offering a pdf version means giving readers something searchable and easier to navigate than a physical book. That's important when the book in question isn't a novel. Thing two, I want to see online errata and updates. I know it's impossible to expect publishers and authors to constantly revise their books, but I'd really like a little community and challenge to build up around textbooks (for an example, look again at Ubuntu Kung Fu). Give me an errata section that users can contribute to, give me updates on the subject matter, give me a discussion board. In short, give me an online portal for the textbook. Make it relevant and timely. For marketing especially, things don't lie still. Timely subjects need timely textbooks, not a new version every couple years.

Vitruvian Hipster

Illustration to go with an article about -you guessed it!- hipsters. It was a fun concept, but I'm not terribly pleased with my execution.

Head Turner

This one goes along with a review of Ted Turner's book. Initially, I wanted to have two Ted Turners facing off against each other, but graphics that are wider than tall don't play very nicely with newspapers and I didn't want to upset the layout guy.

Happy Shoe Year

I've come up with a workable resolution this year: I'm going to try to incorporate this cartoon version of my own shoe into as much of my work as possible. Keep your eyes open for it as I post new illustrations and sundry other things.

Different kinds of story arcs

Books are different from TV. We know this. The difference I'm thinking of today is in the way their story arcs work. In books (the ones that aren't part of a series, I mean), there's a little bit of a problem. Maybe not everyone has this problem, but I do. I constantly find myself wanting to hurry up and finish the book, just so that I can see how the story ends. But when I finish it, I realize that it's all over. There is no more. Not only is the story over, but the characters and setting are all gone, too. And then I get sad.

This is an area where TV wins. Or where TV series win, at least. The joy of a good TV series is that the viewer gets a satisfying story arc every week, but with the added bonus of not losing everything else at the end of a given story. The characters and setting stick around for another arc next week, with the added bonus of a little more backstory than before.

This quality can make TV, as well as series novels, very attractive. It makes for strong relationships between viewers and characters (I say between, but it's quite one sided) while providing lots of satisfying conclusions to stories.

Books for walls

For several months, my living room has looked like a disaster, thanks to a particularly nasty shade of red on the walls. I'm not keen on painting a small room in a colour dark enough to cover the red. That means that my only real option is wallpaper. But wallpaper is expensive. Solution? Cover the walls in the pages of cheap, second hand teeny bopper romance novels. Six books (that's roughly 1200 pages) and 2L of podge later, two out of four walls are done. Once all four walls are done, up go the shelves and on with the books that are more for reading than tearing apart.

The joys of fridge ownership

I've been working on a wallpapering project involving old books and my currently uninspiring living room. I'm afraid it's made me a little glue happy. I realized last night that the big perk of owning a fridge (as opposed to having one provided by my landlord) is being able to modify it. So: old Archie comics Mod Podged to my decrepit fridge.

Obama North Obama South

Illustration backlog (last one!). This one (which is a good couple months old) was for an article about how Southern voters are more likely to live the values Obama campaigned on than the Northerners who actually voted for him.

Robolover

More illustration backlog. This was for an article about the future of human-robot relations.

eWaste iWaste

Yet more illustration backlog. Reasonably self explanatory title. Two page graphic for a feature article about ewaste.

Cut Here

More illustration backlog. This one was for an article about a proposed underpass that would effectively cut a neighbourhood off from the river.

Artris

Illustration backlog: This one was for an article about video games as art.

Email? No.

Because I've been profoundly lazy about blogging lately, here's a nice, easy, pretty one. It's another darn illustration.

Being profound isn't easy

When very few people knew how to read or write, it must have been much easier to write profound things. Today, with the huge mass of voices, all demanding to be heard and all distributed worldwide via the internet, it's far harder to write things that people will actually pay attention to and remember. We have such a huge volume of information, now. It makes it nearly impossible to actually process and give consideration to everything. And if I blog that sentiment? It's just another bunch of words in our huge wash of constant data.

Being watched by potatoes

Below: An illustration I've just finished for a review of a book about potatoes. Really.

Flamebot

I've been thinking a lot about artificial intelligence lately. It's super fun to play with helper bots on various websites (Anna at IKEA, for example). It occurred to me that a surefire way to get an AI to pass the Turing test, at least if it's talking to people used to the internet, is to create a Flamebot. Essentially, an AI that acts like a troll. It might not be identified as intelligent, but that wouldn't stop it from being mistaken for a lot of humans who hide behind their computers and make inane or rude comments. It doesn't even need to be coherent to be thoroughly entertaining.

Correlation is not causality in Doctor Who

A thought for anyone who enjoys Doctor Who and false logic:

The mother of every companion in new season Doctor Who thinks that the presence of the Doctor means trouble. They believe that the Doctor brings trouble with him. In fact, as the audience and companions know, the Doctor constantly saves others from the trouble that is already planned. While trouble and the Doctor are positively correlated, the concerned mothers are wrong in believing that there is causality.

OCI logo revisited

The OCI logo I was so pleased with yesterday has been replaced by the OCI logo that I prefer today. Behold! Progress! Magenta progress, in fact.
I think this one looks far more dynamic.

Sketch people

I'm in a real silhouettes of people mood right now. That's a good thing, because I'm supposed to be doing some sketchy drawings of people for a conference. So, here's draft one of some sketchy purple people. While they aren't strictly silhouettes, they fulfill my urge to draw un-detailed people.

OCI logo

I've been building iterations of a logo for a semi-secret project that I'm calling the Open Colour Institute. You can guess what the project actually is, if you want. The important thing at this point is that I've come up with a logo that I think I like. And here it is.

The Illustrated Cinderella

I'm working on a project right now called the Illustrated Cinderella. I'm using the original Grimm text and doing decoupage illustrations from public domain images. I'm hoping to get the project finished in the next month, in time for a debut at Expozine. In the interim, here are some of the things I'm working on.

Proper nouns on the Internet

While doing a little writing about traffic shaping and such things, it occurred to me that I don't know whether the name "Net Neutrality" actually qualifies as a proper noun. Many people treat it like a proper noun, capitalizing the first letter of each word, but there are also loads of people who don't. This inconsistency leaves me wondering whether it really should be a proper noun and some people are just being lax, or whether some people are just being overzealous with their capitalization. I've been hunting around to find out what exactly makes something a proper noun in English. According to the Wikipedia, a proper noun represents a unique entity. It then goes on to give examples like cities, the names of people, and specific physical things (like Bill of Rights, which may embody concepts, but has a physical manifestation all the same). But all of the things (not people, not cities, but things) mentioned are tangible. So, can movements and concepts be proper nouns? Net Neutrality isn't tangible. Is it allowed to be a proper noun? I'm thinking yes, given the capitalization of political ideologies and systems of thought. If Marxism and Liberal and Atheist can be proper nouns, surely so can Net Neutrality. I think, then, that I've answered my own question. Is Net Neutrality a proper noun? Yes.

Blogs in print

I've just thought of one of those ideas that qualifies as stupid-smart. So: Blogs use tags. Tags are what allow readers to check out other posts similar to posts that they like. Sometimes, reading things on paper is nicer than on a screen.

My stupid-smart idea: Make little zines or books or magazines of specific tags from blogs. If you were to do that to my blog, for example, you might make a zine based on the "clever ideas" tag. The whole thing would be a compendium of things that I classify as clever ideas.

I'm trying to decide whether this idea has enough merit to actually do. Of course, in the free market spirit, I could just make up a few copies of such a thing, take them to Expozine with me, and see if they have merit.

Vegan trading cards

Finally, after years of being asked what vegans eat, I'm tired of answering. As a result, I've devised a clever solution: vegan trading cards. Imagine little trading cards which, instead of featuring hockey players, picture and explain vegan food. Each card would have a picture of a typical vegan dish on the front (think: curry, stir fry, hummus, tabouleh, etc.) and stats about that dish on the back. The stats would show ingredients as well as nutritional information. It would be a fun way to answer a question that does get a little wearing after a while. Not only that, but the nutritional information would prevent the second question that non-vegans normally ask, namely "Where do you get protein/iron from?" They could look at the card, see that vegans eat a variety of tasty food, and then be shocked by how nutritionally complete those foods actually are. It would save the valuable minutes of my life that I currently wind up spending, trying to remember what I've eaten for the last few days.

Plastic books for wet places

I'll admit it: I read in the bath. I'd read in the shower, but I'm afraid that would be basically impossible. This is why I'm thinking that there should be books for showers. Or beaches. Or pools. Or rainforests. Or any muggy, wet place that poses a threat to the wellbeing of books. So, I present yet another entertaining idea: Plastic books for reading in wet places.

Instead of paper, the pages could be made out of thin sheets of plastic. That would save books from puffing up in humidity, as well as from the dangers of shower water or bath time book fumbles. If such a thing existed, I could fulfill my dream of having a bath tub in the middle of a library without endangering the books.

Most entertaining email ever

This has to be the most fun email I've gotten in a while. While it's also edifying that I'm among the hundreds of people being followed by the Liberals, NDP, and Greens, it just kind of tickles me to see these words pop up in my email. Gee golly! Now the Prime Minister will know what I'm eating, how my plants are doing, and when I have a new blog post up. Twitter really is a fantastic way for politicians to pretend to listen.

Another Kubla Khan

I'm kind of addicted to "Kubla Khan." It's a fantastic, profoundly strange and beautiful poem. It's also in the public domain, which lets me do nice things to it without infringing copyright. I've done an illustrated zine version in the past, I think I'm working on another. Just finished, though, is a very strange web based version.
It's kind of concrete poetry on the internet. Find it here.

The Internet is a Copying Machine

Below is my little lay-introduction to the Internet as the ultimate copy machine. It's altogether too easy to forget that this is an instrument built for copying.

Computers are copying machines. They do the job of duplicating even better than photocopiers. The Internet is the hyperactive child of computation in most respects, but especially when it comes to copying. Everything you so much as look at when browsing the Web (No, I'm not using “Internet” and “Web” interchangeably. Right now, I mean WWW.) gets copied onto your own personal hard drive. Let's say that again, shall we: Everything. That's the automatic aspect of copying on the Internet, as practised by our good friends Firefox and Opera (or their mean brother, IE).

Copying on the Internet isn't just automatic. There's also a social aspect to the copying. When you take digitized media, which is what populates the Internet, and put it in the same place as people, copying will inevitably happen. Say I put a photo on my website. You take a look a look at my website (That's what I want you to do, after all. Why else would I put it on a public website if I didn't want you to look at it?). First, your browser, which doesn't have much taste or discrimination, grabs everything my website has to offer and makes a little copy for itself. Then, quite independently, you decide that you like the photo. You like it so much that you download it. Maybe you use it as a background, or even print it out and hang it on your wall. It's perfectly natural. I make my photo available, you see and like. All you have to do to get your own copy is click your right mouse button (or CTRL click, if you happen to be a Mac person). It doesn't feel like work, and I still have my copy of the photo. In fact, my copy and your copy are exactly the same. And the copy that every browser makes for itself when someone looks at my website is exactly the same as our copies. (It doesn't feel like stealing, since you haven't taken anything from me. In fact, it isn't even copyright infringement, since you've only used it for personal study and can claim Fair Dealing. But you don't know that. You just liked the photo and wanted to look at it without coming back to my website every day.) In such a way, the Internet can be seen as a giant (mostly apolitical and amoral) copying machine.

Annual reports for people

People, if you think about it, are a fair bit like corporations. We all have shareholders, people who have an interest in how things turn out. Generally, we're each the majority shareholder in our own life. We accomplish things (and sometimes don't accomplish things we'd like), and set both long and short term goals. To this end, I've been working on my own annual report. Aside from the lack of financial information, it bears a pretty good resemblance to a normal annual report. Of course, mine may pay a little more attention to style than some corporate annual reports.

For your edification and amusement, I present to you the cover of my 2008 annual report:

Taft on a Horse

For your enjoyment, a picture I found while hunting through the Wikimedia Commons. It's Taft on a horse. For some reason, it strikes me as an intensely funny picture.

An idea for a glossy zine

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous doesn't entirely appeal to me. It just frustrates me to see people who already have everything. It frustrates me because they have it and I don't. It frustrates me because I think it's pretty boring to look at what people do with their vast riches. These people have no reason to innovate or stretch. I have a better idea.

I've dreamed up yet another darn idea for a (maga)zine. I want to do something called Lifestyles of the Poor but Hopeful. I want to look at what people can do with less. How awesome can you make a cheap apartment on a low wage budget? If I'm to judge by some of the places I've seen, people can still do some amazing things with nothing. It strikes me as far more fascinating to see what clever people with less can do than what boring people can do with more.

I think I want to make a marginally glossy zine on this subject. We'll see how it goes. Maybe look for the first installment at Expozine this year. Maybe.

An Easier Website

I was in a design meeting at work today. The complaint: Clients ask for "cleaner" or "more professional" websites. So, the boss muses out loud that we can't just adjust and make a website sixty percent cleaner. It struck me at that point that there should be a way.

Solution: Take a representative sample of people. Give them a word (professional, clean, edgy, etc.). Give them a pile of design elements (colours, layout pieces, whole layouts, typography, all that good stuff). Get them to rate each element on how much it matches their perception of the given word. Look for patterns in the responses. Sort by demographics, psychographics, industries. Take the data. make a website generator with a very simple interface: a white screen with a number of slider bars, where each bar represents a scale of zero to one hundred for a given trait (edgy, contemporary, clean, professional...). Any person who wants a website need only key in a little pertinent information about themself, and then move the sliders to get what they want. Press the button. Don't like the output? Move the sliders some more.

So, I'm sensing another thesis. Doctorate, maybe? The research should be fun and doable. It's just the actual programming that I'm a little scared of. But it could make a good collaboration with a computer science person.

If it actually worked, I'd put myself out of the web design business. On the upside, I'd secure my place in other circles.

Labour of Love

I've been noticing lately (or always, take your pick) that love and romantic interpersonal relationships are a pretty frequent topic of discussion among people. Whether it's a discussion about loving and losing, or a horror story of spectacularly garbled communication, or the standard junk you find in every woman oriented magazine in existence, the concept of romantic love is everywhere. This is cool, because it happens to be a fun topic to discuss.

Because romantic love is interesting to talk about, and because I've been needing a nice, entertaining project to add to my already full plate, I've decided to start (another!) new zine. I'm calling it Labour of Love, and it truly is going to be one. It's going to be my prettiest zine yet, and I'm even going to try to publish it on a semi-regular basis. Basically, because everyone likes to talk about it, I'd like to add a little deeper thinking to the topic of love, in an entertaining and well packaged zine.

If anyone other than search engine spiders are reading this, I'm totally welcoming suggestions on this one.

Two reasons why I want to join the EU

From time to time, I wish Canada could defect from North America and become a member of the European Union. There are two reasons for this. Number one is that I'd like to get out of NAFTA. Number two is that I'd like to be able to participate in Eurovision voting. Yes, that's right: Eurovision and NAFTA in the same post.

Distant families and close TV

I re-watched the season finale of Torchwood today. I actually cried a little when two of the characters died. It strikes me as odd that I should cry for fictional characters. It seems especially odd when I stack it up next to my inability to cry when one of my uncles died. It's been nearly a year and I haven't cried for him yet, but I can cry over fictional characters. Rationally, that seems very strange.

Here's the problem: emotions aren't rational. I barely knew my uncle. He lived on the other side of the country and I only ever met him and handful of times. The Torchwood characters, on the other hand, were a fixture in my life for two years. Over the course of two seasons and twenty six episodes, I learned about their hopes, dreams, histories and problems. They were presented like real human beings. It doesn't matter that their lives revolved around fighting aliens. It's the human element that makes science fiction feasible. Personalities that we can believe in and identify with allow us to suspend our disbelief in other areas. In short, the characters in Torchwood became less abstract to me than a real member of my family.

I can't decide whether this is problematic or not. My knee jerk reaction is to be a little aghast that I have more emotion towards fiction than reality. But then, maybe the problem is that in the standard North American WASP family, there just isn't much emotion going around. Maybe it's life that's the problem. Maybe it's a good thing that TV is training me to feel more.

Attention = Equity

My clever insight for today: Attention is contemporary equity.
It's fun to think about and it makes a great soundbite.

More on video stores

First of all, I need to point out that Movieland is the only name for a video store. It's like calling a bowling alley Bowlerama. It's just the natural order of things.

So, I was in Movieland the other day (seriously) and I decided to carry out a little preliminary research for my video store study. I had a little chat with the guy at the counter. I asked if he'd ever had anyone in, renting movies and crying. His answer was encouraging. It turns out that there are criers. I am now unreasonably happy on two counts: people who cry in video stores do exist; people who work in video stores are suitably observant and would probably make excellent interview subjects.

The other cool thing I've noticed, in conducting my literature review, is that it's next to impossible to actually do a literature review for this project. I've found one study relating to the impact of mood on movie rental choice. That's as close as I can find to information relating to my topic. That's both good and bad. The good is that I won't be studying the same tired old thing. The bad is that secondary sources will be hard to find. Still, it's darn exciting stuff.

Twenty million different ways to get the same information

I've noticed something new and exciting. The thing itself isn't terribly new and exciting, but it's exciting that I've noticed it. I've noticed, as the title of this post says, that there are loads of different ways for me to get the same information. I'll give you an example.

Say I want to see what's new on BoingBoing. I could just plug the URL into Firefox and go have a look at the page itself. I do that a few times every day. Another option is to grab a glance at my iGoogle homepage, which has a widget for the BoingBoing RSS feed. Or, and this is increasingly becoming the case for me, I could look in my Twitter feeds and find out what the very latest post is, if there's been anything recently. But wait! There's more. Say I want to watch BBtv. Go to the webpage and look for it? Why bother when Miro downloads it automatically?

One blog, with one set of information, and I look at it in about four different ways. I do something quite similar with the CBC. I'm wondering whether this tendency is a) convenient; b) the wave of the future; c) an obsessive behaviour; d) a quick route to information overload.

Crying in video stores

Another thing I want to study:

Lots of people watch movies when they feel sad. Where do those people get movies from? Pre-internet, unless they wanted to watch something they already owned, they'd need to go to the video store. That means sad people in video stores. Even if they aren't crying, it should be possible to see who is more upset than the average.

Questions, then: In the past, how often would an average video store get a crier? A sad non-crier? Has the frequency of sad video store customers changed? Has it gone up? Down? If down, where have the sad video watchers gone? Or are people finding different coping mechanisms?

Problems: I don't know how I could possibly dig up information on incidences of video store criers and sad non-criers in the past. I can't imagine that anyone has kept records on that sort of thing. Perhaps it's time for a literature review.

Craigslist personals dynamics

I keep thinking up things that I want to study. Most recently, I've been thinking about what makes people reply to personal ads on Craigslist. Do people ever post ads that get no replies at all? What are the factors in a popular ad?

There are variables: Who the target audience is in terms of gender, sexual preference, age, location, all that good stuff; how the ad is written; whether or not the title of the ad is engaging... I could go on, because I think there are loads of factors in the popularity of ads. It's a fun exercise in personal marketing, and I somehow don't think there's a substantial body of literature on it yet.

An open letter to Facebook

Dear Facebook,

You have access to huge amounts of information about me. You know what city I grew up in, what activities I take part in, what parties I go to. You know what I study and when I'll graduate. You know what interests me and what causes I care about. You know how old I am, what my gender is, even my sexual preference and relationship status. You know where I live and who my friends are.

Why, if you have so very much information about me, do you insist on serving me ads that aren't relevant? You attempt to sell me foolproof scrapbooking supplies, on the assumption that I don't know thing one about design. You'd better tell the design school I've been attending for the past three years that you don't have confidence in their teaching. You'd show gay men ads for dating sites where they can meet great girls, wouldn't you?

Facebook, you have all the power and information in your hands. You have the technology. It's not a new idea. Why can't you serve relevant ads? You know what kind of music I listen to. Can't you give me pertinent ads from HMV or iTunes? You know what sports I like, and yet you refuse to advertise frisbees.

I cannot understand, no matter how hard I try, why a website that collects so much personal information is so bad at personalizing advertisements.

Absentee parents in picture books

In discussing the classic picture book Are You My Mother? today, an important question was raised. Namely: Why is the bird not concerned about who his father is? The baby bird moves heaven and earth to find his mother, but is completely unconcerned by the absence of his father. Could this book be an early example of positive depictions of single parenting? Is the bird unconcerned because he sees his father solely as an earner and would rather seek nurturing from his mother? Who, the bird should be asking, brought in the worms while mother was warming the eggs? Constantly, the little bird asks, "Are you my mother?" Why does a book written long before the mainstreaming of single parenthood present a baby bird with no father in sight, and no concern for his absence?

NOTE: Don't take the above seriously. If it were meant to be serious, there would be footnotes.

The Vernacular Woman

Finally finished a little site that I've been working on for a couple of months. Why did a small site take a couple months? Because I was trying to take a complicated idea that's also been done to death and make it new and simple. The result is a video with a little scene by scene didactic track down below. It's kind of like those audio picture books that little kids have.
Link

Charlie Angus: master of rhetoric

Charlie Angus has a new manifesto/article/thing up on his site about the currently infamous Bell Canada throttling debacle. It's good and nice and necessary, but what really strikes me about it isn't the content, but the form. Anyone who says that rhetoric is a lost art has clearly never read anything written by Charlie Angus. He piles it on. It's good rhetoric, though. I'm all for clever use of language as a tool in the political arsenal.

Link (maybe I should change my CSS so that my links actually look more like links...)

A traffic shaping manifesto

Capitalism is supposed to be good because it provides consumers with choice and companies with an incentive to innovate. By traffic shaping commercial lines used by other ISPs, Bell is eliminating choice. I've tried Bell. I even used their internet for a year. At the start of that year, the delay in getting my internet running was truly impressive. During that year, my internet was spotty. I rebooted my modem more times than I can count. The support was bad and the service was expensive. Needless to say, I switched. I switched to an ISP I knew and liked. I switched to an ISP whose workings I know and who I can get help from without going through an automated system. I even had the BitTorrent discussion with my ISP. I found my new ISP to be both responsible and responsive. In other words, I switched to a small ISP, one of the ones Bell services. As a free market economy allows me to do, I made my choice.

That's why I'm feeling particularly irate. I have not contracted with Bell in order to get my internet. Traffic shaping their own customers is one thing. But I'm not their customer. I do not have a deal with Bell. Why, then, are they attempting to impose their policy on me? I didn't sign on for this. I am not a Bell DSL customer. I won't sit still and allow a party I have no contract with to decide what I may and may not do on the internet. I want to use BitTorrent in peace, for whatever legal purposes I may put it to (like downloading heavy files and perfectly legal movies like Good Copy Bad Copy). I don't want my bandwidth throttled because I'm using a protocol other than http. I do not want to be bumped because Bell feels the need to marginalize certain protocols.

This is why I say, to Bell, as a customer of an independent ISP:

You're not my ISP. Don't throttle me.


The above is in response to Bell Canada's new traffic shaping policy. Read more about it here.
I'm thinking of trying to go big with this. The groundswell is there and I'd like to see something a little more present than a facebook group. I've worked up the logo that I'm going to shove onto my website in protest, and now I just need to build a website/action to go with it.

Instead of shooting shotguns at cans...

Here's a new idea for a fun passtime: Throw romance novels at Barbie dolls. It's like bowling or those carnival games with the water guns, only way more fun. Seriously, you can get a good throw with romance novels. I've tried it. They have a nice heft, but they aren't sturdy enough to actually damage things. And it's amazing catharsis.

Online ads get more obnoxious and depressing every day.

Facebook just asked me if I wanted to not be lonely anymore. That is to say, more specifically, that an ad on facebook asked me if I wanted to not be lonely. Funny thing, I didn't even know I was lonely. Facebook clearly thinks I am, though. Lots of websites also think that I might like to know who my soul mate is. These ads clearly think that I'm not happy as I am. Maybe they think that only frustrated, angry, lonely, desperate people view social networking and news sites. And all of that is without even bringing my SPAM into the equation.

My SPAM thinks that I might like a status symbol watch. Or that I might like to look at wild girls. Or that I'm having troubles with an appendage I don't even have. It's offering me designer shoes for cheap, too.

If I were to judge our social climate by the quality of advertising I see, I'd get the idea that most people are pretty unhappy. I'd get the idea that people are lonely, that they suffer from un-fulfilling relationships and bad sex. And that they don't own enough expensive looking watches. I might think that social problems magically disappear when certain pills and supplements are taken, or at least that people want to think so.

I find that things look fairly bleak, when you judge by the ads.

Conventional media as curator

I'm going to draw a parallel. If I want to see art, there are two things I can do. I could go online and do a search for "art." I'd get over a billion hits (check it yourself if you want to make sure). I'd get to sift through a whole world of art, opinions about art, art history... (Suspend your comments for a moment, if you will, about the non-originalness of the art online. I know that I won't get to see the real painting. But that's not the point of my argument. Forget about it.) My other option would be to go to an art gallery. Doing that would give me access to a limited amount of art, filtered through the perception of a third party. For it to show up in an art gallery, someone has to curate it. I get to look at what they think is interesting.

I think that it would be good for conventional media to operate that way. Let's have an example: Before the internet, it was alright to show one TV show in one country and a different one somewhere else. That's still how it happens, but I'm not sure it's okay any more. If a TV show airs in the UK but not in Canada, and I want to watch it but have no legal way to do so, what am I supposed to do? Am I meant to just not watch it at all? Or do I wait for the DVD to come out and then break the encryption? Or subscribe to digital cable for one show? That's no fun at all. It means that as much as I may want to watch something, there's no sensible, legal way to do it. Why don't they show me what I want to watch on TV? The standard channels only have so much space in their schedules. They have to make decisions about what they think will be successful. They don't have the resources to cater just to me. And yes, I know I could just get BBC Americas or something, but it comes with a large cable package. In order to get one show that I want, I'd have to sign on for a whole lot more. Not very sensible if I don't actually want to spend my free time in front of the TV. So, there's no easy way for conventional media to get my viewership without alienating another large chunk of the viewing public. There simply isn't enough time in the day to accommodate me.

There is, however, another medium that can target individuals quite well. Guess what it is. Did you say The Internet? You're quite right. The internet has all the space necessary to show everyone just what they want to see. That's pretty great. But there are some problems. For one thing, with enough space to make everyone happy, it's sometimes hard to find what you want. Take the art analogy above. A billion hits for the word "art." I'd have to narrow my search down quite a bit to find something that I actually wanted to look at. But that's another problem. Going to the art gallery, or watching TV, or listening to the radio gives me the opportunity to find new things. I might not have known that I'd like it, but when someone else presents it to me, wow! It's a whole new world.

We've established the strengths of conventional media and new media. Conventional media is good at filtering things, at presenting new things to viewers, at curating. The internet, on the other hand, is far better at distribution. You can actually fit all those individual tastes onto the internet. I think that the answer, then, is to make the two work together. Conventional media should become an arbiter of taste, a more curatorial venture, and should leave distribution to new media. Both media could play to their own strengths instead of the constant fear and competition that the current model provokes. Wouldn't that be nice?

Designphone

There's a very clever idea that came out of a BS session at school a few weeks ago. It was break, we were sitting at the back of the room, trying to troubleshoot a project that one of our number was having trouble with. Because many hands make light work, and because people further away from the project generally have more ideas about it, we managed to make some suggestions and come up with some solutions. We're lucky, though: at any given time, there are about fifty people we can go to and discuss issues with. That's an environment that you really only get in school. The informal workshopping sessions get fewer and farther between after graduation. That's when the idea came. Why not, we asked ourselves, offer that kind of environment for professional designers? Why not, for example, have a toll free phone number that designers can call to talk about their work related troubles?

To the group at the back of the room, it seemed like a great idea. We'd call it Designphone and it would be staffed by volunteer designers and design academics, ready and raring to help sort out creative problems.

To me, it still seems like a great idea. I determined, the day we came up with the idea, that I would find some way to implement it. And then I started doing the numbers. Phone line(s), office space, toll free number, snacks to put in the office fridge (if you expect people to do pro-bono work, you should at least feed them something): it all costs money. Where does the money come from, then? I thought that the Canada Council for the Arts might be a likely candidate. They support artist run centres and encourage new media works. But wait! I don't qualify for their grants. They don't give money to students.

So, here I am, sitting here with a pretty awesome idea and no idea how to fund it. I guess I'll have to find out who else funds this kind of thing, or just wait until I graduate and then apply for a grant. We'll see.

Not book reports, website reports

In grade school, I had to write book reports. They usually talked about the plot, the characters, and other basic things. Because it was grade school, I didn't go into much detail. I didn't analyse much or explore deeper issues of imagery and what lies beneath the basic plot. I was writing a reading response today, but it was a little different from the usual. Instead of an article, I was meant to be responding to some websites. As I wrote, it started looking suspiciously like one of those book reports from grade school. So, I'm wondering if, in the future, children in grade school will write website reports. They could discuss what the website is meant to do, the basic layout and structure, what kind of interaction it allows (if any), that kind of thing. Here's to a new artform, then. Or, if not an artform, a new kind of busywork for teachers to assign to small children. At least it promotes media literacy.

Capitalism for butterflies

I have this habit of starting little micro-businesses for individual occasions and situations. I take different things that I'm good at, different trends that I see happening, and different environmental stimuli (impending small press fairs, craft festivals, that sort of thing) and build a business to meet the need. In short, I do something that interests me now, for a limited period of time, and hope to benefit others. I then move on before the concept goes stale. I think there are other examples of this in existence, but I may take it to an extreme.

I'm calling my habit Capitalism for Butterflies, because it does a lot of the same things that butterflies do. Think: Butterflies live short lives, being pretty, flitting from place to place, pollinating. That's what an ideal Capitalism for Butterflies business does.
It exists for a short period of time, based around one good idea that is often trend based. It isn't meant to have staying power. If it works well, it pollinates. It makes the people who encounter it happy, it builds personal brand equity for the people involved, and the whole thing ends before it gets old.

A recent example of Capitalism for Butterflies: no poetry press. I started no poetry press specifically for Expozine. I got it into my head that I would show at Expozine 2007. Roughly two weeks before Expozine took place, I made a website, dreamed up a few zines, did the covers for those zines, put those on the site, and then registered myself for Expozine under the no poetry press banner. By the time Expozine rolled around, I had a catalogue of around ten zines/small books and I was ready to go. People showed up at my table, some of them actually looking for me because they'd seen covers that had interested them on the no poetry press site. I sold a lot and loads of people went home happy with copies of Flow Chart Comics, The Adorable Seven Deadly Sins and Love Poems for Undeserving People. no poetry press hasn't been active since. The website still exists, I still have copies of zines that didn't sell as well, and no poetry press might just register for Expozine 2008.

The bottom line, though, is that a Capitalism for Butterflies business doesn't need to exist all the time or for long. Good Capitalism for Butterflies businesses are low commitment, low investment and extremely compelling. They don't need to last forever. It's like having loads of different product lines under the umbrella of one company. The parent company in this case is just an individual. Every Capitalism for Butterflies project I start gets the ginger coons brand a little more equity. No loss, lots of gain and never any stasis.

Capitalism for Butterflies is a profoundly fluid business model. And that's a very good way to be.

Books are more democratic than television

I just watched an episode of jPod. As the credits rolled, I thought to myself "I really need to get out and buy that book." Immediately after thinking that, though, I realized that reading the book would ruin the show, because I'd know how it ends. But then, my reasoning went, Douglas Coupland is such a fantastic writer. There's probably way more in the text of jPod than there is in the show. After all, I love Douglas Coupland books for their tiny details. And tiny details don't show up very well in TV and movies. If they make it at all, they take a backseat to larger points of plot or mise en scene.

That's what makes books so much more democratic. When reading a book, everything is equal. Everything is just another set of words on a page. Tiny details get the same love that large events get. They have to, because everything comes in sequential order. Things that could happen simultaneously on a screen are forced to go one by one in books. And that's fantastic. It means that the tiny details work. It means that I really get to think about what the room looks like, if that's something that matters. Instead of simply seeing, the sequential nature of books forces me to process, to acknowledge, and to understand.

When word processors are the old fashioned way

I tried to load my blogger dashboard, in order to write the previous two posts. No response, just the generic message from my modem, saying that it wasn't going to happen. Check the modem: no lights out. Check another site, internet working properly. “So,” I though to myself, “blogger must be down. I guess I'll have to write these the old fashioned way and upload later.” The strange thing, though, is that by “the old fashioned way,” I meant in a word processor. Which is to say, a word processor that is actually installed on my physical-right-here-in-front-of-me computer. When did that become the old fashioned way? I'm a little concerned that I might soon be an anachronism. More and more, our productivity apps are moving to the internet (just look at google docs). More and more, the app that people use most is their browser. Will I be hopelessly old fashioned with my word processor and my graphics clients and my email client? The smart money, I think, is on the answer to that question being “yes.”

Blinders

Back in the day, when people used horses to get around and to drive ploughs, they had these blinders that they'd put on the horses. The blinders were essentially just a black thing on either side of the horse's head, blocking the peripheral vision. They were meant to keep the horse looking ahead, to stop it from being distracted by things happening off to the side.

I was in Pharmaprix today, at the checkout. You must understand, before I go on, that I don't care what celebrities do. I don't want to know about a new miracle diet, or twenty hot tips for steamy sex. I just don't care. It's problematic, then, to be constantly assaulted by the racks of magazines at the checkout. So, I'm thinking that I need to get myself some blinders. That way, I'll be able to direct my attention to the task at hand and get out of the store without being distracted by things that will only irritate me.

Results of the trip to Parc Ex

I humbly present one of the adorable photo illustrations that resulted from my trip to Parc Extension last weekend. I'm viewing it as what we might see if mother nature were more literal minded.

Settling and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

We watched The Umbrellas of Cherbourg last night in my film studies class. It may be a musical (entirely sung, no dialogue), and it may have killer sets and costumes that verge on the hilarious, but it's still incredibly sad. At least, I thought it was sad. What makes it sad (spoiler alert!) is that there are two characters, who epitomize young love, who end up, through circumstance, being separated and settling for other people.

The two main characters have the wild, irrational, crazy love that we prize so highly. During a period of separation, for social and economic reasons, they both end up settling for security instead of passion. Fine. They both end up fairly happy, in lives that they find comfortable, with reasonable partners who care about them. However, they have regrets. There are a million things I could take issue with in this premise. I could argue that crazy, irrational love is a relatively recent construct, and that mercenary marriages have long been seen as normal. But that's not what's bothering me, this time around.

What bothers me is the reaction of the other people watching the film. The main complaint was that all of the grand, swooping music and over the top set design didn't match the fairly pedestrian plot. Over and over, people complained that there wasn't enough excitement and conflict in the plot. The other viewers found it problematic that the characters had small issues, but managed to move on with their lives. I'm a little shocked by that viewpoint. I'm worried that we've been so conditioned by Hollywood to expect big things that we can accept reality.

In real life, people live with what they have. People make choices based on their immediate situation and their future happiness. People like comfort and certainty. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg presents a story in which characters react in realistic ways. In movies, people hardly ever settle. In real life, it happens all the time. Based on the reactions of the others in my film studies class, I get the impression that people want grand romance in their movies. They want the hope that unrealistic things can happen. That worries me, just a little bit.

On being ordinary and the economy

Digging deeper into the existing research on romance novels and gender, I've discovered an interesting tendency. I find it interesting, although it shouldn't surprise me. I'm finding more and more evidence that most people just want to have an ordinary life. There seems to be an overwhelming desire to have a comfortable life and just pass the time. I shouldn't be surprised because that's essentially what gets classified as the American Dream: the house, the husband, the car, the kids.

I'm surprised, of course, because I lack the fundamental ability to get out of my own head. My (heavily flawed) reasoning is that if I aspire to be extraordinary and to make an impact on the world, then most people should aspire to be extraordinary and to make an impact on the world. Wrong. If I actually take a moment to think about it, it's easy to see that I've made a seriously bad assumption.

Where does the economy come into it, you may rightly ask. The glib answer would be: where doesn't the economy come into it? But that's not very productive. It is in the interest of industry to have customers who want to buy things. A shiny new car every few years? That's fantastic news for the economy. Taking the metro or walking? Not so much. Cosmetics? Exfoliants? Cleansing pads? New clothes every season? Super! All of these things are sold to us as ways to fit in, to be normal, to live the life. That's not by chance, either.

Being extraordinary? If extraordinary means, etymologically, to be "out of order" (see for yourself), that's not so conducive to meeting societal norms. Want to save the environment? Not good economic sense. Want to re-examine gender roles? Downright dangerous. Not meeting norms? Not good for the economy.

TV on the internet v. TV on TV

I sat down in front of my TV last night to -amazingly enough- watch some TV. Most of the time, I use the TV for watching movies or playing games. I get most of my TV from the internet. The CBC normally gets my viewership by posting episodes on their website. This, I think, works better for everyone. What's so good about it? The CBC gets a more precise impression of where their viewers are coming from. When I pluck waves out of the air with an antenna, the CBC has no idea that I'm watching. On the other hand, when I click through to the jPod website, for example, it is quite clear that I'm watching. There's a useful corollary to that, too. CBC can more precisely tell their advertisers how many people are viewing, and who those people are. That's quite good. Clearly, the CBC benefits from me watching TV on the internet. What, then, do I gain? I gain flexibility and self determination. I gain the ability to watch shows when I want to, instead of when the CBC chooses to air them. That's useful if I'm not home when the show first airs. I'm much less likely to follow a show if I have to drop everything to watch it. The other major gain is that the show doesn't get interrupted by advertisements. I'd much rather view banner ads on the side or top of a website than ads in the middle of a show.

If TV on the internet is so good, why am I even framing this as a competition? TV is, at this point, still better than TV on the internet in some respects. For one, if I were to watch jPod on the CBC website, the resolution would be far worse than the TV version. Not only that, but the episode would stream, and streaming is inherently jumpy. Also, if I happened to be home on a Tuesday night, it would make far more sense to watch the broadcast, since episodes aren't uploaded until after the show has aired. Problematic. But not just problematic for the viewer. Even though the CBC benefits in many ways from making shows available on their website, there's still a major problem: the cost of bandwidth. Streaming a 45 minute long show takes bandwidth. Bandwidth costs money. They now pay not only to broadcast the show on TV, but also to stream it on demand on their website.

Some questions, then, about the good and bad of TV on the internet. Would I rather watch a low res, slightly jumpy version of a show, or have the story constantly interrupted by advertisements? Why, if the CBC is willing to make shows available online, do they not choose a better distribution method? Would it be so wrong to set up a CBC sanctioned torrent? Such a solution might cut bandwidth costs for the CBC, and it would certainly give viewers a better viewing experience. At the same time, would regular viewers be willing to spend time waiting for a show to download, in exchange for better picture quality? Do regular viewers even bother to watch TV on the internet?

If I value flexibility and self determination in my TV viewing, why did I sit down last night and watch TV on TV? Simply, I was home, I had nothing to do, I wanted something lazy to occupy my evening with. So I turned on the TV. I find, though, that the more committed I am to a show, the more I end up watching it on the internet. Broadcast TV, on the other hand, is admirably suited to casual viewing. Plus, commercial breaks are a great time to go and get a fresh cup of tea.