May 30, 2007
i'm kenyatta cheese. who the hell are you? - part 3.
Facebook doesn't think I'm for real:
I tried registering a couple of times and got an error message suggesting that "kenyatta cheese" wasn't a "legitimate name."
Hooray for ethnocentrism!
While the comedy inherent in having a last name like "Cheese" makes this particular instance of q=facebook+%22legitimate+name%22 really funny, I can see how someone telling you that your real name isn't legit can be yet another way of making you feel left out.
update: In the time since I posted this entry, Facebook wrote back and hand-processed my registration for me. Thanks. Here's hoping that you don't have to hand-register the rather large portion of the world without western names.
Posted by yatta at 5:05 PM
August 26, 2006
the usual suspects.
T.L. was standing in Union Square with P, a friend of his who was visiting from Senegal. An unmarked car pulls up next to them. A man gets out and says to P "come with me. I'll give you $50 to be in a lineup."
P didn't understand what the man was saying. P's English isn't very good. T.L. answered for him. "No." "C'mon," the man said, "It'll be real quick. And you make fifty bucks."
T.L. and P walked away.
Now I know how this shit happens.
Posted by yatta at 11:19 PM
April 5, 2006
pedo(shrn)
Senate Testimony By Former 13-year olds.
pedo is so hot right now.
Posted by yatta at 6:04 PM
February 20, 2006
commie baiting is soooo web 0.2
Too bad it wasn't flavored with a bit of this [pdf], a smidgen of this [pdf], and a dash of this.
Because then, you know, it wouldn't be so terribly off.
Perhaps I should just be happy that the piece is so ill-informed that it ends up being it's greatest argument against itself.
Keep information authoring and content creation in the hands of the elite, indeed.
Posted by yatta at 3:02 AM
February 17, 2006
there's a conspiracy in my mouth and everyone's invited.
Just spent five minutes in the UPS room at Datagram. Either the electrical charge in there is substantial or my body is just sensitive to that sort of thing. My head is woozy and my fillings ache. Good thing I don't work at an ISP. Or with controversial giant ionospheric heaters.
Posted by yatta at 12:37 PM
February 10, 2006
i write teh suXor.
"If you do a blog for a long time, you eventually run into the wall where you realize that running your mouth constantly isn't so good a thing. If you want to write better, read more and write less."
I took a look back at my past couple months of posts and cringed. What the hell is happening here? I used to know how to tell a good story. I used to write articles that made people cry. I used to freestyle speeches at campus rallies that moved people to storm the halls of student government. Now look at me. I'm full of bad grammar. My participles dangle. There's no rhythm. No timing. I also just noticed that this is my third sour post in a row.
I write teh suXor.
Posted by yatta at 6:15 PM | Comments (2)
February 7, 2006
I call him 'Sparky'
Fwd: I call him 'Sparky'
Originally uploaded by yatta.
Is it me or do Apple laptop power adapters suck? Last week I had a seven month old powerbook AC adapter fray at the receptor end and stop working. I had to scramble around LA looking for a replacement. The one pictured here (about a year and a half old) started making a whomping sound and when I leaned in to listen to it it sparked and the end broke off. I've gone through four Apple adapters in the past two years. Soon I'll be saying hello to #5.
Posted by yatta at 6:06 PM | Comments (4)
January 28, 2006
is fear of a black planet the best album of all time?
I'm sitting here in a café in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, listening to B Side Wins Again and marveling at Chuck D and Hank Shocklee's genius.
Perhaps my feeling is intensified by the fact that there are about 40 people in the café right now, and the only non-white patrons are myself and the homeless who just asked to use the bathroom.
Posted by yatta at 5:03 PM | Comments (5)
January 17, 2006
oh so quiet.
note to self: while your landlord is doing renovations to the house, interpret the sound of silence to either mean that the electricity isn't on, the heat has been shut off, or both. Radiators and alarm clocks are both supposed to make a racket come wakey time.
Subsequent action item: remind contractor to turn on either one or both upon completion of work for the day.
Posted by yatta at 11:53 AM
January 16, 2006
by the time i get to a.p. history.
Last year I met a middle school teacher who told me how she was asked by her administrator to "stress" the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. as having mixed results for African Americans and that the declaration of his birthday as a national holiday was "controversial." He wasn't being racist, she was told, he was suggesting it in order "to provide a more balanced view of history."
The teacher didn't do it, thankfully, and instead led an impromptu discussion about all the forms xenophobia takes, including poorly veiled suggestions from administrators. Good for her.
Recalling this story to my sister today, she reminded me that many public school districts in suburban Jersey make the MLK holiday optional depending on the racial make-up of the population. As if respect for human rights could be applied selectively.
Oh wait, silly me -- yes they can.
Posted by yatta at 2:17 PM
Deep down, we are all Jolie-Pitts.
Television is one of the bad things that happens when Sunday isn't a school night. After watching about 15 minutes of Access Hollywood, I come up with the idea that we should all add "Jolie-Pitt" to our last names so we could all be part of the extended family.
It'd also mean that I hadn't laid waste to the last 15 minutes of my life. ;)
-Kenyatta Cheese-Jolie-Pitt.
Posted by yatta at 10:01 AM
January 6, 2006
manufacturing content.
PK pointed me to a two week old Om Malik discussion on plagiarism and spam blogging. He forwarded it b/c unmediated was mentioned in TechDirt's post on the subject. Damn -- I so missed the boat on reblogging that one. ;)
Although Mike puts out the fire on splogs...
" One major difference is that the site Om is specifically complaining about is taking his content without crediting him -- which is a more reasonable complaint, but not quite what everyone seems to be talking about. However, when that's happened to Techdirt we've discovered two things -- and both suggest that all this debate is a waste of time. the sites that (1) don't credit properly and (2) don't respond to such emails almost always disappear within a month. Why? Because no one reads them."
...there seemed to be a bit of discussion of the aggregator/resyndicaiton thing....
"Obviously, you can argue that scraper sites don't add value, but some people could find them useful as aggregations of content. Sites like Unmediated and Davenetics' Newsmonger (which appears to be down right now) don't do anything other than repost other people's content (including our own) -- and yet we don't hear too many people complaining about them "making money" off of bloggers' content."
Well, I get that Om isn't talking about reBlog as it's more of a curation tool than a straight up aggregator. And while the value of tools like reBlog lay closer to problems of cognitive overload than with lazy clickers, what a lot of folks don't realize is that unmediated (and many other reBlogs like it) doesn't make a penny on ads that appear on the site. While reblogged entries may be pared down for brevity (with a "Continued at [Source Blog]" link in the post), any ads that appear in the RSS feed remain in the post. (The occasional exception being those that use poorly structured tables that mess with my page formatting or reference external CSS.) So if someone clicks through that reblogged Joystiq sponsor link, it adds to Jason's impressions -- not Eyebeam's or unmediated's.
One thing that's always interested me about reblogging is the ability to see the explicit 'how' and 'why' of a meme's propagation. It's built into the reBlog software and default templates. At unmediated, we try to keep the attribute blog as the primary link. This way, you can always follow the breadcrumbs in a way that's not always apparent with a Technorati search.
The clever devil in all of this is that "originating" blogs themselves are almost oppressively dependent upon existing institutions for their information disperal and I mean that in a depressing Herman and Chomsky sort of way. It's why the "blogs vs mainstream media" debate always struck me as disingenuous and incidental.
It's also why, ultimately, this conversation will probably resurface again in a cycle or two.
Posted by yatta at 2:02 AM
December 21, 2005
casshern
Finally got my hands on a copy of the anime turned CGI-live action movie Casshern the other day. In terms of "the latest greatest CGI blah blah blah" the release of this movie was totally overshadowed by the hype around Sky Captain. (And as an amateur fanboy, I should probably mention Mamoru Oshii's Avalon as the precedent for both.) I'm not trying to write a review here, but I was struck by the similarities between Casshern and the early work of another music video/commercial director turned feature filmmaker in David Fincher.
Like Alien 3 and Se7en, Casshern is visually and technically fantastic pop. But where Alien 3 and Casshern both get caught navel gazing for long periods of time, Casshern has a soul where se7en doesn't. (Speaking of se7en, have I told you that Brad Pitt's "What's in the Box?" scene remains one of my favorite impressions to do while intoxicated? Try me some time.) Granted, Casshern's heart might just be a 70's cartoon channeled through Final Fantasy and modernized for the 18-34 set, but it's still moving, nonetheless. (Or maybe I'm just feeling the residual effects of watching Dogville first.) Either way, I just wanted to make this one comparison and let it go. I've had my say and now I'm done.
Oh wait -- one more thing: speaking of Casshan, where the hell was Friender, the fire-breathing robot dog? ;)
Posted by yatta at 12:09 AM
December 20, 2005
twu strike is on.
It sucks, but I'm not against them. I don't know how long public sentiment can hold out, though.
So... who's carpooling? Anyone want to bike in together?
Posted by yatta at 4:07 AM
November 28, 2005
JFK AirTrain's Bad Wayfinding
JFK AirTrain's Bad Wayfinding
Originally uploaded by yatta.
Perhaps it's my own incompetence, but I had a hard time figuring out which train I had to take to get to Long Term Parking Lot B the other day. Wayfinding on the AirTrain platform is kept to a minimum. This makes for a clean, ultra-mod look but it's damn hard to figure out where you need to go when you're getting off of a six hour flight. Looking at the confused faces on the travelers around me, I wasn't the only one with a problem.
I figure that it took me 30 seconds to locate the map in the room, two minutes to interpret the three train lines (which side is the "loop" and where do the "outbound" trains stop?), five minutes to understand what the two-line red-on-black LED above the tracks meant (small, dim and in a different font than the map), and once I'm on the train, it took me another 30 seconds of listening to the automated announcement (and checking the map again) to make sure that I'm on the right one. Once on board, I spent another five minutes helping my fellow travelers get to their destinations.
Dan: this is a bad one. but the one Michael posted ( www.flickr.com/photos/deprimer/65234082/ ) is even worse, methinks. on top of the fact, that they can't at least decide on a single bad way to do airtrain infographics.
And David solves it all by mashing my AirTrain photo with my Portable Video diagram. ;)
Posted by yatta at 2:55 PM
November 15, 2005
500 errors.
Been down for a while with Error 500 Internal Server Errors. Checked the access logs where I found over 500 of them. I had to remind myself that just because something seems ironic, it doesn't make it clever.
Posted by yatta at 12:46 AM
October 22, 2005
this is my introduction at the OMDS so that I don't take up time.
My name is kenyatta.
Posted by yatta at 8:50 AM | Comments (1)
Openness at the Open Media Developers Summit.
Dave Winer (and Jeff Jarvis) has a short piece pointing out the irony that the first Open Media Developers Summit has a closed invite list.
Dude(s) - you're totally right. But we're also doing this almost totally out of pocket. If it weren't for the generosity of ITP, we wouldn't even have space for the 50 people who are on the list.
Hook us up with some conference sponsors and we'll hold the next one in the biggest venue money can buy.
Posted by yatta at 12:54 AM
September 13, 2005
chicken little.
LA went out. Dreamhost went down. There are large gaping holes in the ceiling at Eyebeam as we get a new roof. All around me the sky is falling.
Whee!
Posted by yatta at 1:52 PM
August 25, 2005
coxsackie.
if anyone wants to know why I haven't gotten back to them in the past couple of days, blame the coxsackie.
Posted by yatta at 1:50 PM
August 19, 2005
instance messaging.
I was just thinking the same thing, Lucas. ;)
Posted by yatta at 4:45 PM | Comments (1)
August 8, 2005
rejected.
Someone came across this post a while ago and posted this comment which I never approved...
I just moved to NYC from LA. Why don't you say Big Cup is the fucking gayest cafe in NYC? are you in the closet pretending everyone there is a male model? That's fuckin gay to me. Are all these list a fagg coffee shop that you frequent?
...but I emailed the guy back anyway...
Dude. It's New York. It's in the middle of Chelsea. Why the fuck are you even here you fucking backwater bigot redneck dumbfuck? There is no place for you here. It's not safe for you here. There's assrape hiding behind every corner. Get back to Ohidaho immediately. U-Haul rentals are up on 45th.
... When I first saw it, I was annoyed. Now, looking at the exchange on the whole, I just think it's funny, so I'm posting it anywway.
Posted by yatta at 4:44 PM | Comments (1)
August 1, 2005
if you don't have anything nice to say...
... say it in a blog.
Have you ever been stuck in a conversation with a stranger who you suspect, at any moment now, is gonna ask you to "put the lotion in the basket?"
Posted by yatta at 9:37 PM
July 30, 2005
tricia's featured in wired magazine...
well, kinda. ;)
She was in Oakland the other day when they were doing a photo shoot for this month's story on the Netscape IPO. So they asked to take her picture for this collage.
So now the joke is that Tricia got into Wired (print edition, thank you very much) before I did.
Posted by yatta at 12:44 AM
July 25, 2005
Completely useless notes on the flight back from Chicago.
Taxi from O'Hare to Downtown Chicago. Time: 75min. Cost: $39.75
"L" train from Downtown Chicago to O'Hare. Time: 40min. Cost: $1.75
Note to self: examine above info for lesson to be learned.
8.09p We finally got on the 4pm flight at a quarter to 8. We've taxied back only to stop short of the runway. The pilot has shut down one of the engines. This bodes well.
8.20p They've shut down all air traffic east out of O'Hare. Turns out there's a bad thunderstorm. They let one plane through to see if they could "find a hole." Note to pilot: the right choice of words can mean so much to your audience.
8.21p We've just been informed that LaGuardia is closed for construction. We're flying into Newark instead.
8.23p. I don't like most peoples' ringtones.
8.24p Dude: why do you need to use your bluetooth headset here? Why?
8.47p My sidekick gets better GPRS service on the tarmac at O'Hare than it does anywhere else on earth.
8.48p Read Google News. It's official: Larry Brown has left Detroit. Thomas is going to make a $50m play to bring him to the Knicks. Still don't have an overwhelming desire to buy tix this year.
9.15p someone behind me has used the phrase "prior to 9-11" three times in the last five minutes. Someone in front of me has said "post 9-11" twice. I'm about three more away from introducing the both of them to the phrase "post-nosebleed."
9.37p If an airline is in bankruptcy, what is the effectiveness of cutting existing operating costs by decreasing the amount of fresh air pumped into the cabin? I would have thought cutting off the air conditioning would be enough.
9.41p I've officially added United to my list of airlines to avoid, joining American, and ATA. The only airline on my first option list? JetBlue.
9.42p Some advertiser should pull this stunt in the near future: 1) search Technorati for positive blog posts having to do with it's product. 2) Send each of these bloggers a thank you email with a $25 Amazon gift certificate. 3) Make sure one of those bloggers informs boing boing of Kthe good news". Links triple immediately.
10.09p We're still on the tarmac but we're moving. Slowly. There are three planes ahead of us and what looks to at least two dozen behind us, I see a UPS cargo plane behind us in queue.
10.17p I'm going to transcribe the next half hour of random playback off of the iPod. I'm in hour five of the O'Harrrowing O'Rdeal O'f O'Hare. I hope the batteries don't give out on me.
"A Year In A Minute" Fennesz - Endless Summer
"I Ain't No Joke" Eric B. & Rakim - Paid In Full
"Try A Little Tenderness" Otis Redding
"Snow" E*Vax - Parking Lot Music
"You Haven't Done Nothing" Stevie Wonder
"Let's Move" The Foreign Exchange - Connected
"Summer Clip" Casino Versus Japan - Whole Numbers play
"Susie-Q" Creedence Clearwater Revival
"Come Beta" Destra - Laventille
"Fix You" Coldplay - X&Y
"Method Man" Wu Tang Clan
"Eden 1" Tortoise Standards
"Off Minor" Thelonious Monk
"Baile Funk One" M.I.A./Diplo Piracy Funds Terrorism
"Rhiannon" Fleetwood Mac
"coming in for a landing, we're home" Wilfred Castillo (on that note, I'll stop.)
11.00p I need to get a sink catcher for my kitchen sink.
11.05p Guy in front of me has a Thinkpad T41. Each time they say we're about to take off, he puts it into "Hibernate" mode. No news here.
11.09p After our third trip around the tarmac in queue someone says, "What is this, NASCAR?" We all laugh. He's going to go home and tell his wife that he made a funny. I just know it.
11.17p What if all citizen journalism sites end up being just like this post -- a bunch of people posting complete non-stories? How will people react when the event that they think is "breaking news" is seen as but a blip to the editors? How much have the citizen journalism folks learned from indymedia? Have they even bothered to study the processes at existing community journalism sites? Will the citizen journalism world be made up of just out-of-work stringers looking to bolster their portfolios?
11.22p People don't use blinkers when driving in NYC b/c it gives away their strategic advantage.
1.42a We land in Newark. I call Tricia. According to the United website, it says we just landed... at JFK.
Posted by yatta at 3:00 PM | Comments (1)
June 30, 2005
obsessed with the abduction of katie holmes.
It's all Tricia's fault. She's so bothered by the mere fact that Katie Holmes exists that every time she comes across a manifestation of the Katie Holmes Media Juggernaut, she tells me all the reasons Katie Holmes sucks so much. Up until then, I hadn't given it much thought. But after seeing stuff like this, I've found myself on a week-long Katie Holmes infoporn binge.
With the Tom Criuse talk show world tour coming to an end, I started thinking that I was in the clear and could put all of this nonsense behind me, but with David thinking about adding a 'katie holmes' category to hello, I'm kinda worried it's still gonna flare up every now and then.
Posted by yatta at 9:45 AM
June 21, 2005
any ideas for bluetoothbrush.org?
Anyone have any neat ideas for the bluetoothbrush.org domain?
A little over a year ago, Josh put together the anti-Bush website, bluetoothagainstbush.com. He was promptly served with a cease and desist from the Bluetooth SIG and was forced to change the name to bluetoothusersagainstbush. I considered the whole thing a little odd and so I decided to register the domain bluetoothbrush.org just in case I needed to get in on some hot stupid-on-stupid action.
Fortunately, it never went that far, but I still have the domain. And if no one can come up with an interesting/funny/ridiculous idea for the domain, I'm going to let it go. You have 30 days. Starting..... NOW!
Posted by yatta at 10:59 AM | Comments (2)
May 7, 2005
on tap for today: contagious conferences and subway parties.
i'm at the contagious media workshops at eyebeam and they're pretty damn keen. I see a few folks who look to be livebloggging it so we'll see what comes up later. In the meantime, we're capturing all of the presentations which I hope to have up on the reblog sooner than later.
unfortunately, i have to split before the yes men keynote. i have to make it out on time for gabe and tricia's latest subway train party. it's also doubling as tricia's belated bday party, so come on out and bring her a silly gift from the dollar store. she'll appreciate it.
it's on the 2 train this time. it leaves 148th st @ 8.20, so try to make it if you can. i'm so exhausted from four weeks of mayhem (peru, la, and all the beam events) that you're likely to find me napping in the corner, but i'll be happy.
Posted by yatta at 5:30 PM | Comments (5)
May 5, 2005
lonely rockers.
I've been on a classic rock radio kick lately. Not sure what it is. Maybe it's some kind of false nostalgia that sets in with age.
An unfortunate side effect is that I have to listen to classic rock radio ads. And three out of the last six ads were either for online dating services or topless bars. I don't know which made me feel dirtier.
Methinks I need to trade in the Credence for some live My Bloody Valentine mp3s. Ooh, and maybe I'll follow that up with some rare PE. (Sorry -- I'm visiting the Bootleg Browser for the first time.)
Posted by yatta at 9:36 PM | Comments (1)
April 28, 2005
peretti and peretti show @ newmuseum.
Jonah and Chelsea have a show at New Museum. It's whole swaths of their contagious media work rolled up into one easy to swallow ball of joy. Go check it out. Jonah and I were joking about how shows make people into capital-A Artists a while ago. So at the opening tonight, I asked Chelsea if it made her feel like a capital-A Artist, completely forgetting that I hadn't started that thread with her. Shit. What an ass.
Hey Chelsea: I hope you didn't take that the wrong way. ;)
Posted by yatta at 5:42 PM
April 18, 2005
Two week summary: Peru = great, Annenberg = great, not being @ NAB = awesome!
I just caught the redeye from San Diego back to NYC. I can feel my brain burning. After getting things settled here @ Eyebeam, I think I'm gonna sleep the rest of the day away at home.
I spent a week in Peru with Cally and had an interesting time. I'll post lots of pics and vid later. Coming back, I took a detour to visit folks at the Annenberg Center @ USC. I had a nice long chat with them about participatory media and stuff we're all working on within and around unmediated. What a great bunch of folks. Big thanks to Mimi Ito for hosting me. After that, I spent a good hour and a half talking to Ellen Seiter's class on anime. Anything with Ellen is always a good time.
But best of all, I just realized that I'm not at NAB this year which makes me very happy. No heat, no casinos, no glossy product brochures, no bargaining, no schmoozing, no pandering. Now I just gotta hope enough people blog NAB to keep on top of it.
Posted by yatta at 4:15 AM | Comments (2)
April 1, 2005
2789 blog entries read in one evening. sort of.
With big connectivity problems at the day job, I haven't had time to reblog unmediated in the past 36 hours. In that time, there were nearly 2800 new blog entries to sift through, prune, edit, reformat, and post. And I look at the clock and it's nearly 3.00a. Ugh.
We've been reblogging upwards of 20 posts a day at unmediated. Sometimes I wonder if this feels overwhelming to anyone else but me and I start to sketch out elaborate schemes for breaking out the category feeds and redesigning the pages to better separate posts and present information. Eli tells me that there's nothing to worry about -- more sources equals more blogworthy posts equals more content to push down the line. I think it means I need to find more sponsors to get more resources to hire a staff person to help with this stuff on a part time basis.
Just more stuff to think about after the conference.
Posted by yatta at 3:02 AM | Comments (2)
User-Distributed Fiona Apple.
I'm finally getting around to listening to the recently covered, never released Fiona Apple album. Me likes.
Posted by yatta at 12:39 AM
March 21, 2005
Welcome, Jason. Here's your nametag and hair net.
Jason Kottke will soon be joining the cult of Eyebeam family as an R&D fellow. Nice.
With his drive and determiniation, He'll be promoted to a certified Fry manufacturer in no time.
Posted by yatta at 7:49 PM
Welcome, Jason. Here's your nametag and hair net.
Jason Kottke will soon be joining the cult of Eyebeam family as an R&D fellow. Nice.
With his drive and determiniation, He'll be promoted to a certified Fry manufacturer in no time.
Posted by yatta at 7:49 PM
March 9, 2005
the inner circle call her 'Chels.'
Harner's got me worried. Any day now she's gonna drop $10 on the starter kit and get put into The Big Time.
What worries me isn't the Space Ruler Xenu part, but the ten bucks. I mean, $10 is, like, half a month's salary for her.
What she needs to do is wait for two guys from Canada to form a fan club for her. I mean, it could happen. It's already happening to folks around her. I'd start one for her but I'm not Canadian for one, let alone two. So instead I'll continue my mutual fanclub with cally, and I'll start a new fanblog for the two Canadians. I'll call it The Chelsea Peretti Fan Club Fan Club. And it'll be a group blog. But I'll have no intention of maintaining it. This way it'll never get completely out of hand and unfunny. Unless there's some college student in Canada with an infinite amount of time and loves a joke with a half life of zero. If you're out there, the Fan Club Fan Club is all yours.
Posted by yatta at 12:47 AM
March 8, 2005
Luna's last show.
I've been so busy moving Eyebeam into the newly renovated facility that I missed Luna's last week of shows. Granted, I haven't really paid much attention since Penthouse (although I've bought every album since and before then), and the occasional free show in Battery Park, Prospect Park, or wherever else there was a nice summer evening to hang out at, but a Luna show was one I'd always enjoy and think back on for weeks. I'm gonna miss that.
(via A VC)
Posted by yatta at 2:27 AM
March 2, 2005
Can you see me now? Good.
I had trouble trying to watch a Knicks game on a trip to my parents' place the other night, not because my favorite bunch of underachievers were losing (they beat Indiana by 11 - go figure!) but because the video was encoded so low that the image was unbearable. I could see trails wherever there was a lot of motion. Camera switches seemed surreal. And while Tricia and I both saw it, neither of my parents noticed it at all.
At first I thought it was something wonky at the head end, but then the "live-from-the-studio" halftime report looked totally fine. The bad encode was happening further upstream, perhaps before the MSG master control. Either way, it made Tricia wonder, "What's going to happen when people learn to accept lower bitrate television?"
Although I'm now sure she was speaking more of my own griping than anything else, she does have a point. Maybe, one day, the difference between the premium "NBA-League Pass" paid subscription and the free television simulcast will be that the premium signal will be encoded at a higher bitrate. Those with the right mix of money and bandwidth will be able to see TV "the way it used to be." Those without the same resources will be reduced to watching a fuzzy, artifact-laden MPEG1 stream. (I'm only speaking of the broadcast of live events here. Any other content will be (should be) time-shifted, so those with slow connections would just have to wait longer for the torrent to complete, legally or illegally.)
This adjustment of our Quality of Service expectations isn't impossible. We already did it years ago, when we traded in the quality of landline telephones for the portability of (more expensive) cell phone service. We've started making that same transition in television with the excuse that live video from a war zone is hard to come by, so we've traded in the clarity of half-a-mil worth of live satellite truck feed for the immediacy of a well "embedded" 500Kbps videophone.
(Two quick unoriginal tangents here: We accept -- no, we expect -- that war zone video to look fuzzy, and we question it's authenticity if it isn't. Also, I wonder if the advent of videophones has accelerated the inverse correlation between the thoughtfulness of a reporter's content and the faster time-to-air enabled by the technology. If there's less time to contemplate, you're gonna say really stupid sh!t.)
Will we learn to tolerate low-bitrate live sports broadcasts? I'm sure we will. My parents watch it already. And strangely, more people that I talk to seem to like the Verizon EVDO VCast stuff than I expected.
I just don't know if I'm ready to see commercials with the tagline: "Can you see it now? Good."
Posted by yatta at 2:48 AM
March 1, 2005
sometimes i doubt your commitment to sparkle motion.
after being chided by a bunch of youz for years because i hadn't seen this movie, it finally floated it's way to the top of my netflix queue. i now understand your urgency. thank you for sharing this with me.
now if you'd please read that book that i bought all of you copies of, we can finally call this thing even.
Posted by yatta at 12:26 AM | Comments (2)
February 21, 2005
Step away from the CSS Mr. Cheese....
I decided to have a little fun with the css for kenyattacheese.net.
And I'm still working on it.
Also added chatango at the suggestion of mr. chapman... but I can't remember why. i know there was a good idea in there somewhere.
Anyway, yes, it's a interface design nightmare, but I like it that way (for now.)
Posted by yatta at 11:53 PM
Melissa + The Cantankerous Lollies + Galapagos = Burlesque tonight in Williamsburg.
Melissa is doing her burlesque thing with The Cantankerous Lollies tonight at Galapagos in Williamsburg. This is another event that I'm gonna miss but that you shouldn't if you're gonna be in the neighborhood.
Posted by yatta at 6:20 PM
February 18, 2005
colbertkilledapanda.com
I can't believe someone registered the domain (yes I can). Anyway, I just caught the Daily Show segment on Gannon/Guckert and the crackuposphere. Chuckled so hard I think I did a little tinkle.
This is why I wish I had cable teevee. Well, that and the NBA Playoffs.
(Link via Chuck.)
Posted by yatta at 10:10 PM
cally's looking for a job.
somebody go hire her.
Posted by yatta at 12:41 PM
January 24, 2005
Providing Awareness and Alternatives to Hot 97 Radio (A Citizens' Tsunami.)
Last night, someone told me about the racist Hot97 skit mocking the Tsunami victims and referring to Asians as "chinks" and "little chinamen." It's an obvious ploy to get the station some play while their former star personalities move to the competing Clear Channel station but it's also inappropriate behavior for any media with that much marketshare and so few alternatives.
But even so, people have been doing their part to make them realize that they won't tolerate their intolerance.
Folks are starting sponsor petitions and boycott campaigns against both the parent corporation, Emmis Communications, and their sponsors. I commend and support these campaigns (I'm in the process of having my entire family cancel their SprintPCS and Nextel phone services of eight years), but like Tim Karr, I question whether they'll be effective enough. (Doesn't mean I'm gonna ignore it either, tho.)
In the above link to MediaCitizen, Tim suggests that folks file a "Petition to Deny" license renewal with the FCC. I'm not a fan of takedowns, but I do agree that both the sponsor and FCC petitions are good ways of taking charge of one's media. The other way is to show people (or give them) an alternative.
So first off, I'm going to start a list of "Alternatives to Hot 97", a list of hip-hop radio stations and radio shows, both mainstream and underground in the greater New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area. It'll take a couple of days to get this list into any real significant form, since I don't really listen to radio anymore, but I know folks who do. So I'm getting them to do what they can. (If you come across a non-commercial college radio or community radio hip-hop show in NYC, del.icio.us it and tag it "fuckhot97")
Second, I'm looking into legal ways to provide a radio alternative for my neighborhood. Right now a couple of strategically placed 100mW Ramseys with letters of consent from my neighbors sounds like an interesting idea.
In the meantime, here's the list...
(And remember, Hot 97's parent, Emmis Communications has sister stations throughout the country.)
Radio Alternatives to Hot 97:
99.5FM WBAI - Saturday nights, 12.00a-2.00a - The Underground Railroad
Net Radio Alternatives to Hot 97:
Smoothbeats.com
Hip Hop Podcasting:
iPodder.org hip hop podcast directory
Posted by yatta at 6:07 PM | TrackBack
January 18, 2005
For Apple repairs in NYC, go to Tekserve
Wow. I just heard two different horror stories about getting your Powerbook or iBook repaired in New York City. And not to name names, but both stories involved some random Mac Store on Prince Street. The service was lousy, the lines were long, and the prices were exorbitant.
I've said it to people time and time again in everything but my blog so here it goes: If you have to get your *Mac or *Book fixed in New York, in or out of warranty, go to Tekserve.
May I never hear a bad Apple service story again.
Posted by yatta at 10:28 AM | Comments (2)
January 13, 2005
Offline prep.
Has anyone noticed the funky rhythm of unmediated lately? That instead of 10-12 consistent reblogged posts a day, instead you're seeing 20-30 posts every two days? And check out those post times: 2.30a, 3.30a. 4.15a! It's been ridiculous.
My daylight hours have been spent installing the Works In Process show which opens at Eyebeam next Thursday. Here's the roster:
Beeoff
Knowear
Mariam Ghani
Jenny Marketou
neuroTransmitter
Bec Stupak
As the tech guy, I usually judge how good a show is gonna be by how draining the installation process becomes. So far, this one is a keeper.
I've also been ankle deep in doing logistical planning for vloggercon. While Ryan, Jay, Steve and crew hold the important stuff down, I'm making sure we have enough napkins and name badges. (Just learned that the Konscious are on board to help Shawn and Dan handle live streaming. Right on!)
We're anticipating 100 people, but I think we're underestimating the crowd we'll get at the door. Last night I had one of those waking premonitions that makes me sketch out contingency plans in the margins of my subway reading. I was on iChat with Cally when she says, "Oh yeah, I'm going to this vloggercon thing next weekend. I saw something on Tony Pierce the other day. It sounds interesting."
If I had a glass of water, I would have done a spittake. Instead, I started dialing Jay's numbre. When friends at least two-times-removed from the distributed media thing start showing interest, you know you need to increase your capacity.
Posted by yatta at 10:37 PM
January 7, 2005
Saving Face in Sundance.
Alice is in Sundance this year. I'm okay with receiving most of my news through blogs. But what does it mean when you find out what's going on with your friends through third-party blogs?
Posted by yatta at 2:44 PM | Comments (1)
December 27, 2004
Cally's got mittens.
We can now commence with the 'Peace on Earth' thing.
Posted by yatta at 5:21 PM
December 13, 2004
post-Hanami bliss.
Just found this on the CF card from last week.
Eyebeam put together a very successful, very fun benefit event last week. so after all the guests had left and all the sushi and sake consumed (or, at least, about to be), Harner, Peretti, and Koh reveled in a bit of post-Hanami bliss:
Posted by yatta at 5:46 PM | Comments (1)
December 5, 2004
liveblogging the pixies.
Just kinda. We're post 'Datsuns' pre 'Pixies right now. Drove three hours down to
"what-the-fuck's-up-with-the-local-govt" Camden, NJ with Brad to see the Pixies at the Tweeter Center. (Didn't get tix in time for the NYC shows.) Now we're killing time between sets wondering how many former presidents were senators first, if the vastness of the space made the Datsuns suck (or if they just plain suck), and whether former hipsters complaining about the current crop of young hipsters is funny or not. Half of the crowd around us is complaining about how old they are. The other half is complaining about all of the old people. We're just enjoying the show.
Posted by yatta at 9:44 PM
November 30, 2004
the tao of dedman.
well, not exactly.
check out the nice bit of editing in this videoblog entry by jay in which our hero goes out in search of giant redwoods in California.
Something tells me we've kept him out of Texas a bit too long.
(via Drew.)
Posted by yatta at 11:16 AM
November 23, 2004
if anyone comes across a 12" powerbook with serial number UV40504####...
This past weekend I had my laptop stolen. I was in a sound check at work and left it unattended on the other side of the gallery. Usually this wouldn't have been a problem as Eyebeam is usually locked and secure. But we had lots of people loading in a show that day. Someone had probably left the building and didn't know to lock the door behind them. So in the ten minutes that the door was unlocked, someone walked in, found the laptop, and stuffed it down his pants. Goodbye laptop.
I hadn't backed up in weeks. three months of digital photos: gone. about a hundred hours of original video: gone. at least a dozen new ideas put down on sticky notes: I can't even think about it. i lost at least fifty hours of project work. that really sucked. I spent a good hour or two combing over the building searching for it. I spend at least 12 hours a day on and off of the thing. most of my waking life was on that laptop. The rest was just a cron job. It was pretty fucking traumatic.
But I'll deal. All my passwords are changed. Most of my data recovered up until September or so. The good thing is that the iDisk is set to sync up to Apple's servers everytime it goes online. So a police report has been filed with the NYPD. Apple Corporate Security should soon be on the case. If it goes online, I'll be waiting. If I get it back, cool. If not, well, hopefully I'm in karmic debt for something good.
So what is the lesson in all of this? Well, first, back the fuck up. But the bigger lesson is more than that. The bigger lesson is that I need a way to automatically sync up all of my data wherever I am, whenever I have an internet connection. The bigger lesson is that I need a web os. Fortunately, there are enough resources out there for me to roll my own. Here's what I'm thinking so far:
First, I should mention that I'm doing this b/c I just have too much data across too many devices. Between the mac laptop, the mac desktop, the pc desktop, the cell phone, and the ipod, I need to put all of my data on a central server and start thinking of the rest of these devices as terminals.
Server: So I'm dropping the mac desktop and installing some flavor of BSD on it. It's an old single proc G4 with about a TB of SATA disk in it. This will become my personal server. I'm going to try to track down a used VXA drive for under $250. My only reservations about using the G4 is that I can't find a good SATA hardware RAID card for it. I'd use the PC desktop (an old VAIO) but the support for power management under BSD or linux on this model is pretty lacking.
DynDNS: There's no place like home. Since the server will be sitting at home on my broadband connection, I'll need a way to find it. So DynDNS will be very helpful.
Backups: I'm undecided on how I should do backups on this box. Should I mimic Apple's iDisk and set up a WebDAV server or should I shut down all of the ports and just do scheduled rsync backups over ssh?
Perhaps I'll divide my work up into two types (online and nearline) and use WebDAV for current files (the first) and rsync+ssh for archived work (the latter).
Email: I have too many email accounts to care for, so I'm going to download all of my email to my personal server, and use IMAP over an SSH tunnel to get to it. Need to find more resources for this.
Web browsing: All bookmarks now move to del.icio.us with regular local backups made to this blog (the 'daily' entries). Changes to the MT database will be mirrored to my backup server.
I'm forgetting something.... calendars and contacts. And syncing with a phone. Need to think about these things or ask for suggestions. I'll update this post as I find more info.
Posted by yatta at 6:26 PM | Comments (1)
November 12, 2004
rocketboom.
andrew's videoblog, hosted by amanda. add it to your newsreader immediately.
Posted by yatta at 3:32 PM
November 10, 2004
go soar, little fella! soar like never before!
john ashcroft officially resigned.
now remember, your're only allowed to throw up a little when they fill the vacancy. you know, one of those "I swallowed it back down so I'm fine" kinda moves.
Posted by yatta at 11:44 AM
November 8, 2004
Dave's Ohio video.
This is what happens when you don't check your email for three days. Dave Pentecost posts some great video from his trip to Ohio last week. It's been boingboinged so you've probably seen it already.
> Hi guys. Here's how I spent my week.
>
> http://www.boingboing.net/2004/11/06/electionday_footage_.html
>
> Links to 4 mirrors of the video at that post.
>
> Check the background link for my account of the trip. Nightmarish moment
> on the bus coming back before Kerry conceded. This was the best I could
> do.
Josh arranged a NYC geekup last weekend just before Dave went to video the vote and Lucas Gonze defected to paradise. Missed it on account of close to a month of bad tummy.
I've never been a sickly child so this sickly thing is starting to worry me.
Enough of that. Let's distract ourselves with something useless so we can act like the bad stuff never happened. Apparently this kind of thing works on 51% of the U.S. population.
A large cat named Pooh:
Posted by yatta at 1:21 PM
November 7, 2004
exploding blogpodfeedcastster
every day i reblog and every day i come across at least a couple new web services for the videoblog/podcast plain-ol-blogging universe. all information on these services have exploded in my head and are presently leaking out my nose. i can't wait for it to finish.
(oh yeah, and yes, i realize now that i was completely ass backwards on my rss playlist post. i've made a note to myself never to post anything thought up after midnight.)
Posted by yatta at 10:11 PM | Comments (1)
November 4, 2004
enclosures + rss = primitive playlists.
okay, this post may not make much sense at 2.00am b/c i'm wicked tired and am just writing stream of thought but...
I just found this on the audvidsyn group:
Here I have to point out something that I have only implied so far: RSS with enclosures is reinventing playlists. You do want metadata for artist name, song title, etc, right? And once you have all that stuff, what is the purpose of the RSS elements which have to do with journal keeping?
- Lucas
Like I said, I'm tired, so I'm still processing the first two sentences. One of the things josh and I have been chatting about is the idea of leaving well enough alone and training ipodder clients and the like to parse description information from existing media file metadata instead of looking for it in RSS. Why reinvent the file metadata when the ID3 tag already exists? Sure, it gets us into an old new bowl of challenges and problems and cherries, but it's interesting to think about.
The next sentence got me thinking about something that might be kinda fun and useful to the podcasting folks...
And once you have all that stuff, what is the purpose of the RSS elements which have to do with journal keeping?
Right. What's the point of passing all of that blog entry text in "podcast" feeds if it isn't being used? Most podcast clients (well, the ipodder family anyway) have no use for the blog text elements. Maybe they could and should, but I think there's a more interesting opportunity here.
We need to start encoding the accompanying blog post text into the ULT or SLT frames of the ID3 tag of the podcast. Okay. Let's try that in Engrish: ULT is a field in the ID3 tag of an mp3 file that was intended to hold text transcription information of some sort. If you could put the blog text in that space, it might be readable by an mp3 player like, say, an iPod. So you could read the blog text that accompanied the podcast mp3 on your iPod. that'd be cool, right?
I need to look into this a bit more and figure out how to add this encoding to either the app that generates my mp3 file or the app that I use to enter blog text. I also need to get a refresher on ULT and SLT.
Last thing: I need to think about ways to incorporate some of SMIL's lessons into the syndicated enclosure discussion at audvidsyn. In particular, the SMIL <switch> tags could potentially be useful. There are attributes for offering alternative files based on conenction speed (system-bitrate) and tags for setting both sequence <seq> and parallel <par> playback characteristics. I need to pick akb's brain on this.
All this talk of metadata also reminds me that I think I owe Eli a beer. And I think Dan owes me one. Maybe I should just syndicate Dan's beer so I can pass it through to Eli.
That made no sense. I'm going to sleep.
Posted by yatta at 2:35 AM
November 3, 2004
gwen stefani channels wesley willis...
and maybe the 10th grade Green Brook High School Talent Show Dance Team. I think i just made maybe the 12th honest to god spit take of my life.
Posted by yatta at 8:53 AM
November 2, 2004
judgment election night.
okay. my vote's been cast. now gwb has the four more years he needs in order to wipe out terrorism and kick some ass.
yeah right.
my mind was made up in early 2001 when his administration reduced the world to right and wrong. it was a strategy that proved to be self-fulfilling when it was further reduced to good and evil. my world isn't made up of good versus evil. it's not varying shades of grey, either. my world just is.
so please go out and make jon stewart's life miserable.
After that, tune in to the two unmediated-related projects going on tonight:
first, there's the ssg election redirect party happening in nyc, ohio, california, florida, belgium, and the netherlands. homebase is at whitebox in nyc.
secondly, there's the konscious tv election night coverage at loc1.
both projects will simulcast live, online. check their pages for stream info.
oh yeah, and i made a doctor's appointment about that thumb thing. got a couple of emails that it grossed you out. sorry about that.
Posted by yatta at 11:48 AM
November 1, 2004
does anyone else's thumb burn from sitting on the palmrest of their powerbook?
My left thumb and palm become numb after about fifteen minutes. my thumb burns and there's a small dark spot underneath my skin where there wasn't one before. okay, now I'm all freaked out.
Posted by yatta at 9:28 PM | Comments (1)
you know those scifi movies where some alien has to take another body temporarily?
well consider that the alien is my movable type database and consider that the temporary vessel is the default blog template that came with the upgrade to MT 3.1. i must get out of this stylesheet before i kill again. oi.
Posted by yatta at 1:52 AM
October 29, 2004
dumbasses gone wild.
if anyone comes across a copy of this online, please let me know. i can think of at least two parodies and one iMovie hack job i want to make of it.
Posted by yatta at 4:05 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
the power of nightmares torrent files.
that power of nightmares documentary i talked about the other week? bittorrents are up on suprnova.org. (thx. kathleen)
Posted by yatta at 12:55 AM | TrackBack
October 28, 2004
there's a muji store @ moma.
there's a muji store @ moma! there's a muji store @ moma!
i have a confession to make: i'm allergic to brands. i can't watch television with anyone b/c i point out the technique in every commercial. i haven't been in a proper "mall" in years b/c i used to get all freaked out when confronted with a controlled marketing environment. (no, i don't do too well at things like the NAB conference, either.) on days when i absolutely must walk through soho, i avoid the sidewalks and walk in the street for fear of the inevitable confrontation between me and a shopping bag with its attendant person. if someone gives me a gift, i have to assess my reaction to the size, shape, and intrusiveness of its logo before accepting it. (christmas with me is usually very unfortunate.) in some cases, the allergen is literal. i started developing a rash from the tags on the inside of my clothing so i had to rip them out. (do a body check next time you see me.)
so when i first learned of the japanese mujirushi ryohin line of consumables that emphasize, among other things, products without labels, i thought, "wow. most americans don't need that here but i need that here." ten years and one failed online US store since my personal discovery, i get an email from brian telling me that moma has started selling muji products at their momastore.
so granted, there are only 28 items in the catalog and there's no way i'm going shopping in soho (unless it's at nine o'clock in the morning on a sunday.) but it's their first "store" in north america and it's a start.
and yes, i have read pattern recognition and yes, the main character is me in some gender-altered fictional universe.
Posted by yatta at 4:16 PM | TrackBack
just the one finger victory salute.
and nothing else.
original here.
it's a shame that this is the fun part of the video, since what's really interesting is his expression and body language just after it. methinks someone's looking to be well liked.
you can press the [pause] button whenever you want it to stop. not that you'd wanna. it's kinda mesmerizing.
via boingboing.
Posted by yatta at 1:59 AM | TrackBack
October 27, 2004
queer eye for the yatta guy.
so i had an casting interview for queer eye today. my sister sent in an application for me a while ago. she and my friends described my style as "frumpy with potential" and my apartment as "absolutely and entirely devoid of personality". wow. thanks guys. (i actually think they went easy on me.) anyhoo, i'm pretty sure i blew it. how do you express a desire to do a better job at some things in your life but not everything? i must make a note to myself: no matter how content i am, no matter how at peace i am, when the casting folks from a self/home/karma improvement teevee show ask you "what's your favorite thing about yourself?" and "if you could change one thing in the world, what would it be?" don't give the following answer:
"nothing."
or if you do, explain that it's because you ARE okay with who you are and what you're doing in life and you ARE changing the world, because these people want to make you and your place look good for chrissakes.
oh well. there's always wife swap.
trying to get my second videoblog entry up tonight. in the meantime the geeks should go check out adrian miles' hyperlinked videoblog file. very cool. also the ssg folks are working hard on the election night project and i need to catch up. they have some fun stuff planned. here's a sample:
Posted by yatta at 6:41 PM | TrackBack
October 26, 2004
eliot shitzer in engrish.
Found this in Google News the other day.
Xinhua has just become my news source of choice.
Posted by yatta at 6:43 PM | TrackBack
October 25, 2004
is this a videoblog?
or a vog? or a vlog? do i need to enable video comments? can i play it on my teevee? is that allowed?
i just switched out the dead powershot for a working one. so far, i've captured more avis than jpegs. that's a good sign.
give me some time to shake off the editing rust. until then, you'll get unedited clips like this:
[QuickTime, 13.4MB]
(by the way: cally doesn't have a lisp. it's the mic.)
Posted by yatta at 6:52 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
October 21, 2004
Sweet Living.
From the folks who brought you "Fuck New York"
Posted by yatta at 7:15 PM | TrackBack
October 19, 2004
harner meets sedaris.
i knew i shouldn't have left the streetmemes event so early on saturday.
harner stepped out to get some coffee and ran into amy sedaris.
all i saw on saturday were some squirrels.
Posted by yatta at 6:14 PM | TrackBack
October 16, 2004
there is no boogeyman.
Dirty bombs aren't real, Wolfowitz is the disorganized brain-child of Leo Strauss, and al-Qaida doesn't exist. Sounds plausible to me.
Adam Curtis has a new documentary series coming out in the UK next week. It's called "The Power of Nightmares." Here he speaks about the 'manufacturing consent' media recursion terror thing:
"They are not the only ones who find opportunities. "Almost no one questions this myth about al-Qaida because so many people have got an interest in keeping it alive," says Curtis. He cites the suspiciously circular relationship between the security services and much of the media since September 2001: the way in which official briefings about terrorism, often unverified or unverifiable by journalists, have become dramatic press stories which - in a jittery media-driven democracy - have prompted further briefings and further stories. Few of these ominous announcements are retracted if they turn out to be baseless: "There is no fact-checking about al-Qaida."
It airs next week on the BBC2. (Who do I know in Great Britain with a TiVo?)
Posted by yatta at 4:14 AM | TrackBack
October 15, 2004
Jon Stewart jacks CNN's Crossfire. Alt torrent on DV Guide.
I just finished watching Jon Stewart's appearance on today's Crossfire for the second time. It was one of those truly surreal moments that just aren't supposed to happen on teevee.
The original place where I found the torrent is down so I posted a mirror to DV Guide. Enjoy.
Posted by yatta at 11:56 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
my powershot is dead. long live my powershot.
Yesterday I learned that the E18 error on the canon powershot s110 means that the lens door won't open on the camera, sorry, please don't try it again. While some people have been able to bang on the side of the camera to get it working again, my camera refuses to cooperate with the abuse.
This is a little bit upsetting as the S110 has accompanied me every day for the past three years. It's been to four continents. It's inadvertently been dipped into six oceans. But it was also starting to show it's age. The 2.1 megapixels were fine for dumbing down to the web but not so great for prints. I couldn't zoom in movie mode. The movie mode is limited to 10 second clips. I think I pushed it too hard. Maybe the camera knew it was due for retirement.
So now I need to replace it and I need suggestions.
My criteria:
I want it to be tiny. It needs to fit in a small backpack pocket or the big pocket on a pair of outdated cargo shorts. I want more than 3 megapixels. It's not a lot, I know, but the largest prints I make are 5x7. I want a sub-3 second startup time. Most importantly, I want a movie mode that'll record 320x240, 30fps in at least 3 minute chunks. I'd rather have the recording length be limited only by the size of my memory card, but that only seems to be possible on larger cameras or those that need Sony's Memory Stick Pro format. This is important b/c the only way I'm going to start videobloggging is if I start recording stuff with my camera and not my camcorder. Oh yeah, and i don't want to spend more than $400 for it. That new Treo is coming out in a month and I'm already subsisting on a diet of peanut butter and soup preparing for that one.
Okay, so with all that said, here are the nominees so far:
Canon Powershot S410 - Small size. Sturdy construction. 4MP. 3x optical zoom. Kin to the S110. Movie mode limited to 3 minutes. Doesn't take CF Type II cards.
Sony CyberShot DSC-W1 - Small size. Sturdy construction. 5.1MP. 3x optical zoom. 2.5in LCD.
Casio Exilim EX-S100 - Frikkin tiny. 3.2MP. Does 320x240@15fps. Not sure about that "transparent ceramic" lens. Nice but seems overpriced.
Canon Powershot S1 IS - Records 640x480@30fps onto cards as big as 4GB. 10x zoom. Only 3.2MP. Bigger than I really want but it does 640x480 video(!)
So what to do? So far I'm leaning towards the S410, but I'm gonna go check out the Sony and Casio this weekend. I was about to rule out the S1 when I read that happykatie got one and seems excited about it. I need to find her contact info and ask for all the geeky details. I also need to check in with Jay and ask what he uses. He's one of the biggest access-heads I know and I doubt he's using tape. Good for him. Anyhoo, gonna make the decision this weekend. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.
Posted by yatta at 6:18 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
mo' servers, mo' problems
I had an iraq of a time moving unmediated to a new server this week. first, there was the upgrade of movable type. then there was the upgrade of the reblog. then there was the import of the old reblog to the new reblog. and going with the stylesheet redesign earlier than expected (i figured, what the hey?) and three days of worrying through dns propagation where the site and feed traffic fell off by 80% (it's rss! what'd you do, folks? unsubscribe?) but now here we are at the end of the week, the site is coming up fine, traffic's back up to a place where i'm worried about overages again, and everything seems to be back to normal.
now it's time to do the same shuffle with this site. fun.
(funny thing happened on the way to the newsreader - just took a gander at we make money not art. seems they went through the same exact thing. chuckle.)
Posted by yatta at 2:07 PM | TrackBack
October 14, 2004
transgender bike messengers/actors wanted.
This weekend I logged in to Friendster for the first time in about a year. Had to b/c Denise Gaberman still sends messages out to folks that way.
Anyway, Denise produces the most badass public access cooking show this side of Jay Dedman, The Post Punk Kitchen. The PPK should be on a major cable network but isn't. That's an injustice that needs to be set right one day.
Anyway, it looks like the DRG's casting for her rock musical about bike messengers:
VICIOUS CYCLES IS CASTING!!!!
Please pass along to friends and friends of friends....
Casting actors for VICIOUS CYCLES trailer. A bike
(read bicycle) movie about two rival bike gangs, one
failing bike shop, treachery, friendship, love, and a bike
race that lays it all on the line. Shooting starts in early
November. Auditions and rehearsals in October.
Open to all sexual preferences and ethnicities:
OIL SLICKS-GREASERS (if the Ramones where the T-
birds on bicycles)
JD, 20s, male, leader of the Oil Slicks, tall slender,
chiseled jaw
Wrench, 20s, transgender f to m, small, resembles
Fonzie
THE DABELLAS-Neighborhood gang
Mad Dog, 30s, Dabella leader, Patti Smith look alike,
tough but has a big heart.
Tina Marie, 27, curvy, sexy not sleazy, "den mother" and
Mad Dog's best friend.
Tadpole, 17, is E-Z’s younger sister and least
experienced of the bunch. She is often mistaken for a
young teenage boy.
THE DERAILERS- bad asses
Vicious, female, 30s, rival gang leader of the Derailers,
tall, lanky mean-name says it all.
Da’ Bomb, 20s, sleazy straight out of a 1950s JD movie,
has curves and “knows how to use them”.
Sprocket, early 20s, punk, sporting a mohawk, she will
do anything to protect her little man Freddie.
Freddie, 19, shaved head, small, goth, easily agitated.
Doris, 50s, female, D's mother, think single sleazy sexy
stripper mom
Chris, 20s, transgender f to m, leader of the transgender
messengers
This is so gonna rock in a "1980's American metal band plays Eastern Europe" sort of way. Casting is in a week or two. Drop her a line if you're interested.
By the way, here's the Friendster testimonial I wrote for her last year, back when I was convinced that I was funny:
I chuckled over that one for weeks.
Posted by yatta at 1:36 AM | TrackBack
a user guide for reblog 0.9.
For months, people have contributed to the unmediated reBlog by posting to their own blogs or their del.icio.us links. I'd take these posts in through reBlog and add text, images, and reformat links as necessary. Since upgrading to reBlog version 0.9, I've handed over reBlogging duties to a group of eight editors (including myself) who are responsible for reBlogging up to 3-4 posts a week, and hopefully spreading the reblogging love across several people.
Because of this, I've put together a quick "user guide" for reBlog 0.9. It doesn't cover reBlog installation or upgrade, but it does give basic instructions for sorting, editing, and publishing a reBlog.
An incomplete user guide for reBlog 0.9:
The idea of reBlogging is pretty simple:
Find posts of interest from RSS feeds, publish each post to your own blog with a link back to the originating post. You may have to do some formatting changes, add images, or add your own comments along the way.
The way it works is also simple:
Sort through RSS feeds and click "publish" on the posts you like best. This puts them all into a single reBlog rss feed that you then go into Movable Type to import, assign categories, and publish in your blog.
Logging In:
When you install reBlog, you install two components: the reBlog plugin for Movable Type and the ReceSS RSS filtering system. The ReceSS files are the ones you will use primarily to reblog. You can find them in the "recess" directory that you uploaded to your server (unless you decide to rename the directory when installing.) Open a browser and go to this directory: http://mydomain.com/the-directory-you-uploaded-recess-to/
reBlog Control Panel:
After logging in you will be presented with the reBlog control panel separated into two sections. At the top you will see what I call the reBlog Main Menu for viewing new items, adding feeds, and updating the feeds you're already subscribed to. There are a couple of other links up there for viewing your reBlogged RSS feed and getting the feed list as an OPML list but we'll talk about that later.
Underneath the reBlog Main Menu, you'll find a list of all of the rss feeds you're subscribed to, separated into "Feeds with new posts" and "Feeds without new posts."
reBlog Control Panel > Subscribing to Feeds:
If you haven't subscribed to any feeds, go to the reBlog Main Menu and click "add feeds." Here you can add feeds by pasting the URLs of blogs, their feeds, or a list of feeds as an OPML file. A handy tool to have is the "FoF subscribe" bookmarklet just below the reBlog Main Menu. Drag this link up to your browser's bookmark bar. Whenever you come across a blog you'd like to add to the reBlog, click the bookmarklet. It'll take you back to the "add feeds" page and attempt to subscribe to the feed if possible. After you've subscribed to a number of feeds, return to the reBlog Control Panel.
reBlog Control Panel > Updating Feeds:
If there are no items listed under "Feeds with new posts" go to the reBlog Main Menu at the top of the screen and click the "update all" button. This will pull any new posts into the reBlog for you to read through. When it has finished updating feeds, go back to the reBlog Control Panel. You will see a list of new "Feeds with new posts" to read through.
You can read the feeds one at a time by clicking on the red "new" link to the left of each feed or by going to the reBlog Main Menu and clicking "view new items."
reBlogging a post:
There are four actions you can take when looking at a post: publish it, delete it, preview/edit it, ignore it.
publish:
If you like the post and want to reBlog it, click the "publish" radio button. This will send the post to the reBlog rss feed and it will disappear from the list.
preview/edit:
If you like the post but think that it needs editing, click the "preview/edit" radio button. This will take you to a page that will allow you to edit the html of the post, add image links, and add your own comment. (Feature alert: sometimes editing the post before publishing will insert a backslash "\" before your quotations and other special characters upon publishing to the reBlog rss. So check your entries after importing your reBlog posts into Movable Type.)
preview/edit: trimming a post
I will usually trim a post down to about 250 words and create a link back to the originating blog in the form of a "Continued at Originating.Blog" link. I'll snip the post in a way that summarizes the main idea, gives a bit of detail, and ends in a place that will hopefully entice the reader to click through for more.
preview/edit: adding images
If a post does not have an image in the body, I will sometimes go out and do an image search to find an appropriate image for the topic. Once I find an image, I download it, rename it, upload it to my own blog either through FTP or the Movable Type interface, and insert the new img tag in the body of the post. While not necessary, adding images both pretties up your reBlog and allows you to make clever juxtapositions of image and text that readers will appreciate.
If a post already has an image in it, I will usually download that image to my desktop, FTP it up to my own server, and change the code in the post to point to my image instead of the originating image. Serving images from someone else's server without their consent is usually considered bad form, so it's best to copy the image over and have it link back to the originating weblog post. Plus, you never know when that originating image will disappear, so better to have your own copy than have it result in a error 404 later down the line.
preview/edit: adding your comment
If I add a comment to a post, I'll usually put it at the end of the post, in italics, signed, and after a line break to visually separate my thoughts from the original blog post. So if I were adding a comment, the code would look like this:
<br>
<i>(This is my comment. -kc.)</i>
delete:
If you click the "delete" radio button it deletes the post.
Importing your reBlog posts into your blog:
Once you've published a bunch of posts to your reBlog rss feed, go back to the reBlog Control Panel and click on the "rss" link in the reBlog Main Menu. This is your reBlog's RSS feed. Copy the URL to your clipboard and log in to your Movable Type installation.
Once you're logged in to Movable Type, go to the "Entries" page for your blog. Scroll to the bottom of the page. If you've installed the reBlog plugin correctly, you should see a link under "Plugin Actions:" named "Configure your Reblog Source RSS Feed." Click on this link and paste in the URL to your reBlog's RSS feed. Click submit. Return to your "Entries" page. You should find a new link under "Plugin Actions:" named "Import Entries from your Reblog Source RSS Feed." Click on this link. It will import any new entries from your reBlog RSS into Movable Type.
When it is finished, return again to the blog "Entries" page. Your reblogged posts will have been imported into your blog and should show up on your main index page. You may want to go into each entry and set the category for each post.
I'm fairly certain that I've forgotten a bunch of stuff. If you're a reblogger and you've spotted something I've forgotten, leave it as a comment and I'll add it to the post.
For more on The Art of the reBlog check out:
Tom Moody's reBlogging Philosophy.
Tim Shey's thoughts on reBlogging.
Other ideas spawned by tim Shey's thoughts (kottke.org).
Adam Greenfield on the problem of resyndication in the reBlog.
Tom Moody's response to Adam Greenfield (plus some gay furry porn).
Posted by yatta at 12:01 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 7, 2004
drm that works.
i copied Adam Curry's daily source code over to my iPod for the first time today. I wanted to listen to it on the subway ride back from Manhattan.
About three minutes into the show, he starts to make his sponsor pitch for plasma TVs. I have no need for a plasma screen so I try scrolling past it and my iPod freezes up. Damn it. Reset. Play. Sponsor message. Scroll. Freeze again. Damnit!
I hereby promise that I will never try skipping past his ads again. :)
Posted by yatta at 10:20 PM | TrackBack
Scoble to Gates: everybody's mediating.
I told him to understand the content-creation trend that's going on. It's not just pod-casting. It's not just blogging. It's not just people using Garageband to create music. It's not just people who soon will be using Photostory to create, well, stories with their pictures, voice, and music. It's not just about ArtRage'ers who are painting beautiful artwork on their Tablet PCs. It's not just the guys who are building weblog technology for Tablet PCs. Or for cell phones. Or for camera phones.
This is a major trend. Microsoft should get behind it. Bigtime. Humans want to create things. We want to send them to our friends and family. We want to be famous to 15 people. We want to share our lives with our video camcorders and our digital cameras. Get into Flickr, for instance. Ask yourself, why is Sharepoint taking off? (Tim O'Reilly told us that book sales of Sharepoint are growing faster than almost any other product). It's the urge to create content. To tell our coworkers our ideas. To tell Bill Gates how to run his company! Isn't this all wild?
CEO's are the only folks that need to hear this.
Posted by yatta at 10:10 PM | TrackBack
"Man, they sound like airlines trying to argue over who has the better bagel."
Jarvis blogging the VOIP panel at Web 2.0.
Thanks, Jeff. I just spit coffee all over my screen.
Posted by yatta at 4:34 PM | TrackBack
October 6, 2004
President Kindergarten Cop
Not that I'm much of one for Pat Buchanan-style nationalism, but this juxtaposition of image and text scared the crap out of me:
You ever feel like you're being set up for some sh!t?
In some weird alternate reality deep within my mind, Arnold didn't win the Cali guvn'r spot, a Diff'rent Arnold did, and the highlight of the DNC was Gary Coleman standing at the podium barking, "Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, G-Dubya!?!"
{{sigh.}}
Posted by yatta at 7:34 PM | TrackBack
nail + hammer = gonze.
"Let it not be so that sleek white computers which resemble nothing so much as a pantsuit are a requirement for fighting to keep the man off our backs, man. MTV is the enemy in every particular and the iPod is as MTV as it gets.
"The point, the thing that matters, the part of the action that isn't cynical puffery, is democracy. This movement is about the ways that centralized media undermine democracy and the hope that a free and well maintained internet can decentralize the media."
:).
We've been democratizing the spread of ideas through technology since before Gutenberg. Now we just have to make sure it's evenly distributed.
Posted by yatta at 12:40 PM | TrackBack
reformatting, reblogging, and the rocket.
I've been busy with movable type templates as of late. (note to self: if the tail end of your template body disappears after saving, it's probably b/c you've got a bad html tag in there somewhere. there. now maybe I'll get this line when I google it next time.)
besides a planned move to the 0.9 reblog, i've made the jump to 3.1 after playing with an install of wordpress for a bit. In the meantime, reading a bunch of comments by reblogging converts got me thinking about installing reblog for the yatta site (although managing two reblogs a day might get to be a bit too much. besides - that's what I use del.icio.us for.)
Anyhoo, go check out tim shey's newly reblog-enabled shey.net.
And check out this pic Justin sent me of him and the Rocket down in Houston the other week. Lucky bastard.
Posted by yatta at 11:08 AM | TrackBack
October 4, 2004
draft vs. published.
wrote a piece for urbmag this month on "blogs to watch" leading up to the november election. funny, this journalism thing: seems there are these "editor" folks who take your original text and "edit" it to fit the space alloted. so the intro that i spent so much time tolling over doesn't sound much like my voice anymore.
i mean, it's totally my fault: i knew and approved of the edit. i was crazybusy and behind schedule. I didn't have time to proof my own stuff so I asked them to do it for me. all the standard excuses in journalism. now i regret it. i messed up and lost my voice.
oh well. they say they liked the piece, so perhaps they'll ask me to do it again. if they do, i'll be better prepared this time and get in with a more concise intro and stay under the word count. until then, here's the draft of my original intro for the nov 2004 urb blogwatch:
BlogWatch - In the 2004 US Presidential election, all politics are contextual.
by kenyatta cheese
You’re either in a red state or a blue state. You either support the president or you’re un-American. You’re either for us or you’re against us. God versus the devil. Paper or plastic. Which side are you on?
The 2004 US presidential election is going down as one of the most divisive in decades. If you listen to the campaign rhetoric out there, the nation’s been polarized like the sunglasses on a sheriff looking to perpetuate a bad stereotype. The political parties are spending record amounts of money trying to convince you that there are only two sides to every story and if you don’t stand on one of them, you stand for nothing. Somewhere along the line, they forgot that it’s not where we stand that’s important – it’s where we’re going.
As long as you know where you want the country to go on the issues that matter to you and you’re registered to vote, you’re good to go. (You are registered to vote, aren’t you? No? Go to http://declareyourself.com and get that cleared up as soon as possible.) But issues don’t matter alone. You need context to help give them meaning. What good is advocating for a policy if you don’t know how it applies to you?
Unfortunately, you’re not going to get any meaning from the mainstream media – they’re bogged down in a war over thirty years old, recounting who did (or didn't do) what, while we wonder what’s going to happen to our jobs, how much longer we can use our TiVos before Congress tries to make them illegal, and whether we’re going to end this war before they decide to reinstate the draft. While mainstream journalism is caught in the quagmire, people like you and I have taken the media into our own hands, creating over 3.5 million blogs covering the issues that matter to us, in our own words, and catapulting our ideas into the nation’s consciousness.
The people have come knocking at the door of the Fourth Estate. It seems they want their public discourse back.
It's kinda clever, right?
Posted by yatta at 3:39 AM | TrackBack
October 1, 2004
terizm terizm terizm terizm terizm...
check this out. it's like badgers for politics:
i think i'm gonna put it on a loop and watch it all day.
thx cally!
Posted by yatta at 2:28 PM | TrackBack
forget the debate. just read tvnewser.
i skipped the debate tonight but got a wonderful eyeful as bar after bar in new york turned down the audio on the yankees game and everyone was glued to the debate. who says that people don't care about politics?
when i got home, i felt like i got more info on the coverage from tvnewser than if i were to surf through the channels myself. even better, i felt inoculated from the crap of having to reinterpret anything that anyone says. thank you tvnewser.
Posted by yatta at 2:07 AM | TrackBack
September 29, 2004
why can't i tivo off off broadway theater?
tonight i'm going to miss one of cally's plays for the first time in forever. i can time shift everything nowadays, from tv to radio, but i can't get theater performances when i want them.
blasphemy, but that's not theatRE, blah blah blah. in the same way that cally criticizes me for believing in community media, i criticize her for working in a quaint medium with fickle attendance. okay, i don't fully believe what i say to her, but it's only to illustrate a greater point: while community-produced media will find a sustaining audience once it moves away from mediums that demand that only the most popular survive, theater is bound to geographic-specifc meatspace which severely limits it's potential audience.
someone has to figure out how to pipe off-off-broadway theater online. if they can, something tells me that they'll thrive.
Posted by yatta at 2:50 PM | TrackBack
did someone "produce out" talib kweli's flow?
i usually don't do music reviews but then again, i also don't "do" anything on braintag but pipe thoughts to bits so whatever, right? plus this isn't as much of a review as it is a way for me to take my mind off of spectropolis presentations for a while.
anyway, i remember getting into this argument with this guy at a rooftop party in union square years ago. he was suggesting that talib kweli was to mos def as phife was to q-tip. although i loved phife in the context of a tribe called quest, i could never get into any solo-phife that i heard it on mixtapes and the occasional bootleg. kweli, i thought, was different. kweli's rhymes were clever. his lyrics had imagination. most importantly, there was a kineticism -- almost stress-like -- just beneath the top layer of his flow that i remember describing at the time as sounding like a man on the verge of revolution. 'dead prez implicit' i called it. (dead prez' album had also just dropped that summer.) for that i never questioned that he would have a record contract outside of black star.
in 2002 kweli drops both reflection eternal (with hi-tek) and quality. i wonder if the kid who argued with me on that rooftop in union square even remembers our conversation. more importantly, both albums stay in heavy rotation through two generations of my ipod.
all that was setup in order to say that i just listened to the beautiful struggle and came away feeling like something was missing. the kineticism was gone. it sounded like the producers he assembled for the album had gone through and sprinkled a layer of barbituates over the entire thing. and here's what was really weird about the album: it made me feel self conscious. Maybe I was wondering if Kweli's well documented concern about his flow had gotten to him. Or to his producers. Or both. (either way, i don't agree with the criticism.)
whatever it was, i know it's not permanent. that energy was still in kweli at the block party the other week. his live show still jumped. i hope his next album will again.
Posted by yatta at 12:44 AM | TrackBack
September 28, 2004
conversing on a panel @ spectropolis tomorrow.
i forgot to mention that I'll be talking with folks at tomorrow's Spectropolis panel on the digital commons. I hope to keep my presentation very short (i'm aiming for 90-120 seconds) in order to spend more time in a conversation during the question and answer period.
Victory of the Commons: The Case for a Public Airwaves Movement
September 29, 7:00 pm, Multi-Purpose Room at Pace University, 3 Spruce Street
This panel will evaluate the case for a widespread social movement advocating open spectrum policies led by community wireless groups. Panelists will present the successes and failures of earlier media and technology movements including media reform, low-power FM, public access television, and open source software.....
Participants: Chris Anderson - Indymedia New York, Dharma Dailey - Prometheus Radio, Anthony Townsend - NYCwireless, Michael Scott Jones - Manhattan Neighborhood Network. Moderator: Laura Forlano - Columbia University This event is ticketed. Admission is $5; free for Pace students. To order tickets or for box office hours, visit http://www.pace.edu/culture. Both Pace University's Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts and the Multi Purpose Room can be found by entering on Spruce Street between Park Row and Gold Street, just east of City Hall Park.
Yeah, my name isn't on the list, but I'll be there.
Posted by yatta at 6:52 PM | TrackBack
the open content evolution
Wrote an article on the Open Content movement for the Community Media Review. It's a basic survey piece that kinda outlines the parallel histories of open source computing and community media. I thought it'd be useful to community media folks just getting into this thing. I wish I had posted the initial draft online for my friends to edit, Darknet style. Next time I'll practice what I preach. ;)
Read it after the continuation...
...
The Open Content Evolution
When musician Colin Mutchler wanted to release his acoustic guitar track, “My Life”, he wanted to see what other artists would do with it, so he posted his song as an mp3 to the website opsound.org and published it using a Creative Commons license, effectively inviting everyone to do something interesting with it – as long as they agree to release their track with the same permissions. Within a month, a violinist named Cora Beth, who had never once met Colin, took the song and added a violin track to it, renaming it “My Life Changed.” And Colin is more than happy with the results. “I think the track is definitely more beautiful now,” says Colin, “Maybe eventually we'll add drums and words.”
People are embracing the open source movement as a way to enable new levels of collaboration, evolve ideas, and ultimately transform not only the way we make media but how we distribute it and how users ultimately participate in it.
Put simply, "open source" describes any project that allows for the following: free redistribution of its work, allows anyone to make modifications or derivatives of its work, does not discriminate against persons or groups, and does not restrict its use in conjunction with other work. It’s a work methodology that stresses the openness of the creative process, backed up with licensing that explicitly promotes the widespread distribution of the work, free of charge.
When most people think of open source they think of computers. One of the most important movements within Computer Science, the open source software movement has created some of the most widely used applications today – applications like the Linux operating system, the Mozilla web browser, and the Apache web server software which powers over half of the world’s web pages. What makes this software succeed isn’t necessarily the genius of their programmers but the terms under which it is licensed and distributed. By producing this software under open source licenses, it allows programmers and users alike to contribute improvements, squash bugs, and enjoy a level of independence by relying on the power of the community instead of the economic health of a single software vendor.
Open source is not just about software. Millions of people everywhere are using the open source model in media, allowing people to redistribute and create derivatives of their words, photos, audio, and video with an "open content" license similar to that of open source. By combining this open content with media-making tools that take advantage of the network (blogs, video and audio editing applications, and playlist generators) users are changing the way that we make and curate media, and allow people to remix, collaborate, and expand upon the work of others like never before.
If any of this seems a wee bit familiar to you, it should. The idea that a group of people with common interests could come together to work on something is not new to us. Community Media has known “open source” and “open content” processes for a while, although we’ve called it things like “media collectives” and “public domain.” Our early involvement in the open source movement can be seen in the open collaboration projects of the 1960s and 1970s. While computer programmers in places like UC-Berkeley, Bell Labs, and MIT worked in environments that promoted the free exchange of software they had written (allowing them to fulfill the hacker credo of “pushing the limits of the do-able”), projects like the Alternative Media Center at NYU, Open Channel, and Global Village showed people that collaborating on video and film productions could yield greater results than working alone. While the products of their work may have seemed different at the time, both movements still shared common thinkers like Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard.
As the economic pressures of the 1970s and 1980s bared down on both the community media and open software movements, their paths split. While community media found legislation as a way to help determine it’s future (public access), the business world picked up on the profitability of computing and sent the programmers on a path of entrepreneurship that traded in the idealism of the “free software” movement for an Ayn Rand-style pragmatism still seen in geek culture to this day. Open source still existed, but the driving force became less about community and more about self-interest.
During the telecommunications and dot-com boom of the 1990s, a computer world flush with money began thinking less about return-on-investment and more about making a “contribution” to the internet world. More times than often, they ended up being one in the same. (Who needs to think about money when everything is profitable?)
Programmers dedicated to open source projects took advantage of the network (the internet) and learned to collaborate on software projects across cultures and across languages. The network lent itself to such collaboration – projects could be hosted on websites and source files weren’t so unwieldy that they couldn’t be transferred in a reasonable amount of time across a 56k modem connection. It was during this time that the computing world saw an explosion in the number and variety of software projects calling themselves “open source.” Everyone wanted to learn how to leverage the network for their projects – and why not? Linux made the technology and business headlines daily and money was being poured into any business plan with "open source" in its model. Open source software seemed to be a success.
Meanwhile, networked-based media still had a ways to go. Audio and video media files were large and unwieldy. Because of the state of digital encoding and slow modem speeds at the time, a 30-minute video program could still take up to three days to transfer over the internet. Despite the success of open source software, and the relative success of early collaborative media distribution projects like indymedia.org, audio and video media production was still not ready for network collaboration.
Flash forward to the current decade, where an audio file can be transferred faster than you can say the word “Napster.” Technologies like QuickTime, mp3, MPEG4, and Windows Media allow 30-minute programs to fit on a USB key drive the size of your thumb. Cable modems and DSL lines transfer files up to 100 times faster than 56k. The advent of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing means that you no longer need a web server with an expensive bandwidth connection in order to distribute a file. (When you download a file off of a P2P network, you automatically help redistribute that file.) The tools had grown to support the sharing of media and the tools and processes were being assembled to support it.
Now people are using P2P networks to trade media, share homegrown remixes, and distribute original content to the world. End users, not just media makers, are distributing media to the point where it now accounts for a steady 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic. But while this has been wonderful for the end-users, the commercial content providers have had a less than stellar time of it. Most of the content being shared on P2P networks is theirs, and it's all been published with closed content licensing. Legally, it shouldn’t be out there.
Both Hollywood and the music industry have built an entire industry not on the creation of media but on its duplication. While P2P networks are built to promote widespread sharing and distribution of media, Hollywood makes their money off of controlling who gets to see their media and when. As a result, commercial content makers have taken to suing thousands of people and threatening millions more. It's a heavy-handed tactic, but they have yet to come up with an innovative way of dealing with this disconnect. All of this would be less of a problem, of course, if the media people were sharing was originally distributed with an open content license.
Fortunately, not all groups are interested in holding back the proliferation of their work. Community media has traditionally placed a higher value on maximizing the reach of their work over its commercial viability. Most community media producers would welcome the widespread proliferation of their work. While some producers see community media as a stepping stone towards earning their Emmy, most are attracted to cable access television and community radio as a way to exercise their First Amendment rights.
But despite this, the majority of content on public access is distributed with licenses of copyright and not copyleft. Most producers are unaware that alternative licensing is out there and fairly easy to understand. Groups like Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org) provide a number of simple, easy to read open content licenses that allow for reasonable levels of use permissions without necessarily giving up all rights as an author, perfect for the producer of a public access program looking to make their voice heard.
It would be quite simple for a community media center to download Creative Commons licenses from the web and create posters that explain all of the options available to a media producer. Copies could be distributed and explained whenever someone new signs up for a show.
By using open content licensing in their work, producers create the opportunity that their ideas will be heard beyond their primary audiences. By promoting the use of open content licensing among their producers, community media centers create the possibility that producers’ monologues get turned into dialogue.
Producers more interested in making their work completely free, can use the open content license put forth by the Open Source Initiative (http://www.opensource.org) or continue issuing their work in the public domain.
Besides individual artists like Colin Mutchler and media collectives like indymedia, people unfamiliar with the community media movement have taken an interest in open content. People like J.D. Lasica and Marc Canter, founders of open-media.org, and Jeff Jarvis, proponent of the Center for Citizens’ Media have seen what open source can do for the computer science world. Now they want to see the same processes applied to the media. They've started projects that promote the creation and proliferation of grassroots media using the internet as it's medium. In the process, they’ve attracted scores of people who weren't otherwise familiar with community media.
Another important aspect of the work of new groups like open-media.org is that they’re attracting computer programmers capable of building the tools necessary to take advantage of open content licensing and P2P networks. While pioneering net-based media collaboration projects like Michael Eisenmenger’s Indymedia Global Video Exchange used centralized servers to store and share media, more recent tools like BitTorrent allow people to share and distribute media without the need of large file servers with lots of bandwidth.
By encoding a video file on your home computer and uploading a pointer to that file to a BitTorrent tracker like DV Guide (http://dv.open4all.info/) you can use your unused home cable modem bandwitdh to share your media with anyone who wants to see it. Applications like webjay (http://webjay.org/) allow users to create playlists of their favorite internet audio and video files, creating thousands of micro-channels of content. New projects like the Digital Bicycle out of LMC-TV in Lowell, MA (http://10speed.ltc.org) look to provide a more community media-centric approach to things like webjay and the DV Guide project, making it easier for centers to share and distribute programming via the P2P networks instead of “bicycling” tapes. All of this starts to shape a world where media production and distribution can easily bypass traditional media networks and reach audiences potentially in the billions.
Ultimately, community media's involvement in open licensing and networked media tools shouldn't end in finding new sources of footage and easy distribution. Tools that empower the media makers also empower the audience, and their proper use and deployment allow us to close the feedback loop started when the first community media projects began over forty years ago.
One of the early goals of community media was to create a safe space for dialogue among the community. For years, that meant providing a space for people to make themselves heard through things like cable television broadcasts. But television is a one-way technology. The soap box only enables one half of the conversation. There also needs to be a way to enable the community to talk back to their broadcasts, hopefully in a respectful, responsible manner.
Internet-based communications tools like instant messaging, text messaging, and video chat continue the conversation started by live call-in shows by providing a way to interact both with their media and each other. By incorporating these tools into television broadcasts both live and taped (squeezed into the corner through a DVE), centers give the community a place to comment on the work they see. Language filtering, user registration, and abuse blocking allow centers to a add a level of responsibility hard to maintain with live phone call-ins.
Projects like Shawn Van Every’s Interactive Tele-Journalism project (http://www.walking-productions.com/itj/) enable audiences to enter a conversation with the media maker, asking questions and leaving comments in live interview situations, while programs like BrowseTV (http://browsetv.net/) use video chat to engage audiences and allow them to help assemble the content of the video program on the fly.
By providing an environment where anyone can take video and audio from a program, remix it, comment on it, and make it their own, centers can enable audiences to gain more control over what they see and transform themselves from passive consumers of media to active participants in the media that they use.
The mediasphere is quickly evolving from an industrial-era hierarchy of producers and consumers to a nodal world of end users with varying levels of participation. These users have started taking control of what media they see, when they see it, and what they share with their community. Traditional media has been slow to respond to this, marrying themselves to content licensing and business models built for a world based on atoms and not bits. In the meantime, community media finds themselves in a world of open content, open tools, and new relationships, giving them the opportunity to finally use technology that mirror the values they already share.
kenyatta cheese (mail@kenyattacheese.net) is a media developer based in New York City. Currently he works with the art and technology lab Eyebeam Atelier (http://www.eyebeam.org) and edits unmediated.org (http://www.unmediated.org), a group blog on decentralized media.
Posted by yatta at 6:40 PM | TrackBack
September 27, 2004
art+tech+activism panel @ New School tonight.
Hot Enough? Art, Activism and Wireless Technology During the Republican National Convention
with Yury Gitman, Tad Hirsch, Natalie Jeremijenko, Joshua Kinberg,
neuroTransmitter, and moderator Jonah Peretti
Monday, September 27, 7PM
The New School, Theresa Lang Center, 2nd Floor
55 West 13th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues
Wow. Just look at that title. I bet they could've fit "locative media" and "social software" somewhere in there if they had wanted to.
Hope to see you there.
Posted by yatta at 5:02 PM | TrackBack
September 24, 2004
"I have a window office."
I think the Wu got herself a free subscription to nerve.
Nerve.com Pickup Line Contest
PICKUP LINES, ORIGINAL DIVISION
"I have a window office." — Alice Wu
Posted by yatta at 1:22 PM | TrackBack
September 22, 2004
the philosophy of the reblog.
tomorrow is tom moody's last day reblogging for the eyebeam reblog. there's been a steady stream of amazingly great rebloggers over there including tom, beverly tang, alex galloway twhid.... I've been checking out the other reblogs out there and I've been pretty damn impressed with those as well. btang's is awesome, near near future is wonderful, and gavin's clippings has been pretty fantastic. (uh, who slipped the 8th grade adjectives into my drink?) oh yeah, and we can't forget sexblo.gs.
anyhoo, tom's gone and put his reblogging philosophy down on blog for others to see. i'm about to give up reins to the unmediated reblog (there are seven authors who post to their own blogs + del.icio.us links and the reblog aggregates them all) for a couple of weeks. I think i'm going to hand out a link to tom's philosophy as a guide.
Posted by yatta at 11:41 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 21, 2004
it brought tears to my eyes.
britney spears busts one. no need to hate on britney but i haven't felt like this since i first heard those william shatner records.
via stereogum
Posted by yatta at 3:55 PM | TrackBack
September 20, 2004
most memorable shows ever....
that i can remember right now, in no particular order:
- 1994. stereolab. mercury lounge, nyc. band arrive in a ford extended passenger van and carry in their own gear. nuff said.
- 1992. versus. some kid's basement, westfield, nj. don't remember who the kid was but how the fuck did he get versus to play his basement?
- 1984. dj cheese (aka: cousin poopsie). my aunt joyce's apartment in the meadowbrook projects, plainfield, nj. watched him scratch for hours.
- 1992. pearl jam. trocadero, philadelphia, pa. went to the show on someone's plus 1 and didn't give a shizit. came away giving a big ass shizit.
- 1994. poor righteous teachers. trenton, nj. don't remember where but that's where i learned the best hip hop is always local.
- 1993. nirvana, roseland, nyc. last show in nyc. audience sings along to (was it "come as you are"?), so kurt cobain starts asking everyone to "shut the fuck up".
- 2004. dave chappelle's block party, quincy st in brooklyn. kanye west opens, accompanied by a marching band. the roots are the house band, backing up almost every single act. yes, the whole night. jill scott and erykah badu sing a duet. during the roots' own set they bring out big daddy kane and kool g rap. i watch mos def and talib kweli perform together as black star for the first time in fuck. between acts there'a sound problem so dave chappelle come out and does stand up for close to an hour to kill time. they end the night with a fugees reunion show (for real this time, lauryn fucking hill). forgot to mention dead prez, common, jeru.... beyond ridiculous - this show was impossible.
between sets i walked back to my place, checked email, had lunch, made calls, played nfl 2k5. when i heard someone go back on, i walked back outside. like i said: never again absolutely impossible. felt like i ran into pretty much everyone i haven't seen in forever. hip hop heads at the show. friends riding through the neighborhood just happen to stop by. sitting on my stoop. drinking beer watching folks trying to figure out the portapotties, listening to the fugees rap over a the roots playing "smells like teen spirit". (have i said 'impossible' already?)
took some shots and vid from the street and my roof (i'll post them later) but i didn't get my camera in the show so go check out downonlove's pics instead.
Posted by yatta at 10:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 18, 2004
uh, what's dave chappelle and michael gondry doing in the backyard?
someone told me earlier this week about a wattstax'-like movie being made by dave chappelle and michael gondry. the thing was to be shot at a secret location in brooklyn. well i found out this morning that the secret location is my frikkin backyard.
The security folks said that no one is being allowed in who haven't been brought in by secret bus, so I guess it really doesn't matter that I tell you that the location is Quincy Street and Downing in here in Clinton Hill. Don't know if I can claim hardship (you're keeping me from sleeping, I might as well party!) and get in but I'll try anyway. Otherwise I'll just listen from my roof. I'm probably closer than most of the audience will be anyway.
I'd be really excited about this whole thing if it weren't for the 15 portapotties lined up in front of my place.
They're expecting 5,000 people for the event. And only 15 portapotties. All lined up on my block. Could anything be more frightening?
Posted by yatta at 2:09 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 17, 2004
sims 2
sheila's afraid of the pending release of the sims 2. she's afraid that it will eat up entire weeks of her existence and it's true. i mean -- she's already in the game....
If contextual menus start popping up over her head I'm gonna just put her out of her misery.
Posted by yatta at 1:54 PM | TrackBack
September 16, 2004
Bike lock anti-terror rhetoric
Kryptonite responds to the bicpengate at Engadget:
The current Kryptonite locks based on a tubular cylinder design.... In 2002, Kryptonite began development of a new disc cylinder system... We are accelerating the delivery of the new disc cylinder locks... The world just got tougher and so did our locks.
Phillip Torrone's response made me giggle:
The world didn’t get tougher, it got Bic pens, blogs and your locks got opened.
{chuckle.}
Posted by yatta at 6:19 PM | TrackBack
September 15, 2004
Colin Mutchler's "Free Culture" show tonight in Williamsburg.
Colin's producing his Free Culture show at Checks Cashed tonight.Free Culture is multimedia performance by Brooklyn based artist Colin Mutchler that mixes music, image, video and spoken word to speak his personal journey, both physically and digitally, through the last four years.I can't make it tonight (nothing to do with my aversion to bars named after their pre-bar occupants. honestly!) but knowing Colin, it'll be a great show. It's free, so drop by if you can.
In the spirit of remixing and sampling culture, Colin uses a unique combination of laptop, projector, and acoustic guitar to share his own experiences and vision since graduating from Duke in 1999, including September 11th, youth media, and the emerging creative commons, where citizens and artists collaborate across space and time.
Posted by yatta at 5:51 PM | TrackBack
shhhh. (it's a modest mouse show.)
Wolf Parade &38;38; Friends @ Webster Hall. (the 'Friends' part.)
Posted by yatta at 5:25 PM | TrackBack
force quit.
Posted by yatta at 5:17 PM | TrackBack
eduardo galeano - blogger extraordinaire.
just re-read the book of embraces. he would make a great blogger.
Posted by yatta at 12:56 PM | TrackBack
September 14, 2004
This weekend I sat around my apartment, rented a movie, watched the squirrels out my window.
This weekend, Michelle does a frikkin triathalon.
(Okay, maybe I didn't just sit around the house, but everything pales in comparison. Kudos, Me-shell.)
Posted by yatta at 2:27 PM | TrackBack
callablahg, nstw, h2ed: a bunch of blogs of note today
Well, besides noting that both this site and unmediated were unreachable for half the day. ugh.
Daniell (of Digital Bicycle) pointed me to a d/l of Extra T's "I Like It" in the comments a couple of days ago. More importantly, I followed the link to his personal blog and found some good stuff there. Thx, Daniell. Keep it up.
Just spent the last couple of hours playing with MT templates for H2Ed in order to relaunch their site using MT for the entire backend. I had been wanting to do that for a while, then after seeing how great a job Will Richardson did with the Hunterdon Central HS site, I went ahead and made H2Ed live. TW's gonna convert all of the static pages over to MT entries with easier to remember URLs. We'll have to see how that goes.
And, finally, I've been waiting years for this one: Cally is blogging. 
Besides being my lifetime partner for world travel, Cally is a playwright. Although I don't know what her site is going to read like, I will tell you that listening to her plays makes me want to eat words:
I knew a man who ate the moon once. A long time ago. He was polite about it. Asked permission of the stars first. Wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin when he was done. I asked him how it tasted. He said, exactly as you might imagine.
She just started blogging a couple of days ago. Let's hope it takes.
Posted by yatta at 12:29 AM | TrackBack
September 13, 2004
like frikkin bunnies.
I went to go catch up on a month of unread messages in the videoblogging yahoo group this evening. and this is what I'm presented with:
i need to switch to digest mode.
Posted by yatta at 11:58 PM | TrackBack
hey ryan.
i'd love to hear your thoughts on this, mr. shaw.
Posted by yatta at 11:22 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 12, 2004
omfg: a bit late to the kill bill thing.
just watched the edit decisions for the final fight sequence of kill bill vol. 2 sixteen times in a row. in slow motion. absolutely wonderful.
Posted by yatta at 4:14 AM | TrackBack
September 11, 2004
pretty pretty reblog.
bev tang's gone and remade her blog into a reblog and it looks mightyfine. I've been working on and off on redesigns of this site and unmediated for a while. seeing this makes me want to get it done sooner than later.
Posted by yatta at 11:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 10, 2004
You must relax.
Okay. After three years of Cold War fever, this ultra-nervous thing is really getting on my, uh, nerves. I'm about to launch my own campaign called "Refuckinglax New York".
(via Gothamist.)
Posted by yatta at 10:04 PM | TrackBack
king of all metadata
is it any surprise that schachter seems to have the most organized tags on del.icio.us?
Posted by yatta at 8:57 PM | TrackBack
September 9, 2004
girl, I know the dawn and clear sky (even rise?) just to honor the persona of my boo.
dusting off cds I come across my copy of prince paul's a prince among thieves. listening to it now. parts of it just blows my mind.
Posted by yatta at 9:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
If a march sh!ts in the woods is it still effective dissent?
Found this NYPress Op over at jsmooth's. It says in short: marches are useless, protesters are smelly, who's going to bring the revolution, blahblahblah.
He also says something about the need for work stoppages as true dissent, but the climate doesn't seem right for that sort of direct action. (Would've made perfect sense after Florida in 2000, though.)
I do agree with one thing which is that marches don't work. They don't work b/c they are no longer spectacle. Haven't been in over thirty years. Disappeared about the same time the town square did. How can you demonstrate anything to anyone when there's no one to demonstrate to? The people you really need to reach are caught in shopping malls or stuck in front of their TV sets. So even if you do amass half a million people in the streets, it doesn't matter.
In the meantime, specials interests have media coverage on lockdown. They've rendered political marches into -- as TW puts it -- "a bunch of dirty granolas who haven't come to terms that they aren't oppressed." If you dismiss the imagery, you get the meat of the problem -- protesters are just another actor on the stage.
So what's my two bit remedy? Forget the spectacle. Go for substance. As Mike Taibbi says in his column, marches don't mean shit. No one's scared of marches unless you live in a country where large gatherings of people still matter. But can you imagine what would have happened the media and the police put all this time and energy into the anti-protester machine and no one showed up?
If the RNC protest organizers said "fuck it", dropped their placards, and while Dick, Bush, and the rest of the Zellinators were conjuring up the hounds of hell in MSG, thousands of people showed up in the swing states, en mass, organizing voter registration drives, handing out voter guides, and leading workshops in media literacy?
Now that would have scared the melgibson out of them.
Posted by yatta at 7:47 PM | TrackBack
John Bruneau Interviews Cory Arcangel
Not that I'm one to misquote people but Cory's worried about the things that get lonely in your closet.
Posted by yatta at 6:28 PM | TrackBack
installed the ecto 2 beta without thinking.
now i need to figure out how to get my prefs back in ecto 1.
idiot.
Posted by yatta at 6:25 PM | TrackBack
September 7, 2004
Anonymity today.
d-boogie shows me this article with the following caption:
Uh, okay.
Posted by yatta at 10:57 PM | TrackBack
wattstax
is on POV tonight! Hot damn!
featuring a young unknown comic named richard pryor and hosted by a baddass rev. jesse (with a baddass fro), I first saw a battered vhs copy of this doc at a party when I was in the 11th grade. it was one of those films that helped cement my decision to go into media.
I guess there's a DVD out now. Never saw it on TV before. Glad to see it now.
Posted by yatta at 10:40 PM | TrackBack
Words I haven't used since high school.
Just going through a bunch of old floppies from my DHS days. Among the words that stand out that I haven't used since then:
- fresh.
- dude.
- word up.
- not. (in the wayne's world sense, tho i remember using it pre-ww.)
- vociferous.
Posted by yatta at 12:18 AM | TrackBack
Project Censored 2005 - Online!
Is this new? It used to be that you couldn't actually read Project Censored "Top 25 Censored Stories" online. You had to buy the book.
I guess they decided to finally join the end of the 20th century.
Posted by yatta at 12:10 AM | TrackBack
September 3, 2004
Terror Quiz.
via Tom Moody (who's reblogging this week, by the way.)
Posted by yatta at 1:25 PM | TrackBack
September 2, 2004
rnc redux done.
just finished reduxing with the screensaversgroup in w'burg. we started off at the brooklyn public library by grand army plaza. that went well until the confrontation with the police (who were into the projection until the staff sarge showed up.) left to join the bopcollective in w'burg and just called in the night. pretty successful week. i'll post clips, pics, and screengrabs on the ssg site in a bit. to everyone who came out to support ssg: thankyou thankyou thankyou!
Posted by yatta at 10:56 PM | TrackBack
September 1, 2004
when nerds protest the RNC.
via cory
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August 30, 2004
Josh survives the Tombs, blogs his experience, works on legal defense.
Quick update of Josh's bikesagainstbush situation: He's out of jail and after a quick shower, called his family (fully supportive, by the way), and did the Hardball interview. He blogged about his jail experience on the msnbc site (make sure to check out his description of "Lil' Gitmo" the oil-slicked razor-wired holding pen the critical mass cyclists were forced to sleep in Friday night. Must find a first person account of this somewhere.) After that he dropped by the screensaversgroup RNCredux event we did at SHARE last night. He looked a little harried but alert (I guess a night in jail will do that to ya.)
The short of it is that the bike is out of commission until the hearing Friday. Although Yury has started gathering the parts needed to build a second bike, the code is still in police custody and Josh didn't have an adequate backup. (I know, i know. I'm buying him a copy of Retrospect for his birthday.)
He's definitely going to continue the project. As he reminded me last night, the goal was never about the RNC -- it's about getting Bush out of office. There are 60 more days before the election and miles of sidewalk left in New York City. :)
Problem is he has to get this declared legal first. There's still a strong possibility that he'll be facing jail time. While his lawyer originally thought that this was an open and shut case, similar casesare starting to make her think otherwise.
So going forward, here's what's going on: Josh is concentrating on putting together his legal defense. (You can make a donation to help him out at bikesagainstbush. Because some folks have been picky about this, make sure to specify whether you want your resources to go towards his legal defense or the construction of a new bike.) Someone passed along contact info for James De La Vega's lawyer that I've passed on to Josh. He appreciates that. If anyone knows of anything or anyone that could help Josh in his case, let him know. (Anyone know who defended Steve Kurtz in his case?)
What we civilians can do in the meantime is spread the word on Josh's case which will hopefully put pressure on the city to resolve this case in a swift and just manner. If you can blog about his case, thank you. If you can get coverage in traditional ink-and-electrons media, that'd help, too. Anything to help the community understand that this is the work of someone exercising his first amendment rights in a legal and respectful manner (and not the work of "a man with a convoluted spray-paint mechanism")
As far as the project is concerned, plans are being made for a second bike. I'm going to move all of the updates on Josh's situation to the bikesagainstbush blog but first I have to get some work done. I mean, it is Monday and all. :)
Posted by yatta at 1:32 PM | TrackBack
August 29, 2004
RNC 2004 - The Struggle Against Those Who Use Bicycles To Try To Shape The World
in 2000, it was the puppets. in 2004, it seems to be the bicycles. first, after eight years of peaceful, fully cooperative protests, 250 bicyclists critical mass riders get arrested on friday. (My favorite quote: "Before, it was these peaceful environmental groups doing it, but they seem to have been taken over by this other group—Critical Mass—that’s basically trying to take over the city" Wha?) Saturday, Josh gets arrested, his bike confiscated, and this afternoon comes with word from NY1 that cyclists were arrested again during today's United for Peace march.
Perhaps this is part of the "Struggle Against Ideological Transportationalists Who Happen to Use Bicycles as a Weapon To Try To Shape The Conscience Of The Free World."
Posted by yatta at 1:56 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 24, 2004
Bunny of the Month.
bev tang: The Morbid Tendencies Bunny of the Month" Club.
"Something dreadful in the mail each month to brighten your life. I encourage you to have them delivered to your office.$35 is the full Bunny Club membership. You get your choice of bunnies, bears, or some of each (e.g., “I want 5 months: 3 bunnies and 2 bears”), and you can request special animals like monkeys or penguins, and I will try my best to get them for you. I do have some cats at the moment.
I do not make the same bunny for everyone each month, oh, no. I look at each person's file, and I think of all the clues I have about them: name, address, handwriting if I have a sample, email style, any hints of personality I am given. I make sure they will not get the same colour or style this month, and finally, I listen to the rabbits and make a wild guess as to which thing to send them this month
I think I just finished my holiday shopping for the year.
Posted by yatta at 9:42 PM | TrackBack
August 23, 2004
RNC-Redux.
Next week is going to be a busy week for a lot of folks in NYC -- that is if standing in extra long lines for trains at Penn Station counts as 'busy.' For me, I'll be busy working on the RNC-Redux project every night while helping document Bikes Against Bush during the day. Additionally, a bunch of the unmediated folks are working on a wifitv broadcast with Konscious TV which I'm supposed to be giving the assist on. Fun times all around.
Posted by yatta at 6:14 PM | TrackBack
frikkin duped!
Frikkin Harner! Or rather: Frikkin Peretti! A couple of months ago, Harner shows me Jane's blog, a blog for a fictional character on some Oxygen show. She even shows me a cross blog where she blogs about "Jane" and "Jane" blogs about her. "Do you think it's written by the actor?" Harner asks me rather innocently. "No, it has to be a writer," I answer, "I don't believe it."
Flash forward to today and I read a Joi Ito post where I find out that Jonah's the one responsible for Jane's Blog in the first place. I'd been duped!
Posted by yatta at 6:11 PM | TrackBack
August 20, 2004
Calendars of RNC related events
I'm compiling a short list for a screensaversgroup project we're doing. Here are the calendars:
- counterconvention
- imagine festival
- rncnotwelcome
- radical reference
Posted by yatta at 12:32 PM | TrackBack
how to make my day....
...and keep me laughing so much i can't get to sleep tonight.
Swedish graffiti artists kidnapped a fiber-glass cow from the international art exhibit CowParade, held power drills to its head and threatened to "sacrifice" it unless the sculptures were declared "non-art."if stockholm's anti-art-terror squad comes after them they should flee to brooklyn where i'll hide them in the mountainous caves and declare them martyrs.
Posted by yatta at 2:18 AM | TrackBack
August 18, 2004
by the power of grayskull!!!!!!
nothing, really. i just wanted to say that.
Posted by yatta at 8:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
the credit roll for your life.
another great use for blog entries. the credit roll for you life. this particular one has to be one of the most sincerely sweetest things i've seen in a while. (like i said, i've been watching television.)
Posted by yatta at 3:06 PM | TrackBack
"saving face" in toronto film festival.
wednesday comes with the news that alice's feature, saving face will be debuting at toronto next month. yippie!
Posted by yatta at 12:34 PM | TrackBack
August 17, 2004
where's the feedback loop for sports pages?
especially during the olympics when thoughts turn to nationalism and performance enhancing scandals. i'm so glad i have a teevee again! it's been good for balancing out my overly content life.
first, i got really annoyed reading the sports pages about usa basketball's loss to puerto rico on sunday, but it wasn't because of the chicken little sky is falling pieces -- knee jerk reactions are excusable. it was because of the "who cares if we lost, it's not so bad" pieces that reeked of anxiety induced testosterone.
first there was the cnnsi guy effectively saying that the loss wasn't embarrassing b/c it wasn't like they lost to a bunch of girls. from there i went to the the foxsports column that took the pat buchanan bunker approach: who cares about anything we're not good at? He even had a couple of pot shots in there about the French. (French bashing was so pre-end to hostilities.) Of course, I'd love to post a response on the article pages, but comment forms don't seem to exist on most sports news sites. Meanwhile, I google around looking for sports blogs and find that most folks are still bbs-ing it. I wonder what's going to happen when more of them start blogging.
Posted by yatta at 4:56 PM | TrackBack
adrants.
is it me or has Steve Hall's adrants been rather randy lately? it's better than reading fleshbot.
It probably doesn't help that J.Jarvis eggs him on. ;)
Posted by yatta at 3:11 PM | TrackBack
August 13, 2004
finally, tv news for me.
reuters "raw footage." it's information without obvious inflection. no obvious narrative. no voice over. no research averse reporting. no fearmongering. interview footage without intermediary. (plus it reminds me of the stuff orlando and i shot for durban diaries.)
Posted by yatta at 3:51 PM | TrackBack
August 12, 2004
I'm proud of my gay governor!
it's stories like this that will always make me proud to say i'm from New Jersey, Bon Jovi be damned:
"At a point in every person's life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world -- not as we may want to see it or hope to see it but as it is," McGreevey told reporters at the Capitol in Trenton. "My truth is that I am a gay American."And, as usual, when I'm looking for news on NJ, I skip all the major media (just AP reposts, anyway) and go straight to the source of all things Blog-Jersey.
Posted by yatta at 5:54 PM | TrackBack
watched tv for the first time in months last night....
for about 30 minutes I cut between the constant high-pitched drone of the '2004 teen choice awards' on fox and the constant dull moan of spike tv's '50 most desirable women'. (There really was nothing else on. Really.) The whole thing reminded me why I'm working on this media alternatives stuff. By the way - the crossover between the two shows? Embarrassingly high.
Posted by yatta at 12:11 PM | TrackBack
August 9, 2004
The Struggle Against I.E.W.D.N.B.I.F.S.W.H.T.U.T.A.A.W.T.T.T.S.T.C.O.T.F.W.
"We actually misnamed the War on Terror. It ought to be the Struggle Against Ideological Extremists Who Do Not Believe in Free Societies Who Happen to Use Terror as a Weapon To Try To Shape The Conscience Of The Free World."Sigh.
Posted by yatta at 5:38 PM | TrackBack
July 7, 2004
how much difference does a movie trailer really mean?
a movie i would consider seeing.
a movie i would not consider seeing.
what a difference an edit makes.
Posted by yatta at 3:10 PM | TrackBack
June 14, 2004
google searching 'nba finals 2004 anticlimactic western conference lakers minnesota'
what happened to all of those articles i saw proclaiming the lakers-twolves series "the real finals"? how the east was just lucky to be invited to the playoffs? can't seem to find them, but i know they're there.
or maybe that was just tricia talking trash again.
:)
Posted by yatta at 1:28 AM | TrackBack
June 11, 2004
the reagan coverage is like sympathy puking
i mean, that's what the collective alzheimer's is all about, right?
thx michele.
Posted by yatta at 4:35 PM | TrackBack
May 13, 2004
a brief lesson in crisis management.
abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse. abuse.
if you keep on using the word abuse, no one will remember that it was torture.
Posted by yatta at 3:52 PM | TrackBack
May 2, 2004
Ministry of Truth.
Passages like this worry me:
Five of the eight minutes Bush spoke to the White House correspondents were devoted to a serious message about the service of Americans -- in the news media and the military -- in what the president called "a period of testing and sacrifice."
Posted by yatta at 3:11 AM | TrackBack
September 10, 2003
Don't Buy Another New CD Ever Again.
Okay. I know everyone's seen this. The RIAA targeted a 12-year old girl as one of the 261 most dangerous music priates in America. She can face fines of up to $150,000 per song. She lives in nycha housing. She's an honor student. (She was d/ling frikkin Barney for chrissakes!) So there's all this bad publicity out there for the RIAA today - you think good sense would prevail and they would drop the suit? No. Instead, they get the 12-year old's mother to settle for $2G. Booooooo!!!!!!!!
I've got a plan: I'm never buying another new major label CD ever again. Period. Here's how I'm going to do it....
- 1. Stop Consuming Pop Media. Okay, I'm not exactly a pop music junkie. i mean, I barely knew who Tatu was. (like anybody does now?) It's junk media like MTV, Clear Channel radio stations and E! that make you think that you want to buy this po(o)p in the first place.
- 2. Support Big Artists Who Escape The System. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America. Sony and Universal aren't in the 'musician' business. They manufacture CDs. They're in the duplication biz. Problem is most artists don't get signed, and of the ones that do, most don't Make It Big. Major media is the distribution lotto. They teach you that they're the only game in town. So artists think that they've got to sign in order to have any success. But some artists have learned better. Prince, Public Enemy, Pearl Jam. Phish, Aimee Mann all self distribute. They've all proven themselves sustainable and some of them are even more profitable than they've ever been.
- 2. Find Alternative Artists and Labels In My Favorite Genres. Spend an afternoon listening to a mix of local, college, community, and freeform radio stations (don't worry. if you turn the knob to the far left of the FM dial, it won't fall off.) The best music comes from small labels nowadays. rawkus, warp, drag city, duophonic, def jux, and practically all good reggae, soca, and dancehall is on independents.
- 3. Need Music? Check the Library. Every time I receive a book from Amazon I kick myself for forgetting one of the best things my dad ever taught me: use the Public Library. When i was a young'n, my sister and I spent every afternoon at the public library. We checked out as many books (and audio tapes) as we could carry. The Public Library is the greatest essential resource our society has to offer. Well, besides roads, emergency medical services, and sewage treatment plants.
- 4. Buy Music From Independent Distribution Services. Julie Goldman is on CDBaby. What more do you need?
- 5. If I Must Buy A Major Label CD, Buy It Used. The Big Five don't make money when you buy a CD that's used. The only one who makes out (in a very meager way) is the used record store you bought it in. In fact, the same goes for books. Which is why major publishers had a fit when Amazon started selling used books. And trust me, your favorite artist isn't getting hurt. In fact, they probably aren't making as much as you think.
- 6. Tell All My Musician Friends To Self Distribute. Fortunately, many of them have started this already. It's not that hard. And thanks to digital, now it's even easier.
So those are my six steps to better listening. Spurred to do something about it? Check here for starters. Can you think of something I missed? Let me know.
Posted by yatta at 3:14 AM