techyum ::

This is from 2000, but oh my is it more relevant than ever.

I never, ever, ever thought I’d tell you that Courtney Love should be listened to. (Never been a fan.) If she really wrote what she said here, she did the math and calls out the RIAA and major label cartels and dot-com Mad Men VC fuckwads (oh, they’re all the same now) for strangling artists out of their rent. She spells out something that is just as relevant ten years later — especially in the new tech bubble.

Think I’ve been smoking what she’s been smoking? You tell me. You tell me if you’ve ever wanted to create, write, make something you know people want and have run up against corporate distribution mafia tactics/traditions, smelled the sweat of piracy fear from your hard work’s gatekeepers, or realized your work will never get recognition or given distribution access based on merit.

Read this transcript of Love’s talk in Salon and in place of the word ‘musician’ insert ‘writer’ ‘author’ ‘blogger’ ‘developer’ or ‘filmmaker’ or even ‘sex worker’.

This is a cultural slap I’ve been waiting for — this is one of my favorite parts:

When you people do business with artists, you have to take a different view of things. We want to be treated with the respect that now goes to Web designers. We’re not Dockers-wearing Intel workers from Portland who know how to “manage our stress.” We don’t understand or want to understand corporate culture.

I feel this obscene gold rush greedgreedgreed vibe that bothers me a lot when I talk to dot-com people about all this. You guys can’t hustle artists that well. At least slick A&R guys know the buzzwords. Don’t try to compete with them. I just laugh at you when you do! Maybe you could a year ago when anything dot-com sounded smarter than the rest of us, but the scam has been uncovered.

The celebrity-for-sale business is about to crash, I hope, and the idea of a sucker VC gifting some company with four floors just because they can “do” “chats” with “Christina” once or twice is ridiculous. I did a chat today, twice. Big damn deal. 200 bucks for the software and some elbow grease and a good back-end coder. Wow. That’s not worth 150 million bucks.

(…) I know my place. I’m a waiter. I’m in the service industry.

I live on tips. Occasionally, I’m going to get stiffed, but that’s OK. If I work hard and I’m doing good work, I believe that the people who enjoy it are going to want to come directly to me and get my music because it sounds better, since it’s mastered and packaged by me personally. I’m providing an honest, real experience. Period.

When people buy the bootleg T-shirt in the concert parking lot and not the more expensive T-shirt inside the venue, it isn’t to save money. The T-shirt in the parking lot is cheap and badly made, but it’s easier to buy. The bootleggers have a better distribution system. There’s no waiting in line and it only takes two minutes to buy one.

I know that if I can provide my own T-shirt that I designed, that I made, and provide it as quickly or quicker than the bootleggers, people who’ve enjoyed the experience I’ve provided will be happy to shell out a little more money to cover my costs. Especially if they understand this context, and aren’t being shoveled a load of shit about “uppity” artists. (…)

* Courtney Love does the math – Courtney Love – Salon.com (This is an unedited transcript of Courtney Love’s speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, given in New York on May 16.)

Yes, it’s about that time of year. The WTF? New Words!!! time of year. Making the rounds of blogs and the mainstream media are sure to be the amused observations that the Oxford American Dictionary has added X word or Y expression or Z piece of trendy teenspeak to its pages, reportedly giving schoolteachers agita and providing children and adolescents (who are the only people using the dictionary, right?) with new ways to abuse the American language and claim that they, not bland-ass adults with IQs of 103, are the arbiters of culture. Weird, huh!?!? New words added to the language, almost like it was, like, a living thing or something, huh!?!?

I think we can all agree to bawl and shout and jump up and down and wear party hats and dance some sort of goddamn jig or something about the arrival of such internet- and text-friendly terms as “BFF,” “hashtag,” “defriend,” “LMAO” and “TTYL” into the Oxford American Dictionary.

In fact I, personally, am so unbelievably excited to drone on with faux-hipness and thinly-disguised self-important pseudo-intellectual snootiness about how fascinating it is to see these new terms enter the dictionary that I’m considering applying for a job at a newspaper.

But I’m just so damned busy puzzling over the complete list of additions at the Oxford University Press blog that I’d prefer to keep writing for Techyum, which doesn’t have deadlines. I mean, like, dude. “Bromance?” “Hashtag?” “Hater?” “LBD,” “Paywall?” “Social networking?” Okay. “Steampunk?” “Lipstick lesbian”? Um, all right. “Tag cloud?” Sure. “Tramp stamp?” Like, NSS.

But “gal pal”? “wardrobe malfunction”? “waterboarding”? “webisode?” “the new black?” “my bad”? “what’s not to like?” “like herding cats”? “made man”? Were these things, like, queued up since 1986 or something? Or did I actually become very slightly ahead of the curve on language while I was busy trying to sleep through the press conference on the latest Hollywood remake of Cat on a Roomba Slapping a Pit Bull?

And when it comes to single-source words like “hockey mom” and “truthiness,” or obvious marketing tags like “staycation” — are these honestly new words or clever ideas intended to hawk a political, sales or satirical agenda? In the era of social media, does a large enough number of hits on Google entitle any stumbling Memeasaurus to add whatever crap to the dictionary gets a round of applause at a rally in Knoxville?

Because y’know, Oxford…I kinda feel an attack of Slapsgiving coming on.

Laughing Squid alerts me to a momentous interview with iconic guerrilla street artist Banksy, in today’s issue of UK Tabloid The Sun. The interview includes the first-ever photographs of Banksy working in his studio. No, this isn’t one of the signs of the Apocalypse; his face is pixelated or turned away.

If you’re unfamiliar with Banksy, read this. But the short version is that he’s at once the Godfather, Patron Saint and Lord High Executioner of art pranking and street art, a graffiti artist whose iconic use of stencils and opportunistic street elements has made him one of the biggest influences in contemporary art. One of his recent pranks included replacing 500 copies of Paris Hilton’s new album with 500 copies of his own. Banksy is famously reclusive, in part because his entire style of art is mostly illegal, but in part, I’m sure, just to fuck with people.

The interview precedes the release of his DVD Exit Through the Gift Shop, which comes out Monday.

…in print form, at least. The Telegraph is reporting that the next edition of the OED will probably not be published in print, “because of the impact of the internet on book sales.” It will continue to exist in online form, as it has for ten years.

An important distinction is that this is not the one-volume Oxford Dictionary of English, which is sold in many if not most bookstores. The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary is considered the most definitive work on the English language, with complete etymology for all words. It was last published in 1989, and 80 lexicographers have been working on the next edition ever since. The next edition of the 20-volume OED is an estimated ten years from completion — as of now, it’s 28% finished.

Says the Telegraph:

Sales of the third edition of the vast tome have fallen due to the increasing popularity of online alternatives, according to its publisher.

The dictionary’s owner, Oxford University Press (OUP), said the impact of the internet means OED3 will probably appear only in electronic form…The most recent OED has existed online for more than a decade, where it receives two million hits a month from subscribers who pay an annual fee of £240.

“The print dictionary market is just disappearing, it is falling away by tens of per cent a year,” Nigel Portwood, the chief executive of OUP, told the Sunday Times.

Link.

It’s worth mentioning that the press will use this opportunity to once again sound the death knell of print publishing, based on shit data Amazon pulled out of its fragrant ass. It re-re-re-reported, as the media has been doing for months, Amazon’s report that ebooks outsell print books. This “fact” doesn’t take into account the fact that many of Amazon’s ebooks “sold” for the Kindle are free because they are public domain or sample chapters.

I could go hand out crack on the street, too, rather than selling it. I’d still go to prison if I got caught — but I’d never get myself a pink Jaguar that way. Get my point?

Sometimes you run across stuff online, and you think to yourself, “Really? This is just sitting there for me to find it?” I don’t mean the meanstream media, though I often do have that experience of it. I mean stuff like the NASA image gallery, which is packed with the most amazing public domain images around, proof that our federal tax dollars aren’t just going to pay for lavish Illuminati bank executive parties on 747s and which, if you dig deep enough, hides some very strange stuff.

Take, for instance, this series of photos in the NASA image gallery that’s been cryptically captioned “Visit to Glenn Research Center by Author of a Book,” which made me assume we were talking about some fringe alien theorist or an obscure science fiction author who has a friend in the PR department–

–not so. The question in my mind is not so much “Why is former NASA engineer Homer Hickam too cool to hang out with any of the white people at NASA?” as it is “How many books get written about rocketry that the people hired to do the captions at NASA don’t recognize this guy?”

The former question, I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation for; the latter would be less troubling if in that last photo, Hickam wasn’t actually holding a copy of his #1 New York Times best-selling memoir Rocket Boys, on which the biographical film October Sky was based.

That look on his face says it all: “None of these people have the slightest idea who I am.” Been there, Homer. Been there indeed.

No doubt about it, the guys at Stalqer must love the news this week: Facebook just made their jobs easier and much more interesting. This week the Wal-Mart of social media (Facebook) launched their “Places” feature in a gambit to enter the location-based “check-in” craze (combining it with a couple of other lifestyle social media tools they’ve weakly imitated into their corporate cover for data collection and resale). It was hailed by tech blogs who love special personal invitations and will blow polar bears for press access — but it may be the first time a social networking feature has been introduced and been immediately received with a combination of blogger blowjobs and a serious reaction of outrage and disbelief from the ACLU (link: ACLU’s Places statement, aclunc.org). Immediately, helpfully (but only for those who know about it), Read Write Web published this step-by-step walkthrough to at least help users of the social media site to find the multiple places in their accounts where you can disable some (but not all) of Places ability to reveal, or to fake, your location at any time.

Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng writes,

(…) Several privacy advocates say that the settings are unnecessarily complex and that users could have certain personal info exposed without their consent.

“There is no single opt-out to avoid location tracking; users must change several different privacy settings to restore their privacy status quo,” the Electronic Privacy Information Center said in a statement on its website. The organization also notes that it and many other consumer privacy organizations still have complaints pending with the FTC over Facebook’s “unfair and deceptive trade practices, which are frequently associated with new product announcements.”

Indeed, there are multiple settings (that are not all grouped together) in which a user must specify his or her preferences when it comes to Places, making it slightly more confusing than necessary. However, there’s one Places-related situation that is not even controllable via settings, and could expose people’s addresses to the world. (…read more, arstechnica.com)

Not all bloggers swallowed the problems with Facebook Places wholesale — at the press announcement some bloggers decided to take Facebook to task out of the starting gate for overlooking glaring privacy issues. These issues (which could prove dangerous for, say, women coping with domestic violence and/or stalkers) were already present for users with the services Facebook proudly partnered with, namely FourSquare and Gowalla. The first question for Zuckerberg, his lead engineer, and the FS/G heads was from indie blogger, podcaster and Slide employee Rod Begbie, who simply wanted to know how to get his home address off the service if someone else put it online on Facebook. Not only was he passed off, the engineer lamely told him he could try to get people to “flag” it for review and deletion, and in the video, we can audibly hear one of the guys from either FourSquare or Gowalla expressing annoyance at the question.

Here’s the video; this is a link to the transcript where Rod Begbie comments, explaining exactly how the Facebook engineer lied to him in the video.

The “venues” (addresses/locations added and created by users) are not only visible to friends, they are in fact, publicly visible… Oh, if only Facebook was as fast and efficient as an online stalker.

Please stop clogging up the internet tubes with your fucking social media strategy already. It has been automated. If this applies to you in any way, please leave the internet immediately. Because you are a beautiful and unique flower of the internet, a rubber bag filled with warm vinegar and water with the words “Social Media Strategist” written on it in black Sharpie is standing by to take your place.

WHAT THE FUCK IS MY SOCIAL MEDIA “STRATEGY”? (whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com, via MeFi where the comments will make your nose into a coffee sprayer while you weep onto your keyboard)

If you watch the TV series Mad Men, then you’re already awash in the great outfits, intense over-consumption, crisp eroticism, and unsettlingly confrontational commonality of misogyny and racism. Website Bored Panda put together this collection of vintage advertisements that would be banned today, and many of them clearly would hail from Sterling Cooper’s desks — even a few of the show’s “clients” are in the roundup. Warning: this collection of (real) ads contains something to offend everyone, from the ads about when it’s “okay” to kill a woman to bleaching skin color to appear ‘more white,’ levied only by the ads explaining which cigarettes doctors prefer most. (boredpanda.com)

Obsessed with artifacts of the macabre and creating exclusive clockwork “DNA” art pieces reminiscent of disaster, plus comprised of materials so rare and expensive few of us will even get nearer to them than a blo post — what’s not to love about Romaine Jerome’s Skeleton Chronograph Tourbillon watch? Only nine will be made and they’ll all be slightly different, though basics remain: the skeleton-arm dial is combines brass, black or, steel, pink gold 5N; they mix mat velvet finish, satin and shot-blasted finish for the Roman numeral XII. The Tourbillon carriage and the chronometry engine are illuminated by the use of pink gold 5N. Each will have 33 rubies, be comprised of steel and titanium, have hands “inspired by the anchor of Titanic”, the crystal will be sapphire, and along with the rubber strap will be water resistant. Ha.
According to the press page’s PDF:

“The rusted steel horological creations in the ‘Titanic DNA’ series features an oxidized steel bezel which is the result of an extraordinary blend of authentic steel from the wreck lying 3840 meters under the sea, and from the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast, where the Titanic was constructed nearly a century ago. Official certificates of authenticity guarantee the origin of materials used.”

Image via Toolmonger.
The Guardian UK has a podcast interview with Jo Marchant, the author of Decoding the Heavens (a book about the Antikythera computer) — and you should definitely visit the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project’s website. But Toolmonger, one of my favorite and regular reads, describes the ancient computer — yes, it’s a computer that’s 2000 years old — and its reconstruction best:

In 1902 sponge divers discovered 81 fragments of an ancient, unknown tool at the bottom of the sea near the Greek island of Antikythera. Dated around the first century B.C., this early “computer” was the most complex technology of its time – and for another thousand years. Originally thought to be an astrolabe, the mechanism tracked and predicted the cycles of the solar system and the movement of heavenly bodies.
Beginning in fall 2005, a team of British and Greek scientists and researchers used innovative digital imaging and 3-D X-ray technology to take high-res pictures of the mechanism, inside and out, including detailed inscriptions that offer insight into the tool’s functions. Now a London museum curator, Michael Wright, has built a working replica – the first to incorporate all the details of the original, including the Greek and Egyptian calendars, markers indicating locations of the moon and five planets known to the ancient Greeks, and predictions of solar and lunar eclipses. (…read more, toolmonger.com)

Here’s video of Michael Wright with his model of the incredible, reconstructed Antikythera mechanism: