By Cory Doctorow at 5:04 pm Friday, Aug 9
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The latest Get Your War On, called "Get Your Exx On," is up. Lotsa yucks and lotsa zingers aimed at the Shrub administration's coziness with financially corrupt corporate felons.
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(
Thanks to everyone who sent this in -- all twenty of you!)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:24 pm Friday, Aug 9
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The third installment of e-sheep's
brilliant alternate-history Afghanistan-response comic, "The Spiders," is online. Damn, this is some of the best sf on the Web.
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Thanks, Stefan!)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:17 am Friday, Aug 9
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An appeals court has overturned Seattle's ban on street-postering, on First Amendment grounds. I love street-postering; when I was a kid, I used to go downtown and peel off (expired) street-posters and save them in a scrap-book as a record of all the events and shows happening in my city.
When I was fundraising for the sustainable development project I did in Costa Rica, I put up about 10,000 posters for my various benefit events, cycling around the city on my lunch breaks and after work with a tape-gun, a big yogurt container, a bag of flour and a sponge, hitting every construction overpass, light-pole and trash-can I could find.
Postering is a great way to get to know your neighbors, a great way to find out about all the fringe, funny and undermonied goings-on in your town, an expression of the underground poster-maker's art.
Reg Hartt, a whacky film archivist in Toronto (kind of a home-grown Prelinger, but with a prediliction for redacted Warner Brothers' "race" cartoons), commands a mighty team of hardened street-posterers who rule Toronto's poster-spaces -- woe to the posterer who covers an unexpired poster for a Hartt event. When I worked at an academic bookstore, we'd hire Reg to blanket the city with posters for our twice-annual sale -- overnight, he could have a poster on every corner.
I remember two crazy bums on Queen Street who'd wander up and down, tearing down every poster they could lay hands on, muttering angrily; I once followed a block behind one of them, postering over all the fresh turf he cleared before me.
As billboards and monied messages creep into every corner of our world (damn, even the urinal liners have ads on 'em, so you pee on the message!), it's great to see indie messages growing up through the cracks.
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(Thanks, Alex!)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:57 am Friday, Aug 9
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Great NYT account of a giant EverQuest convention in Boston. As Stefan notes, this is "a surprisingly non-snarky story." Though it does prove the truism that the press at any geeky con will immediately gravitate to the people in costume.
NICE ears!" the young man with the bow and arrow shouted through the crowd to the corseted woman. Her ears were pointy and Vulcanlike. "I'm guessing, druid?"
"Half-elf," she replied coyly. "Nice try."
He should have known better. After all, this was the Fan Faire, a convention for the most erudite players of the medieval-themed computer game EverQuest. Back home, the 1,500 people whom the conference drew carry out their adventures in an online fantasy world called Norrath where, as Tolkienesque wizards and warriors, they seek treasures, battle monsters and build their characters. The Fan Faire was a rare opportunity for them to meet in the flesh. Players came from as far as Denmark, and many appeared in the guise of their in-game characters -- isosceles ears and all.
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Thanks, Stefan!)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:53 am Friday, Aug 9
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Gadgets for God is your tasteless religious artefact superstore -- from Blessed Odor Eaters to "Icthus" fish-shaped tambourines to Bibles that shoot flame, Gadgets for God has it all.
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Thanks, Steve!)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:35 am Friday, Aug 9
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Mindjack, an excellent webzine with an emphasis on cyberculture and all things geeky, has an open call for new writers to contribute. Mindjack's published some of my favorite pieces over the years (including a bunch that I wrote), and Donald, the editor, is a great guy to write for.
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Thanks, Donald!)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:32 am Friday, Aug 9
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BumperActive is giving away free "Free the Mouse" bumper-stickers to help the world show its support for the
Eldred case, where Larry Lessig is fighting to repeal the repeated extension of copyright every time Mickey Mouse's earliest films are in danger of entering the public domain. I wish I had a car, but failing that, I'm happy to make this the first sticker on my new iBook.
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Thanks, Kyle!)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:24 am Friday, Aug 9
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The new iPod update is really hot -- great calendar integration, support for the
equalization normalization in iTunes (all tracks are
equalized normalized (thanks, Steven!) to the same peak, so you never transition from one tune to another at twice the volume), lots of UI tweaks. It's amazing how a piece of flexible hardware can be continually upgraded, long after you buy it.
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