Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Andy Ihnatko unloads on the Zune with both barrels, calling it a "complete, humiliating failure" and a "colossal blunder," because Microsoft has taken the user out of its design considerations and put the music industry (in the person of Universal's Doug Morris, "a big, clueless idiot") in their place.

Yes, Microsoft's new Zune digital music player is just plain dreadful. I've spent a week setting this thing up and using it, and the overall experience is about as pleasant as having an airbag deploy in your face.

"Avoid," is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that's so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity...

The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure. Toshiba's Gigabeat player, for example, is far more versatile, it has none of the Zune's limitations, and Amazon sells the 30-gig model for 40 bucks less.

Throw in the Zune's tail-wagging relationship with music publishers, and it almost becomes important that you encourage people not to buy one.

Link (via Joho the Blog)

Fred sez,

More evidence that the digital video future may look like a big downgrade compared to the analog present, thanks to viral DRM carried by the CableCard.

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows MCE computers equipped with a CableCard will only be allowed to stream live video to Media Extender devices (like Xbox 360). No streaming to other PCs. Also, recorded CableCard content cannot be converted for playback on portable devices (Zune, iPod).

By contrast, analog, non-CableCard-infected TiVos support both these functions, as do PCs that use analog TV tuner-cards.

Link (Thanks, Fred!)

Gizmodo has a quick and easy hack for breaking the DRM on the Zune's WiFi. The Zune locks the music you wirelessly share with other Zunekers so that it only plays three times before evaporating. This is applied totally indiscriminately, even to Creative Commons music with a machine-readable license granting permission to distribute it. It would also apply this restriction to students who shared MP3s of their class-lectures.

First, you need to enable hard drive mode using the instructions we posted before. Then, rename whatever files—MP3s, movies, programs—to have the extension ".jpg" in order to fool the Zune into thinking its an image. This hack works because Zune doesn't apply DRM to images!

Then what?

Now, take your Zune and send the folder containing these files to your buddy along with a real photo. If you only send a fake photo, an error is thrown. The last step is to have your friend sync the Zune with their computer, open the "containing folder" where the files were downloaded, and rename the files back to their correct extension.

Link (via Wonderland)

See also: Microsoft Zune will violate Creative Commons licenses

Snip from Consumerist:

Inside, a man asks whether the no liquid rules apply to his pie... Not much fuss at the security pageant. We packed our liquids in our checked luggage, seeing no need to perform toilet mid-flight. A man waiting in line asked if it was okay to bring his pie on board. "That aint't a liquid," said the TSA employee. "Oh, good," said the man. We refrained from asking aloud whether cherry pie filling was considered a gel. "Unless it's sweet potato," she said. "It is," he said. "Then I'm gonna have to confiscate it!" said the TSA employee, to general laughter.

Link (Thanks, Ben Popken)

Filmmaker and writer Adario Strange interviewed me for New York Press, and called me an "anthropomorphic avatar," which is pretty darn funny. Link to article, cover scan (photo shot by Jacob Appelbaum).

The Copyright Office has created six new exemptions to the hated Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it a crime to break any digital lock, even if you're doing so for a legitimate purpose.

Every three years, the Copyright Office hears petitions for exemptions to this sweeping rule. This year, it created six exemptions, including one for film profs, another for gamers whose consoles have gone obsolete, blind people, and cell-phone recyclers.

However, the office refused to grant exemptions that would benefit the general public -- space- and format-shifting, backing up your DVDs -- and they took back an earlier exemption that let people reverse-engineer the blacklists maintained by censorware companies to bring some transparency to their process.

1. Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.

2. Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

3. Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete. A dongle shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured or if a replacement or repair is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

4. Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.

5. Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.

6. Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in compact disc format and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully purchased works and create or exploit security flaws or vulnerabilities that compromise the security of personal computers, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing, investigating, or correcting such security flaws or vulnerabilities.

Link (Thanks, Andy, Andreas, and everyone else who suggested this story!)

I've been listening to Sophe Lux's CD Waking the Mystics nonstop for a week or so, and just loving it. The Portland, OR eclectic glam band is fronted by Wendy Haynes, who sounds a little like PJ Harvey by way of Freddy Mercury. The songwriting is often hilarious, sometimes profound, and the songs veer from faux-psychedelic 1960s clavier rock ("God Doesn't Take American Express") to luscious sci-fi rock opera ("Marie Antoinette Robot 2073") to bouncy numbers like "Little Soldiers of Time." It's singable, it's danceable and the concert DVD I've been perusing suggests that this is the kind of thing you want to see live, too. Link

Sticker Graphics is a series of gorgeous box-set mixed-media books devoted to sticker art (something I have a lot of passion for). I picked up issue two ("Do You Love Stickers?") at Reading Frenzy last week, taken by the gorgeous, Space-Odysseyesque curved white box, which has a transparent compartment on the top filled with handsome stickers and patches. There's a drawer set into the box that slides open to reveal a book of lush sticker-art photos, a "locker poster" of stickers, and a DVD of little sticker animations (these are the least interesting part of the package).

The stickers and book, though, are really terrific -- it makes me wish I had a new laptop to cover. There's a lot of Japanese-looking die-cuts, a lot of little stickers perfect for filling in the blank spaces on your canvas (or decorating smaller phones and cameras) and some nice retro and Euro-stickers. The book provides a fascinating tour of global sticker design and placement. Sticker Graphics: All you need is..., Sticker Graphics 2: Do you love stickers?

Livingstones, a French company, sells these cushions that look like rocks -- the idea is to pile them up in your living room to make soft, comfy cairns of cognitively dissonant rock-pillows. Link (via Cribcandy)

Xart, a hobbyist PSP game-maker, has created a DRM system for his games. Creators of unauthorized homebrew games for the PSP worry that others will strip their names off of their creations and appropriate credit for their work, so Xart has proposed that the splash-screens that appear before the game starts should be encrypted so that they can't be altered.

Of course, the homebrew PSP scene exists because this sort of thing just doesn't work. It's impossible to deliver a game to a user with an encrypted section and the keys to decrypt it and expect that the user won't be able to decrypt it.

On the one hand, it's pretty unlikely that a homebrew hobbyist will use the DMCA to attack people who break their crypto, and it's reasonable to want to keep the credit intact on your works. On the other hand, this stuff really doesn't work, and no one should know that better than a PSP hobbyist.

With some people trying to rip off the homebrew scene, pretending to be Dark_Alex or some of our other respected devs, Xart from our forums has come up with a great new idea to prevent people ripping off others work. Xart has developed a powerful, fast Data Array Scrambling (DAS) system to protect your homebrew games and applications from hex editing and others stealing credit from your hard work.

This is an example of an encryption technique and it not a yet full release. For this Xart has used his xLoader application. It's a proof of concept to show just how quick encryption can be done to protect your work.

Link (Thanks, Hamish!)

The NESPaul guitar was made by grafting the neck of a dead electric guitar onto the hollowed-out body of an old Nintendo console. I have no idea if the resulting contraption sounds any good, but it looks so! damned! metal! Link (Thanks, CB)

Mr Blobby (a fathead, blobfish or Psychrolutidae), pictured here, was "trawled during the NORFANZ expedition at a depth between 1013 m and 1340 m, on the Norfolk Ridge, north-west of New Zealand, June 2003." I had no idea that things like this existed outside of the cartoons. He gives me the crawlies. Link (via JWZ)

BoingBoing pal Danielle Spencer says, "Well, after last year's frighteningly realistic Jell-O® turkey (previous BB post), I conducted a Turkey Mold contest for this year's Thanksgiving party at the office. And here, now, the highly unheimlich results."

Snip from a description of one of the winning fowl:

Chopped Liver Turkey
Lianne and Karis's stark and startling chopped liver turkey executes an interrogation reminiscent of Greenbergian formalism — what qualitites are intrinsic and indispensible to turkey qua turkey, to the quiddity of the bird? — they ask us. Simultaneously, the sculptural form references the geometry of minimalism and the somatic impulse of gender and identity-based work. A dazzling recapituation of late twentiety century artistic movements.

Link

Tim sez, "EMI have rescinded their copyright warning about the parody cricket songbook, according to its distributor."

Unless you've been living on another planet you would have surely been hearing about the Fanatics songbook over the last couple of weeks.

Just 5 days prior to the commencement of play at the Gabba it looked like we were going to have to shred the recently printed 100,000 copies.

After a slight misunderstanding with our good friends at EMI, we've been reliably informed that the songbook isn't in breach of any copyright laws and in turn the songbook is once ahead downloadable and fully legal.

Fantastic news for Aussie cricket fans the nation wide!!"

Link (Thanks, Tim!)

I was lucky enough to recently tour Portland's Independent Publishing Resource Center -- a zine-maker's co-op that provides a lab for self-publishing zinesters who can come in and use the center's computers, printers, copiers, and fantastic letter-press workshop. They offer courses in zine-making (especially in the use of the letter-press, which produces really handsome materials). Membership is a sliding scale of $45-$100 year, and the Center also sports a multi-thousand-volume library of zines that you can use for inspiration. It's just upstairs from Reading Frenzy, the stunning zine store. Link

I read Greg Ruth's graphic novel Sudden Gravity this week on a plane and I'm still reeling from it. It's a deeply surreal story about the apocalypse coming to a giant, grim hospital modelled on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. The storyline is un-summarizable in the way that, say, Twin Peaks was. And as with Twin Peaks, the thing that makes this book work is the spooky, overarching feel, something that comes from the writing and especially from the stupendous, stark, haunting black-and-white artwork. I was given this book by Shawna Gore, an editor at Dark Horse, who declared Greg Ruth to be her favorite artist working in the field, and I'm inclined to agree. There is so much to set your skin a-crawl and keep you turning the pages in Ruth's illustration. It's a fast read -- I put it away in less than an hour -- but it's a slow burn. I keep returning to those illustrations in my mind. Link

An executive at IFPI -- the international recording industry association -- has declared DRM to be "dead" -- though he warns of "Son of DRM," whatever that means. He promises that the major labels will always be at the center of the music industry, too (he runs an indie label). New Music Strategies speculates that the labels will shift to even more online surveillance, more lawsuits against fans, and worse End User License Agreements (I don't see how you accomplish this last one without DRM, though).

DRM as we know it is over. There may be Son of DRM but that’s another matter. Right now its dead, the majors are moving towards the new model. The one thing you can be sure of is they will still be at the centre of the world music industry whatever happens. The independents are another matter. As our sector’s share has fallen by almost half in just over twelve months, the new model for us is partnership. It always was, I’m just not sure we got it.

Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

Jeremy sez, "Penguin has released six classic titles with pure white, art-quality covers for people to design their own book jackets. Titles include The Picture of Dorian Gray,Magic Tales from the Brothers Grimm and Emma."

In essence, we've started a new series because if the first six work we'll publish more. The series was named My Penguin by our rather marvellous Creative Director, who came up with the name after about two minutes. The tag line is 'Books by the Greats, Covers by You', and throughout the rush to design the (back) covers, get the right paper, and tell people about them, we've had a really great time. The covers are art-quality paper, and from internal Penguin efforts we know that they hold ink, paint, pencil and glue (see the first efforts here). Each one comes shrink-wrapped so the paper doesn't get dirty, and I hope people might give them as gifts. They're went round Penguin earlier in the week and we've starting an online gallery that will launch with staff efforts at the end of November (no doubt we'll talk about this here). All of the books talk about the gallery on the back cover, because we want anyone and everyone to send in pictures of their own covers so we can put them up too.

Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

Gilles Barbier's genius photo "L'Hospice" depicts the final days of funnybook underwear-perverts -- a saggy Wonder Woman wheels Captain America along on his gurney, Superman leans on his walker... Link (via Geisha Asobi)

Update: Andy sez, "Mr. Barbier's works are actually life-size sculptures, not photos. They were shown at the Whitney Museum in NYC in 2003 as part of an exhibition on how American culture influenced artists worldwide."

BLDGBLOG has posted a fascinating interview with Simon Sellars, co-author of The Lonely Planet Guide to Micronations. Micronations are those "countries" founded by lovable crackpots who declare some chunk of dirt to be sovereign territory and create a flag, currency, royal line of succession, and all the pompous trappings of nationhood. The book is a traveller's guide to these kingdoms, with all the best things to do and see as you visit them.

BLDGBLOG: Have you ever declared your own micronation?

Sellars: Yes. I grew up in the suburb of Bentleigh, in Melbourne, Australia. It was an exceedingly boring place, like a retirement village – it seemed like I was the only teenager around at times. So I founded the Independent Republic of Bentleigh, declared myself President, and claimed the whole of Bentleigh as territory. Our national anthem was "We Can't Be Beaten," a song by the toughest band in the land, Rose Tattoo.

BLDGBLOG: What happened to it?

Sellars: We were beaten – the IRB was invaded by Poland. The Polish kid next door already hated me, but when he saw me poncing up and down the back yard draped in my IRB flag, he was enraged even more than usual. He jumped over the fence, punched me in the mouth and stole my lunch money – and that was all the IRB's assets gone, just like that. He also stepped on my toy tanks and melted my plastic soldiers with a cigarette lighter, which meant the IRB had no defence force, and that was the end of it, really. My mother banned me from starting up a micronation ever again, unless I could back it up with sufficient armoury and investment capital, which of course I never could, being a very lazy kid.

Link

Love this fried-egg toy -- a metal egg-shell that opens up to reveal a felt fried egg. Link (via Cribcandy)

Steven Spielberg decried the iPod's 3-inch screen and promised that he would not shoot for the medium. I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the idea that a 3-inch screen wants different kinds of material than a 300' one -- and that old timers like Spielberg may not have what it takes to shoot for 3".

He also says that people are social and will always go to the cinema -- another statement I largely agree with. But there are two factors working against this:

1. The arms-race for feature-film budgets means that no one takes big chances with wide-release movies. No one is going to take a flier on a $300 million movie, trying something totally unproven and radical.

2. Because the movies cost so much to make, the studios are obsessed with them as crown jewels, and they've taken to treating cinemagoers like suspected criminals, bombarding them with "anti-piracy" warnings (um, I just paid $13 to get into this turkey, I'm not a pirate), searching them and taking away their phones (that thing has my calendar, personal photos, and private rolodex in it -- plus you can use it as digital cash!), and spying on them during the show (now *that's* a way to make a customer feel welcome).

In a free-ranging hour of interview with former NBC News correspondent Garrick Utley and questions from the audience, Spielberg said iPod video may be all the rage but count his films out from tailoring his films to fit the small screen.

"That's one medium where I have to draw the line," he said. "We'll shoot for television and the movies and let there be a wide gap" between that and the small 3-inch screen. He also said that he felt that people are social animals who will choose to go out to a movie rather than watch a show on widescreen.

"I don't think movie theaters will ever go away," Spielberg said.

Link (via Gizmodo)

I like these baseball cuffs -- velvet lined, brass-reinforced, and ready to be autographed by your buddies. Link (via Geisha Asobi)

Today on a very topical Worth 1000 photoshopping contest: gross-out banquets for Thanksgiving. Link

Bibliodyssey has an excellent gallery of 18th century engravings from 'Die Saugthiere in Abbildungen' at Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon (named as 'Histoire naturelle des quadrupèdes'.

The absurd rendering of many of the animals comes about because the engravers/artists working on the project did not actually see the animals. They had to rely on descriptions and their imagination and, as was the fashion of the time, the animals were placed in contrived settings and often given human facial qualities, which only serves to heighten the sense of bizarre. And thankful we are too.

Link

What is this squid doing with a bottle of tea in a parking space? Brought to you by Squid, a blog of all things squidish. Link

Coop is back from his Mexico adventure as a co-racer in the La Carrera Panamericana. He's just posted the photos and stories from day 5.

If you ever need to buy something in a locale where your grasp of the native tongue leaves something to be desired, it helps to be able to draw a picture. We found some valve springs that we hoped would work, and we were on our way again.

I wonder if the Mexican mechanic realizes he in possession of a piece of Coop original artwork. Link

The 4th issue of my favorite art magazine, Hi-Fructose, is hitting stands in December.

The fourth volume of Hi Fructose Magazine returns this winter with more under the counter culture and toysploitation to sink your rotten teeth into

This issue features an extensive interview with Ray Ceasar, the tiled street abduction of Space Invader, the doe-eyed-sweet art of Fawn Gehweiler, Ragnar’s hobos and vixens, and an interview with Gary Taxali! Plus multipage exposes on Kozik’s Mickey Maos, The Gorillaz as shot by Brian McCarty, Leslie Repetaux (aka Black Olive), Sauer Kids, Sam Buxton,Wilfred Wood, a journey into Longo Land, Designer toys and much, much more.

Edited and published by Annie Owens and Attaboy.

Laughing Squid has links to preview pages. Link

Last month, I posted a video of Brian Atene, the young arrogant kid who made an audition tape for Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket casting call in 1984. I followed up the posting with a link to a YouTube video from 2006 of a guy claiming to be Brian Atene. It turns out this was a fake. Here's the REAL Brian Atene.

Well, Brian Atene himself has posted a video response to his 1984 tape, and he more or less admits that the video wasn't a joke. This isn't one of the lame fake Atene videos that popped up on YouTube in the wake of the original video—it really is Atene this time. If you skip the first two (very weird) minutes, this new video is pretty entertaining. Atene seems off his rocker, but he's also weirdly charismatic. Among other things, he says he didn't actually send the famous tape to Kubrick; he made two tapes and ended up submitting the other one.

I actually like the first two minutes. He's funny! Link

The Daily Mail features a gallery of images of animals in the womb from the National Geographic documentary In The Womb: Animals that airs December 10. I'm not sure how much these images have been enhanced and altered with CG but they're still quite stunning.

From the Daily Mail:

Using a combination of three-dimensional ultrasound scans, computer graphics and tiny cameras, the team were able to show the entire process from conception to birth.

"These kind of images from inside animals have never been seen before," said Jeremy Dear of Pioneer Productions, who made the film.

"We worked with dozens of zoos and animal sanctuaries across the world. There were a lot of different challenges - recording a dolphin (image right) is very different from an elephant (image left), for instance.

"Animals were trained to sit still near the scanners and we also inserted cameras into the womb via the elephant's rectum-But it has been worth it. It one sequence we follow an elephant developing. When it is finally born, there is not a dry eye in the house.

Link to Daily Mail article, Link to National Geographic's In the Womb: Animals (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

This weekend nearly 200 Fords in Cardiff, UK were robbed of their stereos, more than four times the norm. According to police, the boosts in boosts was probably due to the spread of an urban legend that chips inside the stereos can be used to decode scrambled digital TV signals. Yesterday, police recovered 37 of the stereos, 21 radio face plates, and a laptop from a single car. From the BBC News:

Police confirmed the rumour but officers have spoken to Ford and the digibox manufacturers who said there was no link.

Ford told BBC News that components cannot be used in this way.

A spokesman said it was "pure myth" sparked by an off-the-cuff comment from someone within the motor industry.

Link

In the latest MAKE: Weekend Project video, Bre Pettis and special guest Allison Kudla teach you how to make the ultimate vegetarian turkey... out of paper. From the project page:

(We'll explain) how to use Blender to decimate a turkey and output it to Pepakura which will flatten it and add tabs and get it ready for papercrafting... Watch the video to learn how to build one from scratch, print out the instructions if you want to learn how to make your own model out of paper, or you can just print out the plans and fold them on up! This could make a great activity for the family while the meat-based bird is cooking!

Link

My art show at Roq La Rue gallery earlier this month was a blast. I showed nine of my paintings and have sold six all of them. My worked was shown with four other artists: Chris Reccardi, Lynne Naylor, Johnny Yanok, and Wednesday Kirwan. Wednesday was at the show, too, and it was really fun meeting her. You can see everyone's art here.

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

"Candy Thief"
20 x 16
Acrylic on Canvas (framed)
SOLD
"Fallen Leaf"
20 x 16
Acrylic on Canvas (framed)
SOLD
"Gumdrop Princess"
24 x 30
Acrylic on Canvas
SOLD
"Pet Walk"
20 x 16
Acrylic on Canvas (framed)
SOLD
"Star Hitcher"
24 x 30
Acrylic on Canvas
SOLD
"Stump Dance"
20 x 16
Acrylic on Canvas (framed)
SOLD
"The Poke"
24 x 30
Acrylic on Canvas
SOLD
"Torn Leaf"
20 x 24
Acrylic on Canvas
SOLD
"Zero"
20 x 24
Acrylic on Canvas
SOLD

Link

Robert Pirsig, author of the best selling philosophical autobiography, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, gave what he claims is his last interview with the Guardian, to promote the republication of his second book, Lila, originally published in 1992.

When [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance] came out, in 1974, edited down from 800,000 words, and having been turned down by 121 publishers, it seemed immediately to catch the need of the time. George Steiner in the New Yorker likened it to Moby Dick. Robert Redford tried to buy the film rights (Pirsig refused). It has since taken on a life of its own, and though parts feel dated, its quest for meaning still seems urgent. For Pirsig, however, it has become a tragic book in some ways. At the heart of it was his relationship with his son, Chris, then 12, who himself, unsettled by his father's mania, seemed close to a breakdown. In 1979, aged 22, Chris was stabbed and killed by a mugger as he came out of the Zen Centre in San Francisco. Subsequent copies of the book have carried a moving afterword by Pirsig. "I think about him, have dreams about him, miss him still," he says now. "He wasn't a perfect kid, he did a lot of things wrong, but he was my son ..."

I ask what Chris thought of the book, and Pirsig's face strains a little.

"He didn't like it. He said, 'Dad, I had a good time on that trip. It was all false.'"

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen will give a free talk next Tuesday at USC in Los Angeles. Seth is the final speaker in my Fulbright Chair lecture series this year, and he's a fascinating technologist who does an admirable job of explaining the subtle ways in which technology design can affect liberty for better or for worse.

Seth's the creator of the conceptual Trusted Computing mod, Owner Override, an implementation of Trusted Computing that preserves all the privacy benefits and eliminates the danger to users.

He's also the maintainer of the Bootable Business Card Linux distribution, the author of the DeCSS Haiku, and one of the investigators who cracked the secret behind the hidden codes in color laser printer outputs.

Where: University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication, Room 207 (Los Angeles)

When: Tuesday, November 28, 7PM-9PM

Hope to see you there! Link

The audio from Andrew "bunnie" Huang's free talk at USC last night is online, thanks to students Mike Jones and Andy Sternberg. Bunnie came to fame for breaking the crypto on the Xbox, enabling the creation of Xbox Linux, and is now working with the startup he founded, Chumby, which makes an open media-player/device.

Bunnie's talk was a fantastic exegesis on the mind of a reverse-engineer, the perils and promise of hardware hacking, and the pursuit of business models that encourage smart customers to get the most out of their devices.

Next week's speaker is EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen, whose many claims to fame include authoring the DeCSS Haiku, his sharp critiques of trusted computing, his role in uncovering the color printer secret codes, and many other seminal technical achievements. He also maintains the Bootable Business Card distribution of Linux. Seth speaks at 7PM on Tuesday, Nov 28, at the USC Annenberg School, room 207. Link, MP3 Link

Chloe from Reading Frenzy (Portland's astounding zine store) just handed me a copy of Crap Hound No. 6, the latest installment in her press's steady reissuance of the seminal clip-art zine. Created by Sean Tejaratchi, Crap Hound issues each featured a grand, disjointed theme -- issue six's is Death, Telephone and Scissors. Each page is a kind of collage of stark, black-and-white imagery of these things, laid out with a lot of wit and yet with a solemn appreciation for the subject.

I'm very excited to hear that a new issue of Crap Hound is coming shortly -- this one to feature "Church and State."

Crap Hound inspired me and countless others in its initial printing (the name of the zine was part of my impetus for titling my first major story-sale "Craphound" and subsequently registering the domain -- I was also inspired in this by the insults fielded in the great film Local Hero). Holding an issue again after all these years takes me whirling back. I could look at this thing for hours. Link

See also Crap Hound -- seminal clipart zine -- is back!

I just finished reading Joe Sayers's mini-comic, "I'm Gonna Rip Your Face Off" (discovered on the shelves of Portland's amazing, one-of-a-kind zine emporium Reading Frenzy) and man, that's some kind of bitter, angry funny! Three bucks is cheap for the kind of sardonic barks of laughter this little book wrung from my chest. Link

In this article, entitled "Every Time You Vote against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf," a sharp analyst tackles what the loss of Net Neutrality could mean for online gamers. Net Neutrality is the idea that your ISP sends you the packets you ask for as well as it can. A non-neutral net is one where ISPs take bribes to make some services better and degrade the rest.

With the permanent barriers that the removal of net neutrality will erect for these uses, the worst-case scenario includes three waves of change:

* One or more mainstream ISPs will introduce excessive lag that will effectively prohibit their users from participating in online games. The move will not be aimed at restricting usage per se, but rather to extract a fee from the game operator. However, as