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theoatmeal.com
Matthew Inman, known to all as The Oatmeal, is Seattle’s (the world’s?) greatest online satirical cartoonist.
He’s also, like so many of us, trying to make a living from his craft in an Internet world in which anything anybody posts is treated as fodder for reposting, revising, or just plain stealing.
Lately, commercial ad-supported dotcoms are using “social media” as their current excuse for taking, and making money from, other people’s creative work without paying those people for such work. “Hey, don’t blame us. We didn’t repost your work. It was one of our users (whom we merely encourage to repost stuff here).”
Inman publicly complained about one such “social aggregation” site, where dozens of his drawings had appeared. Some of his drawings had stayed up at that site, even after others were removed.
The site responded by suing him!
They wanted $20,000 in damages to the reputation of the site’s “brand,” or something like that. At the same time they sent a “cease and desist” letter, demanding Inman stop dissing them.
Inman’s posted response was hilarious; pure Oatmeal snark at its finest.
Inman vowed to start an online fund drive. (Yes, even though he’d already made a cartoon comparing such drives to street begging.)
Then, he vowed to take a photo of himself with the $20,000. The aggregation site’s lawyer would get the photo, plus an original cartoon of the lawyer’s mother (imagined as an unattractive slag) and a Kodiak bear.
The money, however, would be split between the National Wildlife Federation (hence the bear image) and the American Cancer Society.
The (real) fund drive’s title: “BearLove Good. Cancer Bad.”
The result: With 11 days to go, the drive has raised over $165,000!
The aggregation site and its lawyer picked the wrong funnyman to aggravate. (Though the lawyer says he’s thinking of responding with more suits.)
The Power of Oatmeal indeed.
The locally owned Wave Broadband is taking over the dreadful and bankrupt BS Cable (Broadstripe). Yay!
The first part of the transition is the switching of “on demand” program suppliers, effective Wednesday.
This means I’m looking over my current “on demand” lineup while I still can.
I didn’t know I received something called The Karaoke Channel!
I’m now listening to lead-vocal-less covers of the greatest hits of yesterday and today, accompanied by scrolling lyrics and generic stock footage of women twirling around on the beach.
Oh, why did I not discover this sooner?
(PS: I could list the songs from which I culled the above images, but I’m certain you know all of them, you pop-o-philes you.)
(from a Safeway microwave organic rice bowl)
CAUTION: CONTENTS ARE HOT AFTER HEATING.
pleasantfamilyshopping.blogspot.com
This is the Great Wheel, now taking shape at Pier 57 on the waterfront. It is already the greatest addition to Seattle public architecture since the Koohaas downtown library. The rest of the waterfront should be redeveloped around it.
This is from Sunday’s “Color Run” downtown, a 5K benefitting Ronald McDonald House. Runners were splashed with “color dust” at points along the route. (Note: This is not at all to be confused with the 2005 teen novel The Rainbow Party, or with the false rumor that that novel depicted a real-life fad.)
“Supporting traditional marriage” as an excuse for banning gay marriage is like “supporting lettuce” as an excuse for banning cabbage.
last.fm
Pere Ubu founder, noise-rock legend, and great Clevelander David Thomas is, by his own admission, a middle class boy.
And in a recent interview he claims that…
…all adventurous art is done by middle-class people. Because middle-class people don’t care. Because middle-class people don’t care. “I’m going to do what I want, because I can do something else better and make more money than this.”
At the Collapse Board site (started by ex-Seattleite Everett True), blogger Wallace Wylie begs to disagree:
It surely does not need pointing out that almost every adventurous musical innovation of the 20th Century came from working-class origins. The blues, jazz, country, rock’n’roll, soul, reggae, disco, r&b, hip-hop, techno, house; the list goes on. It would take a mixture of ignorance and arrogance on a monumental scale to appropriate all of these innovations for the middle-classes.
You can probably think of your own exceptions, in music and other artistic fields as well.
Then the Scottish-born Wylie goes on to repeat the longtime meme that most American middle-class teens didn’t know about large swaths of American blues and R&B, until they heard them from British rockers:
…While British bands were playing Chuck Berry, embryonic American garage bands were cutting their chops on ‘Gloria’ by Them. In other words, rock music is a British creation that Americans subsequently copied. Bob Dylan named his fifth album Bringing It All Back Home in reference to the fact that British bands had shown Americans music from their own country that they didn’t know existed and now it was time for an American to take these influences back.
That familiar tale neglects the role American “hip” whites (including Cleveland’s own DJ legend Alan Freed) played in bringing R&B across the color line, leading to the commercial teenybopper variant Freed billed as “rock n’ roll.”
It neglects the white garage bands (such as Tacoma’s own Fabulous Wailers) who studiously covered and imitated their favorite R&B sides, especially during the pre-Beatles years.
Methinks Wylie has his own cultural blinders with which to deal.
escapistmagazine.com
sonics first-year pennant, available at gasoline alley antiques
foodbeast.com
one of rob vasquez's many out-of-print 45s, via aarongilbreath.wordpress. com
(No snickering jokes from this corner about a certain three-digit number.)
anti-riaa ad from the electronic frontier foundation; via university of texas
Two reasons why Hilary Rosen, Ann Romney’s recent verbal sparring partner, should not be considered a spokesperson for the Obama campaign or for any “progressive” thing:
(1) She became a PR shill for BP, post-gulf-spill.
(2) and most important: She infamously headed the Recording Industry Association of America during the start of that outfit’s notorious “anti-piracy” extremism.
Rosen didn’t just shut down Napster and Audiogalaxy. She fostered the music-industry lobby group’s policy of punitive aggression in the name of the Almighty Intellectual Property.
After she left the RIAA, the staff she’d hired served all those ridiculous suits for ridiculous sums against lowly individual file-sharers—and against some individuals who’d never shared a file in their lives.
Elsewhere in randomland:
gjenvick-gjonvik archives
Three of the Big Six book publishers (Hachette, News Corp.’s HarperCollins, and CBS’s Simon & Schuster) have settled with the U.S. Justice Dept. in the dispute over alleged e-book price fixing.
The publishers still insist they’re innocent; but they agreed in the settlement to not interfere with, or retaliate against, discounted e-book retail prices.
Apple, Pearson’s Penguin, and Holtzbrinck’s Macmillan have not yet settled; they also insist they did not collude to keep e-book prices up. Bertlesmann’s Random House was not sued.
This is, of course, all really about Amazon, and its ongoing drives to keep e-book retail prices down and its share of those revenues up. The big publishers, and some smaller ones too, claim that’s bad for them and for the book biz as a whole.
In other randomosity: