09.30.04
Posted in forum archive at 11:57 pm by
The machinima minds that brought fans the hilarious Blood Gultch Chronicles is now creating a new Sitcom/Reality TV spoof from the Sims 2 engine – and calling it the Strangerhood.
Initial press has been very positive:
The project is a really good fit. We actually have a lot of stuff already written out. Hopefully, as we start to work with The Sims 2 engine, weÂ’re going to be able to use that. But the way machinima works, you never know. The gameÂ’s not built to make movies, thatÂ’s what the creative process isÂ…we try to milk all that out of [the limited palette]. Some things you can do and some things you canÂ’t, but thatÂ’s part of the fun challenge.
Fun stuff. Check out the trailer. :upper:
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Posted in forum archive at 11:46 pm by
Related stories this week: on one hand music sales are up. On the other hand another 762 people have been sued by the RIAA.
The RIAA would have you believe that the reason that sales numbers are up is because of its war against bloaks with broadband. But hold the IP phone: new figures also released this week show an increase in P2P traffic over the same period, and that people just don’t care about getting sued (gotta love having a direct pipeline from the blogsphere – its information fortified…and yummy!)
Ok, so sales are up but there’s more pirating going on despite the lawsuits. What could be the reasons?
1. Recovering economy means more expendable income
2. Video game consoles are aging and releasing fewer ‘must have’ games, freeing money for other things
3. Digital distribution and hardware like iPods have once again made music a chic thing for the kids to be into (and the Britney Bloat of disposable pop has gone the way of unstaged weddings).
4. The Garage/Electro Pop-Punk Renaissance means there’s something interesting to listen to, and there’s plenty of it (Hives, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Le Tigre, White Stripes, The Rapture, Washington Social Club, Pretty Girls Make Graves, and The Vines)
5. CD prices are continuing to come down (CD prices down 4% compared to the same time last year)
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09.29.04
Posted in forum archive at 6:54 pm by
Excellent article on the register about SunnComm, the DRM company who, most famiously, had its DRM undone by pression the shift key when putting a CD into the computer.
SunnComm began life under a different name – Desert Winds Entertainment Corp. This company, headed up by Michael Paloma, provided Elvis and other impersonators for Las Vegas lounge acts and ended up running into serious trouble with the SEC in 1999. Government documents show that Desert Winds was charged with announcing a $25m deal with Warner Bros. when “no such contract existed.” It’s suspected that numerous insiders sold shares of Desert Winds when the stock rose based on the news of the Warner Bros. deal, and the SEC cracked down on Paloma and another Desert Winds associate Matthew Bardasian.
Interesting reading…
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Posted in miscellaneous at 6:51 pm by
From writers and artists pushing new stylistic boundries to scientists finding ways of delivering medical care in third world nations, ladies and gentlemen, I give you 2004’s Geniuses of the Year.
David Green is a pioneer in the manufacture and distribution of advanced health care products for patients in the developing world who could not otherwise afford them. He organizes engineers, technical experts, distribution partners, and financiers to create production facilities capable of making high-quality products at very low cost. In India, Green established Aurolab to manufacture intraocular lenses (IOLs) – plastic implants used to restore sight to patients suffering from cataracts and other eye diseases. On a self-sustaining basis, Aurolab produces hundreds of thousands of lenses annually at a fraction of the costs in developed countries and distributes them in more than 85 countries. The company is now one of the largest manufacturers of IOLs in the world. By expanding Aurolab’s manufacturing capacity to include low-cost needles and sutures, Green has opened opportunities to restore vision and treat other diseases for millions of people. Green is now developing digitally programmable, inexpensive hearing aids designed to become nonfunctional if any effort is made to resell them in markets other than the intended ones (i.e., those where widespread poverty makes such devices otherwise unobtainable). By applying traditional business strategies in untraditional markets, Green has addressed important public health challenges and improved the lives of populations around the world.
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Posted in miscellaneous at 6:45 pm by
One of the things that was emphasized repeatedly in my MBA courses was that it was vital for a business to create barriers to entry for potential competitors – lock your opponents out of the market and enjoy the future cash flow. One of the suggested ways of doing that was to load up your technology bandwagon with as many patents on your tech as possible. Then, either you opposition joins you (pays money for permission to use your methods) or stays out of the market (because if they enter using a process sorta/kinda/maybe like your process you’ll sue).
Now two professors have come forward in a new book, pointing out just how ridiculous this really is:
“The ability to litigate and expect to get substantial award from litigation increased,” Mr. Lerner said. “So as a result we’ve got somewhat of a vicious cycle. Once you get one firm in an industry beginning a strategy of aggressive patent enforcement, it creates an almost inevitable response – an almost arms-race dynamic – where everyone else in the industry says, ‘We better be doing the same thing.’ “
They lay out a sensible 3 part strategy. Here’s hoping they succeed.
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09.27.04
Posted in forum archive at 10:49 pm by
One sign, slightly used. Apparently being a target of Microsoft’s wrath will net you $5000+ on ebay.
At least they have a sense of humor about it. 
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Posted in forum archive at 2:00 pm by
Sir Richard Branson has done some neat things with his money. Now he’s embarking on his grandest financial adventure yet: the creation of an orbital airlines, called Virgin Galactic.
The British entrepreneur is having five “spaceliners” built in the US by the team behind the SpaceShipOne vehicle.
The California-based rocket plane became the first privately developed carrier to go above 100km in June.
Sir Richard says it will cost around £100,000 to go on a “Virgin Galactic” spaceliner, and the first flights should begin in about three years’ time.
…
The Virgin boss was flanked at Monday’s announcement by Rutan, who has already collaborated with Sir Richard on Virgin GlobalFlyer, a jet plane designed to fly non-stop around the world without refuelling.
“Virgin has been in talks with Paul Allen and Burt throughout this year and in the early hours of Saturday morning signed a historical deal to license SpaceShipOne’s technology to build the world’s first private spaceship to go into commercial operating service,” said Sir Richard, who founded the Virgin Group of companies.
Here’s to flying the virgin skies!
Is it exciting to anyone else that space is cool again? 
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Posted in forum archive at 10:54 am by
In a neat move, Green Day is now selling CD-R’s with their past album art already on them. For fans that have bought their music digitally (and slyly making some bank on those that illegally rip their tunes but want something that doesn’t look homemade) this is great.
Why? Because Green Day is cool like that.
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Posted in miscellaneous at 10:50 am by
Sure, the summer season is winding down. But for next season, why settle for a green lawn when you can grow your own couch?
http://readymademag.com/images/homefeatsodcouch.jpg
Very neat. But how do you mow it?
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09.26.04
Posted in forum archive at 9:51 pm by
An interesting perspective regarding copyright:
So, for one moment, I’d like you to perform an exercise in selective attention. Forget every other consideration — even though they’re fair and important considerations — and see if you can acknowledge that a world in which everyone has free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world. Imagine your children could listen to any song ever created anywhere. What a blessing that would be!
Now, I know it takes a Zen-like awareness to keep that one idea there purely, and to beat back the Buts that want to crowd in. And I by no means deny the validity of those Buts. “But if access were free, then artists couldn’t support themselves. ” I won’t want argue with that. “But it wouldn’t be fair.” I won’t argue that either, at least not here. All I want to do is put on the table a value that I think too often is left on the floor because, among commercial media companies, it has no champion: All things being equal, a world that shares art freely is a better world than one where access to art is stifled. And that’s at least as important as Sony making its quarterly numbers.
Let me stress that I am not arguing for free music, for no copyright, for not paying artists. I am only pointing to a value that should influence the discussion of how to pay for music, how long copyright should hold, and how artists should be supported.
…
Compare a song or a book with a bicycle. A bike is an object that can move through the economy, being sold and resold at will without itself changing. Songs, books and movies have a bike-like side, but we do this weird thing to them that we don’t do with bikes: We publish them. And publishing is a unique and uniquely valuable process.
We publish stuff that gets its meaning and its reality by being read, viewed or heard. An unpublished novel is about as meaningful and real as an imaginary novel. It needs its readers to be. But readers aren’t passive consumers. We reimagine the book, we complete the vision of the book. Readers appropriate works, make them their own. Listeners and viewers, too. In making a work public, artists enter into partnership with their audience. The work succeeds insofar as the audience makes it their own, takes it up, understands it within their own unpredictable circumstances. It leaves the artist’s hands and enters our lives. And that’s not a betrayal of the work. That’s its success. It succeeds insofar as we hum it, quote it, appropriate it so thoroughly that we no longer remember where the phrase came from. That’s artistic success, although it’s a branding failure.
A lot more there from a truly balanced and thoughtful position. Anyone who is interested in this kind of stuff should definately check it out. :upper:
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