ryan.freebern.org

Recently on BoingBoing, a page with a bunch of printable stencils of speculative fiction luminaries was posted. I looked through them, but noticed that three of my favourite authors weren’t in their collection. Inspired, I decided to create my own.

Download these (click them to view them full-size), print them out, attach the printouts to cardboard, and cut out the black sections. Then go stencil-crazy!

Cory Doctorow	John Scalzi	Charles Stross

Edited to add: This page is an excellent tutorial on how to stencil clothing using a printer, freezer paper, an iron, and fabric paint.

Also: Chris Sullins has created vector-art versions of these stencils that have smoother edges and look generally better all-around.

A friend pointed out the excellent Fleep webcomic to me yesterday, and I read it this morning. It’s short — only 44 strips — and utterly fascinating. Go read it!

Last night while driving, I was listening to John Garabedian’s radio show, “Open House Party” on the radio. He’s a DJ who plays a many-hour-long mix of dance/club/pop tunes on weekend evenings, and is syndicated across the country. While I was listening, he told this story (paraphrased; I wasn’t recording, and there’s no online streaming version of the show):

Last week, radio stations across the country received the CD of “Don’t P-H-U-N-K With My Heart”, the single from their upcoming album “Monkey Business.” Now, apparently a major broadcasting group objected to the use of the word P-H-U-N-K in the title, because they thought it sounded like another, dirtier word, so now the Black Eyed Peas are back in the studio recording a new version called “Don’t Mess With My Heart.” This is what we have to live with in this post-9/11 world under the rule of the Taliban.

While the rhetoric is rather heavy-handed, I applaud John Garabedian’s railing against censorship. I’d bet dollars to donuts he was referring to Clear Channel Communications, a media conglomerate notorious for its censorship and conservative values. But what’s next? “Play That Messy Music White Boy”? “We Want The Mess”? And that much-beloved classic 70’s rock band, “Grand Mess Railroad”?

The real culprit here isn’t Clear Channel, though, it’s the FCC and its recent massive increases in fines for “indecency.” Each incident can net them up to half a million dollars now — a huge victory for people who think the government can decide what we’re offended by more accurately than we can. True conservatives, striving for less governmental power, should be fighting tooth and nail against the mere existence of the FCC’s media-complaints division, which attempts to impose a non-majority-decided morality code on American media companies — governmental meddling at its worst. Instead, many people want the government to “protect” them and their children from words that sound bad and accidentally-exposed breasts, rather than take personal responsibility to deal with this stuff on their own.

In a sensible America, if a media company offended enough people, and those people wanted to punish that media company, they’d stop listening to/watching/buying that company’s products, and the company would be forced through market forces to change its policies. The true moral code of the majority would limit the companies’ use of words and images that actually offended them, and people would have to use their discretion before watching things that they knew might bother them, or letting their children watch television that might be unwelcome in their home.

I’ve ranted in the past about how new music is largely overpriced when you buy it in physical form (i.e., a CD from a store). That rant mentions that I would feel much better if I was getting more for my money, and the example I used was Tori Amos’ Scarlet’s Walk limited edition. For $25, you get a whole lot more than just an album of music.

Well, my wife ordered Tori’s new album, The Beekeeper, and it arrived today. Once again, this is more than just an album. Along with the music CD is a DVD of music videos and a packet of wildflower seeds — creative and fun little additions that make the purchase price worth it.

So, props to Sony/BMG for going the extra mile to make this album special. (Jeers to them, though, for printing the FBI anti-piracy label directly on the CD, spoiling an otherwise beautiful design.)

A mashup is a home-spun mix of two or more songs, usually the lyrics from one overlayed on the backing music from another. The artist uses an audio editing program, chops samples out of one or more songs, and blends those samples in some sort of pleasing fashion with samples from other songs. The result, if done well, can be both fun and intriguing, as you hear some familiar sounds in a totally new context. (For instance, the Kleptones’ “A Night at the Hip-Hopera” is quite possibly my favourite album released last year, and it’s entirely mashups.)

The problem with mashups is that record companies really don’t like people chopping up copyrighted songs and redistributing them. They complain a lot and try to sue people for it. However, the mashing-up isn’t what they have a problem with; it’s the distributino of said mashed-up music. So why not get rid of that distribution? Why not invent a way for people to let other people listen to clever mashups without having to actually send them any copyrighted music?

Say there’s an audio editing program which, along with actually editing the audio, keeps track of all the steps you take to do the editing and can save those steps — essentially, a set of instructions describing how to duplicate the edits you’ve made — as a small, easily redistributable file. Imagine: you open songs X and Y in the editor, and remove the vocals from song Y, then chop a few small sections out of song X and lay them on top of the instrumentals from song Y, and produce a mashup, song XY. Meanwhile, the editing program not only saves song XY to disk, it also saves a file describing every operation the program performed on either of the songs, called XY’.

You then send XY’, a file that contains no copyrighted music whatsoever, to a friend. Your friend has his own copies of songs X and Y on CD, and his own copy of the editing program. He opens songs X and Y in the editing program, and loads XY’, and voilá: song XY (your mashup) is available to him, and — here’s the important part — no illegal exchange of copyrighted data has taken place.

Essentially, it’s an optimized macro-recorder for an audio editing program. Someone on the Audacity team get on this, okay?

With TiVo working hard to piss off its customers and the FCC working hard to screw over the entire U.S., I’m seriously looking into building a homebrewed Personal Video Recorder (PVR).

About a year ago, the FCC adopted the broadcast flag mandate rule (link to 430kb PDF) which, in a nutshell, requires any device that has the capability of recording a television broadcast of any sort to respect a flag telling it whether or not consumers should be able to record the broadcast. So, not going to be home for the new episode of Law & Order and want to record it? You might be out of luck, depending on if the TV studio wants you to be able to record it.

Luckily, this broadcast flag rule doesn’t take effect until July 1st, 2005. Any devices manufactured before that date don’t need to respect it — so, if someone like me wants a good, unrestricted PVR, now’s the time to build it. I’ve got approximately six months to plan, purchase, and build this thing, and as I make progress I’ll keep this blog updated.

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When I first saw the trailer for The Polar Express, something about it struck me as disturbing. Since then, I’ve come across more and more reviews that echo my opinion. Then, yesterday, I learned about the Uncanny Valley, and it all made sense.

It’s like this: as an objects resemblance to real humanity grows, people’s empathy for it also grows, until a certain point where empathy drops severely into what is called “the Uncanny Valley”: a place where something looks both amazingly realistic while remaining not quite right. In my opinion, and apparently in the opinions of many others, The Polar Express falls quite neatly into this valley: it looks like the moviemakers attempted to create realistic animated people in the film, but also tried to make them stylistic, like Chris Van Allsburg’s drawings. The end result is a bunch of creepy animated dolls who seem vaguely sinister for no obvious reason.

Suffice it to say, I won’t be going to see this movie.

(While doing some searching on this topic, I came across this great post on Mile High Comics’ blog on the same topic.)

Via BoingBoing: Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the country’s largest television broadcasting companies, is letting its bias hang out by ordering its affiliates to broadcast an anti-Kerry documentary during prime time two weeks before the election. I don’t have a Sinclair affiliate in my area, but if I did, I’d use this page to locate their website, then send them an email expressing my displeasure at this smear tactic.

It disappoints me that Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, a man whom I usually hold in fairly high regard, would link to something as misleading and disingenuous as this post which compares the earnings of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT) with the top Democratic 527s, and concludes that John Kerry has tens of millions of dollars more 527 support than Bush.

The author of the post gets his data from OpenSecrets.org, which attempts to keep track of data on money in politics, including the funds raised by all the 527 groups. Looking at their page on the major 527 players, it’s simple to see that the number of 527s supporting Democrats is just about even with the number supporting Republicans.

Furthermore, the post implies that because Kerry says SBVT is doing Bush’s “dirty work,” that means all 527s do dirty work, so Kerry accepting assistance from 527s is hypocritical. This line of logic is quite obviously flawed. The SBVT, Kerry contends, are doing “dirty work” because the ad they’re running and the points they’re making have largely been proven to be lies, often through corollation with previous statements by the veterans themselves and Navy records. The ads run by MoveOn.org, though, are based on easily verifiable fact. That’s not dirty — it’s providing truth to the public.

And to left-leaning journalists and bloggers: when Bush says he “condemn[s] these activities of the 527s,” he’s not “calling for a halt to Swift Boat veterans’ ads.” He’s calling for a halt to all ads by 527 groups. Spin is ugly, whichever way it goes.

Via Gizmodo, a report about a new skull-implant that uses electrical stimuli to short-circuit seizures.

In 1972, Michael Crichton wrote a book called The Terminal Man about a guy who gets implanted in his head a device that uses electrical stimuli to short-circuit seizures.

In other news, who wants to go to that new dinosaur theme park with me?

Writing on Lawrence Lessig’s blog, Rep. Rick Boucher is soliciting comments on alternative compensation models for artists as a solution to the current filesharing legal debacle.

He puts forth the EFF’s Voluntary Collective Licensing (VCL) idea as a possibility. I’m a big fan of the concept behind VCL, and would gladly embrace it if it was available. The main argument I’ve seen against it, though, is “what incentive do the record labels have to adopt it?” With fewer physical goods sold and more compensation going directly to the artists, the labels will be losing money rapidly — but maybe that’s necessary to give control back to the artists, the ones who really deserve the most profit from their work. Even if the labels don’t like the idea, perhaps they should be made to adopt it, for the good of our culture as a whole. It’d decrease the initial difficulties for artists who are trying to get off the ground, and disrupt the ever-increasing homogeneity of our music culture. I think that’s a good thing.

The main point is this: filesharing isn’t going anywhere, and the music industry needs to recognise that and embrace it rather than fight its futile battle against it. If you have any thoughts on the matter, please let Rep. Boucher hear them so that he can consider them when he does take action on this matter.

Going Nowhere points out the American Dad 6-minute pilot (19.3mb WMV) is available for download. Now I’m a big fan of Seth McFarlane’s show Family Guy, and ecstatic that it’s returning next year (and a movie is in the works), but American Dad just looks like… well, more of the same.

I hate to think McFarlane is only a one-trick pony. His vocal, artistic, and writing talents are impressive, but the American Dad pilot just seemed like six minutes of Family Guy shoehorned onto some new characters. Keeping in mind that these observations are based entirely on viewing only the first six-minute pilot, here are my thoughts: Stan Smith is a more macho and conservative version of Peter Griffin: clueless and out of touch with reality, but completely sure that he’s always right. His wife is a blonde clone of Lois Griffin, the peacemaker and glue that holds the family together. His son, Steve, is just like Family Guy’s Neil Goldman, a tragically dorky friend of Meg’s. Stan’s daughter is Meg with an attitude, and the alien, Roger, and fish, Klaus, are both equal parts Brian and Stewie.

American Dad is set to premiere as a midseason entry in Fox’s lineup next January, around the time the new episodes of Family Guy are also set to air. While I’ll always appreciate more of McFarlane’s brand of wacky humour, I don’t know if the rest of the viewing public is going to be willing to accept so much of it at once. In my opinion, either American Dad had better move in a different direction, or get dropped. If it comes to it, I’d much rather see Family Guy live on and American Dad fall by the wayside.