Category Archives: Net Culture

Fan Wars

Atom Films is hosting a competition for fan-made films paying tribute to the Star Wars franchise, many of which are actually quite funny. The whole affair is sponsored by Lucasfilms and being judged by George Lucas himself. The New York Times has a slightly unfair article about Lucasfilms’ disqualification of any film from the competition that didn’t conform to its strict rule allowing ‘spoofs and documentaries only.’ In it, Jim Ward, V.P. of marketing at Lucasfilm utters this amazingly anti-fan comment: “…If in fact somebody is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that’s not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.” In other words: watch, listen and obey.

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Pixel Playground

db-dbFrancis Lam’s db-db is inscrutable, difficult to use, nearly illegible and patience-testing. But it’s also one of the richest and most impressive Flash-based systems around, an intricate world of tiny, pixel-based avatars living in a ‘chat playground’ superimposed on top of better-than-average design portal content. Its latest incarnation is, like the new K10k, packed with even more little widgets than ever, but the holistic effect is far more solid, giving the impression not just of a thousand corners to explore, but also of a database of great depth.

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Grab Bag of Links

The Art of the Illustrated LetterBoxes and Arrows is a new Web magazine which aims to be the “definitive source for the complex task of bringing architecture and design to the digital landscape.” What’s even cooler is that it’s built using Movable Type, one of the growing crop of free content management solutions.Over at The Gamers Press, John Hummel has an interesting article about converting from Unix to Mac OS X and liking it.The Smithsonian Archives of American Art has an exhibition right now called “Getting the Picture: The Art of the Illustrated Letter.” There are some beautiful drawings here, including this one by Charles Sarka. I just wish the scans were larger.Cal State Fullerton is offering a program in Visual Journalism, which “…expands the professions of photojournalism, reporting, writing, and graphic design.” I’m just starting to learn about this field, but it has my interest piqued.

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Common Sense

Noted legal braniac Lawrence Lessig has a great idea and it’s called Creative Commons. As reported at SFGate.com, “Creative Commons will make available flexible, customizable intellectual-property licenses that artists, writers, programmers and others can obtain free of charge to legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work.”

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VC Horror Tale

Eve Andersson, a founding member of Ars Digita, has published a scalding recounting of the rise and fall of the Internet consultancy and software publisher. It goes into great detail on how the venture capitalists and MBAs destroyed the company and its culture. I had very similar experiences in terms of being led astray by deceitful executive officers, so if nothing else I can attest to its emotional accuracy, and I can say I’m more inclined to sock an MBA across the jaw than I am to trust him with any piece of an enterprise I care about.

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Search Fun

GoogleGoogle is one of those Web success stories that seems truly deserved. They have a great core product in their search engine, which surpasses so many of its competitors in accuracy that I now use it exclusively. And in the past year or so they’ve extended their business in truly interesting ways too, e.g. bringing online a huge archive of Usenet postings. Their latest scheme is a programming contest that opens up a database of 900,000 Web pages and asks contestants to do something clever with it — anything clever. “Part of your job is to convince us of why your program is interesting and why it will scale; other than that, you’re free to implement whatever strikes your fancy.”

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Atari Forever

Atari ArtAtari is going to live forever. At least in the hearts and minds of Eighties kids who continue to fetishize everything associated with that videogame pioneer. Case in point: these lovely and sometimes brilliantly optimistic conceptual drawings from Atari’s arcade division. I defy anyone who attended high school at any time during the Eighties to remain unimpressed by them. Jeez, I sound so old.

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VeriScam

I got an invoice from domain registrar VeriSign (formerly Network Solutions) to renew Subtraction.com. The invoice reads: “Amount Due: $70.00 US Dollars.” It makes no mention of the fact that a one-year renewal costs US$35, and that really only one year is due — which to me adds up to a kind of dishonesty. So I’m giving Capital Networks’s TotalNICa try. They’re an ICANN-approved registrar that will allow me to transfer my registration for just US$9.95 for two years.

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