2012 Christmas Greeting

Here's my offering for this year's Christmas season.  (Late again)

-- Marge

The sky is falling! Uhm, was falling...

Now that we've survived the doomsday prediction (Mayan calendar reaches its end, world doesn't follow suit), we can relax and have a laugh about all the brouhaha.  (However, if you're a true alarmist/doomsday theorist, you could say it's just late.)

Below are two doomsday prediction cartoons by Cam Cardow and two end-of-the-world ones by Wiley Miller (from CSL Cartoonstock).

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I could finish with an interview of a Mayan elder who knows about Mayan calendars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v67pxeizXo), but as any doomsday theorist knows: to accept a viewpoint that disagrees with your personal doomsday theory is against the rules of doomsday theories.

-- Marge

deviantArt, #Digital Landscape

DeviantART, "where ART meets application!", is a gathering place for some wonderfully talented artists.  As an example here's one of the pieces on the front page today.

"A Bed of Moss II" by Matthias-Haker:

One of the areas of digital artwork that continually draws my attention is digital landscapes.  I think that's one reason why I play games like Entropia Universe and World of Warcraft -- to see the landscapes.  (Okay, okay, they're fun too.)  DeviantART has a digital landscape group that accepts new members.  Please note that there are rules for submission.  Here's a sample rendered 3D landscape, titled "Coming Home" and by ~tophoo-de:

Here are two videos showing the landscapes and skyscapes of World of Warcraft (WoW), uploaded by Hubwood:

Not to be forgotten is the work of Ryan Bliss at Digital Blasphemy.  He offers free wallpapers, as well as paid memberships.  Here's a thumbnail of a free wallpaper for "Canopy Creek (Autumn) (2009):

BTW, there's an article at the WoW site, titled "ImagineFX Gets Exclusive with the Blizzard’s Fine Arts Project," that states

The December edition of ImagineFX magazine is now on sale and packed with a little something extra for Blizzard art enthusiasts, including tutorials and how-to information from some of the artists that help bring World of Warcraft to life. You’ll also get to take a look into Blizzard Entertainment’s Fine Arts Project; a unique gathering of some of the world’s greatest contemporary fantasy artists creating their own visions of the Blizzard universe. Legends including Alex Ross, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, Craig Mullins, Alex Horley, Todd Lockwood, and Syd Mead share their experiences and showcase the incredible pieces of art they produced for the project.

-- Marge

All about Murphy's Law with cartoons, too

My home has been a working example of Murphy's Law lately, hence this post about it.

HowStuffWorks has an article by Josh Clark titled "How Murphy's Law Works."  Of note is that it's called Sod's Law in England.

There are sites dedicated to the subject.  The Complete Edition of Murphy's Laws gives an exhaustive glossary of the law, its corollaries and derivatives.  This one I experience on a regular basis:

O'Brian's Law
If you change lines, the one you just left will start to move faster than the one you are now in.

This cartoon is in Clay Bennett's archives:

An collection of cartoons by Diana Denny at The Saturday Evening Post contained this cartoon (all I know is it was published in the summer of 1971, can't read the cartoonist's signature):

And, lastly, here's a demotivational poster from quickmeme by rriverstone:

Have you noticed that social sites have started using the term karma?

-- Marge

Tools for holiday artwork

Starting with a look at the free holiday clip art that's available online, I found that the word for today is brushes.  Since I can't seem to find a site that defines what they are, here goes.

Digital art software comes in mostly two categories, vector (for line drawings) and raster (for working with bitmap images, like photos).  Brushes are usually associated with raster graphics programs; however, Gimp brushes can be in three forms: animation, raster and vector.  

Essentially a brush changes the shape, and possibly other attributes, of your cursor.  In a way a brush acts like a rubber stamp (some programs have a separate feature called rubber stamp). Most art software comes preloaded with a variety of brushes.  You can also download additional ones and/or make your own.  Most of the additional brushes available online are compatible with Photoshop.  Since Photoshop, an Adobe product, and PhotoPaint and Painter, Corel products, are both proprietary software, I'll be talking about Gimp brushes today.  Gimp can use Photoshop brushes and is open source -- version 2.8 is the latest and it's very good.

There's a very long, but good, tutorial on using brushes in Gimp on YouTube. In fact there are many Gimp tutorials on YouTube.

Below is a sampling of the brushes you can download and install for use in Gimp.

All-free-download vector brushes for non-commercial use (Exercise caution clicking at this site -- it's closely tied with Shutter Stock):  

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Obsidian Dawn, byline "digital design resources":

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Brushlovers, byline "amazing free Photoshop brushes":

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If you're wondering about Gimp and Photoshop compatibility, here's an article from Chron, small business division.

Photoshop may be the industry standard for digital graphics, but I dislike working with it.  My preferred money-sink is Corel.  But seeing the video above on Gimp, I'm beginning to wonder about switching.

-- Marge

War on Christmas cartoons

Fox News would have us believe there's a war on Christmas.  It must be so because the reporters there have repeated it over and over (as they do many news items).  And some other reporters and cartoonists have run with the idea.  For example, Jon Stewart at "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central. (Sure miss Jon's point of view.)

Bearman (who may not have a first name)  at Bearman Cartoons posted this cartoon in 2011:

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A cartoon by Jeff Koterba, dated 2011, is posted at Cagle Post --

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Pat Bagley weighs in on the war on Christmas at The Week Magazine with this one:

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And at TruthDig, "drilling beneath the headlines," I found one by Nick Anderson:

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So, is there a war on Christmas?  Jeff Sorensen at the Huffington Post says "The War on Christmas Doesn't Exist."

-- Marge

Alien ancestors?

Visualize this -- Two planets collide and the debris ejected into space contains fragments that are rich with organic material.  The fragments themselves become meteorlike bodies that traverse space until they land on other planets.  Within a landing meteoroid is viable life substance that has been nurtured by radioactive heat source(s) and nutrients.

Voila!  New amino acids and nucleobases take root and possibly flourish far from their origin.

From the TIME article by Jeffrey Kluger, titled Aliens Among Us (you need a subscription to read the whole article):

Life, as far as we can prove, exists only on Earth. There is our modest planet circling our modest star, and then there is the unimaginable hugeness beyond. Yet in that whole, great cosmic sweep, we're the only little koi pond in which anything is stirring. That, at least, has been the limit of our science. But that limit is changing fast.

The cosmos, as scientists now know, is awash in the stuff of biology. Water molecules drift everywhere in interstellar space. Hydrogen, carbon, methane, amino acids--the entire organic-chemistry set--swirl through star systems and dust planets and moons. In 2009, NASA's Stardust mission found the amino acid glycine in the comet Wild 2. In 2003, radio telescopes spotted glycine in regions of star formation within the Milky Way. And meteors that landed on Earth have been found to contain amino acids, nucleobases--which help form DNA and RNA--and even sugars.

The study that looks at "the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by meteoroids, asteroids and planetoids" is called panspermia.  There's an interesting site on the topic called Panspermia-Theory, "origin of life on Earth."  There's also a Panspermia.org, that states "Life comes from space because life comes from life."  Not sure about that, but it could be an interesting stop.

If you're scientifically inclined, be prepared to be fascinated by this video, uploaded by Gravitionalist:

-- Marge

Creators Syndicate -- A new cartoon every hour

At Creators,com (aka Creators Syndicate) you can find a variety of cartoons and comic strips. The cartoon page has an ever-changing assortment of material. I found the cartoons by clicking on the "Content" link on the landing page.  The site bills itself as "a syndicate of talent" and features political opinion pieces, as well as advice and lifestyle.  While the content is intended for syndication by newspapers and other publishers, viewers can read it and comment.

Under editorial cartoons I found this one by Steve Sack:

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And under comic strips there was this one by John L. Hart:

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There is a page where you can find samples of  games, such as Sudoku, crossword puzzles, word finds, and so one.  This link downloads a Charles Preston crossword.

For your added enjoyment here's a sample of Steve Sack's sculpture, titled "Sleeping with the Fishies." He says about his sculpture --

My sculptures are made of paper mache. Not many artists over the age of nine work in paper mache. Which may explain my place in the art world.

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Steve's work is A#1 in my view.

-- Marge

Post 2012 election humor (revised)

It ended 3 days ago and I still can't believe it's over.  The 2012 election, that is.  No more emails pleading for mo' money; no more negative ads on TV.  The news is still just as negative though, guess that will never change.

Here are some cartoons to help you wind down from one of the ugliest elections I've ever seen.

Chan Lowe at Tribune Content Agency:

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David Hitch at the Missoulian:

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Does Mr. America look like the Mad Hatter to you? -- M

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David Hitch at Worcester Telegram and Gazette:

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Tim Eagan at Cagle Post:

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And a beaut of a cartoon from Tim Eagan's site that brings to mind the creative process:

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It's O.K. to sigh a sigh of relief -- it's over.  BTW, looks like Hillary is campaigning already.

-- Marge

Neverwas: part real, part imaginary

Neverwas is a movie that was produced, filmed and completed but not released to theaters (you can find it on DVD).  It's one of the best movies I've ever seen and reminds me somewhat of "The Secret Garden."  Almost halfway into the movie I thought it was mostly about mental illness and there would be a psychological turnabout.  Not so.  The movie ended well and the ending was believable, but by then you liked the characters enough not to care about believability anyway.

This is a movie for people who are open to the unexplainable elements in life and can suspend judgment long enough to appreciate what they're seeing.  The cinematography with light playing around the actors is by Michael Grady and is luscious.  The acting is excellent.  The music is by Phillip Glass.  But mostly the story and its telling take the day -- the film is written and directed by Joshua Michael Stern (I cannot find a bio of him!).

Here is a quote from a review I found at Amazon by Grady Harp:

NEVERWAS, a little miracle of a movie written and directed by Joshua Michael Stern, is an allegory, a fairytale, a dissection of the impact of mental illness on parents and children, and story of compassion, believing, and blossoming of character that was created with a sterling ensemble of actors in 2005, failed to find a niche in theatrical distribution, and went straight to DVD - becoming one of those limited release films that is very elusive even in the megavideo stores. The reasons for this relative anonymity are not clear, but film lovers will do well searching out this little gem: the rewards are immediate gratification and long lasting satisfaction....

 And here is the trailer:

As for me, I'm still working on the 3rd video in Virtual World Tours.  This time we'll be visiting Second Life.

-- Marge

Sim-on-a-stick, part 3: meeting people and exploring in OSGrid

In today's video I'm exploring OSGrid.

OSGrid is one of the virtual worlds powered by OpenSimulator, aka OpenSim.  OpenSim's front page states

OpenSimulator is an open source multi-platform, multi-user 3D application server. It can be used to create a virtual environment (or world) which can be accessed through a variety of clients, on multiple protocols. OpenSimulator allows virtual world developers to customize their worlds using the technologies they feel work best - we've designed the framework to be easily extensible. OpenSimulator is written in C#, running both on Windows over the .NET Framework and on Unix-like machines over the Mono framework. The source code is released under a BSD License, a commercially friendly license to embed OpenSimulator in products. If you want to know about our development history, see History.

OpenSim's history page traces its origin to Second Life(tm) releasing their client to open source in January 2007.  (Second Life has their own open source portal.)  Now there are a number of individuals and companies that run OpenSim.  You can find a grid list at OpenSim's site, where a number of public sites are listed.  Not listed are private grids, usually behind corporate firewalls, that can be used for conferencing, training, and so on.

Advantages of downloading, installing and setting up an OpenSim are having your own land free of  payments to another landowner, complete control over the content, and the ability to back up the world and your work.

When I was considering setting up my own world, I identified three important factors:  a processor fast enough and powerful enough to render the world, a secure database for storing and accessing assets, and enough bandwidth to maintain a reasonable frame rate.  (If you would like to add to my list, feel free to submit a comment.)  It seems to me one of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) setups would work great (but may be pricey).

Because I was unable to upload the video ("Virtual World Tours: OSGrid") to Blogger, you'll have to view it on YouTube.

It always surprises me how creative work knows no deadlines -- it's simply done when it's done.  This video has flaws, but it was time to move on.

-- Marge

Sim-on-a-stick, part 2: some virtual world basics

Highlighted today is a video, the first in a series of visits to virtual worlds.

The region being visited Terra Virtua in Kitely.  Kitely describes itself as "Virtual Worlds on Demand" and states "Each account includes one FREE virtual world." If you sign up at Kitely, you can either use their plugin (the Imprudence viewer) to access your world or launch the viewer of your choice independently of the website.  Kitely is based on OpenSim and they state in the FAQ that they

use a combination of standard OpenSim running in a ROBUST configuration, with our own proprietary OpenSim modules and web services.

Because the worlds are generated on demand, the user must wait for the world to be up and running.  This includes teleporting, which can cause awkward pauses, especially if your destination has particularly complex builds or many objects.

In "Virtual World Tours: Kitely" below, I'm offering basic terms used in virtual worlds and attempting to show what they mean.  There are sections showing building, primitive shapes  and terraforming.  I particularly wanted to show how avatars interact with the 3D environment.  Note that avatar Jamie walks into a structure and moves around in it.  If there were scripts in place, she could sit on the furniture and interact more fully with things.  This video is also available on YouTube in a larger format.

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Whew! Three working copies and a total restart later, the video is done.


-- Marge

Sim-on-a-stick, part 1: the basic idea

This information in an October 22nd article by James Au at New World Notes caught my attention the other day:

Last week I wrote about how Sim-on-a-Stick, a portable, offline version of OpenSim, was used to generate $300K in services for real world clients working on a contract for product placement in several dozen movie theaters. In Comments, Renee "Ener Hax" Miller, who led development on that project, explained why Sim-on-a-Stick (or SoaS) was better for this purpose (simulating these cinema spaces) than an online Second Life (or for that matter, I suppose an online OpenSim), for this application...

This is an interesting use for a virtual world instance and could be applicable for many businesses where a sale is dependent on visualizing a 3D space, such as architecture, real estate, interior design, and home renovation.

For better understanding, in the next few posts I will be discussing -- and showing -- how virtual worlds work and the language used when describing them.  We will be visiting some of the worlds, namely OSGrid, Kitely and Second Life.

Later, then.

-- Marge

Out filming (sort of)

I'm preparing a video to illustrate virtual world sims, prims, and how objects are built. It's not done yet.

In the meantime, take a break.

Heart Gardens in Second Life

-- Marge

I can do bad all by myself...

...is a movie written, produced, directed and acted in by Tyler Perry.  You may know him better as Madea, the pistol-packin' mama.  To me Perry is a perfect example of artist.  He took a difficult early life and transformed it into works that speak humanely (and with great humor) about this stew we live in.

From the article about him in Wikipedia --

Around 1990, he moved to Atlanta, where two years later I Know I've Been Changed was first performed at a community theater, financed by the $12,000 life savings of the 22-year-old Perry.[10] It included Christian themes of forgiveness, dignity and self-worth, while addressing issues such as child abuse and dysfunctional families. The musical initially received a "less than stellar" reception and was a financial failure. Perry persisted, and over the next six years he rewrote the musical repeatedly, though lackluster reviews continued. In 1998, at age 28, he succeeded in retooling of the play in Atlanta first at the House of Blues, then at the Fox Theatre. Perry continued to create new stage productions, touring with them on the so-called "chitlin' circuit" (now also known as the "urban theater circuit") and developing a large, devoted following among African-American audiences. In 2005, Forbes reported that he had sold "more than $100 million in tickets, $30 million in videos of his shows and an estimated $20 million in merchandise" and that "the 300 live shows he produces each year are attended by an average of 35,000 people a week"

His website is nicely interactive and beautifully designed and there he invites visitors to interact with him.

Below are videos from some of his works (he's definitely prolific).

A trailer for "I Can Do Bad All By Myself:"

A second trailer, this one for "Madea's Witness Protection:"

A video from his scapbook of funny moments:

And a song by Gladys Knight from "I Can Do Bad...:"

Simply beautiful.

-- Marge

Electric Sheep

Back to evolving software and artificial life, this time it's electric sheep.  According to Wikipedia,

Electric Sheep is a distributed computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver.

Note that electric sheep is a distributed computing project.  Other distributed projects include SETI@home, which searches for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence; Bitcoin, the most widely used alternative currency; and ClimatePrediction, a project to investigate and reduce uncertainties in climate modelling. In other words your computer becomes a member of a network for the purpose of extending the project's computational ability and/or information processing.

According to an article by Ryan Naraine in eWeek, Grid Computing Can Allow Security Threats, (2005).  (Sorry, it's a fairly old article, but the only one I could find that isn't a scientific paper and locked up tighter than ...)

Wait a minute.  The terminology has evolved: what we're looking at is cloud computing. And "cloud security"

is an evolving sub-domain of computer security, network security, and, more broadly, information security. --Wikipedia

Back to electric sheep.  There are many samples of what the screensavers look like at the electric sheep site and information about how to take part in the project.  Terms for using the application's output are on the remix and reuse page.  Here's a video showing electric sheep on an Ubuntu desktop, published at PinoyGeekdotOrg:

A note to the wise: don't install this application at work without checking with your network admin first.

-- Marge

Artificial life in virtual worlds

Interesting news from the Second Life front:  In an article titled "Student Creates Code Which Generates Second Life/OpenSim Avatars... Based on Simulated Genetics!" Wagner James Au reports on a project being developed by "the University of Western Sydney and the Federation of American Scientists." Here's the video that demonstrates the work:

Envirtech is the group doing this work and they call the project Artificial Life Lab. For background, see the Wikipedia article on artificial life (aka Alife); note that the article directs you to the talk page -- there are a number of "challenges" to the article.

Knowing that MIT has been working with artificial intelligence for a long time, on a hunch I looked to see what might be going on with respect to virtual worlds and found this page on Digital Humanities and this quote mid-page:

It used to be that we in English departments were fond of saying there was nothing outside of the text. Increasingly, though, texts take the form of worlds as much as words. Worlds are emerging as the consummate genre of the new century, whether it’s the virtual worlds of Second Life or World of Warcraft or the more specialized venues seen in high-end simulation and visualization environments. Virtual worlds will be to the new century what cinema was to the last one and the novel to the century before that.

As an aside, I also found the article "‘Artificial leaf’ moves closer to reality" at the MIT site.  It fits in with the artificial photosynthesis article of a few days ago.

I love it when things mesh together.


-- Marge

YAHOO! Friday

In 2012 YAHOO! News had a comics and editorial cartoons page that listed many favorites. It's gone now, but the cartoonists and their magic remain. Here's a small selection of four:

Frank and Ernest:

Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller:

Over the Hedge:

Strange Brew by John Deering:

And that's a wrap.

-- Marge

Aarghhh! printers

Any printer eventually turns out to be my nemesis.  Especially any one I own now.  I finally got the right drivers installed, the correct IP address, and the printer printing.

This is how I feel about it.

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But it's still not right, probably getting too old (in digital equipment years).  *sigh* -- Marge

What's happening in artificial photosynthesis

Enough of politics...how about a little science for today?

With the promise of gas prices rising again and a depletable supply of oil, the time to start developing alternate sources of energy is long past. One promising field is artificial photosynthesis.  The sun pumps out an amazing amount of energy, but solar panels can only capture about 30% of it, although they're getting better all the time.

While the main purpose of natural photosynthesis is to nourish the plant (and, in the larger scale of nature, cleanses the air), the purposes of artificial photosynthesis are different, more specific to whether the output is carbon or oxygen. These purposes include splitting water to produce hydrogen for fuel cells and carbon fixation for biofuels.

The article "How Artificial Photosynthesis Works" from How Stuff works by Julia Layton explains the process. There is now a Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP), established in 2010 as a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Innovation Hub. An article, dated April of 2012, at Science Daily reports "Artificial Photosynthesis Breakthrough: Fast Molecular Catalyzer."

Details of the photosynthesic process are amazingly complex, so I opted for a much-simplified diagram from Estrella Mountain Community College's page on photosynthesis.

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I've long thought that artificial photosynthesis would lend itself to developing a battery.  Apparently so do two chemists at the University of Texas -- Christopher Bielawski and Jonathan Sessler. Their work is detailed in the article, dated September 2010, "Electron Switch Between Molecules Points Way to New High-Powered Organic Batteries."

Note: this post was updated in May, 2016. And there's a lot more information on this topic out there.

-- Marge

Citizens United is not the same as citizens united

In my email this morning there was a call to action from Change.org to sign the following petition to the US Supreme Court and Federal Elections Commission:

Disqualify Mitt Romney from running for President and file felony charges.

Research shows that it's a super PAC that's funneling the money to Romney's campaign.  In fact, super PACs came into being following the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission which

held that the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and unions.

However, Romney's campaign may have overstepped the line when accepting a donation from a foreign-owned corporation as reported in the article by Michael Beckel at the Center for Public Integrity, "Huge Donation To Romney SuperPAC From Foreign Firm Raises 'Red Flags'."  For more on super PACs and their effects, take a look at this article by Mike Lux of Democracy Partners, "The Hidden Effects of Citizens United and Super PACs." (Note that Mike is CEO of "Progressive Strategies, L.L.C., a political consulting firm founded in 1999, focused on strategic political consulting for non-profits, labor unions, PACs and progressive donors.")

This is what PACs and superPACs mean to most of us (from Dave Granlund):

At the Center for Public Integrity site, you can check the sources of funding to super PACs. At OpenSecrets is a list of super PACs, both conservative and liberal, and data on recipients, donors, expenditures, and more.

More sunshine is always good.

-- Marge

Defending democracy

When America was just getting started and settlers were moving into the new territories it was necessary to fight (yes, bear arms) to defend home and family.  It's time to do that again, this time to defend democracy.  To do this we must arm ourselves to vote and vote well. To do that we need good, impartial information. 

Instead of just calling Washington a black hole and broken, let's start watching what's going on there and maybe say something when things are going awry.  Roll Call, is a newspaper published in Washington, D.C. that

reports news of legislative and political maneuverings on Capitol Hill, as well as political coverage of congressional elections across the country. (Wikipedia/Roll Call)

There are sites that welcome your input on political issues, such as Americans for Democratic Action.  And new sites that support defending democracy are starting up, such as Votizen (renamed Brigade),  Memeorandum, and Nationbuilder, as reported in an article by Josh Constantine in TechCrunch.

One alternative is to stand by and watch the candidates make fools of themselves, as shown in this cartoon by Dana Summers, editorial cartoonist for the Orlando Sentinel:

Considering all the political vitriol exchanged in the last few years, and other evidence of a fragmented society, my best solution is to begin rebuilding the real America.  Good luck trying to find any usable information (read not partisan) on the topic online.  The closest I could come was this article by Sabrina Stevens at AlterNet.  The concept of building a village isn't new, but becoming more and more important.

Guess it's time to get out of my chair, go offline (gasp!), and reinvest in the "real world."

-- Marge

Internet health

Seems to me it would be helpful to share some links and information about the internet and internet health, since many of us use it daily and some rely on it for their livelihood.  Unless you work for or connect to the internet via a Tier 1 network/company, you probably pay an ISP (Internet Service Provider) to connect.

There are sites you can check when your internet service slows down, such as Internet Health Report, a breakdown of mobile and internet service by company (note that Level3 is a company as well);  Internet Traffic Report, a well-established and world-wide monitoring service.

Many ISP's offer web pages that perform a speed test; note that these tests only work for connections between you and your provider.  Some ISP's offer a page that reports the status of their network. Another thing that affects your experience of the internet is how fast pages load.  This is mostly a function of your browser. Clearing the cache and recent history will often fix slowdowns.

Graphics that show internet backbone congestion are also available, but limited.  The Akamai Technologies site offers a suite of visualization tools online.  Akamai accounts for 15-30 percent of the global web traffic.  For truly inclusive real time internet usage in a visual format, you may have to develop a viewer.  CAIDA (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) is a good resource for information.  The problem appears to be that each company owns its part of the internet and doesn't want to share.

Companies own the undersea cables that connect distant areas as well.  For an idea of how countries/areas are connected, take a look at this map by Nicolas Rapp.

Hmmm, if so much of the internet is owned by private companies, maybe we do need to assure that the internet is kept free. BTW, wikipedia's annual campaign for donations is on; give 'em five.

-- Marge

Friday walkabout

Not having a particular theme in mind for today's post, I just wandered around the web picking up what caught my attention.  Yesterday's theme of tactical frivolity is still in mind, but don't have a plan -- yet.

At Fuffermutter there's cartoonist Mitra Farmand. The cartoon below is one of hers.

Clay Bennett was found hanging out on the web. His site is nicely organized; here's one of his cartoons:

Remembering Kevin Kallaugher's (KAL) site, I took a look at his portfolio and found this

Brian Crane draws Pickles for the Washington Post. Here he is hard at work.

I like Brian's style of work, think I'll give it a try.


-- Marge

Tactical frivolity

Tired of all the seriousness I've posted lately, I decided to post some frivolity.  First stop was a Google search on frivolity where I found a Wikipedia entry on "tactical frivolity." Sounded interesting.  It is.

One of the references is an article in the Guardian, titled "Carnivalistas slink in with a pink revolution" and written in 2000.  Here's how the article begins --

The idea was sound. Fill up a lorry with 13 women dressed as pink fairies and drive it to Prague for the World Bank meetings to lend glamour to the demonstrations and defuse the confrontations between riot police, anarchists, unions and environmentalists with "tactical frivolity" - carnival, art, song and dance.

The article goes on to detail a comedy of errors surrounding execution of the plan.

Looking for an image to illustrate tactical frivolity, I came across a blog called the South Florida Lawyers with the byline "a law blog done with jealousy, love, snark, humor and civility."  It had this picture --

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The South Florida Lawyers' blog also had this video of Alan Alda in a clip from "Crimes and Misdemeanors," uploaded by TheDukeofMadness.

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Two things -- lawyers can be very funny and I may be "cursed" with seriousness.

Oh, and "If it bends, it's funny. If it breaks, it's not funny!"

-- Marge

The WELL: story of an online community reborn

"WELL Community Members Create For-Profit Corporation in Bid to Buy The WELL," an article by Wagner James Au, talks about user/members of the Well, who bought their community in order to keep it alive. In an essay Wagner wrote for Internet Evolution -- What Went Wrong With the WELL & Why It Matters -- he explains:

Once called "the world's most influential online community" on the cover of Wired magazine, at its peak the WELL counted users like the sci-fi authors Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow; visionaries like the musician Brian Eno and the virtual community expert Howard Rheingold; EFF founders John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, and Mitch Kapor; and even rock stars like Billy Idol and David Crosby. The quality of its users' posts -- smart, funny, creative, and provocative on every imaginable subject -- inspired countless Internet entrepreneurs and thinkers.

The previous owner of the WELL, Salon Media Group, publishes the site Salon. To know more about Salon check this Wikipedia entry.

The WELL's site is somewhat barebones. You must join and pay for a membership to view conversations, as well as participate. According to the Conferences page "Conferences are the heart of The WELL:"

Conferences are where we gather - the heart of The WELL. A vibrant community emerges from thousands of conversations in hundreds of ongoing forums traditionally known as conferences.

Each gathering place has a distinct flavor. A few are open to the world. Most are open to all members. Some limit access to a private group. Others are not listed here by request of their founders. Participants check in frequently at one, five or more conferences, to offer expertise, dissect one another's best ideas and indulge in gossip, mutual aid and general banter.

There are two conferences open to non-members -- Inkwell.vue and Deadsongs.vue -- that you can participate in by emailing the conference hosts.  Click on the "How to participate" link at each for details.

Looks like these conferences might actually be fun.

-- Marge