By Cory Doctorow at 8:12 pm Monday, Feb 20
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From the Raymond Scott blog, "Exactly 75 years ago today, Raymond Scott recorded his iconic hit tune, 'Powerhouse.' On the same date, following 8 months of rehearsals with his Quintette at CBS, he also recorded 'Twilight In Turkey,' 'Minuet In Jazz,' and 'The Toy Trumpet' — not bad for a day's work. He didn't realize it at the time, but these compositions would jump-start his stellar career, and accidentally inspire cartoon antics for future generations. To celebrate the milestone, check-out this collection of 75 YouTube clips of Scott's classic 'Powerhouse,' here and see details about our year-long 75th anniversary events schedule here.
By Cory Doctorow at 6:07 pm Monday, Feb 20
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John Herman sez, "I am producing 'An Evening of Apocalyptic Theatre' in Portsmouth, NH. Nine plays, nine visions of the end -- including new works by Hugo and Nebula award winning science fiction author James Patrick Kelly and best selling author of The Great Typo Hunt, Jeff Deck. A couple argues in a bomb shelter over a dog puzzle. A man gets an unexpected visit from Intergalactic Salvage. CERN scientists experience the romance of multi-verses. PLUS: Not only is the money raised going to three local charities, but I will also shave my head halfway through the show’s run to raise money for St. Baldrick’s Foundation, a group that funds childhood cancer research grants"
An Evening of Apocalyptic Theatre
(Thanks, John!)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:06 pm Monday, Feb 20
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Under a new deal signed by the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto, the act of emailing a link will be classed as equivalent to photocopying, and each student and faculty member will cost the universities $27.50/year for this right that the law gives them for free, along with a collection of other blanket licenses of varying legitimacy. In order to enforce these licenses, all faculty email will be subject to surveillance.
“Toronto’s and Western Ontario’s actions are inexplicable,” said James L. Turk, CAUT executive director. “They have buckled under to Access Copyright’s outrageous and unjustified demands at a time when courts have extended rights to use copyrighted material, better alternatives are becoming available to the services Access offers and just before the passage of new federal copyright legislation that provides additional protections for the educational sector”.
Turk also pointed out that the Supreme Court is set to clarify the educational use of copyrighted works in the coming months, clarifications that could undercut Access’s bargaining position. In contrast to Western Ontario and Toronto, many institutions have opted out of agreements with Access Copyright or are fighting its demands at the Copyright Board of Canada.
“These two universities threw in the towel on the copyright battle prematurely,” said Turk. “We call on other post-secondary institutions not to follow Toronto’s and Western Ontario’s example of capitulating to Access Copyright. It‘s time to stand up for the right to fair and reasonable access to copyrighted works for educational purposes”.
Copyright agreement with Western and Toronto a bad and unwarranted deal
(via O'Reilly Radar)
By Cory Doctorow at 1:56 pm Monday, Feb 20
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Lauren, proprietor of the LAMP zine, got frustrated after arguing with a homophobe on Facebook, so she whipped (!) up a parody of a fundamentalist tract called GOD HATES CHECKERED WHIPTAIL LIZARDS, detailing all the ways in which the parthenogenetic, pseudocoupling titular lizards were a perversion of God's will. Someone phonecammed the tract and posted it to Reddit, and 2.3 million views later, it was Internet history. Lauren was good enough to post a printable PDF on a Tumblr sites for others who'd like to spread the gospel.
GOD HATES CHECKERED WHIPTAIL LIZARDS
By Cory Doctorow at 12:06 pm Monday, Feb 20
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"Circuit Skull" is a prizewinning piece by Graham Rudge from the Yukon School of Visual Arts, entered in a Bank of Montreal competition.
1res Œuvres! Concours invitation destiné aux étudiants en arts visuels,
(via Street Anatomy)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:06 am Monday, Feb 20
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Pril, a brand of dish soap in Germany, had an online competition to create and vote for art to run on the label. The winning art is just so-so, but a few of the runners-up (shown here) are great.
In our Hall of Fame, we present a small selection of very creative, beautiful, sophisticated and witty designs, which have unfortunately not made it into the trade, but the jury greatly admired, appreciated and rewarded are! Thanks to all the creative designers - just phenomenal, which have arisen for design!
By Cory Doctorow at 10:03 am Monday, Feb 20
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On Instructables, CaseyBorders's recipe for making stained glass 20-sided dice. A bit tricky to carry these around in your grandad's old Crown Royal bag, but otherwise, they make some pretty smashing (ahem) RPG accessories.
Now we need to cut 20 triangles out of our sheet of stained glass that match the template that we created. The easiest way to do that is to cut a stip of glass the same height as the triangles we cut in the jig. In the example pictures we used a strip that was 1.5" wide because our triangles ended up being 1.5" tall. Place the strip flush across the bottom of your cutting board and set your angle guide to 60 degrees. Follow your angle guide with your scorer so you end up with a 60 degree angle cut off the end of your glass strip. Depending on the kind of glass you bought you might simply need to flip it over to get the other side of the triangle, but the glass in the demo pictures is textured on the back, so we can only cut on the front, so we need to change our cutting guide to 60 degrees the other way. However you end up doing it, make sure that you are making your cuts and angle adjustments as precisely as you can, because if the triangles are not correctly shaped they will not make a good-looking d20.
Once you have 20 good pieces we can etch the numbers on them. Place each triangle in one of the holes of the cardboard template on the laser cutter's cutting surface. Now you can use the same file that we used to make the template but be sure to set your laser to etch only! We don't want to cut around the holes again!
Making a Stained-Glass d20
(via Neatorama)
The US Trade Representative claims that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, closed-door copyright treaty being negotiated in even greater secrecy than the notorious ACTA, is "transparent."
Actually, he says it has "unprecedented" transparency, because an advisory group is allowed to see it under nondisclosure, and they're not lobbyists at all. Except they are. And except that the norm for copyright treaties used to be UN treaties, negotiated in full public view, not closed-door arm-twisting marathons where the US Trade Rep and a bunch of industry goons threaten foreign nations into signing onto agreements that even the US Congress couldn't pass into law.
— Cory
Streaming rights to the Whitney Houston movie The Bodyguard were revoked at Netflix after her death. According to a Netflix rep quoted by Dan McDermott, the production company (Warner Bros., per IMDB) "saw an opportunity to make really a very large amount of money on the DVD sales of her movies".
UPDATE: Netflix says its staff were mistaken. Dan writes: Netflix is telling the truth. The rights were pulled before her death ... Unfortunately the rep and his supervisors were wrong. — Rob
By Mark Frauenfelder at 7:00 am Monday, Feb 20
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Gweek is a weekly podcast where the editors and friends of Boing Boing talk about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.
My hosts on episode 40 are are cartoonist Ruben Bolling, whose comic, Tom the Dancing Bug premieres weekly on Boing Boing, and Dean Putney, Boing Boing’s coding and development wizard. Our guest this week is two-time Eisner Award winning cartoonist Derf Backderf, creator of the amazing comic The City, which has been running in alternative weekly newspapers for 22 years. He’s the author of the graphic novel Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, which was selected for The Best American Comics 2010. He’s got a new autobiographical graphic novel out about his high-school friendship with the infamous serial murder and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, called My Friend Dahmer. Robert Crumb, who rarely gives endorsements for anyone or anything, says My Friend Dahmer is a “well-told, powerful story. Backderf is quite skilled in using comics to tell this tale of a truly weird and sinister 1970s adolescent world.”
Below is a list of the things we talked about in Gweek episode 40. (Sure, you could just click on the links below to learn about them without listening to the podcast, but then you will miss out on our discussion about whether or not Terry Richardson owns more than one flannel shirt.)
If you enjoy Gweek, please rate it in the iTunes Store -- thanks!
Most of this episode of Gweek is a fascinating discussion with Derf about his high school pal Jeffrey Dahmer, and Derf's new graphic novel My Friend Dahmer.
Dean turned us on to Maddie on Things, a blog of photos of a coonhound named Maddie who likes to stand on things that dogs don't normally stand on. What will Maddie stand on next?
Dean gives a thumbs up to fashion photographer Terry Richardson’s Diary
Mark likes Comic Viewer, an iPad app for reading digital comics.
And once you've installed Comic Viewer, head over to The Big Blog of Kids' Comics! and fill your iPad with mid-century four-color wonder.
Ruben likes Sugar & Spike comics so much that he's willing to pay $59.99 for this archive edition. But who can blame him? This is one of the best kids' comics of all time!
The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly is a massive anthology of old comic book stories for kids, and is a big hit around Mark's house. The oversize format and 350 pages make for a delightful reading experience.
I'm so happy that lots of old comic book stories that otherwise would have been forgotten are being reprinted in fat, inexpensive anthologies like this one: The Golden Treasury of Krazy Kool Klassic Kids' Komics, edited by Craig Yoe. My daughter and I are having a wonderful time reading these funny and deeply weird children's comic book stories from the 1940s and 1950s, featuring art by some of the tops names in the field: Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Carl Barks, Walt Kelly, Frank Frazetta, Wally Wood, and other cartoon giants. At 304 pages, we'll get many nights of entertainment out of this collection.
By Cory Doctorow at 6:18 am Monday, Feb 20
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"I'm Not the Road" is the second album from NYC-based indie band Whisperado. I've been listening to it pretty steadily since it came out a couple weeks ago, with immense and ever-growing pleasure. Whisperado have a kind of rootsy, country feel, and the lyrics and vocals are somewhere in the sweet spot between Ry Cooder and Jimmy Buffet, with a lot of humor and a little pathos. As ever, I'm most fond of the uptempo numbers, like the Bo-Diddley-beat "Insatiable Sally," a kind of hymn to bad TV; and "Teenage Popstar Girl," which reminds me of the more countrified Violent Femmes tunes. But the whole album's a treat, and it's available from CDBaby as a disc or an MP3 download.
I'm Not the Road
By John Biggs at 6:03 am Monday, Feb 20
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The beach at Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. Photo: BBM Explorer
I had my vasectomy on January 19, 2012, the date memorialized with the iCal notation "Vascect [sic] no lunch 34th st." At this writing the objects in question are still apparently live, pumping out spermatozoa like a dying pulsar that will soon dwindle into white noise. It takes a certain number of ejaculations to completely clear the pipes, as it were, and by try number twelve I'll be as barren as the surface of binary moons rising over an alien landscape. Read the rest
By Joshuah Bearman at 6:00 am Monday, Feb 20
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For years the Turk, a chess-playing automaton, toured Europe and America, delighting audiences and besting Catherine the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. But the Turk was a trick: Somewhere inside the cabinet was a human, playing the pieces on the board. No one knew how it worked at the time. Then, in 1854, it was destroyed in a fire and the illusion was lost. The Turk reappeared 130 years later, in Atwater, California, re-created from fragments by John Gaughan, a master magic builder who spent $120,000 of his own money on the duplicitous automaton. — Joshuah
By Cory Doctorow at 5:18 am Monday, Feb 20
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Dominic Ludlam writes, "Promise.TV has launched the world's first Promiscuous TV recorder! Working on the UK's Freeview platform, it records every programme on every TV and radio channel and stores them for a whole week.
And for all Boing Boing readers who visit the site, we have a daily draw running this week to get a new Promise recorder half price!"
This was originally commissioned as an internal BBC project, and the Ludlams and their partners have been productizing it ever since. It really does what it says on the tin: records the whole Freeview multiplex for a week at a time, which means that you don't have to program your PVR with the shows you like: you always have the last week's TV on tap (this'd be especially cool for when scandalous material is broadcast from Parliament -- if you find out about it after the fact you can go back and check). The Promise.tv folks have worked out several ingenious ways of navigating all this stored material as well.
I've written about this before, and I'm awfully glad to see it finally come to market.
The Promise Home is a recorder that connects four additional televisions in other rooms around the home.
All connected TVs can play any of the stored or saved programmes independently, and in they can also share bookmarks. This lets you start watching a programme in one room, set a bookmark and carry on watching from the same point in another room.
Promise.TV
(Thanks, Dom!)
