The tabs on my Firefox browser have been up now for over a week. I haven’t shut down the app or the machine in a while, and after those random bug crashes (that happen often on the newer versions of Firefox), I bring the tabs back up. The past weekend led to some great online research/time wasting (you pick which term because I sometimes cannot tell the difference) thanks to folks like Larry, Pod, and my new hobby with researching the P2P torrent world. I’m ready to close some of these tabs; don’t worry, they’re bookmarked, so thought I should pass some of the leads along to whomever hits the HappyFeet universe:
- GraffitiGen: Fun site that lets you type in words and turn them into graffiti-style art. Change the colors, link to the type you made, and have a good time doing legal digi-graff.
- Visual Complexity: Pod turned me on to this great site a few days ago. This site shows you how things connect using advanced design techniques. Some major thought goes into these images, and the results can look otherworldly at times. Pod and I both wonder if this is the future of corporate data manipulation. Imagine Google using their information on all of us to make these complex charts that will further the bottom line.
- The Oil of the 21st Century: Speaking of information, this convention just happened in Berlin. From their site: “Under the banner of the ‘Information Society’, a cartel of corporate knowledge distributors struggle to maintain their exclusive right to the exploitation and commodification of the informational resources of the world.”
- tvRSS: I just learned what a tracker site is. And I’ve also just learned that sharing a torrent file does not mean that you are sharing info with “exclusive rights”. This site is worse than having cable TV because every show is one click away. Want to spend a day wasting time in front of the tube? Hit up tvRSS before Interpol gets them.
- Also found out that The Pirate Bay is legally hosting a torrent tracker in their home country of Sweden. Sort of. The exciting story coming from that country is that there’s a movement to start a Pirate Party that will seek seats in government. Will the WTO be the final ring for this battle?
- Had the honor of meeting Aaron and his Tactical Ice Cream Unit after the Peace March Saturday. I document educational vehicles and his Ice Cream truck fits the method. I hope to post photos and write more about the TICU soon, and will say briefly that he’s got a good deal going on with that project.
- February 29 might seem far off, but a group of organizers have decided to make Leap Day a day of creative chaos. A call has been sent out to get the ball rolling across the planet for a day of direct action that focuses “on living life in a positive, creative, loving, cooperative, sustainable fashion without domination of others or the earth.” The object is to be so off the wall that the actions will confuse cops and business owners. Sound like fun to me!
- Finally, I read an alt-history book about girls who had to give up their children for adoption in the 1950s and 1960s. The Girls Who Went Away gives first hand accounts of many tragic stories based upon societal, familial, and religious ignorance and misunderstandings. I had to read this book slowly because each story a mother gave filled me with sadness, anger, and compassion for their heartbreaking stories.
larger versions of these photos are below
Halloween Critical Mass filled the streets with costumed goodness, and holiday oddness. But the freaks and strangeness glazed over an underlying unease of massive fires, escalating war rhetoric, sub prime melt down and continued oppression of indigenous peoples in places like Gaza, Oaxaca, and Baghdad. We avoided Union Square early on by turning on to Stockton. Coming out of the Stockton Tunnel into China Town, I rode up to a person trying to light an American Flag. After failed attempts with just a lighter, a fire juggler stopped and handed over a small amount of fuel to get the thing lit. As I took these photographs, some Critical Mass riders groaned and complained about the spectacle. I began to yell loudly that flag burning is protected under the US Constitution as free speech. Time and again the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of allowing someone to express their displeasure with government via burning what for some represents an empty symbol based upon one of the English Corporations that funded colonization of native lands in the 18th Century.
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Ah, a day with nothing to do. After about two months of pounding out the book, a lull has arrived. I mailed out the DVD of photos to Justine in NYC Friday and she got them yesterday. I finally finished hacking out the text and sent that on to the editor yesterday. After all was said and done, I only wrote 10.7k words for the book. I took submissions for parts and edited/rewrote that too, so the total is about 13k. I’ve seen longer articles than that in New Yorker, and am still wondering how writers can knock out those long pieces under tight deadlines. If left to my own facilities, I’d probably work on the text for another year or so, agonizing over every comma and semi-colon. I gave up the editing fight and sent it on to get read by a fresh pair of eyes. Yes, things got a bit hazy towards the end. Some of the parts were written weeks ago so weren’t holding my attention that well. Edits will come back soon and rewrites will happen. For now, I just sent some promotional photos to Manic D so that the book can be promoted out there in the world. I started the MySpace page for the book. Already starting to think through the Spring book opening event and the web site. But am trying not to think about it much today. Enjoy the lull….
Whew! Literally just finished formatting all the filenames for the photos, along with checking spellings, ordering according to preference, doing a bit of research here and there, editing copy to fit the photos as the narrative changes, etc. Actually finished on time too, so that’s a pretty good thing going there. Need to get the DVD to Justine in NYC tomorrow, and will work on the copy for the rest of the weekend and just e-mail that as a .zip file. In other news, I just set up a MySpace page for Stencil Nation. In a matter of minutes, I had over a dozen friend spams. Had to go in there and report them all. MySpace is such a blinky, ad-driven, pain, but millions flock there. Not much going on at that site, but hope to put some time into it later this month. Need to start thinking about the site design for StencilNation.org too. Should be basic enough. Can’t believe that there are over 750 photos going to Justine. This is after I spent a while editing them down to that amount. I had to give her sliding scale numbers for how many pages each of the 47 sections will get. If not, it’d be too big or too small. If each section got three pages with no text, then that’d be 144 pages. That’s about the right amount that Manic D gave me to publish, so with the text, some of the sections will be smaller. I have tried my best to get many of the submitted photos in there and hope that they’ll still make it. If not, they’ll be on StencilNation.org, backing up some of the photos in the book. Really looking forward to seeing Justine work her design magic and make it all well laid out and in there. Ah, the fuzzy math gets boiled down to copy, rules, and images on the pages. Here we go….
Where did yesterday go? I spent a solid 12 hours in front of my trusty machine, writing and then beginning the painful task of formatting all the photo information. I can’t imagine what Justine will go through once she gets the DVD from me. She’ll have 4 GBs of photos to open, resize, color correct, and even stitch together on a few occasions. I have to do the following: compile the information on each photo, put it in an Excel table, order the files from “publish first” to “publish last,” copy/paste filename into the filename (ex.: “Origins_DS_01.jpg”), and double-check for spelling. While doing this, I have to hop through several applications, using Excel, Finder, Word, and sometimes Preview and Firefox. My organizational skills, though advanced, still fall short on some of the submissions, so I have to dig online to find information. Last night I dug into Jef Aerosol’s Flickr archive to get dates on works, locations, etc. Things went easier with Scott Williams, maybe because I am more familiar with his work and took all the photos. Copy/past and Excel’s intuitive cell-memory cache are my friends for this grueling task. I had a design appointment with a friend today and then have spent several hours working on the cover comps that Manic D sent me. The two they sent me where nice, eye-catching, and conveyed somewhat different aspects of stencil art. We ended up with a dilemma: one cover is a good book cover and the other is a stronger stencil. Publishers are deciding as I write. Speaking of writing, I did manage to finish up all the copy for the book. I wrote more than I thought for the latter sections I worked on. Need to look them over and revise. Should do that before falling into the JPG-hole. In other book news, June 1 was set for the release date. Might have some fun going on in Toronto for the opening. Things are already starting to flesh out for the main opening here in San Francisco. More on that once I get this content out the do’!
