I think that people like to give in part because everyone wants to be part of the movies and we all like to feel magnanimous, to help something creative get made. It’s sort of the triumph of the normal person.

— Yancey Strickler, as quoted by NY Times columnist David Carr, who spent some time with us at Sundance. Read more about it here. (via kickstarter)

applearts:

Interior design room: Pick Punch

(via matsunom)

aliensthatlooklikeskrillex:

Team Canvas went to ArtHackDay (arthackday.net) this weekend. For our project, we decided to work with the team working on ScratchML (scratchml.com) to create a shooting game. What started as a joke by Timothy, “let’s convert ScratchML to BulletML”, became a really fun two-day project. Here’s a quick synopsis of the game:

The title: aliensthatlooklikeskrillex.tumblr.com
The backstory: Aliens are trying to communicate with us through dubstep, we interpret these actions as hostile and go on the offensive. Destroy the aliens.
How it works: The DJ controls the boss ship. We are receiving the ScratchML data in realtime from the turntables, so his/her actions directly affect the bullet patterns and movement of the ship. As the player you can dodge and shoot back. It’s a head to head battle of player vs. DJ. Others can participate as well: the Twilio integration allows people to text a number if the DJ sucks, and their text will appear on screen and damage the boss ship.

We had a great time at arthackday. Thanks to everyone involved, the sponsors (hey that includes us!) for the food and drink, the 319 Scholes team, the ArtHackDay team, everyone that showed up to the event and battled the DJ, and especially the ScratchML team.

And if you’re still interested, learn more about us.

-Dave

alittlemoresweetpea:

The husband’s sesame-paste-filled tang yuan — glutinous rice balls — from our Chinese New Year post-dinner festivities. There were of course also tangerines, noodles and dumplings (recipe here). There are more in the freezer, in anyone still needs a tang yuan fix, friends… 

Count me in!

The one thing I wish I had known before launching my Kickstarter project was how much more fun it would be to be accountable to the public than to traditional media gatekeepers. The public wants me to be me. Gatekeepers want to crush any sort of edge or opinion.

— Ted Rall shares lessons he learned from running a Kickstarter project.  (via ensignau)

Back in class, I notice that when someone in the back of the room asks a question or chimes in with a comment, all the women turn around to face the person who is speaking. The men just keep looking at the front of the room like we don’t care. Why is that? Why can’t we be more considerate? What is wrong with us?

— gpc: Class Clown 

When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true.

And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent

I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”

What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.

—

Neil Gaiman on Copyright, Piracy, and the Commercial Value of the Web (X)

(Source: roominthecastle, via kenyatta)

I want to live and work in a world where we are actively engaged with our audience, not taking advantage of them. Seeing the people I design for as rich and complex yields many more exciting opportunities than reducing them to a set of eyeballs with a credit card.

— tashwong: ‘Exploiting Users’

shortformblog:

“Greetings from the home of Super Bowl 46.” Seriously, that’s your intro?

LOL!

jaredcohe:

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote a thoughtful piece for Wired on the PIPA/SOPA people’s revolt. In it, he stated:

“While some have derided the events of last week as a departure from the way we do things in Washington, I believe last week is an example of the way Washington can change for…

wilwheaton:

Not that it matters, and not that I’m some kind of rich mogul, but I’ll say this again: I have lost more money to creative accounting, and American workers have lost more jobs to runaway production, than anything associated with what the MPAA calls piracy. Chris Dodd is lying about piracy costing us jobs. Hollywood’s refusal to adapt to changing times is what’s costing the studios money. That’s it.

We know story. However, it’s the ‘telling’ of stories that is becoming ever more complex and ever more exciting. This is because we have seen two massive shifts. One is the distribution of technology—the other is the distribution of creativity. Everyone is a storyteller, and with technology more and more people have access to tell theirs to other people all over the world.

— Jonathan Mildenhall, Vice President, Global Advertising Strategy and Content Excellence at Coca-Cola. The Coca-Cola Company and ad agency McCann Erickson are exploring the future of storytelling as the inaugural underwriters of the Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Story Lab. Read on-> (via jaredzlotnick)

(via jaredzlotnick)

richardschang:

This made my morning. (via @boingboing)

I didn’t think I would watch all 3:55 of this, but I did. Thanks, Rich!

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone — best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.

— Steve Wozniak.  ”Woz on Creativity: Work Alone.”  (Brain Pickings)  From his memoir. (via chaddickerson)