A true labour of love, my friend Maurcio just released his latest comic, Savings Account.
“A short comic book story about an old woman with nothing to lose. Written by Juliana Azevedo and illustrated by Mauricio Pommella.”
The artwork is splendid and the story is an original. So please consider supporting independent artists and buy it now!
I was having lunch with the Erics today, and the discussion turned to the new Metallica album. Suddenly I remembered a screencap I took back in the day (8 years ago, actually).
It was summer 2000, and the Internet was a wild frontier: usernames couldn’t have @ symbols or spaces, Google was not a verb, people thought downloading music illegally was awesome, and Metallica set the tone for years to come.
Not with their music, but with their hot and fast legal action. It seemed an abstract thing to see Lars cart away crates of seized download records from Napster HQ on TV. But it hit closer to home to me when one Monday I came into work, booted up my computer, and was informed that my Napster account (Woody_the_Bear) was BANNED BY METALLICA. Sweet!
(Click image for larger version)
That just sounds so frickin’ cool, though, don’t it?
Ironically, I didn’t even download ANY Metallica at the time (nor have I ever), because I thought they sucked and sold out. And now I just encourage everyone to Bittorrent the new Metallica album and bootleg their concerts with their cellphone cameras (I would never do that myself, of course). Or, better yet, I encourage people to support and BUY music from some of these lesser-known, but quite deserving artists instead. (Not that they sound ANYTHING like Metallica, but whatever)
Some of the faves on my current iPhone playlist include:
Feel free to check out my guest post on the VIDBLOG, where I wax cranky on the further erosion of mystery in modern life (thanks to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and the internet at large):
http://2008.vidfest.com/2008/05/20/losing-my-mythology-to-the-social-machine/
On my way to work one morning, I noticed that someone took the time to make this “statement”. This is graffiti in the first degree–it takes some premeditation to get the roll of tape, the marker, and walk out this sign and carefully cover up the right letters. Or maybe it’s some activist construction worker from the nearby condo building site?
So, of course, out came the iPhone for a quick pic snap.
You’ve heard it before: “We’re drowning in information and starving for knowledge“. Of course this isn’t an entirely new thought. There have been lots of elaborate methods proposed to combat this predicament we’re increasingly finding ourselves in. Google seems to do a good job of helping us out with sorting our data.
But I think the onus of meeting this challenge also lies somewhere else…