To live is…to lose whatever has not been chosen

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simplykeiko:

I want my own flock of chibi mp evas >w

This wins the prize.

(Source: pema001)

RE: Two for Two →

dbreunig:

jstn:

It’s hard to believe Prometheus will only be Ridley Scott’s third science fiction movie. His record so far (Alien in 1979 and Blade Runner in 1982) is unimpeachable, and to say I’m excited is a gross understatement.

I watch Blade Runner at least a couple times a year because I’m obsessed, but…

I had not realized Alien and Blade Runner were the only two science fiction movies Scott has made. Is there any other instance of an artist dabbling in a genre and producing only canonical works?

Not that I can think of off the top of my head, but some artists were deeply in love with certain genres and styles which they became devoted to doing right by in their own work. It leads to these deeply contemplative works that took years to produce and achieve canonical status, whilst being very sparsely distributed in the artist’s actual portfolio. I guess it’s a measure of mastery, that a person is willing to sink that much time and effort into something as nascent as a concept. I know others might be tempted to argue that true mastery is found in efficiency, in being able to match these works with far less time invested. Then again, would our culture really be the richer without these works?

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freshphotons:

Lego model of The Large Hadron Collider, Via Reddit.

And If You Should Chance Upon Buddha by the Roadside, Slay Him!

scinerds:

“Believe nothing. No matter where you read it. Or who said it. Not even if I said it. Unless it agrees with your own reason and common sense.”

— Buddha

This is a particularly shitty piece of advice considering the field you practice.

brain-food:

Batman doesn’t do friendships, Little Pony. 

(Source: thatirishbastard)

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futurejournalismproject:

For a Solo Artist to Earn US Monthly Minimum Wage

Interesting numbers to know if you’re a musician and want to go/stay independent.

Detail from The World of Online Music by Grovo Labs.

This is a roundabout way of saying the following: if you’re an artist, your life is fucking hopeless. Better pull the ripcord.

(Source: futurejournalismproject)

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brain-food:

Mike Maihack Follow his tumblr, and check out his other batgirl/supergirl comics!  Batgirl/Supergirl comic #1 / Batgirl/Supergirl comic #2 

vintageanchor:

Great Literature Of Cats 101…

Read more here.

All that matters in life, the universe, or anything.

Rights, Who Has Them?

Originally, this was drafted as one long, ceaseless Facebook comment. Sadly, I hit the character-cap and was too lazy to split it. I’d generally put more care into an actual blog-entry, but this, this I’m just re-styling, since tumblr actually has bold and italics.

Basically, the DMCA revolutionized how copyright is treated in this country in a number of ways, most relevant to the internet is that, in an effort to help combat internet piracy, the DMCA makes ISPs of any stripe liable for infringement in keeping the infringing content either accessible within their own systems or by facilitating access to the material (ie linking to it). However, when the laws were being drafted, ISPs complained that it was not they who, by and large and for the most part, were at fault, but their users. ISPs argued that, without due notification and time to respond to a possible incident of infringement, they should not be held accountable for the actions of their users, especially when no bad faith on the part of the ISP itself has been established.

As a result, we have C&D or Cease-and-Desist Letters, aka DMCA Takedown Notifications. These are a legal form of notification furnished to ISPs by rights-holders or their designated legal representatives—to inform ISPs of infringement taking place on their systems. It has to include A LOT of specific information, like when the specific incident was recorded, what specific infringing content was discovered, and relevant addresses/URLs, as well as the relevance of their bearing on this infringement (that is, proof that they actually retain the necessary rights to claim infringement in the first place). This legal notification is then used to make good- or bad-faith determinations of an ISP, since the ISP is obligated to respond to such notifications by blocking access to the specific incidents of infringement that are documented in a timely manner. Failure to do this carries negative legal consequences, however, takedown notifications are a legal tool meant only for the use of rights-holders (or their designated legal representatives) to specify valid incidents of copyright infringement as recognized by US law. Takedown notices are not meant to be used as a truncheon to compel ISPs to blindly comply with the will of the entertainment industry, such an application is, indeed, illegal under the DMCA itself, but also a violation of civil liberties. Obviously, the result is that a takedown notification is only binding when it is valid in the eyes of the law. Furthermore, ISPs are given a grace-period to evaluate and respond to takedown requests; the DMCA recognizes that ISPs might need time to implement any valid takedown request but moreover, ISPs should also be allowed to ensure that the request itself is valid.

Sadly, most ISPs are so terrified of the potential negative consequences of failing to respond to a takedown notification in a timely manner that receipt of any notice immediately prompts a block (and generally, a user reprimand), without the ISP even being bothered to verify if the notification is valid or not. This is problematic for a lot of reasons, but some ISPs are quick to defend themselves by saying that they get so many of the damned things every single day that they simply cannot afford to go through them critically. They also can’t afford to not respond to them, so they treat each and every one as a grave threat to their business, which only illustrates how demented and broken this system is. The Chilling Effects project keeps a huge listing of these things, and while I come equipped with no formal surveys of their catalogue, which itself is hopelessly incomplete, the overriding trend seems to be notices of such inferior quality as to generally render them meaningless under the law, even if they’re attempting to convey a valid incident of infringement. Just think of this for a second: if even minor ISPs get flooded with so many notices as to render them incapable of proper response, what must the applied standard for the paperwork to generate these things be? Worse still, there’s a lot of gamesmanship: there seems to be a lot of overreaching by rights-holders in claiming works which they don’t legally own, seemingly in the hope that whatever apathetic functionary implements the takedowns will give them a pass and do as they request with no legal basis.

Here, I’d just like to pause and point something out. Regardless of whether you’re a sovereign government like the US or an authoritarian regime (there are exceptions for China, since they wouldn’t deal with anybody who didn’t accede to their demands), if you want any content censored from youtube, for example, even if it’s just in your tiny, backwards banana-republic, you have to go through youtube’s legal dept. In fact, there’s one very specific person you have to go through, referred to as the gateway, in the case of youtube (once again), an International Law expert. A few years back, the US gov’t demanded that youtube remove some videos, filmed and posted by insurgents, depicting an attack on US military personnel, an attack in which these personnel are subsequently killed. The government was demanding youtube take the videos down both to spare the families of the soldiers killed in the attack and also to help deprive the insurgents of a means of disseminating materials that could damage the moral of the military, embolden enemy attacks, and potentially breach national security. Basically, the government was lobbying on every front it could to get the videos taken down. Google rebuffed them entirely. Save for China, no individual state or government maintains any kind of direct interface to youtube which would allow them to control or affect its global contents in any way, albeit local to the borders of the nation or beyond them. China does maintain such facilities, accorded them by Google itself in an enormous concession to authoritarian control, but they’re the sole exception (and honestly, if Google didn’t immediately hop down on all fours to lick Mao’s boots and stare deeply into his eyes before passionately kissing him, MS or Yahoo would have done it, anyway).

With that in mind, this is where things get downright dark. To cope with the utterly hopeless task of policing the entire internet of everything ever made by anybody, ever, many sites, particularly sites dependent on user-generated content or mass-indexing, create an automated takedown system which obviates much of the physical-paper and pathetic, perfunctory human-evaluation costs/bottle-necks. Google maintains such a system for its search-results, and an entirely independent one for the videos on youtube. Basically, prominent rights-holders (or their legal representatives) are given privileged accounts on these sites and these accounts enable them to automatically request content made available through the site be blocked. Since there’s no algorithm to determine whether or not a request is valid, there’s only two real approaches to take. One is that all such requests are added to queue of requests moderated and overseen by a human being to ensure their validity. The other is, since these are special accounts given to nobody but the biggest of international players in the entertainment industry and are basically a fairly well-kept secret, the honor system. Just about all networks, once again, default to the latter. Basically, one uses these accounts to make a request, and content disappears—instantly and with no review at all, whatsoever. True, you could be subject to prosecution for using such systems to make false requests, but such requests have occurred in the past and when they clearly weren’t in error, but intentional, no consequence has ever befallen the errant account-holder.

If I were Megaupload, in their upcoming law-suit against Universal, I’d enjoin Google as a co-defendant. Why? Well, Google’s been excessively careful to maintain the value of youtube, internationally, by not turning it into an authoritarian-pride parade in allowing governments other than China’s to do this exact thing (and even then, only within China’s own borders…well, sort of). So, if Google even makes governments bow to their discretion, isn’t what they’re doing with rights-holders merely enabling the abuses of the entertainment industry et al.? Shouldn’t they be made to share in any punishment, especially if they’ve been informed, numerous times, by the actual rights-holder that this is flagrant abuse of Google’s own system and is explicitly illegal? What’s with the double-standard, by the way; it’s okay to err against our inborn freedoms to protect theirs?

All this photo needs is a slow, gradual roll-out and this.

(Source: nilti)