startled

The Corporate Suffrage Movement

On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that political spending by corporations counts as speech deserving of First Amendment protection (NYT article). It’s an important reminder that corporations are people, too.

I just found these vintage posters from the Corporate Suffrage Movement. They seem apropos to current events.

Now that corporations are officially people even more, it’s clear now more than ever that they deserve the right to vote. That we have denied these people this basic right for so long is a travesty of justice. Each corporation should receive one vote, naturally, as it is only one person.

Remember, too, that only corporations that have reached the age of majority may vote. Google will have to wait a few more years, but Palm could be voting this November!

(With apologies to Inez Milholland and white horses everywhere.)

I think it will be some years before corporations build up the courage to run for office themselves, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see a corporation in the White House in my lifetime.

New Zealand SAS soldier

via stuff.co.nz

That this photo is a candid snapshot taken from a war zone (and not a movie poster for a summer blockbuster) is incredible. Apparently, it stirred some controversy about publishing photographs of special forces operatives, but I think they have more dangerous things to worry about, being in the special forces and all.

3 years ago

OK Go’s latest (while it’s still remotely topical)

OK Go’s latest video for “This Too Shall Pass”. And Here is an open letter from band frontman Damian Kulash explaining why it may not be visible in the embedded player above.

Fan-made music videos that outshine official versions

You’ve probably already seen the videos in this post, because they’re basically ancient now and you’re better at the internet than I am. I still feel like documenting my soft spot for fan-made videos that surpass what the band and studio had to offer.

More people have seen Jon Salmon’s video for MGMT’s “Kids” than reside in Australia. If you have managed to avoid it so far, be warned that the song contains military grade earworms.

Austin Hall’s brilliant Daft Hands started a whole subgenre of videos for Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”, of which Daft Bodies is the crowd favorite.

Some bands have figured out how to capitalize on their talented fans. Modest Mouse held a contest to create the official video for “Missed the Boat”. They supplied some footage of the band and asked their listeners to get cracking. My favorite entry was by Max Tyrie, who created an animation using 4,133 photocopies from the footage. His prize for not winning was a DMCA takedown request from Sony Music Entertainment (you can still find it out there, but for how long?)

M83 hosted a similar contest for their single, “We Own the Sky”. This entry, by Luke Ewing and Samm Hodges, didn’t win either. It has cinematography, and also the crazy.

Perhaps you know of others?

First-person Tetris

It’s like you’re really playing Tetris in your living room! I do not recommend night mode, it’s a little too realistic.

http://firstpersontetris.com/

Blogging about blogging

My mom recently asked me, “What’s your favorite online social networking service?”

After thinking a few moments, I replied “Email.”

I’ve never had much presence on the web, even though it should have been easy to. I learned HTML a pretty long time ago, from a book that described the <TABLE> tag as a soon-to-be-released feature. Fancy web skills in hand, I managed to miss the dot-com boom pretty good. If I’d been paying attention, I could have struggled to attain some sort of fleeting on-paper millionaire status for a doomed online pet food delivery concern. I guess I went to college instead.

My point is, I’ve been around the internet long enough that I feel bad not having a real blog-type thing. But during the years where I was busy making fun of “blog” for being a stupid neologism, the online social space got complicated. Things used to be easy: if you wanted stuff on the web, you wrote some HTML files and you FTP’d them to the server. Maybe you had a fancy Perl script to make it easy to update the “news” page. Every now and then, some root exploit hosed your unpatched Red Hat install, and then you restored your site from draft versions recovered off an old hard drive. Things were so much simpler then!

Now, I’m paralyzed by choice. I’m not sure how many accounts I have on how many services. When I have something to say, should I post it on Facebook? Twitter? FriendFeed? LiveJournal? Something else? Heck, even Friendster periodically wakes up long enough to spit out some new terms of service notification. I guess they’re still in the market to be the hub of my social graph, too.

Burdened with accounts on multiple fancy Web 2.0 services, I start to worry about ridiculous things. Like, what happens if FriendFeed cross-posts to Twitter, and then Twitter updates to Facebook, will Facebook post the same message back to FriendFeed again? Is it possible to create a self-perpetuating loop if I add Google Reader into the mix?

See? Complicated. You know what’s easy? Sending email.

Now, with my elaborate justification of blogging laziness in place, I’m ready to try an experiment. See, Posterous lets me pretend that I’m just writing email, but when I hit send it’ll get posted to all the usual places. As a nice bonus, I get to compose using Gmail drafts on whatever computer I’m sitting near, which seems pretty swell. If this thing works, I might even post more than once this year. Maybe I’ll even write about something interesting.