"It’s a weird place to be, feeling like you have succeeded, only to get to the point where you literally have zero idea what to do anymore."
I felt exactly like this in 2008, although my definition of "success" was getting SYFY out the door.
Stargate and Ester Dean, Making Music Hits : The New Yorker. Oh na-na, what's my name? I knew that most pop hits were constructed like this these days, but it's fascinating to read a play-by-play like this article. Also, never heard of a "top-liner" until now.
When you hear somebody go "well of course he could do it, he's Kevin Smith"—those same assholes, before I did it, were like "it's never gonna work, it's dumb, he crazy". And then when it worked, they didn't go like "you know what? we were wrong"—instead they say "well only he could do it because he's Kevin Smith" and I say horseshit.
It's always tempting to attribute someone's success to where they are right now, as if the previous 10-20 years of taking risks and doing the scary hard work didn't count for anything.
The web is all about self-expression. Choose your words from the dropdowns and you're on your way to cranky punditry:
Ever since came along there are way too many cluttering up with their .
Um, just because technology makes something doesn't mean everyone should do it. How is the actual "good" stuff going to be among all this garbage anyway?
Whatever happened to good old-fashioned ?
I'm .
Please, the internet is full of too many things! STOP ENABLING ALL THE THINGS, INTERNET
The 2nd-annual KRACKLEFEST is soon upon us! Below is the email I sent to friends, family and co-workers -- it pretty much tells you all you need to know. If you're coming to Seattle for ECCC, come let us rock you.
As part of the upcoming Emerald City Comic Con, my nerd-rock band Kirby Krackle is throwing the 2nd annual KRACKLEFEST at the Hard Rock Cafe on Friday, March 30th.
Last year's KRACKLEFEST was off the chain, off the hook, um, off its meds, etc. with a full house of fans singing along and getting their faces rocked off with totally not-lame songs about comics and video games, executed with enough energy and precision to power the next Mars mission. This year we're upping the ante with guest performances by nerdcore rapper Adam WarRock (The Parks & Rec EP, the Browncoats EP) and traveling nerdy songwriter Marian Call.
Come watch our singer Kyle lead the crowd in a sing-along to the Konami Code while avoiding sprained ankles during his patented stage jumps. If you're planning on attending ECCC this year you won't want to miss out!
KRACKLEFEST 2012
Kirby Krackle w/ Adam Warrock & Marian Call
Hard Rock Cafe Seattle
Friday, Mar 30, 2012 9:00 PM (8:00 PM Doors)
$8 advance / $10 at the door, 21 and over
I forgot to mention that last week Kirby Krackle released a "story cut" version of our "World Full Of Heroes" video (see the original video here). This version features some "real-life" superheroes and fans who volunteered to be in the video. Pretty sweet!
I only ask you, friends of the Internet, as a creator and consumer of culture, to not confuse your enthusiasm for a thing—expressed in tweets and tumbls and comments and torrents and downloads and upthumbs and gifs—with actual support for a thing that you want to last.
And if you want that thing to last, that means supporting it in the way that, for better or for worse, it makes its money: watching it as it airs, buying tickets to it when it comes out, buying it when it is available, seeing it when it comes to town.
I agree. But something nags: is it our fault that TV networks insist on using metrics that are so out of alignment with how people choose to watch shows today? Is it our fault that we now express our appreciation for quality entertainment through clicks, likes, tweets and pins? The snarky gremlin on my shoulder wants to say "well, what did you expect would happen when you put your television show on television?"
I'd never even heard of Community until I heard it mentioned in this interview with Bill Murray. Even then, another year passed before my wife put it in our Netflix queue. We gobbled up the first two seasons and I bought a Season 3 pass on iTunes so we could catch up to the season currently airing. It's a brilliant, brilliant show.
There eventually has to be a better way to help shows like Community survive than to watch them with full commercials during its time slot. That doesn't feel like supporting the show -- that feels like supporting television watching. We just don't roll like that anymore.
Really, I think that state of mind is all the copy protection any creator needs these days.
Awhile ago I was listening to a podcast interview with Patton Oswalt, and the discussion turned to other comedians who had stolen his jokes. He basically said he didn't care. Which is the same reaction that Louis CK had when people were stealing his jokes. Remember, Louis CK regularly nukes his entire repertoire and starts again from nothing.
Neither guy really cared, because the next morning they were gonna get up, put on the coffee pot, and sit down and write twenty more jokes, and maybe five of them would be any good, and maybe one would be gold but still not make the cut. But they'd likely be twenty jokes ahead of the Mr. Steals-His-Jokes of the world.
And just like you don't become a Patton Oswalt by sweating stolen jokes, you don't become a Richard Stevens by freaking out over who might be grubbing your online comic for free.
Back in January, Kirby Krackle got to check another item off our collective to-do list: our first "performance video" that didn't portray us as animated cartoon characters! We crammed our gear into the Comic Stop in Redmond and played through "I Wanna Live In A World Full Of Heroes" while filmmakers Garret and Jill orbited the room with fancy camera gear.
HEY I'M NOT DEAD YOU GUYS I just took a blogging break for most of the last month. Last week Megan and I went to Palm Springs and Joshua Tree for a much, much, much-needed break from the Pacific Northwest winter gloom. It turned out to be an ideal place for someone like me who likes to evenly divide vacation time between wilderness adventure and lazing in a hammock by a pool with a book and beverage. I took the above photo while hiking a short loop trail only a mile or two from our hotel.
So much has happened since my last post: Kin to Stars played our third show and kind of struggled through it; Kirby Krackle shot a video (more on that later) and kicked off a West Coast tour with nerdcore rapper Adam Warrock (we, the live band, only played the Seattle and Portland shows before Kyle struck off solo); Explone snagged an opening slot for The Jealous Sound here in Seattle, and were confirmed to open for one of my favorite heavy bands, King's X, until their drummer was suddenly hospitalized and their tour canceled, yikes! So that's off for now.
This weekend Explone headlines Friday night at the King Cat Theater (which I'm pretty sure will be torn down afterward to make more buildings for Amazon.com) and Kin to Stars plays a THREE HOUR show at The HUB in Tacoma on Saturday.
In addition, we had electricians come out and drill holes into our house. Would you like to see my house in cross-section? Well here it is anyway:
Matt Haughey recounts how he almost lost the business he'd been running for over a decade due to a bogus copyright claim:
"The formal retraction took nearly two weeks to secure and convince lawyers for my host that it was adequate for removing the DMCA claim. That's two weeks into a 30 day window before I lost my rack of servers and hosting account completely. I'll never forget last year when I went through this because it was two of the stupidest weeks of my life, all because of some problematic laws granted new powers to copyright holders and I had to engage in a prolonged legal fight thanks to a mistake made by a bot."
This is my personal nightmare scenario: I get slapped with a DMCA takedown because one of my song titles resembles another song title, or one of my legally licensed cover songs attracts the attention of some label's lawyers (or worse, a web-crawling robot script they employ), and I'd have to make a difficult and/or expensive choice.
It seems that these US copyright bills always start with "protecting our intellectual property" and end with "keeping you from knowing, doing or saying things we don't want you to know, do or say."
I'd like to believe that the Stop Online Piracy (STOP) and Protect IP (PIPA) bills would only be used to target "rogue" "foreign" infringing websites, as the authors and supporters contend. But that's naïve, because the copyright laws we have now are already being abused.
