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.
Seattle is currently under a sheet of snowy ice! The back door to my house is literally frozen shut and I've been housebound for three days. Luckily I have soup, grilled cheese, a couch-cushion fort to keep away the ice weasels, and the new Kin to Stars single cookin' up. We're performing our third-show ever at the newly-relocated Wayward Coffee in Seattle on January 28th. Details are here on the Facebooks. Hopefully we'll all be thawed out by then.
In other news, I'm promoting snowgnarok as an alternative to snowpocalypse and snowmaggedon, which are both totally played. Please help draw attention to this campaign by changing your Twitter avatar to a light shade of completely white.
I've decided that I don't hate the new Van Halen song and video. The song is 100% not-great VH but all the familiar elements are there, except for maybe Wolfgang.
Beyond the fact that I couldn't stop singing "sexy dragon magiiic!" under my breath for a few hours, this song and video had very little impact on me, other than what I expect from any other viral media thing. I consumed it as I do all media these days: in front of a computer screen, with headphones on. I watched, I was amused, I moved on.
I was not sitting at a computer screen with headphones on when I first heard Van Halen's "Summer Nights." Instead, I was in a car with my high school buddies, on one of the last days of the school year. It was almost summer, finally warm enough to go without a jacket, and we were cruising around the sticks listening to FM radio. Van Halen had just released 5150, Sammy Hagar had replaced Diamond Dave and we were all LOSING OUR MINDS over it.
And when my buddy Jeff jammed the cassette of 5150 into the car's stereo and the opening chords of "Summer Nights" started playing, we pulled up alongside another car at a red light and Pat began rolling the windows down so the occupants could see us stick our heads out just in time to shout out in goofy fist-pumping unison with Sammy:
UHN!
And then peel away, rolling the windows up like nothing happened.
I'm holding out hope that as digital music moves to mobile, away from screens and headphones, there'll be more chances for things that are momentarily interesting to become really awesome moments for someone.
"During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as 'undeliverable,' and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost."
As the story of Lakhdar Boumediene's experience at Guantanamo winds its way across the internet, all I can think of is everyone who told me that if people were being held in that place, there were probably good reasons for it, because if there weren't they wouldn't be in Guantanamo. How ridiculous to think so.
A long time ago I got called for jury duty and spent two days hanging around a city courthouse. To my surprise, I got selected for a trial. During the voir dire phase of juror selection, the defense and prosecuting attorneys took turns asking us questions intended to determine if any of us were unfairly prejudiced, crazy or just extra unhappy to be there.
The defense attorney singled me out. He gestured at the defendant. "Obviously he's done something wrong, or he wouldn't be here, right?"
Of course, the answer to this is no -- in fact it is his right to be here, to have a trial at which to plead his case. Because, allegedly, that's how we roll in the US of A, no matter how sensationalized your story has become. The defendant had probably spent a single evening in the county lockup that previous night, and I could see it in his expression: thank God I am here.
