Categories
Free Culture Satire

Noney

Second Life allows you to set a “non-transferrable” flag on objects. This means that if someone buys the object they cannot then re-sell it.

In the real world you can re-sell things that you buy. It’s only with the event of software and digital media that companies are trying to get around this with end-user licenses and DRM.

As this Guardian article argues, if companies want to sell you songs that evaporate when you stop paying for them, the companies should be willing to accept money that evaporates when they stop giving you access to the music you have paid for.

And it should be the same for Second Life. So I propose Noney. Noney is like money, only not transferrable. If someone sells you an object and insists on making it non-transferrable, they should be willing to accept payment on the same basis.

Anyone who isn’t a hypocrite and who asks for n Linden Dollars payment for something non transferrable will gladly accept n Nonies. They can have as much Noney as they like, but they cannot transfer it, only destroy it when they get tired of it or decide they are fed up with it.

Just need to upload various denomination textures and script the notes. Or possiby a gift voucher. 🙂

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Categories
Free Culture

Lots Of Cool Stuff From Creative Commons

iCommons is being launched as an international focus for commons activism:

http://www.icommons.org/ (link not yet live)

And cc.com is being launched as a way for artists to make money from their cc-licensed work.

(Updated: CC.com is a concept, not a URL. Thanks Mike! )

Given all this good stuff, now is a good time to help CC reach their sponsorship target for this year:

Support CC

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Categories
Free Culture

Magnatune: Less Evil Than Sony

A freeloader complains about Magnatune introducing a nagware policy for their noncommercial offerings:

Magnatune: We’re not as evil as we could be

If you don’t want a company to introduce nagware, buy their products once in a while.

Magnatune show either great chutzpah or the negative effects of speed reading by misrepresenting Lessig and Stallman to claim that noncommercial nagware is helping to build the commons:

Magnatune’s thoughts on the article

Ugh.

There are many fine copyleft record labels who are building a real cultural commons. Loca and OpSound for example.

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Categories
Generative Art Projects

DorkbotLondon

I gave a talk about Minara to around 100 people on Monday at Dorkbot London 33.

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(Click on image for bigger version.)

People asked questions and I managed to recode the window creation in the two minutes I had between the previous talk and my one. I feel that both these facts show I’m on to something. 🙂

No more Minara hacking until April now, when it’s time to tackle picking.

Dorkbot London is absolutely amazing. Alex and Saul have created something wonderful.

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Categories
Free Culture

Flickr Not Hosting Drawngs?

Via Boing Boing:

I emailed flickr and they told me that flickr is for PHOTOS ONLY

Anyone for sketchr?

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Categories
Generative Art

Second Life

If you could register for Second Life and put your referrer down as “Yarrel Fox” that would be great.

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What?

Uh.

Second life is interesting because it simulates a strong IP regime. Indeed since property in the game is intellectual property, there is no difference between IP and physical property in the game. It has a monetary system, and this in tandem with the IP/property system works to incentivise creativity as promised in real life. This is the perfect example of something proving what it’s meant to prove. But it also, unintentionally, shows just what a consensual hallucination any kind of property system is.

That’s Y-a-r-r-e-l F-o-x. Thanks. I get a thousand Linden Dollars for each referral, you see.

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Aesthetics Free Culture

Joy Garnett in Harpers

The excellent Joy Garnett has some images in Harper’s for January 2006:

Chris Ashley on this

I haven’t seen Joy’s paintings in real life, but she makes them available as high resolution digital images under a creative commons noncommercial-sharealike license:

Strange Weather

It was seeing her paintings in this way that convinced me of the quality of her work and the rightness of JoyWar. I’d love to see her work for real. A copy of Harper’s will have to do for now…

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Generative Art

Pixel Sumo

One of the main speakers at dorkbotlondon 33 was Chris O’Shea, whose generative art weblog pixelsumo has a write-up of the event:

pixelsumo .

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Categories
Projects

Minara Opendork Notes

Basics

A tool for generative 2D graphics inspired by Emacs.

“A programmable graphics program editor.”

Minara Is Not A Recursive Acronym. And apparently “minara” means “lighthouse” in one language.

Written in a little C and lots of Scheme, using OpenGL (GLUT). Runs on Mac & Linux so far.

The tools and the software are written in the same language as the graphics files. Simple & unified.

So not like Inkscape or Illustrator, which split implementation/tool/graphics language.

Open and customisable all the way down.

Drawing

Pen.

Shapes.

Zoom, pan, panic.

Undo/redo.

Colour.

Development

Opening the file in an external editor, editing, reloading.

Opening .minara file in an external editor, editing, reloading.

Can develop and edit tools whilst running the application and editing graphics.

Simple Generative Stuff

Subjects.

Random Walk.

ToDo

Picking, copy, paste.

Bezier pen.

Version 0.1 planned for next August.

Categories
Projects

Minara Minibuffers

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Minibuffers work, minimally. As the text I typed says, just char entry, deleting and ok/cancel. Delete autorepeat and left/right keys should work when those events are enabled. No cursor, although that could be implemented (probably as an asterisk or a | ?).

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