Month: August 2012

Domain switch.

I switched my domain. It took a few hours, many Googlings of error messages, and a couple mini heart attacks. As a non-techie, it feels so satisfying when you can successfully carry something out that involves a digital task that breaks out of the bounds of the comfy, squishy user interface that I’m usually lazily bundled inside. I’m also always amazed at how magic command line interfaces seem…when you can move files around, install things, do this and that, from just a few swipes at the keyboard. I wish I could make more time to become fluent in it.

Anyway, my old domain name, “Pragmalogi”, was just a random word I made out of the concept Pragmatism. I have a few more variations of it that I made when I had my William-James-life-epiphany-moment last year. I sort of have a minor problem buying domains…sometimes, sadly, in lieu of actually getting a project done. Buying the domain for a project seems to make it come alive in a way that feels constructive in the most counterproductive way.

Now my website’s hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech.Net instead of DreamHost. Woohoo!

 

 

giving birth to an infographic

I’ve been recently consumed by our campaign against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. I could tell you what’s wrong with it here, but I’d much rather spend the rest of my evening running my brain spigot on some other things.

I’ve heard some critique of infographics, including the assertion that they don’t interpret or analyze information in any meaningful way. After having worked on this for a grueling 3 months with lots of starts and stops however, it made me value them in a different way. It’s especially true for EFF, where we value creative disposition pretty highly in relation to legal accuracy, but the process of simplifying and condensing many elaborate compound problems without sacrificing any factual integrity to ambiguity is extremely difficult. But it’s also really really important.

I don’t think most people who create infographics necessarily seek to add new insight (see: data visualization). The point is to just narrow and sculpt the information into a single visual/conceptual frame that allows a broader audience of people to understand the essence of a given issue. If that can be achieved by throwing facts into some fancy typography, mixing in a few illustrations, and composing it together with a color scheme? Then wonderful!

In short, this was one of the most anxiety-inducing, time-consuming things I’ve ever done as an EFFer. On the other hand, it’s one of the things I’m most proud of having worked on.

Man, it's August.

 

I think about what to post here on my personal blog *at least* a dozen times a day: something overheard, a photo taken, sudden haiku, a story I want to transform into a short comic, whatever. But somehow getting myself to sit down actually writing or posting any of it is so fucking difficult.

When I do get to it, I invariably start these a few hours before the Iron Blogger deadline… and so here I am, sleepy and frustrated that all the potential writing/drawing/posting that I’d been daydreaming about have again fallen victim to the procrastination demons. Aye.

Sooo…I’m gonna go ahead and give a real quick life update as a tanka and post some photos from the last few weeks:

 

~

mini vacations

warm mountains, music, and home

flurry of summer

a coming full-on battle

against a beast agreement

~

 

 

Lunch after reaching the top of Vernal Falls // Yosemite

Mariana // Yosemite

Frances // Yosemite

EFF bike ride // Moss Beach

Skrillex // Golden Gate Park

Post-Outside Lands // Golden Gate Park

Mom and Hanami // Pasadena

Now for some sleep.

It's been bothering me…

a question

arising out of 45+ hrs a week reading, researching, writing, and thinking about intellectual property policy, combined with the incessant disquiet I feel by knowing that we’re in a growing global crisis over resources and economic value. The objective of this game was never scientific, creative progress or human sustainability, it’s the control over capital and material wealth. The ever-changing rules are laid out in such a way that rewards political and social manipulation over mutual thoughtfulness or regard.

This is the Capitalism game. How does intellectual property fit into it?

I know they’re connected. The worst intellectual property policies have been fueled by the need to preserve monopolies over creative capital at the expense of human rights and progress. From inception to execution, no reasonable person could empirically describe the kinds of intellectual property laws that have or have been attempted to pass as rules that could ever work to “promote progress” in society.

This is still working itself out in my head. And it’s very late.