tychoish, now without a net

I don’t tend to write a lot about the music that I listen to/participate in, I have sort of obscure tastes by contemporary standards, and have been known to go on somewhat eccentrically. In any case, I wanted to write briefly about two different kinds of “good music:” the great song, and the “desert island album.”

Great songs are songs that I love to listen to on endless repeat. I’ve spent, literally days listening to a single song, they’re songs that I know most of the lyrics to (though interestingly the songs I like to sing with other people aren’t always the same “great songs.”) Here’s a tentative list, in no particular order:

• Louis Killen’s singing of “The Leaving of Liverpool.”
• Finest Kind’s singing of “The Rose in June” (My dad, by contrast hates this song because it’s too religious and it “takes him too long to drown,” I think it’s a good song in any case.)
• Martin Simpson’s “Love Never Dies,” from the Righteousness and Humidity Album.
• Joni Mitchell’s “Case of You” (though “For Free” is a close second).
• Richard Thompson’s “Andalus/Radio Marrakesh” (The first tune on this list, and though I like a lot of tunes, this one is amazing.)
• Rufus Wainwright’s “Hallelujah” (with due respects to Jeff Buckely, actually it’s a tie, and Wainright, very rightly cribs from Bukley.) This song shares a brain cell with Josh Ritter’s “Harrisburg,” thanks to an old roommate, and I think I might like this song more, but in any case.
• Michelle Shocked’s “Come a Long Way,”
• The Kippling/Bellamy (by anyone) “A Pilgrim’s Way”

Desert Island Albums are something completely different, Judy and some other people started playing around with the question “what’s the album you’d take to a desert island, if you could only take 1?” I think we decided that it couldn’t be done in less than three, but never the less, there are some albums which are just divine as complete entities in themselves, and this doesn’t necessarily overlap with the great song category very much. Here’s a tentative list of my desert island albums (order not important):

• Nic Jones’ The Noah’s Arc Trap (this is Judy’s suggestion, and I agree completely.)
• Eliza Carthy’s Rough Music (It’s her latest)
• Jethro Tull’s Thick as A Brick
• Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run
• Martin Simpson’s The Bramble Briar
• Brian McNeil’s Back of the North Wind
• Fairport Convention’s What we did on our Holidays

I think the former category is more subjective than the later, albeit only slightly. Do you have any good suggestions that I might have left off.

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tagged: media

So these Creative Commons Licenses are pretty popular with the kids today. And they are. Creative commons is a great way to compensate for some of the short fallings of the contemporary copyright system that tends to privilege corporations rather than individual content creators. I’m a big fan, and I often find myself talking about the goodness that is CC in the world, so this is not a critique of the copyleft movement or anything, but rather a critique of the mood that a specific kind of Creative Commons license.

Lets back up. The basic idea of a creative commons license is to grant permissions to do things like distribute/share or create derivative works (e.g., video adaptations, audio books, fan fiction, and so forth.) which under a standard copyright would be infringing behavior and technically illegal. In some situations this seems perfectly absurd, after all if someone likes your work enough to put creative energy into a related project, they’re probably not the kind of people you want to sue. Creative Commons licenses amend this situation by explicitly allowing behavior that doesn’t harm the creators business model.¹ The hope is that by explicitly allowing certain kinds of usage, “the commons” benefits, and possibly as a secondary effect the original creator benefits even more (by gaining greater attention and then selling more of whatever it is that they sell.)

Creative Commons gives you lots of options in terms of licensing, so that you can customize whatever you want. You can allow commercial usage (like the GNU-GPL and the GFDL which wikipedia uses)², you can choose to allow derivative works (or not) or as long as the derivatives are distributed under a compatible licensee (”Share Alike;” this is akin to the “viral” aspect of the GPL), and you can choose to require attribution with all future distributions or allow people to distribute without attribution. Or any combination of the above.

One combination that I’ve seen a lot of recently forbids commercial use, forbids derivative works, and allows redistribution with attribution. This is probably the most restrictive CC option around, and it seems to be the default. This isn’t in and of itself a bad thing, this is a great license for anthologies where the producer of the specific work might not have total control over all the works–for instance–or other works where it’s really crucial for the body of work remain together as a unit. I don’t think it makes a particularly good general purpose license. In effect what it says is “I own it, and if you want to do my marketing work for me, thanks–not that you would have asked anyway, and not that I would have complained elswise–sorry if you want to do anything more…” While it’s a step in the right direction, I’m not sure that the gift to the commons is very great.

I think I’d be more comfortable if the derivative-attribution were more default for more people, with or without the share-alike. It just strikes me that the really exciting thing about CC is the clauses allowing derivative works. Particularly with attribution and no-commercial clauses, the derivative works do nothing to hurt the original creator that I can possibly fathom, and are often a boon to the original creators. Most importantly, it seems that the opportunity to inspire new work and/or act as a substrate for new work is a huge gift to the commons.

So I guess what I’m objecting to is the sort of feeling of being put-upon as the the only benefit of the license is doing a favor for the creator. Which hardly seems fair, particularly if the creator is also selling the content in some capacity. Creative Commons, at the core–at least for me–is about creating a more cooperative/collaborative relationship between creators and consumers, and the no-derivatives license seems to run counter to that.

Just my gut feeling, I apologize if it’s a little raw. I think in fairness I’m not entirely sure that the ramifications of this work are always very thought out, that people assume a connection between commercial use and derivatives, or something, so I don’t think a lot of creators are always making this decision based on all the facts, but I think it’s paramount that when people use Creative Commons and other free licences that they think about all of the ramifications.

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tagged: interwebs • media • technology • writing

I mentioned last week that I had been thinking about getting a new set of headphones for my birthday, but I managed to fix the cord on my old headphones in a spectacular sort of way, and came to the conclusion that I only have one head, and didn’t need two sets of headphones.

I have a similar sort of story from a few days ago…

The astute among you will notice that I’ve been at least a little interested in getting my act together to do a podcast for a while. I’ve done radio before, I’ve done some sound engineering, and it would be cool to bring these experiences together with my internet/blogging/reading fascination. I think it would let me interact with a larger/different audience, and it just seems like fun. I’ve also avoided doing a podcast for a long time because I’ve always felt that my poor old computer was too overburdened and the cheapish USB mics that been able to try out all sucked to my ear¹ I’d and a litany of other excuses.

Anyway, I thought I’d solved my problems with the discovery of this a pretty nifty digital audio recorder, with good mics, which makes up for what it lacks in ruggedness with versatility, and economy. I figured that if I didn’t really need to do anything other than upload the file with my computer it could handle it.

I should interject that at the moment, I’m most interested in doing a podcast in the school of cory doctorow, which is “turn on a mic, and record for 20 to 40 minutes and then post it on the internet.” Anyway, I thought a portable recorder would be the ideal situation for this sort of problem…

On a whim I hooked up the USB mic–that I had tried and failed to use for years–to the computer and…. Hot damn. It worked. Really well. This my friends, is why accepting for wool, books and tea, I don’t really get much new stuff. I always manage to make the old stuff work. Even if I do like toys.

So nix the portable option, I’ll–when I have time–and it’ll be a few weeks, I’ll probably begin putting together a podcast… Nothing formal, and at the moment it’s a second string project, but it’s on my mind, maybe it could be on yours as well.

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So I think I’ve finally gotten into reading The Left Hand of Darkness, so I think this attempt at reading it will be successful. I’ve posted my feminist sf post about difference, spurred on by starting to read this book (again).

The post ponders the ways that feminist SF approaches and resolves issues surrounding “difference,” does feminist (or) SF say, “look here are people that are different,” and then look at all the ways that difference leads to disparity (as cyberpunk and other dystopias tend to,) or the way that differences (between, say men and women) pale in comparison to the differences between aliens and human, (Which strikes me as a little assimilationist). I’m not sure what the “answer” is, but if we had answers, we wouldn’t have a blog…

In other media consumption news, while I posted my thoughts on BSG and torchwood, I’m also more slowly working my way through Jeremiah, a show written by JMS, the same guy who write Babylon 5. While I like the concept, and I think it’s a fun show, I’m ten episodes in, and the pacing of the story feels “off.” The episodic story lines aren’t that gripping, and the story arch moves too slowly. As I think about it, Babylon 5 was probably the same way, but there are seemingly more space opera stories than there are, post-apocalyptic dystopian stories.

In the end this means that I’ve had a hard time mustering the proper entertainment materials to get me through the dark tunnel part of this knitting. Surely there are NCIS episodes or some such that I haven’t seen. I’ll post more about the sweater later. TV recommendations are most welcome.

Onward and Upward!

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tagged: media • reading • science fiction

I just watched the season finale of Torchwood, and the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica, season 4.

Oh. My. G-d.

Torchwood was amazing. I felt Ianto could have been less catatonic in the last moment, but it was really nice. James Masters was perfect. The last few torchwood eps were really poorly written–in my view–but this one was good.

And Battlestar. Oh BSG. This was an episode that basically said “we’re back,” but nothing happened, which was frustrating. But the last episode in season 3 was so incredibly powerful, so it’s not particularly surprising that the emotional energy wasn’t as strong, particularly since we’ve all had so long for the tension to build.

Ok, I’m done being a fan, your more usual tychoish will return tomorrow. While generally I think spoilers are a bad thing to post without warning on the internet, I think the comments to this entry should be fair game for spoilers if anyone has them…

Onward and Upward!

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As I promised earlier, here is the draft of the “terms” that I want to include as part of my pattern for the shawl. It seems reasonable, and it seems to reflect my interests in both promoting freedom and the open exchange of ideas, but more importantly in making it completely clear that I’m not writing this pattern out of philanthropy.

The truth is that by refusing to restrict downloads giving away copies of this pattern means that more and more people will be able to see the pattern and this blog (which is, in the long term, good for me and my pocketbook). The basic idea is that, only a certain percentage of people are going to pay anyway, and with luck by unrestricting the download, more people will see the pattern, and therefore a great number of people will pay. I think/hope the economics work out, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

In any case, below the fold, you’ll see a copy of the draft of the statement of this idea. Please give feedback and commentary either in the comments or via email. I look forward to hearing form you.

Continue reading Pattern Terms

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tagged: hypertext • interwebs • knitting • media