But I am doing more shit than ever! So go over to Not About Twinkies and check out the beginnings of the magic Gaz and I are working.
It is certainly not the same stuff that I write here, but I am hoping you will enjoy it nonetheless. And then, when we have our system down, I will properly get back to my writing.
And, of course keep up with my Twitter and Google+. I am always updating one of those.
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It has been an extended period of unemployment for me now. A truly unfortunate amount of time, especially from the landlord’s perspective. In desperation I have spent a lot of time filling out applications online for anyone who will take them.
Prior to this evening, there was one question that always stumped me. Most box stores have a series of questions that you can rate from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” Generally they are along the lines of “I am always punctual when I have some place to be” or “I often get angry with coworkers for their inability to do a goddamn simple task like straightening shelves because they are fatally flawed Neanderthals.” Run of the mill hourly worker personality test. Until you come across this:
“It angers me when guilty criminals get set free on technicalities.”
This is some left field, mind breaking shit. You are cruising along, clicking all the answers The Man wants to read when you come across Bill O’Reilly’s sneak attack pop quiz. Unlike any previous or following question, it appears in the questionnaires of many major companies. Possibly thrown in to make sure you were paying attention, it was the marker for the excrutiating idiocy of online applications. Until this evening.
When I decided to fill out a Starbucks application.
I sure hope Starbucks paid Timothy Leary good money to come up with this brain busting test. Because he earned them the WTF, Shitball Nutty Employer award.
Are we playing One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other with only two choices?! I can be motivated or I can be interesting, but I can’t be both?!
Being a coffee shop, instinct would tell me to pick out all the freebird, arty choices. But Starbucks has a strict no visible tattoos, piercings or dignity policy.
So which am I, punctual or graceful? I just don’t fucking know.
Whichever gets me a paycheck, I guess.
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For kicks and to make some beer money, I recently opened a Zazzle shop. I had an old Cafe Press shop, but I long ago stopped putting money into it, so they stopped offering me services. I thought I had all those old shirt designs backed up, but it seems they were lost in the Great Computer Meltdown of ’010. Still, I had a couple of designs, so I decided to roll with what I had.
In putting up designs, I took the time to digitize one of my favorite paintings: Mickey Guevara.
This is one of my favorite personal works. I think it says a lot. I also think it falls under the Fair Use provision for Parody.
Although a parody can be considered a derivative work under United States Copyright Law, it can be protected from claims by the copyright owner of the original work under the fair use doctrine, which is codified in 17 U.S.C.§ 107. The Supreme Court of the United States stated that parody “is the use of some elements of a prior author’s composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on that author’s works.” That commentary function provides some justification for use of the older work.
That is what Wikipedia tells us anyway.
Wikipedia's hard-hitting example of parody.
I did far more research than Wikipedia before I decided to post this image. Because I happened to notice that Disney is quite a contributor to Zazzle. After much exploring, I determined my work arguably fell under Fair Use guidelines. Only muddied by the fact that it is also a statement on the sale of Che Guevara’s iconic image, which could potentially put it beneath the unprotected classification of satire.
Still, as equal parts Mickey and Che and a statement on both, I thought I was golden.
Disney disagreed.
It did not even take them 12 hours to get my shirt pulled. I purposefully did not tag the shirt with any Disney names or trademarks in the simple effort to lay low. While I felt I was safe, I didn’t feel it astute to draw attention to myself. Disney is really, really “protective” of their works and they appear to wield the leash of some sort of infringement sniffing hellhound.
Zazzle offers little in the way of arguing my case. Which, quite frankly, I don’t blame them for. Not only are they a for-profit business, but they are also a free service. Disney seems to be a help in their profit that allows them to continue to be free and I am not Van Gogh or Banksy or even a dude who makes a living painting tacky hotel room portraits. I am a little guy with a low traffic blog as my soap box.
So I intend to continue selling my wares through Zazzle as they afford me great opportunity to allow my creations to see the light of day. But I am still a little miffed at the Disney kerfuffle. I understand in a time where piracy is a few clicks away that companies are rightfully protective. Plenty of people would try to use the Mickey Mouse on Zazzle not artistically, but to make a quick buck by just posting his iconic image. As a late night creature of the internet, I see plenty of people blatantly remove watermarks from creative works and add their own to stake lazy, undeserved claim. And that sucks. I am waiting for the day where one of my original images shows back up with not only a lack of accreditation but someone else outright labeling it as their own.
This is a risk I take. A risk Disney certainly does not as an established brand. It would just be nice if they could be a little more lenient with some of us peasant folk. If Disney would allow it, I would sell Mickey Guevara on Zazzle with absolutely no profits coming my way. Just so my work could exist outside of pixels.
Since that won’t happen, I have tirelessly worked on a new, legal creation: Mikey (the legally distinct) Mouse.
He is still obviously a sketch, but I intend to spend my evening digitizing him, adding a little protest text and putting him up for sale. I am sick of reading about bin Laden and the rest of the internet isn’t, so I have time to be petty and spiteful like this.
In the meantime, if you want a Mickey Guevara shirt, email me and I will screenprint you one by hand. Once I have money, I will be restocking my Etsy store with them. Also, I hope to frequently add new designs to the Zazzle shop, so check back.
Viva la revolucion!
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You have a business, a brand, a message. You want to get this message out there to as many people as possible. And I have a very hairy chest.
Wait. What?! How do those two things go together? Let me tell you!
It is hard to successfully market a product these days. A generation of kids who don’t even notice side bar ads. People are complacent to buses painted in a gigantic advertising ploy. You need to be fresh and original and have people say “holy fuck” in order to get your message out there. With beach season upon us, what better way to do that then with your logo shaved into my chest hair?
It seems kooky, right? But what is going to make more sheeple think about Big Macs? An old and tired billboard effort or some goofball parading up and down in front of all the beautiful beach people with the Golden Arches shaved into his chest hair?
“Honey, is that… is that a guy with the McDonald’s logo shaved into his chest hair?”
“WTF?! It is!”
“Well isn’t that a strange site. Maybe we’re both high. That would explain it. I don’t remember smoking pot this morning. But now I have the munchies and a dollar. Doesn’t McDonald’s have a dollar menu?”
BAM!! Instant sales!
Sure, this seems like a marketing campaign fashioned for Nair, but I believe it can work for any company. Act now, and I can do this one time and one time only for just YOUR COMPANY!
That’s right. For the largest amount of money I will be loyal to your company. Add a little more to that pile of bullions and I will video tape it and turn it viral for you. I can be your Isaiah Mustafa (sans beauty and cut torso)!
When the viral video works out, you have your very own Can You Hear Me Now Guy and we can tour the country, we can make commercials, we can even do a sex tape. All with your logo cut into my chest hair.
Hell, I am so desperate for money at this point, I would even become the Apple Chest Hair Goofball. So, Steve Jobs, when you decide to get over that whole “sleek and sexy” product look, you contact me. Because this shit could be magical.
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I spend an unfortunate amount of time on the internet. Why? Because I have a knowledge addiction.
Or that is what I tell myself.
The internet is at it’s most beautiful when you realize how it truly spreads the information to anyone with a cell phone or a dial-up. Free to wander through the interpipes and leak onto anyone’s desktop. One day a bunch of smart guys said “we need to be smarter together faster and from further distances” so they turned off their gramophones, laid some fiber and the internet was born. Slowly growing and making both knowledge and Wikipedia free to travel seemingly infinite distances within mere seconds.
That is why I love the Tumblr and the Twitter. There is so much art. There is so much news. There is so much technical information. THE BEAUTIFUL MEMES!! So much stuff that earlier ages never had access to if it wasn’t within a donkey’s trip to the local general store.
Thus my brain grows needy. Click. Click, click, click. So many answers to asked questions and and four times as many to unasked questions! I can’t turn away. My brain will not let me. There is too much knowledge to be absorbed!
That is the rub.
For every 100 things I never knew I wanted to know, there is one thing I knew I never wanted to. Such as when I was reading a reddit thread and kousi says, “He just brought the jolly rancher story back to every redditor’s mind 
.”
As a redditor for about a year, there are still plenty of inside “jokes” that I don’t get. Being more of a lurker, I mentally persuaded some distant geek to demand the knowledge I did not possess. Reasonman did. “Wait wait, tell me I want to be in on it too.”
Surely that is just overstating the link.
Let me just be clear at this moment, I have seen and read some fucked up stuff on the internet. I am not new to the dangerous waters she bears. I have seen grotesque dead bodies. I could give more examples, but that is all you need. I have never wanted to see a dead body, let alone multiple mangled corpses.
Even knowing such terrible images can be hidden behind those little blue words I am overwhelmed by the irresistible urge to click through. It is the need for knowledge, understanding of the joke, leaving no stone unturned, perpetually proving to myself what an idiot I am, whatever excuse I want to give myself that day.
So I did it yet again. I read the Jolly Rancher story. And I now want to re-enact that scene from Pi where the dude permanently drills the thoughts out of his brain.
Some of you undoubtedly want to read the Jolly Rancher story to see for yourselves the yuck. I would never post this without giving you that link. But if I could just take a moment and beseech you to not do it. This isn’t the worst thing I have ever read on the internet, but it is still disgusting and did not further my evening/intelligence/life in any way. Save your brain cells!
Maybe this can serve as life practice for you to avoid any link where someone explicitly tells you to stay away. Because you may read this particular little tale and think I am simply over-reacting to a nasty, most likely fictional, little story, which may be true, but then one day you will come across another link and think yet again that you can handle it. And that will be the day that haunts you forever.
Not clicking will never bother you on your deathbed.
But, if you still must know, here is the Jolly Rancher story.
For those who clicked on the link, here is a picture of kittens.
Mental cleanser, I hope.
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There will be unicorns and weirdness.
I love you, Tumblr, but stop sucking your own dick for taking a stand against legislation that was already on the back burner in the face of the impending blackout. There are many more battles to come.
This awesomely cute baby sloth (slothlet? slothling?) wants to make it perfectly clear that there is nothing the least bit sinful about it.
[via I Can Has Cheezburger?]
OpMegaUpload Undoes January 18th
Yesterday was a day for the people of the internet. Big sites blacked out in protest. Sites who didn’t black out hosted great conversations about SOPA and PIPA.
Then today happened.
Forced to draw a couple of poor comparisons, the blackout was to Ghandi what OpMegaUpload is to walking up to The Man’s house, wiping a booger on his door knob and then running away screaming “I totally fucked his shit up and shoved shit up his nose and more shit!” DDoSing is nothing more than a minor inconvenience. Screaming about how it is total 1337 is self-indulgent puffery.
Tomorrow i’ll be joining the blackout against SOPA, PIPA and the internet censorship bills. Know more about the movement and, if you have a blog or tumblr, join in.
http://sopastrike.com/
