Simian Uprising by Jer Clarke

Lawrence Lessig has just released a new book, Free Culture onto the world. He has also given it away.
(here for text only)

Part of the reason for this, I’m sure, is that books that are given away on the internet seem to sell more copies. More importantly, though, is that this is a book about copyright and the public domain. About a culture that is being deprived of it’s essence and history by corporations that refuse to give to the public what has become a part of it’s consciousness, and about the ideas that just might help us keep the peace among the technologies that surround us.

So somehow keeping it to himself might have seemed a bit greedy.

It is written in a way that is both readable, and incredibly relevant. He frames the ideas he discusses within the history of various media, using stories about our cultural past to explain our present and future. It has been released under a Creative Commons license, something wonderful that he helped pioneer and which I have recently applied (see at left) to all of my own content.

Obviously, this isn’t a book for everyone. But if you are creating in our current culture, than it is relevant to you, as it is to anyone consuming or thinking in it.

We are at a point now where the realm of copyright seems to expand into infinity, trailing just ahead of a certain anthropomorphic rodent. We are losing culture, fast. The least we can do is to understand how it is happening.

(also, there is a flash-lecture of the same name that briefly covers the relevant material. Definitely worth your minutes.)

You know you want it. You know you always wanted it. Now you can have it.

He’s always been your favorite rationalist, now he can be your favorite tshirt too! Mekka (fellow journalcomicker and philosophy student) is now taking pre-orders on these little gems. Tell him I sent you and I get a discount on the up and coming Marx and Kafka shirts.

It’s win win.

Don’t you want to see it? click here to watch or right-click and select “save as” to save it to your computer

It is about 20, 000, 000 bytes big and is a .mov, so you will need QuickTime to watch it.

I wrote the script and was probably the main character and all the voices. Probably.

We made this entirely in the space of 12 hours.
We were not allowed sound and we were not allowed editing outside the camera. If you make moving pictures than you know that doing everything as you go inside the camera is just about the worst idea ever.

So far it has had a good reception, but so far the only audience has been our fellow classmates who lived through the same predicament (TRUE STORY!) encountered in the film, so the true critics are yet to speak.

Here you go, The Internet. Be nice, I am not a real actor, I just play one in short films.

1. “Slick as a German minute” will come into common parlance.

2. The individual who makes decisions for a given household will no longer be referred to as such, but rather as “the decisor”

3. The activity known as “Cybering” or “Cyber Sex” or “Sex on MSN” should only be called “Textual Relations” (this has probably been said elsewhere before)

4. “Sand is overrated, it’s just tiny rocks” – Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless mind.

5. Chef Boyardee, being good neither in a state of coldness nor hotness, can be eaten at the temperature desired by by the eater, and should not be confined to any absolute standards of preparation.

this was brought to my attention by someone from the internet. (click on an issue to bring up a flash thing).
it’s a kind of conceptual art flash thing, not for everyone, but a gem of the internet nonetheless.