Category: Creativity

Rohrer Rocks On

http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/:

The MUTE project is experimenting with a new fund-raising model based on project milestones. To read more about how creators can make a living post-copyright, read my essay, Free Distribution.

Here is how it works: I propose the next project milestone and set a corresponding fund-raising goal. The fund-raising goal is based on my estimate of the amount of money I will need to support myself and my family during the time it will take me to program the proposed features (we spend roughly $187 per week as part of our $10,000 yearly budget). If you think the features are worth it, you can donate a dollar to support my efforts. Once the fund-raising goal has been met, I will start work on the proposed features. As always, the results of my work will be released for free under the GNU GPL.

The first milestone was intended as a small-scale test, and the amazing success of the fund-raising effort (meeting the goal in only 9 days) demonstrated that this model can work. The next proposed milestone is more involved.

Nice bit here on another page:

Sure, I need to make a living, but I am idealistic enough to believe that there is more to life than just making a living. I feel that the means of making a living should be productive and helpful to society. There are many different ways to “make money.” Some of these methods focus just on making money (for example, playing the stock market), while others focus on helping people in exchange for money (for example, building houses). If everyone chose to work strictly at making money (for example, we all made our livings by playing the stock market), our entire society would collapse, since all true productivity would halt. On the other hand, if we all made our livings in productive ways, and none of us worked strictly at making money, our society would continue running smoothly and perhaps even flourish. Thus, all of those pure “money makers” are not necessary players in society—in fact, they are a parasitic burden.

UPDATE: Doh! I said “Tim Rohrer” instead of “Jason Rohrer.” Tim Rohrer worked on metaphor studies with philosopher Mark Johnson, and maintained metaphor.uoregon.edu for a while (maybe still does). Different Rohrer.

SPANC

Steve Jackson Games: SPANC stands for “Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirl.”

We all need this game.

If you didn’t think you needed this game before, you stop and see that it’s illustrated by Phil Foglio, and you realize, yes, you DO need this game.

Via Websnark.

(Sexist or not, it is designed by a woman — Heather Manley. I remember seeing her posting about this on The Forge a ways back.)

I was just reading Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius yesterday and thinking how much the Foglios rock.

Mash the Planet

Mash The Planet:

citizen engineers,

each week i do a series of how-tos here and there about getting more out of the technology we all have, the content we all create and the ways we can use them, share them and learn from them.

now i need your help, you see, lots of record companies like emi, disney and many others are sending cease and desist letters when people take music they listen to and mash it up for their own pleasure, not selling this music, just mixing it, just listening it to they way they want to and creating new works.

awhile ago, dj danger mouse mashed up the beatles’ “white album” with jay-zee’s “black album” and called the result the “grey album.”

anyone who hosted the files, or even “wanted to” was threatened with legal action, now disney wants sent a cease and desist to waxy.org for just linking to the kleptones – a night at the hip hopera – mash ups using music from queen and ton of other sources.

the solution to end this madness?

more mash ups. millions of them. a digital, creative protest.

this is where you come in, i’m going start a how-to series on making your own mash ups, so if you make these, please drop a note on how you do it, what software you use and all that.

let’s unleash a flood of millions of mash ups. with podcasting really taking off, p2p networks, mp3 players everywhere and the nature of music always wanting to be sample, mixed and heard it’ll be hard to stop everyone turning on, tuning in and mashing up.

Gosh, was I ahead of the curve or what?

Squeak Ambivalence

I’ve been dinking with Squeak again lately.

The thing with Squeak is that there are numerous levels to it.

There’s the classic Smalltalk level.

There’s the new Morphic environment, which was borrowed from the Self programming environment. Morphic was originally (in Self) designed as the visual environment for prototype-based programming par excellance, but of course Squeak is Smalltalk, which is class-based, not prototype-based, so there’s less than a 100% perfect fit there.

There’s the eToys programming environment, which is a visual programming environment built within and on top of Morphic. eToys is prototype-based, and this is accomplished, as best I understand it, through a hack on the Smalltalk environment in which every new object in the eToys environment generates a new singleton class. eToys is an entirely visual programming environment; you literally write code by dragging and dropping tiles into code templates. It’s suprising how much cool stuff you can accomplish there.

I’ve been infatuated with Squeak for several years, but it’s a very stormy relationship. There is so much to Squeak — there is so incredibly much in there — and it’s been developed nonstop very rapidly for years — and the documentation is abysmal, and gets very rapidly out of date. If you look at the Squeak mailing list (populated by elder gods of programming like Douglas Englebart and Alan Kay!) you will find a constant stream of newbies fascinated by Squeak, trying to accomplish something, and baffled by the overwhelming uberty of the Squeakiverse.

I have this dream of using Squeak to make neat little toy programs that my kids would enjoy. Like, I want to make something where you have these little blocks with different colors and they play different notes. And you can put them in a row in a container and play the whole container to make a tune.

That seems perfect for Morphic/eToys. So I tried it. First I tried to just do it in eToys. It was a hoot playing with eToys’s visual interface, and the neat tricks you could make things do, but I found out there seemed to be no connection between eToys and the internal Midi music system in Squeak. Whoops! Environment shear! So I had to go into the Morphic world and make a Morph that could do what I wanted. I succeeded with some effort, but never did quite figure out 100% how to give it a menu that would let you choose the note that the thing played. (I did set it up so that the morph was a different color based on what note it was, and that was wayyy slick how that worked. I was jazzed about Squeak when programming that part.)

I thought, “I should make this morph work in the eToys environment. If I could program it with tiles, I could do the rest of what I want easily.”

No luck there. I couldn’t find doco anywhere on how to give a custom morph its own special set of tiles, and I couldn’t figure it out by reading the code in existing morph classes before frustration and anger at wasted time overtook me.

This is always how it happens. I have a neat idea, I figure out how to do it 40, 60, 80%, and then the rest of it just kills me.

I need to swear off the Squeak. It’s so cool and powerful that it tempts me, it sucks me in, and then it bites me on the ass every time with its lack of documentation and overwhelming complexity.

I think I need to learn Flash or someting. People are always doing in Flash the general sorts of things I would like to do in Squeak. I wonder how much it costs.

Gotta get me away from that Squeak. It sucks all my free time and gives me temporary delight and ultimate disappointment.