2011: Gold Stars
So this was the idea:
I’ve been using Google Reader probably since around the time it was invented. I have kept up with hundreds of blogs, tumblrs, tweets, magazines and news sources with it through the years. As a result I have probably tens of thousands of posts that I’ve starred or shared. The shared items I just throw out there to friends as a “look what I’m reading” kinda link. The starred items are different though. I star items often because I want to blog about them later. And then I rarely get around to it. But when I do blog about a starred item, I usually remove the star so I’m no longer saving the item in Reader. Nonetheless, they accumulate.
A week or so ago, I thought to sum up 2011 from my Reader I’d try to link to all the posts I still have saved and clear out the whole thing. I got through about 2 months of links in a week. That means there are about 6 times as many links as those listed below still starred from 2011 alone in my Reader. What I learned from doing this is that I am way too damn scatter-brained. So in that sense, it was a great eye-opener. I need only to look at this post and realize that I should spend all the energy spent on accumulating and reading and blogging about these things on my own music and writing. Nonetheless, here’s a decent review of things I didn’t get to blogging about in 2011…
General Interest
Louis CK
- Talking Funny
- The Dharma of George Carlin
- Hi, I’m Louis CK and this is a thing
- Louis CK’s DRM-free direct-sales video experiment pays off
- Louis CK’s Letters Regarding His Latest Special
- Just how successful is Louis C.K.’s indie video experiment?
- Louis C.K.’s giant pool of money
- DRM-free experiment makes Louis CK a millionaire
Zen
- Pema Chodron on the Benefits of Hopelessness via One Dharma Nashville: “As long as we’re addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot. In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.”
- “A Massachusetts General Hospital study in next week’s Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging shows marked brain changes over an eight-week practice of mindfulness meditation.”
- “The aim of mindfulness is to know suffering fully.”
Music Videos
From boingboing, EL GUINCHO’s “Bombay”:
From Buzzfeed, She + Him’s “Don’t Look Back”:
Music
- 13 Songs That Sound Suspiciously Like Other Songs.
- Turnstyle: super-minimalist turntable.
- Cute girls doing acoustic covers of 80s songs.
- The Music Bay: Pirate Bay Crew Instill More Fear Into The Music Industry via boing boing.
- Via Buzzfeed, What’s it like divorcing a rock star?
- Clockwork – Office Musik (Dwight K. Shrute vs Weezy).
- Every Kanye sample ever.
Copyfighting
- “The four major record labels that comprise the Canadian Recording Industry Association – EMI Music Canada Inc., Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Co. – have agreed to pay $45 million to settle one of the largest copyright class action lawsuits in Canadian history. The settlement comes after years of fruitless efforts to get the industry to pay for works it used without permission.“
- Ninth Circuit Puts Lump of Coal in UMG’s Stocking, Affirms DMCA Safe Harbors for Veoh.
- RIAA and DHS are hives of depraved piracy.
- Universal music files fraudulent copyright complaints with YouTube, censors pro-Megaupload song
- Megaupload Sues Universal Over ‘Sham’ YouTube Takedown.
- YouTube Says Universal Had No ‘Right’ to Take Down Megaupload Video.
- Young people’s idea of copyright vs. the law
- Patry’s How to Fix Copyright: deftly argued, incandescent book on the evidence-free state of copyright law
- There is no copyright policy, only Internet policy; there is no Internet policy, only policy
- Judge Rules 75,000,000,000,000 LimeWire Lawsuit “Absurd”
- Universal Music uses false copyright claim to censor news program about its false copyright claim
- Hollywood studios busted as torrent-loving dens of piracy
- YouTube’s real pirates: multinational companies that claim ownership over public domain videos
- Your tax dollars at work: misleading, lurid “anti-piracy” ad campaign from US AG and Natl Crime Prevention Council
The Internet
- Woz on Net Neutrality.
- Debunking yet another bought-and-paid-for report on the need for non-neutral net.
Politics
- Who’s More Anti-Science: Republicans or Democrats?
- US House of Representatives: Internet pirates.
- Washington Post readers choose the biggest government screw-ups of 2011.
- Walking through an airport with security expert Bruce Schneier.
- 2011 in Review: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark.
- Congratulations Taxpayers, Chevy Volt is the Most Government-Supported Car at Up To $250k in Subsidies Per Vehicle Sold.
- The Year in Government Waste: Bridges to Nowhere, Pancakes for Yuppies, Sesame Street for Pakistan.
- Sarkozy’s official residence is a den of piracy.
Inspiration
Comics
- Boing boing’s post that introduced me to Axe Cop of which I am now such a fan that I got Ethan to sign a poster for me at Comic Con and I am naming an EP with a reference to Axe Cop.
- Batman: billionaire plutocrat vigilante.
- ’60s Batman Intro Recreated With LEGO Stop-Motion.
- Breast cancer awareness ads feature superheroes giving themselves breast exams.
- Marvel’s lawyers get into fanboy flamewar with IRS about human-status of its mutants
- The Geeky Art of Keron Grant
- Game of Thrones fan art
- Hot chicks in Spider-Man costumes.
- Hot chicks in nerd panties.
- Jessica Rabbit In A Princess Leia Outfit
- How Batgirl Might Look In A Chris Nolan Film
Film
- Sundance: Kevin Smith premiers new film, tells Hollywood to suck it.
- Ebert: film industry is losing money because they charge too much and deliver too little
- Universal studio president: “We make a lot of shitty movies”
- On the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Errol Morris explores the story behind the one man seen standing under an open black umbrella at the site.
From boingboing:
Art
Stuff
Makers
Open Source
- Vortexbox is an intriguing Linux distro that turns a PC into a music server, CD ripper and NAS device — pop a CD into the drive and it’s automatically ripped to MP3 and FLAC, and the system comes bundled with a wide array of open source music players/servers (from OneThingWell).
Books
- Empire State: a phildickian noir detective/superhero/pocket universe novel.
- A better way to get rid of Kindle DRM.
SOPA
- Firefox Add-On Bypasses SOPA DNS Blocking.
- Homemade anti-SOPA PSAs.
- How SOPA will break DNS.
- Lamar Smith is a cheap date.
- The Dangers Of SOPA In A Nutshell.
- Head MPAA shill reduced to outright lies in bid to make the case for SOPA.
- How SOPA will destroy Internet security.
- SOPA and everyday Americans.
- WTF is happening with SOPA now?
- First Amendment scholar on the failures of SOPA.
- In case SOPA passes: emergency list of IP addresses for popular websites.
- Free Speech’s Weak Links Under Internet Blacklist Bills.
- Blacklisting Provisions Remain in Stop Online Piracy Act.
- How SOPA became a bill.
- Everybody who’s anybody hates SOPA.
- An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress.
- Why SOPA is unconstitutional.
- SOPA Undermines the U.S. in Its Negotiations for a Free, Open Internet.
- The OPEN Act: The Good, the Bad, and a Practice in Participatory Government.
- Global Voices on CNN: SOPA will hurt global human rights struggles.
- How SOPA Affects Students, Educators, and Libraries.
- SOPA watered down, still toxic.
- Who needs SOPA when it takes a year to recover mistakenly seized domains?
- EA, Sony, Nintendo pull support from SOPA (but their industry association still supports it)
- SOPA Manager’s Amendment: It’s Still A Blacklist and It’s Still A Disaster
- Hilary Clinton tells world leaders, “hands off the Internet”; US government prepares its own censorship regime
- Business Software Alliance fractures over SOPA support
- The Internet Blacklist vs. The Constitution
- Ink-stained set doesn’t like SOPA either
- Setting the Record Straight on SOPA: Some Evidence-Based Analysis
- Lawmaker Waters Down His Online Blacklisting Bill
- Clinton Condemns Her Own Government’s Internet Policy
- Copyrights vs Human Rights: big publishing and SOPA
- Congressional staffers behind SOPA get shiny new jobs as entertainment industry lobbyists
Steve Jobs
- Billion Dollar Hippie
- Explaining ideas back in 1980
- Missing Steve Jobs
- Poke Life
- Wise Words
- 20 minute documentary of Steve Jobs’ NeXT years
- “it becomes beautiful later…”
- Woz talks about Jobs
- Never-Before-Seen Tribute To Steve Jobs On His 30th Birthday
- Three Degrees of Separation
- Steve Wozniak Reacts To Steve Jobs’ Death
- Remembering Steve Jobs: How Those Who Covered His Life Observed His Death
- Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies