So the FBI decided to send the Wikimedia Foundation a letter in which they demanded this image of the seal be removed because apparently there’s some federal law against depicting the seal of a federal agency in 18 U.S.C. § 701. Except that there isn’t.

Wikimedia’s attorney Mike Godwin (yes, that Godwin) wrote back to the FBI, informing them that:

As the leading case interpreting Section 701 points out, “The enactment of § 701 was intended to protect the public against the use of a recognizable assertion of authority with the intent to deceive.”…Our inclusion of an image of the FBI seal is in no way any evidence of “intent to deceive,” nor is it an “assertion of authority,” recognizable or otherwise.

Entertainingly, in support of your argument, you included a version of 701 in which you removed the very phrases that [pertain to deception]. While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version of Section 701 that you forwarded to us.

Long story short, it is perfectly okay to post a picture of the FBI seal on the Internet, as long as you’re not doing it in order to claim that you are the FBI. So I’m going to exercise my right to do so, and I encourage everyone else on the Internet to join me.

Seriously, doesn’t the FBI have anything better to do?

CC Photo by heartbeaz on Flickr

The idea of “social networking” exploded in the second half of this past decade, with MySpace becoming a household name, and everyone and their mother (quite literally) having a Facebook profile. It was extremely appealing: never stay out of touch with all of your friends, because they’re sharing their whole life with you, even if you can’t be there in person. I got caught up in the craze like all of us, but I soon discovered that, to me, at least, full-blown social networking was a passing fad. Perhaps I overestimated just how much I cared about every mundane detail of my friends’ lives. And considering all of the initial skepticism about Twitter, I’m probably not the only one.

Let me tell you my story, and how I came to this conclusion:

Ever since I actually started talking to people I met on deviantART, I too was enthralled by the ability to stay in touch with people I knew and cared about (especially because, in my case, most of my close friends at the time weren’t people I’d met away-from-keyboard). When I came out of my adolescent basement-dwelling phase and got some actual flesh and blood friends, this tendency translated seamlessly. Most of them were on Livejournal, and I subscribed to all of their blogs on my Friends Page; soon enough, I began to start writing posts of my own every once in a while.

It became a daily, or sometimes quad-hourly, ritual to read through my Friends Page — basically a blog which aggregated all of my friends’ posts in reverse chronological order, except there was no way of marking individual posts as “read”, so it was often a difficult experience — and each read-through gave me journal entries of varying length showcasing what was going on in my friends’ lives, what they were thinking about, or whatever ridiculous quiz or meme they’d stumbled upon that day. My journal was about the same, running the gamut from stories about school and work to my thoughts on the latest video games to “bawwww he doesn’t love me so I’m gonna paint my nails black and listen to Fall Out Boy” embarrassments. Writing those and reading my friends’ was one of the things I enjoyed greatly.

When Facebook became popular, I tried to get into it, but never really did. Perhaps it was because it was mostly populated by people from my school, whom I wasn’t extremely close with, and the members of my big dysfunctional family of geeks and furries were all sticking with Teh El Jay. The fact of the matter was that all the people on Facebook just weren’t involved with my life enough that I really cared about the mundane details of their lives.

(As an aside, the time much of my closer friends began to start using Facebook was about the time my mom did too, and no offense mom, but that’s not exactly an encouragement to start posting more of my personal information and thoughts there)

In January 2009, I rebuilt Plankhead.com (before that it was a Google Sites-built abomination that was so horrible, not even The Internet Archive gave a shit about it) as a place to talk about my filmmaking and futile attempts at projecting a professional persona. As I began to blog here, I started to get more heavily involved in blogger culture, and finally got around to making a serious effort at scrounging up a good RSS reading list. Feedly did wonders for me in this regard — it recommended a ton of sources that I’d never have found on my own, no matter how loudly Robert Scoble screams about the 2010 Web, or how egregiously MG Siegler misuses intermediate punctuation in a failed attempt to sound sophisticated. Lo and behold, there was a whole breadth of information about what was actually happening in the world! This was interesting! Stories about what shiny gadgets are coming out next year, articles doing the kind of artistic critique of video games I’d only dreamed of in the past, headlines about important news going on all over the world, and proclamations that we will all be immortals who have sex with robots in the future and how awesome that will be.

To be honest, it started to make hearing about how incredibly uggggh my friends’ midterms were for them a bit less appealing. I still wanted to keep in touch, but in lieu of slogging through the Friends Page every day, I simply went through the convoluted process of adding all of them to my RSS reader. One. By. One. You’d think it would be simple, but Livejournal has really user-unfriendly RSS feeds.

Now, I don’t get the chance to read every single article that shows up in my RSS reader. So, needless to say, some of my friends’ journal entries fell by the wayside. And I didn’t miss a thing. I saw them in person, and not having kept track of every detail of their lives didn’t inhibit our interactions one bit. In fact, dare I say they enhanced them, because we had so many more potential avenues of conversation.

Perhaps this is why I couldn’t get particularly enthralled by Facebook in its early days, before it started to turn into the Twitter-clone-meets-America-Online that it is today. Nice photos of you at a party. Do I care? No. No, not really. I mean no offense, it’s just not that interesting.

Now, if you post a link to that photo with a tiny bit of description attached to it, then maybe I’ll take a look, if the description is interesting. This is why Twitter appeals to me: it’s simple, distilled, and to the point. If I’m not interested in what you have to say or show me, it’s only 140 characters (although would it kill them to give us 200?). In general, instead of an in-depth analysis of what college classes they’d like to take, I would much prefer my friends share with me a link to a great article they found somewhere; it’s probably much more interesting and better written.

It’s funny, just as I finished that paragraph, one of the people I’m following on Twitter just said this:

• @Astolpho: what’s awesome about twitter is nobody can post a big long bullshit self-indulgent wall of text rant with it. #
• @Astolpho: I don’t think I’ve ever once seen anybody preface their tweets with WARNING: RANT MODE ENGAGED and thank god #

The irony of including that in this very big long bullshit self-indulgent wall of text is not lost on me, by the way. But if you’ve read this far, you’re at least enjoying it.

Of course, perhaps this isn’t as self-indulgent a big long bullshit wall of text as it may seem, because I don’t think I’m alone in this mentality. Devoting such an extraordinary amount of attention to your friends on the Internet, for me and many people, cheapens the personal relationships you have with them away from the keyboard.

There’s a good reason Facebook wanted to be more like Twitter: it’s so much better, overall, to pay less attention to what’s happening to your friends and more to what they’re looking at and want to show you. The occasional bit of personal reflection or drunken party photo album has its place, but there’s much more to be gained from social web sites and services if your friends become footnotes; when, for example, Bob links you to an article, you’re paying more attention to the article than you are to Bob, but subconsciously you make the connection between the article and Bob. Next time you see him, you and Bob have something new to talk about. Or, of course, you can reply to Bob’s link right then and there, and engage in a text-based conversation about something that’s decidedly not self-centered.

So perhaps the title I gave this big long bullshit wall-of-text is confusing now: how is this “antisocial” networking if it’s just a more socially fulfilling use of social networks? That’s because there’s one more facet to this, and one that may be more unique to me than the other things I’ve rambled about thus far: the most interesting stuff often comes from people you barely know.

Am I friends with Cory Doctorow and Xeni Jardin? No, but I’m fascinated by what they share with me and the rest of the world. Do Patrick LaForge and I know each other personally? No, but I’m often interested in what he’s looking at, and sometimes he’s likewise interested in what I link to. Oh, and that Astolpho person I quoted up above? I barely have any idea who the hell he is, he’s just someone who followed me one day. In fact, I had to Google him just now to verify that he was a “he” because I didn’t remember offhand. But he says and shares interesting things, so I keep track. I’m sure many people could find joy in a similar situation to mine.

Regardless of whether you’re a seeker of interesting stuff whether you’re personally acquainted with the person sharing it or not, or someone who wants to know what his or her circle of friends thinks is amusing today, the hardcore keep-track-of-all-your-friends-blogs-and-photos-and-rants is not something I see having a wide appeal for much longer, at least outside of shy teenagers with too much time on their hands. Perhaps that’s why all of our moms are getting into Facebook now: socializing on the Internet has grown up.

But I prefer talking in person, thanks.

Fuck Tweetdeck so hard that I’m not even going to do that middle-of-word-capitalization thing that its creators insist on (It’s supposed to be “TweetDeck,” which is fucking stupid so fuck that, you fucking fuckers).

Normally, I’d just switch to another Twitter client that doesn’t suck, like Nambu, except I switched away from Nambu because the one thing that did suck about it ended up driving me nuts: multiple account support. Tweetdeck, however, solves the problem with Nambu by being a piece of fucking shit.

Recently, I signed up for a second Twitter account, @omgpurplefox. If you click that link, you’ll notice that it’s a protected account, and you need to request my permission before any of the things I post there are visible to you. You see, sometimes I feel like shooting out 140 character blasts of information I don’t want my mother to read. Oh, and about 99% of the planet, too, don’t forget them. Now, naturally, since I’m used to updating and reading Twitter via a client, I’d like to be able to manage the private account from a client as well.

Nambu allowed me to do that, but that, in turn, made one of its best features a pain. It tells you, in numbers, how many tweets from people you follow you haven’t read yet. But if you have it track two accounts which follow some of the same people:

If I have Account A and Account B following Person C, and Person C sends one tweet, Nambu tells me that I have two tweets unread. Thus, I have to mark things as read about 39725686 times, which becomes a chore. This problem was annoying enough to force me to switch to Tweetdeck.

Tweetdeck, on the other hand, doesn’t inform you of the same tweet twice. It just doesn’t tell you anything:

Well, okay, it does. Whenever it determines that you have unread tweets, it shows you a message in the upper right corner of the screen saying “(number) Tweets) or something. This goes away after about five seconds, so if you’re not staring at your computer right at that moment, there is no fucking way to know if there are any new tweets.

Oh, and it pulls the exact same crap for your @Mentions and Direct Messages, which, for Twitter purposes, are basically the equivalent of email addressed to you personally. You kinda want to read them when they come.

Actually, I’m lying. Tweetdeck does tell you if you have any unread tweets. Here, see if you can guess which of the tweets in this Tweetdeck column are marked as “unread”:

The unread ones are the first two. The ones with the tiny dot next to all that tiny text. WOW, HOW OBVIOUS. Now imagine five columns of that, each seven boxes tall. Yeah, it’s totally easy to see which ones are new at a glance. Real easy.

Now, Tweetdeck does have some other nice features. You can create “groups” of people you follow, for instance. Except about 10% of the people I follow are inexplicably not available to be put into groups, while about 50% of people I followed in the past but unfollowed are still on Tweetdeck’s list. And there is no way to fix that.

Ultimately, I hate Tweetdeck, and wish I could use something much, much better. But I need a Twitter client that lets me:

• Tweet and send DMs as either of my two accounts
• Track people I follow, as well as @Mentions and DMs for both accounts
• Notify me, in a way that actually works, how many tweets and messages I have unread
• Not drive me insane when the two accounts follow some of the same people

Because I prioritize necessity number 4 over number 3, I’ve had to abandon Nambu in favor of Tweetdeck, which is the only other client I’ve found that achieves my other needs satisfactorily. Seesmic Desktop is, from what I can tell, more of the same, so there’s no point in switching. So until Nambu at least gives me the option to fix its redundant notification system, I’m stuck with this crappy thing.

In closing, what the fuck is this shit that keeps popping up:

I keep getting that fucking thing for no reason and it takes 3656867357 presses of “Continue” to make it go away.

So this means artists who hope to make a living will now have to rethink their business models, because basing your livelihood on the assumption that all people will pay you for the privilege of merely experiencing your work is on par with [wikipedia]Young Earth creationism[/wikipedia] in la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you factor. But never fear, artistic community, because a ton of niche nerd fandoms have come to terms with that assumption since the heyday of [wikipedia]Usenet[/wikipedia] (because many of them probably had a hand in inventing it). They all operate with similar conventions, but because everything is better with cartoon purple foxes, the example I will explain is the furry subculture.

One of the major cornerstones of furry interest is the visual artwork. Artists draw and paint all sorts of anthropomorphic animal characters, and many of the popular ones make good money selling prints of their work at conventions. The same goes for comic book creators and, more recently, novel authors. While these works sell to adoring fans, much of them are also freely available to view online. But the real money, especially for less universally known artists, is in the sales of commissions. Another cornerstone of furry interest is the “fursona,” an animal character to represent oneself. Many furries would like pictures of “themselves,” and pay artists to do this for them. Once the commissions are finished, the commissioner and artist display them prominently all over the Internet.

Deconstruct this market, and an interesting theory emerges. Artists create works on their own time, and this attracts fans. Many of these fans buy physical copies of the art to show their support. Some others have an idea for a particular work of art they’d like to see produced, and commission the artist to do so. Once this artwork is finished, it is displayed both for the pleasure of the commissioner and everyone else who wants to see it.

These ideas can be scaled up and applied to many other situations. Musicians are having a lot of success with using recordings to attract fans who’ll support their work and come to concerts, and some are doing pretty well with taking commissions. That’s hardly surprising, as Mozart and Beethoven worked in a similar fashion. But it’s not such a stretch to see narrative and interactive media succeeding in a similar fashion. How many times have people in the world thought, “I wish someone would make a movie about [this]“, or “I wish there was a video game where you could [do this]“? Films and games are often larger projects than the budget of a single fan can finance, but Gabe Newell of Valve already thinks a bunch of interested fans could fund a game.

It’s not clear if that would work in our current understanding of the world. Would large projects like films and video games still be able to make a profit if they were funded by fans and then released into the wild, depending on the goodwill of more fans to pay for them after the fact?

To be honest, I hope not. I really hope that the financial implications of producing artwork changes so radically that it no longer makes sense for business to be involved. That’s not to say I hope artists will be unable to support themselves; after all, there’s a big difference in making a living and making a profit. As evidenced by most of what comes out of Hollywood and the LA music industry, “content creators” motivated by profit are generally hacks. Artists motivated by living — the world around them, their lives inspiring their art — are the ones who actually produce things that are worthwhile.

That’s what one sees in these artists who draw animal people. They love and care about what they do, and the money is a side benefit. Few of them get particularly rich from what they do, but that doesn’t matter. It’s this kind of situation that reminds me, file-sharing is not killing music, movies, video games, or anything. It’s killing the artistic cancer that is the copyright industry.

In other words, if you’re not going to draw pictures, write music, make movies, or develop games because there’s no money in it, good. You have the wrong attitude.

A legislative aide to Sen. Jane Orie, a former prosecutor who has championed state legislation to safeguard children, was fired Friday after the Attorney General’s Office charged him with sexually propositioning a child online and suggesting the two dress up as animals and have sex.

Alan David Berlin, 40, who was paid $57,340 a year to do legislative services for Orie, used the Internet screen name “alan_panda_bear” and propositioned the 15-year-old boy several times this month, Attorney General Tom Corbett said.
[...]
In profiles posted on Internet sites used for networking among furries, or people who dress as animals, Berlin identified himself as Alan The Panda with interests in baking, board games, classical music, fine dining, movies, travel, wine — and diapers. The cartoon panda on his Pounced.org page wears a diaper.
[...]
Berlin proposed traveling to the boy’s home in Harrisburg to have sex with him in the backyard while his parents slept inside, Corbett said, and requested nude photos of the teen. He suggested a meeting between the child and another adult, and offered to secure a hotel room if he could take pictures of the sex acts, Corbett said.

The boy’s parents became concerned when they discovered sexually graphic messages on their son’s computer and contacted investigators with the Child Predator Unit, which began an investigation on Tuesday.

Well, this means a few things. First, the man is either sick or incredibly stupid not to know that sex with 15-year-olds is not a good idea. Probably both. Second, that kid is either sick or just incredibly desperate to not liberally apply his instant messenger’s “block” button as soon as a 40-year-old man asks him to take his pants off. Third, the requirement that Pounced members be 18 or older is obviously not doing anything, though it’s not like that wasn’t obvious to anyone with a working knowledge of teenagers on the Internet.

It hits close to my heart when I see this kind of awful thing happen to the type of kid I can relate to. I was a 15-year-old furry once, and met the most fun and awesome people on the face of the earth through the furry community. One of the aspects I enjoyed is that, in general, sexuality isn’t taboo to furries like it inexplicably is to most of America. Should someone like Mr. Berlin exploit that sex-is-not-evil-and-actually-quite-nice sort of vibe and prey on inexperienced teenagers, the result can obviously be undesirable.

Or perhaps Mr. Berlin genuinely is a furry, and isn’t just interested in anthropomorphism for sexual reasons. That does not change the fact that he asked a 15-year-old boy for sex. Whether they’d be wearing fursuits or vampire regalia or Star Trek costumes or nothing but cross pendants around their necks, the man is sick. And that kid should know better, but it’s mostly the pedophile’s fault.

There’s even less of an excuse when you have 8 or 10 staff writers with editing privileges reading each other’s articles. Or when you make 5 updates to a breaking story and your third sentence still talks about “Aople, Inc.”

Large corporations have come up with a solution: go into the manufacturing business. They are now Digital Rights Manufacturing companies, creating new rights for themselves using a revolutionary new process known as “fellating lawmakers”. Their revenue stream comes from licensing these digital rights at high prices, and suing people who don’t pay. But it’s too expensive for indie artists and creators, and it doesn’t win you any friends.

Because of this situation, indie game developers are doing horrible things like experimenting with in-game advertising. I’m not saying this as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of annoying ads bombarding us. I’m saying this as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of depending on the advertising industry for revenue.

Think about it: TV series with devoted fanbases are cancelled because they don’t make enough ad revenue. Millions of websites depending on Google AdSense would go broke if their accounts were inexplicably terminated (I’ve read about this happening before but can’t find a link detailing it. Maybe I’m typing the wrong words into Goo…gle…wait a minute). And remember when GameSpot fired Jeff Gertsmann when their advertisers didn’t like his reviews? For people who call themselves indie, it’s not very indie-pendent.

The best way to be indie in any medium, be it game development, filmmaking, music, writing…hell, even running a business in general, the only party you should be depending on is individual people. Some may know them as “customers”, or “users” who “generate content” on your “social media application”, but let’s avoid such corporate-speak, as it makes baby Jesus cry and is killing America. But there’s still the problem of how exactly to make money on individual people anymore. In a world where art is hard work and people don’t seem to want to pay for it, one man will stand up to explain his opinion. That man is me. Reread the previous two sentences in a movie trailer guy voice, then click the jump-cut-continue-reading thingy:

The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. Part of the admission process is defining what exactly the problem is, so let’s do that now:

• Indie creators need money
• People seem to prefer downloading stuff for free
• If your money comes from ads, you are a slave to the advertisers

Video games are seemingly the easiest medium to solve this for, but the proposed solutions only work for specific cases. I thought about the approach brought up by Dimerocker (as of writing, their site consists entirely of an unmutable coming-soon video with bad techno music, so don’t click) near the end of the Kotaku piece. Asia has dealt with this problem, and the most popular games there are free-to-play with premium components which you can get for micropayments. Piracy is impossible because the games have to be played on the web. This is great for MMO, arcade, and proceduralist games. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work very well for games disinterested in replay value. Some narrative or art games are meant to be played once, and would not benefit from premium items or costumes or levels. For the same reason, this is no way to make a profit from movies.

But a video game business model which could potentially work for other mediums is a revival of the traditional arcade. Imagine a game in which you could play the first level, and every level after that cost 25 cents. It would be browser-based, or otherwise require an Internet connection, and every level you purchase is accessible to you forever. You can save your game, stop playing, pick it up later as normal, and only pay more when you progress to a new “chapter.” This could be applied to movies and books as well, allowing you to pay by the chapter (in the novel or DVD sense) after getting an initial, free teaser.

Anyone reading this is free to try that out, and I hope it works for you, but I still see problems. Presumably a large service would offer this, so what if such a service were to go offline, temporarily or permanently? Not only would that anger customers, whose purchased movies, books, and games are now inaccessible, but creators, who were dependant on the service for their money. Also, the service would be free to pull any “objectionable content,” which would happen willy-nilly if the history of YouTube and Apple are considered. It’s a combination of DRM server scares and not actually being indie which still doesn’t sit well with me.

Perhaps it would work if everyone assembled such a service themselves. Host files on Amazon S3, take PayPal (or some other, more micropayment-focused service), and you’re done. You’re depending on corporations for the infrastructure, but they’re basically dumb pipes. They won’t shut you down if you’re controversial, and if they go bankrupt, switch to someone else.

Alternatively, for the convenience of people without credit cards or living in countries with taxes or tariffs that cause problems, make payment optional. Very few forms of media can be experienced on the Internet without downloading anything, and technologies allowing you to record music or movies from your screen and speakers prove that people want options. Right now, game developers have a free ride; while it’s possible to hear the same song or see the same movie on your iPod as opposed to your computer, Grand Theft Auto IV probably wouldn’t work all that well (it doesn’t work all that well on PCs in the first place, but I digress). This will change. But because of this desire for options, things need to be downloadable in an open format recognized by whatever Personal Media Device or Mobile Entertainment Console or MPπ player happens to exist. Therefore, piracy will occur, so you need to not depend on people paying for easily redistributable stuff. Make them pay for your continued ability to do work. I don’t have an easy, surefire answer about how to do this, other than that you should make donations easy, flexible, and conspicuous. Allow people to pay whatever they want, and some might pay $5000. If not, at least the 100,000 people who downloaded it from Pirate Bay will pay a dollar. With enough experimentation and loud screaming about this business model, the general public will get used to it, and it will be completely normal.

Either way, all that’s left is getting the word out. But with the ubiquity of Facebook, Twitter, IMing, and the age-old practice of human beings ejaculating the word-language from their face-mouths, anything with a compelling, free teaser and a low-to-no price of entry to its awesomeness will sell itself. Such a system will work very well for the 10% of people who make stuff that isn’t crap.

The other 90% may be out of luck. I’ve been thinking for about a half hour how to follow up that statement, originally believing that’s not a good thing. After all, lots of great ideas fail miserably the first time they’re attempted. But then I realized that that 99% of crap is mediocre, derivative, and boring, failing to add anything new to the world. A decreased chance for mediocrity to achieve anything for a creator is actually a pretty awesome thing. People who genuinely have passion for what they do will improve themselves and come back strong, while idiots jumping on the bandwagon will move on to find something they’re actually good at. To some degree, the world works that way already.

So the best thing for an indie artist, musician, filmmaker, game developer, or writer to do in this day and age is twofold: Don’t suck at what you do, and make it easy for people to realize that.