Snow: Episode 30

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Short episode this week. Matt's going easy on me due to my final hand in on Monday. After that we'll get into the swing of things again.

Bought and played through episode 3 of The Walking Dead game on the iPad. It didn't feel as intense as the previous episode, but there were still bits that made me jump/get my heart rate up. And holy shit, the group felt pretty small at the end there. I'd post my stats, but it's too much like spoilers for anyone who hasn't played it yet (unless you got it on Steam, in which case you'l be done and gone with the game by the time episode 4 comes out on the iPad.)

Also got the Penny Arcade "On The Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness" game as well. It seems pretty standard so far. Only just started playing, but the writing is decent! Of course.

Pure Pwnage is kickstarting a movie! It's hit its goal, but you can always support it more! Me 'n Matt used to watch Pure Pwnage way way back in the day. It's cool to see it getting up and going in some way. This is also a scientific video to see if you can really run faster with a knife. You may be surprised by the results. It's from the unreleased episode 19.

8Bit Drawings this Week

I've been busy online recently with one thing or another. I'm starting to get a healthy amount of non-uni drawing in, which feels refreshing. If you want to see the full image of the one above click here (NSFW). That's right! I contributed to the "Sext me all your nudes" project. Hope it makes you lol. Next time your sexting someone download and send them my picture. It'l totally turn them on.

Also if you noticed that the guy actually looks like a giant penis then you win the Freudian test.

This one's for a Moxy article. These are my first attempt at 8bit portraits. Didn't turn out that bad I think, definitely improved on my zombie one though.

This one's a portrait of Becky. She's finished the intro on her comic btw! You can check it out in it's 15 page entirety on her blog. We're big Walking Dead fans now. Many romantic evenings have been spent watching nuts people hassle each other while brain dead zombies shuffle around, then after watching the OC we switch over to The Walking Dead. It made sense to make Becky a zombie, since we've agreed that she'd totally be one of the first to go. I'd just have to assume that she didn't make it. Weak ankles and opting out of "Fight or Flight" in favour of "Freeze" doesn't leave her with very good odds. Although she insists that in a Tyrannosaurus situation, her freeze maneuver would work flawlessly.

 This one's of a dude on G+, Working on my portrait skills. Btw if you're interested in getting drawn up I can do commissions. I don't know about overseas postage of prints and stuff though. But I can definitely hook you up with some 8bit stuff if you're keen. My Paypal needs to get filled up.

Snow: Episode 29

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Aaron may not have got a lot out of Elissa, but she can sure get a lot out of him. you may be wondering why the third panel has such an obscene face, well it's because of how Matt wrote the script.

E

“How far away is that?”
A
“Like two whole days!”
E
“Well then I take it back, oh great explorer.”
A  ಠ_ಠ
…

We did our second to last hand in, and final class at uni EVER on Thursday. It was a great presentation all 'round. Nicole had a "scary" video that went along with her products, at the end it had a sudden black out and a scream. Four or five of us at the back shrieked our heads off when it got to the point, scaring the bijeezes out of a few people I'm sure.

During my presentation I made the allusion to my stamp actually being a butt plug which doubled as a stamp. It was an easy joke, everyone was thinking it, I just needed to say it. While everyone was working on their books right before hand in I drew a comic, although its whereabouts are a big fat 

?

Facing the Music, but not Literally

Photography by Matt Rust

The image above has nothing to do with the following article. This is just a good time to post it. Fun fact, this picture was used in a similiar way back in 2011, good luck finding it cause I'm sure not gonna try. 2011 is an insurmountable pile of flotsam and jetsam.
I wrote another article to throw into the moxy site. Check it out in it's properly formated glory. I still need to add hyperlinked references though. Woops. Please remember that I'm not a journalist and if you're going to take anything from this it should be from the linked references and not from my slap dashery crashing together of ideasness.

Facing the Music

The emerging culture of music and file sharing.

In 1999 Napster was founded. In 2001 it got shut down along with a bunch of clone sites. This seemingly innocuous blip in peer to peer file sharing changed the face of the music industry forever. Since then bittorrents and peer to peer file sharing has skyrocketed. Record numbers of music is stolen each year. In 2010 it was estimated that $12.5 billion is lost each year due to music piracy. Strangely music makes for the second lowest thing pirated online, sitting at 2.9% beaten only by Ebooks at 0.2%. Currently at 35.8% porn is the most pirated item on the internet

The figures paint a scary picture for the music business. But is it entirely grim? Other than copyright crackdowns on people, how is the industry adapting to the encroaching tide of digital media? More specifically, how are the artists themselves reacting, and are we facing a new breed of musician?

Mainstream artists have been feeling the burden of labels and producers for years and the internet has begun to open the way for independent publishing. “Going to a major label these days will 99 out of 100 times mean signing a 360 deal which means they take a piece of EVERYTHING.” Buddy Schaub from Less Than Jake says.
The band has been together for twenty years now and has started branching out in terms of releasing albums.

Peter Wasilewski, saxophonist from Less Than Jake, “I think releasing full records these days is kind of retarded. We just come up with different ways to release a record... Kids get it for free anyway. We’re trying to find new ways to put things out.”
In 2011 the band sold cigarette rolling papers which included a link to a free EP of their music. On this Schaub comments, “These days people expect to get the songs for free so it’s become really important to make the physical record be worth something to the fans whether it be a cool packaging concept, some sweet colored vinyl or a specialty item that comes with a download.”
Less Than Jake has found ways to evolve with the system, taking control of the sales of their own music through their own digital store. Digital distribution has also allowed them to do tasks that used to be deemed impossible, such as recording and then releasing an EP in less than two months.

Bands who are less fortunate and are still signed with labels almost see no profit from their CDs. Streetlight Manifesto went to the drastic action of boycotting itself. Tomas Kalnoky, lead singer of Streetlight wrote on his blog “In regards to getting the music we make, you can buy directly from us, or, alternately, we’re sure you can find a way to get the tunes onto your computer that may not be, ahem, traditional… Speaking a Bit metaphorically, there is a Torrent of methods to accomplish this, and Google is your always loyal friend…”
He goes on to tell people if they really want to support the band, fans should go see them live and buy merch directly off them. If there’s one thing that cannot and will not ever be pirated it’s t-shirts and live shows.

'Speaking a Bit metaphorically, there is a Torrent of methods to accomplish this, and Google is your always loyal friend.'

New bands have found huge audiences with the online community. Local New Zealand band Avalanche City started out as a solo project by Dave Baxter. He released a few songs for free on Soundcloud.
“I just wanted people to have it, I’d worked so hard making this album and if I’d sold it, it would have only reached a few hundred people. I just cared so much more about people having it, listening to it, sharing it with their friends and hopefully identifying with the songs.”
The song went viral until it was picked up by a TV2 executive who heard it in a store and wanted to use it in the promo ads. In no time the song had hit number one in the New Zealand charts.

The concept of giving something away up front and monetizing afterwards is a foreign concept to conventional business, but is integral to small online projects. Most indie bands, as well as other mediums online like webcomics are able to grow rapidly due to the ability viewers have to share their content. Most people are willing to give something a listen if it’s free. But the risk of buying a product and finding out afterwards it wasn’t as great as they thought is too big a risk for an average consumer. Especially on untested new bands.

Purity Ring first started out as a fun project between Megan James and Corin Roddick, who sent each other tracks online and recorded independently of each other, a similar process employed by The Postal Service. They then released their songs via Soundcloud and Tumblr.
“We just put it up on the Internet, like most bands do. Within a week it had circled around to a few different publications and gotten some attention … By the end of that week we were really surprised by the response.” Roddick says.

The ability to quickly publish and get a large audience to check out tracks and comment on them is becoming a litmus test for emerging styles of music. Labels hold less sway over bands now, and genres like chiptunes that were unlikely to ever be heard on the radio can now be shared between thousands of people.

An attitude of sharing has become the order of the day. Sweden has officially recognized file sharing as a religion, dubbed Kopimism. and while it sounds ridiculous, one of the central tenets of Kopimism is focusing “on the open distribution of knowledge to all.”
These ideals can be found spread throughout the web, culminating in projects like Wikipedia.
In the same set of figures that finds that millions are lost each year to file sharing, only 30% find this sharing wrong. If the music industry as we used to know it collapses, would it be the end of music? Definitely not.

Snow: Episode 28

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Aaron continues to realize he's been quite sheltered from the outside world. I guess that's why he's been sent out in the first place right? To learn about the world and all that. Although by the sounds of it he mustn't stand much of a chance if no one tells him to watch out for that sort of stuff.

Finished Snow for the day, time to get back into work. Thursday is the hand in for my D&D project. it's all rounded up, all I need to do now is write a 4 or so page review of the rollout of my campaign launch. I'll be glad when it's over. Moxy is looking good. I've fixed a lot of the problems by straight up blocking anyone who visits it with Internet Explorer. *dusts hands* That's how a coward does it.

While you're here you should go get a free song. Ska may not be everyone's thing, but you can't pass up free, right? It's by New Riot. I found them last time I realized I hadn't expanded that particular genre in five years. They released their first EP in 2009, so they're pretty new to the scene when you compare them to people like Less Than Jake who have been rocking out for thirty years now.

Internet Lynch Mobs

I wrote this for Moxy. It isn't that great, but here it is. In all its shitty glory. I was gonna add sarcastic comments in it for the blog version, but due to needing to write a million other things, I opted not to.

 Over the past year there have been several cases of people being ripped to shreds by the internet. To be a little more specific, certain people who normally wouldn’t be found within the public domain have attracted the ire of a large proportion of the online community.

The two which will be highlighted within this article are Paul Christoforo and Charles Carreon. The oddity this pair shares is the fact neither of them had any sort of web or pop culture presence before each of their infamous debuts into the public eye.

Case 1

Christoforo, the PR representative for ‘Avenger Controllers’ claimed internet infamy with his streak of poorly written correspondence with an upset customer. The customer was inquiring about details into when his controller would arrive and was becoming increasingly aggravated by the lack of information he was getting from Christoforo. This was added to the fact that the PR department, which was manned solely by Mr Christoforo, started replying to the customer with threats and belittling comments. Christoforo also went on to list almost everyone in the games industry he had connections with including ‘Penny Arcade’, a prominent webcomic within the gaming community.

Noting this, the customer forwarded the emails to Mike Krahulik, the artist of Penny Arcade. Krahulik was surprised by his inclusion within the list of Christoforo’s connections, since he had never heard of him before. Christoforo went on to email Krahulik abusively as well before realizing who he was. Unfortunately by this point it was too late, Krahulik published the entire exchange on his site, which quickly went viral and disseminated across the net.*

This could have been the turning point for Christoforo. If he had apologised for his conduct he may have halted the train of events which was beginning to pick up speed. Instead he tried to intimidate the lynch mob that was gathering on twitter, responding to them personally, which only stoked the flames. He swung between trying to gain sympathy for himself and his wife’s new baby, to aggressively threatening Krahulik and Avenger, the company who had decided to cut their loses and fire him.
The drama unfolded over about three weeks when it could have been over in a few days. The events that followed were a gruelling affair of Avenger vilifying Christoforo as much as possible to save what was left of their credibility. Every move he made was promptly reported to the media.
Interestingly it seems that if Christoforo had explained his own situation a lot more succinctly then he may have redeemed himself.
“I did design the current site, and when I designed the site, obviously I had to set the site up on an FTP server...  I wasn’t holding them hostage, but they owed me money. Simple as day. It’s a real simple situation. You owe me fifteen grand, pay me the money.”*

If this was indeed the case then Avenger may not have been as blameless in all this than everyone had originally thought. However it didn’t matter at the time, Christoforo’s reputation had been thoroughly tarnished and anything he had done would have been seen in a negative light.

'So when did this transform from Oatmeal VS FunnyJunk to Carreon VS the internet?'

Case 2

The popular webcomic called ‘The Oatmeal’ got into a scuffle with another site; ‘FunnyJunk’. The Oatmeal had proclaimed in a comic that FunnyJunk had consistently stolen content from his webcomic, and hosted it on their own site providing no link back or credits to The Oatmeal.
“I realize that trying to police copyright infringement on the internet is like strolling into the Vietnamese jungle circa 1964 and politely asking everyone to use squirt guns... but I felt I had to say something about what they're doing.” stated Matthew Inman, creator of The Oatmeal on his blog.*

FunnyJunk quickly removed the stolen content from their site, but not before inciting their userbase against Inman. They flooded Inman with angry messages but after only a few days, it had passed with little incident. The issue lay dormant for a year until Inman suddenly got served papers from Charles Carreon, a lawyer representing FunnyJunk. Carreon was seeking reparation for damages made against FunnyJunk’s character. The claims made against Inman were flimsy at best, citing a year old post made by Inman which claimed that FunnyJunk had not taken down any of his comics.*

FunnyJunk was then demanding that Inman take down any content that related to them as well as pay them $20,000 in reparations. Inman’s response was that he would raise the $20,000, but instead of paying it to FunnyJunk he would send them a picture of the money before donating it to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society.
This is when story takes a sinister twist as the antagonist emerges.

Inman had published the legal documents online, and had blurred out most of the personal details of the lawyer involved in the dispute. However, the name of the lawyer was still emblazoned across the top of the document. It only took a quick google search for trolls to find the lawyer Charles Carreon. A brutal spamming of Carreon’s website and all his social networking profiles quickly followed.

It’s not often that a lawyer overshadows the case and becomes more famous than the client, so it’s almost understandable that Carreon had no idea how to react under the circumstances. Much like Christoforo, he had a chance to extract himself from the situation. Instead he attempted to shut down the charity event.

Inman puts it succinctly “So when did this transform from Oatmeal VS FunnyJunk to Carreon VS the internet? I'm going to take a wild shot in the dark here and guess that it's when you announced to a journalist at MSNBC that you were trying to shut down a charity fundraiser which would benefit cancer victims and endangered wildlife. THAT was the moment when the tide of public opinion focused on you instead of FunnyJunk.”*

The whole thing turned into a bizarre sideshow, even to the point where Carreon’s wife got involved, abusing almost everyone. Despite all this Inman raised $211,223 - far exceeding the 20,000 he had been expecting.*

These two cases of online humiliation demonstrates Christoforo’s and Carreon’s lack understanding of the internet. Christoforo didn’t realize that anything you put on the web would not stay private for long. The very purpose of the internet is to share information quickly and easily. To presuppose that outrageous emails, which could potentially be very damaging to your career, would not leak to the public is foolhardy, especially when sending an email into the hands of someone who would quite happily see your career die.

Christoforo also fell victim to the Streisand effect. This is a phenomenon dubbed after Barbra Streisand’s attempt at suppressing images of her house, which only served in grabbing the public attention, thus spawning hundreds of news articles which featured the very images she was attempting to suppress. Like quicksand, the more someone tries to fight the effect the worse it becomes. The best he could have done under the circumstances was to apologise and back out as soon as possible.

Carreon’s mistake was responding to the swathe of abuse he had garnered. One of the first things kids learn when they participate in forums is that they ‘shouldn’t feed the trolls.’ If he had ignored them, and not taken the abuse personally, he would not now be seen as the lawyer that got out witted by a cartoonist. He could have let FunnyJunk take the abuse, but instead gathered all the attention on himself and by extension his family.

The idea of not feeding trolls is based on operant conditioning, a learning technique where an individuals actions and behaviour is changed by the consequences they encounter. Unfortunately there are always certain elements that Carreon couldn’t negate through inaction. For example, the trolls behaviour could be rewarded by those around them who agree with the sentiments expressed. However, this would not fuel their attacks for long, whereas a reaction from Carreon, which further vilifies him in their eyes, would.

It may not be entirely fair to label those who had abused Carreon and Christoforo as trolls. They sent their complaints through the most direct avenues they could find, either by email or through the victim’s facebooks. A lot of their comments were brutally harsh, threatening rape etc, were all these people actual psychotics? It would be a simple enough task to label them as such if this were happening in a physical domain. 

'After reading a few hundred thousand comments about how big of a piece of shit I am, it starts to affect you a little bit.'

There are a few factors which must be brought in to account for this brutal behaviour. One of which existed long before the internet, and another which found its home here. The former is deindividuation, where a large group of people loses self-awareness. A crowd is defined as “a group of people united by a common characteristic”, so when this crowd loses its self awareness it is then possessed towards a common goal. Sociologists study crowd psychology closely, as manipulation of a mob could both be a powerful tool for change and a way to save lives. What happens when this mentality is brought to a digital environment is that while people may not be able to see the rest of the mob, they still gain positive feedback which serves to further motivate them.

The second ingredient in our abusive lynch mob recipe is described as the ‘Online Disinhibition Effect.’ It is a phenomenon which users may be familiar with. People often find it easier talking to a stranger on a forum about their life than they would to someone they know in person, this is the online disinhibition effect. It’s a two edged sword though, one side is a cathartic release which helps people to network in a non intimidating environment. The other side is a horrible place where you are hardly recognized as being a human being. This dehumanization allows people to say whatever they like without feeling any sort of empathy.*

Christoforo felt the full impact of this darker side of disinhibition “The first 24 hours I was like: ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever, whatever.’ And then after the first 24 hours, and the next 24 hours, things were getting stressful with home. Things were getting stressful for me. Everybody was just on me so much. After reading a few hundred thousand comments about how big of a piece of shit I am, it starts to affect you a little bit.”*

Avenger Controllers now has a decent amount of exposure, and more people are aware of the product since the debacle and Christoforo is currently writing a book on what not to do during a PR disaster. After the success of Inman’s charity campaign he went on to raise over a million dollars for a museum dedicated to Nikola Tesla. Carreon dropped his lawsuit against Inman and declared ‘mission accomplished...I'm famous, I'm notorious.’*

D&D Box Final

One of my final project items for my design course. The dice, of course, are the coolest part, closely followed by the gold seal. Props to Becky for getting the rubber made. She got given a free sheet of laser cutter rubber. The guy down in the Industrial Design department wasn't very happy with us on that one. The sheet stunk up the entire place with noxious fumes as the laser cutter was doing its thing on it. The guy operating the thing wasn't very happy with us. I told him his lungs were totally worth it afterwards. Maybe I'll use it as a selling point. "You can't give this a C! Someone lost braincells for this project!"

Matt took the photos, He's cool like that. Like a Swiss army knife he is.

Snow: Episode 27

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We now have 50 pages worth of comic under our belt. telling ourselves that always gives us this little feeling of accomplishment, a bit like that fuzzy feeling you get when you receive an Xbox achievement. Also I'd like to thank everyone who's been giving us props on G+, that really lights our fire and makes us want to do more and more of these things.

On the whole the future of Project: Snow is looking bright. We're brooding over making a proper site for it, although that isn't really going to happen until I've wrapped up uni. The pressures on at the moment! So now's a perfectly good time to start industriously procrastinating. That's a lie. Today I'm going to be doing more photoshoot stuff for both my projects.

Uni Roundup

Not long to go now till I say goodbye to uni forever. Soon the only things I post on here will be passion projects and actual jobs (as well as Project: Snow of course.)

My DnD Project is going well. Dice are here, tickets are cut out, expensive posters are printed, app is being given up on and the website is looking a little forgotten at the moment. So that's what I'm gonna spend the rest of the night on I guess.

The image at the top there is an ad for my major project, Moxy Web Culture Mag.

If you can do me a big favour and like the gay ass facebook page and the mint G+ page then that would be rad. If you wanna see what all the fuss is about, go check out Moxy.co.nz