K.’s posterous

K.’s posterous

K.  //  A linky diarist.

 
Jul 1 / 1:10pm

Should linking be illegal?

Those who wish to keep the internet free and open had best dust off their legal arguments. One of America's most influential conservative judges, Richard Posner, has proposed a ban on linking to online content without permission. The idea, he said in a blog post last week, is to prevent aggregators and bloggers from linking to newspaper websites without paying:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

via guardian.co.uk

The article is actually pessimistic about stopping this sort of thing.

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Jun 24 / 12:35pm

More real world thinking on Twitter

Kottke on Twitter aggregation sites:

So unless you're into brief but outrageous Twitter news from Mashable that you heard about from Robert Scoble -- and it is incredible the number of people who are -- these services just aren't that useful.

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Jan 21 / 10:51am

Emily the Strange soda

From Jones Soda, a limited edition

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Dec 24 / 2:12pm

Rationalist Christmas ornaments

If the same old decorative glass balls hanging from the Christmas tree (or Festivus pole) seem drab and lackluster, consider switching out your glass balls for meatballs. The Flying Spaghetti Monster tree ornament features a booglie eyed pasta monster that represents the faux Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, created in 2005 by an Oregon graduate student protesting the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require the teaching of intelligent design alongside biological evolution. Yay for politics on the tree! Look out for the Dick Cheney on a ribbon ornament!

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Dec 23 / 8:12am

"They closed down the auto plant in Mahwah late last month"

JANESVILLE — With three white sport utility vehicles immediately preceding it, the Chevy Tahoe snaked its way down the assembly line with a wave of workers and well-wishers in tow.

Fittingly dressed in black, the final production SUV reached the end of the line at the Janesville General Motors assembly plant at 7:07 this morning, leaving thousands of workers, retirees and—most likely—a local industry in its wake.


 

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Dec 22 / 3:46pm

VHS goes way of BetaMax, dodo bird.

After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of the home-entertainment stalwart are slowing to a halt at retail outlets. On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.

"It's dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt," said Kugler, 34, a Burbank businessman. "I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I'm done. Anything left in warehouse we'll just give away or throw away."

From the LA Times: http://idek.net/14x

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Dec 21 / 1:04pm

A man for all seasons

Charles Ponzi, at Wikipedia.

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Nov 9 / 11:03am

The secret of art blogging

If you want to write about art and there's nothing especially interesting in the New York Times, just do a Wikipedia search for one of those barely-remembered terms you learned in art history, and start following links until you find something nice to look at. Here's two to get started with: Mezzotint and Constructivism.

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Nov 9 / 10:58am

Roberto Bolano, 2666

From the review by Jonathan Lethem in the NYT Book Review
If we fear ourselves unworthy of the sublimities glimpsed at the summit of art, what relevance does such exalted stuff have to our grubby lives? Con­versely, if on investigation such works, and their makers, are revealed as ordinary, subject to the same provisions and defects as the rest of what we've plopped onto the planet — all these cities, nations, languages, histories — then why get worked up in the first place? Perfect or, more likely, imperfect, we may suspect art of being useless in either case.

and:
Is a lifetime spent loving poems in a fallen world only a poor joke?

And a quote from the book itself:
"He talked about the stars you see at night, say when you're driving from Des Moines to Lincoln on Route 80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe it's the oil or the radiator, maybe it's a flat tire, and you get out and get the jack and the spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an hour, at most, and when you're done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way. He talked about star athletes. That's a different kind of star, he said, and he compared them to movie stars, though as he said, the life of an athlete is generally much shorter. A star athlete might last 15 years at best, whereas a movie star could go on for 40 or 50 years if he or she started young. Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80 . . . might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn't matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances."

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Nov 7 / 8:41pm

William Eggleston, Democratic Camera

A retrospective at the Whitney:

One of the most influential photographers of the last half-century, William Eggleston has defined the history of color photography. This exhibition is the artist's first retrospective in the United States and includes both his color and black-and-white photographs as well as Stranded in Canton, the artist's video work from the early 1970s. The exhibition will travel throughout the United States as well as to the Haus der Kunst in Munich following its New York presentation.

Also see the NY Times review by Holland Cotter:

Around 1965 he started to use color film, and his range expanded. He moved in close. The first picture he considers a success is in the show. It's of a teenage boy standing about arm's length from the camera. He's seen in profile, pushing carts at a supermarket. His face is slack, his eyes a little glazed, his body bent in an effortful crouch. He's ordinary, but the golden sunlight that falls on him is not: it turns his red hair lustrous and gilds his skin. A prosaic subject is transformed but unromantically; lifted up, but just a little, just enough.

   
Click here to download:
William_Eggleston_Democratic_C.zip (479 KB)

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